Tag: project management

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5 Keys to Effective Project Meetings

Posted on by jaywll

I read the article (linked above) by Brad Egeland a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to share it here because I agree with him, and I think these are great tips. They also apply to any meeting, not just project meetings.

The article also serves as a great reminder that project management is all about people. You could be the best in the world overseeing requirement elicitation for a project, turning that into a work breakdown structure, then a network diagram, then a project plan with schedule and cost baselines… if you can’t run an effective meeting then you’re unlikely to be able to successfully execute upon your plan. These are skills that cannot be forgotten about and the importance of which should not be minimized.

Here are five key practices you can follow to ensure your meetings are effective, well attended and convey the proper information while staying on track and on time.

Sometimes the operative word in your job title is “project,” but more frequently it’s “manager.”

My favourite piece of advice from Brad is the first one: Send out an advance agenda. Adding an agenda to every meeting I host has changed my life. The mere act of forcing myself to think carefully about the agenda ahead of time has inherent value for me, and you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) how often giving this the right thought causes me to reevaluate in some way, maybe by adding or removing invitees, maybe by lengthening or shortening my planned meeting length, or maybe by changing the communication medium altogether and replacing the meeting with a phone call or an email. It also helps participants identify whether they really should be involved or not: maybe I’ve misunderstood someone’s role and they won’t have anything to contribute, or maybe there’s someone on their team that the meeting should be forwarded to for the benefit of obtaining whatever additional insight that person holds. It really helps make meetings effective and minimize the need for follow-ups.

To my mind, in fact, it’s so important that I would go a step further – or more accurately, take one additional step back: define a one-sentence meeting “purpose” up front as well, and share that in the invite too. It doesn’t have to be complicated by any means, but it’s a powerful tool to use if (when) a particular meeting starts to get off track, and it’s also something concrete to come back to at the end. Have we collectively achieved the defined purpose? If not, are we each clear on our individual next steps in order to move expeditiously toward that goal?

You can think of a meeting like a small project in its own right, if it helps: the meeting purpose statement is your project objective, and the agenda is the scope statement that flows from that. You could even include an “out of scope” section if you feel in advance there’s a risk of people getting off topic for one reason or another.

5 Keys to Effective Project Meetings

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We Are Project Managers. Hear Us Roar.

Posted on by jaywll

Over at his blog, Carson Pierce recently wrote about increasing the perceived value of project managers. As he says, “if a project goes smoothly, everyone shares the credit. If it goes off the rails, it was probably all your fault.”

“Project management is like air quality. If you can see it, it’s probably killing you.”

— Nancy Lyons, 2014 DPM Summit

I once had a conversation with my boss at the time following a meeting she’d attended. She’d been told to show up and provide a quick informal update on the progress of some projects, which she did. The leaders of other teams, though, had arrived with carefully crafted PowerPoint decks explaining why they were awesome and the saviours of our business unit.

My boss felt the value of our team’s work wasn’t being recognized, and worse, was being further diminished because she hadn’t had an opportunity to present it on a level footing.

My advice was to recognize that regardless of our job description, we all work in sales.

I work in banking, but I don’t sell mortgages or credit cards like some of my colleagues do. I sell a framework and set of methodologies for successful project delivery, and the customers I sell to are internal. I know that the framework is a successful one, so I can craft just as compelling a value proposition as anybody who’s talking about how a low APR and no annual fees will help you achieve your dreams.

Essentially, I sell the value of me.

I don’t work in the freelance world or even for a contracting company: my next project will arrive because somebody will simply hand it to me, along with my next paycheque and the several after that.

My customers are not hypothetical, though, and nor is the need to sell to them, or the effort sometimes required to make that sale.

This applies to your job too, whatever it may be, but it’s especially true if you work in a field like mine which, as Carson notes, can often be a thankless one.

We Are Project Managers. Hear Us Roar.

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Uncategorized

Project Management Blogosphere

Posted on by jaywll

Very often on this blog you’ll find me linking to other people’s writings. They are, after all, usually much better than my own.

Most of these articles come from my feedly reading list of other blogs and sites that I follow. The list of such sites is vast and varied – everything from traditional news outlets through to blogs to cartoons.

Recently I’ve been on the lookout for some PM-focused content to follow. I came across BradEgeland.com yesterday, and I like the variety of topics he writes about. At more or less exactly the same time my friend and colleague (actually now my direct leader) Matt was discovering DPM Party by Carson Pierce.

I’ve added both to my reading list, and I’ve no doubt you’ll see me linking to an article or two from each in the not too distant future – adding my uniquely insightful commentary (ha!) as I do, of course.

Do any of you know of anything else I should be reading? Let me know in the comment!

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Blog

Mind Mapping as a GTD Tool

Posted on by jaywll

I’ve posted a lot recently about my SharePoint development work.

It’s a topic I know quite a bit about (if I do say so myself), but this is not a SharePoint blog and I have no intentions of making it one – it’s simply that I blog mostly about my work, of the nine projects and tasks I have on my plate currently five of them have at least some kind of custom SharePoint component to them, and two are full-blown web-apps built on top of SharePoint.

With so much going on how, I hear you ask, do I stay organized and keep on top of things?

(Full disclosure: nobody asked. I’m going to tell you all anyway)

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Mind mapping!

I’ve been aware of mind mapping for quite some time, and about a year ago I read a lifehacker article comparing mind mapping tools. I was interested but I didn’t have a good use-case for them at the time, and I’m not a fan of technology just for technology’s sake.

What’s changed in the past year is the nature of my work. A year ago a was adhering fairly closely to the title of Business Analyst that you’ll see on my business cards – I was involved in a relatively small number of projects at a time, but I was usually only responsible for delivering on a subset of the overall scope.

As my role has evolved, I find myself putting on my project manager shoes much more frequently. I have a larger number of projects, and while I’m ultimately accountable for delivery on all aspects of them, I can’t possibly make myself responsible for every detail or I’d drown in minutiae.

So a few weeks ago I downloaded XMind, as recommended by lifehacker readers, and I fell in love with it almost immediately.

At the centre of my map is a node called “To Do,” but that’s probably a bit inaccurate and it speaks to how I thought I’d be using the tool rather than how I actually ended up doing things. Off that I hang projects, initiatives, and tasks, and branching out from those are multiple things.

There are to-do items for myself, often broken down into sub-tasks in a WBS kind of way, questions that need answers, and tasks where I’m waiting on other people. XMind has markers (different types of symbol you can attach to a branch) and I use these to differentiate the types of sub-item I use. I track completion of my own to-do items on an eight point scale, I assign priorities to things, I add notes, and I call drill-down into a view of a single branch in the tree if that’s what I happen to be focussing my attention on at the time.

That’s all kind of irrelevant, though. The end result is representative of a map of my mind and how I work, and your mind and approach to your work are probably not the same. The point is that the tool is flexible enough to work for you, however you choose to use it.

Regardless, mind mapping helps me keep track of the many things I have going on in a very easy to understand (for me) way. I now have XMind open on my computer more or less all day long, and it’s quickly become my go-to productivity tool.

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Blog

Lessons Learned

Posted on by jaywll

Last week I facilitated a “lessons learned” session as part of wrapping a project that I’ve just completed. We gathered a lot of great feedback we can apply to future projects, and a lot of the positive comments around the management of this project were about flexibility.

For some reason, it brought to mind a scene from the movie Broken Arrow.

Vic Deakins:

“This is battle! And battle is a highly fluid situation. You plan on your contingencies, and I have. You keep your initiative, and I will.”

It’s maybe a bit too dramatic to draw too direct a parallel with what I do (my life is not, in fact, an action movie), but the point is certainly transferable between the worlds of nuclear terrorism and project management.

As a project manager you plan. You plan for everything you can think of, and these are often elaborate plans involving resource and people management, procurement, otherwise writing big cheques and spending somebody else’s money, and many other levels of detail. The most important thing you can plan for though is what you’re going to do when the plan falls apart.

You will deviate from your plan somehow. Hopefully it’s not in too big a way, and it may even be to everybody’s advantage to do so. For my project there was no show-stopping issue, just handful of small ones and a couple of details we didn’t foresee.

The positive feedback about the flexibility of the project and the project team was because we had a plan for our plans falling through.

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Blog

Wave Goodbye

Posted on by jaywll

Not to long ago I wrote a post about why I believe it’s so important to build technology that supports business process, rather than building process that supports business technology. It got me thinking, curiously, about Google Wave.

If you’re not familiar with Google Wave, here’s Google’s very own 2009 video on the subject, Google Wave Overview.

What Google did with Wave was an entire re-imagining of email. Throw out everything that’s gone before, and redesign email (or rather, electronic business communication) from the ground up, the way it would look if it were conceived today, and we had today’s technology to take advantage of.

It was a huge failure.

Well actually only in the world of Google is a service with a reported 3 million active users a “huge failure” but still, you get the point. The service was shut down at the start of 2012.

The technology lives on and a lot of the development Google did for wave can today be found in Google Docs, Hangouts, and some other places too (it was all open source).

My friend and colleague Matt wrote some time ago about pilots and their place within proper project management (and the frequent misuse of the term and concept).

Would you run your personal finances this way? Would you buy a lawnmower and figure out how you’ll use it afterwards, even though you live in a high-rise condo? Of course not.

I’ve been trying to think of a corresponding analogy for what happened with Google Wave. I guess it would be that you wouldn’t buy a lawnmower that required you to replace your lawn. And didn’t let you invite friends and family to enjoy your yard with you unless they too had purchased a compatible lawnmower.

The problem, in real terms, was that Google had built a tool to replace email, but for early adopters (like me) it was a very lonely place. I couldn’t really use it because the people I wanted to communicate with didn’t use it.

Specifically what I believe Wave needed was backward compatibility with email somehow. Maybe Wave users would get to enjoy the advanced features Wave offered, but email users would also have a method to at least participate in the conversation until they too chose to adopt the better technology.

Let’s bring this all back to process management and development. I’ve never run or been a part of a process improvement initiative that didn’t being with current-state process mapping in one form or another. Improvements are usually iterative, but even if they’re not and we’re building from the ground up the conversation still involves a transition plan. I’m doing some process mapping work right now for a project which is all about the transition plan.

Quite what Google were thinking with Wave I’m not sure. They’re a technology company and they’re well known for trying innovative things and finding out later whether or not they work. I can therefore forgive them for being focused on technology rather than process, but it doesn’t make it less surprising to me that this particular experiment didn’t work out. Most organizations can’t (and shouldn’t) throw money at technology development the way Google does, so let’s make sure we’re spending our money wisely, thinking in a process-first way, and being specific about the need a particular technology is going to meet for us. If we don’t we’re going to end up with a lot of lawnmowers in high-rise condos.

I do miss Wave though, I thought it had the potential to become a fantastic tool. There are alternatives and derivatives out there, but for some reason they all seem to be very lonely places.

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Blog

Art, and the Lost (to me) Art of Completing Things

Posted on by jaywll

I don’t run projects in my personal life the way I run projects at work.

My website is likely the worst offending example of this. There are many reasons why this is so – I can’t always commit time to personal projects in the same way as I do with work (work is always a higher priority), I’m accountable only to myself and it’s all to easy to let things slide, I get too emotionally invested what I’m doing and burn myself out, the list goes on and on.

The root cause though, at least as far as the website is concerned, is that I don’t even think about it as a project. I don’t wish to get too far up my own arse here, but I think of it as art. When will it be finished? I don’t even understand the question. It will never be “finished.”

I’m currently in the process of a redesign. This is a fairly common state of affairs for me. I’m always in the process of a redesign, seeking inspiration from my favourite gallery sites, plotting clever new ways to pull together and cohesively (and automatically) present the content I create daily all around the web, planning to refresh bits of outdated information (but I can’t just update it, I need to think about how to better present it and how that will fit into the redesign I’m also planning).

I’m determined that things will be different this time around for three reasons that build upon each other:

1. I’m going to avoid cutting-edge design

Cutting-edge design is fashion, and I don’t know fashion. I know what I like, and I’m certainly attracted to what’s new and fresh, but I’m no designer. I can take inspiration from other people’s cutting-edge work and pull it together into something of my own, but that’s about it (maybe that’s what designers do, and I am one. Fine, but we’re getting off-track here. I’m not a design innovator, then). The problem is that fashion moves too quickly for me to keep up, especially with the pace at which I work on these things. What I end up with is a design that looks out of date before I even get around to finishing it.

2. “Fuck It, Ship It”

You’ll have to excuse the language, it came from elsewhere. This brief article sums up the philosophy here. Too many times I throw out work in progress and start over from scratch because what I see on my screen doesn’t meet my exacting standards of perfection.

3. I’m not, in fact, creating “art” here

Let’s inject a little realism, shall we? I’m not crafting a work of art, I’m building a little personal website that probably attracts no more than a dozen visitors each month. I don’t need to do the kind of work you’d see from a New York design agency – it should be simpler, and it should be something that reaches a conclusion.

The Point

I don’t want to be designing my website, I want to be using my website and publishing things to it.

You’re probably reading this post at it’s original tumblr address, and it’s probably displayed using a generic tumblr theme I picked almost at random. Both of those things will change as I work through the project and this content will become part of the site, both in terms of design and in terms of it’s URL. But I’m not waiting for things to be pixel-perfect before I start writing and publishing. Fuck it, it’s shipped.

We’ll see how I get on.

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