In our projects, we seek to provide benefit to our business, by delivering a product at the required quality, on time, and on budget. Now, when economic times are tight, and budgets are being squeezed, we need to start looking how we can deliver on another, bigger project: keeping our business in business.

It is too easy for a project manager to only look at their project, and only think about how to deliver that. In normal times, this is probably what a business wants, but now we need to raise our sights a little.

Be sensitive to what is going on in the business more generally:

• If they are looking to save money, proactively look at which parts of your project could be cut. It is better to achieve most of the benefit at a lower cost, rather than risk delivering no benefit, because the company has run out of money. Effective planning should mean you already have an idea of what the impact would be, in terms of time, features, and budget.
• Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see inefficiencies in your business that could be solved quickly with a new project, with the application of a bit of project management, speak up about it.
• Make sure your projects stay focused on their customers, the stakeholders. Encourage your business to stay focused on their customers too.
• Encourage frequent and vigorous examination of all projects to check they are still relevant in changing circumstances – there’s no point delivering your project perfectly if the end product no longer helps the business!
• Most importantly, deliver. Now more than ever, we have to make sure we only promise what is possible, but challenging, and that we then go on to deliver it.

What about you? How are you reacting as a project manager to lean times? What opportunities do you see? What challenges do you face? Let me know!

Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

This week I’m going to take a look at Twitter. Twitter is a relatively new social networking and ‘micro-blogging’ service, based on the exchange of 140 character messages.

That perfectly explains what Twitter is, while also completely missing the point. Twitter is about keeping in touch with people, in a simple way. You can update people with a light touch, on a frequent basis. These are the kind of small interactions that help to build a community, or a team.

In Twitter, you choose who you want to hear from by selecting who you would like to ‘follow’. In turn, others can choose to follow you. If you want to, you can also make your account protected – this means only the people you allow to can see what you say.

Obviously this has possible applications for a project manager. Twitter enables you to keep your team members updated on a regular basis. For example, you could ‘tweet’ whenever there is an update of the blog you set up for the project. If the account you are using is protected, you can also tweet about the project status, questions you may have, and answers too.

Because Twitter isn’t one way, you can also follow your team members. This enables you to build a network within your team, with short and frequent contacts – especially useful if the team is scattered around the country or even the world.

The best way to learn about Twitter is to actually start using it. To get you started after you have created your account, you can start following a few useful project management people. Try Project Shrink, PM Tips and PM Opinions to get you started. You might also like to try following Josh Nankivel and, of course, Cornelius Fichtner, who is responsible for the great PM Prepcast.

Oh, and you can follow me too! Just click on the follow button after you have logged in.

Once you see how you can use Twitter, you’ll begin to see all sorts of ways it can be useful in your business. I’ll see you there! Next week, we’ll be looking at another social media tool, one which helps bring together all the other tools out there.

What about you? Are you already using Twitter? Who do you find most useful to follow? Or do you think it’s just a waste of time? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

And maybe they’re right.

Project managers have a bad name. Let’s face it, we’ve all come across people and whole companies that think project managers just cause problems. In their eyes, we insist on the production of arcane documents, we get in their way while they are trying to just get on and do the work, and we hold far too many meetings. And don’t get them started on the metrics. Or the milestones. Or the project plans. Or the requests for progress reports.

Now, you and I know that project managers actually add value. We help to keep the project moving forward. We help to keep the team focused. We help to spot problems early, and deal with them. We help to bring it all together.

But… sometimes, those people who complain about us? Sometimes, they have a point.

When team members are complaining about project managers, one of the main reasons behind it could be our fault.

If project team members are complaining about project management getting in the way, it means they aren’t seeing value from it. And that usually means one of two things: either a methodology is being applied blindly, or the project manager isn’t explaining what the value is.

Luckily, the way to solve either of these problems is simple: take the time to talk to your team. And I mean really talk, and really listen, not hold yet more meetings. If there is someone who is complaining a lot, sit down with them, and have them explain why they aren’t happy. Sometimes, you’ll find that they hadn’t realised the benefits to the rest of the project of what you are doing – or asking them to do.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find they have a valid point. Perhaps you have been insisting on a particular piece of information being gathered, or a particular measurement being made, because it worked on the last project similar to this. But maybe it isn’t appropriate here. Don’t be afraid to learn from your team members that you are being too heavy handed in applying a particular methodology.

Remember, no methodology is ever going to be a perfect fit for your project. You need to flex it, lighten it up here and there, toughen it up in other places. You need to borrow some pieces from one system, and other pieces from another, to fit them together to make the right way for managing your project, right now.

So the next time you hear someone complaining about project management, take the time to talk, and to listen. You never know, they might be right.

What about you? Have you come across people who just didn’t get project management? How did you handle it? Let me know!

Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

I’m going to start with something you should all be familiar with, but may not have used in a project context – blogs.

Now, I’m assuming if you are reading this you know what a blog is, because, well, you’re reading one. They are a great tool for getting a message out, but also, thanks to allowing comments, a great way of gathering information too.

A project blog is useful because whoever in the team you allow to post (and I would encourage you allow everyone in the team to do so) can put up some information, and ask for feedback. No matter where in the world the members of your team are, they can read the article, and post their comments.

And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to put your dirty washing out for the whole world to see! A blog could be internal to an organisation, or it could even be restricted to just project team members. If your team is across multiple organisations, you could have it password protected on an external server so only those you allow can see it. (This is even possible using major blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, which allow you to set your own privacy settings.)

You can also use the blog to get your message out. Project status reports, risk logs, all the documents you use to manage the project, can be updated and placed onto the blog. This ensures everyone has access to the information they need and want, when they want.

Don’t take this as a replacement of other communication methods, though – if there is vital information that team members must have and read, then use the most appropriate tool, be that email, tele-conference, or even face to face meetings. But to make your job, and the jobs of your team members, easier and better, use the blog as an additional tool, not a replacement.

You can go a lot further than just a simple blog, of course, with other collaboration technologies. But I’ll come to these in a later post.

This is just one example of how a blog can be used. What about you and your teams? How have you been using blogs? What value do you get out of them? What do you recommend as best practice? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

As a project manager, you are likely to have to attend and run a lot of meetings. Indeed, some people see project management as basically making Gantt charts and holding meetings. But are we running meetings well?

I have a confession to make. I hate meetings. Always have. I started my working life in an organisation that seemed to love holding as many meetings as possible. The building we were based in kept converting rooms into more and more meeting spaces, and they were still always booked up. We always had weekly update meetings. This was the kind of meeting that infuriated me the most. A group of people whose only connection was their manager would sit and say what they had done for the last week. The work was often compartmentalised and unconnected to others, yet we all had to sit through this meeting every week. The mind-numbing boredom of these meetings has given me an extreme antipathy to all meetings ever since.

Unfortunately for me and my irrational prejudice, there is no denying that sometimes, just sometimes, meetings are needed and useful. So, as a project manager, how do I get through a project with as few and as useful meetings as possible?

1. Identify which meetings are needed. The quickest meeting is one that doesn’t happen. Look at the meetings you are holding, and decide which of them are really needed. For example, take a look at one of those perennial favourites, the project update meeting. Your project team dutifully troops into a meeting room, and you go around each of them individually, asking them to give an update on where they are up to. The only people getting value from this meeting are the manager and, while he or she is speaking, the person doing the update. The rest of the participants just sit around being bored until it is their turn to speak. Get rid of it, and find another way.
2. Find better ways of getting information. In the project update example above, attendees were sitting around bored for the majority of the time. You still need the information they gave, so schedule one-to-one meetings (what I like to call ‘a conversation’) with them to get this information. But make sure you are giving value back – give feedback, take on board any obstacles they are facing, and help them with any issues they have.
3. Identify who needs to attend. Meetings need to add value for you and for participants. Otherwise you are just a burden on their time, a drain on their resources. If an attendee isn’t adding and getting benefit from a meeting, they don’t need to be there. Free up their time and yours by letting them escape meeting hell.
4. Use better ways of giving information. If your team needs to have certain information, then get it out to them. But use an email, not a meeting. Take the information from the one-to-one’s above, and put it into a weekly update brief to send to people. Then they can see the parts that are relevant to them, and skip those that aren’t.
5. Have an agenda. If a meeting needs to take place, and you have whittled it down only to the people who need to attend, it is time to make sure the meeting is focussed on what it needs to achieve. Make sure you have an agenda in place, and circulated to all participants, at least 24 hours before the meeting start time. And it’s no good having an agenda if you don’t stick to it. Sure, major issues could arise before the meeting, but anyone who vitally needs to discuss that now can speak to you before the meeting starts. Don’t let rambling diversions occur in the meeting itself.
6. Achieve something. Decide what you need answers to, and get them. Decide what actions need to be taken, and assign them.
7. Be a facilitator, not an attendee. You’ve called this meeting, so you have a responsibility to make sure it goes well, smoothly, and quickly. Stick to the agenda, move the discussion along, agree the action points. Don’t allow the meeting to become a talking shop. This means being firm. Your meeting has a start time – stick to it, regardless of who hasn’t turned up yet. Your meeting also has an end time – stick to it, moving the meeting along smartly to make sure you achieve it.
8. Prepare. We’ve already seen you need to have an agenda. What else do you need to have the meeting go smoothly? A meeting room? Book it. A projector? Make sure it is there. A note taker? Bring someone along to do this. There is no excuse for slowing a meeting down because of your poor preparation.
9. Be brief. In my experience, a meeting should not go on for more than an hour. People stop concentrating, they stop engaging, you cease to get any value out of them, and they cease to get any value out of the meeting. If you think you have a meeting that will go on longer than this, see if you can split it up – and see if you can do it with fewer people in each meeting. If you really can’t split it up, then at least have a break in the middle.
10. Think of the money. Look around the people in your meeting. Have a rough guess at how much they are paid, and what that works out to per hour. Include your own hourly rate. Now calculate how much all of those people spending in a one hour meeting actually costs the business. Have you added that much value to the business in the meeting?

And as an extra bonus tip:

• Avoid meetings that don’t add value to you. I once worked on a project that wanted me to travel for 3 hours every week to attend a 3 hour meeting with the programme manager and the rest of the project managers, and then spend 3 hours travelling back. This was 9 hours of my life that gave me no value. The value I added to the meeting could have been done much more easily via the report I sent in every week. Eventually, I was able to move to attending by teleconference, and ultimately to attending only every fortnight – not ideal, but at least I had reduced the amount of my time spent on this time-sink from 36 hours a month to 6.

These are the tips I try to follow in a project, to reduce the amount of time, both mine and everyone else’s, spent in meetings.  What about you?  Do you have any other tips to share?  Or do you think I need to get over my aversion to meetings?

Just a quick one from Project Management Guide today, to point you at a great video on the ZDNet Between The Lines blog – “The top five reasons why project management fails”.

Notice how important it is to make sure the organisation as a whole is committed to project management.  Too often, appointing a project manager completes the tick-box of project management.  In reality, project management is something that must be bought into by everyone connected with the project – from your sponsor down.  You need to make sure everyone has the discipline to follow the project management steps, leading to a more successful project.

Something a bit different today for Project Management Guide, looking at a couple of related project management blog postings out there.

Firstly, Ron Holohan at pm411.org has another great post and podcast, 5 tips to manage your manager:

I am not talking about manipulating your manager, but rather making sure you are successful in meeting her expectations. We usually know what we need to do to get our job done as a project manager, but do we know our manager’s needs? How can we insure that we are meeting her needs?

This is a very important part of what we do. We must be aware of what our manager is trying to achieve, and they are likely to be a stakeholder in our projects. Not knowing what they need to get out of your work is going to cause you a problem, just as not defining what your project needs to achieve will.

Backing this up is a post by Robert McIlree, The Most Critical P-Word Of All:

We focus primarily on what I call P-words: People, Process, Projects, Programs…and yet, there is one P-word missing; and it’s the one that trumps all of the others almost every time:

Politics.

Absolutely true. I remember one project I worked on, when I was instructed to amend a risk report because the person responsible (through inaction) for one of the high impact, high probability risk would “be embarrassed” by it! This was all due to the complicated politics going on at the time (a number of organisations were merging into one).

Politics within the project, and within the organisation, can have a major impact on your project, and it is important you are aware of it. Hopefully this will mean you are able to accurately gauge the various risks associated with it!