Project management is often more about knowing what to leave out than anything else. Every project will need a different blend of methods, procedures and processes, and you need to use your judgement to know what to apply.

It’s easy to buy a book on project management which will hand you a set of processes to follow, or rules to obey. These books have their place, and are a valuable resource for those just getting started in project management.

But what these books are providing you with are the raw tools you’ll need. These are, naturally, incredibly useful. But there is no point in having a toolbox brimming with shiny new tools if, when confronted with a problem, we don’t know which one to reach for first.

Working as a project management contractor, I have to go into projects without any prior knowledge of the people I am working with, or the organisation. Sometimes I don’t even know much about the project until I’m sat at a new desk in a new office, trying to get to grips with it!

It would be madness to try to use every single tool I have to hand on every project as soon as I arrive. Some projects need lots of big, formal, prescriptive project management procedures and methods. Thankfully, the vast majority do not - they need bits and pieces, they need the right tools in the right places.

This is what the books of procedures and methods can’t teach you - judgement. I need to look around at the situation I find myself in, at the people around me, at the project itself, and make a judgement about what needs to be in place to give the project the best chance of success.

Sometimes, that will be quite strict project management methods. Sometimes I can be more relaxed. Some people I can happily leave a task and now it will be done, while with others I will need to chase regularly for reports. All of these decisions require me to draw on my judgement - and that judgement comes from experience.

Now, all this could be quite disheartening to someone coming new to project management - but it really shouldn’t be. Experience comes to all of us, eventually, and will come to you. And you won’t go far wrong if you apply strict methods to begin with, and relax from there once you have more understanding of the project and project team.

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Building a team is tough. That seems to be the consensus.

Which is pretty odd, when you think about it. After all, human beings are social animals; we like to form groups. So why is it that we seem to find it so hard to form a team in our projects?

The problem isn’t really with forming a team, or a group, it’s with forming the team we want. Normally, we would form social groups with people we like, and the traits and attributes that we like in those people may not necessarily be the ones we would value in a team member.

And therein lies the problem. We select project team members based on attributes other than how well they get on with the rest of the team members. This is based on the not unreasonable expectation that they will be professional enough to work with pretty much anyone.

Much of the time, when there isn’t too much pressure on the team, this works out fine. People are professional enough to just get on with their job. But where this falls apart is when you start putting pressure on the group.

At that point, tensions rise to the surface. Little irritations explode into major problems. And people who were just getting on with their job start to feel less willing to do that.

The problem is the level of commitment, of connection to the project, that a group of individuals has is much lower than that of a team. A team is working towards a common goal, and feels a duty and responsibility to each other, and to the project.

That means that when a team is put under pressure, they work together to defeat the problem, to build the solution, to find the right path to their goal. Pressure can actually help a team be more productive, not less.

Building a team, then, requires emphasising and promoting the values and goals the members share, it involves listening to them, helping them all work together. But most importantly, it involves recognising that most of the work of building a team has to come from the team members themselves.

Yes, you can help the process, facilitate it, provide an environment which makes it more likely to happen. Ultimately, though, it is as much the responsibility of your team members as it is of the project manager. Let them know the importance of this, of them, and of the team.

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Last time, I talked about the importance of teams, and the importance of making sure they didn’t turn into cliques. That got me thinking about the good side of teams.

A team is really just a small community, a group of people who work together to achieve something. Now, a team at work is unlikely to be as close as other communities (which, as we have seen, is probably a good thing), but it is still a community.

Human beings like being in communities. We are social creatures. But it can be very hard to create a community deliberately, rather than having one gradually grow up. In a project, though, you want to ensure your team gels quickly.

This often means you, as the project manager, have to take steps to foster the growth of a team. Yes, this may mean talking about the dreaded team building activities.

One example I have is of the head of a department deciding the whole department should go and help out at a local nature reserve. Their job, when they arrived, was to use shears and secateurs to clear out some of the undergrowth within some woodland.

I can’t help but feel sending an entire department out into the wilds after arming them with sharp metal implements was a brave thing to do, especially as the senior management were out there with them…

However, it seems to have worked - though at least in part because the department bonded over the absurdity of the whole process!

This is where I throw it open to you - how do you go about creating a real team? What do you do to help them form a community? Any particular tips, techniques, even activities that you use?

Technorati Tags: project management, project management techniques, project management tips

Some projects are done entirely in-house. The business has all the tools and people it needs to get the final result that they want. Often, though, a project will need to bring in outside help - such as buying in equipment.

I’ve worked on some projects which have had major procurements as part of them. I don’t want to talk about the process of that procurement - that’s what procurement departments are for! But I do want to talk about how to handle your supplier once you have decided who it is.

With your internal project team, it is quite likely you won’t have line management responsibility for them. This is what makes your people skills so important in project management - you need to inspire and encourage without having the usual tools a manager does to back it up.

However, with an external supplier, you quite often have a lot of power over them. After all, the whole reason they are there (as far as they are concerned) is to get their invoice paid. If you control the money, you can control them.

But I really wouldn’t recommend this adversarial kind of mindset. Making it all about Us and Them isn’t going to help the project at all. That’s not to say there isn’t a time for that mindset - but that time is in the procurement process, when you are making sure you get the best value for money you can.

When I am bringing a supplier into the project, I really want to make them feel a part of the team. Firstly because they really are part of the team - they are supplying something you need to make the project successful, just like every other team member.

But more cynically, it’s also much easier to get the supplier to go the extra mile if they feel included in the team, if they have some emotional investment in making the project a success, if it is about more than just the money. I’ve had suppliers really push hard to solve problems for me - in one case even getting into trouble with his boss to manage it!

Finally, it just makes for a better working environment. Being inclusive makes the project more fun for everyone to work on, and a happy project team is often the successful project team.

What about you? How do you handle your suppliers? What tips and techniques have you used to get them to go the extra mile? Let me know!

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We all know that the purpose of a project is to deliver some sort of benefit to the business. For many projects, the real benefit is that the end result is being sold. But what about projects that are purely internal? What about projects that are trying to change the business?

I’ve run across a few of these in my time. One thing they all seem to have in common is that they are driven from the top - they are designed to deliver a benefit to the senior management. That’s not surprising - senior management are the only ones who can commit to spending money on them!

But that also causes problems for a project manager. When the project is being put together, it’s always a good idea to make sure that there are also benefits to the people who are going to be affected by the changes. Without their support, the project is very unlikely to be successful.

Let’s look at an example. Quite a while ago, I was working at a fairly large and bureaucratic public body. Their whole reason for existing was to pay for and support projects to support and grow the local economy - business support, infrastructure building, that sort of thing.

Naturally, this meant they needed a lot of information. This information was going to be particularly useful to the senior management who had to report upwards to government. But getting this information could be difficult. So naturally, a knowledge management solution was proposed.

Now, this solution was going to use simple techniques - tagging of all documents with keywords, imposing a defined directory structure, and so on. For the senior management, the promised benefits were great: they would be able to drill down into any area, and all the information would naturally flow into a dashboard view.

But the benefits for the other users were minimal, at best. They already had developed their own directory structures. They knew where all the information was. The problem senior management had simply wasn’t a problem for them.

But senior management’s solution, well, that became a huge problem for the staff! Suddenly they had to start adding keywords before they could save their files, they had to try and fit their documents into a structure they couldn’t control, and so on. There was now a new barrier to them doing their work, without any benefit to them!

When the poor soul put in charge of this project ran the concept past me, I was sceptical. It seemed fairly clear the project was going to be horrendously unpopular, and difficult to get finished due to the resistance it would encounter. But my colleague didn’t want to say anything to senior management - he believed that the staff could be made to use the system through coercion, rather than choice.

Maybe he’s right - but you’re not going to get the real benefits out of a system people don’t want to use. Keywords would be selected poorly, missing out a number of useful ones. The directory structure would get filled with files in the wrong places. The expected benefits wouldn’t be delivered.

Not surprisingly, the project hit difficulties almost as soon as it was started, with resistance from all sides, and pressure from above to get it implemented quickly. It dragged on for far too long, before finally it was scaled back, and the business actually talked to staff about what they wanted to get out of the system.

Always remember that to implement an internal change project, you need to make sure you deliver benefit to everyone affected, if possible. If it isn’t possible, minimise the pain as much as it can be, and realise it is going to cause you problems and delay.

What do you think? What barriers do you run across when implementing change? How do you get the buy-in of the various groups? Let me know!

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1. The Social Media Project Manager - Blogs
2. The Social Media Project Manager - Twitter
3. The Social Media Project Manager - FriendFeed
4. The Social Media Project Manager - More Twittering
5. The Social Media Project Manager - Social networking
6. The Social Media Project Manager - An Example
7. The Social Media Project Manager - Wikis
8. The Social Media Project Manager - Blogging Community
9. Edit: I have also put together a slideshow for this series, The Social Media Project Manager - The Movie! Hope you like it!

Over the past few weeks, I have been highlighting some of the tools that can loosely be described as social media. The tools can be of use to a project manager in a variety of ways. Some of them can be directly used to help manage your projects, some of them to help you learn and develop, and some of them can be used for both.

As the series has gone on, my use of some of these technologies has also increased, as I have started to find them more and more useful. Of particular note to me are Twitter and FriendFeed, both of which I have found exceptionally useful. These two tools have helped me become more involved in the online project management community, both by seeing what others are doing, and by trying to contribute!

My resolutions moving forward are to continue to play a part in the project management community, most especially through Twitter and the Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room. I will also continue to search for new ways and new tools of social media to use in project management.

What about you? Which of the tools have you found most useful, or most interesting? What are you going to do to use social media in project management? Or are you going to steer well clear? Let me know your views!

Technorati Tags: project management, project management blog, project management guide, project management tips

Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at ways you can turn the tools of social media into tools of project management. But there is a much simpler way that social media can help us as project managers. Already there are project managers out there who are sharing their expertise through blogging, and that means there are many places we can go to develop ourselves as project managers.

Today, I would like to share with you some of the best project management blogs and resources that are out there. Now, this list isn’t designed to be comprehensive, but it will point you at some of the places I go.

First up, we have PM Hut. This site is a large collection of categorized project management articles, gathered from all over the web. There are many different project managers appearing here as authors, and a wide range of different views from them.

Next, we have PM Student. This site is primarily the work of Josh Nankivel, who you may recall I recommend you follow way back when we covered Twitter. As well as Josh, there are a few guest authors, and a lively group of commenters to keep you entertained!

Project Shrink is a blog by Bas de Baar, a software project manager. the blog has the tagline “Projects Are About Humans. We Help You Deal With That.” The site has a variety of posts that can help you be a more flexible and people-focused project manager. Take a look!

PM Tips is a collaborative blog that covers not only project management, but also “collaboration, knowledge management and all other work 2.0 concepts present in today’s web 2.0 world”! It offers practical tips and advice to help you be a better project manager.

Finally, do take a look at Pawel Brodinski on Software Project Management. This blog is more personal than the others I have mentioned here, and covers a lot of ground.

There are many more high quality blogs out there as well - I haven’t mentioned Jurgen Appelo’s Noop, Elizabeth Harrin’s PM4Girls, or John Reiling’s PM Crunch, all of which deserve a look.

Don’t forget, however, that if you join the Project Management Guide FriendFeed room the feeds from these blogs, and more, are pulled together into one handy place. Join in, and get commenting!

As I say, these are just a few of the blogs I go to. What blogs do you recommend? Which ones have you found to be most useful? And why? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Technorati Tags: project management, project management blog, project management guide, project management tips

As project managers, we’ve all had times when our attention is being pulled from many different directions at once. As well as our day to day tasks, sometimes problems pop up that mean we need to firefight, stakeholders can demand new reports, and team members can seek new direction. All of this can happen despite our best efforts to keep the project on an even keel.

Now, the ability to jump from task to task like this and still be effective is important for a project manager, but I don’t want to talk about that today. No, today I want to talk about the benefit of behaving in the opposite manner, about the benefits of focus.

All of us have had times where we have had to jump from task to task. And I imagine a lot of us have been left feeling that at least some of those tasks were short-changed by us - the pressure we put ourselves under to swap to the next job meant we didn’t spend enough time on the task in hand.

We all know that we should recognise the difference between things that are urgent, and things that are important. But while we all know it, I’m sure many of us still fall into the trap of chasing the urgent, without looking at how important it is.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to resist the demands to switch from task to task. By focusing on one task, you gain the ability to really get to grips with it. You will be able to look deeper into the cause of any problems, and come up with more considered solutions.

So, let’s put these two ideas together: deciding on what is urgent and what is important; and the benefits of focus. So how do we merge them?

Well, when you have a lot of issues clamouring for your attention, take the time to focus on one task first - the task of deciding which of those issues are important, and which are urgent.

Once you’ve done that, you are in a better position to focus on those issues that are important and urgent. Those that are important but not urgent can wait until these are done. Those which are not important, but urgent, can be delegated or renegotiated. Those which are neither important or urgent, well, they can just wait!

One of the ways to think about this is to remember that your time is precious. You are being paid (hopefully well…) to use your time for the benefit of the project. So take just a little of that time to make sure the rest of it is spent in the most effective manner, in the best way to benefit the project.

Of course, this is easy in theory, not so easy in practice. How do you deal with these sort of whirlwind days? Do you end up running around firefighting, or do you manage to find the time to focus on what is important? Let me know!

Technorati Tags: project management, project management blog, project management tips

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!

Wikis are websites that allow the people who access it to contribute to it, or to change and update the information that is already there. The most famous example of a wiki has to be, of course, Wikipedia, which has harnessed the efforts of individuals around the world to build a resource with a remarkable breadth, though with sometimes variable quality!

But can a similar system be of use to us as project managers? We’ve already looked at the benefits of FriendFeed, most notably that as all the ‘conversational’ information is being captured, it generates a searchable resource of this information. However, sometimes we need to make things more formal.

While we can use blogs to share formal documents, they are primarily a one to many communication tool, in that the person writing the posts has the most control over putting information out. In other words, while a blog is useful for gathering comments on the information, it is not good at allowing collaboration in the creation of it.

When all of your team are close by, this may not be a problem - you can walk over and talk to them! Unfortunately, this is increasingly often not the case, and this is where a wiki can come into its own.

By putting up a wiki page, you enable the people viewing it to add information, to modify what is there, and to improve the usefulness of it. This means you can gather the knowledge and expertise from all of your team members, who can contribute to the generation of this resource.

This is useful when you are looking not only at the documentation around running the project, such as risk logs, but also when you are looking to create the documentation about the product - in other words, the documentation about using the product, which should be part of the output of the project.

A wiki isn’t the perfect answer, of course. While, hopefully, the documentation produced on the wiki will be good, it still needs to go through a quality process before release, and this may uncover problems. And, of course, actually getting your team to contribute needs discipline on both your and their parts. There may be a temptation to set up a wiki and leave it alone, assuming that the documentation will magically now get written. This works about as well as you would expect.

But while a wiki brings some challenges, the benefits of using one can be great. Having the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the project team around this project put down in an organised manner is incredibly valuable. And if it is done throughout the life of the project, it is likely to be much more successful than when tacked on the end.

Have you used a wiki in project management? Was it useful? Or did it just mean another thing that had to be monitored? What do you think? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Technorati Tags: project management, project management blog, project management guide, project management tips

A quick update today, looking at an example of a business using Twitter and FriendFeed in the same way I suggested in earlier posts. The company in question is Humana.

Chris Hall has a blog post up, Meeting of the Minds, where he talks about how this came about. He was in a meeting, essentially a project kick-off meeting, about the social media strategy for Humana, when someone suggested that they record the event on Twitter - in the public domain.

You already know I think this is a good idea. The meeting agreed to use a hashtag (#hcoc) to make the tweets easier to find, and an interesting thing is that co-workers not in the meeting were able to follow along, and even suggest ideas. This kind of wide-ranging collaboration is a great benefit of this openness.

In addition, Chris created a FriendFeed room to enable everyone to find the information easily - providing a more stable and helpful resource.

I really encourage you all to go along to the blog post Meeting of the Minds and read more about it.

Do you know of any other examples of organisations using social media in an innovative way? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Technorati Tags: project management, project management blog, project management guide, project management tips