Translating Analytics to Action: Right Metrics, Right Time

Translating Analytics to Action: Right Metrics, Right Time

Getting Thrown under the bus

In the course of human events as a project manager there will be a time.  Yes that dreaded time.   When regardless of what you do, you can NOT keep your project from going sideways.   And you might as well put "It's my fault" on your forehead.   Because you are going down.   Why is this?  Because it's always the PM's fault.   If the network has an issue, its the PM's fault.  If there is a bug in the code, it's the PM's fault.  If the project is over budget its the PM's fault.  If its over schedule, its the PM's fault.  If its under staffed, it's the PM's fault.  Lets face it.  Paint a target on your forehead because you my friend are going down.

How do you get around this?   You have to do your best to move past this point as quickly as possible.  Sometimes that remote install will require you to be on site.  If your code didn't go in correctly perhaps you need to be the one that helps out with testing.   Go the extra mile.   Push past the problem.   

Here are some tips

1. Keep in good relations with your boss.   Make him aware of your project status at all time.   Communicate with them on a personal level.
2. Keep your skills up to date - PM certification is key
3. Keep in good relations with your team.  Don't take anyone else down because of your misfortune.  
4. Sometime you need to fall on your sword.   If its your fault, its your fault.  
5. Stay up to date with job boards.  It does a lot of things for you.  What skills are people looking for?   What is the market doing right now?  Find out when you need to stay in your position and when you need to go because you might be in the market in the near future.
6. Over communicate after this happens.   For ex: We missed our deployment date but we are working on a solution and I will be back in contact as soon as I know the new dates.

Remember, IT groups are built on relationships.   Don't shoot the guy who could fix the problem for you.

7 Ways to Politely Shut Down a Conversation

7 Ways to Politely Shut Down a Conversation

Understand your business

Over the years, I have worked for many sectors of industry.   Distribution, Government, Consumer products, Insurance, Telecom and being a project manager at each business is extremely different in what the job entails.  The one common thread among all sectors is the expectation that you understand your business.   How do you understand your business?

First off, Ask questions.  It sounds simple but you will find yourself not knowing the questions to ask on Day 1, 2 or 90.  Your understanding of the business should grow and the types of questions should change.  Asking a question is not a sign of ignorance or skill level.

Second.    This is the hardest.  Listen.  You don't have to ask a question to get an education.  Sometimes you just need to listen to what the business is talking about or IT is talking about.   Eat lunch with different folks and listen to what they discuss.

Third.  Read what's available.   Sharepoint, project plans, who is the business representative.  Who are the architects?   What is the project cadence?  What's on an agenda?   What developement methodology is IT using?   Try to find the acronym chart.   Man does Telecom have a ton of acronyms.  I couldn't tell whether the acronym was network device or a business unit.   Read.

Attend as many meetings as possible to get acclimated.   Perhaps its an HR meeting where you learn company culture.  Perhaps another teams project meeting where you see their cadence.   Be present.  Meet people.  Let them know that you are there because you never know when your next project will be with one of your new best friends.

Changing priorities

Have you ever had one of those projects that was not at the highest priority for anyone except you?  What did you do about it?   Sometimes that takes some pressure.   Its called an escalation.  Its not to get someone into trouble.  Its to prioritize their work.  

So I would first off talk with your project team.  Ask them when they can complete the task.  If they cant complete the task within the needs of the project, then you will have to escalate to the manager.   If that method is not effective, I would have my manager/director escalate the issue.   So that is key point #1, Know your escalation chain.   Now that you have escalated, you will need to keep that escalation point aware of progress of their team.   Let them know if you are getting on track.   Key point #2, communication.   The escalation should not be the first communication that the escalation manager/director has received.  They should already be in the loop on Project communications.  They should have been notified by Key Point #3, The RISK Log update.   Once you identify a RISK to your project that should have been communicated out to the Project Sponsor and team.   One additional point, when you communicate out the RISK, that should not be the key that the rest of the team can stop working.  Sometimes your team is looking for a reason why they should stop working on your project.  Ensure that they know they still have deliverables and you are working to mitigate the risk.  If there are any change in timelines, communicate those out to the team.

Best of luck.

Joe

Stage Gates and waterfall

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, there was a development process called Waterfall.   In this development process, your project progressed in a step by step process.

1. Initiation - One pager
2. Planning - Scope Document
3. Requirements - Requirements Document
4. Design - Design Document
5. Test - Test cases and Test plan
6. Deployment

At every stage of your project was a stage gate where you would present your project in front of the PMO with leadership.   In this meeting you would walk your way through your project and at the end of your session, you would hopefully have a green light to move to the next phase of your project.   Most of the time, you would be required to have all of your sign offs from the previous phase before you moved on to your next phase.   Waterfall lent itself very well to this process in that it was a step driven development cycle.   The problem with this process was that you might not find out until Design that your project could only afford 5 of the 10 deliverables.   Also you might not find out until Design that you really needed to include additional scope that you didn't know about in the planning phase.  Easily corrected with a CR and additional funding but another problem nonetheless.   The other problem was getting people to sign off on a project that they really knew little about but they owned that sign off.  So I think that depending on your organization and how large it is, you might not really get the business involvement that you seek unless you are diligent about your communication.

Using MS Excel as your first Project plan.

You can use MS Excel to quickly timeline out your project without using MS Project.   Another PM shared how he projected out his project timeline and it has really helped me in the past to quickly put a timeline together.  The bonus it is quickly shared in email to your team as well.

Let me point out a couple of items here.   I manually put in the first two dates above.  Then I select those two cells and drag to the right to auto-populate the rest of the dates.   Then I insert my tasks.  Sometimes, I will create a line for each group.  So line one might be network, line 2 server team, line 3 security, etc.   To show what is done by each time.  More of a swim lane approach.   I find this extremely helpful in presenting to the kick off team.  Because this is really fluid and they can tell you  what might work and what might not work based on your projections. For example: there might be change freezes during a period that you didn't know about.  A task that you thought might take 2 weeks might take 3 weeks, etc.   Best of luck to you.

Project Change Requests

What is a change request?  Change Requests are changes to the project scope. A lot of clients see projects going on and on and wonder how do you handle scope creep. The answer is CR's.   For example: you are working on your enhancement release and the company wants to start a new initiative to change the report label to ABC One Stop.   You are already in the design phase, the new portion is scoped out and we can complete that work in the project timeline.   We open a CR to show that change in scope, document the costs and any impact to timeline.  This is probably logged in your PPM tool, perhaps on sharepoint or notated in your document repository.  As always, you need to communicate this out to your project team and sponsor.

NOTE: just because your company doesn't have a CR system, doesn't mean that you don't need to track this work and communicate.  I guarantee you will think yourself later when you have some sort of documentation as to why your 3 month project became a 6 month project and all fingers are pointing to the PM.

Microsoft One Note

I have become quite a fan of the Microsoft One Note tool.  Its already in the MS OFFICE suite and it helps me to create good notes when tackling my projects.  Date and time stamps are automatically added at the top.   Let me review my format for my project notes:

ATTENDEES

• Joe
• Stan
• Fred

NOTES

What was discussed.  I tend to type as much as I can during this time.
More was discussed
Even more was discussed

ACTION ITEMS

1. Do this first
2. Do this second
3. Do this as well

Another good point of MS One Note is that you can cut and paste in emails into your notes or pictures, or whatever you need.  So after the meeting, I clean up the notes above and then I add a Summary of the meeting to the top of the email and send that out to everyone.  The summary is great because execs don't want to read through every line of your notes but they will read the summary.   Keep this in mind.

Now that I have talked about organizing the meeting notes, how about organizing the One Note area.   You have a Note book a section, and a page.   I work with 5 business units.   I have a notebook for every business unit.   Under the notebook, I have a project in a section.   Under that project, I have my meeting notes under the page.    When that starts to get crowded, you might have to create additional sections or notebooks to clean that up a bit.  But its a great tool.  Notes auto save for you so that's a plus and you can sync them to the cloud for multiple devices to access.

Understanding the Risks

One of the jobs of a project manager is to discover the risks of the project.   What are some of the risks that we will encounter if we move forward with the project?    You will want to keep this question in the forefront of your project team and communicate those risks out as early as possible.   Remember the next question though that will come from your leadership.  How do we mitigate those risks.  How do we ensure that those risks don't become issues in our project?  That's an excellent question.   As the PM, you need to ensure that everyone, especially the project sponsor understands all risks identified.   Keep a risk log and communicate out that risk log.   If you have a PPM tool, log that risk.  Log the mitigation plan.

When I was a system administrator, we always had to open a CR or change request before making changes on any system.   Along with that CR, we had to have a backout plan.  This is crucial for your project.   What is the backout plan?  Do the stakeholders understand the backout plan?

TIP FOR THE DAY: Do you understand the difference between a risk and an issue?   A risk might happen and an issue has already happened.   Learn that answer because you are asked that in most interviews.  Welcome to Project Management.

Understanding the processes

Within all IT shops there are different ways to launch your IT project and get it off of the ground.  Some companies have more well defined processes while others do not.  For example: At Coca-Cola, there is a rigid gating process for each phase of the project.   Each gate has specific documents that need to be in place and define where you are going with your project. Each piece of documentation must be present in a folder for that project and in the gating area.   Your PPM tool must be updated with all of the relevant information.  

In smaller shops, you might not have any required documentation or gating process.   What you do need is some kind of sign off before you proceed.  Or at least a good communication path forward. Smaller clients might not have the processes in place but that doesn't mean that you don't need that paperwork.   You need some type of email or signed form that gives you the go ahead to move forward with the project.   A stickler in one of my clients was security.  Security might need to sign off on your project.  This might be a PMO, infrastructure team or networking team depending on the organization and project.   You might need a Project number generated from a tool like Service Now or Clarity PPM before you begin.   It all depends on the client and the processes.

What is the culture of your client?   Find out quickly, assimilate and move forward.  Best of luck.

Key mistake of new PM's

What is a Project Manager?   A Project Manager executes on the vision of the leaders.   We manage budgets, people and schedule for an organization for a piece of work that the organization wants to accomplish.   We keep our organizations updated on the status, risks and potential roadblocks that may get in the way of executing the plan.  What can be more simple than that right?    Well here is a key idea that you might want to be aware of.  The PM does not always have direct reports to execute on that plan.   What does that mean?   That means that the people that are assigned to work on your project may have and probably have competing priorities.    As the PM, my job is to keep my projects in the forefront of that persons tasks.   Now I may have a project that comes along and bumps my priority to the back burner and that's fine. That doesn't stop me from pushing my project to #2 when there are 10 projects competing for that time.

How do I do this?   Well communication is key.   Take notes and send out those notes.  Assign action items and follow-up.   When you get no response, follow-up again.  When you get no response, escalate.   This escalation path is key to your success as a PM.    When you send out your action items, copy the correct people.   Those correct people are the management chain for your resources.   Don't expect your resources to attend your meeting and then leave and do the job they should.  Follow-up with them.   Remember, there is no such thing as over communicating on a project when you have tight timelines.   Be the Squeaky wheel. This doesn't have to be abrasive.   For ex: "A gentle reminder that we may want to order computers for sites 5,6 and 7 since those dates are about a month out."   Did I force myself on him in any way?  I don't think so but I was the squeaky wheel.  This was a "Hey, focus on my stuff" message.

Sometimes the most important attribute you can have is your personality.   As a matter of fact, some of the best ways to build your relationship with the team is on the call before the meeting starts.  Let conversations happen.  Be a catalyst for getting people to talk before the call starts so they participate after the call begins.     It is called building a rapport with your team.    It helps them to be open to communicating.  Sometimes your calls are quiet and you feel like you are the only one talking.  I am currently working on a project with resources in Canada.   When I build my timeline I factored in to the plan, Canadian holidays.  That is to let me Canadian team who is separated from me by hundreds of miles understand that I am thinking about them and their concerns.  Be intentional.

Fight for your projects.   I pushed and pushed for a vendor to complete a security form so that we could open up some protocols on a server.   After a month of pushing, I pushed with security.   I pushed with them until I had to escalate internally.   This week I have a meeting with their VP.  Am I trying to get them in trouble?   Absolutely not.  I am fighting for my project to move forward.  I am getting rid of roadblocks that need to be moved.  I am pushing my #10 project to #1 or #2.