When was the last time you thought: "Wow! On this project, we have the exact right number of people, AND they all have the precise skillsets we need!"
The project environment (project cost planning, managing talent, and tracking project metrics) is very similar to the small company or startup environment -- there is too much to do, not enough people to do it, and a less-than-ideal match of skillsets and tasks.
In short: every team member will have to do things they've never done before. How can you nail that new role the first time you try it?
The answer: Think like Miles Davis and improvise!
(Note that a good strategic talent management process can help compensate for skillset limitations.)
Left Brain, Meet Right Brain
We recently decided that our public-facing website needed a redesign. No one on our team had ever built a public site before: something marketing-focused and not functionality-focused. Since I was the first one to bring it up at the meeting, I owned it. A new role for me: the algorithms engineer puts on the design hat.
Now that I’m on the other side of the project (the site is live), I was able to reflect on my approach to tackling this new role. Although your project may not be building a public website for the first time, I hope the simple framework described below helps you be successful in your first encounters with new roles.
You are Not Alone
Before you get started, remember: you’re not the first person to do whatever it is you’re doing. (You’re also not the last!) Train resources and yourself by learning from others (for free). Find the best practices. Learn from the masters (like a jazz musician would). In other words: improvise!
Define Project Success
As with any project, the first step is to define your desired future state. After some thought and hallway conversations, my stakeholders and I decided that three simple questions would define project success:
- Question 1: For what purpose(s) will the project deliverable be used? Stated more clearly: what’s the point? 2 or 3 bullet points should get the job done.
- Question 2: What examples have accomplished that same purpose? As previously stated, I am not alone -- for decades, established companies have invested resources to implement websites. I can capitalize on their work and experience simply by observing their end products.
- Question 3: How are these examples similar or different from ours? This answer will inform how our implementation should differ from the existing implementations. Some differences to consider regarding my website building project: target market (B2B? B2C?), company size, technology, number and type of offerings, marketing message and style, etc.
Answering these questions will inform the project design and task list, and help deliver what the stakeholders need. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll develop answers to these answers and share conclusions.
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(Recently I’ve been watching the TED talks online, and I’ve found them to be as fascinating as they are entertaining. They also teach lessons that apply directly to making projects successful. Every Tuesday, I’ll post a talk I found particularly interesting or applicable to project success.)
I imagine that to become the most successful entrepreneur in the world, you have to be a pretty good project manager. In this TED Talk, Bill Gates provides a glimpse into his project management practice and approach.
Bill’s "project" is to make the world a habitable and sustainable place for as many humans as possible. I expect his project is slightly larger in scope than any project you or I will ever manage. That said, his project plan has all the makings of success:
- He clearly defines both his stakeholders and his desired future state.
- Of all the projects he could undertake to achieve that future state, he identifies and substantiates the one project that will have the largest positive impact.
- He then outlines a fact-based approach for execution, based on feasibility.
- To track and measure progress, he defines a simple set of metrics and milestones.
- It’s clear that his plan has not only evolved over time, but he expects it to evolve further and is planning for that.
- He articulates all of this information in less than twenty minutes.
Please set aside a few minutes and watch a master project manager articulate his project plan: Bill Gates TED Talk
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Not long ago, vendors would extol the virtues of their products in white papers. Research firms would release sponsored reports to document the emergence or evolution of a certain market space. Marketing people would spend hours crafting the perfect 10-word phrase to put in a print ad.
Now, it seems, all of that is going away.
Of course, you still need to train resources. Project stakeholders need to be aligned. Markets must be understood, and product messaging must still be communicated. So how do you answer the critical questions that drive project success? Below are some topics of hallway conversations I’ve had recently (I'm sure these sound familiar):
We understand that our plans will certainly change –this doesn't make planning any less important. Each member of the team has the background to answer these questions only partially. So, I went to educate myself.
And I found a great source of information to be....Blogs.
Reading a good blog is like sitting next to the smart kid in class and cheating off their paper. Many contain insightful, rigorous discussions on both the technical and business aspects of running projects and companies. Oh, and they're available for free.
In other words, blogs are a great source of free training, especially for topics where training is not traditionally available. It seems that:
- Blogs are the new Training Documents.
- Blogs are the new White Papers.
- Blogs are the new Case Studies.
- Blogs are the new Press Releases.
- Blogs are the new Customer Feedback Channel.
- Blogs are the new Websites. (It's amazing how many sites are 100% blogs.)
- Blogs are the new Content Aggregators.
Over the past few months, I’ve discovered some great blogs that fill in my own gaps in understanding. Six of them are listed below.
- Cranky Product Manager: A cynical but accurate documentary of how to get deliver projects in the real world.
- For Entrepreneurs: David Skok’s blog is a fascinating, rigorous discussion of a metrics-based approach for measuring success. (It’s focused on software companies but is good reading for anyone.)
- A Smart Bear: Great advice on how to deliver products and projects with minimal budget and resources. As informative as it is amusing.
- Ash Maurya: Unsure if your product or project is aligned with your customers’ needs? Following Ash’s methods will remove all doubt.
- Ganthead: An excellent survey of project management blogs of all types.
So, the next time a team member asks for training or you need some training yourself, consider self-educating using these free resources.
What blogs or other sources of free training have you used and found effective?
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Project executives serve many masters. (In project management-speak, “master” is another word for “stakeholder.”) Depending on project scope and the industry, the number of project stakeholders can be staggering. For example, if you were to install a piece of equipment in a pharmaceutical plant, the list of stakeholders involved is below:
- Senior Leadership (they fund it)
- Project Management Office (they oversee it)
- Engineering (they design it)
- Technical Development (they test it)
- Manufacturing (they own it – i.e., the customer)
- Technical Services (they maintain it)
- Quality Control (they check it)
- Quality Assurance (they check it too)
- Validation (yep, they check it too)
- Regulatory (you guessed it…they check it!)
Each stakeholder has their own agenda (as they should). They can’t all be served equally… you can’t optimize all project metrics simultaneously. So, who’s the number one priority? Which stakeholder is the most important?
“That’s obvious,” you say, “the most critical stakeholder is the customer!” After all, isn’t the customer always right? That argument seems compelling until you consider one fact: If the customer loses interest and the project remains funded, you can still pivot to a new customer – whether that customer was internal or external.
In other words: Projects that have funding and no customers can adapt and deliver. Projects that have customers and no funding are non-starters. That means the most critical stakeholder is whoever’s paying the bills.
As a project manager, product manager, or program manager, you are the CEO of your domain. And like a CEO, your top priority has to be keeping your “company” funded – that is the best way to maximize the chances of success, no matter how success is defined. The best project cost planning strategy is the one that serves your funding source’s best interests. Below are some thoughts to add some context:
- There is a condition under which your customer is the most important stakeholder: the customer and your funding source are the same.
- A smart funding source will align with the customer at the start by making customer buy-in a condition of funding release.
- If the funding source and the customer are aligned at the start, the project manager best serves the funding source stakeholders by maintaining that alignment during project execution.
Who are the stakeholders in your projects? Which ones are the most important?
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“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” ~ Robert Burns (adapted)
(This is part 2 of a 2-part post. You can find part 1 here.)
Project managers have to manage project budgets. Although it's always a line item in the budget, planning doesn’t make sense when you think about the pure economics of it. Consider these statements:
- Creating a project plan takes time and effort. (I have put together some project plans that were so big, the “planning” phase has its own plan!)
- Measuring progress and reporting against the project plan takes even more effort.
- In part one of this two-part blog post, I discussed how your project plan is almost guaranteed to have gaps and require changes – often due to factors you can’t control. That means you have to constantly reevaluate and adjust the plan. That takes still more time and effort.
All this time and effort spent on planning could be invested directly in achieving the project objectives. So, the logical question to ask is:
If things rarely go according to plan, why bother to create a project plan at all?
Stop The Madness
In order to justify the costs of creating and maintaining a project plan, there must be a compelling benefit (and “because everyone else does” is not a good reason). Consider these statements:
- Project success = achieving project objectives.
- Changes are inevitable.
- Minimizing risk to project success = successful change management.
- To manage change, you first have to identify it.
- The only way you can identify change is to have a baseline plan.
Having a plan empowers you to recognize and react to change. In other words, without a plan as a baseline, how can you even identify changes, let alone react and overcome? This is the value and the power of planning: identifying change, minimizing impact, and maximizing success in real-world conditions.
Here are some other reasons why a project plan needs to be in your project management toolkit, listed here in no particular order:
- A project plan is the only way to communicate the project intent in the same way to multiple stakeholders. It gets everyone on the same page.
- Funding and resources are finite. The number of potential projects is infinite. Plans are the only tool available to compare projects and prioritize which ones should get funded.
- A plan rooted in facts checks emotions and predispositions at the door – this can clarify decision making and overall strategy.
- Eventually, with enough planning, you’ll be able to impress your friends by actually being able to read a gantt chart. Also, the original plan is usually good for a laugh during project closeout.
One final note: we've found that sometimes plan adjustments require resetting expectations with customers and stakeholders. This is usually readily accepted (as long as it happens for good reason). I can guarantee your customers, vendors, investors, and stakeholders have all had to reset expectations more than once.
Why?
Because their plans change, too.
We'd love to hear about your reasons for planning (or not planning) in the comments below.
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"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." –General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Like most project managers, a lot of my day is spent making a plan, revising a plan, or measuring progress against a plan. Our company has a product development plan with projects and milestones taken from the product roadmap plan which, together with our marketing plan, informs our customer acquisition plan.
It almost as if we need to write a plan-management plan! And the amazing thing is that despite all that planning, nothing goes according to plan.
Plans are only useful if they help execute successful projects. Our team decided that answering two questions will reveal a great deal about how we can improve both our planning and our project execution:
- Why do things not go according to plan?
- If things rarely go according to plan, why bother to plan at all?
In part one of this two-part blog post, I’ll reflect on recent projects to answer the first of these two questions.
Question 1: Why do things not go according to plan?
If you’re like me, you’ll read a plan from 6 months ago and laugh so hard that your morning coffee comes out your nose. Below are five reasons why this happens.
1. Scope Misdefinition.
Defining a fixed scope is hard because everything is changing, all the time. However, fixing the scope is critical because it tells you two things: what's in scope, and what's not. Two things help us define a fixed scope:
- Begin your plan by describing the desired future state at project's end — this defines the path to the finish line.
- Standardize your scope documents using templates — this will help to avoid gaps and make reading documents easier. Our software project template includes three main sections: a scope write-up, our user interaction specification (a uml-style flow diagram), and relevant screenshots with call-outs.
2. Scope Misunderstanding.
Defining the scope really well won’t help if the scope is wrong or has gaps. You need accuracy AND precision.
How can you avoid big gaps and misses?
- First, to paraphrase Einstein: keep the scope of the project as small as possible, but no smaller. As projects increase in scope, the potential for scope misunderstanding and schedule/budget risk increases rapidly.
- Second, normalize the scope of every task to some manageable duration, like a day or a week. If something takes longer than your "normalized unit," break it up. We’ve found task estimates longer than a week are probably just guesses. Guesses don't make for good plans.
3. Scope Growth.
"While we’re in there, let's just add a new [insert widget]." Before you do that, consider the following two points:
- Additional scope = additional time. How much more? Tough to say since it’s not in the plan…
- Additional time = additional risk. You will 1. add more people, 2. push the schedule out, or 3. delete (or miss!) something in the base scope. The effect: major risk to schedule and budget.
4. A Changing Environment.
Customers provide feedback. Team members go on vacation. Servers go down. These events are invisible when you create your plan. Unfortunately, the unpredictable external environment is the factor over which you have the least control, and it has the second-greatest potential impact to the plan! Which leaves the number one risk to project plans...
5. A Mismatch Between Skillset and Task.
Errors in srategic talent management are the number one reason why projects slip. Every project will experience Scope Misidefinition (item 1), Scope Misunderstanding (item 2), Scope Growth (item 3), and a Changing Environment (item 4). Placing the right resources in the right place at the right time will empower you to react and overcome.
In other words: good strategic talent management is project planning for dummies.
Here are some quick tips for resource sourcing and resource evaluation:
- "Fish where the fish are." For example: if you're looking for software developers, post on the forums where they hang out like MSDN Forums or stackoverflow.
- As in your project plan, standardization helps you evaluate candidates. Parse resumes quickly and effectively by developing a standardized grading rubric. Better yet, have candidates fill out your standardized evaluation form and do away with resumes altogether. Download our FREE eBook for a resource evaluation framework.
In the next blog post, I’ll reflect on the second question posed at the top of this article: If things rarely go according to plan, why bother to plan at all?
If you have any tips or processes that increase the chances of project success, let’s hear about them in the comments.~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Your new resource efficiency project will make your company the industry leader, and it just had its funding pulled.
The difficult economy means management is watching every dollar. Intentions of transforming and evolving your company have been replaced with maintaining the status quo "until things improve."
The reality is that a challenging economic environment may be the best time to start a new project or venture. Read on to find out four reasons why this counter-intuitive notion is true.
Fact #1: People and companies are less willing to part with cash.
- Tight budgets are the best way to understand what your customers consider must-haves and what they consider nice-to-haves. This is the perfect environment to invest in projects that are aligned with your internal and external customers' needs.
- Tight budgets are the best way to hone your personal idea communication and sales skills -- you'll develop an effective response to every objection.
- The customers that purchase your product or invest in your project will be the ones with whom it really resonates. These are the best type of customers to have because they will be your advocates and evangelists. (They're also the ones that give you the best feedback to help you refine your project or idea.)
Fact #2: Companies are "reorganizing" (read: laying-off workers).
- Workers need someplace to work, and new projects need work completed. A rich talent pool of hungry and talented workers is a boon.
- In the chaos lies a unique opportunity. Companies in defensive/survival mode make tactical decisions to stay alive -- in fact, they may do this at the expense of good strategic decisions (they may have to). Is this happening in your industry? Now is a great time to "out innovate" your competitors. Is it happening in your target market? Now is a good time to position your solutions and services to help customers navigate in these troubling times.
- Companies will retain and overwork the very talented workers. These are the same people that, in a better economy, would probably be implementing cutting edge ideas and new ventures. Engage your A-team players, leapfrog your competitors, and get your new initiative off the ground.
Fact #3: Capital is more difficult to raise both internally and externally.
- Without excess capital, you have no choice but to keep project burn rates low. Capital efficiency is a good thing in any economic climate. In a growth economy, it positions you to grow quickly. In a difficult economy, it's required to survive.
- More projects will be funded from internal sources than external sources. To release internal funds, stakeholders must (1) be aligned, and (2) have skin in the game. Those two factors are powerful predictors of project success.
- Capital-inefficient projects will have to scale back or may get canceled altogether. This will free up capital and resources for your capital-efficient, market-aligned project.
Fact #4: Companies' core business is shrinking.
- When companies compete on price, the customer wins. This is especially true for B2B services, and includes everything from office space to large capital equipment purchases and consultant services. Negotiate hard -- executing on a new idea may never be cheaper.
- An inwardly-focused company is less likely to react to changes in the marketplace. This is a chance to be noticed by customers but not by competitors.
Tell management to stop waiting for things to improve. Show them how your new project plans will make that improvement a reality.
We'd love to hear about your project management challenges and triumphs in the comments below, or contact us.
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You have a revolutionary new idea.
It might be a new skill assessment method that will fix your company’s broken talent management process. Perhaps your idea is for a new project management framework that will change how your whole company operates. Maybe your idea
is a whole new company.
So what is your idea, anyway?
Your idea's success will depend on how well you answer this question when someone asks it. In other words: The success of your idea depends on your ability to communicate it -- after all, every effort to develop the idea will start with this initial communication. Furthermore, communicating the idea is critical at every stage of its development, whether you're getting management buy-in, building and aligning your team, or getting customers to invest time and money.
We get asked the "What is your idea?" question all the time. Below is the framework we use to create our answer.
Deja Vu
Our framework for answering this question grew out of many conversations with stakeholders of various types: end-users, team members, and validators. The amazing thing is that no matter who the stakeholder was, the conversation was always nearly the same. Below is a mock transcript from such conversation:
- Stakeholder: Ok, i have 15 minutes between meetings. What is your idea?
- Us: Sagepoint is an online tool that matches every resource to the project that best fits their unique skillset. The result is a workforce completely aligned with your business goals. That's our motto -- optimize your workforce.
- Stakeholder: Oh, matching people and jobs. That's like [online resume job site].
- Us: Not quite. Those tools help you place someone in a job, but we pick up where they leave off -- SagePoint enables you to match resources to projects in real-time.
- Stakeholder: Oh, managing projects. That's like [project management tool].
- Us: Not quite. Project management tools pick up where we leave off -- SagePoint will staff that project with the optimum combination of resources. We do that by measuring and analyzing employee data like skill assessment metrics, availability, geography, and billing rate.
- Stakeholder: Oh, employee metrics tracking. That's like [hr management tool].
- Us: No, not quite. We don't perform typical HR functions like payroll and time tracking. However, we leverage HR data plus other information to perform our core function -- matching every resource to the right project, or workforce optimization.
- Stakeholder: Oh, data aggregation and processing. That's like [Enterprise Resource Planning tool].
- ...and so on.
The General Case
If the details from the above conversation are stripped away, a general process emerges:
You position the idea.- The stakeholder positions your idea relative to similar ideas.
- You correct their position with more information.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 until everyone understands one another.
The key to this process is for the stakeholder to build an accurate understanding of your idea by comparing it to familiar ideas. That understanding is built on three things:
- what your idea is,
- what it isn't,
- how it connects to existing products and processes.
The intersection of these three things will succinctly define your idea and inform your responses to stakeholders' questions. A few notes:
Please share your approach to idea communication and answering the "What do you do? question below.
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Good data is a prerequisite for making good decisions -- that's a fact in business and in life.
You can determine if new marketing copy is getting more prospects by A/B testing. You can find a great deal on that new TV by comparing prices at multiple vendors. These questions are straightforward to answer for one reason: good data is easy to get when that data is easily quantifiable (# of prospects, price).
The problem is that not all decisions are based on quantifiable data. This is true when we seek answers to qualitative questions -- and most questions fall into this qualitative category. (At least, most of the important ones do.) Below are questions that require qualitative data to answer.
These questions are worth billions of dollars -- entire industries have formed around answering each one of them. The qualitative notions are italicized. As you read the list, ask yourself: How do I measure that?
- How can I most easily and reliably find what I'm looking for?
- How good is my website?
- How important or socially relevant is this news article?
- Will I enjoy this book, movie, music, or restaurant?
- Is my physical or virtual environment safe and secure enough?
- Which person is the best fit for my project / job / task requirements?
These questions are hard to answer. So, what is the key to answering them well? The concept is simple --
use a framework to translate qualitative notions into quantitative data.
The Secret Sauce
Creating a system that produces reliable skill metrics, reliability data, or performance tracking data is a simple enough idea -- and as with many simple ideas, the implementation is very, very hard. Companies dominate their market or die based on how well they can map the qualitative to the quantitative. They pour resources into making even incremental improvements to their algorithms, because owning the best algorithm is a giant and sustainable barrier to entry for competitors. Simply put: A good algorithm can be a pretty fantastic cash machine.
Below is a simple graphic that illustrates the "qualitative to quantitative" concept and the companies that have implemented it well. Each of these companies has a "Secret Sauce" algorithm that is the lifeblood of their business.
How good is good enough?
An algorithm doesn't have to be perfect -- it just has to be "good enough." That can mean several things:
- Good Enough = provides meaningful and actionable results or data to the user.
- Good Enough = worth the cost (in time or money) to obtain the data.
- Good Enough = better than anyone else's algorithm (at least, until they refine theirs...).
So how can you tell with certainty when an algorithm is good enough?
I bet there's a billion-dollar market for an algorithm to help us understand that.~~~~~~~~~~~~
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