Its all about confidence

Over the last few days I’ve done a review of an important document for a project. I’ve had other people review it too.  It is a good document but because so much hangs on it being right, we may have put in more quality checks than we probably needed – to make sure the project board has confidence.

In the last few months the new (just under 3 months old, but it feels like more) UK government have made cuts in the organisations that look at the efficiency and effectiveness of local government bodies and scrapped the Audit commission (which published a rush of reports over the last few days – see the updates panel bottom right at http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk ).  Their demise has prompted a debate about what such bodies and what they contribute here: http://bit.ly/bXwsSG. I’ve added a comment to it here: http://bit.ly/bbkkuQ  please do likewise.

But confidence is more than the result of risk management or audit. It is the raw material for positive action.  The recent news stories about the statistical likelihood of a double dip recession have been balanced by reports that consumer confidence will hold the market up and buck that trend.  Confidence is what makes people quit their job to start their own business.

 Confidence is what encourages project teams to start a long journey to a distant target with the first few steps.

Risk Management for Communication

One area of communication planning work that can be forgotten is dealing with the response.  Some communications will provoke an adverse reaction. Others asking for feedback will get a greater response than expected. 

Make resource available in the plan to deal with the expected amount and make sure that the risk management plan has included how to deal with the unexpected. This is one area where not having a real plan to back up the risk that has been discussed can really derail a project.

For each of your planned communications assess the cost and impact if:

• the person you intend to communicate with doesn’t get the message
• the person you communicate with doesn’t like the message and what action they might take
• the person you communicate with is over-enthused about the message and what action they might take
• the person you want to communicate with the project does want to engage
• more people respond than you’ve estimated
• fewer people respond to your message than you need

For each of these situation, plan in advance when you’ll decide if there is a problem, who will manage your actions to deal with the problem, what you’ll do, who you’ll involve and what budget you need to manage these eventualities. 

Make sure you have  diary time at appropriate points for the people involved to be available to respond – and a way to let them know if this time is not needed.

Planning Resources and Training for Communication

 So far in your notes you have:

• who needs what information when,
• how you get feedback and information from stakeholder,
• the timing and format of the communication. 

Now we need to add that work to the project schedule and assign the right resources.

For some communication, you will need the star performer associated with the  project’s objective.  They may be the sponsor, the project manager or a technical specialist and they must be comfortable in the spot light. These people must also be ready to take the hard questions if the project is facing difficulties at the time of the communication.

You may use a specialist facilitator, interviewer or writer for other communication.  Their availability and contracts must be in place before they are needed.  There is nothing more frustrating for stakeholders than cancelled or poorly run communication events.

There is a diversity of specialist training for communication: the right way to say uncomfortable things, how to receive negative feedback, how to understand what a stakeholder really says, how to deliver a presentation or how to facilitate a meeting.  Review your communication  plan and your project schedule, ask this question: what training is needed by whom and when?  Add that to your training plan and schedule the time in your project plan.

Planning Stakeholder Communication

The main part of the communication plan is for communication with stakeholders.

Some preparatory work is needed:

• who the stakeholders are 
• what information they can give
• their areas of influence 
• their information needs

Think about how to have good consultations and relationships with stakeholders.  What is the best outcome the project can get and what is the worst situation it can succeed in? How can you structure project communication to get more of the good and as little as possible of the bad?

When is a good time to communicate with them? In schools, the first and last weeks of the academic year are too busy for your project to be a priority. Some organisations close for certain weeks each year. Some stakeholders may be in a different time zones: early morning meetings are the middle of the night for them.

Now consider how the project needs information from the stakeholders and when it can best deliver the information the stakeholders need.

PRINCE2, PMBoK, Agile

A project manager is a project manager right?  Project managers should be able to manage any project.  Well, yes and no.

Do project managers need to be technical experts to manage technical projects? No. The technical content may have some impact and provided a technical expert is there to work with the project manager, all should be fine.

But HR managers recognise that project managers often have to be technical leads in their organisations and may have to be quite specific about who they can hire. 

When the project has already started, HR managers may need to be specific about the style of project manager too; when the approach to the project closely follows one style of method in the organisation.  The project manager is leading and directing the work of the rest of the team, so if they are not up to speed on the method, it can have a major impact on progress.

There are three common approaches to project management in ICT (computing and communication) projects: PRINCE2, PMBoK, Agile. The differences matter in the project manager’s planning, assignment of  tasks and monitoring.

PRINCE2 is one method for project management that has one particular way of viewing what a project manager does. Yes, it should be tailored for each project within the process flow is specified.

Project Management Institute (PMI.org) has a body of knowledge (PMBoK) on which its entry-level qualification (PMP) is based. PMBoK is also procedural (it tells you what steps to make in a method) and in some places it is different from PRINCE2 – in the detail. 

Agile is a different way of approaching project management: time boxing (a specific number of days scheduled as a development step with a hard deadline) , focus on customer view of requirements, customer involvement, and iterative development.

Knowing all these approaches will develop the project’s manager ability because the different approaches bring out different skills.  However, professional development is rarely why a project manager is recruited.  Recruitment is normally to fill an urgent need for a project manager who can be effective now.

My conclusion? Until we have effective resource planning for project management, we will have organisations recruiting “exact fit” project managers to join projects that are late starting with no time for developing project manager effectively.  That isn’t good for organisations or for the project management profession.

Discussions about Project Management

 I have seen 3 post and had 2 discussion this week (it is only Tuesday!) that suggested we should be more consistent about project management and not confuse people.  Agile method followers insist waterfall is dead and should be buried. Others say Agile is about product development and not project management and should get out!  There is a drive for consistency and conformance: “all businesses need to be run by project management”, “we need one method”

These are frustrating conversations and damaging to business and the project management profession.  They are also naïve.

There is a place for consistence and conformity because it does increase efficiency by driving out variation, easing communication and increasing focus on the requirements. Continuous improvement for consistency and conformance can drive out waste in a process. Project management is not right as the main management technique for a process-driven business where most tasks are very well-defined and repeatable: there, efficiency is the priority.

However, all those wonderful ways of reducing waste also reduce diversity and creativity.  Diversity and creativity are what drive new developments and, hopefully, progress.  Yes, projects are a good way to organize the work of some businesses. Project management focuses on effective delivery of discrete impacts and deliverables.  A project is a “unique undertaking” with a unique place(s), specification, resources, timescale, team and stakeholders. Repeatability is probably not needed for a part of what the project does.

Governance and reporting should be consistent within an organisation to get efficient resource use but project management is more than methods: it is about communication and getting things done.

There are also good reasons why people talk about projects differently:
1.. “project management” includes project portfolio, project and programme management which are significantly different management situations
2. Project management has a number of techniques/methods applicable to different sorts of projects/programmes/portfolios
3. everybody has their own experience of project management – every project is unique – and we learn from each other’s experience

Don’t get trapped in ineffective uniformity for efficiency’s sake.  Talk about effectiveness and business needs. Consider the context and the people involved. Weigh the balance of a unique approach to resolve the project needs against the benefits of consistency.

Beware if all your projects are the same: start to question if you really have projects and if there are more effective and efficient ways to manage the work.

Finally and importantly, share the lessons learned about managing projects in your context.

Planning Communication with the Team

Planning for formal communications with the project team might seem to pre-empt the project manager’s role.  However, deciding the frequency, style and timing of communication with the team is important. 

Consider the team’s time zones, location, languages, different public holidays and any disability that needs adaptions. Thinking about these may change the way this project communicates compared to the organisations other projects. While the project needs to fit within its organisation, it may need to be different in approach to be effective.

Communication within the team is more than reporting progress and monitoring completion. It is also about building commitment, and understanding the context and aims of the project.

Adoption of technology curve

The adoption of technology has a curve: leading edge, fast followers, a drop off where some of the fast followers become disillusioned, the technology matures and around 80% of the market place suddenly appears, before a decline as the world moves on.

This curve was documented by EW Rodgers, you may find his book (and one by Paul Sloane) interesting.

It is so easy for leaders or fast followers to forget they are in that role until the mass market catches them up and they feel like they are repeating themselves.

I think Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is reaching the mass market.  Many organisations have tried it over the last few years – unfortunately, not always successfully.

How many organisations have the sort of systems the technology experts are talking about? How many of them working well?  I think that is beginning to change.  The vendors seem to have gone through some pain and now have more understanding of what businesses need and organisations seem ready to accept that they may need to change the way they work to get the best from these systems.

How many people turning up to presentations gurus are finally beginning to really understand what that guru (and those like me who have been there for a long time) feel like they’ve said for 10 years.

When the mass market pick up a way of working, the fast followers finally understand how to make these projects truly successful, and the bleeding edge seem to be after their 3rd or 4th implementation or major improvement.

Now the mass market has caught up, the thought leaders must simply recognise that they are retelling the story for those that missed it the first time round. The world is now ready to listen.

Then they must move on: what is the next lesson for the fast followers?

Too Much Success

Project Managers do risk management to improve their chance of success.  We want to avoid things that could stop the project being derailed.

Unfortunately, many projects don’t spend much time actively managing the risks they’ve identified.  That is worse than not doing risk management at all: it builds a false sence of security and projects fail with the team saying, “yeah, we had that risk on our risk log”.

If we don’t manage risks well, are we any better with “opportunities” those things that might happen and make us more successful? Colleagues who do serious research on this agree with my observations: mostly opportunities aren’t formally identified, monitored or managed.

I have a small personal project: making my garden productive as well as colourful. I’m succeeding. There have been risks to be managed:

• If the grape vine doesn’t flower, we get no fruit.
• If the bees don’t polinate the flowers, our raspberry crop will be below the yeild we want.
• If the weather is very windy, pots will be blown over.

By planning and then acting, I’m improving my chances of success: using the right structures and staking to stop wind damage, adding the fertilisers to encourage flowering and planting plants that encourage “good” insects. 

I have identified an opportunity that needs to be managed. I didn’t expect much success with the grape vine: a little fruit to enjoy is what I hoped for.  This year, it has grown considerably more than planned. This success means I need to put in extra work pruning. 

There is a residual opportunity too: despite the puning, the vine may have more ripe fruit than expected. The opportunity of too much fruit is one I will need to manage before it ripens: plan time to pick, distribute and use the extra products.  Of course, I could leave it on the vine for the birds but wasting fruit would “ruin my day” – a definition of risk that works for threats and opportunities from my colleage, Adrian Wilson.

While there is work on opportunities as part of risk management in PMI (Project Management Institute) and APM (Association for Project Management) risk management forum, there is little guidance on the options for action (treatment) after identification. Threats have a range of responses (in english): avoid/do-something-else, share/transfer, reduce/mitigate, plan contingency/watch, or accept. In contrast, opportunities can be accepted or maximised – the methods rarely give more than one option. 

In practice, every opportunity is being dealt with separately.  We used to say the same about risks.  I believe the practice for managing opportunities is evolving. I look forward to watching what develops.

Planning Communication for Governance

The first part of the planning should be about responsibilities and governance.  If this is decided early, then the decision-making process is easier when the project is under pressure. 

• Who is responsible for the expenditure on communication?
• Who must authorise any external communications?
• Who looks after the data protection aspects of external communication? 
• Is there an organisational brand or style that should be used? 
• Is there a master communication plan for the organisation that the project must fit in with? 
• How is the work of the Marketing and Communication teams, project sponsors, programme management and project management coordinated? 
• Are there other projects’ communication plans that contact the same stakeholders -  how are schedule conflicts to be managed?
• Are there times when communication with those outside the organisation is suspended (just before elections or official announcements to shareholders, busy time because there is seasonal work to focus on)?

If these things are known and in the plan, it is easier to make detailed plans and do the work for planned communication and deal with the unplanned issues.

The project manager will also need to plan for the communication associated with project governance.

• How long before a meeting does the board need the papers on a project?
• Who must be included in project governance communication?