Posts Tagged ‘Building’

Choosing the right move

Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.”

Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one. 
For example, imagine that you increase the investment in advertising, but the return from it is not proportional. Why did that happen? It seems that the quality of leads dropped. Why did that happen? Because we didn’t have a quick feedback loop between the money put into advertising and the output from advertising that we get. Why didn’t we have that feedback loop? Because we didn’t know how to properly score leads. Why didn’t we properly score leads? Because no one did statistical data analysis. Why didn’t we mine the data? Because the process didn’t allocate time for someone to periodically mine the data.

The next step of implementing root-cause analysis is to make a proportional investment to correct each level of the problem. It helps you to avoid both ignoring and over-reacting to a minor problem. In the case above, the decisions could be to allocate some time for data mining, to score the leads, to feed that data back to analytics, and to adjust advertising campaigns based on that. You address the problem on all levels with an incremental improvement.

Every time you face a problem, you make an effort to improve the company at multiple levels with small steps. If the problem is more complex than you thought, it will keep occurring, and every time it reoccurs, you will make an incremental improvement, until it is finally solved. This way, you invest your time and money only into the part of your business that needs it the most. “Lean startups” are lean. 

You can see that this method combines learning and doing, continuously changing your company as you learn. This fits perfectly in the frame of continuous learning.

To close, I also want to mention the importance of your own unique vision for the product. I don’t mean to suggest that the shortest way to success is to simply follow every customer’s request. Those requests will often pull the company in different directions, and you don’t want to be doing Brownian motion. This is where the art mixes with the science and produces brilliant results.

What about your professional experience? How do you normally deal with failures in your business?
Project Management 2.0

Let the feedback direct you

John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and A/B testing. These are basic tools of the trade for specialists in marketing or advertising that enable them to evaluate the effect of every small change in banner ads, landing pages and e-mails. But this kind of testing can only answer tactical questions and normally doesn’t affect business strategy. Is it possible to make the whole business structure respond to this type of feedback?  
"Lean startups," a term popularized by Eric Ries, are particularly successful at doing this. The main idea of a “lean startup” is to deploy a minimum viable product and test it as soon as possible. In today’s software world, it’s possible to release software updates several times a day, continuously getting feedback on every 20 new lines of code and aligning the direction of the product. This way, “lean startups” meet customers’ needs much faster than big companies, like Microsoft, which have a multi-year release cycle.

In fact, staying in contact with customers throughout the creation of a product is the only way to make something they will actually use. This is especially true for the new companies coming up with new products. They always have to act in an unknown environment, relying only on their hypotheses. “No business plan survives first contact with a customer,” says Steve Blank, well known in the start-up community as the father of Customer Development theory. Our assumptions about what our customers need are no more than assumptions before we actually talk to customers and test the assumptions. Thanks to Web technologies, getting closer to customers has become a lot easier. We can regularly receive their feedback, without even getting out of the room. Still, don’t get too comfortable, since the dry bits, numbers and characters, while easy to aggregate, are often superfluous.

So, at least initially, it’s very important to get out of your office and speak directly to your customers, person-to-person. You will see your product in a way you’ve never seen it before. But this will be no more than a set of interesting facts without taking the next step – learning from the feedback you got and aligning your product vision and business strategy according to it. I will speak about this in the last post of this series. 
Project Management 2.0

Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects and comedians, Sims discovered one thing they had in common. All of them used the same approach of relentlessly “making little bets” to test their new ideas, even if they were not sure about their success. Most of these bets ended up as failures, but five or six out of 100 turned out to be the breakthroughs. According to Sims, in most cases, there’s no mysterious genius behind the great achievement, but perseverance and the willingness to take small risks.

In this series of posts, I’ll analyze how failures nurture success and describe how learning through failures can help you develop your business into a real innovation machine. Through hardship to the stars!
Low-cost experimentation
The idea of “successful failure” is familiar to many successful software entrepreneurs. For instance, Randy Komisar names “the culture of constructive failure” as the main reason that Silicon Valley became the world’s innovation center.

In his “Getting to plan B” framework, Komisar suggests including in the business plan the ability to quickly adjust it. All plans have assumptions, and Komisar’s idea is to focus on the most risky assumptions first and devise your work in a way to test your risky hypothesis in the market as soon as physically possible. Businesses can hardly afford big failures financially, so the key is finding a way to minimize the cost of experimentation.

Getting feedback as fast as possible can save you a lot of time and money you could otherwise lose by going in the wrong direction. That sounds obvious, so obvious that you might be tricked into thinking that you are already doing your best job there. Sometimes it’s the case, but oftentimes some thinking out of the box can help you save a lot of effort and money. For example, in the software business, a traditional approach is to develop the software and then try to sell it. An approach in the spirit of Komisar’s ideas would be to create a quick prototype, a mock demo, or a simple “slideware” and sell a contract with an advance delivery date. That’s, of course, if your biggest risk is market adoption. If you can’t sell it because nobody needs it, well, you’ve just saved a lot of money on developing software that nobody needs.

Some people are defensive and want to buy more time to tweak their solutions before presenting those solutions to the real world. This big bet works for a selected few visionaries, and the media is always quick to highlight those stories. But the truth of the world (at least in the eyes of Peters Sims, Randy Komisar and yours sincerely) is that in most cases, you’ll get much further with small bets, fast feedback and applying your boldness to facing a failure, rather than to doubling the failing bets.

To be continued…
Project Management 2.0

It’s all up to you.

In large part, the relationship you foster with project sponsors is up to you. Everyone, including the project sponsor, has a role to play that helps determine whether a project is successful or struggles. However, unlike most members of the team, a project sponsor might not completely understand his or her role. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for keeping sponsors engaged and participating:

1. Schedule regular meetings (usually monthly) with sponsors, team members and other important stakeholders: This my be a good time for a quick status update; but more importantly, it is a time for reinforcing the value and significance of the project in terms of business value and the sponsor’s commitment to helping the team.
2. Educate the sponsor on their role as part of the team: The sponsor has an important role as project advocate in steering/stakeholder committee meetings to communicate with other stakeholders and provide visibility to executives. Don’t assume your sponsor understands his or her role, you may need to provide a little guidance so they know what they’re supposed to do to help the project move forward.
3. Don’t neglect impromptu one-on-one time with the project sponsor: Make sure your sponsor is willing to have the occasional informal meetings when needed. It’s not only important to cultivate the relationship with the sponsor—your success impacts their success within the organization.

Keeping sponsors engaged often makes the difference between a project that succeeds and one that fails. Project management tools that facilitate sponsor and stakeholder communication can make this easier, but regardless of whether or not it’s part of your work management solution, allowing project sponsors to sit on the sideline isn’t a good idea.

How do you keep your project sponsors involved? Is there anything we can add to the list?

Strategic Project Management

I owe a big shout out to Raj Menon of the 13apples blog this morning for a post he originally made back in 2008 and reposted today on building the perfect team. I really liked the message of his post and enjoyed the podcast link he posted of Nikos Mourkogiannis interviewed on Business Week’s "Climbing the Ladder" podcast. They are both excellent.

Mourkogiannis suggests that every team needs the following four roles to be successful: magicians, lovers, sovereigns and warriors.

1. Magicians: The dreamers, innovators, and communicators of great ideas.
2. Lovers: The masters of engagement who spread their love of an idea and invite others to love and believe in the idea.
3. Sovereigns: The independent rulers, like the kings and queens of old, who show the path to realizing the ideas that will inspire us to keep going.
4. Warriors: Those who will lead us through thick and thin to make ideas reality.

Which role do you play on your team? Thanks Raj—great post and great podcast!
Strategic Project Management

Can you precisely answer this question: “Do you have ample amount of trust amongst your project team?” May be…May be No.

It becomes very difficult to manage projects when team members do not have good amount of trust among one another.   They would see everything happening in and on the project with skeptical eyes.

In the matrix organizations where project managers do not have implied authority to reward the team members by giving them pay-hike or promotion, trust remains the only effective factor that gets things done.

OK got it but what to do to build trust-based work environment?

Well, here’re few ideas:

1. Trust Yourself: It might look funny but I’ve seen many project managers who don’t trust themselves. They have doubts in everything they do, everything others do and they feel that everyone else is out there to cheat them. Do not belong to that community. Trust yourself. Trust your guts. Trust what you do. It’s okay to make mistakes, learn from it and move ahead. Remember, people don’t trust whom who do not trust himself.
2. Be authentic: Make sure what you say is fact. Be transparent in all you do. Do what you mean; mean what you do. Sarah Ban Breathnach said it once so beautifully, “The authentic self is the soul made visible.” So make your soul visible to your team and win their trust.
3. Effectively Handle Conflicts: Robert Townsand said it once, “A good manager doesn’t try to eliminate conflict; he tries to keep it from wasting the energies of his people. If you’re the boss and your people fight you openly when they think that you are wrong – that’s healthy.”  Make sure that conflict doesn’t get converted to combat, instead profit from it.
4. Listen twice, speak once: Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” How true!  Invest in listening to your people. People feel good when they feel attended and listening is the best gift you can give to anyone.
5. Say No: When you really mean you should say no, say ‘No’. Just because of the fear of confrontation, do not say ‘yes’ for which you’ll regret later. Saying no is about being transparent. Saying no means taking responsibility. Say no and also be ready to justify the reasons behind it. Once convinced, team members will respect you more.

Trustless team is just unacceptable and as a project manager it’s your humble duty to plant the seeds of trust in your team. Also you need to think about bigger questions like below:

“Many organizations put their customer first in their so called mission statements but don’t invest in establishing and nurturing trust in their project teams.  This leads to unnecessary delays in getting things done. Isn’t it a customer-disservice?”

If you don’t have such bigger questions to combat then here are three not so big but still very important questions:

1. As a project manager, do you have ample amount of trust in your team?
2. If the answer is no then what concrete actions you’re taking about it?
3. If the answer is yes then what else can you do to solidify it?

Photo Credit: notsogoodphotography’s Flickr Photostream

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See Also:

1. How To Inaugurate Effectiveness In Your Project Team
2. More On Better Team Relationships 12
3. How Team Relationships Are Affecting Your Ongoing Projects?
4. Who Else Wants The Best Out Of The Team 51
5. Zen of Team Handling for Software Projects

Utpal Writes

Good Project Management: Risk Acceptance and Building Trust

Risk Acceptance

Personal risk acceptance is directly related to consultative leadership skills and trust-building skills. The greater one’s consultative leadership skills and one’s ability to develop trusted relationships, the less personal and project risk a project manager must bear.

If he project manager’s skills are less than adequate, the risk level that manager must take on may become too great to tolerate; this may leave the project manager in the realm of mediocrity, or failure. Thus, it is important for project managers to build these skills and to manage the amount of personal risk they are willing to accept.

Risk is a necessary component of attaining a high degree of competency. A competent project manager is confident enough in his or her ability to face the possibility of failure. A competent project manager demonstrates on a daily basis a willingness to stick it out.

Developing Trustworthy Relationships

According to Maister, Green & Galford in The Trusted Advisor, to develop trustworthy relationships an advisor must be able to demonstrate their “credibility, reliability, intimacy and a low concern for self.” This applies to project managers too.

If you are trusted by stakeholders (sponsors and team members), they will likely seek your advice and be more inclined to follow your recommendations. You will be targeted for strategic projects that have greater visibility and opportunities for reward. Stakeholders will respect you, forgive you more readily when you make a mistake, warn you of potential pitfalls, and–most importantly–get you involved in the process earlier so you can make your imprint on the project earlier.

Credibility
The first step to developing beneficial trusted relationships with your project team and customers is to be credible. Credibility is based on what you know, such as project management expertise–experiences, reputation and technical competence, and knowledge of business and technical issues.
To establish credibility early in a project, the manager must be able to articulate the scope, impact and desired outcomes of the project. This project manager can define, track, update and report the costs of the project with accuracy and understand, articulate and manage associated business risks.

Reliability
How reliable a project manager are you? This is in your control because it is directly related to your actions. Customers and team members prefer to have a project manager who is reliable.  A project manager can undo their credibility quite quickly if he or she is not reliable and consistent.
Erratic behavior and project management do not mix.

Some practical ways to increase your stakeholders opinion of your reliability are to produce status reports in a consistent and timely manner, to provide them with timely responses to e-mail, voicemail and other contacts, to be consistent in managing personnel, making decisions and dealing with adversity, and to adhere to project processes and rarely make exceptions to them.

Behaviour and Attitude
A project manager’s individual behaviors, attitudes, integrity and openness have a huge impact on whether stakeholders trust him or her.

Project stakeholders, particularly customers and team members who have something to gain or lose, will have anxiety over the project. These stakeholders want a project manager who not only sincerely cares about the project, but also sincerely cares about them and their interests individually. Do you have to have close personal ties with everyone? Of course not! There is not enough time in the day. Do you need to figure out who is important, who has a high level of interest, concern and influence over you project? Yes. Developing behaviors that attempt to build closer relationships with these individuals and support them is what intimacy is all about.  

Low Self-Orientation
If a project manager is consumed with his or her own personal self-interest, stakeholders will discount any of the trust-building behaviors mentioned thus far. A project manager Sydney realizes their agenda is linked to others. He or she, having low self-orientation, will see all stakeholders on equal footing, no matter what level they are on in the organization or what their agenda is. The project manager with low self-orientation will look for opportunities to praise team members in public, will act to put other stakeholder’s interest ahead of his or her own self interest, will express interdependent reliance on others for success, and will show a sincere appreciation for teamwork, commitment and honesty. A project manager with low self-orientation listens first.

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Building Project Management Capability & Maturity

Building Project Management Capability and Maturity must be a priority for any organisation involved in delivering multiple projects and programmes. Having mature project management will have a direct impact on an organisations capability to consistently delivery successful projects and programmes. The alternative leads to projects going over budget and failing to deliver on promises made. For some organisations, these project failures can have a devastating impact on the success of the entire business. It can lead to products and services being late to market, other projects being cancelled or postponed due to tied in resources, and problems due to poor quality outputs.

Many organisations take the decision to adopt ‘best practice’ project management principles in order to improve their project management capabilities. In the UK and many other countries around the globe, this usually means Prince2 – ‘Projects in a Controlled Environment’. Prince2 was developed in the UK by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and launched in 1996. It is used in many countries throughout the world both in the public and private sectors as the standard for project management best practice. It is comparable to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) as often used in the USA and elsewhere.

Although PRINCE2 sets out a framework for how individual projects should be managed, it doesn’t address how an organisation should be set up to use it. This takes a great deal of planning and time. In fact, the implementation of methodologies such as Prince2 within an organisation is a project in its own right and needs to be run as such. Some might even argue that the implementation of Prince 2 requires a Programme of work to implement it successfully. When Prince2 has been implemented correctly it has been embedded into the organisation in such a way that all projects are managed in the same way, taking into consideration the size and purpose of the individual project. A test of this would be a measure of the ease at which employees could move between projects without incurring prolonged period of acclimatisation. When the methodology has been embedded properly within the organisation, you would see the same repeatable processes and techniques used by all projects. When these processes are being continuously reviewed and improved this is called a mature process. The Prince2 Maturity Model (P2MM) defines such a scenario and allows organisations to gauge, by assessment their own level of maturity as well as identifying where improvements need to be made. The Prince2 Maturity Model should be the aspiration of all organisations seeking to implement a new Prince2 methodology or to improve an existing methodology.

Of course, the Prince Maturity Model was developed because so many organisations were failing to grasp the concept that Prince2 implementation affects the whole organisation and the way they manage projects. This basic fact is often overlooked by organisations that mistakenly believe Prince2 training is all that is required to achieve success in project management. If you train your workforce they become better at their job right? As logic goes, it looks a sound approach and is why many organisations have embarked on Prince training as a means to ensure that projects are properly managed. Of course, no one is suggesting that Prince2 training is a bad thing; but it is only one aspect of improving the success of projects within the organisation. Successful project management requires a three-strand approach: Knowledge, Expertise and an Embedded Methodology.

Knowledge refers to Prince2 training and certification. In many ways this is the easy bit. You pay your money and your project managers get trained.  Of course for the individuals it’s not really easy at all but you get the point. The projects managers return with an understanding about the project management methodology to play their part in the Prince2 organisation. However, whilst having an understanding of the Prince2 methodology and project management in general will be a big step forward, to become an excellent project manager requires the second strand; experience.

It mustn’t be overlooked that project management is first and foremost a management discipline. Project Managers are managers first and project managers second. This may feel unpalatable for many but it is true. The best project managers are not the ones who have the most project management qualifications but the ones with the most management experience; not necessarily in project management but in management per se. If you think about it, project management shares many of the generic management disciplines such as setting objectives, motivating staff, planning events, leading teams, enforcing ways of working, communication, negotiation, reporting, monitoring and control. Experience in these disciplines is far more important and hard to obtain that passing a Prince2 examination. I don’t say this to denigrate the Prince2 methodology or the training that is provided, which is usually excellent. I say this because if organisations wish to build a strong project management capability within their organisations, they can’t rely on rookie project managers with little or no prior exposure and experience in management. They can’t teach you experience, you have to acquire it over a period and usually by making mistakes. The lessons for organisations aiming to increase project management capability, is to ensure a mix of experience as well as qualifications.

The third and in many ways the most overlooked strand to building project management capability is that the Prince2 methodology (or any methodology for that matter) must be embedded within the organisation. I remember turning up at a large Local Authority in the UK to carry out an assessment of a failing project and to recommend a recovery plan. The Local Authority went to great lengths to explain to me that they were ‘a Prince2 House’. They had trained 13 of their project managers in Prince2 and told me that all of their projects were run according to Prince2. As I spoke to the project managers and interviewed various other stakeholders it became clear that the organisation was Prince 2 in name only. It had no repeatable Prince2 systems and processes into which the project managers could engage. I would expect to have seen a centre of excellence or programme office issuing templates, guidance documents, route maps, lifecycle models, tools, quality procedures etc. but found none. Instead, each project manager had designed their own way of working, together with their own document formats, planning methods etc. In short, there were no commonly understood processes, techniques and components, as one would expect from the Prince2 methodology. Further more, Prince2 training had not been extended beyond the project managers and therefore, key roles such as Senior User were simply not being fulfilled adequately. Attempts to set up project boards were hampered by stakeholder confusion about their role. As a result, they either didn’t attend project boards or sent a deputy without the appropriate decision making authority; which defeats the entire purpose.

To conclude then, if you want to enable your organisation to deliver successful projects and programmes, by all means select a good methodology or life cycle model. However, don’t rely entirely in training alone. Experience and cultural acceptance of the chosen methodology is just as important. Why not set up a project specifically aimed at implementing your chosen methodology. What better way to implement your new methodology throughout the organisation?

To see the article source please follow this link: Building Project Management Capability & Maturity

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About Rita Mulcahy, PMP – An expert in advanced project management, the PMP® Exam and risk management – A gifted instructor and author of the books PMP ®Exam Prep and Risk Management Tricks of the Trade – President of RMC Project Management, the Innovators in Project Management Training and Products since 1991.
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Building Skills For Business Recovery Through Project Management Training

Often when a recession strikes training budgets are unfortunately one of the first to be slashed, according to research that looks at previous recessions this is a fatal error! Trends show that companies who carry on investing in training are then in the healthiest position to gain competitive advantage when during recession recovery. Research from the OGC (Office of Government Commerce) also highlights one of the top reasons for project failure is poorly trained Project Managers when businesses often rely on successful projects & programmes to pull them through downturns and business change.

This view on training was recently hailed by an alliance consisting of some of the UK’s most senior business people including Sir Mike Rake, Chairman of BT group and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. The alliance took the first-time move to issue a joint call via an open letter to employers advising them to invest in training during the downturn and to make it a top priority.
 
The letter stated “the skills of our people are our best guarantee of future prosperity – and the best investment a business can make in challenging times. We must not pay the price of failing to invest in the very talent on which our future will be built.”
 
This view was also supported by a recent report Nurturing Talent by Cranfield University which stated development of internal talent was a cost effective way to boost business performance during any period especially a downturn. The report also found that successful organisations were those that had invested in long-term focus on employee development.
 
A good example of this philosophy was demonstrated by an American based airline that trained its way out of the 2001 recession whilst still managing to make a profit.
 
By now the importance of well run projects should be obvious. It is critical that projects are delivered within time, cost and quality constraints. There is very little tolerance for delays or overruns. Customised project management training that caters for the exact needs of an organisation and its projects provides much better ROI over generic public courses. During the recession is the time to invest in your internal talent to ensure you come through strong.

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