Project Management 2.0

Situation: You're building a WBS and need a quick audit of what you're doing.

Project Headway tasks offer a lot of guidance in managing your projects.  One popular feature of the process is "Questions you ask of yourself and others" within each task in the process. Define Work Breakdown Structure guides you through building a WBS for your project.  These are the questions we've come up with for that task.  Please let us know if you feel they are helpful and/or what's missing.

When defining your WBS, ask yourself the following questions:

• What type of WBS has been used on previous projects?
• Has the larger team been included in the development of the WBS?
• Do the activities at the lowest level result in a tangible work product?
• Is there tight integration within the branches of the WBS? Are the activities and deliverables related?
• Can the cost, schedule and resource needs be effectively estimated?
• Is it defined at a level that you can confidently and effectively manage at?
• Can you turn the WBS into a manageable project schedule?
• Have required deliverable review and approval cycles been included?
• Have transitional and transformational activities been included?
• Have the lessons learned from previous projects been reviewed for possible impacts on the plan or approach to this project? 

Ask a trusted colleague or a key team member the same questions.

Situation: You need people who think broadly to make existing systems work, rather than simply deploying new ones.

A few days ago, I came across an HBR posting "Why your IT Project needs a Cognitive Scientist." . In a nutshell, the author says that in addition to technology-focused and business-focused folks, we need to have people who can look at problems in new ways and understand how the available information can be used to create something new and truly useful. He wraps up by saying that we need people who know:

• when to draw on data
• how to frame questions
• how to build hypotheses
• how to conduct experiements
• and how to determine results

These questions are useful to ask whether the business is depending on you for a breakthrough project or you're simply making the most of a more routine effort. Take a look at each member of your team. How do they measure up on each of the five points above? How could you help them improve?

Situation: You need a simple PM app that integrates with Google Calendar

I thought this one was a little different.  Most software is moving into the cloud, but the outer edge of that software spectrum contains the free email accounts that most of us have on Google.

Situation: You want to keep up with the latest industry trends.

ESI released it's annual Top 10 Trends for Project Management a few minutes ago. You can see them listed out below.  Do you agree with their assessment?

“This year’s trends bring a murky problem into specific light,” said J. LeRoy Ward, Executive Vice President, ESI International. “Leadership skills are lacking within the project community, and until project managers learn how to properly lead teams and their projects, project execution will continue to be a problem.”

ESI’s top 10 trends for project management include:

1.      Organizations will continue to call for strong project leaders but will focus on investments in hard skills

2.      Agile implementation will be viewed in some organizations as a failure, but for the wrong reasons

3.      Project management is not just for project managers anymore

4.      Large projects pose unique challenges that are increasingly tough to overcome

5.      PMOs will focus on proving their worth and driving innovation

6.      The U.S. government will upgrade its PM certification in the face of rising criticism

7.      Improving vendor management practices will top the list of skills for project managers

8.      Continued poor project performance in many organizations will result in more PMOs being terminated

9.      Portfolio management will take on a greater role as funding continues to tighten and the number of projects grows

10.  Organizations will adopt Agile to accelerate time to market but what they ultimately achieve may be a different story

“Many of this year’s trends focus on the need to improve project skills, process and the overall management of our initiatives,” said Ward. “It is clear that it is no longer possible to hire project managers and expect results. We need our PMs to be experts, and take control of our projects to get maximum results.”

ESI’s top 10 trends in project management is put together annually by ESI senior executives and subject matter experts.

You can also check it out in video form (see below)

Situation: It's a New Year and you're looking to get things done.

A big selling point of simple, inexpensive SaaS tools is that they give you the functionality you need & nothing else.  Tool vendors combine that with an interface that's easier to use and we assume that most of the ease of use is coming from the fact that there isn't much to do inside of the app. There is no complexity to simplify.

In our actual work lives, there is plenty of complexity built right in - which why we need tools in the first place. There is so much complexity, that even with tools we have trouble focusing our efforts. 

So the trend I've noticed recently is that tools are helping you focus on tasks or chunks of information one at a time. They effectively bring your attention to what matters now and obscure the rest. That last bit is where I see a difference in these new tools versus older ones - they completely clear away non-essential information. Yet that task or bit of information you are working on is kept in context in subtle ways - ensuring you still grasp the big picture.

For example, Workflowy is a neat little tool you could use to organize anything from a To-Do list to your life. There are lots of tools that help you create hierarchies, some of them very cool (I've always loved MindManager). The issue with these is that they do not force focus and clear away detail effectively enough.  You can still get lost in a dense hierarchy of information. Workflowy limits what you see to one focus area.  With Workflowy, higher levels of the structure are rolled up into breadcrumbs at the top, giving you context without detail. So you really only see what you should be working on now.

Example #2

Prezi has been all the rage lately as a new, flexible way of presenting dense information.  The idea is that people can absorb detail, but only in appropriate chunks. With Prezi, you essentially replace your PowerPoint Deck with a huge virtual sheet of paper that puts everything in to context like an infographic does. Then you zoom in on very specific parts of the presentation in a way that helps you tell a story. Again, dealing with complex information by breaking it into chunks - providing just enough context to have it all make sense.

What are you doing these days to help you focus?  Are the any particular software tools that help? Please share -