pmStudent

Getting started in project management can be tough.  When starting out, there are many questions and challenges to face, and they are different based on your particular background and situation. 

People who struggle with this come from various backgrounds:

Project Newbies - You might be a recent graduate or switching careers.  If you have no experience whatsoever with working on or managing projects, it can seem almost impossible to get your foot in the door. 

Technical Gurus – You have been on project teams and been “in the trenches” getting things done.  Now it seems that managing these projects is your calling, but you have to go through a paradigm shift and learn new skills to make the transition.

People Managers – You have been managing people and are good at it.  Now you want to expand your horizons and switch from the day-to-day management of functional teams to the dynamic environment of delivering unique projects.

You might be trying to break into project management, or you may be an “Accidental Project Manager” who looked up one day and asked, “What have I gotten myself into?”  A project fell in your lap somehow.  How do you get good at managing it?

The questions I get most from these groups center around expanding knowledge, gaining experience, and planning your career path.  Answers change based on individual circumstances.  Your personality attributes and background play heavily into the path forward.

Hard and Soft Skills

Natural aptitudes vary from person to person, but you can acquire a level of competency for nearly all project management skills through education and experience.

Hard Skills refer to competency with the tools and techniques of formal project management.  If you are analytical by nature, hard skills are relatively easy for you to acquire and master.

Soft Skills or “people skills” include competency in communication and relationships with other people.  Outgoing “people persons” have a natural aptitude to be comfortable in this arena, but can also engage in many ineffective approaches when lacking in knowledge and experience.  Do not confuse personal attributes with soft skills.  I cannot influence personal attributes and aptitudes, but I can teach soft skills.

Building Knowledge

Regardless of which group you belong to, you will need to expand your knowledge base.

Technical Gurus will likely pick up the hard skills quickly, but many of the soft skills practices of managing people effectively and politics may be somewhat new.  People Managers will find soft skill nuances in project environments and many of the hard skills will be new territory.  Project Newbies may be familiar with some of the theories in project management, but are going to need a lot of real-world knowledge, experience, and coaching to land that first job and formulate their project manager career path.

Some great sources of real-world project management education include:

• Blogs/Podcasts – Use sites like http://blogsearch.google.com to find them
• Books – Focus on the basics first, follow the cutting edge later
• Join PM Organizations – Local PMI Chapters are a great example
• Training – Focus on gaining useful knowledge, certifications come later!

Finding a Mentor and Gaining Experience

A mentor is a huge boon to you if you can find one.  You can find mentors by networking locally or online, but be sure you approach them in the right way and offer benefit to them in exchange for their wisdom.  Your goal should be to offer valuable assistance to potential mentors, with the hope (but not expectation) they will reciprocate by sharing their lessons learned.

Do not just ask to “shadow” them.  What value are you offering them?  Ask if there are tasks (mundane as they may be) that you could do for them, to free their time up.  If you are a project team member, ask if you can help compile the status report or take meeting minutes during project meetings. 

Donate your time; this is in addition to your current responsibilities.  Whether volunteering for another organization or within your own company, this is a great way to gain experience.  Within your own organization you should let it be known you are interested in project management; not just through words but by your daily actions.

What You Need To Grow

Is the organization you work for now a good environment for your desired career path?

Does your company make money by delivering successful projects, and/or do they respect Project Management as a formal discipline worth investing in?  If so, you will likely see opportunities for entry-level positions in project management that provide specialization such as:

• Project Controller
• Project Coordinator
• Project Assistant
• Project Analyst
• Project Scheduler
• Junior Project Manager
• Assistant Project Manager

Other organizations may have a progression of technical or management roles through which you can pass and eventually start managing your own projects.  Whatever your situation, put yourself into the best environment possible, and plan out your career path ahead of time so you have a roadmap with goals to follow.

Oh, and when you get there, be a mentor for someone else!

photo by n.kuzma

Dux Raymond Sy shares his 3 lessons learned while we were at the PMI North America Global Congress:

• Keep re-affirming customer expectations and priorities
• The difference between influence and interest - who is writing the check?
• Be a project facilitator and leader, not a control freak!

Lastly, Dux shares his thoughts about the conference.  Then of course I had to open my big mouth and add my opinion to Dux' second point about who is really influential on your projects.  From there we have some good back-and-forth conversation on related points and the acknowledgement of project management at high levels of government and corporations. 

(Notice the awesome Gantthead shirt I snagged while I was at the conference!)

Bas De Baar asks Josh Nankivel about what Kanban is and how he is using it with his teams, and how you can get started using Kanban for yourself (personal Kanban) and your project teams.

I've been asked about this recently, and thinking about it on my own too for my own teams.  Here are some guidelines I suggest for myself and others to evaluate existing cultures and create new  project performance measurement processes that are meaningful and do what you want them to do.

1.  What Adds Value?

Measure only what gives a true picture of performance and adds value.  What impacts the bottom line?  Are you REALLY going to use the data you are gathering?  If not, why are you gathering it?

2. Don't Measure Everything

Project managers can be a controlling bunch.  Many of us want to measure EVERYTHING.  In my experience, there are probably around 3 things you want to measure some aspect of.  Not much more, and not much less.  This has held true for me across multiple industries and some examples from my past include a) cycle time/velocity b) customer/stakeholder satisfaction and c) on-time delivery.

3.  Stay Out of the Weeds

I've seen detailed gathering of performance metrics you wouldn't believe.  Be very aware of the balance between level of detail and the effort/morale of the team to report the detail.  If people start asking for a new charge code to account for the time they are spending accounting for their time, you've gone too far!

4.  Consistency

Be consistent.  "Flavor of the month" means gaming the system, not a focus on performance.  Whatever your objectives are, they had better have a life span of more than a month or a quarter.

5.  Beware of Gaming

Beware of gaming the system.   If possible measurements should be so transparent that gaming is not possible.  Self-report data is prone to this, even unintentionally and subconsciously.  This is why objective measures like physical percent complete and cost/schedule performance data from an external group is so important.

6.  Focus on Methods

Don't use metrics for an incentive program of any kind.  For instance, don't penalize people in any way for their estimates being wrong.  If you want to get better at doing estimates, great.  Focus on methodology, not who was close or not close on their estimates.  Use the results as an indicator for what is working and what needs improvement.

7.  Eliminate Internal Competition

If your performance management system is generating competition between individuals or teams, you're doing it wrong.  In the call center world you see this all the time with "contests" that pit teams or sites against each other.  These result in animosity towards competetors and incent a decrease in quality in favor of whatever the "flavor of the month" stat is you are touting in the contest.  They usually create the appearance of performance.

"Hey, what do you know?  We made call handle time a key metric in this contest, and our average call handle time went down!  Yippie!"  (You're doing it wrong)

Customers, teams, and organizations lose.

Yeah, me too.

So how do we get out of the sand trap in a dynamic environment where it seems like you are being pulled in a thousand directions at once?

It's not easy, but here are some of the things I do and am trying to do to stay on solid ground.

Kanban

Personal Kanban and team Kanban.  It's wonderful, I love it so much!  It helps me manage what's going on right now and in the near future for both of my teams, myself at the day job, and for myself at my pmStudent.com office.  Yep, I have 4 Kanban boards total.

I won't go into what it is and how I use it here since I've posted already about Kanban, but feel free to check these out to learn more.

Meetings

They need to be effective.  That means focus, having the exact people who add or gain value (no more or less), and as short as possible.  Help your team and yourself escape from meeting hell.

Email

Only check it at a few scheduled times during the day.  Turn notifications off.  When you do check it, everything that can be resolved in a few minutes is done immediately, everything else goes into your personal task management system (mine is Kanban).  I have a filter which shows me only unread email, and each time I check it, my email box goes to 0 unread messages.  No folders for me, everything stays in the inbox but is out of my sight because it's unread.  I've tried a lot of things, but for me this email management system has shown itself to be the best.

What do you do to keep your head above the sand?

photo by Pink Sherbet Photography