The Money Files

Insurance is something we think about naturally for our homes, cars and even our lives. But should you be considering it on your project too?

Insurance is a risk response strategy to help you mitigate the impact of what might go wrong on your project. Typically, we do talk about positive and negative risk, and while I’m sure you could probably find a firm to insure you against positive risk, you are far more likely to consider insurance as a support strategy for negative risk.

What could you insure?

Through a broker, you can pretty much insure against anything. However, organising specialist, one-off insurance for a very specific, unique, circumstance is potentially a lot of work (and expense) so you would only want to do that if your project was large enough to support that effort.

However, you can more easily insure a range of other, more ‘regular’ things on your project. For example, event cancellation due to poor weather or low attendance rates. In this situation, you’d get a pay out from the insurance if you had to cancel the cycle race you’d organised (for example). This would help you offset the costs you had incurred organising the cycle race, like catering vans, first aid teams, water for the cyclists, security and so on – all costs you’d still have to pay because you’ve booked them and probably can’t cancel them with such short notice.

Travel insurance

Another type of insurance to consider for your project team is travel insurance. If your team is travelling a lot for work, it would be worth checking that your company offers insurance for employees travelling for business.

This would cover them if they lost their laptop or other work items while away for business. It could also help cover the costs of travel arrangements if their flights were cancelled, or they were unable to travel.

Other insurance for staff

If you are a sole proprietor or a small business owner – and many project managers do work independently as contractors or in small consulting firms – then it’s also worth considering other types of insurance that cover you and your team as individuals.

For example, in the UK you can get director’s insurance, that covers the business in the case that the director is unable to carry out their duties, say, due to illness.

You can also organise health insurance for the team. Depending on where you are in the world, healthcare costs can be really expensive. Insurance will help offset those costs, and help an employee get back on their feet (and back to work) more quickly.

I should add that I am not a financial advisor, and the points above are given simply to give you ideas of how to consider the part insurance could play in your business and on your project. If you don’t have anything set up yet for your team, it’s worth asking the question of your Finance team or Director. Get some proper advice from a financial advisor.

Think about whether insurance is a viable option for your risk mitigation strategies and if so, you may be grateful one day for having it set up!

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This is the end of my deep dive into the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, and what it covers about Project Schedule Management. I’ve looked in detail at the major changes between the Fifth Edition and the current version.

One of the biggest changes in the Sixth Edition is the inclusion of information on trends and emerging practices, tailoring and Agile. This is long overdue and it’s helpful to have some specific guidance around how we can adapt the sometimes dizzying amount of information in the PMBOK® Guide to our own organisations.

To recap, here is the rest of the Project Schedule Management deep dive series:

Plan Schedule Management

Define Activities

Sequence Activities

Estimate Activity Durations

Develop Schedule

Control Schedule

OK? Let’s take a look at what you need to know about adapting this process for your environment.

Trends and Emerging Practices

Scheduling techniques have pretty much stayed the same for many years, but there are some new thought processes at work. We have to be able to manage in a competitive environment where everything seems to be needed much more quickly. There’s a business advantage to being able to compress schedules and deliver things in a shorter timeframe, so the emerging practices covered in the PMBOK® Guide relate to those.

Iterative Scheduling

First we have iterative scheduling with a backlog. This is a common way of managing work in an Agile environment and supports rolling wave planning. In other words, you have a big bucket of requirements (user stories) that are prioritised as you come to the end of a time box, for delivery in the next time box. This works really well when you can or need to be flexible about what features get released when.

The major benefit is that the customer gets to see real progress on an iterative basis. This is great for building loyalty, delivering benefits more quickly and ensuring user adoption over time.

However, when there are lots of dependencies between tasks or requirements, it can become difficult to manage.

On-demand Scheduling

On-demand scheduling is based on the theory of constraints. It limits the work in progress for a team so that you can balance demand against what the team is capable of doing. As someone who is not a fan of multitasking (although I do it every day), limiting WIP is a great idea.

Kanban is where you will see this approach in use most commonly. In practice it works because instead of building a schedule based on requirements, you plan around the team’s availability and they take work from the queue to work on it immediately.

This is a good approach in environments where you have people doing a mixture of BAU and project work, and their project work does not have hard deadlines. I have no project experience of on-demand scheduling, aside from using something similar for my own To Do lists, so share your experiences in the comments below – I’d love to hear more.

Tailoring

The PMBOK® Guide talks about the need to tailor the approach to scheduling because every project is different. For your project, think about:

The life cycle: what life cycle are you using for your project and is it the best approach for getting to a detailed schedule?

Resource availability: You might have to switch up how you manage the schedule because of difficulties securing the resources you need.

The project itself: Big, complex projects need a different approach to scheduling to a small, easy project. There might be constraints within the project environment that lead you down one scheduling path compared to another, for example being required to use earned value as a stipulation of a particular contract, or using a particular scheduling software tool because that is what the client uses. That leads us to:

Tech support: What tools are available to you? If you don’t have access to modelling tools, for example, it’s not appropriate to build your schedule on the basis that you can use them. If you don’t have virtual Kanban boards and yet your team is virtual, then perhaps a scheduling approach that relies on specific software isn’t the best way to go.

Considerations for Agile

Adaptive project methods are those that use short delivery cycles. You do the work, review the outputs and make changes as necessary before the next delivery cycle kicks off. We’re seeing more and more projects use agile approaches like this because they work.

However, in my experience, and that of the many project managers I mentor, a lot of companies have project teams doing agile and project teams who don’t use agile. Sometimes we use Agile and non-Agile techniques on the same project (for different aspects of the same project). There’s a recognition now that this is OK. If it works and you get results, then it’s OK.

The PMBOK® Guide talks about hybrid approaches and being able to combine scheduling techniques from different approaches to get where you need to get. As a project manager, you have to make or support decisions around the tools and approaches you are going to use, and it helps to have some experience of these. If you find yourself suddenly managing an Agile project with no prior experience, you’ll be fine, but get familiar with the approaches as quickly as you can!

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My last few videos have looked at the procurement lifecycle, and today I want to dive into the third step: negotiating and contracting. This is a really important part of working with suppliers and it takes us to the point of saying yes to the work (hopefully).

Here’s a quick overview of what you need to know:

You can read more about this part of the procurement lifecycle in this article.

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Risk management is so important when it comes to ensuring your project stays on track – both in terms of budget, which is what this column mainly talks about – but also in generally.

The graphic below shows the three levels of risk management to consider on your project (and beyond). If you aren’t working at the portfolio management level in your organisation, you can still take these into consideration because you can work with those who are managing your portfolio. Ask the right questions and help keep your project on track!

For more on this idea, check out this article.

http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/11125/

Last month I shared some tips for using spreadsheets. Today I have some tips for presentations. I tend to use Microsoft PowerPoint, but all of these tips are relevant regardless of what presentation software you use.

1. Use icons

You can make slides look so much better if you include a few icons scattered through in relevant places. Corporate slide decks (in my experience) tend to have lots of bullet points, so even if you add one or two icons you can break up the feel of large blocks of text.

Note: Remember to respect copyright. Don’t download icons to use from the internet unless you specifically have the licence and rights to use them.

Here’s an example of a slide that uses icons.

2. Use a big font

The bigger the better! Anything less than 18 point is hard to read at distance.

The best way to check if you can read the slide is to go to the room you’ll be presenting in and put the slides on the screen. Then you’ll be able to see (in real life) whether you are making it difficult for people to read your material.

3. Use a full-slide background

Full-slide backgrounds can make your slides look really good.

Note: Slides that are predominately for use as training materials or to be read without you standing there talking through might be better off with more words. If you are able to talk about and explain the slides, you don’t need as many words on the slides – and a full-slide background can be a stylish way of presenting a few words on the screen.

Here’s an example of a slide that uses a full-slide background. The image is the same as one of my book jacket.

4. Add an extra slide for a handout

If you are distributing the slide deck, you can add in an extra slide at the end with more information. You wouldn’t show it within the presentation as you stand up and deliver it, and you can hide the slide from the presentation (in PowerPoint) if you want to. Or just stop clicking through the slides before you reach that one!

Your final slide can then be an extra list of resources, an appendix, links or anything else that you want people to be able to refer to.

5. Rehearse with the software!

It won’t be news to you that rehearsing is a good idea!

However, you should also practice with the slides. Use your clicker, or practice moving the slides on with your keyboard or mouse. Check that any multi-media works e.g. videos or audio that you have embedded in the presentation.

Check that you are aware of the slide transitions and builds. It’s annoying to watch a speaker either fly in all the bullet points in one go before talking about the slide, or finish talking and… oops!... there’s another bullet arriving covering a point they’ve forgotten about. If you don’t like using slide builds, take them out!

What presentation tips do you have for putting together a great slide deck? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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