The Money Files

As a project manager, there’s one big problem on projects – you are right in the middle of it. You have tight deadlines, unforgiving stakeholders and detailed plans. It is very hard to lift yourself up out of this and see the bigger corporate picture – many project managers can’t do this at all.

You should try.

Being able to see the bigger picture puts your project in context. It helps you operate more effectively. It helps you see what is important to your project and business customers. It makes you a better member of the company, as well as a better project manager.

Here are 5 ways to ensure that you can see the big picture.

Go to internal networking events.

Every company has them. And if, for some reason, yours doesn’t, start one. Got to lunch and learn events. Go to afternoon briefings, or drinks after work, or corporate team building days. Don’t opt out of anything. You never know who you might meet, but more importantly, what you might learn about the company’s focus. You can use this to sharpen your project’s focus to deliver what is really important to the business.

Read the annual report.

Yes, it’s boring. But it is also a great source of information about how the company operates. How does your company make money? If you sell shoes, it’s pretty obvious, but many firms have more complex ways of bringing in the cash. How will your project contribute to this? Is there a strategic thread where your project fits (or is it clear that your project is now irrelevant to the new corporate strategy?).

Read the business pages.

Follow your industry. Not project management, but the industry your company operates in – IT, construction, engineering, retail etc. What’s happening there? What are your competitors up to? Set up a Google alert for the name of your company and your CEO. How does your project fit with what your CEO talks about in the media?

Join an industry body.

In the UK, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, represents the interests of the IT arena. It’s not the only IT industry body, but it actually doesn’t matter which one you join. The point is to have another way to find out what’s happening in the big wide world. Read their magazines. Go to their events. Join their LinkedIn discussion groups.

Ask questions.

If you don’t know what terms like ROI, IRR, BCR and payback period, ask (or watch my videos). Talk to your managers, customers and suppliers. What is important to them? How is your project helping?

Being able to see the bigger picture lifts you out of the detail and helps you operate in a project leadership role. How do you make sure that you know what’s going on outside of your project?

I was lucky enough to get to Wimbledon this year to watch the ladies’ semi-finals, and it was only once I had arrived at the All England Lawn Tennis Club that I realised it is also the venue for the Olympic tennis.

The UK hasn’t hosted Olympic tennis since 1908, but the preparations to transform the Club into an Olympic venue are already underway. It’s a project with a short timescale, given that the Wimbledon Championships have only just finished. It gives the grounds staff and the project team only 20 days to turn the place around.

The famous green backdrops and court surrounds will be replaced by the purple branding of the 2012 Games. The grounds team will install Olympic rings where they need to go, and there is a new podium being constructed on Centre Court, ready for the winners to receive their medals.

In the programme I took away from my day trip to the AELTC, there was a short interview with Eddie Seaward, Head Groundsman. “We will soak the courts, pre-germinate the seed, and wait to see what Mother Nature throws at us,” he says in it. Luckily, Centre Court now has a retractable roof, so even if it continues to rain as much as it has over the last couple of weeks, the tennis will still go on.

The feel of the venue will no doubt be very different. For the AELTC Championships, the players wear traditional white clothes. For the Olympics, they’ll be in their national team colours. They will only use 12 courts instead of the 19 used for the Championships. This might be because the Paralympics are scheduled after the Olympics, and the wheelchair tennis is not being held at Wimbledon. During the 2 weeks of the AELTC Championships, Wimbledon hosts wheelchair tennis as well.

I think the biggest change will be in the advertising, although I haven’t been to see the redecorated Wimbledon, and I won’t be going, so this is just speculation. The AELTC has no large advertising placards. There are no McDonalds or Starbucks concessions. The shops, restaurants and cafes on site are discrete and even the corporate hospitality marquees are barely branded. I have a feeling that it won’t be like that when the Olympics comes to town. Given the way branding has been managed elsewhere in London, I imagine that the venue will be full of posters and sponsors’ adverts.

I’ll have to watch the Olympic tennis on TV to find out if I’m right, and if the transformation project was a success.

Photo: Serena Williams playing on Ladies' Semi-Finals day on Wimbledon Centre Court. Photo copyright: Elizabeth Harrin

In this instalment of Ask the Experts, I talk to Neil Stolovitsky, Senior Solution Specialist with Genius Inside. We discuss the use of social media features in project management software and also top tips for using time recording for better productivity.

Neil, Genius Inside’s latest release includes ‘baked in’ social media tools. How can project managers encourage team members to use the social features, if they haven't used Facebook or other social media tools before?

Social media tools have become ever-present in the way today's information workers communicate both personally and professionally. We have been fortunate enough as a project and portfolio management software vendor to develop a very comprehensive and robust solution over the last 15 years. That being said, features and functions are only as good as their usage and ability to improve the way project stakeholders work.

One of the biggest roadblocks we hear from the PM community is that social media tools can introduce pollution to their project information and can be dangerous in their inherent application to share uncensored information that can be potentially hurtful to a project's progress.  In order for project managers to encourage their team members to adopt these tools they need to invest in a social media strategy that will work for their environment.  If the recommendation of the appropriate tools are set up and are in line with the way they currently work, people will jump on board.  The bottom line is, social media tools have to be positioned as a means to improve productivity and helping their team members in their every day work, and not just another piece of technology that will make their lives more difficult.

Your product has a ‘wall’ feature. How does this help project managers work more effectively?

We believe Genius Project's social media function Genius Live! will not only address the market's demand for these tools, but moreover will change the way project teams will communicate by allowing project information to pro-actively find its users, as oppose to the traditional usage of PPM tools where the user must dig through the system to take action and find strategic information.

The idea behind the Genius Live! project wall is to push information to all project stakeholders, as oppose to digging through the project management system to find the necessary information to take necessary actions and make strategic decisions. We find that project managers are constantly faced with the challenge of getting to important project information to improve their performance and those of their team members and the project as a whole. The project wall feature is designed to eliminate this reality in a user-friendly and familiar design accessible from any web-enabled device.  

Sifting through information quickly can certainly be a time-saver. Why is recording time on projects important?

It is no secret to the project management world that time is money. Recording time allows project managers and their stakeholders gauge where they stand against their plan.  In addition, it helps organizations assess the efficiency of their teams and their ability to hit milestones in a timely manner. Genius Project has fully integrated time sheet functionality that allows users to post time against both project and non-project activities, and allows for an optional workflow for time sheet approval and review by managers.

What's your top tip for getting people to record time?

The best way to get people to record time is to provide multiple options, such as centralized time sheet and time slip functions, to capture time data in a simple format. In organizations in which there may be resistance to submitting time sheets, providing users with their own workspace to access their assignments and a centralized time slip option for each task will simplify the process. The primary goal is to provide a single method and location to record time to achieve the best results in accurate time capture.

That sounds sensible. People can only record time against tasks that have been allocated to them. While we’re on the subject, what's your top tip for resource allocation?

The main strategy for effective resource allocation is to have the necessary visibility into resources schedules when planning project workloads. This is best achieved when managing a single resource pool across all projects that ensures the accuracy of information, and also having the ability to quickly see resource schedules across all activities when deciding to assign the work in project plans.  

Thanks, Neil!

About the expert

Neil has over 12 years of IT experience with end-user, consulting, and vendor organizations, along with extensive expertise in business development, software selection, and channel strategies. He has published numerous white papers and articles covering Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for service industries, Project Portfolio Management, Professional Services Automation, IT governance, and new product development to a global audience. Neil currently holds the position of Senior Solution Specialist with Genius Inside.

I was on a course recently and all my pre-course reading came on a Kindle. When I asked the instructors about it, they said it was because people travelling to courses were fed up with coming and going with huge heavy folders of paper. New technologies have changed how we choose to do many things, and training courses are no exception. I caught up with John Roberts, Director at change consultancy myProteus, about how training providers are adapting.

John, how do you think models of training are changing and why?

A key finding from the CIPD 2012 Learning and Talent Development surveyrevealed that traditional learning methods are considered amongst the least effective ways to up-skill employees but, in the absence of anything else, they tend to dominate most learning and development programmes.

With the acceleration in economic uncertainty, organisations are keen to invest in the professional development of their people but can ill afford to provide costly face-to-face training for all.  Increasingly organisations are looking for a more flexible solution that embeds learning and delivers an ongoing sustainable improvement in performance.

To satisfy this need, it is imperative that models of training change to appropriately reflect different learning styles, embrace technology, be practical, enable self-help on an ongoing basis, embed best practice and facilitate real skills transfer. 

I see that companies are moving towards online learning. A product from your company, myProteus, provides online support – tell me more about that.

Technology has clearly caused a sea change in the delivery of both learning models and project management tools and techniques, and has been instrumental in developing the myProteus offering.  myProteus is a modular online self-help portal which is replete with project and programme management best practice, cutting-edge know how, and diagnostic self-help tools. It is designed for anyone involved with change, not just the project management professionals.

Built upon the power of self-learning and customisation, it is more focused on the ‘how do I…’ of projects rather than the ‘what is…’

Not only does it provide the basics you would expect but it also makes available practical items and insights that can make a real difference to an organisation, its projects and its people.  

Self-help ‘training’ is an interesting option. I image that helps project managers be more productive and spend less time (and money) on finding the answer?

Projects are, without a doubt, getting harder. In fact, a recent survey we conducted revealed that 55% of projects are demonstrating more complex characteristics than those traditionally delivered in the past. 

This acceleration in complexity often means that organisations are embarking on projects of unprecedented size and scale, but using traditional training approaches which are unlikely to result in success.

Self-help products, like ours, help project managers be more effective by:

• helping them to know and ask the ‘right’ questions of their Sponsor or Project manager
• enabling them to regularly self-assess the health of their projects to identify and address any hot spots
• sharing insights and case studies to help organisations learn the lessons and issues to watch out for from similar projects to increase their chances of success
• equipping people with more appropriate approaches and know-how relevant for today’s projects
• providing an ability for corporates to compare themselves with ‘best-in-class’ (including from other sectors) to highlight areas for improvement. 

Anything that helps project managers be more effective saves money. How else can the model of self-training benefit a company’s bottom line?

It allows corporates to achieve a level of project maturity and performance faster and cheaper than would be the norm.  Typical corporate benefits include:

• Improved project delivery performance – significant improvement in the speed and predictability of the projects being run within organisations, releasing new capabilities and benefits into the business more quickly.
• Reduced costs – significant reduction in staff, capability investment, project mobilisation and consultancy costs, with typical savings between £2m - £17m.
• Better management information – significantly improved and useable intelligence around the ‘state of the nation’.
• Greater internal capability – multi-development offering including best practice know-how articles, self-help tools, e-learning, face-to-face masterclasses, mobile apps, and coaching, among others.
• Ability to benchmark – corporates can readily benchmark their projects and their project community against role model benchmarks to identify key areas to address and to demonstrate changes in capability and project performance over time.  They can also be benchmarked with organisations in their sector or other sectors.

We believe such bold approaches – demystifying project management and empowering employees throughout an organisation with the knowledge and skills required to manage projects effectively – hold the keys to making sustainable change truly achievable.

Thanks, John!

About The Expert:

John Roberts is a director at myProteus, a change consultancy that has recently launched a mobile app for project managers and an app for project sponsors which contain market-leading insights built around the top ten themes identified by both project managers and sponsors in a survey.