The Money Files

Today I'm interviewing Eleanor Mayrhofer, who has built a project management methodology specifically for small, indie businesses. Steal This Process (STP) is designed to save creative, independent businesses time and money by helping them do more, more effectively. The business ethic fits perfectly with this month’s Gantthead theme of doing things on a budget! Eleanor has her roots in large IT projects, and now runs her own small creative business, so she knows what works in both situations and has been able to translate the techniques used by large companies into language that makes sense to those with no project management experience.

Eleanor, how did you come up with the idea of the toolkit?

My last role at my corporate job was on the methodology team, developing how-to guides and templates for the company’s global creative practice. Many of these templates had to be used in conjunction with or integrated with templates for enterprise level technology implementation projects. By necessity some of the tools like the WBS, estimation and scope matrices were complex, but the concepts behind them were simple. I figured that a bare-bones, less-complex set of tools for people doing creative work or running very small businesses would be helpful.

You say in the toolkit that you learned a lot from working for The Man. What was the most important project management lesson The Man taught you?

Scope! Everything comes back to properly defining scope and then managing it consistently (and sometimes ruthlessly!). It seems to me whether on large scale IT projects or a small business making crochet patterns, delivery issues can almost always be traced back to problems in scope definition and management.

The design of STP is beautiful.

Thank you!

Did you enjoy putting your web and print design skills to good use on this project? Why was that important?

I did very much. It was important to create content that was in a visual language that my target audience would understand. Project management is a very analytical, left-brained and mechanistic subject, but I heartily believe that it is something that right-brained creative people can not only benefit from but can easily grasp and excel at.

A large part of the battle is just presenting it right. I still vividly remember how intimated I was by Excel, Gantt charts and the like when I only did graphic design. One look at this type of documentation sends all kind of symbolic messages to the creative brain such as: Math! Rigidity! Rules! Mechanism! Constraints! All of this creates an immediate instinctive aversion to the content.

However if you can present the same content in a compelling visual way, defences go down and the concepts can be absorbed. Witness the popularity that beautifully designed informational graphics are getting. When analytical information is beautifully presented it can be quite sexy.

How do you feel good project management helps small businesses be more effective?

Small business owners tend to wear multiple hats and have to carry out more than one role. This can cause a lot of overwhelm which good project management can alleviate. In my own business working with defining scope and converting it into tracks (marketing, continuous improvement, product development, operations, etc.) really has helped me get realistic about what I can accomplish as well as get focused on certain projects. In some ways it’s not so much about finishing on time and on budget, since you are your own client, but rather structuring all of the work, projects and activities that are part of running a small business.

Reusable templates can help with structuring the work, and you provide these in the toolkit. They must save companies a lot of time, and, if you are working for yourself, time is money. You’d be surprised at how many non-indie businesses don’t have a suite of templates. How much time do you think they saved you when you were setting up your print and design company em.papers?

It’s hard to know because by the time I had started e.m.papers planning was second nature and I just re-purposed templates that I had from my old days on the job. It was only after talking to crafters and folks with creative businesses that I realized that defining scope, estimating work and doing high, mid and low level planning wasn’t ‘normal’for most indie businesses. I think it’s fair to say, though, that being able to grab some templates and just run with them probably saved me at least 6 months of churn.

Wow, that's a lot of time! You no doubt learned a lot along the way so what is your top tip for people implementing project management and time management practices in their companies?

To do less better. Everyone –including myself –is usually too ambitious about what can realistically be accomplished. Overly aggressive scope and planning will only lead to discouragement. It’s all about setting achievable goals and projects, then executing well against them.

Thanks, Eleanor!

You can download the Steal This Process project and time management kit from Eleanor's website, here.

Imposter Syndrome is not a medical condition. It is a convenient term for the feeling you have when you believe that you do not really know what you are doing. You attend a meeting where the discussion goes over your head and you suddenly feel like an idiot. You believe that you are in completely the wrong job and the wrong company and you are in no way worthy of holding your current position. Surely it is only a matter of time before someone notices that you are not up to the job and fires you?

In reality, lots of people feel that they don't measure up. I’ve spoken to men and women who have said they occasionally (or regularly) feel like a fraud at work. At one conference I spoke at earlier this year, when I asked if anyone had ever felt like they didn’t really know what they were doing in their job, nearly every hand in the room went up. Lots of people feel like this, but we don’t talk about it much. Why is that?

When you take on something new – a new project, a new responsibility – you might be surrounded with people who are subject matter experts or who have been in a similar role as yours for years. It feels as if they know everything, and you don't know anything at all. Who wants to confess that they don’t feel they fit in when everyone around you looks like they have always belonged here?

That's how Imposter Syndrome manifests itself: it undermines your self-confidence. It can hit anyone, at any time. And the truth is that nearly everyone feels like this at some point – some people are just better at hiding it than others!

Ring any bells? If it does, my new ebook could help. Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: Ten Strategies to Stop Feeling Like a Fraud at Workdiscusses how you can feel more confident at work. It explains what Imposter Syndrome is, why we feel like we aren’t measuring up, and shares practical strategies that have been proven to work addressing the feelings of Imposter Syndrome.

You can get your copy at www.OvercomingImposterSyndrome.com or on Amazon Kindle. May 2012 be the year that you feel better about your abilities at work!

Value Management: Translating Aspirations into Performance is a new book by Roger H. Davies and Adam J. Davies (Gower, 2011). It’s heavy going, but if you are into getting the best value out of the change programmes you are delivering, then it makes useful reading.

There is a fair amount of theory, but there are techniques in here that you can apply to your programmes straight away. I’d say that it is aimed at people in a pure programme management, portfolio office or senior executive role, as there is not much here that project managers will be able to put into practice without senior support.

Defining value

The authors define value as:

Or, to describe it less financially:

I would argue that value means different things to different people, but I understand that you need a common ground on which to base the rest of the book.

Asking the right questions

The book starts with a really nice feature that I’ve never seen before: executive questions. Here’s an example:

Q: How does Value Management address the challenge of delivering greater value from change programmes?

A: Value Management provides the means to deliver more benefit for less cost and risk. Value Management targets, times and aligns initiatives to maximise overall value. This is achieved by linking programmes explicitly to attributable benefits. This requires precise quantification of cause and effect relationships between programme deliverables, the drivers of business performance and consequential stakeholder benefits.

Reference: See Chapter 7 (Programming Value) and Chapter 8 (Aligning Value)

This is a neat way of explaining to people picking up the book the kind of questions that will be answered by reading it, and forms a kind of annotated table of contents so you can flick to the section that most interests you first.

Is it a good read?

Value Management is not an easy read, but perhaps I’m just not in a role where I can act effectively on the information in here. There is also a good glossary and lots and lots of graphs, figures and tables, so the authors make it as easy as possible to understand the concepts discussed. They also draw on real life examples and their own anecdotes, including examples from the movies, so they have tried to make the theory as accessible as possible.

One of the authors was obviously very taken with neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and there are a number of references to how powerful this can be. The authors write: “The ability most relelvant to Value Management is to produce radical shifts in performance by re-programming limiting perceptions and ... enable clients to release latent potential through change.” They call this a value breakthrough, but this was one of the weaker points of the book for me. I’m sure you could achieve similar results with cultural change without having to ‘NLP’ your entire organisation.

If you are looking to drive savings and ensure that your change programmes and portfolio of projects delivers the best possible value for your company – and you work in an organisation with a high level of maturity when it comes to PMO practices and project thinking – then you could get a lot from this book. If your company doesn’t have a mature approach to programme management, you could struggle to get any of this implemented, but at least understanding the concepts will help you assess which are likely to be the best programmes for your business, and how to get the last drop of value out of them.

Over the past months we have looked at payback period, internal rate of return, benefit cost ration and net present value. Today I want to introduce two other financial metrics.

Discounted Cash Flow

As with a lot of these metrics, different companies have different ways of calculating them. Discounted cash flow is all about the time value of money. You use it to work out how much stuff in the future will cost you at today’s prices.

You can use it to value a project in terms that the project board – or whoever is assessing the business case – will understand. If we do this project, the value is £x, and that project has a value of £y.

In other words, you work out how much cash your new fancy project will generate for the company, knock a bit off of because prices go up in the future, and that tells you the value of the income today.

OK, that is a terribly simplistic view of discounted cash flow. The good thing is that you probably won’t ever have to work it out yourself. Your Finance team or your project office accountant will be able to plug the right figures into the equation, use the standard discount rate for your type of project and you just add the numbers to the business case.

The only other useful thing to know is that discount rates are normally linked to the cost of the capital. So, if it costs you 5% a year to borrow money to invest in your new engineering product or to hire the land that the new shop is going on, then that will factor into the discount rate calculation. In other words, it’s not just about inflation.

Activity-Based Cost Management

Don’t you just love all this terminology? I think it’s important for project managers to understand these terms because even if we never have to work them out for ourselves you don’t want to be bamboozled by your colleagues in Finance, or even business people who are used to dealing with profit and loss accounts and business cases.

Activity-based cost management, or ABC/M, just means working out how much each activity costs. It’s a bit more scientific than just assigning day rates to different types of resources as it also looks at processes. The idea is to calculate how much different routes through the processes cost, using different types of resources including customers.

That gives you the activity-based part. You can then do the management part, which is analysing the results and working out if there are smarter ways to do things. If you know the elements that add the most cost to the process, you can work out how to influence these and deliver more stuff for less money.

Personally, I can see the value in doing this in manufacturing and engineering environments, but up until recently I couldn’t see the value in doing it in other sectors. After all, so much is non-standard, as we try to give personal service to everyone. But actually there are a lot of things that can be standardised, and even standard costs give you an indication of the success (or value) of the process.  Projects drop out of this data.

For example, turnaround times in airports. If you knew which type of planes, terminals, crews and passenger combinations took the most time to get the flight in the air, you could launch a project to assess the process and speed it up. Or you could look at locations and crews that had great turnaround times and replicate the success where you could. The same goes for the cost of surgery in hospitals, supply chains, and customer service teams handling different types of customer problems.

While ABC/M takes a lot of effort and number crunching, it’s a useful tool. Does your Project Management Office do anything like this? Let us know in the comments.

Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, spoke at Synergy 2011 last month in London for International Project Management Day.
 
He talked about the U.K.'s reputation and ability to carry out large construction and civil engineering projects. He used the example of the Thames Barrier project which was instigated after a number of floods in the 1950s. The project was finally approved to go ahead in the 1970s. It was finally completed a few weeks before some more floods. He explained that there was no incentive or structure put in place for the project to be finished and no one built into the plans any proposals for on time delivery. In fact, it was in the project team’s interest that the project as long as possible. No wonder that the project went eight times over budget.
 
"What is so wrong about public services in Britain that we just can't complete these projects?" he said.

When Livingstone was leader of the Greater London Council, it was at a time when there was no central government funding for capital investment projects. He also said that during the Thatcher years a law was passed making it a requirement for local councils to have their capital spending plans reviewed by the government before they took place, so even if there was the money, there was no chance that investment projects would happen.

Implementing the congestion charge

Livingstone was elected Mayor of London in 2000 and one of his first challenges was to deal with the transport situation in the capital. He said he did not want to be remembered as the Mayor for failed projects, so when he decided to implement the congestion charge, he brought in a team of people with the experience of delivering this type of thing.

Livingtone bemoaned the situation in the UK that meant he had to look elsewhere for the skills required.
 
TFL is the largest transport organisation in the world. No one in the organisation from bus drivers to managers had a record of successful management at the time, he said. The Jubilee line extension was the only thing the city had managed to pull off and that had hardly been a roaring success. He told us that 27 of the top 30 executives were pensioned off in his first year as Mayor. "Far too many people simply accept what they are told by people who have a vested interest in the outcome."

His overseas team settled in London and took on the job of implementing the congestion charge. Every fortnight they had "an incredibly bruising meeting where all the assumptions were tested,” he said. “That level of real scrutiny, done that scale, meant that it worked perfectly from day one, with one small glitch." That small glitch was that there were not enough people available to answer the phone when drivers called in with questions. The congestion charge project was launched as expected and the introduction was remarkably smooth. Londoners now have come to accept paying to drive into the capital, and we even manage to keep up to date when the boundaries of the congestion zone change or the rates are amended.

Working with the Olympics team

Livingstone was Mayor during the time that the UK was preparing a bid for London to host the Olympics. Despite having no interest in sport himself, Livingstone saw the Olympics as a great opportunity for the city, because the country would be forced to invest in a transport infrastructure in East London. He also knew that the government would want to run the construction if they were successful in winning the bid.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on which side you are on), no one in the senior civil services thought London had a credible chance of winning the bid for the Olympics. The way Livingstone tells the story, this meant that the Olympics team had the opportunity to structure the contract in a way that reduced central government involvement and allowed the office of the Mayor a significant say in how the investment projects were run. The projects could go ahead under that contract without needing to be substantially changed.

"Every change you make magnifies the cost," Livingstone said. The Olympic site is virtually complete and £800 million under budget at the moment. He said that he had to bring in an American woman to plan it and an Australian man to build it. It’s unfortunately, he said, that we don’t have enough of those types of skills in the UK. It’s the legacy of not having investment projects during the 80’s, as we didn’t learn the lessons from capital initiatives. "What worries me so much at the moment,” he said, “in response to the economic downturn, is cancelling all the investment projects and losing another generation of competent project managers."