The Money Files

In this video I look at three more pitfalls to avoid when doing your project estimates. Don't fall into these traps!

In his book, How To Be A Productivity Ninja, Graham Allcott talks about how to manage your time more effectively. It’s a good book, but one of the best things I took away from it was his idea of how you should spend your Friday afternoons (assuming that your working week finishes on a Friday).

He recommends spending time working through a weekly checklist and clearing out your email inbox, reviewing your To Do list, updating your processes, consolidating notes from the week and preparing ahead. So what does that look like in practice? Here are 5 things that you can do on a Friday afternoon to clear your head for the weekend and start the following week with the least possible disruption.

1. Clear your inbox

Allcott is a huge fan of ‘Inbox Zero’ which means not using your email inbox as a dumping ground where emails go to die. He thinks we should all clear out our inboxes, and when better to do that than a Friday, when you’ve got all the messages from the week to look over and deal with.

Go through your inbox and delete anything that can go. File anything that you need to keep for reference. Forward any messages that require other people to do actions on the project with instructions on what you are delegating to them. Anything that takes less than a couple of minutes to do, do now. You’ll probably have to put any other email-related tasks to one side as otherwise you won’t get the rest of your Friday afternoon checklist done.

2. Update your To Do list

What actions have you written in your project notebook or stuck on sticky notes around your monitor this week? Consolidate all that into your master To Do list. I take this a step further by writing the 3 most important tasks for Monday on a sticky note and sticking it on the front of my laptop. Then when I get my laptop out of my bag on Monday morning I know exactly what I should be focused on.

3. Update your files

Make some time to update your filing system and files. Create new folders for stuff if you need to. Otherwise, make sure that your project schedule reflects reality, and that all the risks and issues have up-to-date statuses.

4. Prepare for next week’s meetings

What are you up to next week? Book train or travel tickets. Check meeting room reservations and who is coming to your meetings. Send out agendas if you haven’t done so already, or call round the venues and sort out coffees and teas for people on arrival. It’s easy to put these little admin tasks off during the week but it’s getting a bit late now and you don’t want to be issuing driving and parking instructions on the morning of the meeting, so sort it out now.

5. Review what’s going to stop you

Finally, Allcott suggests thinking critically about what is going to stop you achieving your goals next week. That could be anything from a project team member being off ill, to not having the template for this quarter’s budget submission, to not being able to find time on your calendar to meet with the project sponsor. Once you identify the things that are going to hold up your progress, you can start to think about what you can do about them (if anything). Anything major can go on your project risk log. Anything that is more about your personal productivity can either be dealt with or accepted. Having this time to think about blockers will hopefully make them less stressful when they do happen next week – it’s another sort of risk management to do.

That seems a lot to me for a couple of hours on a Friday, because your project team members won’t stop emailing you or asking questions, and your project sponsor will still expect a weekly report to be produced in the same time slot or to turn up at your desk unannounced and ask for the latest earned value figures to take to the board. But give it a go. I think a period of updating and reflection on the last working day of the week will certainly make it easier to leave the project behind at the office. What do you think?

With CRM being this month’s focus area, making all your systems interact with each other is a key part of being able to get the data you need to feed your CRM system. Your project, therefore, if it has anything to do with IT, systems or data, probably needs some kind of interoperability approach in order to make it possible to pull relevant bits of information out when they are needed.

Think about it for a moment. If you design and build something that is completely standalone that’s good for a short while. But when you need to create a single view of the truth – a single customer record or report showing various data points – you will have to merge data from that system with data held in other systems. Which one is the master data? Even something simple like a customer informing you of a change of address becomes a problem if the systems aren’t linked.

What is interoperability?

Interoperability is that link between systems. This includes things like programming languages. When you are designing a product, think about the environment in which it will operate, who needs to use it and how it will link to, provide data for or send data to other systems. It’s often easier to think about information or data flow rather than the systems themselves, as these can be mapped on afterwards.

Using common standards and programming languages for system builds can save money and make it easier to find technical team members to work on your projects. Using open source tools, for example, is one way to build interoperability into your systems, but of course this will only work if your other systems use the same protocols.

Why is it important to your project?

No project is really standalone. Including interoperability in your design specifications as a non-functional requirement builds in future proofing. It also simplifies making links with other projects and systems which is especially important if your project is being carried out as part of a programme.

How do you get it?

You can’t design in interoperability yourself, although it doesn’t hurt to know that you need it! Involve your firm’s technical architect or, if you are using commercial off the shelf packages, talk to the supplier. A business analyst can help map processes and explain how the business users will actually use the system, so they can be really helpful when it comes to showing where the data comes from and how individual records are used and updated.

The best advice is to look at the big picture from the start of the project. Consider how things connect and consider what might be asked of the system or the project in the future. Of course, you can’t always predict how your new IT package will be used, but you can have a good guess. And you may find that users are already suggesting technical and functional changes that you are having to put into a bucket called ‘Phase 2’ for assessment and analysis later. These features may give you a good idea about the sort of things users will be asking for in the future so you can build in (or at least not shut any doors) for them.

Interoperability is probably already in your company’s technical strategy, so that’s a good place to start if you are building up your project requirements or including constraints in your project initiation document.

It isn’t the most glamorous of project requirements, but if you want your product – be that CRM or something else – to be useful and to be used, then it is worth considering from the outset.

In this video I talk about 4 pitfalls of project estimating.

One way to distinguish yourself from the other project managers in the department is to think about how good your grasp is of project finances. This is often an area where project managers have weaker skills because not all projects require them to balance lots of books and sometimes big projects even have financial analysts assigned to them so they don’t have to worry about working out the detail themselves.

So if you want to set yourself apart and develop a USP (unique selling point – something that makes you different from everyone else), building your project financial skills is a great start. You can then demonstrate how much value you add by being able to explain the project financials to your C-suite stakeholders.

Show you have a grasp on project finances

When asked, you should be able to talk knowledgeably about your project’s budget and whether or not you are on track. If you don’t have the figures to hand and you’ve been caught in the corridor by an exec who wants to know, explain that you don’t want to tell them the wrong thing and that you’ll check when you are back at your desk. Then follow up and email them the right figures as soon as you can. Of course, if pushed, you can always give a ballpark figure.

Show you understand the business case

Ideally, when you discuss your project with C-suite stakeholders (or anyone else, for that matter), you should be able to demonstrate that you have an understanding of the financials of the business case. If the project is going to deliver some kind of return on investment, then you should understand how that is going to be calculated. If there are other financial benefits, make sure you understand those and how the project deliverables and the work the team is doing will actually end up generating cash when the project is complete.

Work with your finance team

Get to know your finance department! They are a source of lots of useful information so find out what help they can offer you and make use of them! Even if they don’t have the staff to be able to dedicate lots of time to your project they can often help with ad hoc queries especially when it comes to things like invoice processing, year end processes and accruals.

Educate yourself

Be aware of context that your project is working in. For example, is the company under some financial strains or is there pressure to spend a certain amount of the department budget before the end of the year?

Also make sure that you understand the financial terms that you are likely to hear when it comes to company budgets – ROI, IRR, payback period and so on. Check out my videos on these subjects if you need a refresher.

Think big picture

How does your project fit into your programme and the business strategy overall? This will also help set you apart as in my experience many project managers don’t have the ability to think about the bigger picture overall and focus very much on their own projects and getting those done (although this is changing). Being able to see the big picture is a further way to demonstrate your value to the C-suite and to set yourself apart from your fellow project managers.

Showing that you have a grasp on your project finances and how this affects the project and the company overall brings a touch of reality to business case, and helps you explain your project’s contribution to your team members as well. Make your business savvy the way you distinguish yourself from the competition at the top level – it really can set you apart in the quest for a new job or for recognition in what you do.