The Money Files

Project status reports include financial information, but also a whole host of other things related to the project’s progress. But are yours actually getting read? And do your stakeholders make decisions or act on the information in there?

This is a common problem for project managers, that and the fact that they are time-consuming and a bit boring to produce anyway. My new online course and ebook, Better Project Status Reports, aims to change all that. It even includes an option where I’ll review one of your status reports and help you make it better.

You can find out more about it here.

And it’s got a money back guarantee if you change your mind at any point or decide it isn’t for you.

Drop me a line if you need more information or have any questions!

Ah, wouldn’t it be great if you could wave a magic wand and get more cash for your project? Think of all the things you could do with a bit more budget – add in some extra features, reward the team, improve the quality, deliver faster! Well, you can increase your project budget but it’s not the easiest of things to do and it does depend on your project. Have a look at these 4 ways to increase your budget and see if you could use any of them on your project.

1. Call in some favours

Yes, top of the list is cashing in those favours that you’ve been banking over the years. This could mean that another manager lends you a resource or some equipment without cross-charging your budget (call it a development opportunity). It could be that you cut travel expenses on your project by getting everyone to call in favours and stay overnight with their friends and family members.

The downside of calling in favours is then you don’t have anything in the ‘bank’ for the future and it isn’t always possible. This isn’t a reliable way to increase your project budget but depending on your project there might be something you could do here.

2. Swap or Barter for services

Again, it depends on your project as to whether swapping services is going to work for you. Swapping a high value software licence for some free pens from the stationery cupboard obviously isn’t appropriate. But talk to your connections and reach out to your network. There could be someone willing to take publicity photos or write you a press release in exchange for sending one of their staff along to a training course you are running. Look at ways to reduce your expenses.

Just a note: you shouldn’t ask people to work for free. They should be getting something of value back in exchange, otherwise it isn’t really a swap or a barter, it’s just you asking for free stuff. That isn’t ethical and you’ll probably hear ‘No’ quite a lot.

3. Reduce the project scope

What can you cut out? Reducing the scope would give you extra cash to improve the areas of scope that remain. You can’t make this decision without input from your project sponsor, but you could put forward a recommendation about postponing some areas of project scope and moving them into a Phase 2.

Look at areas of the project budget that don’t add as much value as other areas and see if you could cut those without compromising quality. Do you really need that all-hands meeting at a posh hotel? Couldn’t you manage with a conference call? Then, with your sponsor’s approval, the money that was going towards those can be legitimately put towards other areas.

4. Don’t take the first deal

Shop around for the best deal. You probably do this anyway using the procurement project management approaches for large items, but could you do it for small items too? Instead of going to your usual meeting venue, is there somewhere cheaper locally? (Or could you ask your favourite venue to match the price of another venue?). Can you get a single resource with the skills to cover several subject areas on the project? That could save you having to fund the salaries and costs of two employees.

Think about all the extra stuff that comes with what you buy – warranties, guarantees, escrow, insurance, maintenance contracts… what do you actually need and would it be cheaper to source it from somewhere else? Could you acquire equipment second hand or refurbished? There are often other ways to carry out procurement, but make sure you check any non-standard approach with your purchasing or finance team first.

What else have you tried to save the pennies on your project budget? Let us know in the comments.

Dr Yoram Bosc-Haddard, Senior VP at Capgemini, spoke at Conference: Zero last month about introducing Lean ways of working to the company. His role was to transfer the way the company works and to shift behaviours – no mean feat in a company that has grown rapidly (especially in India) since 2009.

The project team focused on moving behaviours moving from a command and control style of management to a culture of leadership and support. “It’s impossible in IT services to design from the top because things change so rapidly,” Yoram said. “We wanted to create a culture of problem solving instead of waiting for the boss to do it.”

Four years later, the team have formulated standards, and adopted a gradual implementation of what they call the Capgemini Lean Foundation supported by digital distributed delivery tools. They haven’t made any particular maturity levels compulsory, but Yoram said that what is compulsory is to start and to progress continuously, so the culture of continuous improvement is embedded.

Measuring change

The project team has a maturity dashboard which is updated every two months and is now starting to become the standard way of assessing maturing in the company. Yoram shared a snapshot of it from September which was difficult to read as the resolution wasn’t that great (perhaps that was deliberate), but he pointed out that they take an honest approach and that not everything is green.

Being able to quantify or demonstrate the benefits is, as Yoram said, a standard question of any transformation programme, but even more so with Lean “because it is Lean”. This, he explained, was one of the key challenges.

The company and team agreed that there was no mathematical business case for this change. “But you can connect and measure the investment, measuring behavioural change and operational change,” Yoram said. They measured the quality of problem solving, technical issues, throughput, operational KPIs and how the team managed to share resources. “This was the way we justified the business case and have managed to so ongoing,” he said.

“People were seeing Lean as something we to do bottom up and there was a natural tendency to reinvent all the time because all our clients are a little bit different.” He wanted to adopt standards where they could be adopted to avoid this rework and to increase maturity. This was done through the Capgemini Lean Foundation. This starts with the customer and builds through a daily standing up meeting, operational KPIs, standardisation, continuous improvement, visual management, leadership engagement, skills management, and flow management.

“Very often people are promoted because of their technical skill and not their managerial skills,” Yoram said. “This foundation equips them with a way of working that is suitable for the new world, and distributed teams.” They also put in place a quarterly feedback loop. Finally, the team also made sure that the developers of the tools in use for digital distributed delivery were the first users. This meant instant feedback from people who had actually built them and that bugs could be ironed out before the tools were deployed to other customers.

Yoram said that they had a lot of political, technical and emotional trouble along the way. “The success recipe was purpose and agility,” he explained. They stuck with the purpose of equipping people to do problem solving and not just firefighting. With this goal in mind it became clear that the cultural change was achievable and that behaviours would slowly shift to the ‘new world’.

This year Yoram and his team want to move the management of change from ‘business as unusual’ to business as usual. By this he means that the project should simply evolve into the way that change is done. It’s a new company culture, rather than an event. They are also moving it from “proof of concept to return on investment” and focusing on making the tools involved production systems; the way they do business. With their track record, I’m sure they’ll achieve this.

Welcome to the September/October 2013 edition of carnival of project management. I'm glad that this edition is being hosted here this month - it makes a nice change!

So, without further ado, here are the top articles and some interesting reads for this time's Carnival.

Rich Maltzman, PMP presents Your PM Career – Inside Out posted at Earth PM, saying, "We discuss how sustainability can strengthen your PM career from the inside-out and from the outside-in."

Brian Daniel Young presents an introduction to Six Sigma: Why Six Sigma is Important in Business posted at Business and Sports Articles Blog - Cerilene.com. Although you may know that I'm not a massive fan of sports analogies in business.

Ben Aston presents How to run a great project kick-off meeting posted at The Digital Project Manager, saying, "All projects start somewhere. But how you start them can often dictate how the rest of the project or client relationship will run. Run a kick-off meeting well and the rest is much more likely to succeed; Run it badly, and you can find a project or relationship going backwards before you’ve even started. So here’s a few pointers to remember along the way." This article also includes a sample agenda for a kick-off meeting.

There's an article about leadership, Project Manager: leader or manager?, posted at The Project Manager Pad. "While the manager's vocabulary usually includes words such as administering, authority, duties or objectives, the leader talks to people's minds and leverage on their aspirations, needs and abilities more than on company's procedures. The leader acts as an authoritative person, combining conceptual skills like vision and innovation with human skills like influencing and trust."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of project management using our carnival submission form.