The Money Files

I’m delighted that Carl Nixon, The Excel Expert, has offered to answer your questions on spreadsheets, and in particular, Excel.

In my experience project budgets are often done in Excel – it’s certainly the product I turn to. I use it for everything from doing the odd sum instead of loading that calculator desktop app, to building complex financial trackers.

They aren’t really that complex. I’m not an Excel Expert, unlike Carl.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Carl in his own words. At the bottom you’ll see how to get in touch with your queries. I’ll collate the questions, feed them back to Carl and in a future article he’ll answer them for you. I’m really excited! I think we could all learn a lot.

Introducing Carl Nixon – The Excel Expert To Answer Your Excel Questions

As a freelance “Excel Expert”, I provide Excel spreadsheet services to companies big and small around the world. I have helped them to save thousands of hours and to reduce their errors to the barest minimum.

Working as a freelancer has resulted in me working on some very unusual and exciting projects. I have helped farmers understand data gathered from drones, supermarkets plan their pricing and global brands to plan billion-dollar expansions.

As well as providing freelance services, I am currently developing a number of off the shelf solutions for smaller companies.

Tell Me About Your Excel Problems

I have teamed up with Elizabeth and ProjectManagement.com to answer any of your questions on Excel spreadsheets. So, if you have any issues in the following areas get in touch:

• Problem / broken formulas
• Problem / broken macros
• Problem reports / charts
• Error prevention / capture
• Security

My aim is not to just look at practical issues of building a spreadsheet (formulas, macros etc); I can also give you advice on more general spreadsheet concepts as well. We can talk about good spreadsheet design, automation, error prevention and even data security.

So fire away with your Excel questions, no matter how big or small they are!

My Bio

Just over 6 years ago, I decided to become a freelance Excel consultant (www.excel-expert.com). My reputation for creating no-nonsense solutions soon spread and I quickly picked up clients that included Pepsico, Walmart, General Mills and many other household names.

When I manage to get away from spreadsheets my life revolves around kids. Especially my four wonderful grandsons who seem to eat up every minute of my spare time.

A real passion of mine is helping children’s charities and causes here in the UK and in Eastern Europe. I have done everything from organising film premieres to delivering aid in war zones (Kosovo).

Thanks, Carl!

Leave a comment below with your Excel queries and we’ll be in touch when the answers are up.

It’s easy (kind of) to plan the project financial provision and contracts when you’ve got lots of time and plenty of opportunity to research the market. But what about when you are up against it? That’s when you might rush into a decision and only find out afterwards that it’s not the right approach.

Stephen Wearne and Keith White-Hunt have reviewed 12 urgent and unplanned projects (from dealing with local flooding to the 9/11 pile removal project) in their book Managing the Urgent and Unexpected. As you can imagine, the cost implications for each were unique to the situation, but there are some lessons that we can take away from those major pieces of work. Here’s what I can summarise:

“In all the cases of employing contractors for construction work, the terms of the contract chosen were those already approved by the sponsors.”

In other words, even when a new contractor is required, go for contract terms that your management team is familiar with. This isn’t the time to be trying to ask for waivers to the rules or to get round procedures. If you want to be fast, make the decision easy.

“Contractor and consultant teams already employed for longer-term programmes were switched to the urgent and unexpected work under cost-plus payment terms.”

Make the most of the people you already have working for you. Divert them on to the priority projects and update your contracts accordingly. If you can, add the new work into an existing contract – several of the projects in the book did this under cost-reimbursable terms.

“In the 9/11 pile removal case the contracts were made orally, for later confirmation.”

When you’re working in a real emergency, you might not have the time to draw up legally binding paperwork. When you know that you need to get started, get started on the basis of a gentleman’s agreement. You need to have confidence in the supplier to do this, so if the situation itself doesn’t bind you together somehow, work with suppliers that have a similar outlook and values to you.

“Terms adapted from previous contracts for emergency repair of a city stadium were used.”

Reuse, reuse, reuse! Don’t start from scratch. Get your contracted work up and running more quickly by adapting documentation that you already have.

“Contractors previously shown trust when employed on normal projects were reported as responding particularly well to these unexpected demands.”

For example, they made their best staff available and supported the projects through all-hours working. The lesson here is that the more of a partnership approach you take, and the better the working relationships with the suppliers you use, the more they will help you step up when you need it. That applies outside of a crisis as well – good working relationships with all your project stakeholders will help you move projects forward in non-emergency times as well.

The overall message from the book is that when you are dealing with an emergency, you need to cut out the bureaucracy and get going. Actually, this is what you should be doing on all projects: simplification is a good thing where you can do it. In the case of an urgent project, it’s essential.

The book mentioned in this article is:

Wearne, S. and K. White-Hunt. (2014). Managing the Urgent and Unexpected. Farham: Gower.

Read my review of it here. Check out Gower’s online catalogue for more about this book and their other PM titles: http://bit.ly/1H5I88G

In this video I share the answers to a couple of questions raised during PMXPO:

• What tools do I use to link my project communications calendar to my daily diary?
• Is it the project manager's job to be responsible for project communications?

I didn't get a chance to answer these during my presentation on 10 Ways to Market Your Project (which you can watch here).

Cesar Abeid has a new book out, called Project Management for You, and it’s a step by step guide to everything you need to get started with managing a project. You may feel that you have enough experience to not need a beginners guide to project management, and you may be right. Still, it doesn’t hurt to refresh ourselves on the basics every so often, and that’s never more true that on topics relating to project budgets. Because if you mess up your project’s finances it is very difficult to recover your credibility and the lost cash!

Here’s what Cesar has to say about project estimating for budgets.

Estimating a Work Package

Cesar breaks down estimating the cost of a work package into three areas: people, tools and materials.

People: “Estimate how many hours/days will be required by the person responsible for the work package, and calculate how much that will cost,” he writes. This, he says, is the best way to go if you are paying your team members for their time and they are billing you in hours or days. If you plan to pay them a flat rate for the task, then he points out you’ll need a quote to use as a estimate.

Tools: Think about the tools you need to complete the work package. “This determination will include actual tools, equipment, and software that you might have to purchase to enable your team to do the work,” he writes. Many of these you may already have but you might need additional tools in order to deliver this particular project.

Materials: If tools are what you need to do the project management, materials are what you need to do the work. Small projects, digital projects and other types of project may have very little here. “If you are building a deck or a garage, then materials might be the largest part of your estimate,” Cesar writes.

These three mini-estimates make up the components of the budget estimate for your work package. Add them up and that’s the total cost for the work package.

Estimating Your Project

“Once you have the estimate for each work package, add them up,” Cesar writes. “The resulting number will be the cost estimate for your project.”

This isn’t rocket science but you’d be surprised how often elements get left out. Check that you’ve included all your work packages in your overall estimate.

Then check your workings the other way. If it’s a budget item that you know needs to be spent but there is no work package that goes along side it, should you be creating a work package to cover that element? If not, how are you going to track and monitor that expenditure as the project goes along? Don’t make it easy to trip yourself up later.

Work with Ranges

I am a big fan of working with ranges because they help set expectations for project stakeholders and provide you with a bit of leeway. Cesar says the same. He advises estimating twice for each element. The first estimate is based on the best case scenario (say, $100) and the second on the worst case (say, $200). Together they give you a range of financial confidence (the task will cost between $100 and $200).

It can be difficult to convince your sponsor to understand ranges. There’s a good range (ha ha!) of comments on this article about how challenging it can be to talk to your project sponsors about why this way of thinking is beneficial when it comes to project finances. Sponsors like hard, precise numbers and with many projects that have an uncertain outcome that isn’t as easy as they’d like.

Plan with Confidence

Cesar concludes by saying that your estimating gives you the data you need to plan with confidence. If you’ve done the same for duration estimates as well you are in a good position to know how long your project will take and what you need to pay for it. With this information, you can make decisions about tasks and expenditure as well as the people you need to involve.

He writes:

“If you can estimate your cost and time based on the requirements of your project, the constraints that are present, and the resources available to you, you can plan with confidence and make promises that you know you can deliver on.”

How do you plan with confidence? Let me know your tips for estimating and planning in the comments below.

Cesar Abeid’s book, Project Management for You, is available in print and ebook. Find out more on Cesar’s website.

Today I wanted to share this infographic on the cost of unproductive meetings. I work virtually a lot of the time, but that doesn't generate half as many meetings as when I am physically in the office with my colleagues. Perhaps it's because when they see me they are keen to chat, or perhaps they forget I'm around to invite when I'm working out of the office.

When I attend meetings, and I'm sure you'll say the same, they often start with general chat or get derailed (obviously not the ones I'm chairing...!). When you add up the fact we spend around 7 days a month in meetings that's a lot of time wasted if you don't get the best out of your meetings. Have a look at the figures and I'll join you again at the bottom.

This infographic was put together by http://facilitationfirst.com/

I was surprised that only 73% of people confess to multi-tasking during meetings but we should also acknowledge that it isn't always a bad thing. I've been in a few meetings recently where someone asked a question and the group didn't have the data. A team manager Skype'd her colleague, got the response and shared the information with us so we could continue to debate that point. That's multi-tasking, but it's productive and useful and probably saved us from having a follow up meeting.

I'd also question that 50% of meetings are unnecessary. They might have the wrong people in the room, and if an exec says a meeting is unnecessary then they might simply mean that they personally didn't have to be there, not that the meeting shouldn't have happened at all.

We do need to make sure that project meetings involve the right group of people: senior enough to take ownership for decisions and move things forward but not so senior that it's too much detail for them and wastes their time (or lets them meddle in tasks that we'd rather they stayed out of).

So, what do you think about this data? Share your thoughts on meetings good and bad in the comments below. And is the answer better meeting management or just scrapping meetings altogether?