The Money Files

How did you do with sticking to your resolutions from last year? If you are anything like me, you would have started out with good intentions and then forgotten all about them as the snow melted.

This year it's not too late to make some resolutions about managing your projects more effectively, and make them achievable so you’ll actually stick to them throughout 2014. There’s no point in setting yourself unrealistic targets, so let’s look at some project management resolutions that you could still be doing next December.

1. I will do timesheets (and get my team to do the same)

If you don’t use timesheets already, make 2014 the year that you start. They are essential for finding out where your time is actually being spent, and you can use the data for loads of things including improving your estimates.

Do them regularly and you’ll find that you aren’t blocking out 7 hours per day to a bucket task called ‘project management’. You’ll get the granularity of detail required to understand exactly what your project management effort is being spent on – reporting, budgeting, team management and so on. And then you can assess whether that’s reasonable or not.

Break down your resolution into manageable chunks such as:

• Quarter 1: Select project management timesheet application
• Quarter 2: Implement application and train staff
• Quarter 3: Bedding in time, we all start using it
• Quarter 4: Aim for timesheets to become business as usual.

2. I will understand what the Finance team actually does

How much do you rely on your company’s Finance team to help you understand and manage your project budget? They are the experts about your business’ financial processes, forecasting and managing budgets, so you may as well use them. On some projects, you may have a financial analyst allocated to the project team on a full or part time basis too.

Here are some videos to help you get started understanding the role of the different Finance teams:

• Treasury team: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6144/
• Accounts Receivable: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6108/
• General Accountants: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6034/
• Accounts Payable: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/5890/

3. I will improve my estimating

How good is your estimating? If you feel that your project team needs to understand why estimating goes wrong and they could do with a bit of help when it comes to getting their estimates spot on, why not make that the focus for 2014? There’s a lot that you can do to help the people in the team manage the estimating process more effectively, and also estimating tips that you can give them.

Here are some more video resources to review:

• The Estimating Lifecycle: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6443/
• Parametric estimating: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6343/
• Analogous estimating: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6231/
• Bottom up estimating: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6567/
• Team roles in project estimating: http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/6672/

4. I will include financial updates in my reports

Project status reports don’t always include a section on finances. This could be because your project sponsor isn’t that interested, or because you are sharing the information with people with whom it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss the project finances with. But if your reports don’t include a budget update, you should be clear why this is – don’t just leave it out because it’s too hard or because you don’t know what to include.

Talk to your sponsor about what he or she would like to see in your status report and provide budget updates as required on at least a quarterly basis.

5. I will quantify the cost of risks

Does your project risk log include the financial impact of risks? Many don’t, because many risks aren’t quantified like this (or at least, many project teams don’t bother to quantify them like this). Of course, quantifying your risks in a financial way may not be appropriate for all the risks on your log. There are probably some risks that affect the project in ways that will not have a financial impact, or where you’ll be trying to calculate the financial impact based on some arbitrary figures.

But there will be a financial cost for many project risks. This is either the cost of the risk occurring or the cost of the mitigation plan – either way you can calculate the impact and then add this to your project budget so that you are clear about what implications the risk has on your financial planning for the project.

Will you use any of these as your resolutions for 2014? If not, what are you having as your resolutions instead (if any)?

Elizabeth Harrin is Director of The Otobos Group, a project management communications consultancy. Find her on Facebook.

At PMI’s Synergy conference at the end of last year, Stephen Carver gave a well-received presentation which included some information about the different types of complexity, as perceived by the brains at Cranfield.

He talked about what success looks like on projects and said that the level of complexity faced is part of whether a project is deemed to be a success or not. The 3 types of complexity he identified are:

• Structural
• Emergent
• Socio-political.

Let’s look at each of those in turn.

Structural complexity

This is the ‘easiest’ level of complexity and it involves the scale of the work on the project. A project is structurally complex when it has many stakeholders, workstreams or other elements. There is a lot for the project manager to manage and control, with many variables.

Emergent complexity

This is where the project is changing around you, for example increases to the price of steel in a construction project or stakeholders who were not identified at the outset suddenly needing to be included. It encompasses projects where there are a number of unforeseen issues or where the situation is unknowable, for example where there is a great deal of novelty perhaps in the technical set up or the way the commercials are being managed.

Socio-political complexity

This is where the project suffers from hidden agendas and lots of politics. There is little transparency and at the worst end of the scale maybe even sabotage. There are conflicting priorities and resistance. Cultural IQ becomes really important for the project manager along with being able to adequately manage the people involved and creating a shared understanding of objectives and the project’s vision in order to align agendas effectively.

Stephen said that most training courses cover dealing with structural complexity but in a survey of 246 project managers who were asked which of these 3 areas they found most challenging, socio-political complexity came out on top.

Which is hardly a surprise.

“Projects,” he said, “are deeply emotional things.” Whether the Millennium Dome, for example, was seen as a success or failure is down to your point of view and the passage of time: rebadged as the O2, it’s now a very successful arena and venue. The Sydney Opera House, Concord and Terminal 5 at Heathrow were other examples he gave of projects where the definition of success was difficult to pin down and would mean different things to different people.

“If you don’t do anything, you won’t make any mistakes,” he added. “We do a lot so we are bound to make mistakes.” Unfortunately, on complex projects these mistakes tend to be in the socio-political arena and they can be very hard to undo. Not setting up proper workstream reporting, for example, might give you a structural problem at the start of your project but it’s easy enough to address that sort of complexity and put it right. Dealing with damaged egos or senior stakeholders who each think the project is going to address their own pet issue is a far harder situation to deal with.

He didn’t give any pointers as far as I can remember about being able to deal with socio-political complexity, although I imagine that a 45 minute presentation about project success was never going to have much time to touch on what project managers can do differently (better) in order to address these challenges.

What tips do you have for managing projects with this type of complexity? Is it just good stakeholder management or are there other things that you can do to deal with it successfully? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

At the PMI UK Chapter Synergy conference (you can see the stage in the photo) last month Hamish Taylor spoke about innovation and getting projects off the ground by looking outside your current industry for inspiration. He is ex-CEO of Eurostar and took over there at a time when the company was facing a loss of £206m. On the day he started they didn’t even have a product to offer as a fire had closed the tunnel and stopped the service.

However, he started off his talk on innovation by introducing his experiences from working at BA. He was instrumental in the project to deliver the world’s first flat bed – while now that doesn’t seem very innovative as all airlines off them, at the time it hadn’t been done before. He started off by approaching the normal company that made their airline seats but the manufacturer wasn’t able to think creatively and the finished designs didn’t really do what Taylor wanted. So he looked outside his industry for people who were used to designing luxury in small spaces.

He ended up approaching a yacht interior designer and they went on to design what eventually became the beds that were used in First Class.

Taylor used the same innovative approach when looking at how they could improve the customer experience at the airport. In 1993 they were struggling with check in queues and customer complaints were going up. So he looked at places where queuing wasn’t a problem, and could even be fun. He got executives from Disney Parks to come and observe the airport and point out what they were doing wrong.

This was at a time, he said, when each check in desk had an individual queue, and whichever queue you chose it was always the slowest. No one was doing a ‘zig zag queue’ where you join one queue and go to the next available desk. But that’s what was happening at Disney. Taylor’s team also picked up some other useful points from the Disney visit:

• Make the queue really narrow because then it moves faster, even if it makes the total queuing time the same. People will be moving forward so they feel as if the queue is going down and be more satisfied.
• If there’s a 25 minute wait from this point, tell them it will be 30 minutes so they feel s if they’ve beaten the system when they arrive earlier.

As a result of these simple changes, customer complaints about check in time went down – but the answers weren’t available in the airline industry at the time.

Understanding your customer for projects

“We need to change the way we understand customers,” Taylor said. “We’ve got to get better generally at soft insights, not data.” Insightful customer understanding, he explained, comes from understanding the customer’s world, and to illustrate this he gave an example from his time at the helm of Sainsbury’s Bank.

The project was to set up the bank in the supermarket. The traditional approach suggested a bank information point, with leaflets and a desk staffed by people in uniform. In short, a traditional bank, but just situated in the supermarket.

It didn’t work.

The ‘soft insight’ here was understanding the customers’ mood. When you go food shopping, most people want to get in and out of the supermarket as quickly as possible. They are in a bad mood. They don’t want to have a 20 minute discussion about credit cards while the ice cream melts in their trolley. So instead, the project team created simple products marketed at the right place in the store, for example, pet insurance by the pet food.

Making it customer focused

Taylor gave another BA example in his presentation, that of a project designed to increase the amount of people travelling business class. In their first advertisement, the focus is on the fact that business class has the widest seat in the world. It’s safe, secure, extra comfy and so on. But it’s not about the customer – it’s about the features of the seat.

Then Singapore Airlines launched a seat that was half an inch wider, and the ad campaign had to be scrapped.

Two years later, the ‘BA Club World’ project team had a different focus. It was about helping travellers arrive ready to work and making their journey as smooth as possible. The whole company was engaged with the vision: “How else could you help people arrive better prepared for business?” Taylor knew this approach was working when a member of staff from the lounge called him up and suggested that they serve a meal there as an alternative to having to dine on board. This way, business travellers could get more sleep on the flight and arrive better prepared for their working day.

“Project management is the catalyst for change,” Taylor said, and while he gave plenty of examples of projects, the key message was that unless you look for innovation, you won’t stay ahead of your competitors. As project leaders, we should be encouraging innovative approaches in our project teams and supporting projects that take a slightly different approach – you never know where that might lead in terms of innovation and success.

In his book, Project Management for Musicians Jonathan Feist talks about several ways to mitigate risk, and they aren’t the ‘avoid, mitigate, reduce, transfer’ approaches that you are used to. Those are good, but they are approaches, they aren’t actual measures that you can take to mitigate a risk. Here are the 7 ways that Feist suggests you can reduce the likelihood that something will become a project issue.

1. Good project management

Yep, following good project management principles is top of the list. Of course, having a lovely Gantt chart and an up-to-date risk register won’t guarantee project success but it does give you the best chance of putting in place plans to mitigate that risk.

Make sure your risk management processes are up to scratch and that you are able to easily follow through on mitigation actions. Good project management also helps manage against risks of going over budget or missing milestones, because you’ll naturally be doing the things to stop these becoming a massive problem.

2. Written agreements

While you always have to factor in how someone else will interpret your written communications, putting things in writing can limit misunderstandings. It also gives you a sense of formality when it comes to contracts and agreements. Getting it all down on paper increases the chance that nothing is being missed.

3. Checklists

I love checklists and I use them all the time. As Feist says, “Checklists help you remember important details: procedures, gear items, points for conversations, people who need certain information, and more. Checklists are among the most effective tools used to reduce risk.” I have recently written a peer review checklist for my team – one of the many ways you can use checklists on a project to look at potential areas of concern and do something about them.

4. Cross-footing

This means calculating data in several directions to confirm that it’s correct. You add rows as well as columns on your spreadsheet, or check the data in a dashboard as well as a tabular report. Find different ways to double-check your maths or working, even if this is as simple as having someone else check for you.

5. Empowering competent people

If something does go wrong, you want your project team to be able to act appropriately and make decisions quickly, not sit around wringing their hands until you come in to the office to sort it all out. If you have competent people on your project team (and I hope you do) instil a culture where they can make their own decisions. Set levels to their decision-making power as appropriate so that they aren’t deciding to spending another million dollars on the project without anyone else approving it, but give them the freedom they need to do the right thing.

Feist says that the higher the risk, the more you want to make sure that if you are delegating tasks they go to someone who is a safe pair of hands. This isn’t the time to be delegating work to a junior colleague as a ‘learning opportunity’!

6. Developing emergency plans

Having a Plan B is important, and a traditional risk management technique that you are probably familiar with. Sometimes just having a back up plan is enough to make sure that the risk doesn’t happen. However, in case you do need another approach to dealing with a problem, it is useful to have already thought through what you will need to do in the emergency. Get everyone involved so that they can swing into action if and when they are required.

7. Written instructions

Like checklists, these are a great help if you need to distribute detailed instructions or have tasks that need to be done over and over again. Written instructions can also help clarify expectations. For example, on an IT project with a testing element, written instructions for the testers will help get standardised results and ensure consistency across several testers.

Have you used any of these methods on your projects? Let us know in the comments.