The Money Files

In my new book, Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, I explore the opportunities for project teams working with new technology.

Here are two emerging themes in both project management and in social and collaborative technologies that are worth knowing about.

1. Digital PMOs and the Role of the Digital Leader

Disruptive technologies such as big data are hitting businesses across all functional areas, not just project management. Companies have to come up with practical ways to incorporate this massive amount of change and to sift through the trends that are worth adopting while ditching those that are not relevant at this time.

This is starting to come to the fore in the form of the chief digital officer or other digital leadership position at the very top of businesses. We are also seeing digital PMOs—divisions supporting the project structure in the way a traditional PMO would, but with a leaning toward paperless, integrated, and online ways of working, along with the culture changes that brings.

2. The Culture of Collaboration

It’s not all about the tech. Part of the challenge facing the digital leader, be that a project manager or a PMO director, will be managing flatter teams, both across business teams and within projects.

Employees will create their own internal networks outside of the traditional hierarchy, which potentially makes many of the formal line management structures redundant and forces the organization to become flatter. The digital divide—those employees who are familiar with digital working practices and those who are not—is a further team-related problem that digital leaders have to face up to and proactively manage.

"If virtual teams are to be successful, and if collaboration tools are to be fully embedded in the working practices of the team, then it’s important for businesses to invest in collaboration offline as well."

Successful collaboration and teamwork comes from a culture that supports those ways of working. If virtual teams are to be successful, and if collaboration tools are to be fully embedded in the working practices of the team, then it’s important for businesses to invest in collaboration offline as well.

We’ll see greater investment in building corporate culture, fostering employee engagement, and creating the environment to deliver successful change. All of this underpins the use of any technology and supports the business objective of getting the right people to do the right things the first time, which cuts down on overall project costs.

3. Knowledge Sharing

A collaborative culture also supports the urgent need for knowledge sharing in a global economy that is facing significant talent gaps. As the Baby Boomer generation leaves the workplace, taking with them an incredible amount of organizational knowledge, companies need to find alternative ways to capture and maintain their knowledge assets. Technology (like wikis) has a part to play, as well as collaborative work environments where knowledge is freely shared.

What trends have you noticed?

If you're interested in finding out more about how project teams can benefit from using collaboration tools, you can get a copy of the book from the PMI Marketplace here.

“Far too often we see highly skilled team members deployed to the wrong projects,” said Dan Lefsky at PMI Global Congress EMEA in Barcelona. He gave an interesting presentation about resource management and here are my takeaways.

Uncover the Unspoken Calendar

The resource calendar on your project management tool probably has all the national holidays built in, but what about the unspoken dates? Lefsky explained that events like the World Cup (in any sport), the concept of siesta and other cultural events can totally throw out your work schedule. I’ve seen this first hand in a company that installed additional TVs so that workers could keep one eye on the football when they were in the office.

He also gave the example of August in France as a time when most things close down. You’d be hard pressed to get project team members to do additional hours (or any hours) when the country goes on holiday. I’ve seen that first hand too, as has he, as he currently lives in Paris where I used to live.

Manage Resource Risk

Not all resources work out. Lefsky explained that you should know the failure rates of your resources.

Another resource risk is that of availability. Have you really scheduled them at 100%? Don’t make that error. Even scheduling at 80% can be optimistic if they have day jobs and it gets even worse if their daily responsibilities change during the life of a project. Suddenly a key resource is being pulled on to other tasks and there’s nothing you can do about it. So plan for that risk if you can.

He also suggested taking into account strikes and other labour events, or at least being aware that they could present a risk to your project. They have certainly affected me when in worked in France and affected colleagues in other countries.

Finally, the weather can present a resource risk. In these days of virtual working you might be surprised that projects and businesses can grind to a halt when there’s a bit of snow, but often work does involve someone or some equipment travelling somewhere at some time. If that coincides with a weather event then you can quickly fall behind your baselined schedule.

Manage Demand

Lefsky said that it’s important to start looking at demand management. Look at what is coming into the project pipeline and what is likely to be approved, alongside what has been currently approved and what has been approved but is not yet started.

Putting this in your model can help you longer term. You are building out solid teams who want to come to work, and you can do that more effectively if you know what projects are coming up. “Ultimately,” he said, “you are building teams who need to deliver.”

Demand management is all about looking at the strategic alignment between resource acquisition and getting them into the right place at the right time.

He talked about having an enterprise resource pool with both named and generic resources to help identify the skills available and match them to upcoming demand.

Be Best In Class

Or at least understand what best in class looks like. Lefsky explained that best in class resource management functions have these features:

• Notifications and alerts
• Staffing algorithms
• Diversified data collection
• Real-time metrics.

With all of this information you can start to build economic models based on variables that help you identify what your resource needs will be in an economy with weak growth, strong growth or somewhere in between.

“A big piece of this is trying to move the process along more quickly without being able to change the structure of the organisation,” he said.

That’s an understatement! It’s fine to start with some of his simpler ideas, but getting to the economic models part is going to take some organisational commitment at a senior level.

Either way, it was an interesting and useful presentation that explained how teams can be more effective at managing their resources and the resource demand.

What are your current challenges with resources? Does anything here help you start to address them? Let us know in the blog comments.

PMI has recently released a new Pulse report that goes deep into the topic of benefits realisation, specifically around benefits identification. The introduction to that report says it’s the first in a series of deep dives into the project management area that is benefits.

The report calls out 5 questions that you should be asking during the benefits identification phase of your project. What, you don’t have a benefits identification step? That’s where you are going wrong.

Planning for Benefits

Project management is now widely acknowledged as the link between strategy and actually making change in the business work to achieve that strategy. The report defines benefits identification as a key part of this because if you don’t know what the benefits are going to be you cannot accurately assess whether the project or programme will help you get closer to your strategic goals.

The report includes the results of a survey of over 1000 project managers and shares the results. This one, in particular, jumped out at me:

When project benefits are frequently identified before the start of a project—as part of the business case—organisations experience better results: 74 % of projects meet goals and business intent versus 48 % in organisations that do not. And when organisations frequently use formal project management to address the benefits identification process, they experience greater gains: 80 % of their projects meet goals and business intent versus 54 % in organisations that do not.

Pretty compelling, right? If you spend time thinking about benefits then you are more likely to achieve them. There are a lot of reasons we can guess at for why this might be the case:

• Project teams understand how the tasks they are doing fit in with the bigger picture.
• Everyone is more focused on the end goal because they understand the reason why the project is being done.
• Decisions are made in line with whether the benefits will be achieved or harmed as a result, which could result in better decision-making with fewer office politics.
• As there is a documented end state, results can be compared back to this and measured instead of being guessed at or not tracked at all.

And so on.

So where do you start? You need to identify your benefits and the report helpfully provides 5 questions to ask when you start. Here they are, along with my interpretation and ideas about how you could use these to prompt discussion on your project.

The Essential Benefits Questions

1. Why are we doing the project or programme— what are the business drivers?

Understanding the business drivers will help you pin down what kind of benefits you are expecting to see. A project that is starting out because of the business driver to increase sales, for example, would expect to see benefits related to sales targets.

If you can get your executives and your project sponsor to explain the rationale behind the project is gives you all a starting point to look for clarifying benefits.

That leads on to…

2. What are the measurable benefits?

The key word here is ‘measurable’.

I would argue that it’s also fine to have non-measurable benefits, but you can’t track those really. Some people would point out that even so-called intangible benefits like staff happiness can be tracked and measured, for example by engagement surveys, so think carefully about including non-measurable benefits and don’t get lazy and avoid working out any measures. It’s not too difficult if you spend the time on it.

3. Who is accountable for the benefits?

This is a really important question because the jury is out – and has been for 20 years, according to Dr Terry Cooke-Davies’s piece in the Pulse report – about whether it’s the role of the project manager or the customer.

The truth, I suspect, is partly between the two. To avoid the “You were going to do it,” “No, you were going to do it,” scenario at the end of your project, make sure that you have some clarity around who is going to be accountable.

4. Who ensures the project benefits are aligned with strategic goals?

I imagine the answer to this question in most cases is the Project Board or Steering Group. There is a degree of ongoing governance that has to happen on any project and it makes sense to me to make that group responsible for ensuring that benefits align with the strategic goals at the start and then don’t deviate during the delivery part of the project.

You’ll have to have this discussion internally to get an idea  of where your sponsor feels the responsibility sits, and if it doesn’t seem logical to you, feel free to challenge.

5. Who signs off on the benefits?

And is this different from the person who is accountable? Getting all these different roles straight is important because if anything changes through the life of the project and you become aware that reaching the benefits will not be possible, or will be challenging, then you’ll have identified everyone who needs to know.

Consider it a mini stakeholder identification exercise, because you’ll be surprised at how many people want to have a say in benefits when you start talking to the wider team and managers about them.

These 5 questions give you an easy framework for starting conversations about benefits. You can still use them, even if your project has already started. I hope you find them useful!

Read the whole report here: http://www.pmi.org/learning/pulse.aspx

In this video I talk about how to keep the costs of your Project Management Office down - or at least under consideration!

An enterprise resource pool is a great way to track and manage the people available to work on projects. It’s often set up by the Project Management Office and used to work out who is going to be a good fit for the skill needs of a new project.

Setting one up doesn’t have to be a big job or particularly complex, and many project management software tools will do this for you. Dan Lefsky, speaking at the PMI Global Congress EMEA in Barcelona, talked about the things you need to include in your resource pool data set in order to get the most use out of it.

Categories of Resource

He explained that a resource pool includes two types of resources:

• Generic resources (these could actually be non-people resources like meeting rooms, although he didn’t cover those)
• Named resources (these are your potential project team members).

The Data Needed For Your Resource Pool

He gave examples of the 8 things you need to consider and record for each named resource in order for you to be able to usefully draw on the data to select team members for upcoming projects. These are:

1. The Type of Resource

Is the person a Business Analyst, a Project Manager, a Quality Analyst, a User Experience expert, a Tech Writer, a Developer? Or something else? This is typically their job title and doesn’t necessarily reflect their particular skills.

2. Skillset

This is where you record their skills. You’ll probably want to set up a drop down list or categories that you can tick from as searching free text fields is going to be too difficult once you’ve got all your resources on there. Skills can include programming languages, Agile/waterfall/hybrid PM methodologies and so on.

3. Experience

It’s worth noting the experience of each individual. This could include the departments they have worked on, the category of project they do, the number of years they have been at the company, or years’ experience overall in their role, the key relationships they have within informal networks etc.

4. Cost

Cost of resource is a factor. Are they charged at time and materials? Or fixed price? What’s their internal day rate when working on projects? You might not have costs for some resources because it’s moving ‘wooden dollars’ around the organisation and that’s fine, but if you intend to charge clients for resource time then you’ll need to know what each person costs.

5. Location

Where is the resource based? For some projects it might not matter because they can work virtually, but for others it might have a significant impact. You could categorise these, Lefsky said, by onsite, offshore, onshore, nearshore or remote. Or you could list the city where they work (or do both).

6. Maximum Availability

This could change depending on their other commitments but it’s definitely a useful piece of information to have for some resources. For example, where an individual also works as a team manager, they will have certain management responsibilities that take up some time. These are things, speaking from experience, like approving timesheets, managing team’s expenses, team-level reporting, 1-to-1 meetings and performance reviews, dealing with sickness absence and so on.

You can’t allocate these people to your project 100% of the time. In fact, it’s not sensible to allocate anyone to your project 100% of the time. Note down what time they have outside their normal responsibilities that can be allocated to project work.

7. Manager

Knowing their line manager is helpful for resource requests.

8. Resource Breakdown Structure

Lefsky talked about positioning resources in the Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS) as this lets you see their security permissions, areas of control and similar. If you have a formal RBS then this could be worth doing but if you don’t, you could just as easily create another categorisation for security clearance if that was important to you.

Gather all this information and start to populate your enterprise resource pool. When you get started you’ll probably just focus on the people who spend a lot of time working on projects, but it’s worth expanding this if you can, and if you are going to take an enterprise-wide view of portfolio management. It’s a big job, and you have to reconcile the fact of treating individuals as ‘resources’ who can be put into little boxes and categorised, instead of the unique individuals that they are, but in large organisations particularly it can be incredibly successful.

Note that you’re going to have to continually review this. While someone’s job title might not change that often they could gain new experience through projects or develop new skills after training. Don’t let your resource pool data get out of date or you won’t benefit from being able to develop individuals or from letting them use new skills.

Do you use a resource pool? Let us know in the comments if it has been successful for you or whether – as I suspect it might be in many companies – it was set up as a one-off exercise and then not developed further, thus falling out of use very quickly. I look forward to hearing your experiences!