The Money Files

My last few videos have looked at the procurement lifecycle, and today I want to dive into the third step: negotiating and contracting. This is a really important part of working with suppliers and it takes us to the point of saying yes to the work (hopefully).

Here’s a quick overview of what you need to know:

You can read more about this part of the procurement lifecycle in this article.

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Risk management is so important when it comes to ensuring your project stays on track – both in terms of budget, which is what this column mainly talks about – but also in generally.

The graphic below shows the three levels of risk management to consider on your project (and beyond). If you aren’t working at the portfolio management level in your organisation, you can still take these into consideration because you can work with those who are managing your portfolio. Ask the right questions and help keep your project on track!

For more on this idea, check out this article.

http://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/The-Money-Files/11125/

Last month I shared some tips for using spreadsheets. Today I have some tips for presentations. I tend to use Microsoft PowerPoint, but all of these tips are relevant regardless of what presentation software you use.

1. Use icons

You can make slides look so much better if you include a few icons scattered through in relevant places. Corporate slide decks (in my experience) tend to have lots of bullet points, so even if you add one or two icons you can break up the feel of large blocks of text.

Note: Remember to respect copyright. Don’t download icons to use from the internet unless you specifically have the licence and rights to use them.

Here’s an example of a slide that uses icons.

2. Use a big font

The bigger the better! Anything less than 18 point is hard to read at distance.

The best way to check if you can read the slide is to go to the room you’ll be presenting in and put the slides on the screen. Then you’ll be able to see (in real life) whether you are making it difficult for people to read your material.

3. Use a full-slide background

Full-slide backgrounds can make your slides look really good.

Note: Slides that are predominately for use as training materials or to be read without you standing there talking through might be better off with more words. If you are able to talk about and explain the slides, you don’t need as many words on the slides – and a full-slide background can be a stylish way of presenting a few words on the screen.

Here’s an example of a slide that uses a full-slide background. The image is the same as one of my book jacket.

4. Add an extra slide for a handout

If you are distributing the slide deck, you can add in an extra slide at the end with more information. You wouldn’t show it within the presentation as you stand up and deliver it, and you can hide the slide from the presentation (in PowerPoint) if you want to. Or just stop clicking through the slides before you reach that one!

Your final slide can then be an extra list of resources, an appendix, links or anything else that you want people to be able to refer to.

5. Rehearse with the software!

It won’t be news to you that rehearsing is a good idea!

However, you should also practice with the slides. Use your clicker, or practice moving the slides on with your keyboard or mouse. Check that any multi-media works e.g. videos or audio that you have embedded in the presentation.

Check that you are aware of the slide transitions and builds. It’s annoying to watch a speaker either fly in all the bullet points in one go before talking about the slide, or finish talking and… oops!... there’s another bullet arriving covering a point they’ve forgotten about. If you don’t like using slide builds, take them out!

What presentation tips do you have for putting together a great slide deck? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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In this video I talk about the second part of the procurement lifecycle, which is finding a vendor.

Watch the overview of the procurement lifecycle and a focus on the first step (requirements) in this video.

There’s more information about the overall procurement lifecycle in this article.

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We’re almost at the end of the deep dive into the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, and what it has to say about Project Schedule Management. Last time I looked at the Develop Schedule process.

Today we are moving out of the Planning process group and moving into Monitoring and Controlling for the sixth process: Control Schedule. This is the last process in the Knowledge Area.

Here are the previous instalments:

Plan Schedule Management

Define Activities

Sequence Activities

Estimate Activity Durations

Develop Schedule

Control Schedule Process

The Control Schedule process happens on an ongoing basis throughout the execution part of a project. As you are doing the work, you are constantly going back to the schedule to track your progress, make changes and ensure the schedule still reflects reality.

As a result, the biggest output of the process is changes. You won’t put every schedule change through change control, but you’ll be using work performance information to make daily tweaks to the schedule to keep everything on track.

Inputs

We see the common trend to simplify again in this process. Project schedule, project calendars and schedule data have been replaced by project documents in the Inputs list. You can still use all those documents for this process, but they aren’t called out individually any longer as specific Inputs.

You can also draw on:

• Lessons learned register – this turns up a lot in the PMI guidance for processes; it’s a constant reminder to check what other projects have learned before you go ahead with anything
• Resource calendars – because you might have to make changes as a result of changes to resource availability.

And of course this isn’t a definitive list. Use whatever you need to in order to track, monitor and control progress against the schedule in a timely and efficient way.

Tools & Techniques

There are a few changes to Tools & Techniques, but they are all logical and make a lot of sense.

Performance reviews is out. These related to contract performance specifically, if I remember rightly, so the focus here is on being flexible enough to acknowledge some of the work (if not all of it) is performed by people who are employed by the organisation requesting the project. If I’m honest, my big issue with previous versions of the PMBOK® Guide was around the fact a lot of it was written as if you were outsourcing a lot of the work and buying in lots of services from contractors. Yes, I’ve worked on projects where that is the case, but not all my projects (or yours, I imagine) have been mainly supervising the work of contractors. We have internal staff who are also heavily involved in doing project work.

Project management software and scheduling tool have been replaced by project management information system, as we have seen elsewhere in other processes.

Resource optimisation techniques is now simply resource optimisation.

Modelling techniques is out.

The new T&T are:

• Data analysis, which covers a wide range of techniques including earned value, agile tracking with burndown charts, performance reviews (which were specifically taken out and included in the more generic term here), trend and variance analysis of schedule performance and the ‘what if’ analysis we also saw in the last process.
• Critical path method. This is basically using the critical path progress to track progress. If the tasks on the critical path slip, so does the end date for the project. In many software tools you can capture the original critical path and then use the software feature to show you the comparison of the original against the current progress. You can also use the critical path to help you identify schedule risk that should be on your risk register.

Outputs

The Outputs stay the same except organisational process assets updates has dropped off the list. If updating your schedule and controlling your project resulted in some business process having to change, then by all means report that to the PMO as a lesson learned. If updating an organisational process asset makes sense then do it anyway, even if it is no longer an output of this process. If you’ve got an example of when you doing schedule control has changed the way your business operates, then let us all know in the comments below, as I’m struggling to come up with a relevant example. Thanks!

That brings us to the end of the Project Schedule Management Knowledge Area. Next month, I’ll be looking at the trends and tailoring guidance for this topic. As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve followed the whole series, we’re seeing more specific guidance for Agile approaches through the different processes, so I’m expecting to see more information about that called out in the PMBOK® Guide. Watch this space!

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