The Money Files

“There are two kinds of measures of use in managing a system: permanent and temporary,” writes John Seddon in Freedom from Command & Control: A better way to make the work work. “Permanent measures, those that are related to purpose, are the guiding measures for all performance-improvement work. Temporary measures are those that are useful in ascertaining the nature and size of a problem before action is taken.”

Seddon is an occupational psychologist who has spent his career trying to improve systems by taking the waste out of processes. One of the ways he has done this is by focusing on what gets measured, a kind of ‘What gets measured gets done’ approach to improvement. His work has no doubt resulted in a lot of projects, particularly those that relate to continuous process improvement, but his book doesn’t cover project environments particularly. Still, I think that the way he splits measures into these two types is relevant to project managers – and we are focusing on governance this month at ProjectManagement.com. Let’s take a closer look at the types of measures Seddon explores in his book.

Permanent measures

Permanent measures, are, as you have probably guessed by the name, permanent. As nothing much is permanent on a project, these are the kind of measures you are likely to find in your Project Management Office or Portfolio Office. They are the measures that help manage the work overall. Some examples of permanent measures are:

Capacity and demand. This can help with resource scheduling on an ongoing basis. It helps to know what work is due to complete and when project managers will be free to take on other projects.

End-to-end time. This is how long it takes to complete the work from the customer’s perspective. As not many projects are repetitive, this is a bit of a pointless measure on projects. However, if you are repeating similar initiatives over a period of time (such as rolling out new software to an office at a time), it can be very useful to know how long it takes to complete one implementation.

Accuracy. In a project environment, this would be covered by project audits. The ‘accuracy’ of a project could equate to scope items covered, fit with requirements or how customer-centric you are and how much value you create for customers.

Temporary measures

Temporary measures are those that don’t last long. They aren’t permanently built into the fabric of how companies report projects. As such, you could have temporary measures on your project, especially if your project has a RAG status of Red and is in trouble. If you are trying to rescue a failing project, you will want to gather some data on what has been done to date and how best you can recover the situation.

It’s less easy to see how Seddon’s examples of temporary measures relate to projects. Here they are.

Type and frequency of demand. This could be a PMO measure, especially if you are looking to recruit an additional project manager or more staff in other capacities. You could measure the type and frequency of demand over a short period of time to check that you really do have cause to hire someone. Equally, on your project, you could use this type of metric for resource management. For example, as you move into the testing phase your resource needs will change. This is something that you won’t measure when the project is over as staffing up to support the product is a task for the operational team.

Type and frequency of ‘dirt’ in input. Seddon is mainly writing about service organisations like call centres, so he means incomplete application forms, letters that don’t have enough information in and so on. In the world of projects, this could be things like project initiation forms that don’t have enough information in for the stakeholders to sign off the scope, incomplete business cases, requests for projects that appear in the form on an email with a good idea rather than a thought-through assessment for a new project etc. He recommends that a few small changes could make a big difference, such as changing the forms or template letters used. For example, you could amend the form on your company intranet so that it is rejected unless someone enters all the detail required to submit a new project for consideration.

Type and frequency of waste. ‘Waste’ to Seddon means steps in the process that don’t add any value. These could be things like handovers between teams, lost time, rework and errors. There are probably numerous places on a project or in your project management processes where things get lost or handoffs between teams are not as slick as they could be.

I’m a big believer in taking what we can from other areas of management practice and applying them to projects, so I think it is worth considering what we can learn from the type of metrics used in service organisations and the like. Do your project or PMO metrics fit any of these categories?

In this installment of my series on estimating, I look at what bottom up estimating is in a short video.

Today I talk to Dr Andrew Makar, IT program manager and author of Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy, about getting a new job.

Why is preparing for a new job more than just about practising responses to interview questions?

Preparing to find the next opportunity requires a lot more preparation than futility trying to memorize an exhaustive list of project management interview questions. The majority of the “interview tip” websites seem to think providing over 50 interview questions is a useful resource a candidate can apply in an interview setting.

It isn’t realistic to memorize questions that may never be asked.  This is why finding new opportunities and preparing for upcoming interviews is a reflective one much like a project management lessons learned session or retrospective.

I advocate thinking about past scenarios rather than memorizing questions.  Reviewing your resume, reflecting on the lessons learned from those past projects and positions provides a much better background than rehearsing the perfect answer to a question that may never be asked.

You talk about a career contact matrix in your book. What is that?

The career contact matrix is a tool I’ve used to help me identify opportunities, leads, and follow up on active conversations for the next career opportunity. It’s a simple matrix that can track active opportunities and identify contacts for professional networking and follow up over a three- to six-month time period.

I developed a career contact matrix using a variety of formats including spreadsheets and mind maps. The career contact matrix consists of 9 simple columns including:

• Opportunity Status
• Opportunity Title
• Company
• Contact Name
• Contact Phone
• Contact Email
• Contact Job Title
• LinkedIn Profile
• Next Steps

The matrix is managed like a project manager’s issue log where opportunities turn into qualified leads and other opportunities don’t meet your need or interest. By keeping in touch with your contacts, new opportunities can occur frequently and a timely phone call can open up an entirely new job opportunity. Another key benefit of an updated matrix is it becomes your emergency unemployment rescue kit. There is a template for the matrix in my book, Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy.

If you do find yourself unemployed, employers often use phone interviews as a way of cutting down the number of candidates they invite in to the office. What's the biggest difference between a phone interview and a face to face interview?

Phone interviews can be difficult because of the lack of subtext. You only have the benefit of the interviewer’s tone rather than seeing non-verbal communication signals. Most phone interviews tend to be screening interviews when there recruiter is vetting your profile for both skills and salary range. It is difficult to develop rapport with one phone call. The face to face interview is much better because you can look a person in the eye and determine if the opportunity is the right fit.

Remember, you are evaluating them just as they are evaluating you.

That’s  a good tip. Do you have any others?

For the job seeker, developing your personal network and promoting your personal brand is a key factor to creating a career safety net. I use the career contact matrix to maintain an action plan for professional networking and building better relationships. I always dislike receiving an email from someone seeking a job when I haven’t spoken to them in a year. By developing better relationships and “checking in” from time to time, your job search becomes easier as opportunities pop.

My past 3 jobs have all come from a professional network instead of a job posting system. As project managers, we can spend over 40 hours a week delivering projects. Take at least one hour a week to focus on your career including networking, opportunity prospecting and directing your own career.

Is the interview the best time to ask questions about salary and benefits? If not, when should you ask about these?

The interview is the best time to sell yourself. The hiring decision is usually the interviewer’s decision. The salary and associated benefits is an HR decision. Focus on positioning yourself as the desired candidate and obtain the hire decision. Once HR makes an offer, you can negotiate the salary and benefits.

In my experience, the initial phone screen or the job description will help identify the position title. You can usually find out about benefits and salary ranges incomparable positions from others in your professional network or using tools like salary.monster.com or glassdoor.com

What happens if the interview includes other things like tests or a presentation? How can people prepare for those?

I’ve asked candidates to demonstrate their skills in an interview by providing situational questions or even asking candidates to draw a small data model. In a project management interview, you want to provide specific actions taken using the processes, tools and techniques to manage a project. If you indicate on your resume that earned value management is a skill, be prepared to share how you’d apply earned value on a project or better yet how you would do it in Microsoft Project. Reflecting on your past job scenarios, providing real world examples with the techniques to support your responses will help you pass any test or presentation.

About Andrew Makar

In this instalment of my occasional Ask the Experts column, I spoke to Kevin Baker (pictured), Head of Project & Programme Management Operations at Airbus, about the work he has been leading to improve project management standards and culture at the company, including the improvement of project financial controls.

Kevin, you've enhanced the project management culture at Airbus. Has any of this work been around standardising project financial control or risk management? If so, what?

At Airbus we have been working to standardise all aspects of project management, and of course this includes financial control and risk management. Together with schedule management and quality, these form the pillars of a robust project management approach.

What have we actually done? The principles of financial management and risk management have been known in Airbus for many years, there is nothing really new here. What is new is to have a standard set of methodology and tools, so that all actors in the company start to work in the same way, and to use the same language. Over a period of a few years, and with a strong push from the senior management, this starts to embed the new way of working into the company.

Yes, it is really important to have that senior management support. Have you implemented any common tools for project managers to use for managing project budgets or project risks?

In Airbus we have a number of very large projects, like our new aircraft – the A350XWB. Their size and complexity requires a special treatment and we have developed our own toolset – it is called Unified Planning. This takes the schedule status and the cost status at work package level and then aggregates this up to give the overall picture at total project level, that is the status for the complete aircraft development. We also compare cost to schedule achievements to produce an Earned Value indicator. This gives the managers at all levels the visibility of where they are, and how they are performing. And it makes sure that everyone is working to the same information.

Do smaller projects use the same tools?

We also have many hundreds of smaller projects, and we have adopted a simpler toolset for these. But it follows the same basic principles – monitor cost vs budget, and schedule progress vs plan, then calculate earned value.

We cannot say that these new tools will overcome all the difficulties on our projects, but they make sure that we know where we are so that the project managers can quickly start a corrective action if necessary. We are not steering ‘blind’.

Data is a key part to making the right decisions. In order to get there, you’ve had to change the culture at Airbus. What was the biggest challenge in trying to get the company to embrace project management as an intrinsic part of how everyone works?

Airbus is just over 40 years old, and its strength comes from a determination to build the best performing products to the very highest standard of safety. The challenge now is to promote a project management culture alongside these existing strengths. That is to make sure that we not only build fantastic products which perform well but also that we make sure that we do it on time, and within the budget.

We know that the culture change is a long process. It is about making sure that we all think ‘project’. We have made good progress, but the journey will never end. So what is next? – it is more of the same. We keep pushing for a common way of working, a common mindset, a common language. We are deploying some levers to help here. For example we have a project management career path, which is linked to an internal project management certification process. This will help to make project management into a real profession in Airbus – to make more people want to be project managers, to be more proud to be project managers. We are also expanding our range of PM training focussing more now on soft skills.

Thanks, Kevin!

About my interviewee: Kevin Baker is Head of Project & Programme Management Operations at Airbus. He spoke at Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt last month about this programme of work to enhance project management culture at the company.

This month on ProjectManagement.com we are focusing on business process management. A popular topic in this area is CRM – customer relationship management. Many project managers will find themselves implementing CRM systems, often at huge expense and upheaval to the company. You may have one such system in your own company. But for those who haven’t worked with CRM, it can be a bit of a mystery. So what is CRM software actually for?

CRM can tailor marketing information

CRM software can be used to support sales by targeting customers with what they are really interested in. For example, if you work in a car dealership and send out a company newsletter to customers, you could tailor the newsletter to be relevant to each individual customer by including articles about the type of car they bought from you, or offering special deals on cars that you know they have registered an interest in. Instead of getting a generic newsletter, the same as everyone else, they get something tailored to their interests. This gives you more of a chance that they will come and buy something, or take up a special offer. It’s the same principle as getting vouchers from your supermarket in the post – the vouchers are probably for something that you have bought before.

To make this work, CRM projects involve setting up large databases to capture customer information and preferences. However, it also runs the risk of being a bit too targeted – how many times have you logged into Amazon or something similar and seen a ‘you might also like’ promotion that is completely irrelevant to you? They may be displaying something based on a gift you once bought for someone else, or the day that you let your cousin use your account to buy something for himself.

CRM can track customer behaviour

Companies want to know more about their customers, and CRM can help. The theory is that the more you know about what customers are doing or buying, the better you can tweak your sales offering to pick up more customers, or keep those original customers coming back. For example, if you run a coffee shop, you could track the busiest times of the day and offer promotions for people who don’t come to the shop at those times. This could give you extra customers during the quiet periods.

CRM can help sales

Once your CRM project has created a massive database to store customer information in, you can use it for supporting the sales team. In fact, many CRM projects have the sales team as the major stakeholders. Sales personnel can use it to record conversations with customers so that customers get a better level of service when they ring back again – they won’t have to repeat everything a second time, for example.

CRM can help build relationships

If your CRM project is well implemented and has good strategic goals, it can be a great asset for the company. Having the records of how you dealt with a customer last time can be really beneficial, especially if the records show that the person is either a valued customer who spends a lot, or someone who complains all the time about nothing. Of course, most customers fall in between these categories, but even knowing the last time they bought something from you can help build relationships. In a recent personal example of where this failed, I tried to order some flowers online as a birthday present. I had used the company before, and thought that the purpose of creating an account would mean that next time I needed to send flowers, all the data about me would be stored. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case and I had to enter everything (everything!) again. Apparently the only reason the company has used my data over the past year is to send me junk emails that don’t relate to my purchasing history at all. They could have sent a tailored special offer (or even just a reminder email) that so-and-so’s birthday was coming up and did I want to send flowers again? That would have been useful. As it happens, I probably won’t use their services again – they have failed to make their CRM initiative of value to the customer and they certainly aren’t building any relationships with it.

If you think of your project stakeholders as customers, your stakeholder analysis and communication plan become part of your ‘project CRM system’ – a way to track and interact with the people you are working with. I think the easiest way to think of CRM is to imagine yourself on the other end. What do you want people to do with the information they hold about you? How can it be used to provide a better service? Just as you tailor project communications to your stakeholders, depending on what they want to know and how they want to receive the information, your company is doing it on a much larger scale to their customers. That’s what CRM is, although it is just as likely to fail as it is to succeed.

About the author: Elizabeth Harrin is Director of The Otobos Group, a project management communications consultancy. You can get in touch with her via ProjectManagement.com, Google+ and Facebook.