The Money Files

I’m taking a quick break from my mini-series on resilience in project teams as I’ve been doing some thinking recently on how to improve the project management software we have. You might know that I wrote Collaboration Tools for Project Managers so the changing landscape of software products is something I try to stay close to.

One of the conclusions I’m coming to is that tools don’t do everything. As a result, we have to integrate with other products. The software is powerful, but it just can’t/shouldn’t do everything, or you end up with a hybrid product that is rubbish at most things and does everything badly. So integrations so you can use best of breed products is the way forward.

Integrations extend the functionality of your project management tools, and here are 4 benefits to consider.

1. Streamlined workflows

Double-keying data? No thanks! Integrations between apps allow you to automate the flow of information between tools. Need to get that timesheet data into a financial tool? There’s an integration for that. Need to bring in actuals from the accounting software? No problem, we can feed those into the project budget and forecast.

Integrations reduce manual data entry and minimise the risk of human error. And they remove some of the boring work too – win win!

2. Centralised information

How many tabs do you have open? It’s no fun switching from dashboards in one tool to review benefits and then back to the PM tool to enter the actuals, and grabbing stuff from all the places. Bringing in what you need saves time and centralises the data so your team has everything in one place. That should help with transparency and reporting, plus saving time so you don’t have to log in to so many apps in the morning.

For example, integrate with your cloud storage or file-sharing software and then you can access the relevant documents directly within the project management system. To be fair, that isn’t even hard if you’ve got cloud file storage – just add a link! Done!

3. Improved collaboration

You’re in your PM tool but you need to flag something… do you have to leave to go to a messaging app or email? It’s better if there is an integration within the tool so your relevant threads can appear linked to the project task, risk or issue etc. If your tool doesn’t have native messaging, integrate it with whatever tool you do use so that status updates can be sync’d across platforms in real time, so the whole team can see what is going on.

4. Enhanced reporting and analytics

Finally, the more data you have in your PM tool, the better your reporting and analytics can be, and the more you can make use of AI. AI needs pools of data to give you forecasts or suggestions, so if your PM tool is scanty in that area, it’s hard for AI to do anything meaningful with your portfolio data.

Sync up your project data with external analytics or business intelligence tools so you can create detailed reports, analyse data trends, and monitor progress without exporting data manually. And you’ll be able to share project performance data with people who don’t have licences for your PM tools. Because that’s a problem, right?

So, integrations for the win! What tools do you link up (or what problems do you face when they don’t)? Let me know in the comments!

Last time I looked at what team resilience is and how it shows up for project teams in their behaviour. But that’s not very actionable – today we move on to actionable things you can do to improve the resilience of your team so you can bounce back and get over setbacks with a smile!

Here are 6 factors that contribute to team resilience. If you don’t already have these in place, what can you do to get them? They’ll all help your team feel more supported and able to cope with the challenges of project work.

1. A clear vision and purpose

Hopefully your project already has a clear vision and purpose. Is it time to revisit that?

The point of having clarity on the mission is so that you can all stay motivated and focused on achieving those goals, even when things are sticky. Maybe put the goals front and centre on your team meeting slides each week or as a poster in the office if you work physically together.

2. Strong communication

Again, hopefully you already have open and transparent communication. If not, why not (perhaps it’s to do with number 3 below?). Good communication within the team helps with sharing challenges and collaborating on problems. It’s hard to be resilient and get over a problem if no one talks to you! Get into the habit of sharing and linking people together so they can work collaboratively more easily, and when there is an issue, it will be second nature.

3. Psychological safety

Team members must feel safe to voice their opinions, admit mistakes, and ask for help without fear of judgment or retribution – that’s psychological safety. Without that in your team, no one is going to put forward slightly wacky ideas that might just solve a problem, or be innovative if it’s high risk.

4. Emotional intelligence

OK, this one is hard – you kind of have to recruit for emotional intelligence or give people the time to grow into it with appropriate support. You can’t wave a magic wand and have everyone on the team have amazing EI skills overnight.

You can surround yourself with people who demonstrate EI so think about who you use to fill your project teams. EI helps individuals better manage stress, communicate effectively and respond to crises. They are better at reading the room so can pick up problems before they start and they are better at reaching out to support others because they can tell it’s needed.

As the project manager, work on your own EI and lead from the front with this one.

5. Supportive leadership

Continuing the theme of leadership, be the best leader you can be. Leaders who provide encouragement, guidance, and crucially the right resources so people can actually do their jobs are important to creating a resilient culture.

Resilient teams need leadership that listens, provides timely feedback, and shows understanding during difficult moments. It shouldn’t just come from you as the PM. Think about the role your sponsor or steering group plays and how they can support from the top. Team leaders, workstream leaders and subject matter experts can also all demonstrate leadership – you don’t have to be in charge of a team to be a leader.

6. Flexibility and autonomy

Where you can, give the team the autonomy to make decisions and adapt their approach to best fit their preferences for working styles. With the knowledge that they have some flexibility to tackle problems the way that makes the most sense to them, they can go into those problems with confidence for dealing with them. That could also mean changing direction, if that’s the best answer.

What else do you see in resilient project teams that you would add here? Let us know in the comments!

We hear a lot about how projects and people should  be resilient, but what does it really mean? I think of it like being a tree – there’s that quote about bending with the wind and not breaking, but how does that translate to your work life? I think resilience is something that we talk about a lot but find difficult to turn into actionable insights, and I’m all about actionable insights! So I did some thinking about resilience and have a few things to say on the subject.

Let’s start my new mini-series on this topic with an overview of what it actually is and what resilience looks like in project teams.

What is team resilience?

Resilience refers to a team’s ability to adapt, recover, and grow stronger in response to adversity, stress, or change. And on projects, we see a lot of stress, adversity and change, right?

If you work in a project team, resilience involves the collective ability to maintain focus, adapt strategies, and work collaboratively when facing obstacles.

OK, so that’s a definition. But we’re not much closer to knowing how that shows up in the way teams behave.

Characteristics of resilient teams

Here’s what I think resilient teams demonstrate.

• Adaptability: The ability to shift strategies or tactics when unexpected challenges arise, managing change.
• Collaboration: People support one another and work together effectively, especially under pressure.
• Optimism: Team members have a positive outlook that they bring to problem-solving, even when there are big challenges ahead.
• Persistence: The team shows determination to stay on course and get things done even if there are setbacks.
• Emotional regulation: People in the team (especially the project manager) have the ability to manage stress and stay calm in high-pressure situations, like audits, project reviews or dealing with issues.

All those characteristics are things that I think project managers show, perhaps more than other roles in the business, because we are exposed to challenges, stress and changes all the time. All. The. Time. Even on projects that are ‘easy’!

Whether it’s tight deadlines, changing client demands, unforeseen risks, your budget being cut by 10% or a staff member going off sick… there are challenges every week with delivering projects. Working on improving the characteristics of resilience means your team is going to be more likely to overcome these challenges while maintaining morale and productivity.

If that wasn’t benefit enough, resilient teams are also more likely to be innovative (because they have to be creative to get out of sticky situations). Resilience helps improve long-term project outcomes, because we can learn from failures and refine processes over time – that’s the ‘bouncing back’ bit.

They’re more capable of dealing with ambiguity and complexity because they’ve got the mental agility to manage when things aren’t linear.

As an aside, when I started out in project management, I assumed things would be linear, and mostly my projects were. But as I’ve grown into my career, I’ve worked on more and more projects where we don’t have the ability to see into the future, the end is not clear… we’re flying the plane while we build it. And that ability to sit with ambiguity and just get on with what you can is something that’s been useful for me.

So, we can conclude that resilience is an important skill and we know what it looks like in project teams. Next time, I’ll talk about some practical things you can do for your team to help them have every chance of being resilient when the work gets tough.

Last time I wrote about the business benefits that you might want to consider for your business cases. But identification of the benefits is only the first step. The training I was putting together was an hour-long overview, so nothing really deep dive, but I wanted to cover the process for managing benefits beyond simply brainstorming the things we could list to justify the business case.

This is the process I included in my presentation.

1. Identify

This is the step covered in my last article. Define what benefits the project is expected to deliver. Consider financial, customer, operational, strategic, employee, and ESG benefits.

As well as the list I shared last time, go back to some past business cases and see what kind of things they included, as well as the level of detail expected. For example, some business cases I’ve seen are really high-level with hardly any detail and they still got approved! I think it depends on how much you have already socialised the idea and how much the exec team want to do the project… But don’t waste too much time doing the work if you don’t need to in order to get it approved. Maybe stick to two or three good quality benefits instead of listing out 15 non-quantifiable benefits instead.

2. Define and quantify

Make each benefit SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Where possible, quantify in financial terms or KPIs.

This is the step where you’ll spend the most time. It’s normally quite easy to work out the kinds of benefits you’ll get from the project activity. It’s really hard to agree what the baseline is and how you are going to work out the measures going forward.

3. Map and align

Link each benefit to project outputs and strategic objectives. Ensure they support organisational goals.

Do this on a slide to include in the business case or just in a paragraph. This bit doesn’t have to be too much work but you will want to evidence to the decision makers that you have thought about strategic alignment.

4. Plan for realisation

Clarify how and when each benefit will be achieved, who owns it, and what dependencies exist. Go back to step 2 – normally it’s the person who owns the baseline data who will own the ‘new’ data for the benefit. Think about when the benefit kicks in. If it’s about more sales, do they happen in the same month as you made them on the call? If customers have 60 days to pay their invoice, maybe you need to recognise the revenue 60 days later?

This step is another time-consuming one as you work out and negotiate all these pieces.

5. Track and measure

Include plans to track benefits through delivery and beyond. Does the project need to deliver a new dashboard to track sales or some other target? Add those tasks to the project plan otherwise you’ll get to the end and have no way of measuring your achievements.

6. Review and update

I wish I could have made this into 5 steps for the training because 6 doesn’t fit so nicely on a slide! But there is this final step which is to keep benefits under review. Update the business case as the project evolves or as assumptions change. This might mean going back around the approval process if the benefits are hugely different.

Hope that helps with your next business case and benefits discussions! Let me know what else you do in the comments below.

Recently a colleague asked me to do some training on business case benefits – how to identify them, manage them and track them. We spent a lot of the time thinking about different types of benefits, and I thought the list we brainstormed might be useful to you too.

Why not copy/paste this list or bookmark it so that next time you are creating a business case you can review whether you’re going to get any of these types of benefits?

1. Financial Benefits

Let’s start with the obvious ones, and the ones most execs, in my experience, tend to care about the most – the money benefits. You might have:

• Increased revenue (e.g. from new products or markets)
• Improved EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation)
• Cost savings (e.g. from process efficiencies or automation)
• Avoided costs (e.g. preventing fines, reducing waste, or legacy system support)
• Improved cash flow or working capital efficiency

Working capital efficiency benefits were only something I came across on a project last year. While they might not make such great headlines as increasing revenue, they are definitely something you should be looking at if you have the opportunity.

2. Customer Benefits

Next up, benefits to your customers.

• Improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) or whatever measure you use to track customer satisfaction
• Reduced customer complaints or complaints about not-so-serious things
• Faster response/resolution times
• Enhanced customer experience (e.g. self-service tools, more intuitive systems)
• Increased customer retention or loyalty

3. Operational/Process Benefits

Next, we looked at internal benefits.

• Faster cycle times or reduced lead times
• Better data quality
• Improved productivity or throughput
• Standardisation or simplification of processes
• Increased system uptime or availability
• Improved compliance with regulations or standards

Some of these will translate into a financial benefit, for example, if you reduce the time it takes to answer a customer service call, you’d expect an agent to be able to do more calls in a day. Each call might turn into a sale, so there is the potential for increased revenue as a result of more calls answered. That kind of thing. You then start getting into the realms of assumptions – we assume 50% of calls convert to a sale, or something like that. I’d lean on your finance team or business planning and forecasting team here rather than try to guess at what the right assumptions might be.

There’s no reason not to include process benefits – they are easy to track for the most part – but if you can convert them to money benefits you might find your business case stacks up better.

4. Strategic Benefits

Personally, I think the strategic benefits are a bit vague. These are the kind of benefits you’d list in the exec summary to convince people of strategic alignment and the overall  ‘goodness’ of the business case, but you wouldn’t necessarily put them in a financial model.

• Entry into new markets or segments
• Support for strategic goals or transformation
• Improved agility or responsiveness to change
• Future-proofing the organisation (e.g. through technology upgrades)

5. Employee and Organisational Benefits

Benefits to staff often use similar measures to the customer service metrics, so if you can reuse any calculations, assumptions of measurement methods, then that will save you time.

• Improved staff engagement or morale from staff satisfaction surveys. Best to make these the ‘official’ surveys but you could also do ad hoc surveys before and after your project goes live to assess the difference
• Increased staff retention
• Better tools or systems for employees
• Upskilling or capability building
• Reduced manual work or rework

Get your HR team involved in measuring and tracking people-related benefits as they probably have access to a lot more data than you will about turnover, retention and so on.

6. Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Benefits

Even if you think your project might not have any benefits that fall into the corporate/social responsibility or ESG category, spend a few minutes thinking about them as you might find something.

• Carbon footprint reduction
• Waste reduction
• Improved sustainability reporting
• Better ethical or diversity practices
• Community or social impact

These are pretty hard to track in my experience. Waste reduction and recycling not so much as you can measure what you throw away, but carbon reporting can get quite complicated, especially if you don’t have someone in your organisation who is responsible for this.

7. Risk Reduction/Avoidance

Finally, we talked about the benefits of reducing (or avoiding) risks, including:

• Reduced operational risk (e.g. from old systems, manual processes)
• Improved data security or resilience
• Better business continuity or disaster recovery

Which of these could you use in your business cases?