Project Management

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A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts. Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

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Date

What’s happening in Q3?

Quarter 3 of a calendar year is July, August and September. Your business year might not follow the same quarters, but wherever you are in your business year, it’s probably the right time to be looking ahead at what needs to come next. Here are 3 focus areas for Quarter 3.

3 focus areas for quarter 3

Forward planning

Begin strategising and planning for high-priority projects in the upcoming quarters. That might look like warming up stakeholders, seeing who is going to be available to work on upcoming projects, doing some light discovery work or pre-initiation investigation, especially on the areas that are likely to take the most time such as procurement and contract negotiations, or getting suppliers to submit security information and forms, or the RFP process. (Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything!)

Involving the team in these discussions can help maintain their focus on future goals and the bigger picture, while hopefully getting you a head start when you come to get those projects going in earnest.

Process optimisation

There’s never a right time to optimise processes, in my experience. The process is in use and it works, so often it feels better to sort out something that is broken, or that is strategically important. But those inefficient processes contribute to low staff morale and wasting time, month after month, so it’s worth scheduling some time to put some effort in. Each quarter, tackle one point or a couple of points, and soon you’ll build up a momentum and improvements.

So how do we do this? Analyse the project management processes and methodologies. Look for inefficiencies or bottlenecks in workflows that could be streamlined for better performance in busier times. I would look through the lessons learned from recent projects and see what’s highlighted there that could be improved.

Ideally, you’d do a full analysis of all possible problems and highlight one or two from the priority list, but in reality that’s a load of work before you see any improvements. A better option might be to just trust your team. If they are telling you that the change control process is a pain in the behind, just focus in on that for now. Improve what is causing people the most headaches, and trust me, they’ll have an opinion on what that is if you ask them.

Tool use

Do a quick review of who is still using the project management software tools you have. People move on so it might be time to claw back licences from users who are no longer in the business or who have changed roles. And other people might benefit from having the licences.

On the topic of forward planning for the quarter, look at what projects are coming up and whether your current licence package is adequate. You might need to add in more licences if you’ve got more projects or more stakeholders needing access to the tools.

If you foresee a need to add in more users, it might be worth scheduling the training for them now so they can hit the ground running when they get their own account.

What else would you be doing at this time to feel prepared for the upcoming months ahead? Let me know in the comments!

Posted on: June 11, 2024 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

How to Use Alternative Metrics

Last month I looked at a range of alternative metrics for assessing success. One of the comments on that article asked how, on reflection, had I seen these or other alternative metrics implemented effectively. It also asked whether there were challenges that might arise integrating alternative metrics into existing project management frameworks (which I’ll look at in a different article).

So, if you want to implement a more nuanced approach to measuring project success, how do you put this into practice? Below are some ideas. This topic is one that we could probably speak (or write) about at length, but hopefully the examples and ideas I share will give you some starting points for incorporating a range of measures into your project management practice.

metrics for project success

  1. Customer satisfaction

This is an area where I have quite a lot of examples to share. In my book, Customer-Centric Project Management, my co-author and I describe an extensive exercise to set up customer satisfaction tracking on projects, with internal customers.

I’ve written about customer satisfaction measurement on this blog before (start with this article: Lessons about project metrics). Basically, find out what is important to people, then track that regularly and plot your scores as part of regular reviews.

You don’t have to use an ‘official’ CSAT mechanism, or pay for electronic survey tools. Just ask people as a minimum.

  1. Innovation level

I haven’t used an innovation score regularly throughout a project, but it has been included in the way we rate projects and prioritize which ones should be done as the requests come into the pipeline.

Implement an innovation score yourself on a simple Likert scale (1-5 or similar). Ideally, you don’t want the measure to be subjective, so set some criteria e.g.:

  • Number of tools used where the business has less than 1 year of experience using them
  • Years of experience of team implementing (as someone could have gained a lot of relevant experience in a different role)
  • Contractor level of experience rated on a scale of how many implementations they have done.

Or similar – you really only need a couple of measures to make up your innovation score. Use the innovation score as part of the decision criteria for whether a project should be taken forward or not.

  1. Resource utilization

Resource utilization reports are something I’ve only actively used on a couple of projects, because mostly we either haven’t had the tools to extract the data (because we aren’t doing timesheets or detailed estimates), or because staff have been 100% assigned to the project so we don’t have to worry about them splitting their time across projects. We would still have to worry about them being scheduled to do too many tasks in a week and being over booked, or under utilized, but when the team is full time somehow that’s easier to manage as you can see what they are doing and we speak every day.

Use the reports to check exactly that: is the team going to struggle to meet its commitments? And if it is, because staff are over-scheduled, what are you going to do about it?

Even the basic reports from Microsoft Project will give you utilization data, so take a look at what you already have within your tool suite and if you find it useful, use it.

  1. Risk mitigation effectiveness

The final one I’m going to talk about today is tracking risk mitigation effectiveness. I mentioned in the article that you could use AI-powered insights to establish the effectiveness of the risk management activities undertaken, but in reality I imagine that takes quite a lot of effort to set up.

Another way to do this would be at project closure, or during lessons learned conversations, whenever these take place in your project lifecycle.

Look at what the risk was and what was done to mitigate it. Score the risk based on the effectiveness of the action:

  • 1: Risk management activity was 100% successful and risk was closed
  • 2: Risk management activity was successful but residual risk was worth £x
  • 3: and so on.

Using residual risk (and specifically, a financial value of residual risk) is a way to establish how effective your management action was – or at least, it’s one way to create data that allows you to assess that.

Hopefully that gives you some pointers for measuring project success through different routes, with some more concrete examples of how to get started.

Posted on: January 22, 2024 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Why do we bother with business cases?

Project documents (and there are some good templates here on ProjectManagement.com) are important to keeping projects moving, and many times, a project will start with a business case.

You might accept the need to do a business case as part of the organisational process – just something you have to do to tick a box. Maybe your organisation doesn’t use them in a formal sense, but each project has to be justified in some way – whether that’s a slide deck or even an email. There is some ‘reason to work’ that kicks off a project.

But have you ever really stopped to think about what role a business case really plays? If you do them, I think we shouldn’t take them for granted. If you don’t do them, it’s time to start.

Here are a few reasons why it is advantageous to have a business case before the work begins.

Understand the scope

The process of putting together a business case helps everyone involved understand what the scope is going to be. And if they don’t like what that looks like, they have the opportunity to influence it early so the scope better aligns with the direction they want to take.

Understand the issues

Perhaps there are concerns, issues, risks or challenges that decision makers need to be aware of – there always are. The discussions that feed into the business case help make sure that everyone is aware of what those are and what implications they might have for the work.

Fact-based decision making will give the project a better chance of success. The leadership team can weed out the ideas that won’t work before any time and effort is spent on them.

We can frame this conversation by thinking about project viability. Having a thorough discussion of the issues makes people aware of whether a project is viable and will continue to be viable throughout the delivery phases, despite any challenges that may arise.

business case

Understand progress

Finally, a good business case lays out information that is useful for managing the work, monitoring and controlling progress. For example, a schedule of stage payments or key milestones, scope elements or deliverables.

The business case isn’t the project schedule and you will need more than simply the business case, but if it is a well-thought through, well-prepared document, there will be enough in there to help set up adequate project tracking.

The document should also set out success criteria and/or benefits which give you the framework for evaluating success as the project progresses.

As a project manager, you might be thinking that putting together the business case is not really your job, and you’d be right. However, on the projects I have worked on, it’s always been easier to get up to speed and start work when I’ve been involved from the business case stage or earlier.

That doesn’t mean doing loads of work – just being interested and talked to and maybe asked an opinion about the resource information or timeline that should go into the document.

Then when I come to lead the work (assuming it gets approved), I have a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind the project and the decisions that have already been taken.

Do you have a business case template that you are happy with? If not, check out some of the templates on this site as a starting point, and adapt one to give you the information you need to start your projects from a good place.

Posted on: May 02, 2023 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Building resilience into project delivery

I’ve just finished reading Business Resilience by David Roberts etc al. It’s a book that sets out a whole framework for delivering progress at a sustained pace and not being left behind in VUCA times. It’s aimed at senior leadership at the top levels as that is where the culture change is likely to need to start from, if you are rethinking strategy delivery.

It did get me thinking about what it means for projects and project managers. Thinking about what resilience meant in an IT world, back in the days when I worked in the IT team, I could draw a few parallels with resilience from a tech perspective and what it translates to for project professionals. (These are my thoughts, they aren’t from the book, which is far more strategic and articulate!)

Process

Process resilience to me means having steps in place to get things done, even when things change. For example, when I moved from a fixed term to a permanent contract, my records were updated. Unfortunately, that meant that I could no longer see any purchase orders that were approved by the ‘old’ me.

That wasn’t a huge problem but as process steps go, it would have been nice to have the continuity without having to ask for it.

Another example of building in process resilience is making sure workflows can be delegated when you are out of the business. For example, handing over order approvals, estimates or change management approvals to a colleague during your holidays, instead of them all being stuck in your queue to approve when you get back.

Redundancy

In IT, we used to build solutions that had adequate redundancy. For example, the servers would fail over to another server if the first server had problems. We had back up generators to keep critical systems operational if (when) the power went down.

In project terms, that would look like having two people trained to carry out a project role so that if one resource is off sick, someone else can step in and do the work.

That’s quite an overhead for a project team, as normally we wouldn’t want to carry additional cost, but on business critical projects, or where your resource is truly specialised, it might be worth it.

Data availability

How long do you spend looking for project documentation? Probably quite a long time, especially if its on a collaboration tool that shall remain nameless! Thank goodness for being able to search.

In a technical environment, we’d create backups so the data was available even if the main system went down (although of course with the redundancy, the goal is that the main system stays up…).

Project documentation and data availability in a resilient team would mean you could find what you are looking for easily, in the right place, and access the data.

I think as the world gets more complex, projects get busier and teams have more to handle, being resilient is more and more important if we want to get things done and avoid burnout. These are just 3 ideas of things you can do with your project team this week to be a little bit more resilient and prepared for what next week might throw at you:

  1. Review your processes and look for where you can build resilience in to keep things moving and avoid the process stalling
  2. Look at your resource plans and consider how you can build in resource redundancy – maybe get a few more people on a training course
  3. Consider where you store your project data and how easy it is for people to access when they need it.

What do you think of these ideas? Share any other resilience-building tips you have in the comments below!

Posted on: February 15, 2023 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Psychology of Estimating

James Lea, founder of Project Science, spoke at EVA 26 earlier this year. He talked about the psychology of estimating. “People,” he said, “are just as important as the techniques and data.”

He went on: “Plans and estimates are built by and used by people. Psychology matters.”

The talk was very interesting, and here’s what I took from it.

He started by asking us our experiences of estimating and the emotional responses we had at the time. Think about your own experience of estimating. Did you feel:

  • Under pressure?
  • Worried about how the numbers would be used?
  • Unsupported by colleagues
  • Unsure what the estimate was for?

That’s all (unfortunately) normal, and we all nodded along as he talked.

Challenge how will estimates be used

James talked about how we should challenge how estimates should be used. “Uncertainty drives variable reactions in our teams,” he said. “It drives emotions and responses.” If you are open about how estimates are going to be used and how they should be used, that can help people feel more comfortable with the process.

Make estimating positive

How can we enable our teams to experience planning and estimating as a positive, creative experience? Instead of the stressful, “I suppose I can give you a number,” experience that it is mostly?

It’s hard for an organisation to accept that it doesn’t know the answer, and that can sometimes lead to a poor experience of the estimating process for the people involved.

Here are some ways he suggested we could turn the experience into a positive one:

  • Develop the models
  • Turn the work of an individual into the work of a team with reviews
  • Use the past as a guide to future performance
  • Frame everything as a change
  • Refine the estimates.

Creating a route to predict the future

James talked about asking the question about whether we have a route to predict whether the estimate is a robust one or not. We need to understand what is in and out of our control. Where things are out of our control, accept that and track it.

Estimates are only a guess without a map of how you got there and a set of viable routes.

We often hear that people can’t estimate where there is no historical data. Well, data science should make it easier now to estimate from past performance and the vast tracts of data we store about projects. If leaders can give teams the data, in a way that helps with estimating, that should make our estimates better.

Building defensible plans

James talked about showing your workings and documenting the bases of estimates. Steve Wake, the conference chair, shared his thoughts too, namely that the audit office regularly says people don’t know the basis of estimate and therefore the best ‘proof’ that your estimates are good is that you can justify them.

He talked about bounding your plans carefully, describing the world around the estimate as well as the estimate itself to provide rigour.

He suggested we quantify and compare with data science, applying risk appetite to the delivery methodology to round out what we know.

That, and the other points discussed, are ways to shape the emotional response and create a safe space for people to estimate their work.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Posted on: June 21, 2022 04:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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