The Money Files

Is your team a remote or hybrid team? It can be challenging to keep projects moving with the same pace during the holiday season, when availability and communication can be limited. Here are a few tips on how to stay on top of your project deliverables over the holidays.

1. Establish availability and schedules

Encourage colleagues to set clear expectations around holiday availability and working hours. For example, they can set out of office messages and identify a delegate in that message so that people know who to go for when they are unavailable.

If you have limits on how many people in the team can be out of the office at the same time, then make sure these are clear and communicated. A project team holiday calendar can make it clear when people are off (although you’ll have to get them to fill it in… always a challenge). There might be times when holidays are unlikely to be approved, for example over a go live period, so flag that in advance so that anyone who needs to book holiday can do so with enough notice.

2. Communicate across time zones

Your remote team might not include people in different time zone, but given that there are multiple time zones in Europe, the US and Australia, as well as elsewhere, even if you are working solely within one region it’s likely you will have colleagues who are keeping different hours to you.

If the holidays mean your working hours are different, make sure everyone knows this. Check that people are aware of the most appropriate ways to stay in touch. For example, Teams is the best way to get me, even when I’m travelling or otherwise out of the office, because it’s on my phone and I literally can’t escape it!

(That’s not to say you should be working on your time off, but if you are working remotely, make sure you can still be contacted.)

3. Adjust project timelines

You might want to adjust the project schedule to account for reduced productivity during December. I know no one wants to admit to being less productive in December, but if you take out time for school concerts, longer, social lunches, plus the impact of the weather and so on, you might find that productivity dips a little. If you’ve got the flexibility in the plan, consider using it.

4. Maintain team morale

The flip side of a productivity dip is a task surge. I don’t know about you, but the last few years have seen me working even more than usual during the run up to year end as we try to get deliverables completed in year.

So consider what you can do to keep morale high, if work is going to be tough. That might be a team celebration (virtually – there are lots of options you can do remotely including quizzes and games) or other ways to connect when team members are scattered and less available.

5. Ensure project continuity

Most importantly, make sure that there is continuity and that the work continues, even when key team members are out. For example, make sure that your documentation is up to date and that knowledge-sharing has happened to avoid bottlenecks. Use the pre-holiday period to review plans with the team and make sure that everyone knows what they have to do.

Whether you are a remote project manager or working with a remote team, it is possible to navigate the holiday period and keep your projects going. It takes a bit of extra effort, a little more stakeholder engagement and a lot more forward planning, but it pays off to know that you can balance work and life, have a wonder holiday period and also stay on top of your work without burning out.

How do you do it? Share your tips in the comments below!

If you’re role is anything like mine, sometimes being a project manager can be a little bit lonely. We don’t spend much time with other project managers, because our focus is on the team and the people we work with there.

So how do project managers learn from each other? We’re great at learning from project experience: you’ve probably got retrospectives and project lessons learned meetings in the diary for the next quarter. But when do we get to hear what our peers are up to?

Here are some tips for fostering a culture of knowledge sharing in project management teams.

Use your team meetings

If there’s more than one project manager in your department, chances are you have team meetings. Make knowledge sharing a regular agenda item.

Have someone present about their current project. Or have someone share the top lessons learned from within a project. Have someone share about their experience of using a process or making a new connection in a different part of the business.

Use Shu Ha Ri as a way of packaging up your lessons.

Schedule project management coffee chats

Sometimes it’s nice to have chats with your peers. This can work well if you haven’t got many project managers in your direct department, so you can’t invite them to a formal meetings, but there are others doing the same role elsewhere in the business.

Build an informal community of practice. You don’t have to call it that, but you can set up a shared mailing list or have your own ‘directory’ of project managers across the organisation.

Share resources

Model the behaviour you want to see by sharing resources. If you’ve got particularly good feedback on a steering deck or a business case, share it with the team. Invite others to do the same, perhaps start a ‘good documents’ folder on your shared drive so that everyone can upload examples of docs that have worked well for their purpose.

If you don’t have a knowledge repository already, set one up. Establish a central location (e.g., a shared drive, intranet site, or dedicated software) where other project managers can store and access documents, best practices, lessons learned, templates, process flows etc.

Leverage technology

You’ve probably already got collaborative tools like wikis, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Confluence. Set up a channel for knowledge sharing and collaboration to support your community of practice. Make it a place where people can ask each other questions, so you can help each other out in real time.

Reward sharing

If someone is supportive of knowledge sharing, recognise that and thank them. You don’t have to be their line manager to nominate them for an internal recognition award. Drop a note to their manager and say how much you appreciated their input. 

Feedback from conferences

This is something that has worked well for me in the past. If someone has been to a conference or some other kind of professional event, get them to do a short brief to the rest of the team. They can share their key takeaways, talks they enjoyed, thoughts and reflections on the event. It might encourage others to go next time.

If you hear about free webinars or other training opportunities, why not share them round with the people in your community of practice? Afterwards, meet up and discuss your key takeaways. You could even watch the webinar as a group – host a watch party!

How do you foster an environment of knowledge sharing in your team? Let us know in the chat below!

Psychological safety, as I think of it, is the way that you show up at work and how much risk you feel yourself in when expressing your opinions or when choosing a course of action.

If it feels ‘safe’ you’ll speak up when things are wrong, suggest new ideas and call out bad behaviour. If it doesn’t feel safe, you’ll keep your head down.

On a project team, psychological safety is important because you want people to challenge poor ideas or speak up when they see a better way of doing things. And also because we are nice leaders and we want people to be happy at work, without second-guessing what their boss is going to think all the time.

In an environment where psychological safety is present, people feel that it is safe to take risks. They might try a new solution or propose a new way of working. They might come up with an idea and implement it, or opt for a new technology over a proven one because it might be better.

They also feel that it is safe to speak up and express ideas. They’ll speak in meetings, bounce ideas around, build on other people’s ideas and say when they don’t think an idea will work.

The benefits are clear.

You will see better team collaboration. People will be more creative and prepared to innovate. You should end up with better problem-solving and decision-making. And it will feel like a nice place to work surrounded by professional adults.

How do you know if you’ve got psychological safety in the team?

It’s probably easier to look at what the environment looks like if you don’t have psychological safety.

You’ll see:

• Lack of participation in meetings.
• Fear of retribution
• Fear of embarrassment.

People might not say out loud: I was too embarrassed to say what I thought, but you might pick up on it either through one-to-one conversations or body language.

If you want to find out more, you could survey the team or use other feedback methods, but if the environment doesn’t feel like one where you can speak freely, frankly I don’t think you’ll get a lot of good out of those methods. It is probably best to build good relationships with some of the people who exhibit more confidence or who contribute the most and talk to them openly about your worries for the team.

The trouble with projects is that they happen inside the culture of the organisation, so while you might want to create an environment where people feel safe, if the rest of the organisation isn’t backing you up, that can be tricky.

How to create a safer environment

In your leadership role, you can model vulnerability and openness. Share what you’re comfortable sharing. Lead by example. Be consistent in your actions and expectations and demonstrate the behaviours you want to see.

Encourage and reward contributions. Let people know you appreciate their ideas even if you don’t end up using them.

Value diverse perspectives. Ask for them, incorporate them and let people know that their voices are being heard. Again, if they share their perspective and you can’t do anything with it or affect any change, at least pass that back to them.

A lot of what you can do centres on establishing norms for respectful communication. For example, regularly ask for feedback, through anonymous suggestion methods if necessary (and people are wary of Microsoft forms not being truly anonymous). Handle conflict early when you spot it, and look out for those people who are showing signs of being resistant to change and support them.

Schedule some team-building activities, but not awkward cringey ones, things that the team actually will be interested in doing.

Over time, hopefully you’ll see that the feeling in the team has changed. I think it’s a hard thing to measure, but you might see results through employee surveys, perhaps in responses to do with belonging, or feeling understood/appreciated etc.

What’s more evident is that you’ll probably feel it. You can observe the team dynamics and notice what is different. However, you don’t want to lose that and slip back into old ways, so keep psychological safety on the agenda. Ask people how they feel about working in the team now, and what else you could do together to encourage good working practices. Then act on their suggestions.

At the EVA conference in London in March, I had the pleasure of listening to Gary Hill, Co-chair of PsACE, the Public Sector Advisory Community for Estimating. He was talking about the importance of estimating and how the community helps shape the professional estimating done on public sector projects in the UK.

The purpose of the group is to simplify, standardise, systemise and professional project estimating process and capability across the public sector. He shared their vision, which is to bring together experts across government and client organisations to promote leading practice in estimating, underpinned by an ethos of trust and collaboration. I like how he talked about leading practice instead of ‘best practice’ because as we all know, there isn’t one definitive best practice for pretty much anything in project management.

He talked about how the community started in April 2019 when someone reached out to him and asked for help with something. “It started over coffee and turned into a beer,” he joked. The community sets out to address the problem that many project managers have in all aspects of our work: where do you go for advice, how do you know if that advice is any good and who says it’s good anyway?

To find out where good practice was in the public sector the community carried out a benchmark of 7 government departments where they measured good practice. Surprise, surprise, no department was good at everything.

Today, the community is sponsored by IPA, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which Gary said gives the community’s work more weight and more chance of making things stick. They really started to gain traction when they were mentioned in a government select community discussion, and membership started to grow.

It’s a volunteer-led community and Gary shared the common problem that many volunteer-led communities have: everyone wants to get involved because it’s a good idea, but everyone has a day job to do so it’s hard to get people to take on jobs.

Next up on the agenda for PsACE is to write to each permanent secretary in the UK government and ask them to support the community’s work, so that’s a large piece of stakeholder engagement to do.

In terms of what they actually do, Gary explained that PsACE was involved in providing input to the IPA estimating guide, and was represented on the committee preparing British Standard 202002 for Project Controls.

There are current workstreams covering:

• People capability: creating a course on estimating
• Data platform: collating data for benchmarking
• An advisory panel: to provide deep dive reviews of papers and initiatives
• Guidance for Senior Responsible Owners: to help SROs understand estimating
• Group conference: to bring together the community for a conference
• Leading practice: to identify leading practice and launch a maturity assessment.

I found it really interesting to see what a grass roots effort could do, and how powerful it is when experts come together with a common goal of simply wanting to share knowledge and do things better.

Gary shared his vision for the community, and I think it seems hugely realistic given the momentum behind PsACE at the moment. He talked about how the long-term goal is to align policy, data and expertise to encourage informed decision making to achieve more predictable outcomes. That’s something worth striving for, don’t you think?

Do you have a community like this where you work, in your industry? Let us know in the comments!

How much time do you spend doing routine tasks? Just think about how long it takes you to type things like your company name or location details when they get mentioned in an email.

For a long time, Outlook (and I expect other tools) have had autocorrect functions that allow you to type something and have it ‘autocorrect’ to something else. It’s a text expander feature – and you get tools that lay on top of your normal suite of applications that just do text expanding. I even have that function built into my iPad, which is handy when it comes to typing out my email address every time. Now I just type a shortcode and the whole email address populates.

Predictive text takes this one step further by working out what you are going to type before you type it. Predictive apps use passive data, for example, emails, to suggest tasks and updates. Think predictive text when you are trying to type a message on your phone, and scale it up so that the app sends suggestions to your To Do list about what activities you should be working on that day or flags which deliverables are likely to be late because of software defects logged in your testing system.

Many tools are already embedding AI into them to help users have less to do. I was looking at one retrospective meetings management tool the other day and it used AI to automatically name the groupings of sticky notes we created in the meeting, based on the common content of those notes. Clever. It wasn’t always grammatically correct, but it saved us the job of typing a name for each group (although we could edit them if we wanted).

Predictive software sounds like it’s taking the thinking and professional judgement out of being a project manager, but it’s just crunching data for you. For example, you can’t hold information in your head about how accurate each individual team member has been in estimating their workload on this project and the last five projects they have worked on. Predictive software could sift through estimates and actuals, and then flag the three team members with the worst record for getting their estimates right so that you can appropriately challenge them.

This kind of system requires a particular leap of faith as it scours other systems for data. As a community, we’re going to have to go a long way before we are all comfortable with the idea of an app reading our emails and digging through personal files, even if it does predict who isn’t going to hit their deadlines that week.

Whatever collaboration tools you adopt at work, and however you use them, keep in mind that they should be compatible with and reflect what is going on outside the walls of your company. Technology and workplace cultures will continue to evolve and the key is going to be keeping up and staying relevant while making sure your teams have the tools they need to do their jobs productively. That might mean embracing AI and predictive functionalities of tools, even if it feels a teeny bit uncomfortable to do so.

The future is in flatter, more informal working cultures supported by unified organizational collaborative technologies. We might not refer to the tools that way (or even be using the term social and collaborative media) in ten years’ time, but the principles that underpin this revolution in working practices are here to stay.

This article includes a few points that were made in my PMI book: Collaboration Tools for Project Managers. Given what we’ve been going through and seeing so far this year, it felt appropriate to try to pick out some comments on tech for teams and where that might be taking us – because it seems to me that virtual working is here to stay.

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