The Money Files

I’m continuing my deep dive into continuous improvement this month as it’s such an important topic for project managers. There’s this expectation that we will use the retro and lessons learned processes to make improvements, and yet there is rarely the time to fully implement lessons. That’s one of the major challenges, and I want to talk more about challenges in making changes to ways of working today.

Resistance to change

The first challenge is resistance to change. Resistance can come about for lots of reasons, not least because people are worried about the extra workload of having to deliver project management process changes on top of their project execution activity.

Also, humans seem programmed to not like change. Having to learn a new way of working is a pain.

We can address this in the same way as you address change resistance to any of your projects: understanding the concern, clear communication, training and support and demonstrating the benefits. Plus a bit of management ‘this is the new way of working and you will follow the process’ can be useful!

Sustaining momentum

Improvement programmes might start out well, but it’s challenging to keep them going. After all, there are only so many improvements that are simple to make and easy to implement, so you might feel your goal of improving continuously is struggling because people have already suggested the easy wins.

Team members might not engage with it any longer. Keep celebrating success, keep recognising good contributors (without making those who cannot suggest improvements for whatever reason feel bad).

Pace out your changes so there is a small strand of work happening throughout the year instead of a big push and then nothing.

Resource constraints

I’ve mentioned this a lot throughout the series because I really do think it is the hardest thing to overcome. We have to balance improvement activities with project deliverables.  In resource-constrained environments (isn’t that everyone’s project environment?), you may find it challenging to allocate time and resources for improvement initiatives. Management might not see the value.

People doing the work might prefer to focus on their project work, which probably already has to be balanced against their business as usual activity. Now you’re asking them to do even more, and even if they are willing, they have to make prioritisation calls, and frankly, changing processes is probably way down the list.

They might be incentivised on other things. Their personal performance metrics or team objectives and KPIs probably don’t include the new improvement that has only just been thought up. So unless you’re going to work with line managers to write in a percentage of their availability to work on improvements, expect to see some up and down commitment throughout the year. People will do what they can, but creating the space for them to do that is important.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for helping teams find the time to overcome resource constraints for project improvements? Do you build it into their personal objectives or make it part of the expected ways of working for the squad? Let me know in the comments below!

That concludes my deep dive into continuous improvement. It’s an important aspect of project management practice, and it helps us create an environment where we can contribute to the business in more ways than simply project delivery. We can be the driver for change as project managers, and help our teams, and our organisations, deliver more in difficult times.

Over the last few weeks I’ve looked at why continuous improvement matters in project management, how we create the right culture for it and what tools we’ve got available to do it (lots, fortunately).

Now, I want to look at how you can check to see if those improvement opportunities are having the effect you expected. Again, we have project management tools and techniques readily available for this because we have methods for benefits realisation and tracking. And those are the kind of things you can draw on for tracking.

But first, we have to start off with some metrics.

What metrics are you going to use?

All benefits tracking relies on having something to track against, so when you are planning your improvement initiatives, it’s important to think about what you are going to use to track. How will you know if the change has been successful?

In reality, some of the changes are going to be small and you wouldn’t track them. For example, I removed a section of a template that was no longer relevant – I’m not going to set up tracking to establish whether or not that was worth it. It was worth it. If in the future we decide we want it back in (we won’t), we can add it back in.

But there are other changes where it is worth measuring the impact, especially if you have to justify the change in some way. For example, if you need investment to make the change (like a change to your software tool or to pull chargeable resource off a chargeable project to do an internal change) then you’ll want to track.

You could look for:

Process efficiency metrics: Track changes in key process metrics, such as time to completion, resource usage, and cost savings. Ideally, you would want to see a reduction in time or cost per task. So you have to have ways to track that today, and not be implementing anything else at the same time that would also affect the metric.

Quality improvements: Measure the improvement in project deliverables, such as defect rates or rework levels. You’re looking for a decrease in errors or bugs. For example, if you’ve implemented improvements to software testing or pair programming.

Team engagement: If you have employee satisfaction surveys you could use those results. Or you could look at team retention rates, or the number of improvement suggestions submitted by team members as an indicator of engagement with the continuous improvement process. However, a lot of factors influence engagement, so it’s hard to say with confidence that it’s the changes that have been made that have had a significant (or any) impact on engagement and morale. Also, the impact diminishes over time. While people might start out thinking the change is amazing, over time it just becomes ‘the way we do things around here’ and people start to take it for granted.

Assessing the impact

You’ll need to find a way to track performance before and after. Alternatively, consider benchmarking against other organisations. I’d only suggest doing this if you already have access to the information. When we’ve run a benchmarking exercise, it’s been expensive and I’m not sure it gave us the level of detail that would help with project management continuous improvement. So I personally wouldn’t be recommending that we invest in benchmarking unless it was for something bigger, like an assessment of PMO maturity against industry competitors.

Anyway, I digress.

Qualitative measures

It’s also OK to go for qualitative measures like stakeholder feedback. Ask if they think your improvements have made a difference.

However, it also might be positive if they haven’t noticed a difference. That means your change has gone in so smoothly that it is transparent to stakeholders, and that might be a good thing!

Be sure to ask the team as well. Continuous feedback loops are useful, and basically that just means talking to people about how the change has impacted them and listening to their feedback.

I’m enjoying writing about continuous improvement, and next time I’m going to cover some of the challenges that you might face while trying to make project management process improvements, with perhaps a few tips on how to overcome those. See you then!

I’ve been looking at continuous improvement in project management this month, covering why it matters and ideas for building a culture where continuous improvement is the norm. Now I’m going to turn to look at what you have available to help, in terms of tools and techniques.

Luckily for us in project management, we have a range of tools available already that you are using across the rest of your project delivery work, and we can put those to use.

Tools for collecting feedback

First off, you have to make sure that you can collect the improvement ideas. We talked a bit about that in my last article (suggestion boxes) and there’s a lot more you can do – with techniques you will already be familiar with.

Surveys and questionnaires

We use Microsoft Forms for sending out lessons learned surveys and you could set up a form (on any platform) to gather feedback at various points in the project or simply have one on your team intranet page for people to suggest improvements when they think of them.

The trouble with ‘fill it in when you want’ forms is that you have to keep constantly reminding people it is there, so when they do have an idea they go to the form instinctively.

Retros

You’re probably (hopefully) already using retrospectives and lessons learned. Add in questions, if you don’t already have them, for the group to reflect on how project management processes could be changed to deliver better results.

Team meetings

Add an agenda point to your regular team meetings where you talk about what’s been improved, what improvements are being worked on and ask for suggestions. It doesn’t have to be every week, but once a quarter or something like that would work well as a reminder for the team.

Techniques for learning

Once you’ve got some ideas, you’ll want to dig into them and see if they stand up to scrutiny – and whether they are worth the effort to change. Luckily, again as project professionals, we have a range of techniques already in our toolboxes that help us do exactly that.

Root cause analysis

Use root cause analysis techniques (like the ‘5 Whys’) to identify the underlying causes of issues. Then you can focus in on what is genuinely going to address the problem.

Lessons learned databases

You’ve got a repository of lessons learned from each project, right? Take a look through that at the types of projects that have struggled in this area and what has already been done to resolve the problem. That should help prevent you from wasting time on solutions that have already been shown not to work.

Peer reviews and feedback

You’ve got experienced people on the team. They’ve come from different corporate backgrounds and industries, so make use of their knowledge and find out what has worked in their previous roles.

Project management tools

Don’t forget that we also have access to project management tools. Collaboration tools can help people communicate and work together to sort out issues. Planning and scheduling can be done for your improvements, using the tools you already have. Use your knowledge management systems to capture, store and share the ideas, improvements and lessons, so that everyone can benefit from any information created.

With all the resources available to us, it should be easy to make improvements to ways of working. So let’s say you’ve made the improvements, and you want to track how things are going and whether your improvements are having the impact you expected. That’s what I’ll be talking about next time.

It’s very easy to talk about continuous improvement, but if you’re anything like me, it’s a lot harder to build the actions into the workflows and processes you use to ensure that the improvement actually happens.

OK, perhaps that is an exaggeration. There are some simple activities that, once you realise, are easy to change and within your sphere of influence. Those are the improvements we can make simply and with minimal effort, and that everyone appreciates.

But the world of work is increasingly more complex, more VUCA, more intertwined, and changing one thing has an impact on other things. We’re not talking about updating a document template to add a new section, but rewriting workflows within project management tools, or changing how benefits are owned, tracked and reported on across the company. Those types of continuous improvements warrant projects of their own. Projects that often we don’t have the time put aside to deliver on.

Continuous improvement in project teams

What do we actually mean by continuous improvement? In my experience, when people talk about it in a project management environment, they mean the ongoing effort to enhance processes, increase efficiency, and drive better results. Whatever that takes. Like I said, it could be small tweaks or organisation-wide transformation of how projects are run in the business. And frankly, that makes it kind of hard for the average project team to effect any major change.

Still, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. So, if you want to create an environment where people have the opportunity to raise their voices when they see things that can be improved, here are some suggestions.

Set the right example

If we want to foster the right culture, people have to believe they are already in a culture where their suggestions will be listened to. So we want to demonstrate:

Leadership commitment: That’s leading by example, speaking up and suggesting improvements, pointing out where things could be better and encouraging others to do the same whenever we hear them mention a good idea.

Communication: Unsurprisingly, communication needs to be taken seriously and you need to create the time for it. If everything is rushed, they won’t feel that they can share feedback and lessons learned (outside of structured conversations or retros). Create feedback loops or ask about improvement ideas in regular check ins.

Recognise the wins: Celebrate improvements and suggestions, even if they don’t turn out to be implementable – you’re recognising the fact that an idea was brought to the group. Hopefully this will encourage others to do the same and to feel that their ideas are valued.

Make it easy to suggest improvements

People need to feel empowered to suggest improvements and to act on them. Granted, most organisations don’t have dedicated ‘innovation’ time or slack in the calendar where people can work on their own projects. But you can remove the barriers to making suggestions.

Let people work their own way: Encourage ownership on the project and let people run their area of the project the way they feel best. If they find ways to improve or change the process, let them.

Suggestion schemes: In the olden days we used to have a box at work for suggestions. These days there are forms online where we can submit ideas. If you think people would be more open to suggesting ideas anonymously, make sure these systems are in place.

Incentivise innovation: In my very first corporate job we had a scheme where we sent in suggestions and got cards back. If you matched the cards to make a picture, you got a prize. Or something like that. It was a long time ago, but there was an incentive scheme for pointing things out. What could you do that’s similar?

Build in creativity training

Building problem-solving and creativity skills is a… skill. And we can train people on skills. Find some time for training on problem solving techniques, process improvement methods, creative thinking and so on. The Six Sigma training I did in my early career was so influential in how I approach problems today. But let’s just say I’m not naturally someone who would whip out a control chart.

Something else that’s easy to do and within your control is cross-skilling team members. Cross-functional learning and an appreciation of what other people do in their job helps people see the project from different perspectives and find improvement opportunities that way.

This is an interesting topic for me and I think there’s more we can cover, so next time I’ll look at tools and techniques for continuous improvement. Watch this space!

I’ve been looking at my professional development goals for the year and while I’m not quite ready to put them out there for everyone to see, one of things I am reflecting on is continuous improvement in project management and what that means for me and my teams.

If you’ve been around project management for any length of time you will have come across continuous improvement as a concept.

For me, it means an ongoing process where teams evaluate their performance, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes that lead to better project outcomes. Sounds simple, right? The challenge I have is that even if we have the headspace to come up with the improvement ideas, we rarely have the time or the authority to make the changes.

So, what can we do? First, focus on what we can change. It’s about creating a mindset of constant reflection, learning, and evolving. And second, encourage the team to focus in on the ‘why’ of continuous improvement so the ideas we are coming up with are small enough to implement in the time and boundaries we have.

So why does it matter?

Beyond the obvious (we’re all trying to do more with less, because somehow the appetite to deliver change is just as big if not bigger than it always was, but with less staff), here are some formal reasons we are reflecting on:

Efficiency gains: How can we deliver projects more efficiently, reduce waste, and optimise resources? While working within the processes we have.

Mitigate risk: What have we learned from past projects that helps us identify and act on risks on future projects?

Collaborate: Generally, the conversations about improvements help teams build relationships and work together effectively. Any time spent together helps us understand more about how colleagues work and what ways of working are the most effective.

And what are we looking for?

Project professionals should be looking for ways to:

Deliver change incrementally: What are the small, iterative changes we can put in place that won’t overwhelm the team and that feel we are taking steps towards more effective ways of working? If it’s a big (potential) improvement, how can you break it down and make it into smaller steps so it can be phased in over time.

OK, if you have the time and capacity to do the change all in one go, and are confident that it’s the right thing, by all means go for it. But if you feel like doing things at a slower pace would be beneficial – and I think that’s the right approach – then go at that pace.

Empower people to take ownership: How do we encourage individuals to take responsibility for identifying and implementing changes? And the big challenge here for me is making sure that I have the time available to do the implementing!

Use data to make decisions: Let’s not dive in and make changes without having a real understanding of what that would affect. For example, in one project a good few years ago, a process was changed but it impacted teams downstream. Without an understanding of what that team did, I think we inadvertently made their lives harder until we did a proper process mapping exercise to understand how work flowed through the organisation.

You could also use data points from your project management software, feedback or databases and statistics, dashboards or reporting. Just don’t guess at what would be an improvement.

That’s the what and the why. Next time, I’ll look at how you can start building a culture of continuous improvement in project teams because it’s important to have some practical strategies as well. See you then!