What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know
| My CEO always told me that to be a good project manager, you must be an entrepreneur. I took that seriously and started my own part-time business. And I discovered that to be a good entrepreneur requires a lot of project management experience. For instance, project management skills help me efficiently manage and track my resources. I don't spend more than one or two hours a day on my business, but I have clear visibility about the inventory, orders and payments. the salespeople input their data in a custom-made Excel tool and I get a daily summary report. I also rely on my project management skills for handling vendors and suppliers. They do not over-commit, but rather rely on a well-defined scope of work and regular follow-ups for tracking. As a result, the vendors feel more pressure because if there's a delay, they know I will notice and get in touch with their superiors. Even a small business requires project management skills and if the entrepreneur is a Project Management Professional (PMP)® he or she will rock the market. Have you started your own business? Please share your experience. |
Acknowledgment Isn't Just for Teams
| I always have plenty to say about acknowledgment, but in this post, I'm going to let you draw your own conclusions from portions of a letter I received from W. Pond, PMP. During my session on acknowledgment at the PMI® Global Congress 2009--North America, Mr. Pond says he found his mind turning to his first mentor, Tom: "The two of us met in the hospital; patients with similar diagnoses. Tom would complete treatments two weeks prior to me. As a result he would prepare me for what to expect and the lessons he learned to make things more bearable for myself. [We stayed connected during our recovery] and found ourselves taking many walks together and when one or both of us was too tired we would sit [and talk in] front of the fire. Tom later offered me a position with his [telecommunications company]. He [taught] me more about business, management, operations and ethics than any university. I have been in so much debt to him and my personal appreciation was given in a conversation where only a verbal thank you was provided. During the session, as suggested, I drafted a letter of acknowledgment to my mentor: Dear Tom: Death comes to all of us faster than we all expect, as we both know. You and I have been through more than we would like. I wanted to thank you for all that you have done for me. You sacrificed so much even in your time of need. You embraced and assisted me despite your own family and financial responsibilities. I need you to know that all of my professional and personal successes can be attributed to your influence. Memories of our walks and conversations by the fire about life and the meaning of being a man will always be treasured. You were twice my age and my best friend. Thank you for listening and providing comfort even in your own pain and anxiety. Thank you for hiring me and giving me the chance to find my own niche. This has been so long in coming. I apologize for not sharing my utmost appreciation years ago. Now, as I hold my wife, I recognize the things she loves in me were given to me by you. You have given so much of yourself without asking for anything in return. For these things, I wanted to thank you. For these reasons, I love you. It took a while to find Tom. We had a phone conversation discussing our lives since the hospital. I sent my letter acknowledging his role in my life. Since that time I have felt a closeness to Tom once again. Sending this out has provided me a clear conscience and a renewed friendship. While I continue in my role as a project manager, husband and father, I hope to acknowledge those in my life in a timely manner. If you're wondering whether or not to acknowledge someone, take it from me, do it. Do it now, today." Thank you Mr. Pond for being a demonstration of the living, breathing power of acknowledgment. You moved everyone in our session deeply with your story--leaving many of us in tears. You cannot begin to know how far the ripples of your story will be felt and acted upon. |
Making Vision Real
| This is a guest post from Roger Chou, PgMP, of the Institute of Taiwan Project Management Leaders have vision. They put forth a dream and direction that other people want to share and follow. This "leadership vision" goes beyond a mission statement. It permeates the workplace and is manifested in the actions, beliefs, values and goals of the organization's leaders. It's also known as "charismatic leadership." A recent and famous example of leadership vision was shown by U.S. President Barack Obama in his election campaign. By offering a dream of a fairer society, he was able to mobilize people to work on his campaign without payment. The campaign was of a door-to-door nature, obtaining 13 million e-mail addresses in the process. From this, more than one billion e-mails were then sent, and in return 4 million people made donations--generating a record US$500 million, with an average donation of US$85. Why did people respond to this campaign so enthusiastically? Obama's campaign promised new possibilities; people were persuaded by this prospect of positive change for the better to help him achieve change. Therefore, for them, responding to and working for Barack Obama meant working for themselves. In helping him realize his dream, they were realizing their own dreams. What they gained was far more valuable than a day's pay. At the Institute of Taiwan Project Management, the organization I run, we rely on four key ideas to create and achieve vision leadership: 1. Continually evaluate the business environment and propose a vision. 2. Express this vision through persuasion and encouragement. 3. Gain the trust of those you want to share your vision and engage them in this vision. 4. Lead others in fulfilling this vision. With this shared zeal, we were able to quickly mobilize 300 volunteer project managers for a flood-relief operation after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in August. Together, we prepared a work breakdown structure (WBS) that helped the relief operation. Since then, the WBS has been sent to the President's Office, the Executive Yuan, the Post-Flood Reconstruction Committee, the Domestic Affairs Bureau, the Major Construction Association, the Taiwan Red Cross and other charity organizations. I believe leadership vision will continue to allow our Taiwan PM Institute to thrive. How has your organization benefited from leadership vision? |
Flawed Reasons for Avoiding Project Management, Part 2
| In my previous post I addressed two common, but profoundly flawed, reasons team members offer up to avoid implementing the systems to sustain project management capability. Here are reasons three through one: Objection 3: "If the cost and schedule performance reports indicate a negative variance, upper management will go on the attack, even if the reports are wrong." I'm sure this happens. What makes this objection so astonishing disingenuous, though, is that it's obviously an indictment against upper management, not the information system itself. Once a project has been baselined, the primary value of the work breakdown structure (WBS) is that it enables variance to be traced to their root causes. This analysis, known as "drilling down" through the WBS, quickly reveals if the variance is indicative of a genuine problem or simply a data anomaly. It it's a real problem, then is it not appropriate for management to get involved? And, if you're getting beat up over non-problems, then the cost/schedule system is still doing you a favor: It's telling you that you need to get another boss. Objection 2: "If the cost and schedule performance reports indicate a positive variance, upper management will want budget/money back." In addition to the problems with this objection addressed in No. 3, this push-back tactic is often indicative of a padded baseline. When creating the budget, some control account managers will inflate line items as a hedge against project risk. If all goes as planned for, say, the first half of the project, any earned value system worthy of the name will identify padded baselines and the extent to which they are overstated. The correct approach, of course, is to produce as honest a cost baseline as possible and then perform a risk analysis for identifying an appropriate contingency fund. But for those who don't want to go through the trouble of doing it right, the cost/schedule performance system represents quite the check against this particular cheat. Objection 1: "We don't need earned value or critical path to provide us with cost or schedule information because we're using (fill in the name of another system here)." As I discuss in my book, Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong [PMI, 2008], one of the most effective but non-legitimate tactics is to employ rival systems. The quick reason behind this is that there is no project cost control without earned value, and it's next to impossible to control a schedule without critical pat, and anyone who asserts to the contrary is either insufficiently skills or attempting to deceive. Most of the time, it's not lack of skills in play. Feel free to offer your comments, and have a fantastic New Year! |
The Other Side of the Argument
| As I said in my last post, customers' perceptions are their reality--and if you're going to make the sale, you need to deal with their reality not yours. This poses a number of challenges for technically oriented people (i.e., project managers) focused on "the facts." The first challenge is recognizing that if you want someone to take on your ideas and work to help you, you have to get them to accept your ideas. This is a sales process. Even the terms we use to describe the transfer of the ideas are sales-based. You have to "sell the idea" to get "buy-in." The second challenge is recognizing perceptions are highly unlikely to change quickly. You can deal with this in one of two ways: - - arriving late for appointments. You can differentiate your business by guaranteeing a time, offering a US$10 discount for every 5 minutes you're late and proposing to quote a fixed price before starting work. This solution is partly differentiation and partly working within the reality of the perception by offering a benefit (the discount) if the perception holds true. The difficulty with managing perceptions is that most people don't advertise their views openly. The only way to unearth another person's perceptions is through a combination of observation, active listening and careful questioning -- in that order. This takes time and effort and needs to be focused on the stakeholders who matter. At the PMI Asia Pacific Congress in February I will deliver a paper called, "Beyond Reporting--The Communication Strategy" that builds on this idea. I will discuss more on this idea in upcoming posts. |
