Voices on Project Management

by Christian Bisson

For far too long, I've seen new teams being set up with barely any time allowed to actually enable their success. There are many aspects of creating a new team that people forget or underestimate, and it can create short-term and long-term problems.

With all of the different topics the team should cover at the beginning, an effective setup could easily take two or three full days.

Here are several aspects that should be included:

Meet & Greet

If there’s one thing I've seen being left aside because "it takes time we don't have," it is allowing the people who will work together to actually get a chance to get acquainted with each other. This is an important aspect as it helps to build trust among team members, and trust is the foundation of any efficient team. Trust will not be built overnight, but planning a team-building activity to allow people to share about themselves will at least give it an initial boost.

The team-building activity can take many forms. Regardless of what is chosen, it should be something anyone would be willing to jump into. Some people will be shy at the beginning and not everyone will feel very open, so make it something accessible. 

Identify a Framework

Another important aspect is to identify the framework the team will be using. Is it scrum, Kanban, waterfall? Typically, this is already decided. Assuming everyone is an expert in the framework, the team just "jumps" in it. It's important to plan time for training on the topic, and a decent training could easily take a full day or more.

Let's use scrum as an example. Training should include an overview of the framework and other aspects like the roles within a scrum team, backlog management (ex. writing user stories, how to properly split them, etc.), how context switching can affect productivity, etc.

Discuss Ways of Working 

Along with the framework, there are other aspects that the team members need to agree on. These will vary depending of the framework and the team's circumstances, but here are a few examples:

• Team agreements: The team should agree on day-to-day aspects of how they will work. For example: What time are the scrum ceremonies? What's the decision-making process? What tools will be used? What are the communication channels? What standards dictate how to work (ex. coding standards)? 
• Definition of ready: This is a definition agreed upon by the whole team on what is required for an item in the backlog to be considered "ready" to start working on it. For example, it would need a properly formatted summary, acceptance criteria, etc.
• Definition of done: Another important definition the team should agree on is what is considered "done" for a backlog item. For example: test coverage, approved by someone, code review was done, etc.

Agreeing on these can easily take a few hours depending on the size of the team and the maturity of good practices.

Knowledge Mapping

Clearly identifying each team member’s skills is likely the most forgotten aspect of setting up a team that I've seen so far, and yet it's crucial to:

• Identify missing competencies
• Identify the gap between team members
• Track team development
• Identify missing resources

Once this is mapped, it's easier to plan accordingly on how knowledge will be gained. For example, if a technical skill is only known by one expert among the team, it could be planned for that person to train the others. It might be knowledge about the system the team will be working on that will require ramping up. You might also notice that some expertise is completely missing from the team and needs to be acquired from a source outside the team.

Having the team discuss what skills are required, having them map out their strengths and weaknesses, and then discussing next steps is not in itself very time consuming, yet many teams skip that part and thus risk hitting roadblocks along the way.

Conclusion

I've written a few examples of what should be part of a team setup agenda. You can see that for it to be an efficient setup, the team will need time—which will pay off immediately. So "just do it!" 

How are you setting up your teams? What topics are necessary? 

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By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

A few years ago (when virtual meetings were less common for most people), I often presented myself by phone, explaining how I liked to communicate on a project (I admitted that sometimes, I send too many emails!)—but I didn't get into many more details about myself.

Lately, I’ve begun to work with a lot of new people. Serendipitously, I read a blog that covered the importance of writing a guide that helps convey how you want people to work with you. Thanks to my volunteer activities as a PMI UAE social media contributor, I've developed graphic design skills: I decided to create a one-page display with some information about myself and send it to 10 trusting colleagues and friends as an experiment.

I asked them three questions:

• What do you think about it?
• Does it help you to work with me?
• Would you (still) like to work with me?

I don’t pretend to be an organizational psychologist, but it elicited some good, surprising responses and enthusiastic thoughts that I’d like to share with you (with humility).

1. Why create a visual self-portrait?

Self-introductions are not easy to make when you begin to work with new colleagues. We often mention diplomas, certifications, years of experience and our former activities. But how can we use that information to forge a successful path for collaboration on a project?

Visuals transcend hierarchical and geographic boundaries and are easily adaptable to different communication channels; some people like text, others visuals and colors. I came up with a concise graphic about myself.

“It is too Yasmina-centric,” one colleague told me. “I’d like to have more advice to work with you.” Added another: “I can understand you beyond just being a colleague.”

It’s not about being egoistic or narcissistic; it’s about carving out some time to reflect about yourself beyond tasks, deadlines and emails to elevate your self-awareness. You can keep your feet on the ground by triggering conversations around the visual. Of course, you must have good self-awareness of yourself in the workplace. If I had done this kind of exercise at the beginning of my career, I would have been less precise and honest. Thanks to leadership practice and training, I’ve learnt a lot about myself.

With the ongoing pandemic, remote and global work is expanding, this provides a good opportunity to rethink how we introduce ourselves in a more empathetic way to ease future collaboration and avoid some misunderstandings. Beyond a project role, you can share personal things that are important to you and forge deeper bonds with your colleagues.

2. When to use it

One colleague told me he would use it as an icebreaker when a new project member comes on board, but you can use it at any time during the project. You’ll have to update it, because you’ll change with work and life experiences. Every human interaction we have helps us know ourselves better, so you’ll discover more about yourself by reviewing it regularly.

By sending it to some colleagues, I got insightful feedback. (One colleague I worked with for a long time discovered that I preferred working in the morning.)

3. How to use it

As an individual…

"When you share negative things about yourself, it seems like you have accepted them and you expect people to work around them," shared another close friend (who does not work in project management).

It takes courage to write down some of these things, but talking about my “bad” traits (like tending to interrupt people) doesn’t excuse me from them; I shall improve that through self-management and learning to be more patient. But it can avoid unintentional misunderstanding.

It is up to you to keep it as a personal compass for your own awareness, or to share it publicly.

As a team…

You must talk to the team about the benefits of this kind of visual, along with the categories you can choose to display (without putting too many constraints on it), how often the teams will review them, customize them, etc.

It is crucial to highlight that this is not a static view that pigeonholes you into some boxes. This visual has meaning only with added oral explanations and in specific contexts (like how to foster better teamwork and collaboration).

What I haven’t displayed is the level of adjustments: Being more productive in the morning doesn't mean I'm sleeping in the afternoon. Lile many of you, I'm flexible and adapt to the circumstances—but it is still important that I know when I'm more productive to organize the workload accordingly if I can.

Working as a project manager in a multicultural environment, I know that misunderstandings can happen quickly, suddenly and for minor things. If you make the effort to clarify things from the outset, you’ll be rewarded! By being authentic and transparent, you’ll infuse an honest mindset into the team.

How do you get to get to know each other in your project team? Share your comments below.

by Dave Wakeman

As we head into the homestretch of 2021, we are still being heavily impacted by the pandemic—and it seems like a society that is restructuring (or realigning) itself due to challenges and issues that the pandemic uncovered.

Reading this morning’s paper highlighted this to me. It got me thinking about the types of skills that a PM is going to need to highlight (or build) to ensure that they are on top of the ever-changing world we are living in.

Here are my top three:

1. Communication: I feel like any good list on what makes a good PM should always contain improving your communication skills, but in this regard the communication skills we need to improve are a bit more broad than normal.

In a general sense, we always want to remember that your communications need to be clear, concise and easy to understand. But as we expand here, we need to make certain that we have the ability to communicate with folks clearly in different cultures. This might mean recognizing how different phrases translate or different customs come across.

The key to being a successful communicator in a changing world is that you need to focus on the receiver of the communication—with an emphasis placed on things that might make your communications fall flat. Because even when you share a common language, the gulf in understanding can be significant.

2. Negotiation: We hear a lot about different issues that are being exposed around the world right now, like supply chain backups, staff shortages and demand issues. The list goes on and can contain hundreds of variations on each issue, but the key idea here is that even if you are dealing with a challenge, a good PM has to find ways to resolve issues. This comes down to negotiation. And what is negotiation but solution seeking at its finest?!

To be an effective negotiator in a changing world, you need to focus on your communications to begin with (like I mentioned above, communications seem to be the gateway for effective project leadership). But you also need to recognize how to frame ideas, challenges and solutions to give people win/win opportunities. You also need to be able to see different routes to success.

Probably the most important skill is to not look at negotiation as a winner-takes-all situation. Because in most instances, it’s going to be about accommodation and not capitulation.

3. Recruitment: I’ve written here over the years about how great a PM I think Alabama football coach Nick Saban is. One of his best skills is his ability to recruit talent to Tuscaloosa. Talent wins.

To be a successful PM in our new environments of change and uncertainty, you are going to need to focus on recruiting folks to your team to be successful as well.

Recruiting in this context doesn’t mean getting people to sign up as your “ride or die,” though it may require that at certain times. Instead, recruitment is likely a lot more flexible as you need people to dedicate a few hours to a challenge you are dealing with, sign off on a new piece of your project, or commit the resources necessary to help you keep your project moving forward.

As I write this out, I start thinking about how we recently discussed project management being a sales job. Then, I look at my list and realize that the key way that PMs are going to work forward now is through selling: their ideas, their partnership and their resources.

Maybe instead of a big change, the more things change the more they stay the same? Let me know what you think in the comments

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

Project management skills are transferable skills you can use in any domain or environment.

All of us have heard this, but I didn’t believe it until I realized the power of PM skills in two situations. The first one was in a software project I managed many years ago. More recently, I leveraged my project management practice in a new technical environment.

Based on my lessons learned, here are five main ingredients I’d like to share with you in terms of establishing your credibility in a new environment

1. Accept your limits
I don't have a developer background. When I was appointed, the team was skeptical. From the outset, I set the expectations: I said right away that I didn’t know much about software development. Talking openly about our limits is the cornerstone to forge trust among stakeholders.

2. Stay in your lane
The developers were experts. One of the sponsors tried to compete with them, asking tricky questions, challenging what they were saying. The developers interpreted it as a lack of trust—which it was, partly. He plummeted their engagement.

It's not about foregoing a general understanding of what experts are doing. It's about knowing where to put the bar. The time you will spend learning will translate to less time wasted down the line.

3. Connect and reflect
Take time to get to know the people you’ll work with—and remember what they told you. Taking a genuine interest in your team members will translate into stronger teamwork and better outcomes.

More importantly, think about creating spaces in your clogged calendar to self-reflect. What objectives would you like to achieve in the three coming months? It will help you to not go astray.

When you arrive in a new environment, you are also overwhelmed by names, faces, documents and information. I write down the information I get (including personal ones) to jog my memory when I need to.

4. Observe, ask and take notes
When I revamped the delivery process in the new technical environment, I interviewed experts to understand the current state. I listened, I misunderstood, I asked again —that's critical for understanding where the most important things lie.

In my former position, I trained newcomers. I was a reference on the team. In this new environment, I felt like a fresh graduate student with more ego. Thoughts of failure crawled in. It was not easy to accept. In hindsight, it was an incredible lesson in humility to push me to shift my mindset from “knowing it all” to learning.

5. Communicate
Before being project manager, I contributed to different projects. In one of them, I hardly saw the project manager—and I didn't understand how she managed it.

Drawing on this lesson learned, when I took over the project role on the software team, I explained how I worked, the way I communicated, what I knew (and didn’t know) and the frontiers of my role.

In both cases, I set up different communication threads:

• A general email, like a newsletter every two weeks (a long email list with all stakeholders, including some top managers)
• Dedicated project emails
• Ad hoc conference calls (if needed)
• Instant messaging groups

These also provided places where I could reward some team players for their contributions.

In the beginning, people didn't see the value of these communications; I was accused of sending too many emails. But in the long run, it has held. It fostered team spirit.

What are the ingredients of your recipe to thrive in a new environment? Share your comments below.

by Dave Wakeman

I recently realized something that I never really thought about before (at least, I don’t remember thinking about before): Project managers share a lot of the same needs and requirements with salespeople.

Crazy, right?

Many of you are probably scratching your head, thinking, “Dave has really lost his mind now.” You might be right, but let me try and explain. Here are some things we have in common with salespeople…

1. Driving awareness: One of the key jobs of a PM is to make sure that the stakeholders and key assets of a project know what is going on and are committed to helping the project reach its goal.

That’s really just another way of saying “drive awareness.” Which is really one of the key things that salespeople do: They find targets in the market and they create attention and need through elevating awareness.

For project managers, a similar process happens when you look at the people that have an impact or influence on your project’s success or failure. You have to figure out who these people are and let them know that your project is moving forward—and what impact it is likely to have on folks over time (if you are successful).

That’s a lot like a salesperson. 

2. Expressing value: I’m a trained marketer. That means that I don’t believe in commodities. Which is good for project managers, because every project a PM undertakes should have some sort of unique value that is going to also add value to the team, stakeholders and environment that the project exists in.

As a PM, you also likely find yourself struggling to get people to buy in on the value your project creates at all times.

Why? People have different priorities. People may have different beliefs about the value of a project. Or, people just don’t want to invest in certain things.

We could go on here, but the key is that as a PM, you have to mitigate the risk to your project of people not knowing the value of what you are doing. How? By expressing the value of what you are working on.

There are two types of value to express: tangible value and intangible value. Tangible things are easily measured (like time saved, money saved or money earned); intangibles are much more difficult to measure, but they can have a big impact (like less stress, less time wasted or time saved). You make these values clear by expressing them in a manner that shows how your project directly leads to the benefits.

Again, y’all are selling!

3. Gaining commitment to action: This is the ultimate sales job. Without action, nothing happens.

In any leadership role, you end up only being successful through the efforts of others. In sales, the same idea holds. This is why the focus on commitment to action is so important.  You have to get people to commit to taking action or no change will take place.

What does action look like? A process started. A job completed. A purchase made.

As a PM, these jobs look exactly like the job of a salesperson, because you both are relying on the efforts of others to help you achieve success.

Now I may be wrong, but when laid out like this, PMs and salespeople look much more alike than we usually think they do in a lot of cases.

Or I’ve lost my mind.  (You tell me in the comments below!)