Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Viewing Posts by Bernadine Douglas
How Talent Mapping Can Shore Up Your Project’s Future
| By Bernadine Douglas Every team member brings a unique skill set to a project. It’s easy enough for observant project managers to take note of individuals’ varying backgrounds and skills. What’s harder is using different team member talents strategically to aid a project when the going gets tough. Here are a few tips for practitioners looking to maximize their team’s talents to keep a project on track. The How. The first step is to get to know your team members. On many fast-paced projects, it may not be easy to find time to have general conversations with people. But if small time slots arise, be sure to take advantage of them. The payoff could be quick: Even during a casual conversation, a team member may share an insight for getting a task done in an innovative way or information about a skill you didn’t realize he or she had. The What. It’s important to map your team’s skills while keeping potential resource shortages in mind. You want to make sure that one aspect of the project can continue if the point person for that area on your team becomes unavailable. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify a backup on the team with the right skills to step in if necessary. If that proves impossible, you may have to get approval from another project manager in the organization to bring in someone from another project to meet a tight deadline. (This has happened to me.) The When. Don’t be afraid of being flexible. In a budget-constrained situation, I have had to quickly train a team member on a skill so a project could continue. The key is finding a team member with the availability and willingness to learn on the fly. Have you mapped your team’s varied skill sets? Have you thought about whom you’d turn to if a highly valuable team member were suddenly unavailable? I’d love to hear your project contingency plans. |
The Network Diagram Mentality
| You want your projects to get off to a good start and end without major glitches. However, what typically happens is that projects begin with many unknowns and continue to progress with more unknowns. Not only that, projects hit many bumps along the way — and you are constantly addressing problems, attempting to resolve issues and rallying to minimize risks. Faced with this, I recommend approaching projects with a “project network diagram” mentality. (A network diagram is a planning tool that shows sequences of tasks, dependencies on tasks and impacts on a project.) Here are tips on using a network diagram mentality for managing project schedules: 1. Count backward. There are tasks that inevitably depend on each other and have specific time frames. For example, it might take 10 days for one task to be done and 15 days for dependent tasks to be complete. So right away, you know you already need 25 days for that project. So these start-to-finish and other connecting relationships matter when building a schedule, as do float, slack and critical path times. These are all time factors you consider when doing backward counting. The technique of counting backward helps define the schedule because you focus better so as not to miss a number or a task. 2. Look in other directions. A horse can see in one direction with one eye and in the other direction with the other eye. A project manager needs to do the same and constantly be aware of the surroundings. A network diagram offers this peripheral vision by encompassing all the aspects that matter to the project — and helps you set boundaries. A view in one direction can focus on what’s happening in the project. The other direction could be the bigger picture of your project. Let the boundary be what could potentially surface from either of those directions. For example, say your company has a portfolio of projects it has to complete. So at the same time you’re keeping an eye on the spending on your project, you also want to be aware of whether the company will be able to maintain your resources over the length of the project, especially in an economy in which layoffs happen all the time. If your company has to release some of your resources, what then would be your contingency plan to still make sure your project can be completed? 3. Keep the end in mind. Have an idea of the goal the project should achieve. Encourage team members to maintain a layout of their tasks in a way that identifies and prioritizes what must be done and can be done to reach that goal. Then, inspire your team to approach all tasks with confidence. In a network diagram, after having laid possible connections together, the project manager sets controls in place, giving him or her the capability for more optimal opportunities of project success. Manage your time and your project team’s time based on making it to the finish line. What method do you use to help you prepare for and better manage project schedules? |
To Have and To Hold
| In one of my previous posts, I suggested ways to maintain documentation. And as you know, documentation is very important -- it's the essence of knowledge transfer. The beauty of documentation is that it allows us to avoid the pains of reinventing a series of events that may only reside in a person's mind as a singular experience. It can also lead us to extract some aspect that may move our project from uncertainty and unknowns to more useful information. So, once we have taken the precautions I mentioned in my previous post for generating clear and valid documentation, the question becomes: What project documentation should we always have and hold on to? I would suggest, at a minimum, the following: The charter. It is the closest disclosure to everything the project should touch on. It includes a high-level look at the project: resource list, budget, timeline, assumptions, constraints, risks, other areas of impact and dependencies, a brief description and an immediate focus. Budget background and expenditures. This information typically details the budget spending and directs you to possible future support, if any can be used again. Sources. These include contacts and stakeholders; where information is stored; direct lines of contact; contacts who would be next in the succession; who and where to reach out to in case of additional needs; and where information stemmed from, and how it should be categorized and even prioritized. A status report of risks and issues in their most recent form. These items show the progress that has or has not been made and is especially helpful in communicating to a new project manager (or yourself, if returning to a project) where to pick up. This status report can even help determine the project's resource needs. Scope. This tells you what should have been the focus of the project. It also helps determine whether there needed to be an extension to this scope or if something different should be embarked upon, such as a total new project or maybe a revamping of the current scope. Are there any types of documentation you find significant to have during a project and to hold on to after a project closes? |
Great Time Management Is in the Details
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| Bringing together all the aspects of a project -- including stakeholders, team members, software tools and project requirements -- is just the beginning. Once we gather all the pieces of the project, we cannot sit back and relax. Properly controlling a project hinges on using time management skills to see it through to the end. And those skills consist of these three types of actions: Reactive. There will always be an aspect of the project that needs to be tended to: risks and issues that may need near turnaround resolutions or disparate interests of team members and stakeholders that need addressing. But it's how we've set the stage for our project that will help us steer the project to the finish line, so allot some time to plan for issues to come up. Always be aware of how your surroundings and other resources may affect your project and how they can be of value at another point. For example, when your project is heading into a critical situation and you have no resources that can help, have a contact at the ready who may be able to get an immediate resolution. Co-active. This element entails taking collective action toward correcting an off-schedule project. While we set out to have a process for every action, somewhere along the line, the schedule starts slipping or team members aren't reporting bottlenecks or bad news in a timely fashion. In these instances, reset the tone of your project control. My technique is to keep the scope constantly visible, usually by making sure the agenda has it displayed. However, I didn't do this on a project years ago. The developers were making ongoing enhancements to the software, ones that would be very useful at a future point. Yet they were very off-scope. The co-active measure was to pull back on the enhancements and redefine the scope to get it to what the sponsor originally requested. I did so by meeting with the sponsor and development team manager and reviewing requirements from the standpoint of:
Proactive. But what if a project has components that are not fully defined yet? This is a situation in which we're not reacting to the existing project or controlling project issues, but instead considering the future: possible risks, another project's potential impact or information a stakeholder may want. Here I would recommend actively anticipating what may be helpful that has not yet been discussed. And this consideration can be addressed perhaps as an earned value chart, a report outlining project enhancements for future work or something as simple as organizing a meeting with sponsors to ensure there are no new impacts on the rise. Are there any aspects to managing your time in a project that you see as helping to bring the project to a smooth close? |
Getting Documentation Right
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| Documentation is an important aspect of a project manager's job. We document to keep us aware of status on projects. We use it to stabilize spending and keep a paper trail of events and circumstances. So, what should you capture and how should it be maintained? Here are a few tips to make sure you're capturing usable documentation.
Now that you know how to maintain documentation, we'll review which documents should be retained in my next post. What are your must-have tips for documentation on projects? |