Viewing Posts by Siti Hajar Abdul Hamid
"Requirements" for Managing Your Project and Team
| Editor's note: The title of this post was changed on 9 December 2011. Do you make time to identify your requirements for managing a project? Sure, you plan and manage the project, but as a program or project manager do you also identify your needs for running the project and the team? It's important to know what we require of our team and stakeholders. When these needs are clearly identified and communicated, it's easier to track and manage the related project tasks and variables. For example, I recommend that you require your stakeholders to attend meetings and give input during the change management process. You'll need the decision makers to assist you in evaluating the need for change. When you set and express this participation as a requirement, your stakeholders understand your requirements and their own importance. Further, when a change is requested during the project, it doesn't come as a surprise that you expect stakeholders to be involved in the process. When it comes to your project team, maybe you require team members to be on time for meetings and to submit progress updates. Communicating this as a need and setting the expectation helps ensure that team members give timely feedback when needed. When team members meet this particular need, you're able to meet your own deadlines with the customer. Setting and communicating project management requirements are nothing new. For the most part, these needs are automatically expected from everyone involved in the project. But failure to pen down and communicate each need usually leads to more project challenges. For example, team members may start to argue, finger-point or shake off their responsibilities. There's also the possibility of missing a milestone -- and that's something to avoid. Take time as the project manager to set your requirements for running the project. And do so as a high priority. What requirements do you establish for managing a project? Do you communicate these to the project team and stakeholders? |
Timeboxed Meetings Foster Efficiency
| Official project meetings normally take up so much time that most see it as time wasted. How do you ensure you're getting or delivering information that you want without wasting time? How do you train your team members to be more efficient in sharing information you need? There is one technique in agile scrum that I particularly like and have found very useful. I'm pretty sure this technique has been around for a long time, only now they have a special name for it: the timeboxed meeting. Timeboxing is typically used when a project schedule is divided into separate time periods -- each period has its own schedule, deliverables and budget. When you apply timeboxing to a meeting, each team member answers three questions:
In reality, having team members summarize their last 24 hours into three minutes is challenging. Without focus, and practice, they will undoubtedly fall into the trap of over-elaborating and, worse, finger pointing. In the beginning, you might want to try five minutes per person, but reduce the number of participants. This means you will have more than one session of timeboxed meetings. As your team gets more comfortable, start reducing the time and adding team members per session. Remember, the idea is to hold these meetings daily with the objective of sharing updated information quickly. As an added benefit, you're indirectly coaching your team members to be more focused and efficient. As project managers, we have to determine whether a technique is counterproductive. If the idea of having a daily update meeting seems too taxing, try holding them every other day. If you feel that getting team members together at one time is difficult, improvise and ask them to send text messages or email instead. Have you used timeboxed meeting techniques? What methods do you use to increase the reporting efficiency within your project team? |
Coaching Through Process Improvements
| Being involved in process improvements can feel similar to being audited -- not pleasant. So how do you make the period of process improvements more manageable for your team members, especially when they are project managers themselves? When creating process improvement initiatives, look at it as an opportunity to motivate your team members. Morale is likely low and improvements should be made. Hand-hold your team members during the process. Instead of sitting in front of them like an interviewer would, sit next to them -- be a peer. This will help them see that you're making things better, not making their lives messier. For example, I'm currently spearheading a process improvement initiative where the objective is to improve the current project management techniques for project implementation. Before I even started this project, I was told that I'd face some adversity. But I have a plan. I want to make the initiative as painless as possible, so I plan to turn the investigative process into a learning process -- both for my team members and myself. I will take on a student's point of view, rather than as the instructor, because I'm learning, too. I'll also try to be more open. I want my team to share their plights and success stories with me. I'd like to construct a scenario in which my team members learn new things from their experiences, seeing the areas that can be improved or approached differently for themselves. It is a common saying: Things will get worse before they get better. Managing team members during process improvement period is like that. They will dislike you before they like you. Adversity is to be expected, but as the saying goes, impossible odds make achievements more satisfying. What do you think a project manager should do to garner cooperation from team members during a process improvement initiative? How do you turn process improvement initiatives into a learning process? How do you manage team member resistance to change or idea makeovers? |
Delegate to Project Team Members and Coach Them to Succeed
Categories:
Education
Categories: Education
| Project managers have notoriously full schedules. As difficult as it can be sometimes, delegating is a must. While more than 80 percent of our time is spent communicating, the other aspects of the job are crammed into the remaining 20 percent. If we focus too heavily on individual tasks, we will crash into our myriad deadlines. This is where delegating becomes essential to leading successful projects. Personally, I would rather do everything myself than ask another team member to do things for me. But this attitude can lead to significant catastrophes:
First, tell team members the information that you need and give them a deadline. Prepare a template to make it easier for them and to ensure you get all the necessary information. For good measure, I might remind them of what I need from them 24 hours before the deadline. Delegation has a few benefits. First, you'll make your deadlines because you'll get the right information from the right sources, on time. Secondly, team members are exposed to structured work and reporting methods, and will see the significance of the work they contribute to the project. Finally, you'll increase trust within the team because of greater responsibilities, which can enhance self-worth for team members. What is your take on delegating? What tasks have you delegated to your team members? What positive impacts do you see from delegating tasks to your team members? |
Grooming the Apprentice Project Manager
| How many of your project team members aspire to become project managers? Do you see promise in some of them for this role? How can you impart some of your knowledge and skills to help them be successful? There are elements of project management in everything that we do. It's your responsibility as the team leader or project manager to point this out to your team members and guide them to see the connections. A programmer might manage her time and communication, while also helping to develop a module, for example. A junior analyst may manage budget and scope while discussing the change request with the client. Show your team members how the tasks they are performing are also project management practices. This way, team members can appreciate that the work that they are doing is impacting the project as a whole. If team morale is often low, perhaps members don't see the significance of their work. You can help change their perspective by coaching them to view their contributions differently. Not all of your team members will appreciate your efforts. Some of them will feel that it's an interruption of their productive time or that you're meddling in the actual work being done. But by showing the team members how their tasks relate to project management, they will see that project management is present in everything that we do. And who knows? That skeptical team member could become your organization's next high performing project manager -- thanks to you. What do you think? Are project team members already performing some tasks of a project manager? How do you coach your team members to become good project managers? |
