Voices on Project Management

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMP

Are you passionate about a cause? Do you want to lend a hand? Whether you’re interested in volunteering in the project management community or using your project skills to help a non-profit, you may be unsure where to start.

As a newcomer to the volunteer world myself, I had no idea what questions to ask or what to expect. So, to help other project managers, I’m sharing six of the biggest myths and misconceptions about volunteering I’ve encountered—and the key questions to ask to make the most of your experience. 

Myth #1: Volunteering is easy. 

Volunteering often means learning new skills and delivering projects alongside people you’ve never met before. That’s why building trusting relationships is key to successful engagement in volunteer opportunities—and it’s not as simple as it may sound.

As a volunteer, you’ll likely be entering into an organization with people who have already made connections and collaborated. You’ll have to prove your worth as a member of the team. Depending on the organization and your role, some specific skills are needed. As you pursue volunteer opportunities, take the time to understand the position by asking these questions:

• Will the volunteering be in person? Or is it virtual?
• How many hours per week, on average, does this role require?
• How does the team communicate? How often?
• How is information shared among team members?
• Who will my other teammates be?

Myth #2: Volunteering requires minimal time.

Many organizations run on volunteer work, which sometimes means a lot will be asked of you. You may even end up spending your weekends or evenings working for the organization, even if at the beginning you promised yourself you’d only work a few hours a week. Set boundaries early on to ensure that both you and the organization are getting your needs met. And ask yourself these questions first:

• What are the actual hours and commitment required? Remember, this is volunteer work—not a second unpaid job.
• Does this opportunity fit with your personal, professional and family life? Will it generate unwarranted frustration or stress?
• When will meetings generally take place, on the weekends or weekday evenings?

Myth #3: Commitment is flexible.

Even if it is a volunteer opportunity, you need to commit to deliver or not. Otherwise, your colleagues will be overloaded if you jump ship with short or no notice. For example, I volunteered as a community manager for the LinkedIn group of a local community and when I replaced the former admin, 500 member requests were pending! Not fulfilling your responsibilities as a volunteer damages the association’s reputation and creates added work for other parties involved. Step up or step back!

Myth #4: Communication is simple.

In many work environments, communication isn’t always valued. Volunteering adds another layer of complexity. Volunteers often communicate with teams via emails and instant messenger. Moreover, volunteers don’t always have access to the same team members that full-time staffers enjoy. This can create misunderstandings. Communication—verbal or virtual—must be clear to cut through the static. Ask yourself these questions first:

• What are your preferred means of communication?
• When and how can you be contacted?
• Is there information that you, as a volunteer, will not be privy to?

Myth #5: Only the organization will benefit.

When done well, volunteering should benefit both the organization and the volunteer. Before committing to a role, clarify your goals and how they align with the organization:

• What can you bring to the organization?
• What can you learn?
• Do you want to volunteer for your ego, or to help the organization and its members? Or both?
• What are the values of the organization? Do they align with your values? 
• How does this activity reinforce your professional goals and values, without damaging them?

Myth #6: There’s no way out.

Life can change in an instant. Your motivation also evolves. Moving on is not a mark of shame, provided you plan your exit properly. Therefore, from the outset, you should enquire:

• Is it a flexible position? 
• How long should I engage?
• What is the process to stop?

What are some lessons learned from your own volunteer experiences?

By Lynda Bourne

Calculating a project cost estimate is the easy bit. Having the estimate accepted by either a client or your management—or both—and then delivering your project on budget is far more difficult.

The technical processes involved in developing a realistic and achievable estimate are well-defined in standards and guides such as the Practice Standard for Project Estimating - Second Edition. But, after the development of this cost baseline, every project faces two challenges: The first is dealing with the uncertainty associated with every estimate and developing an adequate (but not excessive) contingency to cover the known uncertainties. The second is having the estimate accepted to allow the project to proceed.

There are three interlinked issues that can lead to non-acceptance of the estimate:

1. Unrealistic expectations about what the cost should be on the part of the person paying, which is usually linked to a lack of trust in the person presenting the estimate.
2. Unwillingness on the part of the person paying to accept the fact that every estimate contains a degree of uncertainty and placing undue emphasis on a “guaranteed” price without any form of contingency.
3. A lack of confidence, skill and/or communication ability on the part of the person/team delivering the estimate.

Over many years, I have found any idiot can produce a winning bid or cut costs in a business case to get the project accepted, and then lose money doing the work. The work of Bent Flyvbjerg, professor of major programme management at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, would suggest that this is almost traditional in the accepted costs for megaprojects. But, under-pricing work to get the project started is hardly ethical, and likely to be career-limiting in the long run.

I’ve also noticed smart clients understand that an unrealistically low bid will cost them dearly in the long term due to diminished quality, excessive claims and/or the cost of dealing with a failed project. Unfortunately, smart clients are in the minority. But if it were your money and project at stake, would you want a client who puts the short-term expediency of a cheap price ahead of achieving value? Starting an under-priced project and attempting to cut costs to meet budget constraints almost always drives down quality and drives up costs over time.

There’s a well-known business quote, often attributed to John Ruskin: "There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money—that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”

The antidote to these challenges is having the skills needed to develop a sound estimate that has a reasonable prospect of allowing the project to be delivered on budget, having the confidence to stand by the estimate and to justify the costs, and, most important of all, having the communication and stakeholder engagement skills needed to sell the estimate to either your client or your manager. 

The factors underpinning your engagement and communication capabilities include:

• Your credibility. The people you are communicating with need to know you are competent, honest and reliable. Their perceptions are vital.
• Your stakeholder assessment skills. Determine who is really important in the decision-making processes and what their real objectives and interests are. This understanding is vital in helping you develop a proposal that can be accepted.
• Your ability to communicate complex information. There is usually a lot more to a project proposal or business case than just the cost. Decision makers need to understand the benefits of the proposal and feel confident you can look after their interests. You must be able to communicate this plan effectively to different audiences.

Each of these elements work together to help you get good project proposals accepted. They also help you help your managers abandon projects that do not add value. If the project does not stack up at the proper price, it should not be funded.

How do you go about selling your good project proposals?

By Conrado Morlan

When it comes to project management, Murphy’s Law often rings true: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So it’s up to project leaders to be ready and willing to pivot at a moment’s notice. And it’s a lesson learned that I’ve taken from a number of projects.

In this post, I’d like to share one example. During the first wave of a regional billing implementation project in the Americas, my team and I were learning the ropes of replacing the local application with a centralized regional application.

The first stop was Central America. This region was the first choice because Costa Rica was centralizing its billing operations for the area. Costa Rica already had a dedicated team to manage the billing functions for each Central American country. But this shift meant configuring and training seven countries in a single location.

The outcome was successful, and my team and I identified areas of opportunity to enhance the implementation process for the next countries in the wave.

The next country to implement the program was Chile. We started gathering customer data, cleansing the data, and configuring the training and production processes.

The audience for the training, which lasted one week, included people from finance, billing and IT. After the training, the participants were able to practice for a week in the training environment, and my team and I addressed any questions they had. The planned go-live date was slated for two weeks after the training and practice.

During the two-week break period in Chile, my team and I went to Ecuador as scheduled to begin implementation activities.

One week before the go-live date, the Chile country manager called me and delivered the news: “All the people in the billing department resigned.” The country manager wanted to throw in the towel and postpone the initiative’s launch date. His first comment was, “I will not be able to hire and get the new hires ready in a week.” I asked him to wait before making any decision and that I wanted to discuss alternatives with my team.

I shared the news with my team and asked them to come up with ideas that would keep the program on schedule or at least minimize the impact caused by an unexpected delay. We reconvened at the end of the day and discussed some potential solutions:

1. Hire and retrain team members. This would postpone the Chile implementation for at least one month.
2. Implement Ecuador and Chile in parallel.
3. Split the implementation team. Half would support Chile’s billing operation while the hiring process takes place, and the other half would support Ecuador’s implementation.
4. Ask Costa Rica to temporarily support Chile’s billing operation.

Option one and two were similar, assuming that the hiring process would be completed and the new hires would be available for the two-week training/practice. This would also double the workload for the in-country implementation team and the support team in Malaysia.

Option three was feasible but would put a heavy burden on the in-country implementation team and would require assurance that Chile would expedite the hiring and training process to release the members of the in-country implementation team.

Option four was a bizarre idea, but this option would cover all the bases, as the team in Costa Rica was already providing remote support for the billing operations.

My team and I decided on option four. I called the billing and finance head in Costa Rica, explained the situation and asked if the proposed idea would be feasible. They responded that they would need to talk with their Chilean counterparts to check to see if their team could take on the extra workload, but, in general, they found the option feasible.

I also shared the news and the alternatives with the regional CFO and CIO, and both agreed to delegate the final decision to me.

After the call between the Costa Rica and Chile counterparts, it was agreed that Costa Rica would temporarily support Chile, and Chile committed to start the hiring process right away.

This situation reminded me of a basketball player handling the ball from one side of the court to the other and encountering opponents along the way: Sometimes the player must stop to check the conditions and pivot to the left or to the right to continue with the play and be able to put the ball into the net.

While facing issues or risks, project management professionals need to be confident making informed decisions quickly and thinking on their feet to keep projects moving forward.

How have you pivoted from unforeseen occurrences to make project progress? Share your story below.

By Cyndee Miller

Climate change … heralded as the greatest and most pressing existential threat to humankind.

Or rather, it was … until COVID-19.

With the world at a virtual standstill, greenhouse gas emissions plummeted, air quality shot up and ecosystems thrived sans intervention. But we all know that these trends are temporary. When the world finally does rein in COVID-19—and it will—the need to control climate change will kick right back into high gear. Old habits die hard. Case in point: As Asian cities emerge from The Great Lockdown, the BBC reports traffic—and accompanying air pollution—are spiking.

At the same time, the world is facing an economic meltdown not seen in modern times. Against the backdrop of the raging coronavirus pandemic, the global economy is projected to shrink by 3.2 percent this year, according to a May report by the UN.  Many leaders will be understandably tempted to put the battle against climate change on the back burner.

That would be a massive mistake. An economic recovery plan led by green projects lets us boldly attack both issues.

As government leaders scramble to revive economies decimated by the virus, research shows that climate-friendly policies could deliver a better result for both economies and the environment. On average, the 231 experts surveyed by a cohort of world-renowned economists saw a “green route” out of the crisis as highly economically effective. Citing evidence suggesting that green projects create more jobs, deliver higher short-term returns per dollar spend and lead to increased long-term cost savings, authors called on leaders to “seize this generational opportunity.”

So are you ready to seize the opportunity and steer the world back from the point of no return? Many of you already are.

Teams from conservation group Forest Carbon, for example, are working to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels through the reforestation and restoration of Indonesia’s peaklands, which have been ravaged by fires and degraded by canal construction. The project centers around “assisted regeneration.” Rather than simply replanting trees, teams are laying the ecological groundwork for the peaklands to restore themselves.

“We want the area to return to its natural wild state rather than coming in and planting a monoculture of species,” says Devan Wardwell, Forest Carbon’s director of growth, on a recent episode of Projectified^™. “That strategy is really based off of the idea that nature can do the work itself if we give it enough time and we create the proper starting conditions.”

Reforestation teams face plenty of risks. But the biggest might be human in nature: “If people aren’t invested, concerned and engaged in the wellbeing of their land, then the trees don’t stand a chance,” says Sebastian Africano, executive director, Trees, Water & People, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, in a special climate change issue of PM Network^®.

The fight against climate change isn’t just taking place in forests, of course. Most people live in cities, and that number is only going to grow, per UN projections. Urban areas were also some of the hardest hit by the coronavirus, forcing a fundamental rethink of how cities are designed, including that staple of city life: public transportation. Some urbanites might be wary of hopping on a packed train or bus, but everyone jumping into their cars is a traffic nightmare—and a huge setback in cutting carbon emissions. So urban planners in Italy, Greece, France and the U.K. are carving out huge swaths of their cities for areas dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists.

Even the country that brought us the famed autobahn is conjuring up an eco-friendly version: The Radbahn is a protected bike path below a portion of Berlin’s elevated metro line. To build buy-in, the team is letting residents go on a test ride.

“The idea is to experiment with the space and give our stakeholders an opportunity to participate in the project and express their views on the outcome,” Radbahn co-founder Perttu Ratilainen tells PM Network.

There’s no escaping discussion of COVID-19 right now—and that’s how it should be. But this needn't be a competition. With the right investments in the right projects led by the right people, we can conquer the coronavirus, rebuild our fragile economy and protect our planet—all at once. How’s that for an efficient project plan?

What are you seeing out there? Can projects simultaneously bring back the economy and protect the earth? Let me know in the comments.

By Marat Oyvetsky, PMP

Global companies often struggle to get international projects across the finish line because they have to mitigate risks or issues that are outside of typical budgeting and resource availability constraints. In many cases, companies must work through issues such as language barriers, cultural differences, varying time zones and international team cohesion. All of these can cause serious delays in successful project completion.

However, when a global pandemic strikes that quarantines a large portion of the planet, new risks are introduced that can completely derail or destroy a company’s international projects.

While the COVID-19 pandemic introduced challenges in completing many international projects on time and on budget, it didn’t completely eradicate the finish line for many international projects.

Here are a few tips to consider when working to successfully complete global projects during a pandemic:

1. Seek out executive sponsorship: Every project has stakeholders who will be the main champions for the project’s successful completion. During a global pandemic, it is even more vital to ensure that there are executive sponsors involved in the project. The crisis has affected global manufacturing, the global supply chain, banking and a horde of other institutions that projects and project teams depend on to complete tasks and reach milestones.

During the pandemic, executive sponsors can provide support and quick approval for additional budgets and emergency funding that can help projects stay afloat and allow the most vital projects to be funded to completion.

2. Adjust hardware lead times and balance international resources: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every business around the globe, from slowing down the supply chain to completely shutting down many factories. This has impacted hardware lead times, from computers to network systems. Instead of measuring shipping in days, companies were finding that lead times for hardware delivery had either been postponed indefinitely or been delayed by weeks or even months.

Reviewing all lead times across every global project, project leaders can work to prioritize projects that are vital to the company as well as those that have workable lead times and can still be completed, even with an extended deadline. Working with executive leadership, project leaders can also prioritize which projects need the most resources globally and help refocus attention to those projects to help drive them to completion.

3. Increase team meeting frequency: When running international projects, many project leaders manage resources in a matrix environment globally. This means that there are resources on the project team that are internal company resources as well as external customer and consulting resources. Communication is vital to ensure that all tasks and milestones are coordinated and completed efficiently within the planned time and budget.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown extreme chaos into project timelines and budgets. Project leaders can communicate more effectively with the global team by planning shorter but more frequent meetings. Increasing the recurrence but decreasing the meeting duration can improve communications between all company resources. Tasks and milestone assignments can be reviewed quickly, assigned or reassigned, as well as updated and forecasted to ensure that the entire team is not only in lockstep daily and weekly, but is also prepared for the extended lead time durations, project timeline baselines and changing budgets.

4. Balance the portfolio: COVID-19 has impacted nearly all global project timelines due to its effect on the global workforce. Project leaders will need to work with executive leadership to identify projects that fit into two categories: projects that are vital to the business and projects that can still be completed, even with increased timelines and dependency lead times. Once these projects are identified, project leaders will need to work with their teams to ensure that resources are balanced appropriately across the portfolio, targeting the most strategic projects with the most realistic completable timelines.

While the pandemic has crippled the global workforce and economy, project leaders are still leading international programs and projects to successful completion with global teams working together through extended timelines, adjusted budgets and augmented requirements.

Share below: What are your lessons learned from leading international project teams during the pandemic?