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Voices on Project Management
by Cameron McGaughy,
Lynda Bourne, Kevin Korterud, Conrado Morlan, Peter Tarhanidis, Mario Trentim, Jen Skrabak, David Wakeman, Wanda Curlee, Christian Bisson, Ramiro Rodrigues, Soma Bhattacharya, Emily Luijbregts, Sree Rao, Yasmina Khelifi, Marat Oyvetsky, Lenka Pincot, Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres, cyndee miller
Voices on Project Management offers insights, tips, advice and personal stories from project managers in different regions and industries. The goal is to get you thinking, and spark a discussion. So, if you read something that you agree with--or even disagree with--leave a comment.
View Posts By:
Cameron McGaughy
Lynda Bourne
Kevin Korterud
Conrado Morlan
Peter Tarhanidis
Mario Trentim
Jen Skrabak
David Wakeman
Wanda Curlee
Christian Bisson
Ramiro Rodrigues
Soma Bhattacharya
Emily Luijbregts
Sree Rao
Yasmina Khelifi
Marat Oyvetsky
Lenka Pincot
Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres
cyndee miller
Past Contributors:
Rex Holmlin
Vivek Prakash
Dan Goldfischer
Linda Agyapong
Jim De Piante
Siti Hajar Abdul Hamid
Bernadine Douglas
Michael Hatfield
Deanna Landers
Kelley Hunsberger
Taralyn Frasqueri-Molina
Alfonso Bucero Torres
Marian Haus
Shobhna Raghupathy
Peter Taylor
Joanna Newman
Saira Karim
Jess Tayel
Lung-Hung Chou
Rebecca Braglio
Roberto Toledo
Geoff Mattie
Recent Posts
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The Technical Program Manager: How to Stay Relevant in 2025
5 Things Your Operational Plan Should Do
5 New Project Guardrails for Adaptive Leaders
The Leader's Voice: Respect It, Protect It, and Use It Properly!
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| "To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation." -- François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
Interpersonal skills are crucial to project management. There's a lot of literature about them, even a section dedicated to them in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)--Fifth Edition. Still, some of us think it is too much work to improve on an interpersonal level.
I believe that good interpersonal skills can transform you into a "WOW!" project manager, as U.S. business management writer Tom Peters would say.
In my view, one of the most challenging interpersonal skills to develop is communication. And communication is equal parts listening and speaking. However, I would say it's twice as important to be a good listener than a good speaker. Greek philosopher Epictetus said: "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak."
Being an active listener is not easy. I think it is more art than skill, so I often encourage my colleagues to review and use this checklist every time they have an important meeting with stakeholders and team members. It includes five elements; if you try to work on one at a time, you will end up becoming an active listener:
- Be 100 percent attentive to what your speaker is saying.
- Let the speaker know that you are listening: establish eye contact and nod often.
- Be open to what he or she has to tell you and encourage honest communication, no matter what.
- Avoid making judgments about what you are hearing. Try to be empathetic about what is being said and wait until the conversation is concluded before responding. When something is not clear, try to rephrase it to make sure that you understood correctly, prefacing it with: "What I am hearing is that..."
- Provide feedback appropriately. If you feel upset or annoyed in any way, then call for a pause. The worst thing you can do is to continue a conversation that is making you feel uncomfortable, because inevitably, you'll stop listening and the speaker will stop talking.
That's what I try to put in practice to be better at my listening skills, although I recognize it is very difficult and usually this takes a lot of conscious effort and self-discipline.
Do you have more tips to add to this checklist on how to become an active listener? |
In past posts, I covered five steps for setting up a schedule planning framework and seven basic tips for building a project schedule.
In this final installment of this series, I'll discuss 10 common pitfalls of building a schedule on any project:
- The silo approach: Avoid developing the schedule in "silo" mode -- that is, without input from key stakeholders or subject-matter experts that can validate and confirm the schedule's content.
- Inappropriate tasks decomposition: When decomposing work in tasks, avoid an overly detailed decomposition or under detailed decomposition. In my experience, each task should not be shorter than two days and not longer than two reporting periods (typically two weeks). A task of this length is generally explicit, focused, actionable, assignable and traceable.
- Too many milestones: Limit milestones to significant project events or decisions -- for example, the project start, completion of major deliverables or phases and the project's end.
- Overly ambitious schedule: Everyone wants to please the customer, but an aggressive schedule can have the opposite effect if unrealistic deadlines are continually missed. Instead, aim to exceed expectations by delivering the project in a realistic timeframe, with solid execution. If you inherit an overly ambitious schedule, you could "fast-track" (i.e., make work parallel) or "crash" the schedule by assigning more resources to reduce task duration.
- Loops: A project schedule is not a flowchart, and time cannot flow in reverse. Therefore, loops, a circular task dependency, are not possible or validated by most project management scheduling software. Do not confuse loops with iterations. Iterations of tasks --such as design, implement and deploy -- are allowed on a project schedule.
- Danglers: These are the dependency links between tasks. Only one task will have no predecessor (the project start task) and only one will have no successor (the project end task). All the other tasks should have a successor and predecessor.
- Confusing tasks efforts with schedule time: Don't just ask team members: "When can you complete this task?" Instead, ask for the estimated effort to complete the task in labor hours or days. Then, transform the effort into work periods (the work days the team member can carry out the task) and map this to the project calendar (considering business days, holidays and vacation periods).
- Allocating schedule buffer instead of effort buffer: Don't allocate buffers to a certain schedule time. Task estimation is a three-step process: effort, duration and required calendar time. Allocate buffers primarily on a task's effort and not on the overall required calendar time.
- Depending on overall buffers: Avoid relying on sweeping buffers, like the classic "20 percent." When assigning buffers, consider the project-specific risks (for example, unfamiliar technologies), the experience of the project team and non-project related factors, such as resources allocated to parallel projects or team members' involvement in non-project activities.
- Wrong tasks on the critical path: Project management tasks, effort estimation tasks and other schedule planning activities should not be located on the critical path. They have nothing to do with the actual project work tasks.
How do you overcome these pitfalls, and what other schedule planning difficulties have you faced?
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Posted
by
Marian Haus
on: July 12, 2013 09:53 AM
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Permalink |
Comments (6)
| We've all seen the signs a project is about to blow up — a schedule goes awry, a budget exceeds its tolerance threshold. To prevent this, consider taking a few measures:
- Secure executive support for major issues. Initial project documentation, such as a project charter and communications plan, will classify your project sponsors and champions, their roles and responsibilities, and escalation procedures. Rely on that, but also position yourself for frequent project status meetings with executives.
- Keep communications with sponsors and key stakeholders at a level that allows you to reach out to them when you may need them.
- Be aware of your project environment at all times. Regularly review project plans against where you are and what's planned to come. It will help minimize the risk of an issue arising when you least expect it — a resource pushed to the point of no return, for example.
- Look for lessons learned. Review the project history for potential concerns you may want to monitor and document in your risk log. Meet with other project managers in and outside of your organization to learn about pitfalls they may have encountered and how they handled them.
Prevention requires preparation, listening and awareness. As you interact with your team, your sponsors and other project managers, be sure to listen and look for pain points that warrant investigation.
In my next post, I'll talk about recovery steps when facing a troubled project. For now, please share what you do to prevent troubled projects. |
Posted
by
Bernadine Douglas
on: July 09, 2013 04:49 PM
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Permalink |
Comments (2)
| Many project managers feel they need to be the expert who has every answer to every question to maintain their authority. They think it's a sign of weakness to ask for help or admit they don't know something.
The fact is that if you don't know something and waste time and energy trying to find the answer yourself — or worse, make an expensive mistake based on false knowledge — no one benefits, least of all you. Once your bluff has been exposed, your credibility is destroyed, and with it, your ability to lead effectively.
Strangely, most people seem happy to offer help when someone asks for it, but are too embarrassed to ask for help themselves. But strong leaders, managers and team members overcome this "shyness" and take the time to clearly understand what they don't know. Then, they seek aid to build their knowledge.
The key is asking the "right questions" — this makes you a better leader and also shows your team that it's okay for them to ask for help. Everyone wins by asking for assistance when needed. The energy wasted on struggling to solve the problem can be used for positive purposes.
The power of "not knowing" will also open up two-way communication within the team and generate all sorts of efficiencies. Here are a couple of examples on how to put the power of not knowing to work:
- Delegating. Some tasks are simply better delegated to an expert who knows how to do the job well and quickly. I'm sure everyone could learn to use pivot tables in Excel. But is it worth several hours of struggle when a knowledgeable expert — even if it's the most junior team member — can solve the issue in a few minutes?
- Engaging team members. Ask a team member to talk you through a challenge he or she is working on. You'll get the lowdown on the task at hand, and good insights into how he or she works.
By encouraging your team to ask questions, it reduces errors, frees up communication and enhances the information flow in a positive way. It seems obvious, but it won't happen without a push in the right direction.
Things you can do as a leader to be open to not knowing are: - Stop talking to yourself and decide that you are going to talk to someone else.
- Decide who that will be.
- Craft the conversation. Write down what you are going to ask them and how you hope they will respond.
- Schedule a meeting with the person and promise yourself you'll ask him or her for help and be open to his or her suggestions.
- Tell someone else of your intentions; someone who will hold you accountable for having the meeting and asking for help.
It really is okay to know what you don't know and seek help. The skill is asking effective questions that get the right answers, and then having the knowledge on how to use the resulting information.
How do you turn a lack of knowledge as a barrier to success into a catalyst for positive outcomes? |
Posted
by
Lynda Bourne
on: June 25, 2013 10:52 AM
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Comments (0)
| Who said managing projects would be a bed of roses? You have probably experienced the same hardships I have on a few projects, especially if you manage multicultural distributed teams.
Well, the global project I was leading was no exception. We had hit some bumps in the road, but finally found ourselves in an in-person project status meeting in a major city in the United States where the organization was headquartered.
Brought together were distributed team members from the United States, Latin America and Germany. In the meeting, we all agreed we were in the same boat, but there were still many disagreements and moments of finger pointing. By the end of the day, with no positive outcome in sight, we were tired, frustrated and hungry. The last thing we wanted to do was to see each other that evening, but we still decided to have dinner together for lack of other plans.
A large circular table held our party of 10. While we read the menus, the server asked us what we would like to drink, and that's when the magic started.
The server said: "I hear different accents. Are you pilots?" To which I responded no, and then jokingly added: "We are Facebook friends from different parts of the world and decided to pick a place to have dinner and meet in person." My colleagues heard the joke and followed along.
Then, the server asked us where we came from and about our interests. She became our group moderator. Every time she came to the table, she asked questions, which we answered according to our different cultures and life experiences.
We realized we shared many things in common -- and little by little, we became acquaintances on a personal level. This dinner that almost everyone was trying to avoid helped us connect.
The next day at the office, even though we were facing the same project hardships, our attitudes had changed. We worked together to define an action plan to bring the project back on track. We also agreed to stay on site for the next two weeks to implement the plan.
And during our free time, we kept bonding by participating in shared interests. For example, those who were runners ran together in the morning, while others who were auto-racing fans visited a go-kart track near our hotel. At night, the wine lovers taught us about vintages over dinner.
How do you foster bonds with distributed multicultural teams? What team-building exercise has yielded good results?
Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post.
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Posted
by
Conrado Morlan
on: June 21, 2013 09:58 AM
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Permalink |
Comments (1)
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"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else."
- Erma Bombeck
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