Voices on Project Management

By Ramiro Rodrigues       

Among consultancies it’s common to reward project teams for good results with financial incentives.  

The question is: Does this practice lead to better results? There’s a clear difference in position depending on which side the respondents are on. The dilemma is easy to understand.

When you’re in the position to be rewarded for the results achieved, it’s natural to see the positive side of this approach. But when you are responsible for delivering the bonus, some doubt will naturally exist. After all, what guarantees that this strategy will lead to projects with better results (regarding time, cost or quality)?

Many feel these rewards act as great incentives for project teams, thus leading to better performance. But one should also consider the concerns of those who fear that, in the name of this search for metrics, some values—such as professional ethics, transparency and lawfulness—may be compromised.

To find out if the bonus strategy should be implemented at your organization, have a look at the following four steps:

Step 1: Evaluate your organization's values.

More aggressive companies that encourage internal competition tend to favor this strategy. Knowing your organizational environment well will help you determine whether to adopt the financial incentive strategy or not.

Step 2: Define quality metrics.

Interpreting success only by the results related to project time or costs may lead to short-sightedness regarding customer satisfaction. Therefore, develop templates for satisfaction surveys that can help measure the quality of the delivered product and the opinion of the customer who receives the final result.

Step 3: Encourage mutual collaboration.

Dividing the bonus between specific members or projects creates a great risk of dissatisfaction among those who have been excluded. Thus, sharing the bonus between all team members, depending on the results of the overall project portfolio of the organization, is an interesting idea to consider.

Step 4: Start slowly and measure results.

Treat the implementation of this assessment as a project and aim to progress gradually, so that you can evaluate any impacts of this strategy on the culture and value perception of your company.

Good luck and much success!

By Peter Tarhanidis, MBA, Ph.D. 

In project management, your presence as a leader is vital to your success. But how do you begin to refine this skill set? Start by considering what kind of presence you convey, and how that presence impacts your influence with teams.

Underlying a leader’s presence are sets of behaviors and actions directed toward team members in various situations. A leader must distinguish between the two prevailing behavioral approaches. In the task approach, leaders accomplish their goals by setting structures, organizing work, and defining roles and responsibilities. The relationship approach, on the other hand, employs behaviors to help teams feel at ease within a variety of situations.

In other words: Is the leader driven to treat team members as valued individuals and attend to their needs, or do they see team members as a means to achieving a goal? This approach will affect a leader and their team’s performance.

Project managers are constantly combining these two approaches to influence teams and attain a goal. Clearly, there are certain behaviors that emerge in one’s presence which increase one’s influence over teams. Examples include humility, honesty, confidence, composure and emotional intelligence. But the truth is, influencing teams takes a great deal of time and energy. There is only a certain amount of time and energy one dedicates in every moment. For many project managers this creates a challenge: What can a leader do to be present in every moment?

The opportunity does exist for leaders to train themselves to be present. By applying a certain regimen of actions, a leader can apply a thoughtful approach to increasing their presence. Dedicating yourself to increasing your energy and presence will result in positively influencing teams. Below is a list of four actions to help unleash one’s performance through increased energy, focus and presence:

1. Define your purpose to engage your passion and goals. Write down an easy and memorable statement that you can use as your personal branding message.
2. Identify the key relationships that require your energy and balance their needs.
3. Stay physically and emotionally healthy, which will increase your energy levels.
4. Take time daily to meditate to recognize your feelings and the consequences of the decisions you need to make to attain your goals.

Let me know how you unleash your performance. Please share your top behavior picks, why they define your presence, and how you successfully increased your influence with teams!

As a project manager, there’s perhaps nothing better than starting a new project. With it comes a fresh start and the promise of a successful conclusion. To me, it’s akin to starting a new year in school with new notebooks, where nothing has been written to spoil the fresh sheets of paper.

However, as we become more experienced as project managers, we’re called on more and more to assume control of a project already in motion. This might be triggered by a happy event, such as a promotion for the existing project manager, or a less-than-happy situation, such as a lack of progress on the project.

Assuming responsibility for a project that has already launched is a lot different than starting from the beginning. You won’t have the benefit of starting with a clean sheet of paper, and there will be things you need to do—and undo.

Here are three tips I always follow when assuming control of an existing project:

1. Assume Nothing    

When starting a new project, you have the opportunity to perform mobilization and initiation activities to effectively set the project on a path to success. In addition, there are some early checkpoints where you can perform structured control actions to further assure the proper trajectory of the project.  

While the existing project status reports can show the assumed disposition of a project, they may not reveal essential missing activities needed for project success. For example, an existing project might not have had the benefit of a thorough mobilization and initiation effort to properly set its course. In addition, there may be hidden or under-mitigated risks, emerging issues, stakeholder challenges and hidden dependencies that have not yet come to light. 

When taking over an existing project, the first thing I do is review it in the same way I would a new project. Introducing a pause in project activities to perform a “soft reset” allows both confirmation of assumptions and validation of project progress.

In addition, this activity can reveal unseen factors that put the current project position in doubt. This is a good time to reforecast the remaining work. By assuming nothing about the project, the “soft reset” serves as a basis to properly transition the project towards success.

2. Match the Team to the Realistic Remaining Work  

One of the most important facets of a soft reset is reforecasting the amount of remaining work. Use the existing forecast as a foundation for considering other factors that may influence the future progress of the project. These may include effort, scheduling conflicts (e.g., year-end holidays), upcoming business process changes and technology-readiness dependencies. 

From the reforecast, compare these factors against the capacity and capabilities of the existing project team. Review whether you have the requisite skills and team members available for each phase of the project. In addition, consider the availability of key resources who cannot be readily substituted in case they are not able to work on the project. This examination of project resources by phase should include not only individual team members, but also team leads and third-party suppliers.

3. Engage More Frequently With the Most Accountable Stakeholder

While there are many inorganic components of a project, such as deliverables and status reports, often the most critical components revolve around the organic nature of people. Having strong executive sponsorship, a structured governance engagement model and open communication all enable project success.

When you are introduced as the new project manager on an existing effort, some change management work will need to be done to ensure a smooth transition.

Given the myriad stakeholders involved in a project, who should you start with? The typical consideration is to start with the most senior leadership stakeholder, who is typically also the project sponsor.

I think, however, a better place to start is with the most accountable stakeholder. This would be the person who after the project is implemented would manage the new solution to achieve the project objectives. In addition, this person would likely have the greatest knowledge of requirements and implementation considerations, which would be valuable to your soft reset.

Set Your Team Up for Success
When airline pilots transfer control of an aircraft to another pilot, they go through a structured process. Before control is transferred, the flying pilot does a check of instruments, course and speed. The pilot currently flying and the pilot taking over the controls exchange a distinct exchange of commands to ensure a precise transition and a safe flight.  

Assuming control of an existing project should have that same level of attention to detail and precision. Now that you are leading this existing project, be sure to consider the factors shared above that confidently allow you to say, “I have the controls.”

When assuming existing projects, what sort of activities do you perform as part of a transition? I’d welcome other thoughts to help make us all better project managers.

Make it or break it!

In the world of Business Transformation (BT), project management plays a critical part in the successful delivery of the business transformation programs to an extend where I can say it is a “Make it or Break it”

And why is that?

Imagine a school music play and the effort required to coordinate everything to get it done successfully. Of course, there is a lot of planning, coordination and execution that goes into it to produce a high quality school play

Now imagine an orchestra and the effort required to get this done successfully. In essence and to the inexperienced eye, the tasks may be similar but the effort and complexity are just a different ball game altogether

This is the same thing when it comes to managing a non-BT project and a BT project. The main tasks of initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and closing may look the same on the surface but underneath the skeleton,  is a different level of complexity

Having said that, BT project management requires a different calibre of project managers to help get the beast out of the door while achieving business outcomes

To be on the same page, let’s define what business transformation is. Business transformation is a significant change that an organization goes through impacting its people, process and/or technology. The change is usually a complex one with long term business outcomes to be achieved   

Project management becomes the core part of delivering the business transformation and ensure that business outcomes are achieved. The calibre of the BT project manager is therefore a lot more complex and at a higher level of maturity. Below are the key characteristics for a successful business transformation project manager  

Exceptional Business Acumen

• Ability to lose the jargon and speak to the business in their own language
• Come from a place of wanting to understand what the business wants and needs
• Makes no assumptions about what success looks like but instead co-create with it with the business
• Understands the business vision and direction and how to best position the project to fulfil the business outcomes
• Keep everyone accountable to achieving measurable business outcomes  

Visionary and can see beyond the short term goals

• Able to mentally fast forward the current events to predict issues and resolve them early on
• Proactively seek guidance and collaboration to ensure alignment
• Understand the art of the unspoken word and the goal behind the goal
• Able to manoeuvre and venture into the political landscape of the organization and foster relationship building

Can see different angles and prospective

• Understand the business interdependencies, people impact and technology constraints
• Able to see the logic in the various stakeholder groups’ points of view and make sense of them all to come to a well-rounded conclusion
• Understand the different motives of the various levels in the organization i.e. executives, management and front liners

Diversified skill set

• Having a diverse skill set is key in the success of BT project management. This allows the project manager to properly articulate what is required and most importantly see the missing links
• Able to work better with the project team members coming from a land of similar experiences (not necessarily at the same level of depth)

Knows and understands failure

• A project manager who have seen this, done that would have a higher level of exposure to different setups and problems which enriches their ability to problem solving
• Have seen the good, the bad and the ugly means they can smell failure from a mile away and able to take action to set proper direction to avoid it or have the proper contingencies in place

Knows the job and acts beyond it

• In the world of BT, project managers hardly have a job description to follow. For hiring purposes, yes they might have one but when doing the doing and working day-in day-out; they work on ensuring that the BT project is delivered successfully. This will take them beyond the scope of works to understand the wider environment of the project and resolve problems and issues that may “technically” be out of the project scope “the agreed baseline scope”
• BT project manager does not say “Sorry, this is not my job!”

by Christian Bisson, PMP

Story points, while an essential component of agile, are often misintrepeted.
And that’s a problem, as story points are are a vital unit of measure to help
estimate user stories. And stories, in turn, help teams plan their next sprint.
When they’re misinterpreted, story points lose their effectiveness, and they
can even hurt teams because of how they are used.

For the sake of my examples below, I assume teams use the Fibonacci sequence.
Let’s run through a few common misconceptions:

1. It’s about the complexity.

Some teams will mistakenly focus only on the complexity of the user story,
as measured by the required level of training it takes to complete a given
task. If a task is simple but time-consuming, they will assign it a “1.”
This is misguided because in addition to complexity, story points also take
into account effort and risks.

It’s important to factor in all three of these aspects of user stories to make a
proper estimate.

2. It’s about the business value.

Simply put: no.
When prioritizing their backlogs or even deciding to move forward with a
user story, it’s important for product owners to understand that story points
have nothing to do with business value.

A “13” could bring no value while being costly, and a “1” could be a golden
opportunity (a.k.a. a “quick win”).

Some Product Owners assign a “Business Value” to user stories (for example: A, B, C), although not mandatory, it can be used along with story points to help make key
decisions about priorities.

3. One point is one day of work.

Story points are not days, nor hours—they are a separate unit of measure. If
using “days” to estimate user stories works well for your team, then by all
means keep going, but call them days as opposed to story points to avoid
confusion.

4. Story points can be used to compare teams.

This one is a dangerous trap, especially if used by someone who can
influence people below him or her. It’s important to understand that story
points are relative to each person. Even within a team, it can be a challenge
to align initially until they have a few user stories to compare with.

A “5” can mean something different for Team A than for Team B, so
comparing each team’s velocity gives absolutely no value whatsoever. In
fact, it can mislead you into thinking one team is more efficient than
another, which in turn might result in unjustified negative feedback or
pressure to “have high velocity.”

In Summary

Story points are a tool, and like all tools, they’re only as good as how we use
them. If we fall into common trap, using our story points to plan our sprints
will lead us to disaster. It’s important that every member of the team
understands the concept, and that you also take the time to educate anyone
outside the team who has influence over your work, such as upper
management or customers.

Do you know of any other misconceptions around story points?