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Integrating Project Communications into Lessons Learned
| Lessons learned sessions typically focus on project deliverables and budget. But I'd recommend adding project communications to the agenda of elements to review. Take a hard look at the communications plan and how well it worked. This process should include evaluating the stakeholders listed, the way the tool was manipulated throughout the project life cycle, or even the categories listed on the communications plan, such as audience, frequency and deliverables. Then discuss other communications documents — status reports, issues lists and risk registers — and how to make them more worthwhile. Consider the frequency with which these documents were published and the need to develop communications tools specific for each of your different audiences. Finally, look at your communications with team members and executives. How you communicate with team members is different from how you communicate with management, so these should be separate areas of discussion. Yet for both groups, keep in mind how time zones, language barriers, leadership style and working relationships may have affected communications. When examining your team communications, here are a few questions to ask:
When looking at your communications with management, keep in mind that this probably required less day-to-day communications than you had with the project team. Management's interest is in the big-picture, milestone items, such as presentations on status, the budget and the go-live date. When looking at your communication with executives, ask yourselves:
One last thing to keep in mind: As with any topic in a lessons learned session, be prepared to discuss unforeseen issues. Some project communications mishaps that I have heard about include not bringing in the data owner, issues reported too late or misalignment of user feedback with a requirement. How do you evaluate your project communications in lessons learned? |
A Project Management Wish List for 2013
| Another year for project managers has come and gone. And while this is the time for all the usual year-end activities (budgets, status reports, etc.), it's also a good opportunity to look toward the future. To project managers around the world, I wish you health and prosperity. I also thought I would share a few other dreams I would like to see come true in the New Year: 1. Talking project plans. From GPS systems to smartphones, just about every device offers a verbal communications mode nowadays. The same technology should be applied to project plans. They could alert you to urgent issues: "Your resources are overloaded" or "You need to add more tasks." A talking project plan could even present an entire status report without you speaking a word. Think how much fun your meetings would be when the project plan says, "Just go home because your project will never make its projected end date." 2. Project issues that solve themselves. Project managers know that early detection of project issues is the key to staying on schedule and budget. We hold resolution meetings. We collaborate with leadership to craft brilliant solutions. Yet every so often, it would be great for issues to just solve themselves. For example, say your project is over budget. Then suddenly you get an e-mail from your project sponsor that grants extra funding due to your company's outstanding performance this year. A project manager can dream, right? 3. Resources ready, willing and able to jump into the action. We spend a considerable amount of time identifying resources and negotiating for their availability on a project. And still, we see our schedules fall apart when they're pulled away by other demands. Just once I'd like to have a project where everyone is fully dedicated, with no other distractions to threaten the schedule. It would make me very happy to hear a project team member turn down a meeting with the company president to work on my project. 4. No change requests. During the early phases of a project, we work to create the most accurate set of requirements possible. We consider it all — the many functional needs and the hidden complexities. After all that work, wouldn't it be nice if everything remained precisely the same throughout the life cycle of the project? Think of the time you could save by canceling those painful weekly change-request meetings. 5. Give back all contingency funding in the project. We typically reserve contingency funding to guard against unforeseen events. Imagine the sheer joy of having no project risks that required budget or schedule relief. Just think of the satisfaction of telling your project leadership "We have no weather, people, software, hardware or network risks, so we are returning all contingency funds!" What's your project management wish for 2013? |
The Basics: Skills for a Successful Lessons Learned Session
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| Project professionals wear many hats. As writers, you prepare the project's charter to initiate the project. As leaders, you manage project teams. And as an accountant of sorts, you control the project budget. With the many skills you must possess to oversee a project, you should also be cognizant of the basic skills you'll need when conducting a lessons learned session: 1. Time management The session should be arranged with a specified meeting start and finish time. Team members will have other projects and tasks to work on, so it is imperative to respect the time they give you during the session. Start on time and keep the meeting moving. Pay attention to the clock to control the lengthiness of the discussions. This way, the meeting ends when it was arranged to end. To keep the meeting on track, you may have to tell team members when to close on a discussion point or ask them to discuss it more in-depth at a later time. If needed, schedule an additional meeting to talk about that point, or add it to the meeting notes and solicit feedback when you circulate the document. 2. Ability to engage As the facilitator, you must be able to persuade everyone to participate — from team leads to database administrators. You should also detach yourself from ranking attendees by their titles. After all, the goal of a lessons learned session is to collect details and feedback on a project's activities and decipher what may or may not be relevant to the next project — no matter the team member's position. 3. Shared vocabulary Many times, project teams use jargon that only they know. For example, the word "call" could refer to a programming term or simply to describe a customer service method. If you have not been a part of the project all along, make a point to familiarize yourself with some of the terms that may have been used on the project or may be mentioned in the discussion. What other basic skills do you use for conducting effective lessons learned sessions? |
5 Communication Tips for Better Stakeholder Management
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Over the past few years, I have written numerous posts looking at different aspects of stakeholder management. But what really matters and what is just useful to know? Here are my top five things to know to achieve effective stakeholder management: 1. Know who really matters. Make sure that the majority of your limited resources are being used to communicate with the stakeholders who really matter. They might not always be the bosses, either. The most important stakeholders will almost certainly change from month to month, so you need to regularly re-assess who is a top influencer at any given time. 2. Know why those stakeholders matter and what they need or want. Mutuality is important. If you need something from the stakeholder, you need to be able to link your needs with their requirements. Trading is far more effective and realistic than relying on charity or altruism. 3. One size fits no one. If you want your communication to be effective and deliver the outcome you need, you must understand the stakeholder with whom you're communicating. If you want your communication to have its intended effect, you need to have the right information for the receiver, in the proper format and delivered through the channel he or she prefers. 4. Attitudes change constantly. People change their minds all of the time. What you knew about your stakeholder's attitude toward your project last month is probably out of date. To compensate for a shift in focus, constantly re-assess the important stakeholder's attitudes and adjust your communication plan to deal with the current situation. 5. Everyone is biased (including you). When managing stakeholders, rational objectivity is nearly impossible to achieve. You are using your perception of your stakeholder's perception of your project to plan and manage your stakeholder communication effort. But perceptions are not real -- they are simply a person's understanding of what they believe to be real, filtered through their innate and acquired biases. To be successful, you need to be pragmatic, design the best communication plan you can with the resources available to you, and then see what happens. Knowing these five basic concepts and adapting as the situation changes won't guarantee success, but it will at last give you a fighting chance. Your project will always be better off if you spend time thinking about the best way to manage your stakeholder's needs and expectations. |
Gather More Than Just Requirements
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| When managing requirements, we naturally focus primarily on the business need or opportunity the requirements will address. We pay attention to how requirements are formulated, and whether they are clear, comprehensive and aligned to the project goals. There's nothing wrong with focusing on the "what" of requirements — that is, what is asked to be delivered. But to avoid any major problems during the project, it's also important to identify the related assumptions, constraints, dependencies and risks. A requirement assumption is a condition or event that's assumed to be true or false, or that is supposed to happen or not, that directly influences the requirement's context. On the other hand, a requirement constraint is an imposed limitation to the requirement's context. A requirement dependency is a direct correlation between two or more requirements, where the result of one requirement influences the outcome of others. And a requirement risk is the uncertainty of a requirement. For example, consider a project to develop a shopping website. One of the business requirements is to allow customers to perform credit card payments for their purchases. This particular requirement assumption presumes that customers will both own a credit card and be willing to pay with it online. If we would limit credit card payments to U.S. customers only, we would be dealing with a requirement constraint. The requirement would have an additional assumption and at the same time a requirement dependency on another requirement — that the website must be capable of handling credit card transactions. On the other hand, one of the requirement risks would be the security of payment transactions. While this may seem like too many factors to keep track of, gathering these related elements doesn't have to be difficult. Personally, I document requirement assumptions, constraints and dependencies in a dedicated log, and include them as part of the project scope statement. I also use them while sequencing activities on the project schedule, and for assigning activities leads and lags. Concerning risks, I consider project scope and project requirements as two of the main sources for identifying risks on a project. Interestingly, another risk will be the assumptions, constraints and dependencies themselves, because they can also create a negative or positive possibility of risks. Regardless of the risk source, I recommend tracking requirements risks in the risk register and addressing them during the scope-definition stage and as part of the risk management process throughout the project. How do you manage requirements assumptions, constraints, dependencies and risks on your projects? |