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Project Change Challenges
| Who should lead the change challenge: organization management or project management? The project team probably has a better idea of the technical aspects of the changes required. But, the organization's management initiates the project and has overall responsibility for achieving the intended benefits after the project is complete. In my opinion, change management is an organizational responsibility. The role of project management is to focus on creating the deliverable effectively and supporting the organizational change effort. In short, the project management team works for the organizational change management team. However, I have seen many situations where managing the change is treated as a project responsibility. For those project teams undertaking change management, the change challenge is getting the necessary buy-in from organizational stakeholders who have to make effective use of the project's deliverables to get the expected value from the project. There is no point in the project team being happy with its work if no one uses it. The way the organization works has to change if the deliverable is going to be used effectively to create value for the organization and generate a ROI on the investment in the project. Effective communication with the affected stakeholders is a must when addressing the change challenge. These communications follow a fairly standard pattern:
See more posts from Lynda. See more on stakeholder management. |
Use a Framework to Plan Project Requirements
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| Project requirements are rarely collected and made available in a final form to a project team. Instead, requirements are often collected through an elicitation process, which involves a discovery, analysis, understanding and validation endeavor. Usually, a business or requirements analyst carries out the requirements elicitation process. The project manager is typically responsible for planning and setting up the requirements elicitation and management framework. Well-planned and well-managed project requirements are common characteristics of successful projects. This simplified framework can be a guiding requirements checklist for project managers: Organizational assets: Identify the available organizational process assets for planning and managing project requirements. The organization or project management office might already have standards, guidelines and templates that can or should be used as a starting point. Stakeholders: Use the stakeholder register to identify the stakeholders who will help provide, collect, analyze and document the project requirements. Categories: Identify and categorize the requirements types that are to be elicited, such as:
Documentation: Identify how requirements will be documented, whether it's textual form, graphically or using a formal requirements language. Identify the way requirements will be tracked -- through requirement tools, Word documents or spreadsheets. Maturity Index: Establish the criteria by which requirements are validated and qualified. Is it clear? Does it make sense? Is the criteria aligned to the project vision and goals? Prioritization: Identify the criteria on how requirements will be prioritized and scoped. For instance, list the must-haves first. Then come the "quick wins," requirements based on the owner prioritization, complexity and costs, the project phase, etc. Risks: One of the main inputs for the project risk management plan are the scoped requirements. Identify the requirements posing a risk to the project. Develop risk mitigation, response and tracking plans. Change management: Establish the criteria for detecting scope creep and basic rules for handling requirements changes for applying the change management process. How are you planning and managing your project requirements? See more posts from Marian. See more on project planning. |
The Optimistic Team for Project Management Success
| "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." -- Winston Churchill About 100 years ago, Ernest Shackleton was looking for a crew for a challenging project: to produce a map of the South Pole. It is said that he published an ad in the local newspaper looking for team members with creativity, a good sense of humor and technical skills. Fast forward to the present day. Dr. Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, is the founder of positive psychology, which focuses on the study of such things as positive emotions, strengths-based character and healthy institutions. Dr. Seligman theorizes that in order to choose people for success in a challenging job, you need to search for aptitude, motivation and optimism. This "explanatory style" theory, which indicates how people explain to themselves why they experience a particular event, can be applied to teams, too, according to Dr. Seligman. He based his hypothesis in three basic predictions: If everything else remains unchanged, the individual with a more optimistic explanatory style will succeed. This happens because he or she will try harder, particularly under bad circumstances. The same thing should hold true for teams. If a team can be classified by its level of optimism, the more optimistic team should achieve its goals, and this will be more evident under pressure. If you can change the style of the team members from pessimistic to optimistic, they will achieve more, particularly under pressure. The next time you need to pick a project team member, consider their optimism in addition to his or her technical competencies. How do you choose your team members? What characteristics do you take into account when integrating members to your team? Read more from Jorge. Read more about teams. |
Help Celebrate Project Management Achievements
Categories:
PMI
Categories: PMI
| There are some stunning stories of success out there -- too many of which go unheralded. Here's your chance to change that with the 2012 PMI Professional Awards. You've got plenty of options -- from project and individual awards to research and literature awards. Consider that peer you've seen contributing to the advancement of the project management profession or PMI. Now's the time to acknowledge all that hard work by nominating him or her for the PMI Distinguished Contribution Award. Nominee(s) don't have to be a PMI member and may work in any field. Doing well should give project professionals more than just that "warm and fuzzy" feeling. Shine the spotlight on projects that improve the wellbeing of a community, or achievements that apply project management principles to the pro bono delivery of goods and services. The PMI Community Advancement Through Project Management Award is offered in Individual, Organizational and PMI Chapter categories. Nominations for both awards must be submitted by 1 April 2012. All awards are presented among your peers at the PMI Awards Ceremony, which is held in conjunction with PMI® Global Congress 2012 -- North America (20-23 October in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada). No one knows excellence in project management like you and your peers. So nominate a deserving colleague today. Learn more, download applications, and watch videos of past award winners and nominees. |
Resolve Communication Issues in Projects
| After a recent project progress meeting with my team, one of the senior members and I discussed the face-to-face communication challenges we have with other members. We concurred that when the person receiving information has a low retention, it results in false assumptions and misunderstanding the topic of discussion. Why is this happening? Why, if the person receiving information confirms that everything is clear, do we still we face communication issues in projects? Usually, it's because taking notes in a meeting is going away, as many team members wait for a meeting recap that notes their action items. In face-to-face communication, we spend most of the time listening -- and apparently, we're not good at it. We filter what we want to hear and that may result in a broken message. The senior member of my team referenced earlier is part of the silent generation. He mastered his listening skills in an environment without all of the ways to "replay" conversations that we use today. In addition, he mentioned that the communication environment was "less polluted" than today, where we are bombarded with things that affect our ability to pay attention. I asked the senior team member what are the key elements of good listening skills, based on his experience. He recommended:
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