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Viewing Posts by Kevin Korterud
Are Project Managers Born or Made?
Categories:
Reflections on the PM Life
Categories: Reflections on the PM Life
| Every so often, I hear theories from team members on how their project manager became effective at leading projects. Sometimes they say something like, "She was born to be a project manager." This got me to thinking whether some people are naturally predisposed to be project managers, or if they have a specific set of experiences that shapes them to become project managers. It's almost a question of anthropological proportions: Are good project managers born or made? To help answer it, let us look at some key competencies of project managers and see if these skills are innate or developed over time.
So coming back to the question of whether project managers are born or made, I think both are true. While nobody has yet found a project manager gene, we all seem to be born into a journey that leads us to being a project manager. This journey starts with the skills and behaviors we're born with, and continues with the functional knowledge, technical expertise and professional training we accumulate over time. This essential mix of what we are as well as how we grow is key to becoming an effective project manager. Do you think you were born to be a project manager or became one over time? |
Best Weekly Status Meeting Ever
Categories:
Project Delivery
Categories: Project Delivery
| Many project team members prepare for weekly status meetings with a sense of dread and resignation. These meetings often subject people to long motivational speeches, an overly detailed review of project tasks and even the unpleasant prospect of speaking about their specific progress in front of project leadership. Sometimes these meetings last hours, causing team members to rush to complete project activities. No wonder they make excuses to miss these meetings! How can you, as project manager, structure a weekly status meeting so team members are engaged, informed and willing to contribute to the project's next steps? Here are some tips: 1. Start with the answer. The worst question to ask is, "What did you do this week?" It invariably generates unnecessary, time-consuming dialogue from team members. Plus, you should already know what everyone on the team did during the week. Avoid this time-waster by starting with a "project answer," such as:
Starting the meeting with a project answer produces confidence in team members and allows them to focus on remedies for schedule, budget and progress variances. 2. Structure discussion around risks and issues. After presenting the project answer, lead a group discussion on risks and issues. You should have a list of the current risks and issues along with their assigned "owners." Make clear before the meeting that risk and issue owners should come prepared to share the status of their item. In addition, they should have a path to resolution. If they do not, this is a clear signal for you to escalate the risk or issue to the leadership team. 3. Clarify and confirm upcoming milestones. As the last agenda item on the status meeting, you should highlight the upcoming two to three weeks of milestones and the path to completion for them. In addition, share your expectations on the progress toward these milestones by the next status meeting. This agenda item also serves as an excellent opportunity for team members to identify new risks or issues that may impair the team's progress. 4. Schedule the status meeting the second workday of each week. Project managers have varying opinions on the best day to conduct status meetings. Some prefer the first workday, thinking it will provide a head start on the workweek. Others prefer the end of the workweek, believing this maximizes the project manager's visibility to recent project activities. Personally, I find that holding the meeting on the second workday is the most beneficial. It allows time during the first workday to gather information for the meeting. In addition, the project team then has three full days to act on the milestone guidance from the last portion of the meeting. These tips have worked well for me in leading effective status meetings. What's your number one tip for conducting successful status meetings? |
Work Before the Work Plan
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| While reviewing a project work plan this week, I thought back to the first generation of work-planning tools. I marveled at their ability to mechanize manually arduous activities, such as progress calculations and schedule charts. After using these tools on a few projects, I felt supremely confident about creating a work plan and managing a project of any size. But as I became more proficient at using them, I found myself struggling to make the work plan match what was actually going on with the project. After much frustration, I spoke to a senior project manager. She suggested that before even touching the tools, I needed to rethink my approach to work planning. Here are some of her tips that I continue to employ today:
I recommend capturing a fixed commitment -- that is, the amount of hours by resource per week. This accounts for even those resources that, by the nature of their labor contracts, can only devote a certain number of hours to the project. It also highlights the capacity these resources have to work on other projects. If the capacity is a set amount, you can quickly determine a more accurate project schedule. What are your tips for getting off to a good start with work planning? |
Tips for First-Time Global Project Managers
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A project manager's first global project marks a pivotal time in professional development. A project with global scope offers an exciting opportunity to work with people from many different cultures and skill sets. However, global projects also come with unique challenges. These can include large physical distances between implementation teams, language barriers, country-specific regulations and other considerations that can negatively affect your project. To get off to a good start, project managers need to manage the differences between global and co-located projects within these essential elements: 1. Requirements: On a co-located project, there is a single set of project requirements. On global projects, it is common to encounter both global (such as quarterly financial reporting) and country (such as provincial tax) requirements. Failure to consider them can cause painful functional gaps upon implementation. Work with your project leadership team to define a prioritization scheme for both types of requirements. For example, prioritize the country requirements by regulatory mandate, business value and desired need. A prioritization scheme helps you achieve overall balance in meeting the project success criteria. 2. Estimation: A global project typically features added complexity and costs not found with a co-located project. This calls for estimation to include additional effort to manage the previously mentioned requirements, as well as cross-geography coordination. The latter can include things such as team member travel time and global communications. In addition, there can be additional costs, such as import duties on equipment, that can add to the overall estimate. To ensure good estimation, identify global and local estimation components to more accurately account for the additional complexity. 3. Scheduling: Scheduling milestones, effort and resources on global projects is one of the greatest challenges for a project manager. The first thing to remember is to include country-specific scheduling considerations, such as regional holidays and vacations. In addition, always leave room in the schedule for project risks that can arise from unstable governments, new regulations and labor disputes. Finally, be prepared for unexpected surprises from nature, such as snowstorms, floods, volcanic eruptions and other disruptions. If such an event happens, meet with your leadership team to discuss whether to reset the project schedule around the unexpected surprise. While global projects can present some unique problems, they also can be very rewarding when managed properly -- even if a volcano erupts! What tips do you have for first-time global project managers? |
Making Earned Value More Valuable
Categories:
Calculating Project Value
Categories: Calculating Project Value
| The most powerful — and most commonly misunderstood — measurement of project progress is earned value metrics, the way of measuring actual versus planned progress. "Earned value" is so attractive because the term conjures positive visions, emotions and expectations on what earned value metrics will do. But in reality, if a project manager does not measure and then present the metrics properly to project sponsors, the numbers can produce unpleasant mood swings, premature celebrations and raging arguments. I have found that project managers who successfully track project progress with earned value metric share a common practice: They allocate the same effort to the meaningful presentation of earned value and its implementation. Consider these basic tips for making earned value actually mean something: 1. Qualify activities that earn value. One of the quickest roads to failure is to include all project activities in determining earned value. This can set up the false indication of true progress by incorporating administrative tasks like the kick-off meetings, project status meetings and other activities that are not central to actual progress. To avoid misleadingly optimistic earned value, include only core items when determining earned value — for example, high- effort and -risk activities, and external dependency milestones. 2. Set standard earned value ranges. Another common trap in calculating earned value is allowing optimistic or downright untrue declarations of progress. You've all probably heard, "We are 99 percent complete, and all we have left to do is..." time and time again. To avoid this trap, set up conservative ranges of progress completion. For example, you may set a conservative percentage-complete tier of 75 percent if a deliverable is completed, and designate the remaining 25 percent to the approval process by the project sponsor. 3. Clearly communicate earned value to project sponsors. Speaking of project sponsors, one of my all-time favorite earned value moments occurred recently during the first progress status meeting. After several weeks of high expectations around earned value, the project manager stood up and said, "Our SPI is .92." Needless to say, this abbreviated report of the schedule performance index caused a long silence, puzzled looks and furrowed brows among project sponsors. Avoid such tense moments by communicating to project sponsors, in terms they understand, what earned value can and cannot do. Add relevance and context by combining earned value with other project readout content, and tailor your communications to sponsors through visualization techniques. For example, present a graph showing the schedule of planned value against the actual earned value of these deliverables for the project. Earned value can be one of the most powerful and revealing indications of true project progress — as long as it is properly determined and presented. How do you measure earned value? What are your tips in presenting earned value to project sponsors? |