Step by Step

Snakes and Ladders – Gantt

Commonly used in project management, Gantt Chart is one of the most popular and useful ways of showing activities (tasks or events) displayed against time.

Gantt Chart History

Henry Gantt, (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) was an American engineer and consultant.  Some references explain that was Henry who created the chart in 1910, but looking forward in the history, the first Gantt chart was devised in the mid-1890s in the Karol Adamiecki (March 18, 1866 – May 16, 1933) publications.

Karol Adamiecki was a Polish engineer who ran a steelworks in southern Poland and had become interested in management ideas and techniques.

However, Karol Adamiecki published his works in Polish and Russian language, due to that, his charts didn’t reach the popularity that Henry Gantt in western countries.

What is a Gantt Chart? 

Basically is a horizontal bar chart that illustrates the project schedule.

On the left of the chart, is the list of the activities and on the top the time scale.

Each activity is represented by a bar.

This set up will allow us to see

• The activities that we are tracking
• When each activity will start/end and how long it is.
• Overlapping between tasks and
• Start and End of the whole project.

Creating Gantt Charts

In today's world, they are usually created by computer applications, such as Microsoft® Project, Primavera Project Planner®, and others.

There are a lot of youtube videos, books, manuals and courses that will teach you how to use those applications. 

How to present Gantt chart to your stakeholders?

Here we are! There are hundreds of publications about how to improve our skills using these tools, but nobody told you the most important. 

BE CAREFULLY WHEN YOU’LL PRESENT THIS KIND OF INFORMATION.

When I started working as a project manager, directly I exported from MS Project to a power point the schedule, and here the face and comment from one of my lovely  users: 

Then,

• Don’t make assumptions, not all your stakeholders know what is a Gantt chart.
• When you plan a meeting, take in mind who is invited before to prepare the slide about schedules.
• Simplify. 

The beginning of a new year is always shown as an opportunity to reflect our goals or resolutions fulfilled and unfulfilled throughout the year.

I’ve reviewed my goals from last year, both professional and personal, and I’ve realized, that I have fulfilled them all. Why? Simple, consciously or unconsciously, my personal life is managed as a project. Giving importance to all different process groups, I’ve achieved all my 2016 goals. Then I’m ready to start 2017 completely clean.  

If you continue reading, you’ll discover how I’ve managed the different process groups during last year. 

Initiating Process Group

During December 2015, I began to review my lessons learned, and objectives. Then I created a project charter. 

Planning Process Group

This is the key process; some of us started the year with an enthusiastic spirit, with a huge list of joys and good intentions, ambitious goals. However few people achieve this goal, and this is due to the following

• We recycle goals from one year to the next. This leads to professional and personal stagnation.
• We procrastinate. Basically, because we have defined goals and objectives that do not motivate us.
• We do not have a plan and we simply define general goals.

By following the next key tips, you will get a correct right way to plan your goals.

• Take your time to elaborate a plan thoroughly. Do not plan your goals quickly, spend time just like you would in your daily professional project.
• Create a clear categorization of your goals (Personal, Professional, Education, Entertainment, Health ...) and include a deadline for each goal. Do not leave everything for December 31st.
• Define goals that really motivate you, for example, if your dream is to play the Spanish guitar, because you’ve seen at the campground your neighbor singing around the campfire, but it really does not motivate you, the most likely is that around mid-year, you deprioritize that goal to focus on another.
• Use positive statements. Try to change expressions like “I want to stop procrastinating in my free time”, to something like “I want to do an outdoor activity once a month”
• Specify and detail all the objectives. Ambiguous objectives will give us ambiguous results. Example, Studying for the PMP Certification vs. Dedicating 1 hour to prepare the PMP Certification.

Executing process group

When you already have the objectives set, and a good implementation plan. It is time to focus on realization. Always try to pursue one goal at the time, although you can execute in multi-task mode, remember that you’ll lose efficiency and quality in pursuing your goals. Prioritize and do not stop monitoring and controlling.

Monitoring and controlling process group

Depending on the goals and deadlines that you’ve, do not forget to check and review weekly or monthly the status of your goals.

When you are reviewing the objectives, some risks that you didn’t include initially will appear, maybe you’ll have to lead with cost problems, then take in mind…you have to manage your project Go2NewYear as a professional project, you must revieww and check that you are taking care of all knowledge areas.

And if you're not getting your goals, what happens? Well, the same as in a project: it has to re-plan and execute accordingly.

Closing process group

Before to closing, remember, document lessons learned for each goal and CELEBRATE, CELEBRATE!!

Did you celebrate your goals in 2016? Do you have a plan for 2017? 

I am sure that if you are reading this post, is because at some point, last time that you connected and checked your LinkedIn you’ve realized that something is wrong. You are receiving a lot of spam or the information you see on your screen, isn’t relevant for you

In theory, LinkedIn is the PROFESSIONAL NETWORK by definition, the ones that create here a profile is to find or create business opportunities, work, and knowledge exchange…

Here the key points to identify and eliminate contacts on LinkedIn. 

• Spammers, these are the first to eliminate.
  • They send courses offers that do not have to do with our field.
  • Impersonalized offers or recommendation requests without our name or adding hundreds of contacts at the same time.
  • "The Perfect" job, salaries of six figures, working from home ... this does not look good!

• Non-professionals. Lately, I've noticed that people post on LinkedIn like in Facebook, kittens, and congratulating parties, family photos. These contacts are in my eyehole, my time has a value, and I really glad that your dog is healthy, but if this post really interests me, I will be checking my Facebook, not LinkedIn.

• Outdated, unfinished or profiles without a photo. Bye bye! 

• Sectors of non-interest, many of us made the mistake (years ago) when we created the LinkedIn account to add to familiars, friends, general contacts, who do not belong to our sectors. This beginner’s failure makes that we see news on our home page that has a lack of interest. It’s the time to clean it, we can see family and friends in other social media. 

• Bad behavior. Maybe this is a little subjective, but I define the following by bad behavior something like these examples. 

  • Ask for advice or favors continuously for free.
  • Sends too many messages, using the inbox as a chat.
  • Try to sell something few seconds after accepted the connection request.  
  • Their interactions or post are rude and inappropriate.
  • Requested personal data in an open post.
  • Copy and reuse your post without permission.

• Smoke Sellers. Last but not least, people who sell smoke. I have super clear that LinkedIn is nourished by ego, and promoting the "good that we are", but from selling or strengths to "I'm expert guru, visionary..." really? From my point of view, you are an amazing and great IT help desk technician, visionary is Steven Hopkins, you are in my point of view, if I only see this in your presentation, and I do not see interesting posts or contributions that prove it, I am sorry, but you are out.

What do you think of your LinkedIn contacts? Do they meet these conditions? Are you going to clean them?

By the way, feel free to add me to your LinkedIn connections. lol

Sometimes I had the rude consultant in my mind; it helps me not to forget about how we need to take care and improve our communication or stakeholder management.

Honestly, I did not think at any time to share my intimacies or invite him to a close family party, I did not pretend to be his friend. A Simply, cordial relationship with co-workers.

Throughout my professional life, I’ve recognized that I made great friends as well as good co-workers. We spend many hours in our work, and over time the relationships between us never stop improving.

Personally, when I start a new project or start working in a new office, I do not go with the idea of making a lot of friends or inviting the whole department to a Saturday crazy party dinner in my home. I usually consider myself a reserved person, and the step to move from peer to friend, is not a fast step and usually occurs when I leave that company or project. I should point out that I have been a freelance for years, which has made me travel around Europe from project to project and from client to client, meeting amazing people.

I have been living in the United States less than two years, and I’m gratefully surprised that we can find statistics and data on anything, I love that.

A few days ago, I’ve taken a look to the Bureau of Labor statistical, I was curious about how the Americans spend their time. 

So, it is a fact that we spend more than 8 hours at work.

Some newspaper articles, important doctors, psychologists, coaches, and mentors, argue about the fact that we must stop separating professional life from the work.

As project managers, here are the key reasons can help us to improve our skills if we’ll stop separating both lifes. 

• We'll be better workers. Increasing productivity and reducing stress.
• We'll engage the teams better. By getting to know the team members better, it is easier to know their needs and get a buy-in.
• Improving communication
• Diminution of stress

But, there are also some inconvenient:

• Overconfidence makes the requests you make are not taken in the required way
• Falling into the error of talking about work during leisure time
• Possible conflict of interests or leave in a disadvantage relation to the rest of the team.
• Less productivity due to a more distractions, longer coffee breaks, more time to have lunch,
• Lose the boundaries, and then, the outside issues will affect to work.

Each of us is very different, and each of you will take different approach how to manage the ties at work, but, here few tips for the first days that will be useful not to  be rude but don’t spoil anything.

• Prioritize the work
• Be a little reserved. Avoid speak about religion, politics, money.
• Don’t participate in gossips
• Live together, share time at the office with your peers, don’t lunch alone, participate during the coffee breaks, or after works drinks
• Collaborate with the group, offer your help, and share your knowledge.
• Don’t exclude any team member, sometimes in a team, people try to join with people with the same role, be open! Talk with the technicians, or with the developers, you’ll discover an all-new world.

What’s your approach? Friends or Colleagues? 

Reference: Bureau of Labor Statistics - Charts from the American Time Use Survey. 

http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/

Few years after, I wondered what had happened to the rude consultant, I was trying to remember the name, the last name…but the bell didn’t ring.

Days ago, I’ve received a LinkedIn request, I’ve checked the picture, and OMG was the rude consultant. Grace to this tool, I was available to check his photo (hi seems older that he is), his career progression (nothing special). During few minutes I was thinking in answer his request with something like I’m not on LinkedIn to be your friend or sorry who are you?

Instead of my emotional response, I accepted his request and I’ve thought about how the networking has developed in less than years, the objectives of networking, how to consolidate my professional network.

When I was at university for me, networking was two or more connected computers that share resources such as files, printers or CD-Roms and are capable of electronic communications. The networks are cables, telephone lines, radio waves, satellite, etc.

Nowadays when we listen to the word networking our mind think about business cards, LinkedIn, job opportunities. It’s amazing how we completely changed the sense of the word.

Maybe you can remember those company dinners, village festivals or your neighbor’s birthday where people were distributing business cards as if it was an Olympic game. I had a mate that told me “Today I bring with me fifty business cards, and at the end of the party I only have 5, I’m an expert in networking” This kind of comments always make me think about how we manage the tools that we have, or how sometimes we misunderstand the new uses of old words.

With the evolution of social networks, how we keep our professional and personal contacts changed at the same pace, there are companies that help us to increase or presence on the web, if you spend some dollars you can get mobile applications that combine all your social networks, apps that allow you to share in a cloud your business information and profile.

There are books, articles, videos that explain what the goals of networking, how to properly networking, best practices, how to improve our efficiency and performance.

Since I am no expert on the subject, having read about networking, I prefer to keep to in mind only one quote from Woody Allen.

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

Where from my point of view success is something subjective, that depend on each of us, maybe your professional success will be a CIO of a big company and mine maybe becomes a speaker in a PMI Global congress?

In the XXI century, where every day will launch new applications, new social networks, new careers, "showing up" isn’t limited to hand a card to a birthday party or PMI chapter event, neither purchase a premium account on LinkedIn or write a blog about a rude consultant who worked with you.

We must keep up, retrain, and be aware of all these new technologies that we can use to increase our chances of networking.

As project managers, we have to increase and maintain our network of contacts, not only use it for business opportunities or new professional challenges, but also to acquire new knowledge, develop ourselves and our team, and above all, prevent any of our team members come to us and said something like  "I did not come here to make friends"