Easy in theory, difficult in practice

A discussion happened a while ago on a LinkedIn group attempting to identify the best project management tools. While there was healthy debate, nearly all of the responses pertained to the virtues of different software solutions ranging from applications within the Microsoft Office suite up to multi-million dollar project portfolio management solutions.

However, I was surprised to see that no one chose to honor one of the most powerful, versatile and cost-effective tools in a project manager’s belt, Post-it Notes!

Before you think I’ve gone off the deep end, let me provide my own version of Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose monologue by listing multiple ways in which Post-it Notes can help us better manage our projects.

With Scope Management, they provide an easy method of supporting requirements elicitation as well as scope inclusion and exclusion discussions. Post-it Notes can also be used to facilitate a bottom-up work breakdown structure process by having team members provide activities and then using affinity grouping to work up to key work packages.

With Schedule Management, they can help you develop an activity network diagram – it’s a lot easier to move notes around on a whiteboard than it is to fix incorrect dependencies using paper and pencil, and this “old school” method can encourage teams to focus exclusively on activity sequencing without becoming distracted by dates or resources as might happen when using software schedulers.

For Cost Management, when estimating costs, they can be used to help team members in brainstorming one-time and ongoing costs. They can also provide critical assistance of reminding team members to complete time sheets or to submit invoices in a timely fashion when stuck on people’s monitors!

Post-it Notes can support inspection activities when we consider Quality Management. After all, who hasn’t used Post-it Notes to mark pages in hardcopy documents which need further review or refinement? They can also be used to label and identify physical components requiring re-work.

If a process map is being developed to identify efficiency or effectiveness improvements, they can be used to develop the right process sequence and to distinguish value-add, non-value-add and value-enabling activities. They can also support prevention activities – a Post-it Note next to a lever, gauge or button can often provide a more timely reminder on correct procedure than a detailed checklist. Finally, Post-it Notes and a whiteboard make it easy to create a quick Ishikawa “fishbone” diagram when trying to identify the root cause of defects or when troubleshooting an issue.

When performing Resource Management, Post-it Notes can help the project team to develop a project RACI matrix in a collaborative, iterative fashion and could also be used to construct a project’s organization chart.

They can be used during team building activities – a simple one is for team members to write their names on one Post-it Note, and then have them write something unique about themselves on another. The project manager gathers and randomly sticks these two different groups of Post-it Notes on either side of a whiteboard. Then, each team member can take turns drawing links between the names & the attributes.

When faced with a conflict, project managers could consider having team members individually write what they believe the problem is on Post-it Notes and then have the whole team analyze the perceptions to develop a shared understanding of the true issue.

A project manager can also use Post-it Notes to recognize team members for small wins (getting a “You Rock!” note on your monitor can be a small, but powerful motivator) and helping them to focus on what’s critical by having them write down their top three project priorities and sticking that in a frequently observed location.

The most obvious use of Post-it Notes for supporting Communications Management is the ubiquitous “Come see me when you are back at your desk!” notification. Unlike e-mail messages or phone messages, if the recipient returns to their desk they can’t truthfully say that they never received the message!

Colored Post-it Notes can also be used to differentiate types of work items or the criticality of issues on Kanban boards, Issue boards or other types of visual dashboards. Finally, they can also be used to facilitate identification and grouping of similar lessons when conducting a lessons (to be) learned session with the project team.

Beyond their use in helping a team to brainstorm risks during identification workshops, they can also help when analyzing risks visually – a two-by-two table can be drawn on a whiteboard, and individual risks can be organized by probability and impact across the cells of the table. This is a great way to surface risk biases amongst team members and stakeholders and can also help to focus response efforts on meaningful risks.

When reviewing contracts or Statements of Work as part of project procurement activities, Post-it Notes can be used to flag specific terms and conditions requiring rework or can be used to easily identify where approvers need to sign.

Finally, with Stakeholder Management, similar to their use during risk analysis, Post-it Notes can help a team to categorize stakeholders on Influence/Impact axis when performing stakeholder analysis.

How many software solutions do you know which can claim to effectively support so many PMBOK knowledge areas?

I encourage you to provide me with more creative uses to support my belief that while there is no "one size fits all" tool for project management, Post-it Notes come pretty close!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in April 2014 on ProjectTimes.com)

When we think of an agile transformation, improving portfolio management might not be high on the organization’s list of priorities.

But what happens if your organization doesn’t have an effective and efficient portfolio management capability?

There is a greater likelihood of having too many active projects which increases the risk of resource shortages. Instead of having a dedicated team of primary roles for a project, most team members will be multitasking between multiple projects. This makes it impossible to accurately estimate capacity during iteration planning and usually contributes to a team missing their iteration commitments resulting in delivery delays.

Multitasking also increases the effort to have a consistent understanding of the product and can impact quality as team members might be delivering based on stale knowledge.

If multitasking is not a concern, stealth or low value pet projects might be consuming resource capacity which is required to effective staff more strategic projects. This will cause delays to these projects.

Finally, for secondary non-dedicated roles which are needed to contribute to specific work items only, a lack of visibility into when they are becoming available will be a further source of delay.

If governance committees aren’t selecting the right projects which are in alignment with strategic objectives, and only kicking off as many projects as can be effectively staffed, it won’t matter how efficient, empowering or customer-centric the organization’s delivery practices are. In addition, if the existing portfolio governance practices are inefficient and onerous, by the time a team has finally received funding approval to get started with delivery, they might have insufficient time left to deliver even minimal value to exploit a market opportunity or to meet a regulatory deadline.

Portfolio plans are useless, portfolio planning is indispensable.

Rather than having business executives, finance analysts and PMO staff spending weeks coming up with the perfect roster of projects for the next year only to realize a month or two into the year that their plans have been disrupted by domino effect delays, new priorities or resource shortfalls, portfolio planning needs to be an ongoing activity.

To enable this, a lean but effective resource capacity management capability also needs to be in place to ensure that portfolio decisions are being made based on a current and accurate understanding of resource availability.

Agile delivery is not a silver bullet.

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in September 2017 on https://kbondale.wordpress.com)

Mindfulness has received significant coverage as a good practice for improving one’s interactions with others on both a personal and business front. It is rare to find an article in the Harvard Business Review on leadership, conflict resolution or negotiation that doesn’t touch on the concept.

But what exactly is mindfulness?

Maria Gonzalez defines it in "Mindful Leadership" as “simply noticing the way things are.” Our own biases, emotions, and preconceived notions get in the way of truly seeing things for what they are. The decisions we make based on that altered view of reality are what get us and our projects into trouble.

So what does mindfulness mean to a project manager?

1. Be present. When meeting with your key stakeholders or your team members, don’t dwell on the past or dream of the future. Focus on what is being said, who is saying it, and how they are saying it. It can be a tremendous recognition for someone to know that the person they are speaking with is giving them 100% of their attention, especially because this occurs so rarely!
2. Be aware. Mindfulness is not about suppressing one’s emotions and reactions. It is about recognizing them as they bubble up and not letting them control you. When meeting with a stakeholder who has let the team down, or confronting a team member who repeatedly misses their commitments, it can be easy to let anger drive your behavior. Acknowledge the feelings of frustration but don’t let them drive you to an impetuous response.
3. Be calm. The first line of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If “, says it the best “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” Not only does calm in the face of chaos help you make better decisions, but it is also contagious. If your team members see that you can be calm even when it seems like nothing is working out for the project, they will draw strength from your composure and will be less likely to make things worse.
4. Be focused. Projects can have hundreds if not thousands of moving parts, and team members might be tempted to juggle multiple tasks along with their operational responsibilities. By focusing them on one or two concurrent tasks, throughput will increase, and you’ll generate less waste.
5. Be clear. Emotions can introduce unpredictability and inconsistency into decision-making. If you know what the expected end state or outcome is for your project, and what the relative priorities are of all of the project’s constraints, then that can inject objectivity into the decision- making process.
6. Have equanimity. The “Serenity Prayer” should be a mantra for project managers. The uncertainty that is present in all projects will result in issues that you and your team will not have direct control over. While you may not be able to control the occurrence of an event that impacts your project, you have total control over your reaction to it. As the project manager, you need to set the standard of behavior for your team, and if they witness you accepting the bad with the good, and proceeding in a thoughtful manner, they are also likely to proceed in a calm manner.
7. Be a positive force. When your project is behind schedule or over budget, it can be easy to fall into a fugue, and this can colour your interactions with stakeholders and team members. However, if you can accept that things are tough, but still greet people with a smile on your face (and in your heart), that might be one of the easiest forms of recognition you can offer each day.
8. Be compassionate. Like charity, compassion begins at home. We are our own worst critics, and if we are beating ourselves up when things are going bad on our projects, this is likely to reduce our ability to cope with stress, leave us more open to getting into unnecessary arguments, and increases our likelihood of making poor decisions.
9. Be impeccable. This doesn’t mean that you are always right, but it does mean that you demonstrate integrity and honesty in all of your dealings. If you have made a mistake, then take responsibility for it and don’t look to find a scapegoat.

While each of these behaviors might seem obvious, incorporating them will take lots of practice.

Without this practice, the analogy of an anti-drunk driving television ad from the past decade comes to mind. It shows a view of the road through a windshield getting progressively blurrier as empty beer glasses are placed in front of the camera lens, one after another. Our emotions act in the same way – if we let them cloud our judgment, we are committing the sin of project managing under the influence.

(Note: this article was written and published by me on April 2015 on Projecttimes.com)

When we think about the journey from traditional delivery approaches to agile, the focus is normally on delivery teams or on those areas of the organization which will need to transition from being project-focused to becoming product, capability or value-stream centric.
Human resources is a good example of an organizational function which you might not think would experience significant change.

For large companies which have defined job families and roles, agile might introduce new roles such as Scrum Masters, product owners or agile coaches. Not only will organizational design professionals have to develop the required competencies and accountabilities of such new roles, they'll also need to design career transitions from other roles into and out of these.

In many markets, experienced agile coaches might be worth their weight in gold so compensation staff will need to identify what will be reasonable median salaries for such roles and then calculate the impact of potential compensation ripple effects on the feeder roles into such positions. This is critical, otherwise the effort spent hiring, onboarding or promoting staff into these roles will be wasted if compensation doesn't reflect market realities. As with other hot skills, retention can be as challenging as procurement.

Companies are often organized into departments of distinct, specialized skills and performance measurement programs emphasize the individual instead of teams. Traditional recognition programs reward individual performance with team celebration or recognition getting short shrift when it comes to budgets.

Agile delivery flourishes when you have long lived teams of generalizing specialists who collaborate closely. The team, rather than any one team member is the lowest level of granularity when it comes to decision-making, commitment and performance.

What this implies is that people managers who might previously have discouraged their staff from straying outside the boundaries of their specific competencies or roles will need to alter their approach and HR will need to lead this charge on encouraging the right types of leadership behavior. Performance management processes will also need to evolve to emphasize an individual's contribution towards team performance to incent the right type of behaviors from former primadonnas.

A successful agile transformation impacts all parts of a company, including those which are usually not directly involved with project delivery.

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in September 2016 on kbondale.wordpress.com)

If you have been involved with project management for any length of time, you likely have been asked to explain or justify the value of project management.  The challenge in answering this question is that while it is fairly easy to provide a comprehensive response, you may not feel that confident if you are put on the spot to answer this question in a stereotypical “elevator pitch” of thirty words (or seconds) or less!

A reasonable assumption is that the answer will be role-specific based on who is asking the question so let’s evaluate this from the perspective of key stakeholders.

Project sponsors provide financial and influence funding and support for projects.  In this capacity, they act in a similar fashion to investment managers in a brokerage. To be successful, they need their investments to provide guaranteed returns.  While a project manager cannot be held solely responsible for the successful realization of the benefits of a project, application of project management practices can reduce the surprises and increase the likelihood of projects being completed within established constraints.  This in turn helps to reduce uncertainty for the sponsors so that they can focus on ensuring that the benefits of the project are achieved.

For resource managers, gaining better visibility into the demands on their staff while simultaneously reducing resource contention is a key benefit.  Without knowing when resources are needed, for how long, and with what skills, as well as knowing when changes occur on projects that can affect these commitments, it is very difficult for them to do their jobs as resource providers or to motivate their staff.  Project management can extend the knowledge of planned resource allocations and can improve visibility into those factors that could affect the planned allocation.

For senior executives, projects are a means to an end. They help to deliver the strategic plan for the organization as well as supporting other objectives, including regulatory compliance and maximizing shareholder value.  In the absence of project management practices, the likelihood of success for large initiatives rests solely on the skills, motivation and dedication of staff. This is certainly a critical success factor for any project, but insufficient to assure executives that long running projects will complete on time and on budget, while providing the expected “bang for the buck”.

Finally, let’s consider project resources. They might perceive project management as an administrative burden.  However, with appropriate project management skills being applied to their projects, they should have a better understanding of their short and long term task lists as well as how the work they are doing will benefit the organization.  The issues they encounter on their projects will hopefully be escalated and resolved in a timely fashion, and the expectations for how they perform their work, as well as the performance evaluations they receive, should not be unexpected.

While each role may experience slightly different benefits from the use of project management, a commonality to all of these value propositions is improved predictability.  The advantage of using this simple statement is that the focus of the predictability is in the eye of the beholder. For a sponsor, it is about having their project completed when they expected at a price point they had justified. For a project resource, it could be knowing what they will work on this week and feeling confident that hurdles they encounter will be appropriately escalated and addressed.

So the next time someone puts you on the spot to “sell” project management, counter with “improved predictability.” Of course, when those elevator doors open, you might be invited to deliver a more comprehensive explanation!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me on Projecttimes.com in August 2010)