remote working imageProject managers and PMO officers muster a highly technical skill set. However, the soft skills in which they need to be well-versed in order to be recognized as leaders have become one of the toughest areas of excellence for any project-based organization.

The problem has become even more urgent with the digitalization of intellectual work: workers and experts can now be brought into a project remotely across countries, languages and a myriad of different cultural elements. How to turn delocalized networks of diverse people into robust teams is one of the standing challenges for a modern project leader.

The stepping stone into project leadership is to find support in the use of technological systems designed to support and enhance intensive collaboration, like ITM Platform’s PPM software.

But besides that, if they want to succeed project leaders will have to recognize that external consultants and remote teams have different support needs than the traditional, internal team members.

Invite all your collaborators to ITM Platform and power your projects with a PPM tool with in-built social communication.

Is project leadership the same as traditional business leadership?

“Project members may feel the disorientation that comes with the lack of a stable home”

According to an already classic research paper, “Transformational leadership in a project-based environment: a comparative study of the leadership styles of project managers and line managers”, the project leader can have the same authority and recognition as the leader in a functional organization; however, the nature of project-based work sets barriers for transformational outcomes.

In fact, many project members unbound to a department feel the nausea or disorientation that is related to the lack of a stable home: a permanent work station; a group of colleagues to relate to and build confidence with over time; or even a geographic location and a predictable daily routine. In absence of all these coordinates of professional stability, leaders will find that it is harder to motivate employees, oversee their careers, and make them understand their place and importance in the overall scheme of things.

Similarly, all modern organizations suffer under the inescapable dooms and benefits of technological innovation: nowadays, a team member can be recruited for a short-term engagement from a different country on the other end of the world. Usually, these relationships are based on the demand for readily available and highly qualified talent, which can literally be found anywhere thanks to the existing collaboration hubs. While this trend was barely emerging in the early 2000’s, it has consolidated as a clear business model with a myriad of online platforms, such as freelancer or 99designs for designers, twago or Upwork for web and software development, or even NineSights or kaggle for innovation and big data contests.

While hiring talent from across the globe is easier than ever, this frictionless environment shifts a strenuous pressure into the coordination needs with newcomers. And, paradoxically, at the same time it's becoming increasingly difficult to retain talent and meet the professional expectations of millenials in terms of flexibility, work-life balance and career development. This guide on working with technology that is suited to millennial culture can help your company overcome this challenge.

Obviously, this pressure then translates into new styles of leadership; and it does it at a time in which often support systems for traditional, site-based project teams are still precarious.

In this context, it’s obvious that team management requirements have changed enormously, shifting away from the face to face authority of the office leader to the need to clearly communicate and align expectations to that kind of loosely coordinated network in which team members come and go.

Most often team members will fulfil specialized tasks, but entire projects with important co-dependencies can also be outsourced. In the latter case, that is when projects are tightly packaged before they are outsourced, the external player will have it easy: he or she shall only need to understand project scope, deadlines and budget.

However, outsourcing tasks within projects and externalizing a part of the project team is a much harder practice in the day-to-day of project leaders. If we go back to the initial metaphor, the leader will somehow have to reconstruct a home (or a temporary albeit comfortable shelter) for the external member so their engagement with the project is guaranteed.

1. On-boarding = constructing a home with corporate values

“Combining the collaborative power of Slack with the PPM capabilities of ITM Platform is a great way of keeping all project members on the same page, multiplying team interactions and ensuring that project planning and execution are strictly aligned”

While many full-time freelancers are likely to feel comfortable in loosely coupled teams with brief touching points and interactions, making sure any new node in the network knows how to proceed is a strong organizational priority.

The home cannot be forced upon the external member: whoever prefers a detached, professional collaboration with no soft commitment will eventually have her way; but on the corporate side it should be all about a seductive approach to persuasion that is very strongly related to corporate culture and values, to a strong branding and to the on-boarding. Depending on how this process work, employees and consultants can either feel important contributors to the organizations or a redundant appendix.

Under this light, seemingly secondary pieces of communication have an enormous importance. How you welcome members into the team, make requests for feedback or encourage spontaneous interactions become central elements to the leadership activity. It’s important to stimulate autonomous work while ensuring that there is a record of all vital progress.

For that reason, the integration of collaboration tools and project management technology is particularly relevant in the project leader portfolio. To support that need, we recently designed ITM Platform Teambot, an app for Slack that allows our user base to recall their current projects and tasks, report hours and progress and send contextual comments into the platform without ever leaving Slack’s IRC-type chat interface.

GIF-Assignations

Combining the collaborative power of Slack with the PPM capabilities of ITM Platform is a great way of keeping all project members on the same page, multiplying team interactions and ensuring that project planning and execution are strictly aligned.

2. Self-management and discipline

“Sustained clarity into the processes, expectations and requirements are of particular importance for remote workers and external consultants.”

Much more than regular employees, who can embed their practices into the dynamics of the organization and rely on daily interactions to regulate inter-dependencies, remote workers and consultants need to self-manage their time and be very disciplined. However, this doesn’t mean they don’t need to follow external leadership: on the contrary, even the most disciplined professionals will be extremely frustrated in the absence of proper project leadership that doesn’t communicate a clear focus.

Although it obviously benefits from the magnetism of charismatic authority, project leadership doesn’t have to be very personal. Sustained clarity into the processes, expectations and requirements are of particular importance for remote workers and external consultants.

3. Strong processes embedded in top-value technology

“The technological backbone is a fundamental pillar of project management processes. Your ITM Platform environment will be the organizational home to your project activities”

Project management instruments, methodologies and templates are the core of a strong policy of validated processes that work throughout the entire organization. A fundamental pillar of those processes is the technological backbone that keeps track of the everyday progresses.

In project management contexts with remote team members, it’s vital to have a tool that covers that backbone and connects communicational needs with planning and execution:

  • Financial management: keeping track of all the costs incurred by the resources allocated to a given project
  • Time tracking: Control whether team members, particularly new ones, are as productive as planned, identify deviations and bottlenecks and assess their cause
  • Planning: Plan projects in the same environment your team members use to report their efforts. Your ITM Platform environment will be the organizational home to your project activities.
  • Communication: Direct messages between members, contextual messages related to any given task or project. The objective is to empower teams for conversations that are permanently relevant because they stored where the work actually happens.

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Our guest author, Albert Garriga, the man behindrecursosenprojectmanagement.com, covers in detail two of the most powerful methodologies for multiproject situations: critical chain and earned value.

vector modern colorful geometry triangle pattern, color abstract geometric background, pillow multicolored print, retro texture, hipster fashion designA common situation in many companies is the existence of several projects running in parallel, which share and compete for the resources of the departments. This is what is known as a multiproject environment, and requires criteria and tools to prioritize the allocation of these resources and maximize the overall result of the organization.

In this article, we are going to discuss two methods to be able to manage multiproject organizations; which are based on two well-known project management methodologies: Critical Chain and Earned Value.

 

Start calculating the earned value of your ITM Platform projects

Critical Chain Prioritization

If projects are planned using the Critical Chain method, the protections of the different projects allow for an objective criterion for the decision making process, at least in relation to the schedule; as this shows the actual status of the project and the risk of not complying with the delivery date.

Imagine that we have six projects, each with its protection related to the tasks in its critical chain and its degree of progress. From this data, we can place them in a graph that shows the percentage completed on the horizontal axis and the percentage of protection consumption on the vertical axis.

The graph would be as follows and allows to distinguish three areas:

  • Green area. The consumption of protection is low in relation to the progress of the task, implying that the project is performing better than expected, and therefore the confidence interval to meet the schedule has increased. This would be the case for projects D and E.
  • Yellow area. The consumption of protection is close to the estimated, so we expect the project to meet the schedule. This would be the case for projects A and C.
  • Pink area. These projects have consumed more protection than estimated for their degree of progress, so they will not meet the schedule if their performance does not improve or countermeasures are implemented. This would be the case for projects B and F.

This graph allows us to objectively compare the state of the different projects from the point of view of the schedule, and thus determine which of them need additional action to meet the objectives and which are less of a priority. Obviously, from the point of view of the organization, the objective is that all the projects fulfill their objective, which implies that all are in the green and yellow areas.

Based on this, it would be reasonable to pass resources from the green area projects to those in the pink area, and prioritize the latter in case of conflict. In a way, we are "damaging" the projects that are better to "favor" those which are worse, with the aim of all going as expected.

Another important point when it comes to prioritizing projects according to this chart is to view their progress, since a more advanced project will cost more to change their situation than one that is just starting:

  • In the pink area, means that a more advanced project will have higher priority when it comes to receiving resources than one that is less advanced.
  • In the green area, the opposite is true: the more advanced projects are the least priority, since the reduction of resources will have a lower impact on the final result (less time to act).

Prioritization with Earned Value

In projects managed with Earned Value, it is also possible to objectively prioritize and compare their status’, with the advantage being that in this case we can make time and cost comparisons simultaneously through different parameters:

Cost variation (CV), which is calculated as a percentage CV = (EV-AC) / EV, where EV is the earned value and AC is the actual cost, which is used with the following criteria:

  • CV> 0: project is saving money
  • CV = 0: the project is following the planned cost line
  • CV <0: the project presents extra costs.

Schedule variation (SV), which is calculated as SV = (EV - PV) / PV, where EV is the earned value and PV is the planned value, and is used with the following criteria:

  • SV> 0: the project is ahead of schedule.
  • SV = 0: the project is on schedule.
  • SV <0: the project is behind schedule.

Imagine that we have six projects managed with Earned Value, which allows them to be shown together in a chart according to their SV and CV; distinguishing four areas:

  • The pink area (3) shows the projects that are not meeting either the costs or deadlines (projects A and E); which then become the highest priority.
  • The two yellow areas (1 and 4) show the projects that are not meeting one of either cost (project C) or schedule (project B).
  • The green area (2) means that the project is better than planned in relation to cost and time (project F), or is progressing just as planned in point 0.0 (project D)

According to this criterion, the goal of the organization would be to have all projects in the green area. Therefore, the criterion in prioritizing resources would be as follows:

  • Prioritize the use of the most economical resources for projects in areas 3 and 4, which can be done even if it implies a delay in the projects of area 4, since these have more time in terms of schedule.
  • Increase resources for projects in areas 1 and 3 so that they can be completed quicker, even at the expense of higher costs in area 1 projects, taking advantage of having savings on them.
  • This prioritization can be done "at the expense" of the projects in area 2, since these have the margin to delay or assume higher costs. Except the projects in 0,0 which would be better left alone, as they are perfectly on track.

The most complex situation occurs in the projects located in area 3, since these must improve simultaneously both cost and time. This implies that we must avoid improving one variable by lessening the other.

Final considerations on prioritization

So far, the prioritization between projects has been treated objectively and based on quantifiable variables, which is correct but insufficient. In reality, there is another aspect to take into account: the political or commercial interests of the organization.

If we think beyond the time or cost of executing the projects, we see that not all of them are just as important for the organization. In some cases, we will have projects that can generate new orders or have high visibility, which gives them priority. Therefore, the person in charge of managing the portfolio of projects must know these political and commercial aspects, and know how to balance them with the objective criteria.

 

Albert Garriga

 

 

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abstract infographics with cubes and wired structuresYou don’t even need to be able to measure the value.

But imagine if you could.

Imagine that you could quantify the value that collaboration contributes to your projects. If you could add a few cents (or a few dollars) to your "collaborative balance" every time someone makes a constructive comment, warns of a problem in time, makes an innovative proposal outside the scope of their responsibilities, share experiences of other Projects that can save hours of misguided execution.

 

Try ITM Platform and start integrating PPM capabilities and powerful communication across projects.

You could show the results to top executives, including shareholders and customers, and defend the profitability of investing in strong internal communication policies.

In reality, you don’t need to measure the value at every instant. It is enough to make sure that in your organization there are solid channels for communication to flow. You may need more than one technological solution to support the entire flow. Oh, and remember that email stopped counting as collaborative technology back in 2006.

Collaborative tools

It is convenient to distinguish between channels for internal communication (within the team of each project) and external communication, or between projects.

Communication between projects

The business chat or intranet services are excellent for removing watertight drawers, but they live far from the technical planning of the projects, so they are difficult to integrate with the daily management of them. They are excellent for cross-cutting issues affecting all departments.

Internal communication

By contrast, internal communication to a project team will be better supported through management software such as ITM Platform, which integrates social networking features within each project.

Creating the Right Portfolio

No tool can communicate between projects and connect to the equipment of each project without generating noise. Therefore, it is essential to be able to find a good internal technology portfolio that maintains governance criteria.

The combination of ITM Platform with Slack is a great example of a portfolio of communication tools. Within each project, the owner is ITM Platform, while Slack is unbeatable as a business chat between teams. Thanks to the ITM Platform Teambot app, you can also connect both tools so that the members of your teams can work with the ITM Platform from Slack.

This way you can get all the benefits of a communication policy as well as improving the quality of your projects and learning between teams.

Do you still want to measure your ROI of collaboration? Subscribe to this blog and you will get the answer.

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vector set of customer relationship management and business negotiation icons. flat linear pictograms and infographics design elementsIf you lead a consultancy firm in project management, odds are that things have been good for you in the last couple of years: the industry has recovered from the global recession in many sectors, and PM has rapidly grown as a management philosophy to expand beyond the niche areas of software development, construction and infrastructures. In fact, many of our best customers come from industries as different as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or the food industry.

However, we still find it very surprising that many small-to-medium consultancy firms with great talent offering highly specialized consultancy services in project management are not stocking up in a solid and diversified portfolio of project management solutions.

Sure, many players choose to go hand in hand with a top vendor. This grants them access to big accounts and ensures that the complexity of the solution is a golden gate to offer on-boarding services. However, there are several reasons why you should not be content with doing just that:

  1. Improve your vendor portfolio

No matter how much you love your expensive and sophisticated solutions, some customers won’t fall for them for a number of reasons: price, past experiences, or very specific needs. It’s always a good idea to add additional vendors that stick out for different reasons: whether they’re targeted at specific industries, have a focus on certain buyer personas, a methodological edge or simply a lower price point, they’ll be a catch for a number customers you’d likely not convert on your own.

  1. Diversify

If built properly, a diverse vendor portfolio can better support your own service offerings. Different software solutions will need different forms of supplementary training and support, and the chances are that, unless you build your strategy around your main vendor, smaller players can better adapt to some of your already existing services.

  1. Care about your level of Sales Relationships

People outside the industry may think otherwise, but we know that selling technological services is fundamentally a matter of trust. Trust not only takes time, but the bigger the other size it is, the more laborious it will be to establish it.

What I’m trying to say is that the ladder of sales relationships can be very long if you’re partnered with an industry giant, but just takes clear strategy, periodical meetings and some sales with a smaller company.

  1. Grow your reputation as independent advisor

The more diverse your portfolio of solutions, the likelier it is that you can be perceived as a recommender with the ability to provide reliable, independent expertise, including non-biased advice on what solutions should be implemented in a given situation. A limited vendor portfolio immediately defies that purpose.

The example of ITM Platform’s Partner Model

Over the last three years, ITM Platform has built a network of partners to sell our PPM software solution globally.

A recently added partner in Mexico landed a $ 250,000 job after we referred them a company that had recognized their need to reorganize their processes on a project basis.

In a Southern European country, a former user of ITM Platform was put in charge of creating a new food processing plant and decided to stay with the solution he was already familiar with. Our local partners were able to secure the training and capacitation for the factory set-up in the first yearly period.

In all these cases, the price tag for licenses we sold was a mere percentage in single digits of the revenues that the services provided by our partners generated for them.

That’s not a problem. “We’re in the business of providing a solution and generating recurring monthly revenue from satisfied customers. Asking our partners to share their revenues for associated services with us would only distort the model and distract us”, says our CEO, Daniel Piret.

“We think we can have a particular appeal for firms that are interested in moving from the traditional model of service provision to the juicy recurring SaaS business model”, points Daniel.

Our mission for 2017 is to transform our partner network in our main channel for sales, and to do that we have designed new partner-friendly policies.

In other words, our growth strategy consists in helping our partners attract big business.

What do our partners get:

  • A PPM solution that, added to their portfolio, competes in functionality with the top players, while having the extra appeal of being incredibly cost-effective.
  • Our partners have priority as re-sellers: they can sell licenses for a lower price than our official price lists. It’s our way to make sure that customers won’t contact us directly after being approached by a partner.
  • Hot leads coming from our marketing campaigns
  • Recurring net margin
  • And much more!

To apply for the program, register at our partner website, or download our brochure here.

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two men speaking over web camera. sofa, chairOne of the great challenges facing CEOs is improving internal communication. The challenge of this type of policy is to proceed with communication without restricting it; Or, in other words, get the information that:

  • is sufficient but does not generate noise;
  • leave traces that allow recovery;
  • distributed in a differentiated way, without generating gaps.

The importance of internal communication policies is proportional to the size of the organization. However, finding this balance can be especially difficult if you do not have a team where members are accustomed to collaborative work. To reinforce this interconnection, it is necessary to engage its members with strategies that foster the pooling of their skills and allow them to evolve as part of a whole.

When working in project management, it is vital to strengthen communication channels among the members of the initiative. If we think of our team as a coordinated body, they all bring their inventiveness and talent to achieve a common result by assembling their different functions. However, in designing internal communication policies, different procedures and channels will have to be designed:

  • communication between the team of a project

  • communication between projects and teams other than the same organization(external)

While in the first case the communication tends to have a tactical dimension, because it is oriented to improve the quality of the project and the effectiveness of the execution, in the case of communication between projects can have a strategic dimension, oriented to generate synergies and create Shared knowledge that can raise the value of the organization and its capacity for innovation. It is at this point that the management of internal communication may require an expert to coordinate and direct it.

Perhaps a line of work is not as efficient as it may be because its resources are unlinked, that is: employees, technology and processes work in an uncoordinated way. An integrated vision of the tasks assigned to the team members, allows the manager to guide the goals of each one and propose synergies aimed at encouraging reciprocal learning.

Here are some factors that you should take into account to improve the collaboration in your projects and we present the definitive tool to optimize the communications between the members of your team.

Synchronize your computer

A good internal communication plan allows the company that deploys it to save resources and avoid deviations in cost planning. This is because errors have a greater monitoring by all the collaborators, so that corrections not only come from the management of the project, but are generated once they are publicly shared. The added value of promoting self-help among peers increases the sense of authorship that the employee professes towards the object of his work.

Likewise, a project manager who relies on the values ​​of cooperation and emphasizes the role of collective work will be able to propose more agile solutions, since it will have real-time information on the specific availability of each member, and scope of specialization. It can also use the creation of subgroups that, because of the special affinity of their members, are able to solve problems that another conjugation of employees would be unable to address.

Mission impossible without the right tools

Improving the relationships between the different segments that make up a human team can be supported by software that integrates their tasks, documentary contributions and specific annotations into a single conversion platform. Relying on these types of applications often means that project coordinators have a greater capacity to intervene on the overall stage, since they have a global perspective on all operations.

Slack is a great example of business communication that manages to retain the user, retrieve shared information more easily than email, and add features through apps. There are many reasons why you should start using Slack in your office.

For example, the ITM Platform Teambot application allows you to use ITM Platform from Slack, query tasks and projects and navigate to the planning environment without having the Slack chat.

If you are not an ITM Platform customer, you can now try Teambot with a free environment from this trial:

Little by little

It often happens that employees perceive these types of measures as restrictive, since they involve the obligatory adaptation of all those affected to be implemented. However, once that initial phase of mistrust in the new protocols is overcome, they themselves discover the advantages of working with project management tools.

One of the most common points of friction between employees and a new working methodology is related to the learning challenges involved in using an unknown platform. In this sense, ITM Platform Teambot relies on the leadership of the Slack network within the world of corporate messaging and leverages its infrastructure to offer a more intuitive work experience. Moving to an environment where the user feels comfortable reduces the general rejection associated with technical progress.

To counteract this proven trend that evokes the technological evolution in teams already formed, it is appropriate to devote the time that is necessary to show the benefits derived from working with state-of-the-art solutions. Creating a tutorial for all collaborators, starting a shared video conference presentation or disseminating a written manual, are initiatives that can reduce the step and increase the confidence of the staff in the new methodology.

As you have seen, many factors are involved in the definition of an internal communication plan. Therefore, we must spare no effort in enabling new channels of interaction that ensure corporate synergy and increase the degree of commitment of our employees or subordinates.

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business man shake hand puzzle background agreement concept flat vector illustration

Although collaboration is an essential principle for a modern and innovative organization, it is worth remembering that it is not recommendable to embrace collaboration at all costs. The definition of a collaborative culture will have to be oriented to different parameters specific to each organization.

Collaboration for PMOs: advantages and disadvantages

If you are convinced that your organization needs to improve project collaboration, you must make sure collaboration is properly oriented and directed towards the goals of the organization.

For example, collaboration is a priority in innovation intensive organizations dedicated to the design of new products and services: the more ideas are gained, the greater the innovative potential. In these cases it may be important to collect inputs from all interested parties and even to determine a iterative procedure, whereby each design phase is subject to an open round of discussions.

However, in organizations with more predictive projects, a culture of open and uncontrolled collaboration can be pernicious. Even destructive:

  • Hierarchical validation procedures are proportionately related to deadline compliance
  • Informal communication relies on people, not processes. That is why large organizations and teams with high turnover suffer especially when they fail to combine collaborative elements with standardized procedures.

1. Project Management

Despite the risks of open collaboration, the risks of not collaborating are also high. A project manager who does not delegate, share information, or accept comments beyond the established channels becomes a bottleneck that can choke the entire organization.

On the contrary, among the collaborative responsibilities of the project manager is the habit of sharing knowledge with all stakeholders: team members and executives, clients, suppliers, or public entities in the case of tenders.To avoid being lost in this web, it is very important from a certain complexity to determine what tools, documents and processes are right for each stage.

2. Project collaboration

​ Another advantage of a collaborative controlled culture is that team members can benefit from cross-pollinization. Again, this is a very important aspect when the project presents unknowns or new problems to solve.

Some practices to make ideas flow:

  • Use open spaces
  • Use equally open chat tools: instead of email, a chat service for channels such as Slack, for example
  • Adopt SaaS tools, so that your computer's hard drives do not become black boxes

3. How to combine closed communication and standardized procedures

Unfortunately, these days it is not enough to be productive and execute a list of tasks within a project. Actually, we have many applications based on a timeless distribution of activities or the check-list approach , which, although they are very valid for certain functions, do not serve for the execution and planning of professional projects. The most difficult in these cases is to get the right balance between collaboration and controlled information.

ITM Platform Teambot is an application for Slack that allows, precisely, to speed collaboration through the messaging chat that has taken a robot to Mars while incorporating the strengths of an ITM Platform capacity planning tool. Where Slack adds the collaborative dimension, ITM Platform adds the control.

In fact, ITM Platform Teambot, created for all team members, is the most convenient way to use ITM Platform:

  • It allows to recall tasks and projects
  • facilitates reporting processes
  • Links seamlessly to ITM Platform

Advantages of ITM Platform Teambot:

  • Teambot is the only project management application in Slack that, besides allowing to recall information, offers the possibility to use agile and predictive methodology in the same integrated portfolio
  • Share knowledge and cooperate with organizations that integrate different hierarchies or open teams
  • Check projects and tasks in seconds
  • Report your progress from Slack and without ever having to log in to ITM Platform

Request a demo of ITM Platform and we will tell you how to establish successful collaborative practices for your projects.

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