When you take on the role of “project leader” you should be able to increase effectiveness on a daily basis. One strategy consists of streamlining communication to underpin our leadership. Work tools represent another important way in which to enhance effectiveness. Trust in solid and versatile software to allow yourself to fully focus on the portfolio and meeting the expectations of your clients.

Let’s look at 11 keys to developing this:

Let’s think about our human capital. The team should consider its project manager as someone they can (1)trust and willingly accept their point of view and working methodology.
How do we ensure people trust us? (2)Transparency is one of the keys.
Why withhold information? If we are strong and confident, there is no reason to fear people questioning our leadership. Very seldom does confidentiality justify maintaining information secret.

(3)Lead and (4)delegate if we can do this, our confidence and strength will become pillars underpinning a great leader. Although, let’s be honest, we are not perfect. Moving on with our confidence intact after recognizing that something can be improved will make us stronger.

Knowing how to delegate is another step towards successfully reaching a common goal. There are bound to be professionals in our group capable of getting the most out of a task. Let’s be fair and generous with their ideas; the most important thing is to achieve those goals and we should therefore consider every contribution that might facilitate success.

A leader with (5)motivation  will transmit their energy with much less effort and, furthermore, if they  (6)lead by example, they will maintain high morale in the team and productivity at 100%.

The triumph of good ideas: (7)equality;  Whenever confrontation arises between teams or departments, a leader needs to overcome those differences in a constructive manner. To do so, we should practice active listening and give priority to the most suitable solutions for achieving the goals. Avoid personalism, let’s apply equality at work. You need to know how to say “no”, firmly but without offense.

Another point at which persuasive communication plays a fundamental role is when (8)pressure needs to be kept under control. The team depends on its leader to preserve stability and focus on tactical aspects, especially on a long project.

Important: (9)active listening. This is about emphasizing your comprehension of the other person more than making an effort to be understood yourself. As we can well imagine, we must be  (10)accessible leaders for there to be positive and fluid communication. Our team should be confident enough to communicate freely and without restraints. And always ensure that the way you speak leans towards (11)clarity of expression, complicated language will only distance you from your audience.

In short, the goal is to exercise effective leadership from every perspective while not forgetting the fundamental role of fluid communication.

Any project, no matter how good the initial planning, may encounter new situations or unforeseen circumstances that will need to be dealt with. In a project managed using flexible methods, the project manager must demonstrate this flexibility and capacity to adapt to changing circumstances to thus convert problems into challenges and emerge stronger from having resolved them.

To do this, project managers will need

to demonstrate certain characteristics:

Show leadership

This is very easy to say but much harder to do. When faced with an adverse situation, it is likely that team members will adopt a series of negative attitudes. Some will show pessimistic behavior that will magnify the seriousness of the adversity, and they will transmit these negative attitudes to colleagues. Others may become paralyzed from not knowing how to behave in light of the new circumstances, demonstrating a passive attitude that allows problems to grow on their own if they are not resolved.

Project managers should show their leadership skills and be able to nip these attitudes in the bud. They should demonstrate strength by offering solutions and transmitting a positivity capable of ending the vicious circle of negative and passive attitudes.

Avoid the temptation to increase resources

When faced with an unfinished task or one that is not achieving the expected results, a simple solution will always be to increase the material and human resources being applied to completing that task.

However, such situations cannot always be resolved in this way. For example, increasing the number of cooks in a restaurant might increase the total number of dishes prepared but will not necessarily improve the quality of the best one nor indeed the average quality. Hence, although the waiting times may be less or more diners may be served, it is quite possible that the end quality of the product (and customer satisfaction) will be lower; the very opposite to the desired effect. Therefore, rather than increase the resources allocated to the task, it would be better to consider whether the best use is being made of current resources or to even reorganize the project entirely.

Project managers should be capable of considering to what extent allocated resources need to be increased in order to achieve added value in the project and how those resources will need to be used better.

Show the reality how it is

There is a certain tendency to sugar-coat problems and show the reality in a different light to how it actually is. Nonetheless, in time all problems will eventually come to light. Given that there is no way to hide a problem forever, it is better to truly accept it from the very beginning. By doing so, in the long term, project managers will gain credibility, respect and trust.

For example, when discussing the degree to which project goals are being met, project managers should honestly communicate the real status of the project to all team members. This can be accompanied by a halo of optimism and proactivity that might stimulate the team into doing their best job every day but without hiding or sugar-coating the facts. Project managers should combine realism with optimism.

Review actions

Second World War historians say that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat their errors”. In the same way that this sentence can be applied to people or cultures, it can also be applied to projects.

Project managers who do not analyze the tasks in which they were involved will repeat the things they do right and commit the same mistakes time and time again. It is possible that they will sometimes benefit from luck or a special skill in certain fields that will enable them to emerge victorious on many occasions. However, in the long term, work has its rewards and the best people in any field will be those who make the greatest effort; the same applies to project management.

Hence, a constant review of all actions taken is necessary; in the most exhaustive and neutral way possible. Reviewing actions immediately after they are completed is useful because, if a mistake is detected, corrections can be made now and in any actions in the immediate future. However, it can sometimes be useful to let time pass between events and their review in order to thus obtain a less biased perspective and make a more objective analysis.

It is also important to accept advice from critical voices. It can sometimes be cruel to uncover our weaknesses but this is merely the first step towards converting them into strengths.

Constant passion for ongoing improvement

Project managers should be able to apply everything they learn to the project they are managing. All the improvements stemming from the reviews and analyses should be applied as soon as possible. Similarly, project managers seek new ideas in their daily lives that enable them to improve what they are passionate about, achieve improved efficiency in their projects, and obtain greater satisfaction from the client and workers.

You are not alone in the pursuit of these goals; you have the best possible support. At ITM Platform, we work hard to develop the best project and service management solution that will help you organize all your projects and services, as well as eliminate subjectivity from the executive team when tackling the project portfolio.

We work every day so that the management of your projects is as simple and efficient as possible so you can increase your productivity. Try ITM Platform for free. “ITM Platform: projects delivered, clients satisfied”.

Scrum is a flexible method that can be used for managing any type of project. It has been traditionally used in the software sector in particular, but can also be applied to other areas.

It is especially useful in processes with rapid changes or emerging requirements. It is based on a premise that the customer may not have a clear and precise idea about the final goal when deciding to launch a project. Furthermore, it understands that the market, suppliers, raw materials, customers, economic framework, etc... society and the environment as a whole are all in a state of constant flux. The system used for project management should be able to adapt itself to these changes with enough speed so as to satisfy the needs of customers at any time.

To that end, the scrum working method builds a series of constant iteractions. To quote a popular saying, scrum “divides and conquers”. Rather than proposing lavish projects, it divides a complex project into short stages (between one and four weeks), which are usually referred to as sprints.

At the start of each sprint, a meeting takes place to establish the targets to be met. There are three main figures at this meeting:

• Product Owner.
  This person is responsible for representing the voice of the customer or stakeholder. They must position the tasks to be completed on a prioritized list of targets, which is referred to as the product backlog.

• Scrum Master. This person is responsible for ensuring team members achieve the established target. To do so, they must eliminate obstacles that could prevent the completion of tasks and coordinate teams. It is important to stress that this person does not lead any of the teams because each team organizes itself without the need for an external leader.

• Development Team. These people are responsible for executing the tasks. They are governed by a horizontal and collaborative organization structure.

At the end of each sprint, another meeting takes place and this one is referred to as the sprint retrospective. It analyses the level of compliance with established targets, the changes that were necessary while undertaking the work and the process as a whole in an attempt to apply the principle of ongoing improvement (kaizen).

This produces feedback on the process, analyzing the difficulties encountered, improving the execution of future processes and ensuring that the team works a little better each day.

This principle of review and ongoing improvement is also applied during each sprint. The scrum method is based on daily meetings between members of each team. These meetings should be as short as possible in order to detract the least time and energy from executing the tasks. They should not last any longer than 15 minutes. They are used to briefly review the work completed the previous day and establish a list of priority targets for the current day so that each team member knows what they should be doing at any given moment. In turn, the retrospective analysis of activities carried out the previous day should lead to positive feedback by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses.

With this we return to the saying “divide and conquer” because once again we divide the task for each sprint into micro tasks to be completed each day by each member of each team.

This flexible method is not exclusive. It can (and indeed should) be supported by others, such as Kanban, which will make life easier for all workers and increase profitability from the effort made.

If you are trying to plan a schedule for your project, you need to put ideas down on paper and assign a timeslot and priority to each one.

This article describes a few methods you can use to prepare this schedule:

Spreadsheet

This is probably the simplest method, but also the least efficient. Although they were designed for other uses, spreadsheet programs work with tables that can be used to create schedules and calendars.

In fact, many of these programs have various calendar templates to save you time filling out a table with the days of the week or month.

Some spreadsheet programs need to be purchased, but there are an increasing number of free software alternatives or “cloud-based” systems.

The programs that only exist on one computer (programs that are not “cloud-based”) have a problem: you need to come up with a way to share the files. The simplest and more “traditional” method is to distribute them by email as attachments. This method has the problem that, if any team member wishes to make a change, they need to make sure they make the change to the latest version and then resend the amended file to everyone. This method generates inefficiency and task duplication. It is far from recommendable in a technology-rich environment where there are other simple and much more advanced tools.

The solution to this problem is to use “cloud-based” platforms. Some of these platforms allow file changes to be synchronized with our personal space in the “cloud” or even with our work and personal schedule or email.

These “cloud-based” tools usually offer free plans that are sufficient for personal use or for small companies. They can also be used to learn how to use the system and see how they can improve efficiency in our work.

We can then contract various more comprehensive plans that fully meet the needs of our company.

Online calendars:

These tools are also simple to use, and much more efficient. Tasks are added to a calendar that can be amended and updated in real time by any member of the team. Furthermore, they allow an alert system to be configured and synchronized with computers or mobile devices so that no member of the team is left unaware of a task.

Calendars can be created in one of two ways:

• Individual calendars: A separate calendar can be created for each team member, on which all the tasks they need to complete within a certain period of time are organized. The project manager will have access to the calendars of all team members, enabling them to oversee progress on the tasks.

• Project team calendars: A shared calendar for a whole project is created, which can be accessed by all team members involved. The calendar permissions can be configured so that some of the people with access to the calendar can view the events while others can also edit them.

Gantt Chart:

This is probably the least intuitive tool, but is the most efficient. It allows teams to organize project tasks and objectives in real time so they can work together on a single timeline. It also shows the duration of tasks, connects tasks wherever they are interrelated, enables notes to be added to tasks and time periods, and allows for the comparison of projects and the teams assigned to them.

At ITM Platform, we have created a project management tool that can incorporate your preferred system for organizing your work and that of your company. The following video shows how easy it is to create Gantt charts using our software. If you would like to try it for yourself, just have a go with our trial version. It will change the way you look at project management.

Calculating the time needed to complete a project is a fundamental part of the planning process. Given that a project consists of multiple tasks, planning the schedule for a project as a whole is directly related to estimating the time needed to complete each one of the tasks.

Estimate the duration of your tasks within ITM Platform

Who should estimate the duration of a task?

This should be done by people who are used to completing tasks of a similar nature to the one being estimated. They will understand the complexity of the task and therefore the time needed to complete it. Similarly, when estimating the necessary budget or human resources, an opinion from an expert in the field might provide increased certainty and precision when planning the task. Nonetheless, any study should be supported by the greatest possible mathematical certainty.

How is the duration of a task estimated?

There are different methods that can be used depending on the associated risks and the intrinsic variability of the task.

It is a good idea to properly differentiate these two concepts. The risks should be included in the risk management process, and not considered when estimating the duration of the task nor included in the schedule.
We should focus ourselves on time estimates at this point, which consider the variability factors inherent to the task and cannot be avoided, therefore requiring inclusion in the schedule. As is the case for any estimation, there is a core or average value and a confidence margin or interval, which will consist of a certainty percentage.

There are various estimation methods to choose from:

Estimation by analogy

This consists of estimating the duration of a task based on the historical data available. To do so, it will be necessary to gather information on projects similar to that which we wish to estimate and that have been previously completed by our company or others. A series of descriptive statistics can be obtained by knowing their completion times, such as the average completion time or the standard deviation from this parameter. Assuming that the duration of these projects follows a normal or Gaussian distribution, we can establish confidence intervals. Hence:

• The average +/- a standard deviation will provide a confidence interval of 68%.
• The average +/- twice the standard deviation will provide a confidence interval of 95%.
• The average +/- three times the standard deviation will provide a probability of  99%.

Gathering information on more projects will enable a more precise estimation of both the average and the standard deviation.
At the same time, as can be seen, obtaining confidence intervals with a high accuracy percentage will mean that the estimated parameter will have a greater variability. By observing the Gaussian bell curve, it can be seen that making small changes to the typical deviations in the central values has a greater effect on the accuracy percentage for the estimate. However, at each end of the curve, larger changes must be made to the typical deviations to have even a slight effect on the degree of accuracy for the estimate.

Hence, for the majority of projects, studies are performed with a confidence interval of 95%; in other words, the average +/- twice the standard deviation. It is the agreed value for which the greatest degree of confidence can be obtained with the least variability in the estimated parameter.

Although a normal distribution will be obtained from the majority of studies (and the natural variables), the information gathered on previous projects will sometimes show a duration for the tasks that will better suited to lognormal distribution.

In these cases, the distribution curve is characterized by showing Gaussian behavior for the low values while showing logarithmic behavior for higher values. This means there are work groups that show abnormally high completion times.
In these cases, there is no sense in calculating average values or typical deviations that include all the projects. The projects that show abnormally high completion times should be excluded. Those projects that  “do not follow the norm” should also be studied, but in a different way. We should focus ourselves on finding external factors that affected their completion, about which we should also be aware.

Another possibility is that the scope of these projects was much greater than the other projects we are studying. If all the projects analyzed have a local scope and one of them has an international scope, it is likely that the latter required a much greater completion time.
It would be more appropriate to perform a parametric approximation for such cases.

Parametric estimation:

This estimation technique is very similar to estimation by analogy but, in this case, there are no previous projects with a scope similar to that which we wish to undertake. The solution is to use correction factors that consider the magnitude of the project. Linear regression is the mathematical technique adopted to do this.

For example, if a project was undertaken at a national scale in countries with a small population and a large population without there having been any countries with an average population (the scope of the project we wish to undertake), one estimate should be made for the projects completed in small countries and another for those completed in large countries. Subsequently, a correction factor should be calculated based on the number of inhabitants. Hence, a process of interpolation will enable calculation of the time needed to complete a project in an intermediate-sized country.

The learning curve is another factor that should be taken into consideration. If a project needs to be completed repeatedly, it is obvious that it will be completed faster the more times it is completed. With this in mind, if all the data we extract are taken from experienced work groups, the estimation we obtain will not be realistic. It will be necessary to include correction factors that consider the number of repetitions and the learning curve.

Estimation by expert criteria:

This is the least recommended method but is sometimes the only one available (for example when there are no historical data or great disparity among them). It should also be taken into consideration that, although the other techniques explained above are mathematical, human intervention is still required to decide on the previous projects to be included in the study and the mathematical model to be applied. Hence, any type of study conducted by experts will imply a certain guarantee.

One way to improve this estimation is to use various experts independently. An average can be taken from the results proposed by each expert and a more overall and less biased view can thus be obtained from the particular criteria of each one.
Another way to improve the estimate produced from this method is that known as three-point estimation. In these cases, experts are asked to produce an average estimate, a pessimistic estimate and an optimistic estimate. An average result is subsequently taken from these three estimates.

As is the case with any system, this one also has its faults. The pessimistic and optimistic estimates might consider external risks, which should not be included in the task duration estimate. It will therefore be down to the project manager to clarify or reach decisions on these points and enable a more precise estimation to be generated. In any case, as explained above, these latter methods are fundamentally based on human criteria and therefore more subject to error than other methods based on mathematical analysis.

The project manager, in addition to the difficulties inherent to the management of projects and tasks, must face endless situations that can affect them personally and emotionally, as well as the well-being of his team. For this reason, a good project manager should have the following soft skills:

1. Communication

Communication is the foundation of a properly-functioning, civilised society. This also applies to project teams. A good project manager must be able to clearly communicate to his team the tasks they must perform, so that the performance of the workers is adjusted as much as possible to the needs of customers.

2. Know how to listen

An aspect of communication is the ability to listen to others. A good project manager must be able to listen and understand both clients and workers. Only then can he be able to mediate between the two and arrive at the project’s desired goals.

3. Leadership

The project will not easily come to fruition if the project manager does not demonstrate a high level of leadership. The project depends on him and he will achieve it through the work of the team, so he must know how to lead.

4. Strenghten the team

The success of a project lies in a good team (or several teams, depending on the type of project). And it is the project manager’s responsibility to create that team and ensure its proper functioning. Choosing the right people, assigning responsibilities, betting on a climate of trust and mediating in case of conflict between team-members are some of the key functions that should be performed to ensure the performance of the group.

Conflicts should not always be avoided, though, as they can sometimes have a positive impact on the team or project, provided that the project manager correctly intermediates. In addition, a reward system should be devised for each team, based on the achievement of the objectives.

5. Problem solving, adaptation and intelligence

These three skills that should be intrinsic to any leader, including a project manager. Quoting the scientist Stephen Hawking, "intelligence is the ability to adapt to change." During the execution of a project, there are many circumstances that can change, creating adverse situations and problems that must be solved. A good leader demonstrates his intelligence by being flexible, adapting to the moment and finding solutions appropriate to the context.

6. Restless research and creativity

When facing a problem that you have encountered before, you can simply apply a solution that previously worked. But what happens when you face a new problem that requires a different solution?

A project manager must be able to find innovative and creative solutions. A leader must be able to look for solutions applied in other companies, environments, markets or sectors and find a way to apply these solutions to the specific situation of the organisation.

However, there may be situations that are completely new, for which there are no precedents. In these cases, the leader should be creative and find new solutions.

7. Economic skills

The management of a project implies the management of a budget assigned for its execution. A project manager must not only be able to adequately manage human resources, but also the material and economic goods assigned to the project.

8. Empathy

The project manager must be close and make himself accessible to team members. Only then he can understand their needs and difficulties and provide the best solutions.

Additionally, the project manager should always consider the human aspect of each task. All team members can face personal problems of force majeure. Especially in these situations, the project manager must empathise with the team and act as a problem solver.

9. Motivation

A good project manager should know how to properly motivate the team and take into account the different expectations of team members. His mission will be to find a rewards system that is motivating for all members.

10. Risk analysis

One quality that any project manager should have is to be able to be analytical. Before taking any action, he must be able to foresee the consequences in case that something doesn’t work as intended and prepare contingency plans for these situations.

11. Learning and improvement

In classical Greek philosophy, Heraclitus of Ephesus affirmed that "change is the only constant". In today's world, fast and dynamic as never before in History, this quote makes even more sense.

A project manager must be willing to constantly change, to adapt and learn tirelessly. Only then he will be able to consistently contribute and improve the execution of his projects.

At ITM Platform we work for you and for the success of your projects. We put at your disposal the best tools in the cloud, so you can concentrate on taking your business to success. Our goal is to make you spend less time with the software and more time with your teams. Try our platform for free and discover how we can contribute to the development of your company.