Let’s face it: making a good plan is a difficult task. It is necessary to identify all the requirements and break down the work in a way that is manageable and achievable by the team, appropriately managing dependencies between tasks and grouping work so that the best result is obtained.

ITM Platform offers an advance editor Gantt  to complete the plan and pursue it on a very easy form.

Planning is complicated, but it is even harder to turn that plan into a reality. Put to work the whole team in a coordinated manner without loss efforts unnecessary tasks is a real challenge. Good communication and leadership skills with the team are required. Each team member should know what to do and must be responsible for their work, that’s why communication is so important in managing teams factor. Communicate and involve the team in decisions get to work hard in the right direction.

ITM Platform has a social red  corporative  that makes it simple to communicate with the team.

In addition to assigning and communicate to each team member their tasks, it is necessary to accurately track the subsequent work and progress. Those responsible for each task should report frequently on progress achieved, without waiting to have a problem, so that the project manager can deal with any eventuality. This communication must be fluid and simple to perform, assuming no additional equipment work.

In short, it plans to stop being just good intentions we deploy all our communication skills and leadership for the team to work hard and achieve the expected project results.

It is said that a project manager should think and act like a CEO of a small enterprise, that enterprise being the project itself. How should a project manager behave when appointed CEO of MyProject Inc.?

• If you have a habit of committing, then you will feel responsible for effectively managing the resources (money, people, and materials) entrusted to you.
• If you have a habit of planning, you will know better than anyone about the vision, values, short- and long-term objectives, potential threats and opportunities, relationships with third parties, process assets, quality standards, etc.

These two habits (committing and planning) are highly important. However, it may be more important for a CEO to be someone who gets things done:

• CEOs do not do the work themselves, they effectively delegate to managers (not to go-fers). It is not effective to dictate each and every action or to go into too much technical detail. Any effective delegation has 5 steps: 1) agree on the desired results; 2) indicate guidelines or frameworks; 3) identify available resources; 4) define the oversight and assessment mechanisms; and 5) clarify the consequences of good and bad performance.
• But others do not do everything. What will you spend most of your time doing? To communicating in an “executive” manner. Operational level communication, steered towards getting things done, should not be overloaded with details. As the CEO of MyProject Inc., when you speak at the “shareholders’ meeting”, your messages have to be clear, synthetic, information-based and factual. You summarise what has happened in the past and predict what is going to happen in the near future. Steering committee members ask high level questions that you have already anticipated. Your answers are straight to the point.
• Last, but not least, the ugliest part of being a CEO is that mistakes are costly: you can be accused, demoted, made destitute, even prosecuted! Some mistakes are yours, some are from others. To protect yourself from other's mistakes, the only thing you can do is implement “expiation management”. Maybe it will never be necessary, but it is not a bad practice to keep an up-to-date record of project milestones, the decisions taken, who took them, when, whose idea they were, what was recommended, the risks assumed, etc.

In our field of project management, there are many well-known techniques to produce an “executive communication”. Here we are just three examples:

• Communicating on cost and schedule variations could be based on the standard EVM (Earned Value Management).
• Scope control can be graphically expressed on a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) diagram, with the percentage of completion on control accounts.
• Status reports could be institutionalised across the organisation. Recipients would appreciate the use of dashboards and RAG indicators (Red: the project is now off-plan and drastic action is needed; Amber: substantial or corrective action is required; Green: the project is on-track and likely to meet expectations).

As far as “expiation management” is concerned; it is highly effective to keep a record of risks, on the one hand, and a record of project milestones, on the other – in other words, a project log

You may have had some experience with a project manager who was not as efficient as perhaps they should have been. When we come across an ineffective project manager, what do you usually think of them? Which characteristics upset you most? If you happen to be in a position to contribute to his performance appraisal, you may have even written down some of the expressions below:

1.He is always complaining about internal processes, resources, the client, the deadlines, etc. But never actually offers any solutions.

2.He is not a proactive person. He does not anticipate problems. He acts reactively, from crisis to crisis.

3.He takes a long time to make a decision. He does not seem to have clear criteria.

4.He does not have a complete plan of the project, either written down or in his head. When I ask for one, he creates a Gantt Chart but I suspect it is only to fill up the file.

5.He does not manage time well. He is always overwhelmed. He never seems to have time for anything new. He does not answer emails. He does not return calls. He is always too busy doing urgent things to do anything important. He generally fails to meet commitments.

6.He does not know how to delegate, every decision must be his. He gets too involved in technical tasks.

7.He is too authoritarian. He has exhausted the team. He receives numerous complaints from department managers, clients, suppliers, etc. He does not have a good relationship with those involved, they do not trust him.

8.He lacks drive to close the project. He always tells me that we are at 90%.

9.I always see him making the same mistakes. He stumbles at the same hurdle every time. He does not try to improve.

10.He does not keep a record of incidents. He does not know how to manage scope. He says ‘yes’ to everything the client wants.

11.He is unaware of the budget, what has been spent, billed, the profit margin, etc.

12.He gives me no executive information. For example, he is incapable of justifying real progress, what the final delay on the project will be and how much the cost will overrun.

Ineffective project managers are usually criticised for lacking “soft skills”
Please take notice that only the last three bullet points are related to hard skills. Most ineffective project managers are criticised for lacking soft skills. A project could fail simply because two team members are always fighting, because the team has low morale or because we do not understand client requirements.

Imagine you are a project sponsor. You enter the elevator and bump into your project manager. There are two kinds of conversations you are likely to have:

Conversation 1:

• You: Hey! I’ve been meaning to catch up with you. How’s my project coming along?

• Project manager: Well, so so… The thing is that Mike’s leaving the company and has left us somewhat in the lurch…

• You: Mike? Who’s Mike?

• Project manager: Our database expert. I thought you knew him. I don’t know what we’ll do without him…

• You: So, do I need to tell the client there’s going to be a delay?

• Project manager: That wouldn’t be a bad idea, yes.

• You: How long? What are we doing about it? Will it affect the project budget? Why wasn’t there a backup?

• Project manager: Basically, we can’t cope with all the new requests. They keep changing the requirements from one day to the next.

• You: We can’t have that. We can’t say ‘yes’ to everything. The contract has a fixed price. I’ll go and see them tomorrow. Give me the record of changes, the risk register and the estimate to complete.

• Project manager: Hmmm, well… this is my floor. I’ll send you an email later…

You already know that this project manager will not send you an email this afternoon, or tomorrow morning. This project manager will come up with the excuse that there were more urgent matters to attend to. What impression does this project manager give you? Do you think he is an effective project manager? What will you say when they ask for your opinion at his annual review? What would the CEO have thought if he had taken the same elevator?

Conversation 2:

Rewind to the beginning. You enter the same elevator but this time bump into an effective project manager. How will this conversation go?

• You: Hey! I’ve been meaning to catch up with you. How’s my project coming along?

• Effective project manager: You have an email from me in your inbox. The risk we identified two weeks ago has materialised. I need your approval to replace the database expert. You’ll remember that we had approved a 2-month subcontracting deal for € 10,000. This cost overrun will reduce the final margin by 0.5%.

• You: Does it affect the final deadline?

• Effective project manager: If he’s here next Monday, as they tell me he will be, there’ll be no delay on that count.

• Sponsor: On that count? Are you worried about something else?

• Effective project manager: The level of rework we are having to do. They changed the specifications for a third time on Monday. I estimate we have produced 500 function points that we need to just throw away. This means another € 10,000.

• You: What do you suggest we do?

• Effective project manager: I’ve prepared three alternatives for reducing the scope. There’s a Powerpoint attached to the email I sent you. Do you have time to go over it now? I think we should go and see the client tomorrow…

Can you see the difference? This second project manager clearly conveys a sense of efficiency. What do you think his or her secret is?

I see it every day. Organizations acquiring project management solutions and failing at the implementation. Why? Probably because you know how important project management is, but the rest do not (necessarily). Moreover –and worse-, they might be right.

Of course, project, program and portfolio management is key. If you run the PMO, it becomes the quintessence of your work.

Alas, realizing the advantages of a well-implemented project management organization requires being in a particular position of the value chain where not everybody is placed. Put yourself in the Team Member’s shoes; would you perceive any value by reporting the time you spent working on tasks? Or, if you were an experienced Project Manager (and chances are that you wouldn’t even know what that means: you just do your job), would you be willing to estimate tasks efforts, foresee expenses, spend time declaring risks or evaluate the Earned Value insights when you positively know what’s going on with your project? Again, probably not. Because your portion of work is just fine as it is.

These are some ideas that may help when it comes to transform your company in a project-driven organization.

• Think of the “clamp” effect. You need to act top-down and bottom-up in a coordinate way. By just pounding the table (top-down) or kindly ask everyone to get on board (bottom-up) is not enough. You need to go both ways.
• I know managers afraid of setting the rules when it comes to asking for reporting. They think people may find it counterproductive or useless; they are scared of their own team reactions. If you happen to think like that yourself, how will you convince others? Do not hesitate: set follow-up based on the metrics the organization needs: hours, expenses, progress, risks…you name it. But do not allow anyone to go on his/her own.
• You do not seem to have that superpower? Go ask someone else to do it. The higher the better. Top managers not only need to ask for the benefits of accurate dashboards, but also to agree with the effort involved in getting to that point. It is not easy, I know. So many directors want results without any sacrifice. My piece of advice: work hard on it before making any movement, otherwise they will not feel involved and afterwards it might be too late. It is not easy to convince a CEO to support an initiative that is already ongoing, is it?
• PMO professionals frequently feel like the most disliked people in the organization: if they happen to succeed in the previous steps, they will be promoting the top-down pounding on the table + rules + procedures, etc. Very annoying. Here is where bottom-up strategies pop up. Do not underestimate the lower levels of the organization or overestimate the C-Level support. The “clamp” needs to act in a coordinated manner in order to balance pressures. Here are some practices that seem to work quite well:

1. Give back some of the information you’ve got. If the information is useful for you, it should also be for others.
2. Facilitate free communication among team members. Vertical communication is fine, but the real world works its own way.
3. Publicly highlight good performers. Your PM tool should help on this.
4. Is there a plan? Let people know where they exactly are located on it.
5. If you know what project management culture is, spread it out. Education is the long-term investment that works best in the future short-term.
6. There frequently are neat management issues to solve (which you are probably very aware of) but also day-to-day issues that are not so evident. Do your homework. Research on those, ask people what their daily problems are and really get into it. Then, figure out a solution for the most common issues that you can help with. The thing is not just responding to the higher level demands, but also to simplify and add value to the majority.
7. Try to solve a situation in a particular area that worries your resilient target more than you. Say Project Managers are concerned about team geographical dispersion. Okay, try to solve it with your brand new tool. Or, even better, can you reduce their paperwork? Go ahead, choose you least needed report and kill it.
8. Do not bite off more than you can chew. Go little by little; first step first, then second, then third. Expecting to transform your organization in a bing-bang way is not a good idea (unless you have no choice). Expectations are everything in frustration management and, really, your tool will not make the difference. The way you implement it will.

I hope it helped! What is your experience on this? Any recurring issue when it comes to setting up a project management culture? How did you solve the difficulties you found?