ITM Platform - ITM Platform | Projects Programs Portfolio

In every career, there’s a range of qualities and personality traits that can make or break your success. Project management is no different—and there are certain characteristics that project managers need to have in order to meet proficiencies in various industries. With the help of a useful software that eases the organizational and methodological demands of the job, project managers can find the necessary foundation of support whilst honing their own regulatory skillset.

Whether or not you have enrolled in a college program dedicated to growing a project management skillset or you intend to independently learn the industry with the assistance of technology, there are specific qualities that need to be exhibited in order to be successful. Some of the desirable qualities include having a mentorship mentality and being tech-savvy, but one of the most vital skills for any project manager is negotiation. Without negotiation, project management strategies both interpersonally and online will ultimately fail, as achieving wise decisions based on an effectual negotiation is the staple of any worthy venture.

Why Negotiation Matters

Negotiation is an essential part of project management due to the on-going nature of negotiating within the projects, and software can greatly improve the systematic fulfilment of project objectives. Both informal and formal negotiations are typical in various scenarios, such as when dealing with providers as they agree to contracts (formal) and having discussions to obtain internal resources (informal). Project managers will therefore need to know how to negotiate and how to do it well for the sake of each step of the project.

Negotiation is vital in many facets of project management, such as conflict management, contract management, and stakeholder management. By being a strong negotiator face to face and online, you will be able to showcase excellent verbal and listening skills while setting and achieving certain goals and limits. Having this skill also means that you know when and how to close the negotiation, which can make a significant impact on the outcome of the project and how your company ranks online.

Tips for Being a Better Negotiator

If you want to develop your negotiating skills, there are many tips to consider. One is that you should always take the initiative and be proactive about your approach. By taking charge of the process, you will have the psychological advantage to shape its outcome. Many strong negotiators often utilize the “anchoring” technique, where you clearly state your intentions early on in the conversation so that your counter-party uses your opinion as their starting point.

Another tip is to use your body language to your advantage. Research in communication shows that a message is transferred 55% by body language, 38% by the way you speak, and 7% by the actual words. This means that your facial expressions and gesticulations can make you more persuasive in negotiation and more suggestive of your point of view.

Negotiation is a daily part of project management, both face to face and online, and it is crucial for people in the field to develop effective negotiating skills in order to be most successful at the job in addition to utilizing available organizational software.

Receive the latest blogs directly into your inbox

Companies usually underestimate the scale of change that is necessary when implementing a new corporate technology or when changing the type of customer or type of product or service.

Despite of the difficulties that a new system of change may entail, attention is usually focused on finding new corporate technologies or hiring the best suppliers. These aspects are important, but they are not enough to ensure that change happens in the practical behavior of our teams.

See what ITM Platform can do to transform your project management processes

Change management is a global system that implies complex interactions. It must affect not only technologies or suppliers, but the whole organization. Comprehensive influence starts with the individual change of each of the employees. These changes are summed up later and they produce interactions to achieve global changes.

However, producing this change is tough, especially at the initial steps.

Imagine a dedicated and motivated employee who has been working for the company for the last 20 years. As a result of his information and his long working experience, he knows exactly how all the mechanisms of the company work and how to achieve the things he needs and wants in his job. He is a good worker, even though he is using methodologies that may be suboptimal under current circumstances.

In order to accept and carry out changes correctly, this worker needs to take into account the influence model. In other words:

Training about how to carry out change, before starting to implement it and during the process.
Specific attention to the particular situation: it is very likely that change managers find themselves with objective obstacles to the daily operational implementation. The worker might need some tools to combine quality job criteria with new ways of doing things. Leaving him alone in this aspect will create strong friction.
It is necessary that the worker maintains his motivation Properly justifying change processes is essential.
Human support. It is important to accompany transitions through support teams not only engaged in technical issues, but also human, which will prevent the worker from developing fear of or disengagement from change.

However, even if change happens under the best conditions, it is common for companies to experience a small decrease in productivity and efficiency while adapting to new circumstances. Many recognized sources refer to this as the “valley of despair”. This valley’s duration and depth are correlated with time and difficulties experimented by workers in order to adapt to new work methodologies.

Traditionally, companies’ position towards this valley was simply letting time pass by, waiting for the storm to pass and believing that problems, in the end, would be solved.

Currently, change management implies an active response to those problems. It has been proved that organizational change management gets to minimize the duration and depth of this valley, using an appropriate communication that enables the education and entertainment of the staff.

Furthermore, it has been also proved that it can be a way of saving money. Investing a certain amount of resources on helping companies to prepare their employees for changes minimizes the negative impacts these changes may mean for their work and the productivity of the company, thus achieving a significant direct economic saving, since the depth and duration of the "valley of despair" is reduced. On the other hand, an earlier productivity rise is achieved when implementing new working technologies faster, bringing an increase of the company’s profits.

When you consider carrying out a new change on the working system of your company, we advise you to take into account these five principles:

Alienation of leaders with the project

Business team leaders tend to focus all their attention on “what” is needed to be completed within the project or what is the final product, without paying much attention to the “why” and the “how”. Nevertheless, these questions are the pillars of change management.

Many business leaders think that changes in organization management happen automatically. It is as simple as defining change for workers to adopt it. However, experience shows this doesn’t happen this way. Organizational change management methodologies are a set of techniques that have proven their effectiveness in implementing change in a company.

Invest on organizational change management

These new methods allow efficient change implementation. Investing on them will bring a quicker adaptation to the new systems and improve employee satisfaction, contributing to the productivity of the company.

Counting on specific organizational change management technologies and a specialized team will reach a more efficient implementation of changes.

It is a very profitable investment if you are willing to implement the change in your company.

Boost employees’ implication

Employees’ implication is crucial. Not only because they are the ones using those new technologies at their jobs day by day, but because they are the best teacher for the rest of the staff. Getting workers involved and trained in the new work systems will allow the rest to be motivated and learn much better, as they will have the support they need within an arm's reach.

Create knowledge transfer systems

Doing something for the first time is difficult, but repeating it with the experience and support of others is an entirely different thing – and a much less daunting one.

Take into account that there are many barriers for the knowledge transfer between projects and internally towards every team project. Knowing how to recognize them in time will help you design effective knowledge transfer policies.

Leave written proof of all change processes. Let the experience acquired by few train others.

Keep on reading about change management on our blog:

How to cope with resistance to change in your organization

Change management: what we do or what we are

Receive the latest blogs directly into your inbox

The professional training industry has experienced several game changing trends in the last decade. Until the arrival of the internet, in-company training used to be conducted face to face by consultants with pedagogic methods that resembled very closely what happens in a classroom. In spite of team exercises and group-focused sessions, trainers and coaches were the authority and the source of wisdom, knowledge and expertise.

What has changed in professional training?

Currently, most of the average training courses have been replaced with online experiences because they are cheaper to produce for vendors and take less time off employees’ schedules. An HR officer will always consider the benefits of letting their staff take a course at their own pace, rather than disrupting the daily operations of an entire group to put them together in a room, sit tightly and listen to somebody talk.

The perception has changed radically: if you need to absorb knowledge or just check a formal training requirement, online self-paced courses do the job and are only half as boring as ordinary face-to-face training. Moreover, they can be better tailored to what each learner needs.

Not all changes are for good: very often, online training is poorly designed and based on the very same rudiments of repetition and passive learning. Education guru Roger Schank and founder of Schank Academy is quite right when he points out that the principles of learning by doing are being ignored by most online education providers.

Roger Schank dixit: “Learning happens when someone wants to learn, not when someone wants to teach”

But the new ecosystem will never go back. Nowadays, if you want to justify spending thousands of dollars in offline training, there really needs to be a rationale behind it. You need to deliver outstanding learning experiences that are memorable, that change people’s perspectives and that will have an impact on how learners apply their experience to their job.

Training in project management

Project management has followed the same trend. There are a lot of formal requirements, particularly towards certifications, that can be met with dull courses. But everybody knows that learning the PMBOK by heart won’t turn you magically into a certified project manager: you still need the thousands of hours of practice. And even with that kind of experience, running projects -not to say a project management office- remains challenging for the smartest minds.

The job can be so daunting, even for experienced folks, that additional training is common. It can never harm. In fact, bringing a good coach to the office can be a great way of shedding light on unsurfaced problems or perceptions that might not be obvious to all… perhaps because there are power dynamics silencing some opinions, or simply because nobody ever has a full image of what everyone is doing.

So how does an extraordinary, memorable experience in project management training look like?

A good example is the trend of gamification, also called serious games. Serious games are designed with a purpose, rather than for sheer entertainment.

A great example is to teach the complexities and elaborate dynamics of SCRUM with LEGO simulations, a model developed by Alexey Krivitsky.

Krivitsky isn’t alone in the usage of building blocks to represent and simulate work environments. The importance of LEGO as a driver of serious games is such that the method LEGO Seriousplay has been registered. In this process, participants build their own model responding to the mentor’s questions.

It’s a great way of probing deeper and deeper into participant’s mental models and perceptions, thus helping surface unconscious conflicts in beliefs or priorities between members of a same team. When these differences became apparent, it’s much easier to talk them through and come up with creative solutions.

In fact, LEGO Seriousplay has been used to help project teams with memorable kickoff meetings where members can share, discuss, use metaphors , elaborate and negotiate using the mediation of the built model.

Teaching project management through serious games is a trend in and of itself, with specific research devoted to generating guidelines and extending its practice, or quite accomplished and entertaining online games like shark word or Unlock.

A scene of the project management game Unlock

It’s a brave world out there, but project management professionals have plenty of resources at their fingertips, including the possibility of using ITM Platform to teach project management through real world practice with a cutting-edge tool.

It’s what our educational partners, including many leading institutions, are already doing. Universidad de Barcelona, Monterrey’s Technological Institute and the leading technological university in Brasil are simulating PMOs with ITM Platform, so their students strengthen their core project management capabilities:

Coordinate project work
Align project results with business strategies
Keep everyone in synch
Obtain live data of project progress
Collaborate on a shared environment in real time
Distribute responsibilities according to differentiated roles

Feel free to browse our educational partner page if you’re interested, or inquire about the possibilities of an in-company course with ITM Platform with an email at info@itmplatform.com

Receive the latest blogs directly into your inbox

Even though we all have seen Kanban boards, many of the principles that stand out this methodology are often overlooked when in practice.

If you are working in software development, in a technological environment or in a start-up, it is very likely that sometime you have used a Kanban board to visualize which tasks are still pending, which ones are in progress and which ones are already finished.

This is the Kanban MVP: three columns, three stages: to do, in progress, recently completed.

ITM Platform’s personal board sums up the pending work with Kanban.

This simplicity has been, in some way, a blessing, because boards have become hugely popular. However, in a way it has also doomed them – many people either use them or criticize them without knowing in detail the characteristics of this method.

For example, Kanban’s usefulness for managing work that doesn’t fit into any project is commonly ignored.

This makes Kanban an excellent tool accessory to manage a portfolio of projects, in which change demand also includes isolated tasks for which there is no formal coordinator or project manager.

Nevertheless, very few portfolio tools include Kanban among their characteristics; and very few online Kanban versions feature portfolio management.

If you fancy having both things, ITM Platform is on the of the few suppliers that can satisfy you.

Link your Kanban projects with a unified portfolio with ITM Platform.

Kanban vs agile vs SCRUM

In the software development world, it is common to consider that SCRUM is the best agile methodology, if not the only one. However, each methodology has its pros and cons. If you want to have a look at the main differences, here you have a helpful article.

SCRUM, for example, is only used for software projects and, in that field, it replaces traditional waterfall design methods in a much more efficient manner.

However, outside that field, SCRUM becomes very fragile, not to say useless. For example, it cannot be applied to design processes of new products that lack programming elements.

On the other hand, besides being used extensively in development (often mixed with SCRUM methodologies), Kanban has proved its utility in contexts where most of the work volume is operational. The classic example is industrial manufacturing, such as the Toyota factories where this method was invented. But the design of new goods and services of any industry can benefit from its structure.

The 3 principles of Kanban:

Visualize everything that is happening at any given moment. Each element and its stage can be seen within the context of all scheduled work, regardless of whether it’s a project or operational work.
Set caps for work in progress (WIP)There should be a maximum number of tasks that can be managed at the same time, and the visual boundaries of the board help us perceive that limitation. For example, if a quality control unit can manage a maximum of 5 batches, it shouldn’t accept the 6th one until it has one empty spot for it. This might not be very intuitive, but WIP limitation consists, precisely, on visualising bottlenecks in order to prioritise work in those areas and gather the resources required to solve them.
Improves work quantity. As soon as a task is finished, another one from the backlog is started. In order to do that, it is essential that the backlog be correctly managed, prioritised and categorised.

When should Kanban be used?

There are 4 situations in which Kanban should be used:

In operative environments where priorities change very often
When changes in requirements can be introduced any time
When work units are isolated tasks
When the incremental optimization of an already existing process is pursued.

What are Kanban’s advantages?

Maximum transparency
Continuous worflow
Equating the team’s capacity with the ongoing work
Focus on the duration of the cycle (how long it takes a task to go from backlog to be completed)
It allows assigning different WIP maximums to the consecutive stages and redirecting the work to improve the delivery time.

For example, regarding this last point, it’s very normal to have 4 stages within a programming team: To Do, In progress, Code Review and Finished. Allocating a maximum of 2 tasks to Code Review means that In Progress cannot take over more tasks right away. Therefore, programmers must spend some time checking code, a very unrewarding task that is often relegated. Thanks to this, we can avoid the bottleneck of having all the code written, but pending from review.

When teamwork and immediate communication are added to the board, benefits are crystal clear.

Receive the latest blogs directly into your inbox

Being a project manager can often feel like a circus performer juggling a dozen balls at one time. The only difference is you have to juggle those balls within a strict deadline and, hopefully, within your budget too.

One of the biggest issues PMOs face is a gap in communication within their department and the many other parties involved in the project. Without stellar communication, any one of those balls could go flying out of place, obliterating your chances of successfully executing your master plan.

Start managing projects for all your customers with ITM Platform

When there is no room for error, the only viable option is to equip your team with the best possible tools for the job. Ensuring flawless communication is simple when you combine a quality project management tool with a leading customer relationship management software. This is especially critical for companies that run client projects. A great PM and CRM combo ensures that you can always track customer relations without losing a single detail on either end.

Actually integrating the two products is a snap. Industry-leading PM programs offer advanced API for developers that will allow you to connect to almost any existing system you already know and love. ITM Platform even provides a comprehensive array of APIs that are constantly updated to ensure they remain user-friendly, a key tool for advanced productivity.

With features like this, combining the power of your PM and CRM is a simple and streamlined solution to communication issues you’ll want to prevent during your next project.

But how exactly does a CRM assist you with communication? A stellar customer relationship management program gives you the benefit of automatic communication tracking. Missing important information like that two-line email with a question from your client can be damaging to your project and relationship.

Beyond communications, you’ll also have the ability to expand customer tracking with the ability to connect methods for purchases, invoices, client profiles, and suppliers.

Simple human errors, like a missed email or a faulty memory, no longer have a place in your carefully developed process.

Quality customer relationship management software will also offer automatic data sync. Once connected to your project management tool, the information collected from your ITM Platform mobile app, desktop application, and CRM platform will merge together. Information that gets added becomes almost instantly available for your entire team on every device. This makes information clear and accessible for everyone involved so your team can stay on the same page at every stage of the project lifecycle. Items like invoices, budget estimates, and revenue are readily accessible on programs like ITM Platform.

As a project manager, it is your job to ensure your comprehensive plan accounts for the flawless execution of tasks by all parties. By arming your team with a combination of outstanding PM and CRM softwares, you’re sure to excel in your previously determined targets by creating a strong collaborative foundation.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to get the most out of your project management tools, request a helpful ITM Platform demonstration now and get started upgrading your communication skills today.