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This is a guest article by Elizabeth Harrin. Elizabeth has recently published a review of ITM Platform on her blog. This article contains affiliate links that don’t cost you extra.

When I’m on holiday I want to be, you know, actually on holiday. Enjoying my vacation time, chilling out with a cocktail and a barbeque and playing ball with my kids. I don’t want to be checking emails, dealing with phone calls from my project sponsor or still doing project reports from the cabin in the woods because no one else can possibly write them in my absence.

I know our roles as the project manager is important, but the project can’t stop when we’re away. It’s not good for you to be using your relax and recharge time to do work. You deserve a break.

However, it’s easy to say. It’s less easy to do, because so much of the project management part of our roles isn’t straightforward to delegate to someone else, and often we don’t have anyone to delegate it to. That example of writing project reports while I was on holiday: that actually happened. The report wasn’t even that good because I wasn’t in touch with the team to get a real update of what was going on.

So how can you get a proper break without your project falling apart without you? Here are 5 stress-busting tips for before your vacation so you can go away and enjoy yourself with confidence.

1. Get On Top of Your Schedule

It feels a lot more comfortable to go away if you are leaving your project schedule in a good state.

An up-to-date schedule means that everyone will know what tasks they need to work on while you are away. To be honest, they’ve probably got an idea of what they should be doing anyway, but having it there accurately on the schedule means they have no excuse!

If you still have tasks without assigned resources, assign someone so that it’s on their radar while you are out of the office. If you need to, take some time before you go away to explain what the task is all about and how you expect it to be done. Use that conversation as a way to confirm the delivery date with them as well and to check that your estimate is realistic.

2. Handover the Important Stuff to Someone Else

If you are lucky, there won’t be anything important happening while you are away. You’re a project manager, so you’ve probably planned your holiday at a time where it is going to have a minimal impact on the project.

Unlike me, who went on maternity leave just before a two-year software development project went live (that was some handover).

However, if there is anything that is outstanding or is presenting as an issue, brief someone about it. You might have a number of people you talk to: don’t feel that your handover has to be to one single person. Your project sponsor might pick up some of the issue management. A workstream leader might chase down outstanding tasks. Your project coordinator might be briefed about staying on top of the action log.

Write down as much as you can when you’re preparing your handover because people forget. Include key contact details of people who can help them so that they don’t automatically speed dial you with problems.

You can also let them know what they can ignore. Someone might complete a project task, for example, but if it’s not on the critical path the work could sit there until you come back to deal with it. Try to set some clear guidelines about what should be actioned or progressed and what can wait. Trust me, a lot of it can wait.

3. Set Your Out Of Office Message

Set expectations from the beginning about you being out of the office. Change your voicemail message so that people calling you hear that you are away from the office. Add an autoresponder to your email system so that people who contact you get a response saying that you are away. This all helps to manage your colleagues’ expectations so that they aren’t frustrated that you aren’t replying straight away (especially if that is what they are used to). It also gives you some breathing room as you’ll know people are being told where you are and what to expect in terms of a response.

If you have a deputy or someone who can handle the majority of your tasks, or urgent queries then include their details in your messages. Check with them first though! Personally I wouldn’t set up a rule to forward messages on, but if that’s the culture of your organization then get that created and working before you leave on your last day.

Remember to turn off your out of office responder and reset your voicemail when you get back. Just put a note in your diary to do it on the day you come back from holiday, and then no one will leave you voicemails saying that your message is out of date.

4. Talk To Your Sponsor

Even if you aren’t handing off any work to your sponsor, pop some time in their calendar to meet with them and discuss the plans for when you are off. Let them know your vacation dates and who they can turn to in an emergency.

If you are happy for them to contact you while you are away, let them know – and give them your vacation time contact details if necessary.

The aim here is for you to go away knowing that your sponsor is confident that everything is in hand and that you have it all under control, even if you aren’t physically there for a week or two. Again, this is all about managing expectations.

5. Plan Your Return

Block out the morning of your first morning back. Book yourself out so that your diary is full and no one tries to book you to attend a sneaky meeting.

This is your time to catch up. Review all your emails, get back into the swing of things, log into your project management software and check on the team’s progress. Having this buffer on your first day back is a huge stress reliever. Even if you do spend some of that time on the phone to the help-desk having forgotten the password for your laptop.

With all these plans in place, you can go away and have a fantastic time on your vacation. As much as it might feel like the project will grind to a halt without you there, it probably won’t happen. The chances of you coming back to a total disaster after a fortnight off are remote, especially if you’ve worked through these tips and put your plans into action for a smooth transition away and then back.

The team will no doubt be glad to have you back and I expect you’ll have a stack of emails to read, invoices to approve and tasks to do. But at least your forward planning will have made for a stress-free holiday and time to recharge before you get back into the daily management of your project.

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For change to be carried out under optimal conditions, it must influence a series of attitude changes in the workforce to ensure that it is carried out successfully, both individually and collectively.

However, it may be complex to produce changes in business organisations and its working methodologies, both in large and small corporations.

Some studies indicate that approximately 70% of attempted company change or transformation end in failure. This is not surprising, because human beings, by nature, are conformist and tend to be resistant to change.

According to a 2016 study by consulting firm McKinsey, there are four building blocks that determine the influence on employee behaviour.

All the models focus in the mindset of the worker and assume that the worker will accept the change if he observes or finds positive attitudes around his or her working environment. Therefore, the exposition of each of the attitudes will begin by articulating a phrase that summarises the worker's feeling towards them. Below, we will analyze why each of the attitudes work.

Role Modelling

"I observe that my colleagues, leaders, and in general the whole team behave differently."

This theory works because people tend to imitate the attitudes of a group and to integrate within it, both consciously and unconsciously.

If the whole team behaves in a certain way, the tendency is that all workers try to adopt the same attitudes to blend in.

All new members will be conscious of the active working model and, therefore, will adopt it immediately.

Knowledge, understanding and conviction

"I understand what is being asked of me and it makes sense to me"

In a company, or in any other organization, there are critical voices, and they must always exist. They are necessary for both individual and collective growth.

However, both criticisms as well as the adoption of collective standards, especially among highly qualified teams, should not be destructive but constructive. In this way, the company can present a certain flexibility to adapt to the specific needs and methodologies of each of its employees.

At the same time, as they are rules that are not completely imposed, but are collectively established, understood and accepted by all workers, compliance is guaranteed.

The worker should not understand the new methodologies of work as an imposition but as a necessity that makes his work more productive and efficient.

Development of talents and abilities

"I have the skills, the talent and the opportunity to adopt the new working methodologies."

In order to adopt new working methodologies, firstly, it is necessary to learn to use them from a theoretical point of view and then proceed to a practical tutored period. To do this, the company must conceive the adoption of new work methodologies and new project management systems as an investment for the future. After all, the work, products or services developed by the company are channelled through projects, so working on their optimization means facilitating the success of the company as a whole.

In addition to the worker feeling that what is good for the company is good for him, he must also feel accompanied and guided during the process of change. Therefore, it is necessary to teach already established workers to adopt to the new working methodologies.

Reinforcement of adopted attitudes

"I note that structures, processes, and systems support the change that is required of me."

The dissonance between the demands of behavioural change and the infrastructure of technology and methodologies can definitely inhibit not only motivation for change, but the employee's own commitment to the organization and leadership. On the other hand, if the employee is able to see that the required change is not only a necessary consequence of the organization's processes, but that its new behaviour is prolonged and supported by those same processes, leadership will be perceived as responsible, considerate and capable to take into account all the details.

If workers observe, feel, and understand that change leads to a more successful business and that this is beneficial to them, they will be happy to continue adopting new work systems. Therefore, the greater productivity achieved through change must be transferred to their daily work and demonstrated through data and also through improvements in their daily lives.

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ITM Platform is specifically designed to support multi-project organizations: our client base ranges from small consultants to large corporations, such as Grupo Lala, the first manufacturer of dairy products in Mexico, or Spire Healthcare, the second largest private healthcare provider in the United Kingdom.

Why do they choose us? They say that among all the tools that allow both planning and executing projects and managing portfolios, it is not easy to find solutions that are useful for both project managers and PMO directors at the same time in the same environment.

So when someone asks us if we can help them get their Project Management Office up and running, the answer comes as natural as the smile you give an old friend. In this article we discuss the main reasons why ITM Platform is a great ally to support the activities of a PMO.

1. Capture your organization

Any organization can reflect the structure of their teams in a very short time. Whether it's a functional organizational structure based on departments, a purely project-based structure, or a matrix-type intermediate structure, the first step for your organization to start managing your ITM Platform projects is to map which department, project or area of competence belongs to each member.

In fact, flexibility is achieved by combining two criteria:

Organizational units, comparable to traditional departments
Working groups, which allow cross-grouping. For example, you can create project teams that have a certain permanence character. These groups can also be used to bring experts together by competencies so that project and PMO managers can easily assign them to specialized tasks and groups.

Once you have reflected the departments and functional units, you can continue defining the details that will allow ITM Platform to control the costs and progress of your projects in real time:

Hourly rates: How much do your team members charge per hour? How much do external consultants charge? What is the overhead of a workgroup compared to a technician? By specifying the fees for each type of expert, ITM Platform allows you to reflect the actual costs of your projects with the desired level of detail.

2. Capture your processes

ITM Platform allows you to capture any methodology you are using in your organization for project management. Although the software is intended to capture the components, processes and groups recommended in standards such as PMBOK or Prince2, especially when it comes to project integration management, it is not necessary to strictly follow these manuals to properly manage the projects. The focus of the tool is to provide a flexible technological service that allows the capture of all relevant information and capture the process flows that exist in each organization.

3. Connect to your teams

ITM Platform empowers all project teams, from the highest level director to the young talented new arrivals.

Management: Those who are interested in seeing key metrics such as the degree of progress of the projects by each program, the level of risk exposure of the projects, or the composition of costs per manpower according to the provider can use the customizable scorecards and reports.
PMO portfolio managers, program managers and PMO directors

The people that connect the company's strategy to day-to-day project management are those that most directly benefit from the ITM Platform. Let us see some different aspects:

Shared resources

In situations with cross-cutting projects shared by experts and analysts from different functional areas or departments, it is common practice for one of the PMO director's main attributions to be to avoid conflicts when using shared resources: professionals in high demand due to them being very qualified and are irreplaceable in their specialty. Conflicts for shared resources are the cause of delay in 42% of large cross-sectional projects.To avoid such conflicts, ITM Platform allows you to immediately identify over-allocation of all resources in the organization.

Scenario projections

The ITM Platform methodological tools for defining business objectives and linking them to project execution scenarios are one of the aspects most valued by those who manage project programs.

Portfolio Evaluation

Aggregated project data allows you to carry out a continuous evaluation of your portfolio with the required periodicity. From the moment that your entire project team is using the same tool to plan and execute projects to carry out portfolio tracking, you can say goodbye to tedious periodic portfolio evaluations that stretch over months. It will be sufficient to extract data from ITM Platform to discuss with your team.

Project Managers

The possibility of combining predictive projects with agile methodologies allows different relationships to coexist between customers the development of products and results within a single unified portfolio based on shared financial management and resources.To top it off, project managers benefit from a user experience optimized for the integration of projects from menus that are always visible and easy to navigate.

Analysts and team members

Team members with no planning and control responsibilities should only enter the progress data of their tasks on the ITM Platform. For this, they have different auxiliary interfaces that save time and increase their productivity:

Mobile App on Android and MacOS. Report the time worked on a task. It is a fundamental support tool for those who are out and about or working remotely.
The ITM Platform teambot. The integration of ITM Platform with Slack is designed to aid personal productivity, as it allows each team member to track the tasks in which they are involved and report progress with simple commands such as “/itmplatform list tasks”
In addition, software development teams working with JIRA for issue management can connect these with their ITM Platform projects to manage their portfolio from their preferred environment.

4. Align project management and portfolio planning

Project management software can be divided into three broad sections: task managers and teams; project planners; and portfolio managers. Few tools can find the balance between these three areas. This is where ITM Platform stands out precisely because our obsession is to optimize the return of the projects from the first minute, with little to no barriers of entry.

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Too much innovation can be bad

Innovation is dangerous. Despite the many benefits of marketing new products and services, it is important for any private organization not to underestimate the complications of practicing innovation on a day to day basis. In short, for a private organization with limited resources, too much innovation without sufficient control, can quickly lead to disaster.

Start managing your innovative projects in a unified portfolio with ITM Platform

Innovative ideas are, by definition, very risky. When you launch an innovative project, the future, the success and acceptance in the market, and often the technical difficulties for its development are unknown.

Solution: portfolio management of innovative projects

Over time, some innovative projects will fail, while others will succeed, they will come to market and may even become established.

This means that, in order to achieve successful innovation, it is imperative to fail, close defective projects, expose oneself to risk and, ultimately, lose financial resources that will not produce results.

So that the risk of innovation does not overwhelm your organization, it is essential to treat innovative projects as a portfolio that is managed according to unified criteria. Therefore the team that manages the portfolio has the important task of monitoring the organization's innovative projects.

Responsibilities include the following:

Demand a clear business argument about the commercial feasibility of the development and its relationship with the needs of customers.
When there are no spontaneous candidates for innovation, it is essential to request new proposals in the strategic directions and areas that have been identified.
Establish evaluation criteria for proposals.
Evaluate the proposals, discarding those that are too risky or do not promise sufficient benefits.
Decide investment limits for innovative projects, as well as total risk capacity.
Compose a balanced portfolio.
Coordinate the management of projects that make up the portfolio, especially in the case of shared resources.

How to monitor a portfolio of innovative projects?

When composing the portfolio and with a view of monitoring innovation, it is important to:

Have an appropriate balance between different types of projects, such as small technical innovations that improve an existing product or totally new products and services; and types and levels of risk.
In addition, it is essential that innovative projects are not linked to each other and can fail or continue independently. Otherwise, if projects share risks and have dependencies, failure in a component could have an impact on the whole portfolio. The fundamental idea of a balanced portfolio is diversification and experimentation: that each project has its own life.
Achieve a number of projects low enough to be feasible with available resources (which will often be shared) and high enough to allow the introduction of new products and an interesting flow of projects for the portfolio's half-yearly and annual evaluations.

Evaluation of innovative projects

As we indicated above, in order to evaluate innovative projects and decide whether to keep them in the organization’s portfolio, it is important to define a series of benchmarks. Although it will depend on the sector and the characteristics of each entity, some typical criteria are:

Estimated cost
Development time
Critical resource consumption
Alignment with the strategic factors of the organization
Innovative and differential character
Technical success probabilities
Commercial success probabilities
Ease of imitation by competitors

Once the criteria are selected, it is important that they be assigned a weighting that allows final estimates to be made. The relative weight of each factor is usually a measure of the organization's situation. For example, in consulting firms that rely on networks of collaborators, the consumption of critical resources will be of little importance, whereas the limitation of development time may have more weight than in other more stable organizations, where innovative projects can be developed with stability over the years.

The score is a good estimate of the value of the project. However, the viability of an innovative portfolio depends on special attention to the composition of its risks. Therefore, beyond that final score reached by the projects based on the selected criteria, it is recommended that the composition of the portfolio of innovative projects make use of an assessment matrix.

The assessment matrix of innovative projects

Many of our readers are already familiar with the ITM Platform risk assessment matrix. The evaluation of innovative projects allows a completely analogous technique to be used.

In the assessment matrix of innovative projects two variables appear:

Expected commercial return of the project
Risk level

Ideally, all projects will be placed in the upper left quadrant of the matrix, they may be scarce and there may be many projects in the balanced quadrants marked in blue (where returns are proportional to risks).

Bearing in mind that it is good practice to include projects of different types with different levels of risk and knowing that, no matter what we do, some of the innovations will not be successful, a good result is the allocation of the project budget with Percentages that follow a proportion like that of the illustration.

From the location of innovative projects in the matrix and their combination with the punctuation according to the criteria listed above, it should be much easier to make the final decision about which proposals to accept and which to discard.

Innovation will remain risky; but well-organized monitoring will increase the organization's chances of success and learning, with the potential to turn unsuccessful projects into better, more ambitious proposals in line with the pulse of the market.

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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.

A 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

Recursos en project management