project management - ITM Platform | Projects Programs Portfolio

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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The Pentagon is not only the symbol of the most powerful military power in the world, but the supreme governing body of the American military: the public organization that has contributed the most to the consolidation of project management as a discipline. The technological development experienced by the arms industry and the expansion of logistics operations supported the development of numerous methodologies and an abundant class of engineers.

For example, the Work Structure Decomposition (DEBS) method was designed by the Department of Defense and was first deployed to the United States Navy in 1957 within a ballistic program. In addition, one of the most common careers for military members and retired veterans is precisely to direct projects. Military matters assume the highest demands on timely delivery and quality of results.

On the other hand, the fact that the Pentagon has access to huge budgets for other states carries a very important risk of wastage.

You cannot live in glory: in complex environments with multiple projects and where it is practically impossible to always have an overview of all the work, it is very easy to produce problems of inefficiency. This explains why project monitoring is a fundamental mission in the management of any portfolio.

X-ray of the Pentagon

In January of 2015, an internal report of the Department of Defense revealed a chilling fact: in the next 5 years a total of 125 trillion dollars could be saved, which would be enough to appropriate adjustments in the administrative and bureaucratic departments.

Approximately a quarter of the Pentagon's budget is spent on administration, management and maintenance costs, and cannot be used for the mission of the agency.

So, what are all these resources destined for? In large part, the maintenance of a complex structure of management processes in which a total of one million people are employed, a number forty times greater than the employees of the pentagon itself and practically identical to the ones that are in operations Military. The six major administrative processes are Human Resources, Health Management, Financial Management, Logistics, Procurement and Suppliers, and Real Estate Management.

In the image below you can see an example of the intricate bureaucratic web in which all these back-office workers are involved in one way or another. The title of the image is: Integrated Department of Defense system for the acquisition, development of technology and Supply logistics.

That said, the image shows the complex process by which it is decided to contract (or not) a particular service, to develop (or not) an investigation, to manufacture (or not) a weapon or other device, to move it (or not) to the front and keep (or not) weapons, vehicles or any other type of technology.

The inefficiency of this process is proverbial, as in the case of the development of the Bradley vehicle in the 80s, whose total development cost 15 billion dollars.

The solution: efficient management

Other documentation for internal use indicates some of the measures that can be taken to improve the management of these projects, making it much more efficient in the administration of all financial resources. By way of illustration, in 5 years, according to their calculations, 4,325 more soldiers could be hired.

Among the most interesting solutions for other organizations are the following:

Establishment of transversal teams for each process that can create common rules and methodologies for all
Prioritization of contracts
Review of contracts to exclude and discount all items that do not correspond to real requirements
Training of cross-cutting teams to improve productivity
Development of internal initiatives in priority processes and activities

Interestingly, pentagon solutions go through the creation of a portfolio of internal optimization and operational innovation projects that would be overseen and supported by program managers.

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

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

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

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

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

Is project leadership the same as traditional business leadership?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Self-management and discipline

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

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

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

3. Strong processes embedded in top-value technology

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

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

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

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

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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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This is the third article in a series devoted to the 10 areas of knowledge covered by PMBOK since its 5th edition. Read more on the two articles already publishedon project integration:

The 10 areas of knowledge. 1: Project integration management

Integration with the ITM Platform Project Menu

Control project time, effort and costs in real time with ITM Platform

The areas of knowledge are listed by importance

The areas of knowledge recognized in the PMBOK are practical subdisciplines that can be described as a set of methodological component, the sum of which covers the total domain of project management expertise. In contrast with the six phases of a project, the areas do not follow a cronological logic, but are rather sorted by importance. That explains the fact that project integration, almost a meta-area of knowledge that extends across all the rest, appears first and not last. Without component integration, there is no project beyond its parts. In other words, integration is a necessary condition for the existence and survival of a project. We're not even talking about results, efficiency and success.

That's where the next area of knowledge comes in. Now that a project exists, we want to do something specific with it. Project scope management allows to properly fulfill the two most basic conditions for a project to yield the result expected:

The project includes all the work needed
The project excludes everything that is not strictly necessary

In other words: while integration consists in giving life and sustaining a project as a complex artifact, scope management controls the causal relationships between project components and the final result. If the idea of a project starts with the final results, scope management includes all the causal factores that explain that future state.

The benefits of proper scope management are self-evident: by following the processes included in the area, the project manager will increase the chances of success and facilitate a clear work structure for the project team.

Due to the causal nexus implicit in the notion, scope can refer to:

Product scope : functional requirements to be delivered to the client.
Project scope, a broader term that often extends to include product scope. Project scope refers to the "how" (the means) rather than to the "what" (the product), and includes all the piececs that need to be take into account throughout the project lifecycle, including risks and management alternatives.

Project scope management

Project scope co-depends from the two other variables in the famous triangle: time and effort. The three variables exert a reciprocal influence, so that (at least theoretically) a larger scope can be tackled with a longer time devoted to the project or with a larger number of resources devoted to it.

The processes included in this area are thus tools to define the scope triangle with the maximum accuracy. Beyond the creation of a scope management plan, the processes include:

Requirement collection
Scope definition
Creation of a Work Breakdown Structure(WBS)
Scope validation

Of course, as we'll see in coming articles, risk management has an enormously important role in scope protection: it forsees possible situation that may alter it, and design mitigation responses.

Fine-tuning the scope definition

An accurate definition of the project scope improves time estimates, the efficacy of budgeted costs and the resources needed, forming a baseline against which all subsequent performance metrics and monitoring activities will be tracking. At that stage the scope also connects with the important area of project communication, which is vital to prevent the scope from gradually expanding.

Project Scope Statement

This detailed statement includes the following:

Objetives
Project scope and qualities
Project requirements, conditions or delivery capacity
Limits
Results
Acceptance criteria
Budget
Initial organization
Initially defined risks
Programmed milestones and important dates
Cost estimates

Work Breakdown Structure

This logical method to decompose the work needed into its smallest possible pieces is vital. Starting from the scope statement, it groups all tasks in a diagram and enables the work of creating a detailed gantt chart with dates, estimated costs, required resources, and possible change scenarios.

WBS can easily become the soul of the planning process - the whole team participates in its definition so no level or task are left behind.

WBS Dictionary

Project scope management consolidates around this imperative document, which contains both the statement and the WBS and extends to a detailed description of work packages with their objectives, assignments, dates, acceptance criteria, assumptions, assigned resources and dependencies.

This instrument of permanent consultation shows the different relationships between work packages and consolidates the scope baseline.

Recommendations

Beware the kitchen sink syndrom!

One of the clichés in project management but unfortunately an invariably common risk, scope creep is also known as "Kitchen sink syndrome". Projects are particularly vulnerable to scope creep when they are large and/or innovative. In the latter case, for example, it's understandable that some of the basic requirements in the WBS may become black boxes with more complexity than initially estimated.

Realism is no time waste

That's the reason why an extraordinary effort to compile realistic requirements can avoid so many problems later down the road. It might seem counterintuitive to spend hours trying to properly understand the dimensions of a secondary area within the project - but if major areas have dependencies with it and as a consequence the critical path is accepted, a delay in the project start will surely be compensated with better time control throughout the execution.

Descriptive and permanent communication with the project team and stakeholders substantially supports scope management. Don't think that it's a waste of time to talk to a technician about apparently nimble aspects of her routine: it may help you steer the complexity of your project with dexterity.

Control, control, control

Project monitorization requires the adoption of tools that immediately identify deviations with estimated times. If you lack visibility of the time your team members are devoting to their tasks, or if your financial management is not properly connected with the project advance you will immediately benefit from ITM Platform advantages.