Monthly Archives: January 2017

Find your “green flash” in each of your projects

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A green flash occurs when the conditions are right as the sun rises or sets. Growing up on St. Croix with many weekends spent at the beach at the west end of the island, I’ve seen a few of them. As I sit down to get some work done on this damp, dark, dreary, rainy day Monday I think about this one to two second flash of brilliance on the horizon. Sometimes it is just what you need to refocus your attention on the task or project at hand.

Green flash – www.sandcastleonthebeach.com

So, what then is the equivalent of a green flash moment on a project. It’s that thought, idea or component that drives you forward. It could be the group of people you are working with; or the ability to use a specific skill; or learn something new. It doesn’t really matter what it is, but rather that it motivates you. And this is a more personal endeavor than just being on time, or on budget, or meeting a specific stakeholder KPI. This can and probably should be different across different projects.

Just like a lighthouse beacon, every decision or action you take should be with this point in mind. This means that you need to consciously think through your actions to make sure they align to this particular project goal. While I don’t necessarily think it’s necessary to share your personal green flash moment, but I do think that you need to visualize yourself succeeding in the way you defined. Your mental conversation should be how you get to the end, not questioning whether you can get there.

 

3 reasons to embrace your most vocal customers

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So, you’re in the middle of a project and your customer spent the last 15 minutes telling you all the ways the are frustrated with how the project is going, and what you need to do to fix it. As a project manager, this can be quite disheartening. Often we put so much of our selves into our work and it’s hard to hear that your falling short. That said, I think we need to view this scenario from another perspective. Here are 3 reasons to embrace this vocal customer:

improvement_construction

  1. Engagement – If your customer is taking the time to vent their frustrations with you they are still engaged. At this point they still want the project to be successful and haven’t given up on you as a vendor. You still have work to do to resolve issues and mend the trust issues, but they are enabling you to do this.
  2. Improvement – Your most vocal customers are the ones that are pushing you to be better. These customers are sharing their intimate business challenges and opportunities and asking for your help in solving them. While it can be frustrating and  the relevancy to the organization may be foggy, this customer has chosen you to help them. Working closely on defining solutions together allows you to do a better job servicing other customers in the same industry.
  3. The alternative is futile – Doing nothing to respond to your customer’s concerns sets you on a very difficult path. This will ultimately drive your customers away. They underlying business requirement doesn’t go away in this situation so if you aren’t helping to solve it, so other vendor will. Additionally, if you aren’t constantly listening to the changing landscape of your customers’ industries, you aren’t able to iterate to solve those challenges.

Next time you are feeling a bit attacked by your customer, take a step back to breath and recover. Once you relax and realize this isn’t a bad thing, then you can identify your plan for exceeding expectations and delivering to the customer.

Do Project Managers still deliver value in 2017?

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“Between agile and automation, project management is going away. There may be jobs with that title but the work will be very different.” — Kevin Brennan

I saw the above quote today on Twitter. Just like a couple of weeks ago, I was totally taken aback. Agile and automation doesn’t take away what a really good project manager can do. These are methodologies and tools that a project manager can use to deliver projects better. When I asked my husband, a software engineer, what he thought of the quote, he suggested that maybe these would drive the non-technical project managers into extinction.

I guess it all really begs the question of what does or what should a good project manager do? I’ve been asked to help train someone on how I run implementation projects, so I guess I should start putting to paper the criteria around what I do and why it allows me to deliver on implementation projects. I will start by saying that all project managers are not equal. This is a big part of the reason that many technical resources are so critical of the PMO and project managers. They don’t see the value and often feel that the project manager just adds work to the technical resources.

Above anything else, a good project manager should remove obstacles from the team and the project. This might be resource alignment, or a dependency from another department, or almost anything. Status meetings, project documentation and stakeholder management are merely manifestations of this work. The catch here is that the project manager needs to be technical enough to fully understand the nature of technical issues, and work with resources on getting them what they need to resolve them.

Second, a good project manager has the analytics wherewithal to assist business and technical resources. On the business side, the project manager can help bridge that gap between that user story or business requirement to the details of how functionality works, to ultimately helping coordinate the validation efforts further offloading work from the technical project team. On the technical side, the project manager with strong analytic foundations can step in at any point from requirement interpretation to design to validation/QA.

A natural curiosity can also differentiate a good project manager. The ability to ask questions and drill into the details yields a great project management dividends. It shows your stakeholders and project team that your interested in what they have to say, and is instrumental in the trust building required to successfully deliver. Very few projects run without hitches. The desire to ask why can broaden the range of solutions, ultimately resulting in a successful implementation despite the twists and turns.

A good project manager will balance tenacity with adaptation. Too much happens too quickly these days for project managers to stagnate within in a set methodology, toolset or process. We too often see project managers so set in their ways, unfortunately often following the PMI rulebook to its smallest minutia. The moment the project offsets the delicate balance (of the PM), the delivery becomes jeopardized. Come to the table with your preferred methodology and toolkit, but be willing to be flexible during the project implementation. Ultimately, the project manager will be more successful.

At the end of the day, I don’t think being a good project manager is really difficult. I think a shift in mindset and the ability to constantly learn can make you successful. I’ll continue to do what I do and deliver projects. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this description of a project manager, sent to me by a former coworker. He hadn’t been a fan of project managers until he had the opportunity to work with me on a project. In addition to the several job referrals, he sends me funny project management memes.

pm-meme

 

2016 Retrospective

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Like many of you, the start of another calendar year made me think about what I accomplished in 2016 and what my goals are for 2017. Overall 2016 was a good year. I worked on some interesting projects, and was able to spend some time working on the business too. I’m going use this post to share 4 key observations around data analytics and business intelligence as it relates to the data integration projects I managed last year.

  1. Projects were cross data more than any time before – It used to be that a data integration project was very specific and limited in scope to single sets of data. Sometimes this happened as a result of trying to solve a very specific problem, or the specific team paying for the implementation. But this year, all my data integration projects were done at a higher level covering multiple sources. People and businesses are leveraging different data points/sources more than they ever have before.
  2. People want self service tools to cover all scenarios – Traditionally, organizations had specific roles or departments that handled data analytics. A big reason for this was the level of expertise required to mine data (databases, programming languages, etc). The increase and implication of self services business intelligence tools have enabled many more people to participate. Unfortunately there is still a level of expertise required to master these tools. We are starting to see the impact of this with users believing the single tool or skill they invested in will solve all their data analytic questions. But that’s not the case. Using the wrong tool for the job, or trying to get a single tool to cover all scenarios often results in frustration all the way around.
  3. There’s a lot still to learn about data quality – In every data integration project I have managed, there has been an epiphany moment with the customer where they realize the data isn’t as clean as they thought it was. This might be as simple as have gaps in data where you thought it existed, but it can also extend to data mistakes, duplication, missing relationships, etc. Nobody wants to hear that there are issues with the data having been used for years. However, projects where the stakeholders have an open mind and treat the project as an opportunity to remedy some of these issues are often more successful. Vendors and project teams need to work closely with the customer to ensure proper documentation and root causes are identified to the best of our abilities.
  4. Flexibility is key – We are still working in times of very tight purse strings, but needing to move very quickly to respond to current and future market signals. For businesses to succeed, the organization needs to be working at optimal performance and be able to flex with the client needs around product, services, payments, etc.

What were your key take-aways from your projects in 2016? Without reviewing where we came from in our projects and operations, how can make the next initiatives more successful than the last?