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Project Managers: 3 Tips for Managing Project Schedule When Client Expectations Don’t Match Implementation Timelines

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There are often misalignments in the available time for a project implementation and the full range of work that needs to occur. As a technical project manager, I have managed this scenario many times as a result of optimistic sales schedules, distorted expectations of the custom software implementation (versus installation of out of the box software) or a variety of other reasons.

Kenneth Darter wrote in a in March 3, 2014 blog post on ProjectManagement.com that there are 3 Methods to Managing Customer Expectations: Optimistic, Realist and Pessimistic. Different organizational groups lean towards different methods. An optimistic approach can result in customer & team frustration when hiccups or schedule slippage occurs, while pessimistic approaches sometimes breed mistrust as the estimates are so padded that nobody believes them. Realism in project estimation requires significant a solid understanding of the team players, the work that needs to happen & client expectations.

PM_constraintshttps://www.projectsmart.co.uk/understanding-the-project-management-triple-constraint.php

As Duncan Haughey pointed out in his December 19, 2011 post on Project Smart, it is often said that there is a 3-way constraint In all projects between cost, time and scope, with quality assumed. This has recently evolved to a 4-way diamond of cost, time, scope, quality, with customer expectations as the foundation. Without understanding the customer expectations, it will be incredibly difficult to you make the right decisions regarding cost, time, scope or quality.

Regardless of your primary method for setting schedules, you will always need to take into consideration cost, time, scope, quality, and most importantly customer expectations.

  1. Communicate the Facts – In reviewing the list of work before a weekend migration project, it became apparent that there were more machine hours of work to migrate some historical data than existed in the weekend of the deployment. Armed with the facts, I was able to talk the client into reducing the scope of the historical data migration for the deployment weekend and plan for remaining work after the fact.
  2. Discover the Business Motivation – During a data integration project with aggressive timelines, a client requested 2 weeks for internal validation. After initial pushback, it became apparent that the issue wasn’t our work, the client had data quality concerns from the source and needed to determine the impact to the business. We were able to tweak our approach to the project to help mitigate some of the concerns.
  3. Be Vigilant – As a project manager it is imperative to keep your pulse on the project. When snags occur (and they will), you need to communicate loudly and often to ensure the project team and the client understand what happened, why it happened and how it’s being resolved.

At the heart of every project are the client expectations. While there is an inherent quality you should push your project team towards, cost, scope & time will all radiant around the expectations and adjust as required.

favoritepicDagny is currently Managing Director at Digital Ambit, a consulting company focused on helping you with your data and software integration needs. Dagny has almost 20 years of experience in project delivery & customer success of software implementation projects.

 

The 4 things I’m thankful for

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As we wind down the work week and gear up for Thanksgiving, it seemed appropriate to write a blog post about everything I’m thankful for. I generally try to be polite and say thank you, but in business I feel that some cultures have gone overboard with the thank you culture. I think it is a silly practice to say thank you ever time someone sends an email, sets up a call or does basic tasks within their job function. If overused, I find it cheapens the sincerity of the praise. I would much rather get praise for going above and beyond what was expected of me.

We are 9 months in to running our business as our sole source of income, but have been running it off an on for the last 3 years. During that time, we didn’t ask our friends & family for monetary contributions, but we did rely heavily on them for support and input.

The 4 things I’m thankful for are:

  1. Our parents – Both sets of parents were entrepreneurial. We were raised in environments where we were constantly involved in new adventures. Some worked and some didn’t, but that was ok. We were raised to take chances. Without this instilled spirit, we might never have jumped ship from safer, more stable jobs for other people.
  2. Our family – It’s often written about the stress the entrepreneurial lifestyle has on families. Our immediate and extended family, related or adopted, have all been extremely supportive. Our daughters got involved as interns, learning real-world development tools, designing real-world solutions. They have patiently and quietly stood by as we’ve changed or over-ruled plans to accommodate travel, business meetings, networking, etc.
  3. Our friends & colleagues – Our friends & colleagues are fantastic. We had an overwhelming response to our newsletter launch and our friends have been the source of our work. On top of that, many have been around to talk shop and share their expertise in all things, from sales processes to government contracting.
  4. The startup community – I have spent much of the last 9 months learning and growing. I couldn’t have done it without the help of Community Business Partnership, DC Web Women, Women in Technology, Drupal agencies and conferences, plus various other organizations, conferences, meetups, and events. Each of those made talking about our business easier, gave me tips, tricks and tools to leverage within my business and all were open and willing to share their experiences.

turkeyTo everyone who I’ve met along my journey, thank you for sharing, caring & supporting me on this new adventure. Have a Happy Thanksgiving! 

 

 

Size Matters: How Fast to Grow your Business

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Last night I had the pleasure of joining Jennifer Key from Chief and Heather Cox from Mighty Little Web Shop at the DC Web Women Speaker Series on growing your business. We all came at it from a different perspective, highlighting our unique experiences. I spoke about my experience at different startups and how their growth decisions shaped their conclusions as well as my decisions. Jennifer talked about her personal journey grounded in intention, culture and risk.  Heather spoke about the flows and ebbs of business, which ultimately led her to focus on a very specific niche.

DCWW_speakerseries2_1116

I consider myself an entrepreneur, but Digital Ambit is really my first business. I guess I’ve been closer to a entrepreneur groupie, or maybe just entrepreneurial employee. I’ve had several opportunities to come into businesses early on and help them grow. Some took VC funding, and other self-funded. Some suffered their demise by way of the exuberant spending of the dotcom bubble. While others sold for a hefty profit or pivoted and continued on as a smaller, boutique offering.

Jennifer opened her talk by mentioning that she can’t tell others how to grow their businesses as she doesn’t know them or their businesses. However, she can outline the drivers of her growth, which contributed to the growth of the businesses she’s been involved with. There are 3 critical components she comes back to when evaluating opportunities: intention, culture and risk. Every day, Jennifer starts her day by setting her intention. While these days these are focused on gratitude and kindness, they do fluctuate. By setting your intention, you ground your decisions. Business culture is what drives employees and founders to do what they do every day. Businesses need to decide what their culture will be, and as they grow will need to figure out how to sustain that culture. Sometimes the culture isn’t sustainable, and that’s ok. Although a loss or change in culture may shift employees away. Lastly, business (or personal) growth is about risk. Jennifer herself is risk adverse, but she surrounds herself with mentors and friends who encourage her to take calculated risks.

Heather wants to be a rockstar when she grows up, singing her songs and playing the guitar. In the meantime, she’s focused her business on a niche market and learning what she needs to in order to grow her business. For a long time, Heather didn’t have to market her business. The leads just flowed in. She started this business to engage her dream of building websites and developing marketing strategy for her customers. She opted for packaged pricing so she’d never have to write another proposal. She also participated in some extensive marketing and accelerator programs to learn what she needed to know. Heather is quick to admit she sticks to the basics of understanding her numbers, but has clear size, revenue and margin goals she focuses on every day.

Overall, i saw some clear themes in our stories.

  1. Optimism – Although I wouldn’t consider myself very optimistic, I do have confidence that I can learn and conquer anything I want. “They aren’t problems, they’re possibilities” and “there are no obstacles, but rather opportunities” were a few of the catch phrases of the evening. They definitely highlight the optimistic nature of being an entrepreneur. Some days are scary, but you need to fundamentally believe you can reach your goals.
  2. Mentorship -We all talked about people we worked with that gave us their time and expertise when you need it. Jennifer reminded us to that we need to value our mentors time and make sure to set an agenda so you can work on what you need. There are formal and non-formal mentoring programs, but any opportunity for networking is an opportunity to find one.
  3. Culture – Heather has really molded her business around the things she likes to do, removing or outsourcing the things she doesn’t. That will make for a very deliberate culture. Chief is known for community engagement and built that into their office space. They have a space dedicated for entertaining and host numerous meetup and other groups on a regular basis. I’m building this business with my husband to drive the culture and lifestyle we want. The choices we make in our business will all come back to why we started it and what we want.
  4. Know your numbers – It’s imperative to understand what’s going on in your business. Without that how do you know if or when you can hire? How do know what’s success? or slow down? You don’t need to be the accountant, but you do need to keep an eye on your critical metrics. Identify a few critical ones that tie to your goals and watch them closely.

I don’t care what you think “success” looks like!

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I read an article this week about a Bain & Co. study that found that women enter the workforce with higher aspirations than men and the confidence they can get there. According to the study, this changes dramatically only 2-3 years into career development. After a couple of years, women start “losing confidence in their ability to fit the stereotype of what ‘success’ looks like at an American Company. The study postulates that it is a “deeply ingrained ideal worker, one who worked long and late, took on extra projects, was adept at self-promotion and was always connected” where women and men judge women more harshly.

I have always been attracted to startup or small businesses. This probably has a lot to do with having growing up with parents who ran several, all with varying degrees of success. These organizations gave me the opportunity to learn in a variety of roles. I never mastered one finite set of skills, but was able to move around, become very well-rounded. I left my first real job in 2000 to go to grad school, as I saw the exuberant spending and little return. After I got my MBA, I joined another startup. This one was acquired by a large (for me), publicly traded company. While I spent 3 years there, I jumped ship in 2011 to much surprise and criticism. I now run a consulting company with my husband.

Am I successful? Some people would argue that I’m not. They might question my decisions to leave organizations as failing to work within the confines of corporate america.  I prefer to say that I have defined my own success. I have filled many roles from technical to business, back-office to customer facing. I helped grow several startups. I have gone out on my own and proven that I can not only survive there, but more importantly I can thrive here. I get to pursue my personal vision and mission. I get to leverage all my experience and help different organizations fulfill theirs. I do this on my own time with my own set of rules.

I would highly recommend you stop worrying about how other define success. It is much less important what society says your success should look like. Forge your own path, defining your own success. I suspect once you think about it, you’ll realize that you’ve already reached it. Or at minimum, it’s in your sights.

Help me help you!

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Recently I had a really frustrating experience dealing with one of my daughter’s teachers that reminds me of conversations I have had both with my project teams and with customers. Way too often I think we find ourselves in situations where a little more effort on one person’s side would ultimately result in a better solution or experience. It usually comes down to sharing just a bit more information. I want to be able to leverage all my experiences to give you the best experience, but if the other member of the conversation with-holds information, I am unable to do this. I ask that you simply help me help you.

In the case of this particular trigger event, I received a progress report for my daughter’s english class. Overall, she has been doing really well but there was one assignment where she didn’t perform as well. I immediately emailed the teacher asking for more information. I also talked to my daughter about the assignment. My daughter told she talked to the teacher about it and had done some correction, but the jist of the issue was that she didn’t understand a portion of what was required. About a week after this incident, my daughter came home from school distressed about whether she had english homework. We checked the portal but there wasn’t anything posted. Again, I immediately emailed the teacher to find what about the homework. I did not receive a response to either of those inquiries.

Thinking that there might be something wrong with my emails, I followed up with my daughter’s counselor. She received my emails and agreed to follow up with the teachers. She specifically asked me to follow up confirming I heard from anyone. Another week passes and I still haven’t heard anything, so I informed her counselor. I then received a few emails from other teachers, but still nothing from the english teacher. After about 3 weeks I received this really generic email from the english teacher letting me know that my daughter did not meet the grading criteria on the particular assignment in question. The teacher informed me that there were opportunities to make corrections, but this would not impact my daughter’s grade.

I found this response incredibly frustrating and not at all helpful. I am no closer to understanding whether it was an issue with understanding the assignment, or an issue with not being interested in the assignment. I also don’t have enough information about the assignment to talk to my daughter about how to handle the situation in the future. My daughter told me she talked to her teacher and made corrections, but the english teacher’s feedback made it seem like that wasn’t the case. I’m still stuck in this limbo state of not being able to effectively help my daughter because her teacher has failed to provide me with enough information.

How often have we had a conversation with a customer where they left out a critical piece of background information that would have changed the context of the entire project? Had you had that information, would you have delivered something different? Or in talking to a project team, did they make assumptions about your background therefore with-hold valuable information you could have contributed critical insights to?

My background spans multiple industries and multiple functions, making my experience fairly well rounded. As we become the experts of our field or industry, a common mistake is to assume everyone we are talking to has the same information you do. It might be a simple conversation where you use the acronyms or industry terms, assuming everyone on the call knows what you are talking about. Over the last few years, my roles were more customer facing than backoffice which meant that new technical resources didn’t know I had technical skillsets. This became pretty eye-opening when I started asking technical questions.

I do believe that we were able to deliver better results because of what I brought to the table. But without me challenging common assumptions or being willing to ask for additional information, we would have lost out. We each need to consciously try to prevent ourselves from censuring the information we share.  Let’s work together, helping each other, to develop a better overall experience and meet our collective goals with the best solution.

Prioritizing from the Get-go

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As you may know, I believe many corporate resourcing & delivery issues stem from not properly prioritizing customers & projects. You can read my recommendations on how to approach those in my prior blog post. Today, I’d like to take a step back and look at prioritization from the onset of customer project introduction. In government contracting, this is called the gate review process.

A business faces immense pressure to succeed these days, facing obstacles from all directions. This might be driven from competition, or budget reductions and uncertainty, investor return or simple from cash flow concerns. Amidst all this chaos, the only real thing the business can control is how they behave. It is up to the business to pursue the business, then accept the business and support the business. Ideally all parts of the business are in sync about the choices being made. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. In my experience, most businesses pursue any prospect of business with a vigor and stubbornness, minimizing any negative feedback or concern. Many times this is done by simply not including other parts of the organization in the sales process.

These challenges can be overcome by simply asking the right questions (and following through with the outcome regardless of the answer) throughout the process. This process does not need to be too tedious. However, it should be thorough enough to have all pre and post involved departments participate in the conversation, being able to have their concerns heard, acknowledged and if possible, mitigated. Three simple questions you can ask during this process are: Can we do it?, Can we win it? and Can we make money?

Can we do it?

Fundamentally this is the first step. This step is really about reviewing your capabilities as and organization and determining whether you can deliver. Some ancillary questions include:

  • Do you have the resources? Can you get them in time?
  • Do you have the applicable skills?
  • Have you done this before?
  • Can you identify and mitigate the risks?

Can we win it?

This step is determining how you stack up to your competitors. It is also about doing an honest assessment of the work involved to ensure you can price within the required range to win it. Questions to consider include:

  • What is your existing relationship with the customer?
  • How do you stack up against the competition?

Can we make money?

While there may be reasons to pursue opportunities with limited margin, the answers to this questions should be most honest. Businesses exist to make money. Continuing to pursue opportunities where the prospect of doing so is limited puts the whole business in jeopardy. This discussion will put some key business assumptions to test about efficiencies, repeatable processes, or the reality of custom work. Questions to consider include:

  • What is the customer’s budget?
  • What is the contract type? Where does the risk lie?
  • Where do your competitors end up with price?
  • Can you mitigate the financial risk?
  • Are their efficiencies you can gain?

It is at the intersection of “yes” to all three of these questions where the optimal place exists for your business to pursue new customers or projects.  It becomes a slippery slope when only two questions result in “yes.” You may strategically choose to pursue business when you have two out of three, but these come with very severe risks. Wasted resources and degradation in customer success are two potential outcomes.

Prioritization is critical to business success. Having checkpoints at multiple stages throughout the sales & pipeline, customer success and PMO processes significantly improve your ability to work on the right projects for your customers. It also helps your ability to delivery and make money from your initiatives.

I want to thank David Stearman for his presentation on Gate Review Decision Making at the Association of Proposal Management Professionals-National Capital Area (APMP-NCA) Mid-Atlantic Conference last week. This blog post is a compilation of my notes and thoughts regarding project discovery & decision to move forward.

Be a resource, not a commodity!

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I had the chance to see David Belden (founder of ExecuVision International) deliver his keynote at yesterday’s Association of Proposal Management Professionals-National Capital Area (APMP-NCA) Mid-Atlantic Conference. The topic of the keynote was “Relieving Anxiety in the Procurement Landscape.” At face value this didn’t sound particularly interesting, but just a few short minutes into the presentation I found myself taking my notebook out to starting taking notes. The key take away for me had less to do with anxiety and more about positioning ourselves to be resources, or risk being reduced to commodity status.

We all know that selling on price is not the ideal position. We also know that the pace of business has significantly increased. Unfortunately, only these two things matter when you are a commodity. I think we also know, at least conceptually, that adding value to your customers is how you differentiate yourself. Often we attempt to add value by sharing our methods and solutions for free. While these points are not new concepts, Mr. Belden really drove home the idea that every product or service is on the path to commoditization. He further concluded that our inherent reaction to differentiate ourselves results in becoming the commodity we feared we would become. Customers begin to know, or think they know, enough to comparison shop your solution. These are sobering thoughts as we work to grow our consulting company.

As for the preventative strategy, Mr. Belden challenged us to listen closely to our clients and prospects, with special attention paid towards their anxiety. Embracing your client’s anxiety allows you to become a valuable resource to them and can open up other areas of opportunity for you.

The Importance of Understanding Why

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Last week my 16 year old daughter took her PSATs. While we were talking to her about how she thought she did, it became very evident that she had no idea why the PSAT was important. She claimed that nobody had told her. We discussed a couple of questions she didn’t know and whether she guessed or skipped them. We asked if she knew which option was the best choice for the PSAT. She didn’t know.

This entire conversation frustrated me quite a bit, as I attended a session with her in the Spring about planning for college and some of the major milestones, including the PSATs. Additionally, for most of the summer I was reminding her that she had access to SAT practice tests and she should make the time to take them as her time becomes limited once school starts. At one point in the conversation, I realized she was right. Nobody had explicitly sat down and said the PSAT was important for x, y and z reasons. The importance was implied within broader conversations, but never explicitly stated.

It was easy for me to extrapolate this problem to project management as there have definitely been in situations where you were challenged with a request for less than solid reasoning, mostly because the other person didn’t understand why you were asking. We see this all the time in features and functionality delivered to spec, but that never at all meet the needs of the requestor. To the person doing the explaining, their why is fully ingrained in their own experiences. Each time he/she does this specific process, they have to execute these workarounds because the business need has outpaced the software development. The software developer sees the requirement for the new feature, and implements his interpretation of it. Unfortunately, the lack of understanding of the business needs and processes often result in a working feature that doesn’t fully resolve the business need (although it might replace the workaround).

Flexible development methodologies that allow for knowledge sharing, iterative review and feedback loops are helpful in minimizing this type of issue. As project managers and analysts, we need to hone our ability to ask “why?” not just “what?” Our documents and artifacts need to be flexible enough to articulate both, otherwise there’s a lot to be lost in translation.

Do you suffer from “fear of making mistakes”?

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We often talk about “fear of missing out”, but I’ve found that “fear of making mistakes” is a much bigger issue in the workplace. I’ve worked with project teams where this fear of making mistakes resulted in in lack of communication and frustration on all sides. If we are not willing to make mistakes, how then do we learn and grow? How will we solve the complex problems?

Fear of making mistakes has significant impact to communication among team members. Those resources that are afraid to make mistakes tend to be less forthcoming with details and information. If only positive or complete information is shared, project management and team dynamics become very strained. As the project manager, I want to hear all of it. Help me understand the true status – what’s working, what isn’t, what the next steps are and how you anticipate the changes to the schedule. I’m not there as a passive participant. I am part of the project team, one that team members can rely on to help minimize issues, remove obstacles and ultimately celebrate success. I can’t do that effectively when members only share limited information.

Unfortunately this problem gets more complicated as time goes on. The resource is afraid of making a mistake, so withholds information. This leads to frustration on behalf of the project manager, who may be required to escalate. This makes the resource more nervous, so even less willing to share the low points. Without the proper communication, timeframes, effort and quality of work all come into play.

The onus of identifying this problem and mitigating the circumstances falls to the project manager. The project manager may need to set of separate touchpoints with the specific resource, and review the individual tasks. Targeted questions on next steps, and precise estimates will need to tracked very regularly. Additionally, feedback, especially on areas that aren’t working or need improvement, will need to be clearly documented. All this needs to be handled delicately as I found the resources who experience fear of making mistakes are usually working really hard. The lack of communication makes it difficult for the project team to see the results.

 

 

4 Lessons on Team Dynamics Learned from My Kids’ Sports

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The start of fall rings in the season of multiple sports for our family. While I was protecting myself from the elements during the rainy, windy soccer game and then again, during the brisk temperature of the ice hockey rink, my mind drifted to the lessons we can learn from kids sports (or any sports for that matter). These lessons are also very applicable to any team endeavors including the team dynamics of managing a project.

You can’t control anyone other than yourselves

Teams, sports or project, are comprised of multiple people with very different and dynamic personalities. Each person is added to the team for their unique perspective and talents. It’s important to remember, both as a project member and team contributor, that you can only control your actions. If someone isn’t pulling their weight, or is doing something to negatively impact the project, you can try to influence them. However, the change in attitude or action can only be driven by the person doing it.

One option you have is to step up and fill a gap or try to positively offset the negative behavior. It won’t always work. In other cases it may be enough for the offending person to change their ways.

Sometimes external elements will adversely impact your performance

Outdoor sports are at the whim of the elements. While sometimes it is extreme enough to cancel or postpone the sporting event, but more often than not, the teams just have to power through it. In a project, there are also external pressures and decisions that will adversely impact your performance.

As a project manager, you need to do the best you can to minimize the impact. This might equate to sheltering your team with an umbrella or blanket. It is important to openly communicate about these challenges. As a team member, you need to trust that your project leaders will do their best to shield you from those external influences. Sometimes these efforts are not enough, and then you need to make do with the information and circumstance you have on hand. Like team players should never stop a play until the whistle is blown, team contributors should not stop working towards the end goal until directive is giving to stop or change direction.

You shouldn’t ignore those players who just show up everyday

My youngest daughter plays hockey primarily to spend time with her dad. She’s been playing for 2-3 years on a club team. Admittedly, soccer is not her favorite sport. She knows that playing a second sport often helps improve the first one. That all said, she goes to most practices, sometimes begrudgingly, and participates in all games where she isn’t already playing soccer. This does not mean that every waking hour is consumed by soccer either. It’s unusual for Ana to do an external practice.

This weekend was the first time this season I saw Ana play in both her soccer game and her hockey game. This year is the first year where Ana is playing on a full soccer field, so I wasn’t sure how she’d do. There’s a lot of running involved AND there’s an awful lot of opportunity to get distracted. She did well. Ana stayed focus, she didn’t get too far ahead of herself, or too far behind. The real drastic improvement was in her ice hockey game. This was the first game where I saw Ana as a real hockey player. She had a few shots on goals, plus a few assists. One was a beautiful play, where Ana actually looked up, acknowledged another player then passed the puck. Ana also had several breakaways to the puck, where she beat out the other players.

Something can definitely be said for showing up every day. You are going to improve a little  each time you get out there. Then one day, you will have actually made such significant improvement that everyone begins to notice.

You have to differentiate to separate yourself from the crowd

This one is somewhat in jest of the numerous Ana-like names on Ana’s soccer team. There’s Annika, Anna, Ana and Christiana, who prefers to go by “Ana.” We can’t use last name initial either as Ana is also, “Ana E” (as is Christiana). As you can imagine, this leads to some confusion about positions and field feedback. It’s easy to assume that it’s another  player receiving the feedback. This is not unlike a project team with multiple software developers, analysts or designers. External stakeholders do not necessarily understand the nuances of what each person is doing.

While most examples will not be as blatant as the 4 similarly named girls in the example above, you should assume that everyone is not educated about what you bring to the table. You will need to educate them. Whatever your primary strength, you should be highlighting this throughout your customer interaction. If your expertise is search engine optimization, demonstrating the techniques you use and their impact to the customer experience would differentiate you among your peers.

I’m sure there are quite a few other lessons we can learn from our extra-curricular activities. These were the ones that came to mind this weekend, with our specific games and circumstances.