Category Archives: Project Management

Striving for perfection in project implementations

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One of Merriam-Webster definitions for perfection is “something that cannot be improved.” For me, project management, software development and data analytics are always evolving. Every new project I take on is balanced on the learnings of all the prior projects I managed. This is true for software projects, and is true in data analytics. For every  question I answer, I can think of several more that I’d like to tackle.

the Idea of perfection is so imperfect.

Source: http://www.thefeelgoodlifestyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Perfection-is-imperfect.jpg

Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for project stakeholders to say that you can’t roll something out, or even go into a pilot phase until everything is perfect. It is at these times, that project managers need to take a step back and analyze the project from the people and motivations perspective. The project stakeholders are saying that they are uncomfortable with where the project is and are not willing to put themselves on the line just yet.

How did you get here? 

This problem generally arises when expectations are not aligned. If each side hasn’t clearly documented and shared what they were working towards, there is no guarantee of all sides working towards the same end goal. It is not enough to have documented requirements, or use cases. You also need to agree on the measurement or evaluation criteria.

How then do you move forward? 

  • First, both sides need to communicate.
  • Second, both sides need to jointly agree on a core set of success criteria for each milestone and phase.
  • Third, both sides need to remind themselves that everyone is working towards the same goal.

There will always be requirements that continue to evolve for every software or data integration project. It is making sure the project implementation team is working towards the same success criteria at the same time as the project stakeholders.

 

No one way…balancing “being different” with best practices

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At some point while managing every project, I end up having a conversation with the customer about how different they are from their competitors. Each organization can list a dozen reasons about why and how they are different. This is often used as an excuse for why something can’t or shouldn’t be done a certain way. The reality of it is that organizations within the same industry are more alike than they are different. Yes, there are nuances and competitive advantages that allows them all to exist in the industry, but core business challenges and opportunities are similiar.

I recently had a couple of conversations that were the epitome of this situation. On one hand, we were talking about extensive, semi-permanent changes that were required in order for the system to be “fully accepted and utilized by the stakeholders.” I approached these conversations from the standpoint of acknowledging we would probably move ahead with doing the changes but wanted to ensure that those making the decision understood what purposes those elements served and what potential opportunities were being lost by moving forward. Inevitably, we got to the end of the conversations and I was asked how other organizations had handled this same problem. In all cases, I had to explain that the majority of our customers took the exact opposite approach.

The large-scale data integration projects I manage come with a significant amount of organizational change required to make them truly successful. As a result, the project manager sits at the heart of the internal conflict of the organization between “the way it has always been done” and “industry best practices and opportunity for the future.” The role of the project manager is to educate and recommend, but ultimately, execute. Sometimes that means implementing in the best way for the organization with the understanding that as the system becomes embedded in organizational culture, some of the initial implementation will need to be unraveled.

 

Rewarding Ingenuity Part 2

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Back in March 2014, I wrote this post raising the question of whether we should reward ingenuity or punish bad behavior. We recently had another incident with the same daughter that had us thinking about this question again. This time, our daughter had her electronics taken away for bad behavior, specifically being rude and disrespectful. We had given her a specific timeframe for which she would have to suffer these indignities. After the first day or two, we found her watching Netflix on the family television in the basement. When we questioned her about it, she quickly pointed out that we had “taken her electronics”, but made no mention of her interaction with other electronics.

In a broader context, we often look at these types of situations and argue the gray line. We say that the offender “should have known better” or “should have known what I meant.” I think we walk a very difficult line with this argument, especially given the diversity of our workforces. Every day we interact with people who have had very different personal, work, education, etc. experiences from ourselves. There is a real possibility that they understand something differently (not necessarily better or worse).

Software projects are infamous for being over budget and delayed with the resulting solution not ever meeting the business objectives. In the traditional waterfall approach to software development, requirements are gathered upfront, and then interpreted by developers during implementation with a final delivery of a solution that hopefully meets the  customer goals. Agile methodologies address this by taking a very iterative approach to development, where constant feedback is given. This allows all stakeholders to see the execution (AKA interpretation) of the requirement and determine whether it meets the business objective.

As a project manager, I have to balance between breaking everything down to the simplest form as a means to eliminate misinterpretation and being vague enough to solicit questions, ideas and foster serendipitous moments. A team member that does only what is asked of them is good, but the team member that analyzes and challenges for the greater good of the project can be a rockstar.

In the end, is this really any different than my daughter interpreting her punishment differently?  On one hand, you want them to do their chores and listen to their parents, but on the other you want them to grow up to be critical thinkers and challenge the status quo to make the world better. This is a very hard lesson when you are 13. I’m not sure whether it gets easier to understand as we get older.

P.S. Just to close out the story, we allowed our daughter to use the family TV to watch Netflix because she very delivered her very logical explanation in a calm and peaceful manner.

Kids, Project Management & the Serenity Prayer

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Serenity-Prayer

Source: https://www.goodnightjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/serenity-prayer005.jpg

I’m not religious by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe in the Serenity Prayer. It’s something I have to remind myself of often as I interact with both my kids and my projects. It provides a level of grounding. What’s the point of getting frustrated if it’s outside my control?

The nature of my personality requires that I be hands on. I want to be involved. I want to help control the outcome. But the nature of many of my projects results in things outside my control. These projects are big and complex integration projects that involve technical resources both within my organization and often within the client; and business users. Often the decision to move forward with this implementation was handled by resources higher up the corporate food chain. This means there are questions, considerations and discovery that need to take place at the beginning. The inner workings of corporate culture and the organizational power hierarchy become evident here. It is usually at this time when a decision is made that is totally outside your control, but has major impact on the project. It may be a decision to user an external intermediary for some piece, or the implementation of a business process that impacts overall timelines.

My initial inclination is to get frustrated. It’s that overwhelming feeling of wondering how you are going to accomplish what you set out to do if you don’t control all the pieces. After a little while, I remind myself that I can’t worry about things outside of my control. These are things that I can’t change. So what can I do?

  • Accept the things I can not change – Most importantly, I can recognize and remind myself that there a components of the project that I do not control, and can not change. This allows me to keep my sanity during the project implementation.
  • Establish Trust – I can establish trust with whomever is involved in the project and do my best to work together towards the overall success of the project.
  • Communicate  – I can engage fully with the entire project team and make sure everyone knows the status. There is some trial and error that needs to happen to determine the appropriate level of communication.
  • Raise Concerns & Questions – I can monitor the project situation and raise concerns & questions to the appropriate team members.
  • Focus on what I can control – It’s my job to be looking at the entire picture. What can I contribute? What ideas or actions can I bring to the table to facilitate project implementation success?

This approach is one I need to do a better job of also applying to my children. In some ways it easier to apply this to a project and people you are professionally affiliated with rather than your kids. I think the principles are the same. Yes, your kids belong to you. However, they have their own personalities and natural characteristics which combine with their unique nurtured experiences that we need to consider. I need to keep reminding myself of this as I work to establish & maintain trust, openly communicate, raise concerns & questions and focus on what I can control while encouraging them to do the same.

Make sure you apply what your expertise to your own practice

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captain_obvious

Source: https://twitter.com/obviouscapn

I strongly believe in documentation. As a project manger, I feel that’s I am in the best position to properly capture the twists and turns along the project path. Given this, it makes the most sense for me to at least do the initial drafts of the documentation. There may be times where technical resources need to provide more details around how something is implemented, but for the most part I know enough to provide the starting point. This applies to both business documentation and ongoing production support documentation. I consider this core to what I do as a professional when I manage any project, at work or on volunteer initiatives. After quitting one job, I stayed on for another 3 months to hire my replacement and ensure the documentation was complete and up to date. Three years later, after some personnel turnover, I was asked to come back as a subject matter expert. I resurrected this documentation, refreshed it and used it as the basis for addressing the questions.

Despite all that, my biggest take away from last week’s DrupalCon was that my business needs process to scale. Yes, I know that it’s obvious. I do this all the time for my client work, ensuring that someone could take over my projects with relative ease. In those scenarios, someone taking over would find an archive of project artifacts previously provided to the customer, a site with the project details including other relevant reference sources. The outstanding work would be documented per the client request (i.e. task lists, service tickets, etc).

I have even started this for processes that are outside of my core competencies. If it was new, I needed to document the process for me and my partner so we could reference it, measure it and update it as required. It’s all the other stuff I haven’t documented. To continue the example of someone taking over my client work, while they have the tools, they won’t have the instruction guide. They won’t know how I go about a project. They won’t know how often I communicate with the client or in what form. There won’t be a guide for what to do the first day they step in.

It’s disturbing that the things that are most obvious to us are often the things we overlook the most. Regardless of how valuable we think we are, we have to plan for the unexpected. This could range from tragedy like sickness or death or joyful opportunities like extended holidays in locales with limited connectivity (yes, those places still exist). We limit ourselves when we only share our talents externally. We need to also apply our expertise to our broader roles and organizations. In my scenario, building these processes for how I do what I do will allow my company to grow. For yours, you are adding value not just to external customers, but also creating significant value for the organizations we engage with.

I hope after reading this you think about your core competencies and whether you are truly practicing what you preach.

 

Recap & Top Lessons Learned from DrupalCon New Orleans

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DrupalCon New Orleans was the epitome of “work hard, play hard.” The days were spent in intensive, thought provoking sessions, the nights were spent at the multitude of social events.

Business Summit

Monday was spent as expected, at the Business Summit. Susan Rust coordinated this year’s event and focused on 3 key areas: recurring & repeat revenue, killer marketing & new clients and leading with ease. The day was planned with presentations by corporate industry leaders followed by small group discussions and subsequent presentation of the key take-aways.

While the information was interesting and valuable, the business summit tended to raise more questions than provided answers for us as a micro-business. For example,

  • How do you ensure that you don’t exert too much emotional (or other) investment on too few customers?
    • How do you do this when the same resources are working in and on the business?
  • Do you find or grow your talent? And how do you do this without distracting from the revenue that keeps your business afloat?

Two critical sentiments resonated with me for most of the conference:

  1. Scaling your business is about process, tools & business infrastructure.
  2. Spending too much time working in the business will prevent you from long-term health & success.

We closed out the day by attending the Opening Reception and started collecting our DrupalCon swag (for me it was t-shirts and some awesome drupal socks).

Conference Session

Tuesday was the official opening of the conference. It started with some early morning global entertainment with costumes, Drupal parodies & skits followed by the official kick-off keynote by Dries Buytaert.

My first session was all about data structures in Drupal. This is a pretty fundamental component, and plays to my internal data geek, so I thought it would be a good place to start my technical Drupal education. Ron Northcutt did a good job of describing the structures and providing guidelines for making better decisions. If you ever get tripped up on the terminology or want a starting point in your Drupal education, this presentation would be good for you to watch.

For the remainder of the day, I stuck mostly to the business track. I attended the critical metrics for your drupal business session, hosted by Michael Silverman (DUO) and Dave Terry (Media Current). These guys dove into resources, tips and metrics we should all understand and track for our businesses. Some key points and resources include:

  • Know your goal or exit plan from the beginning
  • “Master the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm” by Verne Harnish
  • “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel Pink
  • “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman
  • Don’t forget to measure your culture (presentation highlights ways to do this)
  • To scale your business, you need to be accounting on an accrual basis
  • Sales Tools: Geckoboard, CRMs, templates
  • “A Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns
  • Recruting Tools: JAZZ, DISC, Perform Yard
  • “TopGrading” by Brandford D. Smart
  • “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” by Bo Schembechler
  • “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

I also attended Jeff Walpole’s session on why and how enterprises get involved in the open source community and the drupal showcase GE and FFW case study. I briefly attended the birds of a feather “BOF” (adhoc session) for small drupal shops before I had to head over to the Women in Drupal event. Approximately 200 people showed up before heading off to the other parties.

On Wednesday, I played hooky in the morning before attending Jeffrey “Jam” McGuire’s session on the value of Drupal 8 technical features. This was incredibly valuable to me and I would recommend taking the time to watch this presentation if you aren’t already immersed in Drupal 8. I also attended the diversity in tech session by Nikki Stevens and Karyn Cassio. They shared valuable stats and practical actions we can control in our own behavior, before opening the floor for an honest discussion.

Thursday is the official last day of the conference so is a bit shorter, leaving room for the closing ceremonies and time for contribution sprints. I attended Aimee Degnan’s session on prioritizing your scrum product backlog for Drupal work. The focus was balancing “keeping the lights on” with new product features for a site or group of sites over time. The biggest insight for me had more to do with how to apply a similar model to working on the business and working in the business.

  • Your business (like a single site) is comprised of: primary value creation; supporting systems with direct impact to value creation and supporting systems with indirect impact to primary value creation.
  • Like a project, there is some overhead associated with running your business as well as the application and review of reporting.

We often apply agile methodologies to our projects, but we haven’t been as effective on applying them to our business.

The next session was Jody Hamilton’s talk on growing your own talent. Jody shared her experiences build Zivtech’s talent. She provided tactical tools & tips on on-ramping, quality, recruitment methodologies and evaluations. The key to doing this successfully is process. The biggest argument small shops have for not pursuing this is struggling to balance workload capacity with training resources. Jody challenged this assumption, pointing out that focusing on the work at hand is a short-term initiative. For long-term viability of your business, it’s imperative to think long-term.

  • Developing the talent to keep your culture, philosophy and work are a requirement to scale your business.

My final session selection was easy. I attended Susan Rust’s margins & maseratis talk. There were so many key points in this talk that I think you’ll need to watch it. Susan started with these 3 directives for successfully scaling your business:

  • Be data driven
  • Measure over time
  • Develop processes

From a practical perspective, I learned we have a lot to do including:

  • Documenting everything we do to deliver value to clients
  • Document the tools we use to do them, measure them, report on them (yes, document ALL the tools..)
  • Measure everything..per project, per person, per organization
  • Make sure to focus (aka specialize). Don’t be everything to everyone.
  • It’s all about the margins! Businesses that want to grow focus on revenue where businesses that want to scale focus on margin. It’s not that revenue isn’t important, but it’s more about changes in revenue that are most critical.

And lastly, we attended the closing ceremonies and the Drupal 6 funeral procession, with brass band and police escorts as we shut down New Orleans streets.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my adventure at DrupalCon New Orleans. I know from others that there are quite a few sessions I missed. I’m planning on watching the recordings of those over the next couple of weeks. I’d also love to hear about your experience and take aways.

Balancing Agility with Process is Really Hard!

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Most of my professional experience has been in small, fast-paced organizations. I had one fairly short stint in a larger public company. During all these experiences, I’ve seen the constant struggle between agility and process. There are numerous studies that prove that companies need to react very quickly in today’s market in order to be competitive. Unfortunately, growth companies tend to pursue agility with pure disregard for process. McKinsey has done a few studies on this, here and here, that speak to the importance of agility but argue that the only way to achieve true agility is to have a strong backbone of structure and governance.

In my experience, the balance between agility and process (AKA structure) is very difficult to attain. When you are a company of 1 or 2, you do what works best for you. Hopefully there is some basic process around prioritization and execution, otherwise there might be a real struggle for viability. As you add additional resources it becomes more important to add some process. Resources need to understand the organization purpose (mission, vision, key performance indicators, etc) or everyone will be doing something different, making the whole very unstable.

Strong sales & organization leaders can overcome this, but they often do it at the expense of their own sanity. If a core group of people exert all their energy in developing sales and onboarding customers, they can compensate for the resources that are adding limited value. It’s at this point in the growth model where organizations struggle. It becomes apparent that some resources are severely underutilized while others are severely over-utilized. The focus of the conversation swings between the expense of training the under utilized resources or releasing the under utilized resources from the organization. In both these cases, the root cause has more to do with the process of onboarding resources. Does the organization invest the time to train the resources they have already or spend the time to find & train new resources? That depends on the resources and how they align to the organization. Some resources will be redeemable, while others are not.

Alternatively, there are many organizations that are so process oriented that they lose sight of agility. The focus becomes on making sure the process is followed, and the appropriate approvals are obtained. This is done at the expense of moving quickly.

Scale comes with being able to consistently deliver your product offering to your customers and add value in your area of expertise. If you have not designed a process around delivery or fully understand your product offering from your customer’s perspective (specifically how they derive value from your offering), you are likely to spend a significant portion of your time in fire fighting mode. Consequently, spending all your time fire fighting results in less time spent helping customers with the value initiatives.

I believe that there should be a balance between agility and process. Define a core set of processes that are critical to your product offering, set the groundwork for resources about why the organization exists (back to mission, vision & goals), but give them the space to make decisions and pivot as required.

 

 

Wisdom learned from the NOVA Ice Dogs Tier 2 U-16 Girls Team

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My 17 year old daughter competed at USA Hockey Tier 2 Nationals last weekend. This was the culmination of many years of hard work for the girls and the coaches. This was the third year that her team declared “national bound”, meaning they would compete for for the right to represent the Southeast division at the National competition. Going into this tournament, our team was ranked 31st in the country, and were scheduled to play the 1st and 2nd ranked teams. Needless to say there was quite a bit of excitement and nerves surrounding the competition. I think we all have a lot to learn about handling ourselves based on this experience.

Rank doesn’t mean much

As I mentioned, the Northern VA (NOVA) Ice Dogs were ranked 31st in the country going into the tournament. Throughout the entire season, the team has been playing teams up and down the east coast. These girls definitely played up, or down, to the level of their competition. We saw them be extremely competitive to teams in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey but then lose to teams they should have beaten locally. This tournament was no different. The girls lost their first game to the 2nd ranked team 0-6, won their second game  and then lost to the 1st ranked team by only 2 points (0-2). Going into this last game, the girls were nervous. It was an evening game so they had all day to dwell on it, but played their hearts out. They had several scoring chances and played solid defense. The girls left that game knowing they deserved to be at Nationals.

I think we’ve all had experiences where we weren’t the first choice. We may know this to be true, or worse, just be worrying that it’s the truth. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you ranked in the process, you got it. You earned it. Stop dwelling and move on to get the job done.

Keep your head held high

The team worked very hard to get to Nationals, playing more than 60 games in regular season. This is highly unusual for National bound teams, as they tend to be more select tournament-only players, playing on other teams during regular season. Our girls did it. They made it to Nationals, but lost. The girls walked out of the locker room after their last game with their heads held high. As they should!

We all have had experiences where we’ve done everything we can but it doesn’t work out. That’s really ok. Walk away from that experience with your head held high, knowing there was nothing more for you to do.

Tenacity & Determination

During the regular season playoffs, and then again during the Southeast division playoffs, the NOVA Ice Dogs had multiple games where the opposing team took the lead about half way through. In each of these games the NOVA Ice Dogs came back to win. They could have walked away, demoralized and out of the game. They didn’t. They fought back and succeeded.

The obvious moral to the story is to regroup and refocus when things aren’t going your way.

 

 

How do you Brand your Project?

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While I was looking for something to write about this week, I came across this blog on Branding your Project by Method123 Project Management Methodology. It got me wondering about my own projects and how actively, or subconsciously I do project branding.

At first I was hesitant to acknowledge that I actively branded my projects. However, as I thought about it more, I realized that everything I do to manage a project is done to effectively get the project to its finish line, and make it successful in the eyes of the project stakeholders. If the point, as the blog says, is “to associate an emotion or a feeling with your project”, then every deliberate action I take contributes to the positive project brand. This includes:

  • conscious communication, almost to the point of over-communication– There is a balance between airing dirty laundry and being honest about issues as they arise.
  • consistent and thorough documentation– the more you can document the project process and make available to stakeholders, users and those expected to support it builds credibility and goodwill.
  • building the bridge between business and technology-Removing perceived obstacles and making sure technical solutions meet the business needs results in better solutions, and happier stakeholders.
  • actively acknowledging hard work– project members, both from the implementation teams and the business teams, need to be recognized for a job well done. This could be as simple as thanking them for their flexibility as you manage meeting times across global resources. Or it could be for figuring out a really complicated problem.

I think establishing your project brand is a lot like the things you do to establish your personal brand. It reminds me of the phrase “do your job, do it well and you’ll be asked to do it again.” By doing the things you need to do as a project manager to effectively manage your project, you lay the groundwork for the project brand. Each artifact, milestone and decision point are opportunities to present the project in the best possible light. If you can’t, or choose not to, capitalize on those opportunities, you leave project perception up to fate. I would rather be deliberate in my message and my management, controlling the project image. You can do this successfully even when you need to deliver bad news.

So, what do you think? Do you actively or passively manage your project brand?

3 Tips to Make Your Project Transitions Occur Smoothly

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At some point during the course of a project, a transition must occur. Ideally this doesn’t occur until the end of the project when you are transitioning from the implementation phase to the support phase. Unfortunately there are times when transitions need to occur during the implementation phase. Regardless of the scenario, I have found that there are a few things the Project Manager/Organization can do to make this transition go more smoothly.

  1. Establish a process for project artifacts (specific documents and central storage) – While each project may have slight variances to a set process, the more aligned the project documentation is, the easier it will be for a new team member to come up to speed. At a minimum I think this should include standard templates for project status including decisions, action items, upcoming goals and most immediately resolved items; project plans; statement of work & change orders; and support documentation that provides the technical details as well as business rules that impact the implementation (what will the support team need to know to manage the day to day operations of the implementation?).  The central repository for project documentation makes it easy for anyone to step in. They know exactly what has been transmitted and can see the progression of the project over time. Without these, time is wasted on finding the components rather than really digging in figuring out the state.
  2. Establish a process for team hand off – Once the new team has had a chance to review the project artifacts, it is important to bring all technical resources together. When you work on a long term project and try to document all the nuts and bolts of what you did to implement, sometimes there are intuitive pieces you fail to document. These are components that are so obvious to you that they have become insignificant. However, new resources won’t know and won’t necessarily know to ask, unless they have faced that situation before. In the process of talking through the implementation to educate the new team, these details surface and can be captured.
  3. Communicate! – The need to communicate only becomes larger during times of transition. The project manager needs to be fully engaged with all team members and stakeholders. Being open and honest about the transition state yields a bit of flexibility among the project team and stakeholders. Make sure to leverage this time to ask the basic questions you don’t know the answer to you and level set expectations.

Project transitions are inevitable, but don’t have to be a horrible experience. Having the proper project documentation, a central project document repository, team hand-offs and very open communication will significantly reduce the risk and improve the success.