Tag Archives: project success

The Myth of the Project Plan

by

 

The Project Management Institute Project Management Book of Knowledge defines a “project plan as a formal, approved document used to guide project execution and project control.” It further specifies that “it should be used to document approved scope, cost, and schedule baselines.” In my experience, a project plan is treated heavy on the “formal” and “approved” and light on the “baseline.” I think the process of approval gives the perception of longevity on the life of the plan. This minimizes the impact of the project plan as a baseline. Unfortunately this misunderstanding causes many complaints about project delays and delivery.

I was struck by this Computer Weekly quote when I conducted a google search for “project plan”: “[It] is one of the most misunderstood terms in project management. It is a set of living documents that can be expected to change over the life of the project.” This is polar opposite to how I have seen the project plan treated. The project plan is usually created at the beginning of the project, based on a statement of work, with fairly limited information. Even in cases where all stakeholders understand that the project scope is fluid, the project plan is expected at the beginning of the project and is used for making time-specific business decisions (training, user acceptance testing, etc).

Historically this has resulted in project managers padding their project plans with additional time so that the project is guaranteed to come in on time. Alternatively, the project plan isn’t padded, but issues of either scope creep, or scope reduction occur. In all cases, decisions are being made to meet a deadline, often selected artificially, which only aligns to the information available at the beginning of the project. There is no consideration to the fluidity of project implementation and information availability.

It would alleviate quite a few problems in project delivery & success if we chose to leverage the project plan as a living, breathing document. As time progresses, and additional details are obtained, the project plan should be updated. As a project team, we would be in a much better position to make decisions, and set more realistic deadlines as we get into the details and work through the development. Furthermore, sharing regular status and having constructive conversations about the state of a project and the next steps result in a more successful deployment. 

 

 

3 Pitfalls with Allowing Technical Teams to Engage Directly with Clients

by

We all inherently know that our best options are to always to go directly to a source, whatever or whomever that is. In a recent post, I advocated for allowing your project team to engage directly with customers. While I strongly believe this allows you to deliver a better experience, I do think there are a few pitfalls to avoid.

bomb_clip_art_10552 1) Be careful about the “shoot from the hip” responses – Often times in design or business discussions an inquiry will ask “how long?”, “how much?” and it is common for people to “shoot from the hip” and give an answer. There must be a structured way to balance these casual conversations, with the reality of the project status, plan, resources, investment. Otherwise, you will get stuck in the never-ending project and perpetual scope creep.

2) Balance gut estimates with discovery – Everyone is in a rush to understand how long it will take to build this product, feature or system. You need to be able to leverage your knowledge of having done similar applications, with the project discovery you need to do to understand this particular project. Too often I’ve been caught in situations where I had to explain that while a team member said they had done something similar in 10 hours, this particular implementation was going to 40. At initial thought, this seems excessive, as compared to the similar project. However, once you start talking about all the additional project management, testing and discovery required for this one versus that other one, it becomes more palatable. Make sure you vet gut estimates with actual requirements and customer needs.

3) Avoid detours – A huge risk to allowing project teams to engage with customers directly is subtle permission this introduces to go directly to the project team. I’ve seen customers who will stop engaging with ticketing systems in lieu of going directly to project teams. This introduces quite a few disruptions to the process. First it makes tracking and accountability difficult as inquiries aren’t going into a central system. Second, it can overwhelm project team members as they try to balance assigned work with the customer engagement. The project team will sometimes feel that they “have to respond.” The project manager or customer success manager needs to step in and manage the process. The team needs to make sure that they are being responsive, but doing it in a way that addresses the customer priorities, and keeps the customer involved in making those decisions.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge advocate for engaging project teams with customers. This is not a free for all. There should be a structure and methodology, with appropriate accountability and check points to adjust for the changing environments.

Use Cases & Technological Investment: The Technology Chicken & Egg?

by

In traditional manufacturing, it’s unheard of to purchase production grade equipment without knowing exactly what it will be used for, and more importantly how the significant cost will be recuperated. However, I have seen it first hand that this isn’t always the case with technological investments. It is not uncommon to make a significant investment in a software or hardware solution without fully understanding the business use case.

Courtesy of iterated-reality.com

Courtesy of iterated-reality.com

A September 2015 blog post by Jarvis on Technological Trends that Impress VCs emphasizes leveraging your business use case to make purchasing decisions. Similar themes include not going extravagant until necessary, improvising as you scale, and ultimately not making a purchasing decision merely because the technology is the best, but rather choose the best solution for your business.

A Workspace blog post “Investing in new technology – right for my business“, written by Mark Sharman, discusses some of these same points. Mark raises the concern of being carried away by all the technology bells and whistles, so strongly recommends having a business use case or cost/benefit analysis to fall back on. Additionally, the “real cost of the investment” needs to be fully recognized, inclusive of delays and opportunity costs of not doing something else. That said, Mark reminded us that surviving in business requires keeping pace with change, but thriving in business requires leading the change.

This effectively highlights the conundrum of use cases versus technology investment. If you make the investment to stay on top of changes in technology, will the use cases come? Or if you define the use cases, will you be leading the pack but putting yourself at risk?

Example 1

In one example I’ve seen, the CTO had implemented a massive initiative to move everything to the cloud. At the time, I oversaw highly critical, back office processes. While we had been in the process of reinventing our systems, it didn’t make a lot of sense for us to move into the cloud. It would have added extra layers and complexity, and moved us away from our data sources. However, the implication of not complying to the blanket initiative were large enough that I chose to define a solution where we would be able to move components to the cloud. After I left my position, a former employee of mine, who was still involved, asked why I had designed the system for the cloud. To him, it didn’t make any sense. I agreed, but explained the nature of the political decision I reacted too.

Moral of the story: Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Example 2

In another example, I was working with a company to implement a very complex software solution. They made significant investment in this solution, and worked closely with us during the development and validation phases of the project. There were two project phases that each took 5-6 months to complete. After the implementation was complete, we didn’t hear anything else about it for another ~6 months. At this time, the company asked for a in-depth, technical and business training working through the business requirements through to the technical implementation. During that training, I was told that the team was still working on the use cases for how they wanted to leverage the solution.

It seemed to me that the significant investment in capital and time would have encouraged the need for a business use case before implementation, but that wasn’t the case. Should the company have made this investment without the use case? They were at the cutting edge of this solution, and were able to influence the process by taking a very hands-on approach.

Moral of the story: Sometimes it’s better to be first and influence the solution, than worry about exactly how you are going to use it.

I was talking to my mentor and friend, Dave Shuman, yesterday about this. He challenged that some of the newer, trending technologies lend themselves to investment first, then defining the use cases. The low barriers to entry from a cost and implementation perspective allows for that buy first, define later approach. Lean Startup development methodologies also lend themselves to building in incremental blocks, then iterating until you find the “right” product fit for your customer.

Final Thoughts

So whether you define your use case first, or whether you invest in technology first, you do need to figure out that sweet spot to getting to your return on investment. We all know how well it turns out if you spend all your money and have nothing to show for it.

Professional Services Leadership – 3 Reasons to Engage your Project Team with your Clients

by

There has been a long running discussion in professional service organizations about whether the technical project team members should be engaged with clients, or whether they should be sheltered from clients often under the guise of allowing them to focus on their task list. In my experience as a Project Manager and Customer Success Manager, I’ve found that allowing them to engage with clients directly streamlined project communication, and expedited the “right” development.

An April 2012 Inc article “The New Rules of Customer Engagement” by Wendy Lea outlines the new customer engagement paradigm. The focus has shifted away from single, often isolated touch-points to a much more integrated, customer-focused, results-driven experience. This particular article is geared towards engagement in social media, it drives home the point that customer service is no longer seen as just part of the sales process. Every conversation that happens, in any venue must be driven toward customer resolution.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/webmobi/Development/websitepics/customer.jpg

Web Mobi Customer picture

A October 2014 Survey Monkey blog post discusses 5 crucial reasons to engage your customer service and product teams as a means to deliver consistently great customer service. It argues that product project teams don’t spend enough time with marketing or customer service to fully understand customer issues and sentiments.

Overall, I think we can agree that being fully engaged with our customers, including fully understanding customer issues and sentiments, is imperative to our business success.  Even further, it is a given that our organization needs to be fully engaged across internal teams. I argue that the technical project teams also need to engage with customers directly. Three critical reasons include:

  1. It streamlines customer communication – When a technical resource needs to make decisions based on business requirements, it can be significantly easier to communicate a question directly to the customer. Critical details often get lost in translation when the technical resource communicates to a project manager, who then translates it to the business user.
  2. It simplifies the project management role – By allowing the direct communication, the requirement for the project manager to be technical becomes minimized. The PM should still understand the technology, but their focus becomes more of a facilitator and a remover of obstacles.
  3. It more closely aligns the customer to the technical team – When the technical project team engages with the customer, and visa versa, each begins to see behind the curtain. This allows each side to more fully appreciate the challenges and opportunities that exist. If the customer never experiences the technical process, or the technical team never experiences the business requirements, you lose the epiphany moments that come from truly solving the customer’s problem rather than more superficial symptoms.

I have seen great success with having my technical teams engage with customers directly. It becomes my role to manage the scope, prioritize the follow ups and generally keep everything on track. I step in to facilitate conversation or remove barriers to success, but don’t get in the way of progress. I challenge each of you to review your engagement model and figure out how to incorporate customer-technical resource communication.

Professional Services Organizations: Do your Project Managers Create Work or Remove Obstacles?

by

I’ve had several conversations lately with software developers or business management regarding project managers, and whether they create work or remove obstacles. As a project manager myself, I’ve felt that removing obstacles and allowing resources to focus on the tasks at hand is one of my top priorities.

In researching this issue, I found a September 2005 article by Scott Berkun “The Art of Project Management: How to Make Things Happen” that highlights that the ability for people to move project forward (AKA remove obstacles) is a skill that some people have, but others do not. Berkun proposes that this skill comes down to knowing how to be a catalyst in many situations, while also having the courage to do it. Additionally, projects move forward more when: prioritization occurs; “no” is accepted and appreciated; open & honest communication occurs; the critical path is known and the PM is relentless & savvy.

PM Technical Skill to Execution Matrix

PM Technical Skill to Execution Matrix

A more recent article published March 16, 2015 in MITSloan Management Review by Alexander Laufer, Edward Hoffman, Jeffrey Russell & W. Scott Cameron “What Successful Project Managers Do” emphasizes the organizational responsibility required to allow project managers to be flexible. This research article states that project managers need to: develop collaboration; integrate planning & review with learning; prevent major disruptions and maintain forward momentum. This ultimately results in a more fluid, adaptive project.

As projects have become significantly more technical in nature, the divide between project managers who create work or remove obstacles has become more pronounced. Technical implementation projects push this even further. As project leaders, we need to recognize the impact of technical skill and the too many active projects on ability to manage a project to its completion. There are 4 combinations on the technical skill to execution matrix:

  • Technical but Overworked – These project managers have the skill, but are not capable of removing obstacles because there are too many other projects on her plate.
  • Technical & Actionable – These are the technical project managers that are able to remove obstacles for their team. Often these resources get overlooked by the project team as they are seen as just doing their job.
  • Non-Technical & Actionable – These resources tend to be PMI certified so know the mechanics of managing a project, are able to remove obstacles without needing to fully understand the technical pieces.
  • Non-Technical & Overworked – These project managers also tend to be PMI certified so know the mechanics, but are overworked so they can’t focus on removing obstacles. Ultimately these pieces get pushed to project resources.

As a technical project manager, I have some bias about which quadrant the rockstars reside. However, there are some strong non-technical project managers who are able to successfully complete projects. This requires management support and a level of organizational prioritization that is really difficult.