January 13, 2010 – An “OH [INSERT EXPLETIVE HERE]!” Moment

I bolted awake at 5:11 this morning…heart pounding, mind racing…to the sound of rain. Living in Southern California, it isn’t a sound I hear all that often, but it is one that strikes fear into my heart. Lest one think that I suffer from Ombrophobia, I actually enjoy a good rain storm. I miss the huge thunderstorms we had growing up south of Buffalo, NY. My true fear of rain rises from the list of my belongings sitting outside that are not intended to get wet.

Today it was the seat from our van, removed a month ago to make traveling easier for my daughter and her sprained ankle. Originally placed in the garage, it was sitting, exposed, on the patio where she had dragged it to sit in the sun.

It was indeed an “Oh [INSERT EXPLETIVE HERE]!” moment. Your mind, body and soul leave their peaceful ignorance and arrive, adrenaline pumping, heart stopping, in total awareness. I’ve had a few of those moments:
• Calculating the cost of sending my daughter to college next year
• Reading the scale the last time I weighed myself
• Opening the email telling me my team lied to me
• Checking the deadline on the project
• Realizing that my last blog was on April 6 of last year
• Getting called in to your manager’s office on the day they announce layoffs

I was reminded again that these moments are the result of choices we make every day. It usually isn’t the big decisions that trip us up. We tend to put a lot of thought into those. It is the little ones that nail us.

How many times did I walk by that seat and think, “That needs to be put back in the van” and did nothing about it? How many pieces of chocolate did I eat between Thanksgiving and New Years? Why didn’t I put either the dog or the garbage out before leaving the house?

Those haunting questions have driven me to take the Choice Challenge. By following these 5 steps, I predict you can drastically reduce your number of “those” moments.

1. Establish Priorities. Without priorities, nothing is important. You may think it is the opposite (i.e. everything becomes important), but life doesn’t work that way. Note to Tiger Woods: A moment (or moments) of excitement with a mistress is not at the same level as your family or your career.

2. Define Achievements. Set bench marks for yourself and head toward something. All great non-goal examples begin “perhaps this is the year I will…” or “wouldn’t it be amazing if….” Drop the “perhaps” and dreaming pieces and establish some real goals.

Having a happy, involved, and loving family would be a great achievement. Is it something you are going to leave to chance or are you willing to work at it?

3. Recognize Your Choices. When your phone rings, you have a choice: interrupt what I am doing or allow the caller to leave a message. Your reaction to a situation or individual is a choice: do I immediately yell and throw a fit or take time to plan my revenge… I mean response? Should I watch reruns on TV or work on my book?

Waiting until after you have eaten a candy bar to think about your diet doesn’t work. Believe me, I’ve been there.

4. Evaluate each Choice against your Priorities and Achievements. Many things are not bad, they just don’t get you where you need to go. Doing your timesheet is a good thing, unless you have a Director waiting for a report. Staying late at work to get ahead is great, unless it is your anniversary and your wife is waiting for you.

5. Make the right choice. Nine times out of ten you know what the right thing to do is. Have the courage and strength to pull the trigger on the right choice. You could avoid having another “Oh…” moment.

One of my achievements this year is to begin writing again… that and to get that chair dried off and back in the van.

July 7, 2008 – Making the Time Tracking Switch

Over the next several months, our company will be upgrading the project management system and adjusting our processes to take advantage of new features. One of the features getting a significant amount of interest is resource management. The ability to plan resource availability in advance will allow us to understand our project capacity and identify bottlenecks in time to adjust.

The key to making this work will be creating and maintaining realistic project schedules with resources assigned and hours tracked at the task level. The tricky part of making this time tracking switch is getting the team members to buy into the concept of entering actual hours into the system and re-estimating the time remaining. In order to make this happen you will need an EDGE.

Expect Resistance. Your team will push back when you inform them of the new expectation to record their project hours at the task level. The obvious reactions you will get include:

• It will take too long to break up my time.
• I work on too many projects for this.
• Why are you micromanaging me?

Anticipate these issues and have answers available. As an example, include additional time on the project schedule for status and timekeeping; up to an hour per week per project.

Direction from the Top. Communicating the change needs to come from as far up the organization as possible. When the CIO says this will help make us successful it carries a lot more weight than just you as a project manager advocating it. The directors and supervisors need to buy in, too. If management doesn’t take action when time isn’t recorded then nothing will happen.

Give Up Some Detail. In order to make this work you may need to cut down on the level of detail in the schedule. Trying to divide time up into 2-4 hour chunks for 3 different projects will drive them insane. The opposite temptation is to drop all the way back to the Phase level or, worse, the Project level. Either one of these is too high. Break tasks down to between 8 and 80 hours (approximately 2 weeks of effort). Additional details can be listed and tracked as started / completed in a spreadsheet to ensure specific tasks are assigned, worked and closed.

Explain the Purpose. It is important to clearly communicate why a more detailed accounting of the project time is required. Begin by explaining the need to understand resource usage and availability but make sure you follow up with these:

• Being over or under an estimate is expected. The theory is that they will balance each other over time.
• A realistic understanding of where we are off schedule allows us to discuss how to get back on track.
• Re-estimating at the task level allows us to re-plan when future resources are needed. This is especially useful if we are ahead of scheduled or if other projects require the same resources.
• This is not intended to single any individual out or micromanage the team.
  It will help identify areas where additional resources, training or other assistance can make a difference.
• By reviewing the workload across all projects, management can find workload issues and take actions to correct them.

As the team sees this information being used to make project decision they will realize its importance get on board.

June 30, 2008 – Muskrats in Your Levee

Last week the Mississippi River broke through the levees holding it back despite the efforts of hundreds of people fortifying it with sandbags. What caused the problem? Muskrats. Their burrows in the grounds along the river weakened it to the point that a breach was formed, flooding miles of farm land.

As managers we strive to make sure the project stays within the course set by the river banks established in the Charter and Scope Statement. Usually we are successful in keeping things flowing smoothly but occasionally problems poke enough holes in to create havoc. Here are five muskrats to watch out for on your project.

1. Slipping timelines. At first they seem harmless: a task runs long but it’s finished the next week. Unfortunately that pushes the next task back 3 days to when Bill is on vacation, costing you another week. Tracking the project at the task level allows you to see potential slips and make adjustments quickly. Most projects can survive by tracking weekly but more agile methods require checkpoints daily to make sure people are working on and completing the right things, right now.
2. Competing projects. As resources are stretched further, many people are required to work on multiple projects simultaneously. When things heat up on one project, the other projects suffer. Keep tabs on how many projects your team members are working and coordinate with the other managers to make it work.
3. Negative Rumors. Perceived pending bad news can demoralize a team, kill productivity and, if unattended, cause people to seek employment elsewhere. Rumors can actually cause more damage than the reality they represent. Work quickly to kill false rumors. If there is truth to the rumor, get it out in the open and show how your are dealing with the problem.
4. Miscommunications. Sometimes the simplest statements can be taken extremely wrong. The pastor of our church was interrupted once by someone coughing in the audience. He said, “Can one of the ushers please help that man out?” Immediately a couple of ushers descended on him and started dragging him away. “No! No!” the pastor corrected quickly, “I meant give him a cup of water or something!” In this situation everyone spoke English and still messed up a simple thing. Given the global world we live in and the complexity of the solutions we develop, it is no wonder our projects have communication problems. When you think you have over communicated what you need, you probably need to repeat yourself.
5. Unresponsive Stakeholders. Silence from your sponsor, end users and other key stakeholders is not good. If you are inviting them to meetings and asking for input but getting nothing back, find out why. It could be simply that people are on vacation or otherwise occupied, but you need to understand why and get it fixed. The problem with assuming that silence means consent is that when they finally do speak up it may be to say everything is wrong. Keep the time between feedback opportunities frequent and follow up when you don’t hear from them.

Each of these things may seem harmless at the time, but when the project is flooding the banks any one of them can cause the levee to break.

May 12, 2008 – Stop Wasting My Time

My brother-in-law, Paul, tells a story about a boy, Theo, who wass afraid of clowns. The tale follows Theo’s life from childhood to teenager to young man through to his old age. At different stages in his life he attempts to survive a circus performance but always ends up fleeing, screaming hysterically, at the sight of the clown. He tries therapy, hypnosis and other extreme means to cure himself. Finally he joins a religious order of monks known for their fearlessness and sharp comebacks in the face of danger. In the final confrontation with the clown, Theo is being chased, stumbles and falls down. With the clown standing menacingly over him, Theo finally faces his fear and yells, “I don’t like you very much!”

Quite pointless, eh? Paul can drag this story out for at least 15 minutes, adding more details and deeper insights. When he finishes you feel cheated out of a large portion of your time.

As project managers, we need to make sure that what we are asked to do has purpose. The Systems Development Life Cycle is a great example of this. As part of the Project Management Office, I expect pushback from the people using the SDLC. The majority of the templates and processes come directly from the teams, but if they don’t make sense we need to get them changed. In order to be successful, everyone needs to get involved in the following ways.

Know What. Keep an eye out for PMO announcements telling you what has been added or changed. When you start a new project or phase, browse through the processes, templates, best practices and lessons learned to make sure you have the latest and greatest. The temptation is to modify what worked for the last project, but great improvements may have been made since then.

Understand Why. I’ve been guilty of playing the PMO blame card. Early in my PM career I would ask the team or client to complete something “because the PMO requires it.” A great example is the Risk Assessment. If you are just filling in risks because you have to, you are missing out on a project saving devise. Telling the client / business that you have to have one to pass an audit may get you off the hook immediately, but it shoots an arrow into your support team. Eventually the client / business will think all PMs blindly do whatever is dictated. They then loose faith in the whole organization.

Use Them. Put the process to the test. Processes and templates generally aren’t built to gaze longingly at. They make really lousy wall hangings and lawn ornaments. They are intended to be used. Besides, the best and most constructive complaints come from those that have tried to use them, not those that ignore them.

Provide Improvements. The goal is to use the group’s collective knowledge and learning to continuously refine and replace what exists today. The PMO will be among the first to admit that the best answers come from the line. Toyota’s manufacturing success has at its core the right and responsibility of assembly workers to suggest ways to make it work better.

The users of the processes are the real owners, not the PMO. If a piece is broken, get it fixed. If it doesn’t make sense, find out why it even exists. If no one knows why, get the PMO to drop it until someone screams for it back.

In the end, no one wants to waist your time with pointlessness. Well, except maybe my brother-in-law.

August 6, 2007 – Time to take it Easy

Here in the sunny southern California my daughters have passed the mid point of their summer holidays. July and August seem to fly by faster than any other months of the year. Last summer I missed most of that time because I was working out of town, flying back and forth just to spend the weekend at home. That summer window of opportunity of spontaneous fun freedom slipped by with me out of town.

I have been working with a team to create a chapter for the second edition of the PMI Standard for Program Management. The father of one of the women on the team is suffering from dementia. His once brilliant mind is failing and the time to spend with her once strong and encouraging dad is slipping away.

The collapse of a major bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota ended the lives of people who thought they were just running to or from work.

What’s my point? It is two fold. First, make sure you take time for yourself. Second, make sure your team does, too.

Be Good to Yourself
Those 60-80 hour weeks, 52 weeks a year are going to kill you eventually but they are taking you away from enjoying your life now. I’m not suggesting you quit your job and convince your family to join a circus. However, if your family calls you “Uncle Daddy” because they see their Canadian cousins more often than they see you there might be a problem.

Recognizing that my travel was detrimental to my family life, I opted to pull back from an exciting PM role to take one closer to home that lacked the challenge.

Delegation is another great way to drop a few hours from your schedule. Find items from your to do list that you really don’t have to do and share the effort with your team. One quick hit for this is team meeting minutes. If everyone on the team takes a turn publishing the minutes you shave at least a half hour from your schedule each week.

Sometimes cutting back isn’t possible. In order to add a little balance to the family / work equation, I do bring work home. I know, it sounds counter productive, but it works. I’m home, usually in time to have dinner with my family and spend a couple hours with them. Once the kids head to bed I pull out the work and put in another couple of hours. It is a great time to do minutes or review documentation. Fortunately I can operate on a limited amount of sleep for several days in a row.

Take Care of Your Team
Burn out is a real possibility for your resources, especially if they try to drive themselves as hard as you do yourself. Here are a couple of items to keep in mind that may help maintain some sanity in the work place.

1. Set realistic dates. Nothing kills the enthusiasm in a team faster than working from behind right from the beginning. It’s acceptable to agree to aggressive dates, but build in a little reality, too.
2. Don’t overdue the overtime. Scheduling everyone to work overtime from the start of the project in order to meet the deadlines will not work. Overtime only works for limited time frames and then only when the team sees the purpose and benefit of doing it. Get their buy in before assigning it. You may be better off obtaining more resources and dividing the work up further.
3. Understand timing on family events. Encourage your team to honor their family commitments. Ask when the big soccer game is or the piano recital and make sure they can make it. It will build your referent authority (see Referent Authority entry) and keep them safe at home.
4. Encourage time off. Many people I work with seem unable to use their vacation time. They keep busy through the year and never get around to it. The theory behind taking time off is to come back refocused. Another great idea is compensation (“comp”) time. When your team has to work the weekend to implement a system give them the opportunity to take that time off just before or just after the event. It is better not to let the time stack up unused because it becomes a pain to track and if the situation changes (ex. project ends) they might loose out on it.
5. Be flexible with time management. Most projects have deadlines, not office hours. If you can be flexible in the work hours your team may be more productive. Granted, there needs to be overlapping time to handle interfaces and discussions, but a flex-schedule adds to the well-being of your resources.
6. Recognize the extra effort. Don’t take the overtime and hard work for granted. Reward the team from time to time. Suggestions include restaurant gift cards or movie passes. Pick things that encourage them to connect with others outside of work and gain a little balance. I know it is appreciated because when it happens for me my wife usually says, “It’s about time they did something for you.”

If you have other ways you use to keep yourself and your team sane drop me a comment and share it with all of us.