Managing Up in Project Management

Published March 9, 2010 Stephanie Simon Leave a Comment

As project managers, we are often working with a variety of individuals on a given project. Sometimes we are working with our team members. Sometimes with our project sponsor or business owner, a vendor or client. And other times we are interacting with members of the leadership team. It can be tough to do a good job  managing all these different types of relationships, particularly as some of these individuals are more senior to us in the organization.

You sometimes hear people talk about “Managing Down,” or managing those people who are subordinate to you, like your staff. But we don’t often talk about the importance of “Managing Up,” or managing the relationships with those senior to you. Managing Up is challenging. We are often intimidated by rank and authority, and rightly so if the person has the ability to fire you.

A key to managing those senior to you is to develop a positive working relationship based on trust. Demonstrate early on that you are competent and trustworthy, and follow through and deliver on what is expected of you. These are good first steps to building the relationship. Communicate regularly and be sure you are honest in your communication. Don’t try to hide the bad news; it will come out eventually, and hiding the information will erode trust and rapport. Take the time to get to know all the individuals you are working with, even if you are working remotely. They will appreciate you asking them something about themselves, and understanding more about the other person will help you with both Managing Up and Managing Down.

When Managing Up, take the time to find out what is important to those senior to you and what their priorities are. Be sure to understand what their expectations are of you and the project. Keep this information in the forefront of your mind. Learn how to work through disagreements with those individuals who have seniority. It is OK to disagree. Be prepared and have your facts and figures ready. Be able to clearly explain what is in the best interest of the project and why. Also take the time to listen and understand differences of opinion. If you have developed a good working relationship, you will be better able to work through these differences and find the best solution for the project. When all else fails, try humor — but use it judiciously. I often find humor works to build relationships and ease tension.

Remember what the impact will be if you yield to authority at all times. You will be struggling to bring your project in on time, on budget, and within the desired scope. Although it is challenging, make sure to keep in mind the importance of Managing Up throughout the project. Look for opportunities to build relationships. Make a conscience effort to work with a variety of individual styles and priorities. And look for good role models! They are out there. And you will notice their careers progress, because relationships do matter.

Statistics In Management Decisions

Published March 3, 2010 David Egan Leave a Comment
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As managers, we want to be able to show progress, improvement, advancement, savings, or ROI. We tend to collect ‘numbers,’ look for trends, set goals, compare and contrast, etc. But we cannot forget to step back once in a while and try to see the big picture, which involves ‘them and us.’

Our innately-human side features our own biases. We may measure many aspects, but are we measuring what we really need? Are we measuring after the fact? Are we thinking ahead instead of behind? Are the numbers providing a broad enough spectrum of information, or are we so narrowly focused and totally fixated that we are not seeing the big picture?

Statistics is a wonderful form of number manipulation. It’s intrinsically accurate and faulty at the same time. Statistics are used to support both strong and weak arguments; hailed as revolutionary or frowned on by the accused. One well-know statistician of the last century was quick to point out that you cannot just measure the results after the fact. F. Edwards Deming believed, and constantly promoted the idea, that you should blame the process before the people. If your management team does not empower the employees, does not rely on after-the-fact statistics, or provides the best tools and support to the employees, then the best job cannot be done. It  does not matter who the hero or heroine is, they are or were set up to fail.

5 of Deming’s 14 points are specific to statistics, and he was a statistician:

  • Cease dependence on mass inspections (after the fact)
  • Eliminate slogans and posters
  • Eliminate numerical quotas and goals
  • Establish right of pride in workmanship
  • Encourage self-improvement in everyone

There are a list of process improvement gurus, like Kaizan and Ishikawa, who believe that if there is a problem at the end of a set of processes, it is better to start analyzing at the beginning of the process or processes, and add small improvements consistently throughout. One should not just measure the end point result as definitive of the entire process. One should not ignore all preceding processes/steps required. Surprise your team by getting them involved with your process improvement. Your staff and team members are your face to the client – empower them!

An Introduction to Procurement Management…continued

Published February 11, 2010 Brian Egan Leave a Comment

Below is a list of steps involved in procurement management.  Steps 1-8 can be found here.

9. Award contract
A contract is awarded for each procurement.  The contract is a legal document that clarifies the responsibilities and relationships between the buyer and seller.
10. Determine work start date
Work cannot begin until after the final contract has been signed by senior management of both the buying and selling organizations.  Delays in obtaining final signatures can result in delays to the start of work.

11. Manage contracts
‘Managing contracts’ is the supervision of actual procurement activities from both an administrative and a practical perspective.  Responsibility for ensuring that the right work gets done at the right time is typically left to the project team.  Administrative responsibility remains with the procurement department.

12. Review performance (extend or terminate)
Throughout the life of the ‘delivery’ of goods and services, the performance of the delivering organization (vendor) must be constantly reviewed and compared with contract terms.  A detailed SOW is a critical component of effective performance analysis.

If vendor performance falls below a specified standard, (such as schedule or quality) then the contract may be terminated according to terms established in the contract.  (Of course every effort should be made to correct the situation through negotiations and discussions before considering termination.)

13. Claims administration
Claims administration involves the management of conflicts between the buyer and seller.

How claims are administered is determined by the procedures set out in the contract.  When the remedies specified in the contract are insufficient to resolve conflicts, the issue may ultimately end up being settled in court.

14. End contracts
After all work is complete, or if the contract is terminated, the contract is formally ‘closed.’

Contract closure involves the formal notification of all parties regarding the status of the contract.  In addition, a contract archive is created that documents exactly what work was completed and what payments made. Records are kept of all correspondence generated during the life of the contract.

15. Lessons learned
An important part of helping an organization to avoid repeating mistakes is the gathering of ‘lessons learned.’  This includes an analysis of what went according to plan, what went wrong, and what should have been done differently.

16. Ongoing claim administration – litigation
Conflicts between the buying and selling organizations can continue long after a project is formally completed.  An organization’s legal and procurement departments take responsibility for ongoing claims administration, which can take years to be resolved.

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Accounting In Projects

Published January 21, 2010 David Egan Leave a Comment

Accounting is always fun to behold, but like anything that relates to moneys or resources being spent on a project, you need to have some ‘checks and balances’ in place.
This is why we spend so much time planning a project. We really want to know what is expected to be spent as the project progresses, and any fluctuations have to be understood before acceptance. This is where the double and triple checks should be used.

You should not be the only one ensuring compliance of spending. Many project managers have a contingency fund available for small, incidental costs that might occur. This fund should still have an extra set of ‘eyes’ on it. One or more associates should be double checking that these payments are justified and fully documented.

Neither you nor your sponsor wants surprises, so keep everyone informed! No matter how small the amount spent is, keep everyone in the loop with open and truthful communication. No surprises!

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Do you use a Checklist?

Published January 19, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

In many professions, checklists have become a common standard, according to a new book called The Checklist Manifesto. The author, Atul Gawande, writes that as today’s jobs become more complex, checklists that outline proper procedures are a way to decrease errors and mistakes.

The book focuses on the checklists used by healthcare professionals for complex procedures…surgeries, blood transfusions, etc. Gawande found that over a three month period with 8000 patients in hospitals around world, the use of checklists decreased death rates by 46%!!

Your projects may not literally be life or death situations (even though they may seem like it), but they can still produce serious consequences when not done correctly. The PMI PMBOK Guide’s Process Groups and Knowledge Areas provide a checklist of sorts for use during a project’s lifetime. But I’m sure that some project managers have their own checklists that they use to help them. Do you? Tell us about it!

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An Introduction to Procurement Management

Published January 14, 2010 Brian Egan 1 Comment

Project procurement activities are often managed by specialists.  By this I mean that the procurement department takes over responsibility for purchasing and contract management from the project manager.  As a result of this separation of responsibilities, the steps and stages of procurement are often poorly understood by PMs.

In this and the next few blog submissions, I will attempt to shed light on procurement activities and relate these activities to the PMI PMBOK.

Procurement Steps

1. Make purchase decisions – Planning
Purchase decisions follow from project planning and analysis. Project needs are analyzed and compared with available resources and skills.  Anything the organization cannot provide must be procured.

2. Prepare bid documents
These documents include a SOW statement (Scope of Work), general terms and conditions, bid response instructions, and an explanation of how proposals will be evaluated (source selection criteria).

3. Distribute bid packages to potential vendors
Potential vendors can be identified through advertising, the internet, or through an organization’s qualified vendors list.

4. Bidder’s conferences
Bidder or vendor conferences are used to efficiently deliver detailed information to potential vendors.  The events offer an opportunity for vendors to ask questions and to hear questions posed by other potential vendors.

5. Receive responses from bidders
A suitable time-frame must be given for vendors to prepare bids.  Additional information and clarifications are often required by vendors.

6. Evaluate proposals
After all bids have been received, they are evaluated on the basis of a predetermined scoring system referred to as ‘source selection criteria.’  The comparisons are typically performed by experts from various disciplines related to the type of procurement.

7. Interview bidders
Short-listed bidders are interviewed to discuss details of their offers and to ensure a good fit with the purchasing organization.

8. Conduct negotiations
The leading candidate is invited to discuss (negotiate) contract details.  The issues that generally require clarification include such things as delivery date, shipping costs, warranty, and support.

To be continued……

Boring Meetings

Published January 13, 2010 David Egan Leave a Comment

Can meetings be tedious and boring when the facilitator/speaker is not prepared? Absolutely!

Lack of preparation and understanding of your objective is a terrible waste of time for everyone. If your business calender is filled with important meetings, whenever you get to one where a key person is just not prepared, you going to be miffed. Should we flog them?

Should we walk out early in disgust? Stamp our feet impatiently? Stomp around the room steaming? Rattle something on the table or chair? Hit them in the back of the head with hastily scrawled note in a paper airplane?

What if this is a remote meeting, with people from all across the country? You just cannot flog, stamp or stomp enough to get their attention! At least in a live meeting there is some satisfaction. Remote meetings require more tact.

Our new business modus operandus includes more and more remote meetings using Internet-based technologies for meetings. We can share voice, text and desktop applications. It works well…if everyone is prepared. Being prepared means if there is a large document to discuss, everyone has a copy of it. If your meeting has desktop or application sharing, the facilitator has a copy to display, if necessary, or some form of presentation, like PowerPoint slides.

The time should be appropriate in length and everyone informed well in advance.

If you’re leading this meeting, be proactive – get to know the technology, understand what information needs to be disseminated, review what you are delivering. In essence, be prepared!

If you have slides and or notes, great; forward them, but DO NOT just read the content. The slides are supposed to awaken the presenter’s deepest, inner thoughts. These should trigger the speaker to spew out enrapturing, imaginative prose. Assume I, and everyone else, can read what is on the screen.

Also, assume that I cannot read your mind across the Internet. If you have something that requires a depth of knowledge, it’s is probably a good topic to review closely, to detail verbosely.

I have had several meetings in the past week. Most of the time, the speakers were prepared, except for this one reallllllly unprepared facilitator. An hour filled with ummms and ahhhs. It was almost painful. The speaker read directly from the slides -  information we already generally knew. He failed to realize and address the real issue, which was the differences between the old version and the new version of a document.

Being a live meeting, we could ask questions. Only then could we further prepare ourselves for our next client meetings. Reviewing the obvious, or material that we already had access to, was a waste of time. Not to mention boring.

Think to the next meeting you have, are you prepared, and will the audience be prepared? Do they already have the material they need? Are you prepared to discuss the changes, the highlights, the specific issues and not the mundane? Did you give enough notice and a good reason for them to attend?

You should be pleasantly surprised at how efficient a well-prepared meeting will seem.

PMs get High-Tech with Holiday Lights

Published December 18, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Two project managers local to Cary, NC, where Global Knowledge is headquartered, were in the area paper today for their extreme holiday decorations.

Denny Cole, a project manager for IBM, and Al Love, who owns his own project management company, worked together to string more than 17,000 Christmas lights and 3,000 feet of wire around Cole’s property. They then synchronized the lights to flash along with two songs from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Onlookers tune to shortwave radio station to hear the music.

Cole plans to increase the scope of his project next year.

Check out the News & Observer video here.

Meeting Management Feedback

Published December 17, 2009 Brian Egan Leave a Comment

Rules, rewards and penalties are needed to collectively encourage meeting owners to put in sufficient effort to ensure that meetings are productive.

Top Down
The establishment of rules and regulations begins at the top.  If mismanaged meetings are acceptable within an organization, it is because senior management permits them to be.  Change starts at the top.  Rot starts at the bottom.

The pathway to improved performance requires senior management awareness and effective feedback.

Problem Recognition
Senior management needs to define how they want meetings to be run.  Best practices need to be explained and demonstrated throughout the organization.

Feedback
Managers at all levels need to encourage best practices by rewarding desirable behavior and discouraging bad.
One organization that I have worked with had a practice of scoring meetings.  Every meeting involving more than three people ended with a quick performance review based on five variables ranked from 1 to 10.

The evaluations were tallied and averaged.  If a meeting received an overall score of less than 8 out of 10, a report and explanation had to be submitted to the meeting owner’s immediate superior.  This was meant to lead to corrective action.

At this company, the practice of giving meetings a ‘grade’ had a huge effect on how meetings were managed.  Not all of them were brilliantly run, but darn few were sloppy.

Best Practices
If meetings are going to be consistently well-run everyone needs to know how this can be achieved.  This means defining best practices and training staff in how to follow protocols for best results.

Feedback
After the training comes feedback, both bad and good.  People will only get better at something if they know what constitutes an improvement.  Feedback is what clarifies behaviors the organization does or does not want emulated.

Conclusion
Virtually everyone in a professional role can come up with a list of what goes wrong in meetings.  They recognize some, if not all, of the common problems.  Despite this widespread recognition, problems persist.

It is obvious that recognition is not enough.  Action, from the top down, is required to move people away from the lazy route and encourage them make meetings work.

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Matching Project and Project Manager

Published December 16, 2009 Stephanie Simon 2 Comments

I had an interesting discussion with a client awhile back as to whether the style of an individual project manager matched with the needs of the project. The client was concerned that the qualities and attributes that the project manager was exhibiting were not a good match with the specific skills needed to be successful on the project.
Being successful in project management involves bringing together a host of skills and attributes. You have to have both technical skills – meaning  knowledge and understanding of project management tools, methodology, and practice – as well as non-technical “soft” skills such as communication and leadership skills. Project managers come from a variety of backgrounds. We all bring different strengths to the table and approach managing projects in our own unique ways.

When selecting a project manager for a project, there is generally much more of a focus on the individual having the appropriate technical skills, such as a PMP credential, and specific industry knowledge. How often do we factor in the intangibles, such as communication and leadership style, when determining a project manager’s suitability for a given project?

Along with credentials and industry knowledge, individual style and strengths should be key factors in determining a project manager’s “fit” for a given project. Especially given how many of us today are managing remote teams where those intangibles become even more important to achieving project success. Taking the upfront time to ensure a good fit between project and project manager will allow for a better work environment for everyone involved.

There was an interesting study conducted on this topic by Dov Dvir, Arik Sadeh, and Ayala Malach-Pines in Israel. They concluded that the fit between project managers’ personality and management style and the types of projects they manage is crucial to project success. For more information on their study was in an article titled “Projects and Project Managers: The Relationship Between Project Managers’ Personality, Project Types, and Project Success” in the December, 2006, issue of the PMI’s Project Management Journal.

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