Archive for December, 2009

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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Spare Equipment – Look Around – Need A Cleanup?

Published December 10, 2009 David Egan Leave a Comment

I needed to test some software recently and found some old equipment in a corner. Then I noticed there were a lot of spare pieces of equipment laying around in various corners of various rooms. Maybe you have noticed the slow accumulation of equipment over time from previous projects.


If this were my garage, it would be full of tools and left-over pieces. But does this make sense in most modern IT departments? The equipment goes out of date so quickly and has usually been scrounged from dead ‘carcass’
computers. I found disk drives of 30, 40 and 60 Gigabytes that were built in the 2000-2002 era. I found hubs and routers that were 10 Megabit per second and had the old bayonet connectors for coax wiring (circa 1980s). We are not a museum.

Should I trust using these old relics with real data? NO! For test equipment, development or training, maybe, but not if I wanted reliable, day to day operations. I have no problem using them for a machine that I am going to test some software on before I try it on real equipment – unless it requires really new equipment (like most new operating systems and larger applications like databases, email, or web services to name a few).

Have you looked around your office? I have mentioned disaster recovery tips in previous blogs; is your IT department a clutter of this old equipment? Does it look like a hurricane disaster at times? Are you keeping this extra equipment for something specific or because it is still on the books?

Clean up! Your desk, your files, your CDROMs/DVDs, backup tapes, old manuals for computers you threw out years ago, install disks for equipment you can no longer find, help disks and EVERYTHING ELSE YOU HAVE NOT LOOKED AT IN 2+ YEARS! Pass it out, give it to charities, give it to salvage and try to avoid putting it in landfills if possible (check your local government’s recycling guidelines to see if they have programs available to collect e-waste).

You might be surprised how exhilarating this can be!

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