In This Issue:
From the Editor
Carl Pritchard on smart milestones
Niel Nickolaisen - how lawnmowers trim project requirements
Matt Glei - how lawnmowers trim project requirements
Cinda Voegtli's Lessons from a Hurricane - Team angst and the fuzzy front end
Featured Bundle: Planning and Tracking
Where's ProjectConnections?
Spain and Pittsburgh
Corporate Subscriptions
From the Editor
This week we continue our blogger introductions, to give you a better idea of who you're hearing from on the Project Practitioner's Blog. These entries from the last couple of weeks have discussed how to sort out the functions we really need from the ones slowing us down, and how to do your yearly planning in a day (without having to do it all in a day). Plus, Cinda Voegtli has another entry in her Lessons from a Hurricane, about how to keep the team going when the stress and pressure of the fuzzy front end make it easier to sit down and wait out the storm.Featured Article
Unraveling the Mystery of the Milestone, by Carl Pritchard
As I write this article, I'm on final approach into Las Vegas, Nevada. The pilot on this particular flight has served as both driver and tour guide, pausing at four intervals along the way to greet the passengers and to highlight local sites of interest 30,000 feet below.
The city down to the right of our flight is Saint Louis, Missouri, Gateway to the West.
If you look out the left side of the aircraft, that's Lake Powell.
What's notable is his effective use of milestones. It's been textbook, which makes you wonder if it's by design, or happenstance. In our projects, it definitely should be by design, and we should seriously consider the implications of the decisions we make in that regard. A good milestone meets some pretty specific criteria. Click to continue »
Cross-functional teams can get a lot of mileage out of project status reports are brief and high-level, avoiding the tenth mile markers. Don't forget to reward your team when they when they don't).
Featured Bloggers
Niel Nickolaisen is the CIO and Director of Strategic Planning at Headwaters, Inc, and is a veteran C-level executive in both technology and operations positions; typically in turnaround roles. He holds a MS in Engineering from MIT and a BS in Physics from Utah State University. He is also one of the founders of Accelinnova, a think tank focused on improving organizational and IT agility. Niel is passionate about process simplification and applying lean concepts to all types of business activities, even IT, and this passion shows through in his blog entries. Last week, he posted a great entry on how his lawnmower helped him cut back on crazy project requirements. (It's not what you think.)
The Parable of the Lawnmower
A couple of months ago one of the wheels on my push lawnmower fell off and I decided to buy a new mower. The old lawnmower had survived 10 years of inattention and I figured it was finally time to put it down. I drove to the local big-box hardware store and selected my new lawnmower.
I took it home, opened the box, threw away the owner's manual (without even cracking the cover), put the mower together, added oil and gas, and fired it up. Then, I noticed something was wrong. There was no throttle on the new mower. My old mower had a throttle control. There was no such thing on the new mower. It ran at one speed and one speed only.
At first, I felt a little cheated. I paid good money for a new mower and there was no throttle control. Then I thought about the usefulness of the throttle control. I could not recall a single time when I had ever adjusted it. Never once had I thought to myself, 'This patch of grass would be better cut at "turtle" speed.'
Perhaps someone at the lawnmower company figured out that a throttle control was functionality that no one needed or actually used. As I finished mowing my front yard and moved to the back, it occurred to me that the throttle control was like a lot of the software I've developed (at someone's request) over the years. Click to continue »
Ensure your teams are capturing all of the project requirements with the techniques in this requirements capture guideline. Then thin them out ruthlessly by comparing to the is/is-not worksheet the team has agreed on as part of project scope. Ann Drinkwater has valuable advice for keeping your requirements meetings on track.
Matt Glei, one of the co-founders of ProjectConnections, has spent his 30-year career in high technology and medical product development and operations, managing at companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Nellcor, and Hoana Medical. His background includes significant periods in R&D, Operations, and Marketing, in environments that range from five-person start-ups to high-volume businesses with a cast of thousands, and has seen the same performance issues in both extremes. Today, Matt focuses on coaching teams through those performance issues as Managing Partner of Know-how Consulting in Honolulu, Hawaii. His most recent entry provides advice for coping with those eleventh hour requests for next year's strategic planning ... oh, and can you have that memo to us in time for the 3pm meeting?
Strategic & Business Planning: a Project Manager's Role
When your company does "strategic" planning or yearly budget planning, do they come to you and want you to estimate the expense budget, the capital budget, the headcount and schedule for one or more projects in a single day? How do you do this quickly and but still come up with estimates that you can live with?
The first thing to remember is that this comes up on a yearly cycle, so if they came to you last November, they'll be back again this November. Remembering this might give you a little notice and time to do your homework. Set a reminder in your calendar that November is "planning month."
Another important item is to know how much detail your company wants as part of this planning. For example, a larger business unit might want rough estimates for many projects so they can add them up and extrapolate resource levels (expenses, capital, headcount, etc.) in general for the business and worry less about the detail of each project. On the other hand, if the company is asking for schedules that they will use as benchmarks on the projects yet to be started or even fully-scoped, then the problem is much more challenging. Click to continue »
Get a high-level view of the expected work and resource assignments in your department with this department- and project-level WBS. Estimating is easier if you have a few estimating methods to choose from. Our Budgets and Cost Tracking template provides some alternatives for recording all these SWAGS in an orderly fashion.
Featured Blog
Lessons from a Hurricane, by Cinda Voegtli
Part 3: Handling team angst in the fuzzy front end
More project lessons from helping my parents recover from impressive Hurricane Gustav damage to their home and lake house. The three weeks after the storm reminded me strongly of what teams at the beginning of a particularly difficult project often face -- and tools I've used on my projects to counter the issues. Picture a team facing a huge tangle of an absolute MESS, feeling pretty helpless as they look at the pile and wonder where the heck to start and what will become of them as they wrestle with that mess . . .
This is how my parents felt those first weeks as they dealt with storm debris everywhere, worried about how to get an 80-foot tree off the top of the garage (it took a crane in the end), and scrambled to get to the lake place and its furniture before any more rain hit, before mold formed . . . Truly a mess of an undertaking. And they experienced huge angst as they wondered and worried. Overwhelm, dread of the unknown, the seemingly huge size of those first steps, all the questions. How long will we have to wait for the insurance people to show up? Will they pay adequate money for the damage? Will we have enough cash for our share? What do we do with all this furniture? How do we keep from being gouged by contractors? How do we decide whether to rebuild the lake place? Many, many unknowns, some complex interactions among decisions, not to mention a whole bunch of work they weren't counting on having to take on. Lots of questions, lots of anxiety, and understandably so. But no way to get around the uncertainty, really -- all they could do is start dealing with the questions and issues. But tied up in tight stressful knots from worry about what they didn't yet understand, it was a recipe for a very unpleasant project experience -- a very negative "team mindset" right out of the gate.
I've actually experienced this same effect with project teams during the fuzzy front end of major projects, and more so as the years of my career have gone by. In my early project days, things felt very orderly and downright leisurely. "Here's the spec. You have x months. Go do this design." Fun creative time in my cube with a few reviews here and there. What could be better for a project team member?
Fast forward a few years and the front end of my projects felt very different. Read more »
Our Project Kickoff Meeting Agenda and guidelines are based on Cinda's recommendations for a successful project launch. Even if your "meeting" is a gathering around the coffeepot, you'll still need a clear project vision and insight into the project issues and alternatives. Fancy forms overkill for your 2-week project? Try our Flexibility Matrix instead.
Featured Bundle
May I Have the Envelope, Please? No, Not That One, the BIG One -
Project Planning and Tracking Bundle
Sometimes hard to fit everything into one little bundle, so we came up with one big one. This bundle of planning and tracking tools will help you get a handle on your project schedule. Learn how to build schedules and estimates that make sense. Go beyond Gantt charts for better visibility into what's really happening on your project. Make sure you everyone involved in the project knows what's going on, and that you know who's involved. Generate status reports that are useful and readable, that can be written and read quickly. If you don't have a Premium subscription yet, this is a great, economical way to get ten of our best Premium resources quickly, for a single low price, and put them to work on your project right away.
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Where's ProjectConnections?
Alfonso Bucero and Randy Englund will be speaking at the Project Portfolio Day conference in Madrid, Spain on December 15.
Carl Pritchard will be conducting a public PMP® Exam Prep class for the Pittsburgh Chapter of the PMI December 9-10. More information is available online at http://www.pittsburghpmi.org/events_calendar.shtm.
Everyone else seems to be busy making their lists and checking them twice. (We're pretty sure everyone's been nice.)
Corporate Subscriptions and Licensing
Want your team members to have their own access to templates and how-to resources for their project work? Need to share documents and deliverables beyond your project team? We make it easier with affordable corporate subscriptions and licensing. Detailed information regarding corporate options is available online. Give your whole team, or even the entire organization, cost-effective access to our comprehensive online library of resources. You already know how helpful it's been for you. Now it's time to share with everyone else. Find out more »Not sure if corporate terms apply to you? Check out our licensing terms at the top of our Terms of Service page, in refreshingly ordinary, everyday English.