From the Editor

In lean times, few of us consider how valuable we are to the organization, or what our time is worth. What does it cost to hold an inefficient meeting, write or read a confusing report, or sift through an avalanche of unimportant email? Nerves and stress get us thinking of ourselves and our projects as expendable and expensive. In our frenzy and frustration, we lose sight of the larger perspective that makes us effective, and valuable. (And we are valuable, or we wouldn't still be here!)

We promised we'd focus on the financial aspects of project management this week, and we are, but this week we want to take a step back from counting pennies and take a look at all the things that impact our project's value to the organization—yes, and our value too. You already know how to count. We would rather help you figure out what to count (figuratively speaking), and when it matters, and what to do once you've added it all up.

FEATURE NOTICE FOR PMBOK PMs: If you've ever wished for a faster way to correlate our templates and resources to PMI's major categories, you'll love our new indexes, which do exactly that. Slice down through our huge template library by PMBOK® Knowledge Area or PMBOK® Process Group. Let us know what you think!

Burning Questions

NEW - Yes, You're Really Worth It to Them
How to Get Control Over Your Time – PREMIUM

"Time is money"—believe it. One approach to getting control of our time is to take this old adage seriously. If you need convincing, make a quick calculation of what it costs your organization to pay you (including benefits, taxes, and bonus), seat you in an office, and equip you with tools, administrative support, and executive management. If you are salaried, a reasonable estimate of your total burdened cost is your gross pay multiplied by a factor of 2 to 3 and divided down to get an hourly rate. These are surprisingly large numbers, and it is real money that we burn every hour. Yet the care we take in our management of time often falls far short of the basic controls, safeguards, and reviews that we use as a matter of course in managing our organizational and personal finances.

So let's really treat time as if it were money and apply the same control and budgeting principles that we would apply to put chaotic finances in order. Click to continue »

Check out our answers to other Burning Questions about personal effectiveness and time management or browse our current collection here.

Don't see your question? Now Premium subscribers can suggest their own burning questions and sticky project issues, so we can build the database that's most useful to our members. Got a question? Submit it here (Premium login required) or just click the link on any Burning Question page. We're listening.

From the Blogs:

Lisa DiTullio observes a phenomenon that's a sore point with many of us, and encourages everyone to pull the plug for a day and see what we get done.

Margaret de Haan offers managers some alternatives to cutting staff-related costs without decreasing your headcount (though none are painless).

Career Corner

Do Your Status Reports Show You In Charge of Your Project?
Project Status Reports – SPECIAL
This Premium resource is free to registered Members until July 8, 2009

When team members and managers review your status reports, will they better understand the current state of affairs? Can they easily see what progress has been made, what issues are looming or already corrected, and who's in charge of the next actions and may need help? Or will they get lost in winding formats or confusing cross-references that obscure your meaning? There are many factors at work here: professional formatting, concise language (whenever possible, fit it on a single page), and consistent organization all make it easier to compare status from one report to the next, and from one project to the next. Awareness of the business priorities that are driving the project and proactive issue management convey that you understand the project's context as well as its content, and that you're looking out for the best interests of the organization.

Our Project Status Reports provide several different example formats appropriate to a variety of situations, so you can communicate about your projects consistently and effectively. For some inspiration that could improve your email communications, check out Cinda's column on What the Girl Scouts Could Teach Us About Project Communication. And if you'd like to brush up on your understanding of business context, consider investigating your organization's strategic goals (see our guideline on Setting Strategic Project Selection Criteria for an overview) and—if you haven't done it already—interview your project sponsor for a bird's eye view of your project. Having that global context, and communicating it in your reports and plans, can make the difference between reacting to shifts in project direction or priority and driving them. It's a career skill that will set you apart from project managers who share lists of action items but don't really convey project status or any sense that they are taking charge of the situation.

Featured Article

What Makes a Project Agile? Part 7: Iterative Planning by Alan Koch

With all that we have discussed so far in this series, you may be wondering how it can even be possible to plan an Agile project. In the first installment, "Learning and Adaptation, Collaboration," we talked about expecting surprises and making allowances for them when they happen. In the second, "Customer Focus," we said that the customer is so important to the success of our project that when they change their minds (or discover their own surprises), we need to go along with them. Next, in "Small Self-Directed Teams," we discussed letting the team self-manage. (Can we really expect them to plan?) In "Embracing Lean Principles" we discussed the value of making decisions as late as we possibly can. (How is that a plan?) In "Progressive Requirements Elaboration" we described starting the project with only a rough picture of the requirements. (How can you plan?) And last time, in "Incremental Delivery," we noted that the customer is likely to change their minds when they see the delivered increments, and we called that a good thing!

Yes, we can plan in the face of all of these things. But the way we go about planning, and the form the plan takes, will necessarily be significantly different from our traditional plans. Like everything else on an Agile project, planning will be iterative and incremental. Let's see how that plays out. Read more »

Featured Templates

NEW - What Good Is a Compass Without a Map? - Business Process Modeling Technique Brief – PREMIUM
A vague idea of where you're going might get you there eventually, but it sure helps to have a detailed map that shows you how to get there. This brief by Sinikka Waugh of Your Clear Next Step, LLC outlines how to go about creating maps of your business processes, when and why you should bother, and what techniques you should consider using. Beyond the how and why, it also addresses who to get on the team, and what to do after you've developed the model so you can be sure your work doesn't go to waste. If you're considering any new integration, software requirements, compliance activity, or process improvements, it's worth understanding how to take this critical step in defining your project scope.

From the Blogs:

Nova Rose offers thoughts on the line between project manager and subject matter expert. In her eyes, there's a danger of "not invented here" syndrome when project managers end up developing processes for business units that didn't own the meeting. What do you think?

Niel Nickolaisen encourages us to give our messy, disordered IT processes at least as much love as our messy garages and clean them out once in a while.

Project Practitioners Blog

Matt Glei discusses some of the most common reasons he has seen for projects going off track, along with some suggestions for avoiding these common hazards.

Alfonso Bucero muses on project management and innovation can help companies survive the current financial mess, in Europe and beyond.

Ann Drinkwater shares observations prompted by reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.

Where's ProjectConnections?

Kimberly Wiefling is back in Osaka for another workshop, and heads to Tokyo in July to continue her Leadership series. HR managers and professional development decision makers may be particularly interested in her HR Managers Workshop in Tokyo on 22 July. See http://wiefling.com/wordpress/?p=368. And if you've been following her adventures in Japan, you may be interested to know you can now read her book Scrappy Project Management in Japanese as well! (US readers take note: Kimberly's back in the States in August.)

Kent McDonald will be at Agile 2009 in Chicago August 24-28. He has a session on "Barely Sufficient Portfolio Management" with Todd Little (one of the co-authors of Stand Back and Deliver) and one on "Feature Injection" with Chris Matts.

Niel Nickolaisen, another Stand Back and Deliver co-author and a ProjectConnections blogger, also has a session at Agile 2009 with Chris Matts, charmingly titled "First, Kill All the Metrics." (We like the way he thinks.)

Carl Pritchard just finished up a Risk Management lunch in Washington D.C. this week, but you can catch him back there again at PMI SeminarsWorld August 10-11, speaking on the same subject. (See the PMI website for more information.) In September he'll be in Pittsburgh, PA conducting a workshop on Project Management Essentials. More details and registration information are available on Carl's website.

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