In This Issue:
From the Editor
Packaged for Consumption by Geof Lory
Career Corner: Breathtaking Competence as a PM
Site Highlights:
More Than Meets the Eye
Getting To the Bottom of Things
And the Award Goes To…
Care to Dance?
Share With the Class
Project Practitioner Blog
Where's ProjectConnections?
This month: Greece, Texas, and everywhere in between
Next month: California, DC, and Minnesooota
From the Editor
Competency as a Project Manager goes far beyond the ability to draft a schedule or update a Gantt chart. It's more than collecting requirements—it's managing requirements. It's knowing you can find the problems worth solving, not just the symptoms that are easy to see. You've got to keep your team motivated and working together productively. And you need to be able to get everyone to the table and agreeing on the goals and milestones; sometimes, this will be more challenging than building whatever it is you hope you've agreed on!
This week, Cinda Voegtli has a few things to say about going far beyond competency as project managers, to what we really should be shooting for if we want to stand out and get great opportunities. In that spirit we're highlighting resources to help you with the push and pull of PM tasks that go beyond mere scheduling. Plus, columnist Geof Lory reminds us that, even if there are nuances piled upon nuances, we'd do well to make sure the PMs we're mentoring can digest the Hows before we overwhelm them with Whys. Read on…
Featured Article
Packaged for Consumption, by Geof Lory
Anyone who has every tried to explain or teach a complex subject they understand very well to someone who doesn't have their level of experience knows what I'm talking about. The student is looking for the recipe, but you know they need to understand all the variables and nuances because there is no recipe. To you, it really isn't that difficult once you understand how all the pieces fit together. But the reality is the student can't grasp the totality of the varying parameters or the nuances of their interaction, because they have little context in which to frame these new ideas. What they need and want are some basic rules to provide a framework for learning the skill.
I help many companies develop best practices for project management. When I say best practices, I mean the best practices for their projects in their environment with their teams, not the best practices. There are many variables that determine whether something is a best practice, so usually I would be doing them a disservice to present absolute best practices as a recipe for success. Read more »
Geof Lory will be in Seattle in November guiding a Fissure Project Management Simulation for 140 of Microsoft's top performers. He will also be delivering a two-day Scrum Team Training class for Medica in Minneapolis the end of November.Career Corner
Breathtaking Competence as a PM (It's so NOT about the tools.)by Cinda Voegtli
I think a lot about our careers as managers. Like many, I got thrown in to both functional management and later project management, with no training to speak of. "Just do it." I had to learn over time (often the hard way) what it takes to be functional at this project management job. And as the stress of learning and doing the basics waned, I realized, who wants to just be "functional"? I want to be great. I want to be the one that executives are dying to hire (and trust, and support, and promote). I want to be the one who has maximum career opportunities because of what I can do and because people want to work with me.
Alfonso Bucero's blog post this week on Competent Project Managers got me thinking about all this and made me go consult a dictionary. Competent is defined there as, "1) having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge, experience, for some purpose. 2) Adequate but not exceptional." Whoa. Is "competent" actually a boring baseline of a term for what we should really aspire to in our jobs? Alfonso talks about competence as "the ability to perform a specific task, action, or function successfully." (And to that, I would add "consistently." Project success isn't worth much in a business if it happens only now and then.) But then, very importantly, Alfonso goes on to talk about "highly competent project managers"—what separates the best from the rest, and your level of competence as the key to your credibility and your influence.
Especially given today's climate—where being credible and influential on our projects, and being great, sought after, and rewarded with ample career opportunities is more critical than ever for each of us—I wanted to focus on this topic. Being (merely) competent should be our starting expectation. Exceptional competence, even breathtaking competence, is what wins games and races in the sporting world, and it can get each of us the best opportunities in the business/project world. The links below provide important food for thought and suggestions for assessing your current place on the PM competence scale, and planning the ongoing personal development that yields the prize of opportunity.
Where are you on the competence spectrum?
What high competence for maximum credibility and influence looks like.
Execs are desperate, but are you the one they want?
What executives REALLY value in project managers. (Hint: it has nothing to do with the tools and rules.)
Why rules and tools can HURT your career
Why inflexibility is one of the worst project manager failings and what you should be doing about it.
Exponential Potential
12 key PM traits and 1 big attitude that leverages it all.
Scribes and coordinators and order takers need not apply
What separates lowly cogs from project big dogs.
Great Careers for Great PMs
The things you can do when you're just that good.
Site Highlights
NEW – More Than Meets the Eye – Requirements Management Plan – SPECIALThis Premium resource is free to registered Members until October 28, 2009
All projects are transformers one way or another. Plans will change, must-do requirements will be discovered (or asserted), and supposedly crystal clear specs will be buried in a document nobody read—least of all the designer. You need to go beyond collecting requirements and manage them. Enter the Requirements Management Plan, contributed by Sinikka Waugh. This template will help the team think through their processes and responsibilities. Decide and document up front how you will track and approve requirements, where they can be found, how to decide what's in or out of scope (and why), and who's responsible for all the pieces, while establishing conventions around risk management, naming and numbering, traceability, and more.
NEW – Getting To the Bottom of Things – Root Cause Analysis Checklist – PREMIUM
Are you sure you've found the problem, and not just another symptom? Taking a methodical approach to a search for the root cause takes time at first, but saves time, effort, and probably money down the road. This checklist for a root cause analysis guides you through the process, helping the team challenge their first reactions and consider the realities of the current business situation. By following a methodical approach like this, you can increase your odds of finding a problem you need to solve, not a symptom that's cloaking the real issue.
And the Award for Most Potential to Get Something Done Goes To… – Team Rewards and Recognition Guideline – MEMBER
If you're searching for the right balance between motivating the team and over-the-top recognition, we've got your back. This guideline prompts you to think ahead about the rewards and activities you can plan to keep the team interested and motivated to succeed. It provides some good ideas, suggestions, and a real-world example from one team's reward-planning activities, without ever resorting to hokey gimmicks or prizes you'd find in the bottom of a cereal box. Project work is important, of course, but that doesn't have to mean it must be drudgery. After all, what could be more energizing than having some fun and a sense that your work is appreciated?
Care to Dance? – Establishing Meeting Ground Rules – PREMIUM
We do it for companies (employee guidebooks) and for governments (laws and regulations) but for some reason we expect team meetings to spontaneously self-organize into perfectly coordinated ballets of productivity. Why is that? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to us either. That's why we created this guideline for setting some rules for your team meetings, to reduce the risk of everyone walking out with hurt feelings and sore toes. It may not be exactly the Joffrey Ballet, but it doesn't have to be a chaotic mosh pit, either.
Got Something to Share with the Rest of the Team? – Milestone Table with Driver Tasks – SPECIAL
This Premium resource is free to registered Members until October 28, 2009
IT is passing notes to Test, Engineering is squabbling with Marketing in the back of the room, Quality hasn't even been to a meeting yet, and you've got to get everyone on the same page. How can you get everyone interested in the same project aspects, when they may only be affected by one small part? Try using something everyone cares about (or should)—business milestones. When team members see their department's activities in the context of the project's critical milestones, it's much easier to understand the value they add to the project, and how others are depending on their work to achieve the business goals.
Project Practitioners Blog
Niel Nickolaisen is very pleased with his success after learning to push pebbles up a hill for a change.Alfonso Bucero defines his personal formula for competent project managers.
Ann Drinkwater begins a series of posts on rescuing troubled projects with 8 steps for assessing and restructuring a struggling project effort.
Margaret de Haan shares some head-slappers from her current bathroom remodel as evidence that every project needs a PMP.
Cinda Voegtli challenges to ask whether we're relevant and valuable as project managers, or just making team members mad.
Where's ProjectConnections?
Niel Nickolaisen is in Athens, Greece today, speaking on "Pragmatic IT and Alignment" at IT Directors Forum '09. Next month, he'll appear at CIO Magazine's CIO: The Year Ahead conference, November 8-10, in slightly less exotic Indian Wells, California. His CIO presentation will address "How to Flawlessly Execute Your Strategy – For Free!"
PMI Austin, Texas Professional Development Day is October 19, and Randy Englund will be there to present "Facilitating Risk Management into a Corporate Culture." Later this month you can find him in Barcelona, Spain along with with Alfonso Bucero, for the second annual Project Portfolio Day, October 29-30.
Lisa DiTullio will also be at the PMI Austin Professional Development Day on October 19, but before that you can find her leading a 4PDU workshop at the Juniper Hills Country Club for the PMI Central Massachusetts chapter on October 17. October 25-27, you'll find her in the Big Easy, New Orleans, for the LavaCon - PMI GNO Chapter Professional Development Summit.
Carl Pritchard will be in Philadelphia October 20 to present a risk workshop for the IT Metrics group. The next day, he'll be in Columbia, Maryland for a presentation on "Transformational Leadership" at the PMI Baltimore Chapter, followed by a 2-day class on Advanced Risk Management on October 29-30.
Kimberly Wiefling is back in the San Francisco Bay area this month, with a free workshop on "Leading from Any Chair in the Organization" for Ultimate in Success on October 29. Details and registration on the Ultimate in Success website. She's booked most of the rest of this year in Japan and Europe, so don't miss the chance if you're in the Bay area.
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.