From the Editor

Vacations are great for providing perspective, aren't they? Three days back from an extended break, your humble editor is already knee-deep, miles behind, and irrationally cheerful about it all. The workload hasn't altered, but the perspective on it has. Taking that step back allows one to remember that if you look only at the big, monumental goals, you're just as likely to trip up as if you spend all your time watching your feet. Big progress and big successes come in a series of small successes. It's OK to savor them. And after a bit of a rest, it's that much easier to make a new start on things that have fallen by the wayside, or floundered under worry and divided focus.

With that in mind, we've assembled a few resources and tips we think will help you reboot your workload after the holiday interruptions. A small shift in perspective may be all you need to have that first small success that leads to the much larger ones down the road -- and to spread irrational cheer among your teammates.

Featured Article

New Year's Resolutions for Your Project
by Kent McDonald

It's that time of year where we all participate in the seemingly futile ritual of committing to improve ourselves by creating a list of self-betterment activities we refer to as resolutions. It may be worth a quick aside to ponder why we call them "resolutions" and not "commitments" or "promises." Perhaps it has something to do with our subconscious realization that we have no intent whatsoever to actually hold ourselves to them. If we associated some measure of success and a time frame with them instead of just stating we will do more of a certain activity, maybe, just maybe, they would have more staying power. "I will lose 20 pounds by July 1st" instead of "I'm going to exercise more and eat better." Perhaps we could even experience more effective, and valuable, projects by doing the same thing with them—although goals may be a better word than resolutions.

Goals, especially those of the measurable type, are excellent ways to know when a project is successful. Having a clear idea of what problem the project is intending to solve doesn't hurt either. Yet it can be surprising how many projects start without any idea of what problem they're solving, and finish—assuming they finish—without any idea of whether they solved it. Weird. Read More »

Career Corner

What's the first thing you do when you need to make sure you've got everyone on the same page after a holiday break? Hold a meeting, naturally! A meeting can certainly represent a new beginning for a project or phase of effort, but it's even more productive to consider a new beginning for your meetings. Holding a meeting should never be an objective in its own right. The best group collaboration occurs in meetings that have a clear purpose, with the right people in attendance, and the right people there to get the job done. Project managers and team members who run these kinds of meetings stand head and shoulders above peers who are "managing" with no agenda, half-formed objectives, and a third of the needed participants.

The best place to start is to make sure you know why you're having the meeting in the first place. Take a look at your calendar, packed with pre-scheduled team meetings. Chances are, you could do away with at least some of them, modify others, and excuse some team members from meetings that don't concern them. If you look around, you may even find a bewildered team member who can't understand why they're continually left out of meetings that regularly impact their workload and deliverables; these kinds of oversights can breed project delays, rework, and even mild paranoia at being "intentionally cut out." Are you confident none of your regular meetings are affected by these common issues? Identifying and fixing them can making your team more efficient and your deliverables more reliable, and put you one step closer to superstar-PM status.

Start by making sure you all know when and why your team is getting together -- this Member-level template illustrates how to get the word out. Then make sure everyone walks into the meeting knowing what to expect (Team Meeting Agenda - a Premium template), and walks out knowing what happened and what they're supposed to do next (Meeting Minutes Formats - Member level). Those three things aren't all there is to running better meetings, but it's a very good beginning.

Featured Resources

Burning Questions

Q: We're keeping track of action items but no one seems to be taking them seriously. We review them and say we'll do them, but the dates often just get changed every week. What's the POINT?

A: The point of an action item list is to track discrete tasks which have been identified during project execution. Action item tasks may have been previously unknown or unplanned, or they might be too small to warrant a line in the schedule but nonetheless important enough to require team visibility.

Before labeling people as uncommitted, it's important to consider root causes for the action item delays, then address those root causes. So first, consider whether the right kinds of items are being tracked as actions, and whether the team understands why these dates are important. Next, make sure you as project manager are not unwittingly participating in or reinforcing the behavior! Demonstrating for the team what it looks like to be consistently accountable for commitments is a fundamental responsibility of the leader. Read the rest of the answer »

Q: Q: How do I know if we've considered enough alternatives?

A: A: When considering alternatives, you'll need to weigh the value of considering enough options against the possible energy-draining effect of considering all possible options. If you consider too few options, you may miss something important. But if you consider too many options, the differences between them may start to blur, and it might become harder to make an informed decision. There's no single, perfect number of alternatives, though the optimal number is probably more than one or two, and fewer than 10 or 12. Rather than count the number of options, however, a better way to use your time is to review the quality and range of the alternatives being considered. Assuming you've already taken the time to ensure that you're generating alternatives to solve the right problem, ask the following questions… Read the rest of the answer »

From the Blogs

Following is just a selection of recent posts to our Project Practitioners blog, which now hosts well over a dozen regular contributors from all walks of project life. For a regular dose of practical, on-the-ground project management tips, techniques, and ideas, check our blog page on the site, or subscribe to our RSS feed. Find something that tweaks your antennae? Digg it, tweet it, or leave a comment. Or all three! We won't mind.

Randy Englund uses a popular song as a prompt to remind us that the monumental issues plaguing our work may be a lot smaller than we think, and that the key is often in how we approach them.

Margaret de Haan tells a story that reminds us to make sure we're making the right long-term decisions without drowning in our short-term interests (and also serves as a great example of the pitfalls of working with outside vendors).

Tom Ferguson provides reams of great suggestions to on using our flipcharts for good, not evil. Sometimes the low-tech solution really is the best.

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