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From the Editor Featured Article Template Bundle Project Practitioners Featured Bundle Site Highlights Monthly Premium How-To Course Corporate Subscriptions & Licensing |
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July 8, 2010, Sponsored by RMC Project Management, Inc.
From the Editor There's a human tendency to use significant events to take stock and make changes in our lives or habits. Calendar changes, major life events, and economic upheaval often prompt us to examine the road not taken. But by waiting for those major events, we can miss a lot of minor side roads that may offer just as many opportunities. Why wait? Instead, make a habit of taking stock, adapting, and making changes as needed. It can make a difference in your life, of course, but it can also make a non-trivial difference in your work.This week, we're highlighting resources you can use to take stock and make changes, to re-evaluate options and assess choices and trade-offs. Even if you're not at a major fork in the road, your teams, your projects, or your career might still benefit from some well-considered course changes. Featured Article Suppressing Your Feminine Side May Be Bad for Business 
About 15 years ago, the wife of a coworker was listening to me describe the challenges I faced as a project manager at Hewlett Packard. "You're not using your feminine power!" she suddenly pronounced, as if she'd just discovered the cause of some mysterious chronic illness. My first reaction was, "Use my feminine power? I sure hope not!" Since I was obviously perplexed, she further explained that this included nurturing behaviors like bringing food and drinks to meetings, and expressing other characteristics that I've heard described as "soft skills" by HR pros. I figured I'd missed that in the job description.You see, I was working in high-tech, and for over a decade I'd painstakingly stamped out any semblance of femininity in my work. After earning a Master's degree in physics, a field in which women are almost as scarce as on-time schedules, I'd entered the high-tech engineering world, a profession with an equally abysmal track record of attracting women. Why on earth would I want to associate myself—in any way—with anything female in my work? Read the rest » Project Practitioners "Performance Reviews That Matter," by Niel NickolaisenMy absolute worst performance appraisal experience went like this: My boss's assistant telephoned me to schedule a meeting with my supervisor. I showed up, and my boss and I sat down in his office. He got straight to the point: "Niel, I am not sure what you do, but I understand you are very good at it. I want to show my appreciation by giving you a raise and this bonus check." I managed to mumble a thank-you, took my check and left his office. A few months later, this manager moved on to other things. But for two reasons, the experience stayed with me. First, it made obvious that I was not managing my relationship with my boss well (since he had no idea what my job entailed). Second, it gave me a clear example of the kind of evaluation I never want to give to my own direct reports.
Be a bit more project-oriented with your own reviews by using our Performance Appraisal Process Summary and Forms (and find out what your direct reports really do). - MEMBER In 2010, summer in Iowa started out with a bang ... and a crash, and a crack, and a thundering boom. Summer greeted us with night after night of storms ... echoing with house-shaking rumbles, bright with brilliant lightning displays, and soggy with steady downpours. And farmers across the state wondered when it would dry out enough to get into their fields, while light sleepers (and parents of storm-sensitive kids) wondered when it would quiet down enough to allow everyone to sleep through the night. Aren't our projects like that sometimes? Our business partners wonder when the downpour of project activity will let up so they start to benefit from the long-awaited results of the project, and our team members wonder when the current storm will pass enough to go back to what they were doing. "Testing Balance," by Kent McDonald It seemed like a straightforward effort (they always do, don't they). Everything we had read about the upgrade led us to believe that coding changes would be minimal, and would just need to convert data sets to operate in the new version. Because of the structure of our development environment, it is impractical to run a complete cycle in our development environment, which is the ideal way to determine the impact of the upgrade on our hundreds of scripts. We performed the update in the development environment and began running into issues. None of which were insurmountable, but based on recent experiences with another software upgrade, many of the developers and their leaders got nervous.
Alan Koch walks us through the basics of harvesting our quality data and putting it to use in "Investing in Quality: When Is "Enough" Enough?." Featured Bundle A Little Planning Goes a Long Way – Bundle: Planning & Tracking
If you're out to set some changes in motion, this bundle can help: ten of our most popular planning and tracking tools, so you can bring a little order to your project, no subscription required. If you're new to ProjectConnections, or to project planning in general, these tools are a great way to implement a little planning discipline without going overboard on paperwork or reinventing the wheel. It will help you identify and order tasks, figure out who you need to communicate with and how, and track and report status without drowning in minutiae. It's a fast path to fundamentals that can make a real difference for your projects. Looking to change the way your organization does projects? A multi-user license for this package allows you to distribute these tools to up to 20 users, for a lot less than you'd spend on sending them to a training class. What a great way to get everyone using some consistent tools without a huge investment! Single-user license: $41.95 – free for Premium Subscribers (after trial period) Multi-user license: $419.95 – 25% discount for Premium subscribers Check out our other great bundles too! » Site Highlights NEW – Pick a Project, Any Project. Take Two, They're Small! – Project Manger Assessment Tool – PREMIUMFor the best chances of project success, you need to be sure the right person is filling the PM role on each project. Gut instinct and subjective assessments can get you partway there, but they also make for challenging, stressful, and uncertain decisions. This tool adds a little objectivity to the process with detailed questions about education, project experience, tool familiarity, people management abilities, and more. It will help you assign people to appropriate project manager positions by supporting a structured discussion between the PM and the PMO or line manager. Presto! Your chance of success—and theirs—increase dramatically. First, Assume a Spherical Project... – Agile Technique Brief: Planning – PREMIUM You have to make some assumptions about the project in order to plan it, but you need those assumptions to have some basis in reality. Enter agile planning: an iterative, feature-based approach to predicting the future of your project. This technique brief provides an overview of the process, including a discussion of which kinds of projects are likely to benefit most from these methods, and describes how to successfully organize planning at the release, iteration, and day-to-day level. Just follow the bouncing cow... Psst. Hey, You. How About a Change? – Change Control Form – PREMIUM Tired of your project requirements shifting on a moment's notice? It might be tempting to "shoot the engineers" (or the execs), but a bright line isn't always the answer. It's not so much the change, as the lack of any consideration of the impacts of those changes, right? A simple change control form like this one can help you quietly shift mindsets. You may not be able to change the culture of mid-project spec changes, but just the act of filling out the form can help your team, as well as the people requesting the changes, identify potentially overlooked effects. Psst. Hey, You. How About Some Real Change? – Requirements Change Management – SPECIAL This Premium resource is free to registered Members until July 22, 2010 A form can help, but if you really want to take control of your project requirements management process, you need more than just forms and approvals. This guideline condenses 20 years of lessons learned to provide a complete overview of change management components, processes, and controls, including often overlooked elements like impact evaluation and communication. It's a detailed, comprehensive guide to the components, processes, and workflows you'll need for a robust change management system.
Think requirements management is just for big companies and government projects? Think again. This case study details Anita's success implementing software requirements management that shatters all the myths: small organization, low-cost implementation, full buy-in, and not a government contract in sight. – MEMBER David Allen aficionados aspire to his ideal: Mind like water. That can be hard when you're bouncing around to a lot of unrelated tasks. Every now and then, it helps to take stock of where your time is going and make sure you're concentrating on what really matters. This form is designed to make that a relatively painless process. In fairly short order, you'll have a broad overview of where your time goes, and whether those are really high-value activities. Long-time readers know that we like to remind everyone of this template occasionally. Even if you've done this recently, it can help to revisit it. Things change, and what was most important six months ago may be a pointless time sink today; or vice-versa. You and What Army? – Project Cancellation Guideline – PREMIUM Can you still pull that project off? Maybe it's not too late to save it, but you need to make a dispassionate analysis of the situation. This comprehensive guideline walks you through the critical decision of whether to cancel a project. If you decide it's worth a reboot, you'll get tips for managing that process so you can begin salvage operations. And in case it really is time to pull the plug, there's also an extensive checklist of activities required to smoothly accomplish ramp down and close out, including considerations for fiscal and material impacts, resources and personnel, related activities (like mar-comm production), and customer relations. Monthly Premium How-To Course NEW – Communicating Up the Chain to Resolve Big Issues – 1 PDU
Have any of your team members run across an issue on your project? Would you know if they did? As project managers, we need to know about the roadblocks and challenges our teams encounter while there's still time to do something about it. And we need our team members to think ahead to the little decisions and course changes they make that could have big impacts on someone else's work. In short, we need constructive ways to "escalate" issues (especially messy and critical ones), so tough decisions can be made quickly and risks can be addressed before they become issues. We need an escalation process. This 40-minute mini-course explains the importance of issue escalation processes and the many ways they can help your team, beyond just faster issue resolution. Avoid project sinkholes and keep your customers in the loop on all the important issues, without people hitting the panic button unnecessarily. PDU credit available for paid Premium subscribers (exercise required). Which course would you like to see in August? – PREMIUM Log in to cast your vote:
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. |
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