Be a Control Freak (at the Beginning)
A smart project manager applies the most time and effort at the start, to prepare for a great launch, and at the finish, to meet the deadline. If you get the start right, you can let the team take on the lion’s share of work in the middle, argues Peter Taylor in his book, The Lazy Project Manager: How to Be Twice as Productive and Still Leave the Office Early. Projects too often fail at the beginning when direction, momentum, and the right processes and controls aren’t in place. Here are a few tips for getting off to a strong start:
Get clear on what you want to accomplish. Define the business problem, why the problem needs to be solved, and what’s required to solve it. Almost as important: Be specific about what the project won’t accomplish. That way, expectations are clear from the get-go.
Decide how you’ll track changes to the project. “The fault with traditional project management approaches is that once people develop a plan, they don’t monitor the changes happening that could change the plan,” says Philippa Fewell, a managing director at consulting firm CC Pace. At Facebook, project managers update the whole company as they’re developing and tweaking new features via e-mail blasts. Designers at Method, the home-care products company, tack product plans and sketches on the walls so that everyone can literally watch the evolution of a new product and chime in with feedback. These tactics might not work at every company, but the point is, be as transparent as possible as the project progresses.
Make plan Bs. Most projects go off the rails because “we don’t lie, but we make optimistic assumptions” about what could really go wrong, says Frank Anbari, a Six Sigma black belt and a professor of project management at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Try this exercise: Make a list of all of the potential disasters that could happen. Then rank the chances that each will happen on a scale of 1 to 10. Rank the size of their impact between 0 and 1.0. A numerical system will help you prioritize where to put the majority of your energy.
Hot Tip
Run a Tight Ship, Creatively
Nokia’s Waits insists that her Friday meetings start on time. To get her team to comply, she adopted a simple strategy: If you’re late, you pay $1 into the beer fund. “It’s a fairly common scrum technique, but it works,” she says.
Don’t Abuse E-mail
By many accounts, a project manager spends up to 90 percent of her time on some form of communication. But the sheer amount of time you spend communicating doesn’t mean you’re actually getting through to anyone.
“Here’s what happens with e-mail,” says Waits. “We’re mostly jotting down thoughts. There’s no feedback loop, no context, no follow-up. Thirty to forty percent of our miscommunications happen because of e-mail.”
The solution? Lynda Bourne, a blogger for the Project Management Institute, recommends you separate push and pull communications. Limit what you push out to your team via e-mail to short highlights and issues that require immediate action. Put detailed reports and reference material in a central location like a wiki or a shared drop box, where team members can grab them when needed. For everything else, pick up the phone or get out of your chair.
Danger! Danger! Danger!
You’re Not the Boss of Everyone
When you’re leading a project that includes employees from other departments, you may think you’re in charge, but you’re not, says Harold Kerzner, senior executive director of the International Institute for Learning and author of project management textbooks. Employees’ loyalty lies with the people who determine their raises and performance reviews — their managers. Cultivate relationships early on with those supervisors by keeping them abreast of the project’s progress and the accomplishments of their direct reports.
Put Out Fires Quickly
You will encounter unforeseen bumps in the road. Accept and plan for that now. In Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, Scott Berkun, a former program manager for Microsoft’s biggest projects, offers advice for dealing with unexpected catastrophes. Here’s a condensed version of his steps to get a project back on track:
- Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing your actions on fear, anger, or frustration.
- Evaluate the problem in relation to the project. Just because someone else thinks the sky has fallen doesn’t mean that it has. Is this really a problem at all? Whose problem is it? How much of the project is at risk or may need to change? Put things in perspective and then prioritize when you will act: emergency (now!), big concern (today), minor concern (this or next week), or bogus (never).
- Get the right people in the room. Any major problem won’t affect you alone. Identify who else is most responsible, knowledgeable, and useful, and get them together right away. Keep this group small; the more complex the issue, the smaller the group should be. Offer your support, but get out of their way (seriously — leave the room if you’re not needed). Don’t let the meeting break up without identifying who will drive the resolution.
- Explore alternatives. After answering any questions and clarifying the situation, list your options.
- Make the simplest plan. Weigh the options and pick the best choice.
- Execute. Make it happen — and make sure whoever drives the action plan has an intimate understanding of why he’s doing it.
- Debrief. After the fire is out, get the right people in the room again and generate a list of lessons learned.
Voice of Experience
Catch Balls Before They Drop
“When people don’t understand their roles very well, things fall between the cracks. Someone thinks it’s someone else’s job. I always ask my team, ‘If you see a ball dropping, let me know, even if you don’t think it’s yours. We’ll deal with it.’”
— Bill Wallace, engineering group manager for the Volt battery at General MotorsAlways Do a Postmortem
Taking stock of what you and your team learned from this project will make your life much easier next time. But don’t let your postmortem turn into a free-for-all. The goal is not to air any and every complaint, but to come away from the project with a clear idea of the processes that worked and those that didn’t. Here are four keys for making the most of a post-project meeting:
Pick an outsider to run it. Go with someone neutral — maybe another project manager or department head — who will stay unemotional, says Neal Whitten, a project consultant whose clients have included Bristol-Myers Squibb, Liberty Mutual, and Lockheed Martin.
Set the ground rules. No BlackBerrys or iPhones allowed; attendance is mandatory; everyone has the right to speak; attack problems, not people.
No homework before the meeting. If you ask employees to evaluate dozens of parts of the project in advance, you’ll end up with an overwhelming number of items to discuss. Instead, use the meeting to identify via consensus the top three things the team did well and the three that need the most work.
Take action. Make the lessons learned a prominent part of the planning process of your next project. For example, evaluate the performance of the employees who were linked to the top three problems to figure out if you’ll need a different mix of skills and experience on the team next time.
