Lots of books and articles have been written about 7 Best of This and 12 Top Tips for That... To be honest these titles do not excite me anymore as there are so many of them and they seem to be recycling the same things just in a different format or context. So, I wasn't that keen on a book that had been handed to me by a fellow project manager, "The 77 Sins of Project Management". After about 2 years on the shelf, the book has finally made it to my hands... and oh, boy! It's amazing! Everything in this book is so true!

I'd like to share this one lesson with you: Managing stakeholders is like working with horses...
I've shared this with some friends/colleagues and the most common response I get is "oh, that means you need to round them up, gather them in one spot"... Well, kind of... there is more though

The analogy is related to the pain that one feels when kicked by a horse. Approach a horse from behind, stand at a distance and feel that hoof reach you... Ouch! This is what happens when you avoid getting too close, a kick from a horse hurts most at the 'end' of its kick, when it's leg is farthest from its body and moving fast. On the other hand, if you stay close, even if you do get kicked, it hurst a whole lot less.

The same applies to stakeholders and issues associated with especially those challenging ones. Keep your distance from them, or worse, ignore them, and you'll soon feel the pain - that mighty kick is coming and once the leg is fully extended it's hard to stop it or reduce its power. So, stay close to the stakeholders and close to the issues - they won't go away by themselves! - you have a chance to anticipate, mitigate and manage them within your control.

And, as a friend of mine added, if all fails pull out a whip... I'm not encouraging animal (or stakeholder!) cruelty here, by no means! However, there is something about the sound of a whip and horses behaving .... works on the stakehoders too :)

Funny enough, I had pictures of horses with faces of those challenging stakeholders from my previous projects flashing in front of my eyes as I was reading the book, and now again when writing this blog... I'm sure you can relate to it too!

Why I love basketball…

The best thing I have done in recent weeks was to start going to basketball games with my son. Almost every Sat night we grab a bag of popcorn and join other fans to cheer for our local premiership team.

Apart from being fun and exciting to watch (and play!), I love basketball because there is so much we project managers can learn from it! I can’t help myself and watching the games I continually look for similarities with the project management world. And, there are so many! Here are just a few:

• Scope - it couldn’t be clearer, all passes must be well planned and agreed, avoiding useless passes that do not add any value, i.e. do not lead to earning at least two points or preventing the other team from doing so
• Time – there are only 40min in the game, event your Sponsor can't grand an extension, so need to plan and execute all the smart moves within this boundary
• Quality - oh, the spectators, including my 5 year old son, are very quick to let you know when you’re failing on this one!
• Risk - every move the players and the coach make is about managing risks
• Human resources - particularly teamwork and R & R’s, unless the team has a strong agreement and execution of the agreed roles, they are doomed for failure
• Communication - with most rounds taking less than a minute, how the team communicates can make or break it; use of codes, sign language and "short-hand" to communicate “secret” strategies requires a lot of planning and practice, something we often undermine in the project world when it comes to communication
• Integration - executing each of the strategies on the court is all about integration; regardless how good a move an individual player makes it’s pointless, or sometimes even impossible, unless it’s built into a broader picture; one such brilliant chain of moves that led to a spectacular finish was when the middle player unexpectedly (or so to an unaware observer) made a long pass towards what looked like an empty space, only to have the ball caught by another player who appeared from nowhere, caught the ball mid-air and immediately placed it in the hoop! It was an incredible display of not only skill but also communication, teamwork, timing, and the good old integration.

If you are in project management, you will most likely notice that I’ve left 2 components out: cost and procurement. This was intentional and I’d like to encourage you to post a comment with your suggestions on how these two aspects of project management present themselves in a basketball game (trying to stay from the obvious like buying equipment and managing the budget – be creative!)

One of my previous blogs was about useless discussions… that post was also inspired by a basketball game and again it’s so relevant to project management. Read it here

Happy Bouncing!

So much to do ... so little time!

Sounds familiar? Oh, yes! There are only 24hrs in a day and noone can change it. Most of us would like to do heaps every day but when you look at it you can only do so much. Say you do a To Do list and it has 20 items ... what are the chances that you get ALL 20 completed in a day? Slim.... very slim.. close to impossible...Why? Don't know what your life and work is but mine has been dominated by constantly being distructed to complete the stuff on my To Do List.. so after checking the email in the morning, attending meetings virtually back-to-back all day I start on my To Do List around 5pm... how much of it do you think I can complete? 20 items .. and if you allocate 15min per item on average, that's 300min = 5 hours....which means staying in the office till 10pm!

This is why I keep saying we all need to take a good hard look at what we are doing to make sure we really are investing our time wisely, spending it on value add activities and have a perspective on life ... there are so many people that are worse off than us even if that means failing to launch to project on the expected day.

So, keep everything in perspective. If your job involves saving lives, this is your priority! Your life and the life you are saving are your priorities! Not the timeline or budget but what's actually important in a given situation.

And, don't forget YOU are important and YOU need to take care of yourself!

Come on! Go out there! Enjoy life!

Why are we wasting time on pointless discussions/arguments?

I always wonder this when watching a sports game, and basketball is my favourite at the moment. You see both the players and the coaches arguing with referees... I can't stop thinking: what's the point? I have never seen a positive outcome of these arguments and I just don't understand why they're wasting everyone's time and disrupting the game, not to mention the lack of respect those arguments are showing for the referees. This article sheds some light on why those arguments happen so often (entertainment, adrenaline, players following the coaches etc.)

Interestingly, we often engage in similar fruitless, time-wasting discussions not only in our personal but also our professional life, including project management. Think about all those "challenging" stakeholders you have had on your projects and the number of times you've been involved in pro-longed debates, often heated, that were just pointless.

So, next time such situation arises, think about that basketball game. Is it worth my/my teams' time and effort or shall I just take a deep breath and look for alternative ways to resolve the situation. This is what I have been doing for a while now and it seems to work. We gain some perspective on things when we take time out (this time a useful strategy sourced from a basketball game!), and allow ourselves to re-think what's best for the project and plan our next conversation with that in mind.

Going to see another basketball game with my son next weekend so will look out for some more similarities with the project world. Stay tuned!

Project Plan or Shopping List?

Project plans too often resemble shopping lists, detailing every single activity that is to be performed. We then find that it takes hours of our valuable time to just keep the plans up to date, not to mention that we focus more on completing individual tasks rather than managing the various components of the project to deliver the end result.

“Shopping Lists” or “To Do Lists” add no value to project management, so abandon them! Develop a project plan that is outcomes focused. Each activity should result in a tangible outcome that contributes to achieving the overall project objective and realising the benefits. Contact us to learn more about outcomes based planning.  

How to catch busy fools

We all know those individuals who are always “so busy”. They often book 50-60 hours in their weekly timesheets. However, when we look at the details, it turns out they are spending 50% of that time on “Misc Admin” activities, whilst their target is to work on projects 90% of the time.

And, what about those ‘clever” ones who regularly over-record the project hours in order to increase their utilisation results. Well, they probably don’t realise there is a cost associated with every hour they record in their timesheets. These costs add up against the project, and if the value of the work completed (Earned Value) turns out to be less than the timesheet cost (Actual Cost), assuming the project cost comprises of labour costs only, then the project Cost Performance Indicator (CPI), sometimes referred to as Realisation, will highlight the poor performance against the project’s efficiency target.

So, what is the hint here? 1. Have appropriate tools in place to effectively measure and report utilisation and performance indicators for cost and schedule 2. Educate your team on the consequences of overbooking “project” time 3. Develop a process to constructively address variances to target

Plan A or B ... or C?

I'm sure most of you would have followed the Chile miners' rescue story... I was particularly interested in that story from the project management perspective. A great amount of precise planning, co-ordination, leadership and teamwork was at play, all of which was imperative to make this project a success. There are loads of lessons learnt from this project ... I wanted to cover one lesson in particular, namely "the contingency planning". I won't go into the technical details as can't claim I know much about mining or mning rescue, however what was interesting about it is that 1) there not only was a Plan B .... and a Plan C (for getting access to the miners so they could be pulled out),  but all three plans were executed at the same time; 2) Plan B failed in the early stages but rather than being abandoned, it was adjusted and reinstated and in fact it was Plan B that worked in the end! So, what are the lessons leart?
Lesson 1: Do have a contingency plan - ALWAYS!
Lesson 2: If possible, and taken into account the cost/benefit trade-off, initiate the back up plan in parallel to the main plan, or have everything set up so that Plan B (or C or D) can kick in as soon as the main plan fails, or even better as soon as it is identified that failure is imminent
Lesson 3: Never Give Up!