Infographic: The Problem with Projects

Effective project management relies on precision. Projects that miss deadlines and exceed budgets are more likely to require remedial intervention, restarting or cancellation.

The success of a project relies on hiring the most experienced, project manager.



NB: This Infographic is an advert for Villanova University, a provider of PMP Project Management Certification.

Project Management: 7 Tips for Managing Virtual Teams

The first law of project management states: it is your responsibility to ensure that deliverables and milestones are achieved on time and with the utmost quality.

No excuses; Even if you are managing cross boundary, expansive projects and managing Virtual teams.

There are many moving and sometimes, non-moving parts to a virtual team that makes managing them more difficult. Here are a few tips and techniques to follow:

1. Set clear project objectives and expectations for your team. Clearly communicate the project objectives, schedules and individual roles and responsibilities. It is important that everyone knows what they are doing, how their work contributes to the project, what other team members need from them, and why. Though everyone can work independently, it is important to keep the links in place and to repeatedly communicate and state the team’s objectives. Failure to do so can be catastrophic for the success of a project. 
2. Set the rules and tone early. At the beginning of the project it is crucial to let the team members know what is expected of them. Status reports, participation in conference calls, hours of availability, and deliverable schedules are essential parts of managing virtual teams.
3. Understand and respect different cultures. This is very important if you are managing team members of different regions and/or in different countries. First Learn and then Honour your team members’ cultural differences and their right for personal commitments and religious practices.
4. Choose the most effective technology to aid communication. The anchor of every virtual team is communications and the technology used to support it. Even as fuel prices soar, flying the team in for a meeting each week is not realistic. So, online chat, conference calls and webinars are much more effective. There are a number of technologies available such as Instant Messaging, Online LiveMeeting, Skype, and many other tools that support video and Web conferencing. Check that these tools are available, suitable and work efficiently in all your regions and countries. In addition, there are collaboration tools that allow team members to share and collaborate on documents such as SharePoint, Dropbox and many more.
5. Be very specific about time commitments. Never 'assume' or leave something to chance. Make sure that all team members know when deliverables are due. Make sure it is clearly definied in your project plan and, if needs be, draw them their own expanded section. You have failed if you have to remind them the day before. You never, ever want to have them scramble to get something done before close of business the next day. The chance of success will be nil or the quality of the deliverable will be greatly reduced.
6. Get the team together on occasion. Although it is expensive to bring remote teams together, it is a necessary element to managing a virtual team. To build and continue team chemistry, gathering the team together strengthens personal relationships and working partnerships in both the short and long term. Never underestimate the importance of building better relationships through team camaraderie and rapport.
7. Three hundred and sixty degree communication. The bottom line: you are the conduit for communications, the motivator and problem solver but when the team is working well, stay out of their way. Empower and trust your team to make proper decisions by working with each other and make sure you are not the bottleneck by insisting that all communication be channeled through you. After all you are not the project, you are just the project manager.

Project management lessons you can take from the Titanic disaster

One hundred years ago this month, RMS Titanic sank after striking an iceberg. More than fifteen hundred people died in that disaster.

The event has been the subject of books and movies, but it also provides a few stark illustrations regarding project management mistakes and oversights.

Here are seven lessons that relate to the sinking itself and three that involve the recovery of the victims.

1: You need to know what you’re measuring

The lack of lifeboats is a well-known matter, and it certainly played a role in the number of deaths. However, according to the regulations that applied at the time, the Titanic DID have “enough” lifeboats?

According to the standards in effect at the time, the WEIGHT of a ship, not the number of passengers, determined the number of required lifeboats. Needless to say, these standards changed as a result of the inquiries into the disaster.

This principle applies to your own projects. In his classic work The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks points out how far too often a project reaches the point of “coding 90% complete,” only to remain that way forever.

Brooks says, milestones should be objectively measurable. If you do not have valid measurements for your project, you will run into problems.

2: Assumptions will kill you

A few hours before the collision, wireless operator Jack Phillips received a message from a nearby ship, telling him of icebergs in the area.

However, Phillips at the time was taking care of messages to and from Titanic passengers and in doing so, was communicating with a lighthouse at Cape Race, Newfoundland.

Unhappy with what he considered a bothersome message, and assuming it was unimportant, Phillips replied brusquely, “Shut up, I am working Cape Race!”

As a result, Phillips never received the iceberg warning the ship was trying to send.

How often have you seen things blow up in your face because of assumptions? Maybe you assumed that a particular system was using a newer software release than it actually was.

Maybe you assumed that another department or someone else, would take care of ordering cable. Maybe you assumed that the vendor received our critical email message and didn't need you to call to check.

Assumptions are important in your work, but if you proceed on the basis of them, make sure everyone is clear about what assumptions you are making.

3: Distractions are dangerous

Of course, when we look back, we can always find fault with the actions of Titanic officers and crew.

Clearly, they must have known about the risks of traveling through “Iceberg Alley” so, they should have focused the wireless operators less on passenger messages and more on communication with other ships.

The Phillips incident, therefore, illustrates another hazard to project management: that of being distracted.

How often do you start your work with the best intentions of completing your to-do list, only to become sidetracked by chatting with co-workers or surfing the Web?

And you are not alone in facing distractions. If enough members of your team encounter enough distractions, your project will gradually wander of course and fall behind.

4: Little things add up

A number of small factors played a role in the Titanic disaster. Allegedly, the lookouts had no binoculars, because those binoculars had been left behind at Southampton, where she began her voyage.

Jack Phillips interrupted a ship trying to send him an iceberg warning and neglected to deliver an earlier warning.

While no one factor can be said to have “caused” the disaster, the effect of all of them made the disaster all the more likely.

Brooks asked rhetorically, “How does a software project get to be a year late? One day at a time.”

He explained that if a major event or problem occurs, a project team rallies and steps up its effort.

However, such a team can fail to appreciate the issues of small delays and how those small delays add up.

In other words, the small delays are just as critical as the large ones, meaning that adherence to milestones is critical to the success of a project.

5: Stakeholders should be kept informed

Following the iceberg collision, the nurse for the Allison family, in first class, took one-year-old Trevor Allison from the family stateroom without saying where she was going.

She and Trevor boarded a lifeboat and were rescued. However, because Trevor’s parents didn’t know about it, they spent the rest of the time looking for Trevor, turning down chances to escape in a lifeboat.

As a result, the parents and their other child, three-year-old Loraine, died when the ship sank.

Your own project might not be as critical as a sinking ship but your stakeholders need to know about the status and progress of your project. Keeping them informed will keep them happier.

6: Other people’s perspectives matter

One of the victims of Titanic was 23-year-old John Law Hume, a member of the band. A few weeks after the sinking, the company that managed the band sent a letter to his father, asking for payment for his son’s band uniform.

Even although such a request made financial sense from the company’s perspective, it almost certainly sounded insensitive to Mr. Hume.

In the same way, when explaining aspects of a project, especially by technical members of your project team, try to see things from the other person’s perspective.

If a client asks a question, try to see beyond the question itself to the motivation behind the question.

If a technical person is explaining a function of a system or program, make sure the explanation avoids jargon. Clear communication will lead to happier clients.

7: Moving targets can hurt you

The Titanic was one of three new ships the White Star Line had built, around that time. The company’s strategy was to emphasize luxury, not speed, as a selling point.

Yet during that maiden Titanic voyage, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay reportedly pressured Captain Edward Smith to increase speed.

This higher speed quite likely contributed to the collision, in preventing the ship and crew from reacting quickly enough.

In your projects, beware of “scope creep.” A typical customer, if there is such a thing, will say, “Can you make just this one small change please?”

The fact is, any change is rarely “small.” It typically involves making other changes to other parts of a system, results in greater complexity, and requires more testing.

Make sure that your customer knows that in a project world governed by quality, time, and budget, at least one will have to yield.

Be sure your customer understands the implications of a requested change, the need for change control and ensure that the customer’s expectations are appropriately set.

8: Traceability is essential

A few days after the sinking, rescue ships based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, set out to recover victims and to return them to Halifax.

As each victim was recovered, he or she was numbered accordingly. The recovery crew recorded information and a description of the victim in a ledger book and then bagged personal effects with that same victim number.

If that victim was later buried in Halifax, and 150 victims were buried in three cemeteries there, then that victim number was engraved on the grave marker.

The victim number allowed researchers and others to link victim and property descriptions, to the cemetery location.

The same kind of traceability is important in your projects. How familiar are you with the strategic objectives of your company?

Can you find a logical connection between the requirements of your project and those strategic objectives?

Of course, the connection might be a distant one, but there should be a connection nonetheless but if you can find no such connection, you start asking yourself whether that requirement really is part of your system.

9: Methodology is more important than technology

When the recovery crews were recording victim information, they used regular ledger notebooks and pens, obviously, no one had iPads, computers, or barcode scanners in those times.

Nonetheless, the methodology they used had solid reasoning behind it, so it proved highly effective.

In the same way, you might want to use sophisticated planning and tracking software and tools.

More important, though, is that your plan be resilient. The best software in the world will not save a poorly designed plan.

10: Documentation may have lasting benefits

The documentation of the recovery records are still kept in Halifax, at the Public Archives. Researchers in Halifax and from around the world still visit and review this documentation, one hundred years after the fact.

A few years ago researchers made use of these records, and DNA analysis to identify the “Unknown Child of the Titanic.”

No one enjoys documenting a project or system but it is a necessary part of it. Documentation is often the 'most' important part of the project because it will exist long after the project team has been disbanded.

Documentation probably won't need to exist for a hundred years, but it should still serve the purpose of helping your customers understand their system and allow them to build on what you have already accomplished.

‪Delivery Exalogic - Qualogy, The Netherlands‬‏ - YouTube

Some excellent lessons to be learned about how to install a new server into a modern building. The task was accomplished with the usual lack of concern for high risk points and health & safety by the Dutch team. Does fortune favour the brave or is Lady Luck a fickle mistress?

Well done to the team in accomplishing this task and continued success through good Project and Risk management practices for the future, and less reliance on luck.

How to Build Influence as a Project Manager

Successful project managers require support from their teams. However, this support cannot be delegated or simply wished into existence. Acquiring the authority to effectively lead a team demands a specific approach.

A project leader must be humble at times and assertive in others, and know when to take charge of a situation and when to delegate roles to members of his or her team.

A big part of succeeding at that is in effectively building influence, often with team members who are not direct employees of the project manager.

Many fail to understand this aspect and walk into project management assuming the role of infallible leader, often inspiring heavy resistance and strained accomplishments.

The guidelines below represent how to properly build influence and establish the authority of a project manager. These are ongoing practices that should organize how instructions and interactions with team members should take place at all times.

Know Where to Partition Labour

Understanding when to delegate authority is an important aspect of leadership. By knowing a team's strengths and weaknesses, a project manager will be able to pass along tasks and decisions for the team members and improve overall efficiency. By doling out responsibility, not only is time saved but everyone on the team becomes more productive.

When delegating, it's important to understand exactly when and to whom power can be entrusted. Not everyone is cut out for a management role, and some are much happier with strict oversight rather than free reign.

Just because a person is excellent at sales, for instance, doesn't mean he or she can manage. And, if a project manager doesn’t keep a careful eye on the individual, the project can lose significant ground. The delayed processes of the sales cycle may not display issues for up to a year or more, resulting in an expanse of lost time, resources and opportunity.

In order to avoid mistaken delegation, try assigning small tasks at first. Have the individual develop a plan, send him or her to do the work, and then evaluate the performance along the way. As the individual improves, increase the task load and/or the complexity of each assignment.

Delegating work will ease the overall burden, but it will also encourage those within the team to work toward a valued end goal and put their trust in the project manager.

Manage by Example

The moment a project manager acts in contrast to his or her own advice is the moment that they lose all credibility. Project managers who truly want the team to respect them and subscribe to their suggestions, must wholeheartedly support their own decisions and back them up with actions.

The most effective way to earn authority is to be a project leader that others want to follow. Be on time. Be kind and considerate. Be efficient with tasks. Be organized. Be fair with others. Set an example for others to follow.

Organise Communication

Communication will always be one of the most vital qualities for effective project management. Developing relationships with team members is critical, and project managers should work to exhibit their true personalities and gain the trust of all coworkers. Effective communication can never be achieved through short emails, incessant demands, or brief interactions; relationships are slowly developed through consistent interaction and honest behavior.

Poor communication has the ability to devastate a project. When NASA lost its Mars orbiter, it was due to the fact that two teams had failed to communicate on the project. One team built the device to metric specifications and the other used inches. This might be an extreme example, but effective communication could have easily solved this $327 million blunder.

When communicating, a project manager should not just assume the role of talker. It is absolutely critical to listen to all team members. Listen, learn and earn the team's respect by valuing members’ input and giving credit where it's due. This will help alleviate any resentment and facilitate collaboration among the group.

Practice Self-Maintenance

Self-maintenance encompasses everything from furthering project management education to working on health. For a project manager to gain respect and enhance authority, he or she must have the knowledge and the capacity to be a true leader. If a team sees its leader as ill-informed, it will be less likely to trust the leader’s judgment. If a project manager cannot perform, the team will be uninspired.

There are incredible resources that can be accessed by enrolling in Web seminars, attending classes or joining a local Project Management Institute chapter. These resources will not only make a project manager’s job easier, but will help the PM to demonstrate their competence to those on the team.

The matter of health may seem a bit trivial but it can be surprisingly important. In 2007, an article in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine titled “Health and Productivity as a Business Strategy” reported that health-related productivity costs were more than four times the costs of treating those health problems. In other words, taking the time to ensure good health can have enormous benefits for the workplace.

Establish Morals

In the end, all anyone has is their honor; project managers should never let themselves be corrupted by feelings of entitlement. To be a great leader, it is important to acknowledge principles and stick to them. Project managers with strong convictions will be respected by others and can feel pleased with what they have accomplished. Good project managers need to believe in themselves, believe in others and believe in their actions. Even if mistakes are made, the project manager can be satisfied with the fact that he or she made those mistakes with the right intentions.
As a project manager, it can be difficult to organize a team. However, accepting these practices can greatly improve any team’s effectiveness. Always remember that a project manager is not in charge of everyone on the team, but rather is a team leader who can either direct a project to success or confront difficulties at every stage. The simple process of being respectful and fair in all decisions can easily keep every member of the team on the same page.

These practices should make it easier for project managers to complete their projects on time and up to quality. If nothing else, they can leave work content, knowing that they have done the job as well as it could have been done.

Project Management: 4 Ways to Manage Your Tight Budget

Project managers do nothing else right they need to meticulously manage their budgets. Here are four strategies for maintaining control of your project budget and preventing massive cost overruns.

1. Continually forecast the budget. A project run without frequent budget management and reforecasting will likely be headed for failure. Why? Because frequent budget oversight prevents the budget from getting too far out of hand. A 10 percent budget overrun is far easier to correct than a 50 percent overrun. Your chances of keeping the project on track with frequent review of the budget plan is far greater than if you forecast it once and forget about it.

2. Regularly forecast resource usage. Just as the budget needs to be constantly revisited to keep it on track, you need to do the same for resource usage, since the people working on a project contribute to its cost. Project managers should review the number of people currently working on a project and the project's future resource needs on a weekly basis . Doing so will ensure that you're fully utilizing the resources you have and that you have the right resources ready for the rest of the project. Regularly revisiting the resource forecast will help keep your project budget on track.

3. Keep the team informed. Always keep the project team informed of the project budget forecast. An informed team is an empowered team that takes ownership of the project. By keeping the team informed of the budget status, they will be more likely to watch their project charges and far less likely to charge extra 'gray area' hours to your project (those are the hours that they know they worked by aren't sure what they were working on.)

4. Manage scope meticulously. Scope creep is one of the leading causes of project overruns. As unplanned work finds its way into your project, billable hours mount and the project budget can get out of control. Project managers must carefully manage scope by creating change orders for work that isn't covered by the project's initial requirements. Change orders authorize additional funding for the project to cover the cost of extra work, and thus keep the project to its new budget.

The project budget must be a living part of projects—something project managers review with their teams and their stakeholders on a regular basis. Project managers who carefully watch budgets throughout the lives of their projects will keep stakeholders and management happy and thus experience greater project and career success.

Agile Development and Project Management

Agile development has become very popular for a number of reasons. First, it emphasises constant communication with the end client, throughout the development process but especially through the more contentious pieces.

This is said, not only to help limit scope-creep and increase customer satisfaction, but also to aid the project management control and success rate..

Ask any executive in any major financial institution these days and they will tell you that they support 'agile' '..because it allows developers to build and demo their results regularly.'

The customer can then keep tabs on development throughout the cycle, enabling you to correct as needed. Clearly, this means more effort and input from the customer, but in the end, it is infinitely preferable to the common misalignment or worst, the wrong product.

The Customer is King
Because the customer needs are constantly a factor in agile environments, development teams are more alert and more reactive. This helps them to become more engaged with the customers' experience and be more market-driven.

“The Agile PMO Role”Some years ago, around the birth of Agile, Tamara Sulaiman, a project management consultant, wrote an article entitled "The Agile PMO Role". In it she asserts that “agile teams are (or should be) cross-functional, self-organising and self-managing.”

So, with admirable characteristics such as these, it's no wonder that agile teams are so much in deman.

Project Management: Keeping your Ducks in a row

Project Management is all about getting your ducks in a row - leading and managing a number of complex tasks in a single project, whilst keeping it flowing along smoothly and calmly.

Where do we begin?
The basic premise of project management is that you must have a project plan to have a successful project implementation. This is the basis for any project management process, guideline, model or framework.

Simply stated,project management is about planning the work and then working to the plan. So why is it that so many projects with a plan are failing?

Clealy, the problem must have to do with the plan and how it was developed. Having said that, there are many problems that can occur during the development of a project plan but the most fundamental problem is how the project is started and how the plan is developed.

Open a fully functional project management tool or drop a good project methodology book and it'll probably fall open at the task list page. So, the PM is compelled to be task orientated from the off, also known as 'bottom up' development.

Unfortunately, most successful project planning requires the opposite approach 'top down' development, the Work Breakdown Structure or WBS.

Some PMs will forceably argue that entering tasks into the project management tool means they are creating the WBS, and this may appear acceptable to the lay person. However, from a true project management standpoint, they are not designing the WBS from the top down, it is being designed from the inside out.

The problem is not the tool or the methodology but the interpretation of both by the PM and they way he/she chooses to use these tools and methids for the development the project plan.

The only way to start from a good footing is to have a well managed workshop. Gather the technical experts together in a large room with a blank wall and start brainstorming.

Together, under the leadership of a good, unbiased project manager, using sticky notes and marker pens, create the WBS from the top down. Once this is established it can be refined and entered into the tool of choice. This use of PM methodology will produce a much more accurate, effective and collaborative plan.

Much of project management success has to do with the fundamentals. Often these fundamentals are forgotten or over-ridden by the eagerness to use some new, sophisticated tool, to the detriment of the project. Keeping it simple will bring you a greater success rate.

Project Management of Application Development

The Future of IT Project Management Software - Business Technology Leadership

The Future of IT Project Management Software - Business Technology Leadership

Today's information technology organisations are responding to the most treacherous recession in memory. Their actions range from classic belt-tightening to innovating and improving value-added services in their organisations. A primary value-adding strategy for the most effective organisations is to further improve project management.

In view of this strategy, the project management software industry's future looks especially promising. During the global recession, industrial countries around the world devoted billions in economic stimulus funds for infrastructure and other projects. This has created considerable demand for project management software.

Innovative Project Managers needed

A good Project manager is not normally a dreamer or spontaneous. A Project managers must be practical, structured and systematic but at the same time they should be open to innovation.

Clearly they need to be structured and systematic to be successful at establishing strong plans and managing a project to implementation. A project manager must have a structured approach, to understand what step goes before another.

A structured, systematic approach is normally linear; it may be multiple paths performed simultaneously, but each individual path is still linear. Unfortunately, the innovative skills may not come as naturally to many project managers.

The act of innovating is defined as “the introduction of new things or methods.” In IT, we know that there is always a better way; the same can be said for how we manage a project. There are aspects of a company’s culture, personalities of key stakeholders, constraints, and limitations that call for a project manager to innovate.

You should view the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) standards as important guidelines but it is not an exact set of rules on how to manage every detail of the project. You should always be challenging yourself to come up with a new, more efficient way of doing things. Innovative project managers are questioning, they set aside “thinking time” to look at the challenge from multiple angles and truly challenge how they have always done things.

I’ve seen so many project managers repeatedly use what went well during the last project. It can makes life appear simple because the outcome is predictable but over time, you might find yourself going with a solution because you’re familiar with it and not necessarily because it’s the best one for the job.

The challenge for project managers is twofold:
Whenever you get that uncertain feeling that occurs when facing a new challenge, and you’re tempted to take one of your “comfortable” tools out of the toolbox, stop and take some time to think and innovate. Instead of repeating what's familiar to you, come up with the best tool for the job.

When faced with a familiar challenge that you have the perfect tools to address, stop, take some think time, and look at the challenge from different angles. Now that you have used this tool successfully for so long, is there a way you can improve it, upgrade it, or replace it with the smarter, better model?

Establishing thinking time takes discipline. I don’t know any successful project manager who isn’t driving projects as hard as they can, dealing with crisis every day. Taking time to think, when time is at a premium has the best results; this thinking time is akin to the planning phase of a project.

When the stakeholder want immediate action, the older wiser project manager will understand that the more time spent in the thinking, planning phase leads to more successful project outcomes.

Project Management Adds Real Value and Cost Savings to Organisations

Project management is certainly not overhead. Project management, if implemented and performed in a structured and professional manner, adds real value by reducing waste, controlling costs and improving performance.

Good portfolio management will reduce waste by weeding out projects that should never be started. Often we start these projects and later cancel them after wasting effort and money.

Practicing good project management in the area of initiation, planning and execution will greatly increase the success rate and performance of your project execution. Resources will be better utilised and the team will be more communicative, motivated and organised.

This will reduce duplication of effort, control costs and ensure that risks, issues and dependencies are dealt with in an optimal and effective manner, maximising effort and minimising waste.

Performing proper project closure, and learning good lessons from our past successes (and occasional mistakes), will improve the performance and effectiveness of future projects.

Finally we need to monitor, review and control our projects. We learn in six sigma that you do not improve what you do not measure.

Taking metrics during each phase of your product development process is key to learning and improving your future performance. You can start taking these measurements at any time.

As you improve your implementation of project management you will also see an improvement in the performance of your projects. These project improvements will provide a 'gearing' effect and the same amount of effort as before, will create a greater momentum and more energy in the implementation of your projects. Simply by the introduction of good, strong project management methods.

With due regard for the creation of real value from dilligent effort, the Project Manager's mantra follows Vaughan's Equation: VO > EI (Value Out is greater than Effort In) You will find that strong project management follows this equation, very closely and will always be well worth your time and effort to implement.

Project management is certainly not overhead. I hesitate even to include the word in the same sentence to avoid establishing a subconscious association.

Project management, if implemented and performed, by a professional, in a structured and professional manner, adds real value by reducing waste, controlling costs and improving performance.

Project management provides better ROI, lower TCO and better TQC.

Your Leaders are in Chains: Let loose the Hounds!

Have you got the measure of your Senior staff? Well, why are you not giving your senior people the opportunity to lead and to deliver better value on their projects. Playing safe is not the same as scoring points!

Currently, modern business-driven organisations have wrapped within them (and without them), an extensive, complex and multi-layered IT Infrastructure that is expected to take-on a more defensive exo-skeletal role than it's intended 'growth enablement' and 'capability enhancement' role, for which it is greatly suited.

The energy lost in defending and maintaining the status quo, could be better spent on more effective expansion and stronger growth.

It would appear that most organisations are favouring the 'wait and see' strategy and find themselves burning precious fuel and time simply hovering above the ground instead of plotting a new course and moving ahead, albeit at a 'steady as she goes, Captain' pace.

So it's no wonder that there is some confusion of the role of the 'gung-ho!' multi-functional, assertive Project Managers and Business Analysts in this stabilising environment that 'maintains the status quo' at all costs.

PMs and BAs alike are confused about the skills and efforts required in these circumstances and are therefore equally unsure about what value they can deliver, while confined to their seemingly passive roles.

"I think our wagons have been formed into a defensive circle for so long, we have forgotten which way is forward!"

Senior people, in particular have become very frustrated and feel restricted in their implementation of new ideas and innovative projects. They know they can deliver more: more value to the clients and more value to the organisation. Certainly more value than the situation allows and they know this because they have already proved it in the past.

There is a very real risk that career advancement paths will quickly stall, especially for senior people. Once you have learned the basic skills of project management and business analysis and have had a number of opportunities to try, fail and put it into practice successfully, what next?

The Clock is Ticking!
Unfortunately from here, it can be a downward spiral. As time flies by, more and more Senior people are moved into low level positions, where they stagnate and then they don’t have the opportunity to show what they can really do. Everybody looses. Experienced PMs and BAs are marginalised, morale suffers, projects suffer, and the company don’t get the results they want from their efforts.

One option being considered, is to come up with new titles for senior people in the PM and BA roles to differentiate them from the crowd and to accentuate the increased value that they can deliver but I fear that this is just another example of 'name magic' and the acquisition of status and respect without undergoing the arduous task of earning it.

Risks or Benefits of Letting Senior People lead
Project success rates will increase if you have Senior people running your projects. People who are abley assisted by Business System Designers who can synthesise or simulate as well as analyse and calculate, to create effective system designs and applications that users like.

When Senior Project Managers have the assertive authority and sound experience to address and resolve problems and issues as they arise, with timely and focussed solutions, then ICT and development projects stay on track and deliverables will meet company expectations.

Let’s untie our Senior project managers and business analysts and see what happens. Take the brakes off! Loosen their shackles and give them more P&L responsibility. Plot a course for your next challenge and into the future growth of your organisation.

Leveraging the talents of senior people in project management and business analysis roles is going to make a huge improvement in project success rates and will take your organisation out of a hovering status quo, with an ICT exo-skeleton and into an assertive forward-thinking leadership, that is capable of creating and managing growth, innovation and business capability. Chocks away and full steam ahead!

Effective ITIL project leadership: Plan-Do-Check-Act

Effective ITIL project leadership: Plan-Do-Check-Act

The first step in the Plan-Do-Check-Act process is to have an executive address ITIL stakeholders at all project kick-off meetings.

This falls under the "Plan" and "Do" activities and also shows the team that the ITIL program has leadership support.

If a CIO or senior executive doesn't attend the kick-off meeting, project support is questioned and that immediately weakens the team and the leader's ability to direct the program.

Following the kick-off meeting, leaders execute the "Do" portion of the cycle by simply following the same process as the rest of their team.

When you talk about "Plan-Do-Check-Act" in ITIL, the "Do" really means that leaders must set the example and establish a culture where the senior executives follow the process like any other employee.

One CIO I have worked with took this a step further and communicated to the entire company how he followed the process. He did this after receiving an irate call from a senior executive who claimed the service desk was not giving him the priority he deserved.

After sharing the process and his own service desk requests with the executive, the CIO pinned the list on every local notice board and in the service desk operations room to give the technicians a tool for response when they were getting pressure to increase the priority of certain tickets.

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Play the Right Person in the Right Position; No strikers in goal!

Aye! Aye! Sir! The face of Experience but not the Voice.

One of the most common mistakes that I see in organisations is that they promote or recruit great technical experts to be poor project managers and excellent sales representatives to be ineffective commercial or business managers.

I am not a big fan of the highly commercialised football business, but the strategy mentioned here is the same as taking your best goal scorer off the field and puting him in as the club manager. The skills needed to perform one job function are rarely suitable to perform the other.

Someone who is a highly accomplished technical expert in the organisation is not the same person to lead, control and focus the efforts of others.

I am not saying that this person is not capable of being re-trained into a new role but has the appropriate assessments and interviews taken place to ascertain, not only elligibility but motivation and focused commitment.

You originally hired them or trained them to perform a very specific task or fullfil a series of objectives. They have consistently delivered high quality results and have bailed the organisation out of many problems. Everyone knows that they can rely on this person.

Suddenly and after due thought, the organisation decides to implement strict project management methodologies to support the company's forecasted growth. They decide to use this chosen technical expert to lead a major implementation.

It makes sense, doesn't it? This is the person that always delivers and therefore they must be the best candidate. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily the correct criteria and so often this person quickly falls into difficulties and ends up on their face. The real victim can be the organisation and it's new found belief that project management doesn’t work for them.

At the core of this issue is not the person chosen to be the project manager, it is the organisation that put them into an untenable position. Although the chosen person is very focussed and motivated by their technnical expertise, they were not truly suitable to organise the resources and coordinate the project.

The majority of technical gurus, would prefer to get their hands on the toys and start fixing the problems themselves. They are used to working in chaotic situation and they are happy to live in that environment. Therefore, they do not always see the true value of running a well controlled project in an organised and structured way.

A second issue that I have seen is with the governance controls inside organisations. These are intended to be established to support project management in an organisation. Often these organisations are stuffed to the roof tops, with theoretical and process people that have never successfully run a project themselves.

So often, processes and policies are developed for the rest of the organisation, that are far removed from the reality of everyday projects. What is developed is something theoretically sound, state-of-the-art approved and slick but, unfortunately, it does not meet the organisation's cultural requirements. "Looks great Bob! but we can't use it!"

At this point one of two things can occur.
1) Stakeholders and senior management sponsors will continue to insist that the PMs, running the projects, use these processes and policies, or else! The risk here is that the projects will all bog down and start to fail, despite the determination of all concerned.

2) In the absence of a strong directive from above, the more experienced PMs will simply ignore the processes and policies and fall back into their own tried and tested 'ways' to run the projects. This can also spell disaster for the organisation and by association, project management methodologies.

Another common issue I have seen, is that most organisation think they can perform project management cheaply, using more junior level people. They hire people that have less than five years experience and they call them Project Managers. They tell these people to take control and drive the projects towards implementation.

Without real, hard-won, experience about how to deal with and communicate positively with senior level functional and business managers, these poor people will very quickly lose their authority. They will be stripped of their implied status and will simply become the subordinates, and compliant 'yes-sirs', to the functional and business managers involved.

The functional and business managers have now gained control of your critical projects and the project managers becomes the note-takers, expeditors and coordinators. The project is now moving in another direction and with prioritised goals that were never required or intended. Again the organisation sees project management as the failure.

To have a successful project management environment you need to hire the right people. Just as you do not hire a goalscorer to manage a team, nor should you hire a technical expert to lead your project management effort. Find a seasoned, well weathered business management professional with the right experience and commitment to lead the organisation.

In conclusion, if you want to succeed, with the development and implementation of project management within your organisation, you must not skimp or stray from the path. You must hire a seasoned project manager with the correct skills and true experience to perform their duties and sometimes that means saying 'No sir!', with all due respect.

Project failures and Change Management strategy

Tight budgets have upped the ante in what IT projects organisations choose to pursue this year, and in some cases the executive involvement in those projects has substantially increased as a result, consultants and practitioners say.

Yet the executive contribution to project and portfolio management (PPM) at large enterprises is more often about communication and change management strategy than other parts of the process.

Project Portfolio Management
Executives are involved with managing the project portfolio or adjusting priorities among projects at less than 20% of organisations with more than 1,000 employees. Rather, those duties are most often performed by IT directors or governing bodies.

Instead, the executive's role is one of communicating a vision and driving a change management strategy that will result in greater user and organizational acceptance of the projects selected for development.

Lead by Example
There is more riding on the executive's decisions in the project management space than ever before. The executive can't just delegate project management responsiveness to the staff because he must lead by example.

Organisational Change
Organisational change management is crucial. Before rolling out new PPM solution from anyone consider having a soft launch, configuring resource pools and providing training for resource managers, senior leadership team members and project managers.

Change Management
Change management should be the starting point because the overall project management strategy will succeed or fail based on this.

A change management strategy formally introduces initiatives to everyone affected by them, and should also introduce any new roles or expectations to team members to get everyone on the same page at the same time.

Creating a Change Culture
Creating a culture where everyone understands their roles, responsibilities and expectations from the get-go increases the chances for project success and it reduces surprises.

Indeed, surprises are one reason for project failures, which persist despite governance and tools like PPM software to keep projects on track. It regularly comes down to the fact that the business didn't realise the impact the change was going to have, and therefore didn't plan for it.

Project Success rates
Research on project success rates found that 24% of projects are cancelled part-way through or delivered and not used. Surveys showed that just 11% of large organisations complete all projects in their development queue; the majority (54%) report an abandonment rate of 1% to 10%. The final third don't even finish 11% to 50% of their projects!

Consolidation
Consolidation can go smoothly if you lay out an extensive workflow for change management prior to or during the implementation process. Pay special attention to the rigorous standardisation that needs to take place while developing a realistic timeline.

Small Changes
Start out by changing small things; changes grow in complexity as the organisation works toward its goals. Remember, you need to be able to crawl before you can run. Whenever you are changing business culture you first need to plan out the procedure for it, or else the tools will just sit there, unused and unwanted.

Starting point
Change management should be the starting point because the overall project management strategy will succeed or fail based on this but too much process can also be a problem, resulting in a slow death "by a thousand cuts".

Approval Points
Before the recent economic crisis, there were two or three approval points to get a project going. Now it feels like the number of stringent checkpoints has increased, leaving new, creative projects to die on the vine before they even have a chance.

Tight Budgets
Tighter budgets have led many organisations to add tight checkpoints for proposals, aimed at weeding out unnecessary or unrealistic projects before they even start. Although these processes can prevent wasting time and money on projects that don't provide a lot of value, they also stifle innovation and discourage new ideas. Finding the middle ground can be difficult.

If there are too many approval points, people get frustrated and throw up their hands in premature defeat but if there is not enough, the engagement can fizzle out.

A Vision
Developing a vision that meets business objectives and the needs of stakeholders can be the first step in finding that happy medium. Start basic, envisioning a plan that doesn't necessarily require a lot of tools and processes but has better stakeholder alignment and overall clarity into what the business problem is that you are trying to solve.

Balance in all things
Strike a balance by staying open to the potential for project adjustments along the way while also following Lean Six Sigma methodologies and ITIL best practices. You can run Lean Six Sigma in parallel to the business processes of the project and you can streamline every project to fit into this overall strategy.

Keeping costs down
At the end of the day, executives are trying desperately to keep operational costs and spending under control while still making progress on IT strategies. They need very honest and accurate information on the projects rolling up to them. It's very important not just for managing IT but also for engaging the stakeholders and the entire business leadership team. It is one of the IT executive's most important responsibilities.

Tools are not the answer
You can have the most expensive and beautiful project management tool out there, but without the support of the management and your project team, it just won't happen.