Project Management - highlights

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Program Management ::

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Using persuasion in project management ::

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(gentle music) - To evoke emotion, we must show emotion. Turn on the video camera on your phone sometime, and record yourself in a practice attempt to influence someone. When you watch back, do you seem animated and excited? Or bored and apathetic? Remember, to evoke emotion, show emotion. - Why is no so often the default in corporate life? You want to launch a pilot? No. You want to revamp the intake procedure? No. You want to explore the Chinese market? No. That's because it's a lot less risky to maintain the status quo. So if you want to get people to say yes to you, there's a simple formula. You have to reduce the perceived risk. In fact ideally, you want to convince them it's riskier to say no and leave things as they are than it would be for them to try something new. - [Terri] Our goal is to enhance organizational performance, create desired changes, and sustain the outcomes. Engaging our stakeholders and gaining their support through communication, consultation, and involvement, will help ensure a healthy project portfolio delivery. We want our approach to emphasize inclusivity and continuous stakeholder engagement. - Often as project manager or program manager, you're not the line manager of the people on your projects. And you have to negotiate to get the ones you want from their other work. This involves influencing their line managers to release them, and influencing the people themselves, to want to come and work on your project. How would you persuade a person to come and work on your project? Five ideas. Number one, show them that it's an interesting project. It's going to cover new ground. Second, that it's an important project. It's going to make a difference to the organization. Maybe even to the world. Third, that it's got a great team. Fourth, compliment them, so they feel good about working with you. They're great, they're perfect for the project, their skills are unique, you really need them, and you'll look after them.

Analytical reasoning ::  -- MosCoW prioritization -- Lean about this

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(upbeat music) - Prioritizing requirements is an important way to identify the minimum requirements we need to ensure we achieve something of value to the organization. If we did not use prioritization then we would have to have a much more flexible approach to time scales and costs for the project, which is not always an option. MosCoW prioritization is a technique used by projects to identify which requirements have more value than others. This technique is widely used in Agile project environments where time, cost, and quality are fixed. - Your schedule should include all the resources required to perform the project work. A resource plan, also called a staffing plan, can help you line up the resources you need when you need them. A resource plan provides a high level view of a project's resource requirements and gives you the information you need to develop a realistic project schedule. - An Agile team uses three techniques to try and make the reporting more efficient. The first technique is to avoid duplication. One set of reports should work for both the team and the stakeholders. There's a lot of potential for miscommunication on a project. The status reports I mention do not do much to improve the team, they're mostly designed to communicate when things have gone wrong. An Agile report should use reports as a way to continuously improve. An Agile report is not only about showing progress, it's a way to show trends and areas to optimize the work. - Most everyone loves tracking things. Tracking information makes us feel more in control. Earned value budget tracking, also called earned value analysis, allows us to understand how much a project has earned based on the tasks you have finished, so we and our managers have a sense of control around the financial status of our project. Earned value analysis looks at the project from cost, schedule, and work completed metrics, and can determine progress and spending variances from your original plan. Earned value analysis allows us to understand cost and schedule status on one graph. Apply this approach and you can quickly and easily share your budget status, any time, anywhere.

Collaboration ::

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(upbeat music) - In traditional project management the project manager is responsible for a project's overall success or failure. In an Agile framework, however, these responsibilities are distributed across the roles on the Agile team. As a leader, when you share accountability, your finding new ways to collaborate and succeed together. - Of all the Agile activities, the daily standup is probably the most misunderstood. Most managers feel that a group left to stand and chat will continue to chat until someone starts the meeting. The scrum master and the project manager must fight the temptation to drive the standup. The team may start chatty, but they'll quickly become more disciplined. Once the team is settled they should take no more than 15 minutes to answer three questions: What did I do yesterday? What am I doing today? Are there any obstacles in my way? - Predictably, team members don't always agree, and a bit of arguing can occur. Your job is not to stop this arguing. It's an important part of the team development process. Instead, your job is to ensure the arguments are productive and do not get personal. Debates about how to best deliver project outcomes are productive and should be encouraged, not cut short. Only via working through their differences can your project team get to the next stage. - The teams I work with are made up of people from many countries, with different cultural values, and are physically separated by hundreds of miles and different time zones. This is the new map of reality, which has brought about a big challenge, in order for diverse and disperse teams to work together effectively, collaboration is key for the success of your project. - The compassionate perspective elevates collaboration beyond idea comparison and polite compromise. The compassionate perspective allows you to understand, as best as you can, how the other person came to have that idea or feeling, and why she or he is holding onto it. If your group currently lacks compassion, be that first person to demonstrate that concern for the well being of others, it will draw other people to you, it will build trust, and it will ultimately make your collaboration that much more successful.

Adaptability ::

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(upbeat music) - As the digital transformation sweeps your organization, you're going to need to change the way you think. You'll need to become more adpative in the way you solve problems. From that perspective, you must be willing to unlearn what worked well for you in the past, so you can learn what works well now. - Change should never be undertaken without a good reason. But even with a good reason, it can be tricky to find the initial momentum to get started. So it's important to understand the driving forces for the change, and equally, the resisting forces. Lewin's Force Field Analysis is a key tool that you, the project manager, and the change manager can use to identify what type of resistance is likely to arise and help to plan how this can be addressed during the project. - As a change manager, it's important you react and address issues to minimize their impact on your efforts. However, you don't need to directly own the resolution of every issue. An effective technique is to assign issue resolution to inform team members and you can then track the progress they make at resolving issues. Risk and issue management can be time consuming and trigger emotions at what might be an already emotional time. Resist the urge to give into those emotions, and guide your team and management through a disciplined risk and issue management exercise. You'll be glad you did. - Ownership of change doesn't mean no one else is involved, leadership owns the goals and objectives, and will adjust them if necessary. They will communicate those changes to portfolio management, which must then integrate them into portfolio. Individual project managers are closest to the work being done, so they're also involved in change management. They're the first to see the need for change within their projects, and they're the best people to identify the specific change needed. - That's why it's not sufficient simply to have one or two adaptive workers, you need a team of adaptive workers, a collaborative group that's dedicated to continually coordinating their efforts to adapt to ongoing change. An adaptive team will treat each new set of challenges by determining the problems to be solved, and the ideal skillsets for generating successful results. They'll then distribute the tasks that need to be performed, to the most appropriate team member. - You can passively wait for change to happen, or you can anticipate it. I suggest you take a proactive approach. Instead of sitting on your hands, expecting your customer to tell you what they want, look for innovative ways to help them achieve their goals, without being asked. Here's the lesson. If you make a habit of waiting for your customer to tell you what they want, you're begging for trouble. It's just a matter of time before they try to introduce new scope into the project. Anticipate this and proactively address it, rather than allow scope creep to join your party.

Cross-functional ::

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(upbeat music) - If you work for a large organization then you might run into the challenge of communicating in a cross-functional team. A cross-functional team is a group of employees from different functional areas working together to deliver a common product. The big challenge with cross-functional teams is that people underestimate the shared language and concepts that are part of each functional area. The key way to overcome this challenge is to make sure that you're doing a lot of cross training between the team members and different functional areas. - Have you ever walked away from a meeting with some technical workers and thought to yourself, what the heck was that all about? Well I know I have. There is a perception that communicating with technical people can be difficult. There are some factual realities to this. First of all, your tech teams talk amongst themselves about the stuff that they're working on, so of course, there will be language that they use which is specific to the topic. There's also the matter of communication styles and preferences. But when you're starting to build relationships with people, it's really important to speak to them in ways that make them comfortable. - One of my clients is a German based international company. The German project team members would habitually send their email requests and instructions in their native language to non German speakers. An email can be easily copy pasted into a translation program, which is precisely what the American and Mexican team members were doing. The problem is that the translations did not cover the precise intent of the original email request, and the tasks performed were wrong, which triggered delays and rework that ultimately caused a late delivery to the customer. What prevented this from happening again? Establishing a basic agreement on the use of the common language can help drive home the idea that with agreements, we can better guarantee the success of our project. - It would seem obvious that you want the best people on your project and on all of the projects in your program. But there are a few things to consider before you start. First, you need to find out who your existing resources are. How many you have of each type. And therefor, how many additional resources that you need. Then there are the criteria for selecting the ideal person. Clearly there's technical knowledge and skills. If you have access to this information, there is personality. Is the person easy to work with? And will they fit with your team's culture and mix? You might be looking for someone creative, or good at detail, or hard driving, or caring, or who stands back and checks things, depending on whatever gaps you have in your current team. - Brainstorming is a simple exercise that makes it almost easy for even the most rigid team to experience the power of creative thinking. Brainstorming is such a powerful tool because it taps into the knowledge and experience of the entire team. Because brainstorming gets people engaged and invested in ideas, it encourages teamwork, and it can often help a team find innovative new paths on their journey to project success.

Project management beyond methodology ::

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(upbeat music) - I think we ought to have a quick look at what is a project and we kind of know one when we see one, but there are certain things that are indicative that it is a project and the first one is they have start and a finish. But there's more to a project than that because there's also the fact that it need to be a collection of related tasks and part of the essence of what makes projects difficult is that the tasks are interrelated. You have to do them in the right order. So, once you've planned the order, you can then work back from the finish and work out how you need to start. But I also think the real essence of a project is that it's something new. It's something that you haven't done before. And finally, I think it needs to be big enough to be difficult. - [Bonnie] Projects of different sizes need different amounts of management, communication, and documentation. Let's look at questions you can ask to determine whether your project is small. The first questions is: What is the project supposed to achieve? Break down the project purpose into objectives. A project can be considered small if it has a single objective or at most, three objectives. Another question is: Are the results you need to deliver straightforward and is it easy to tell if you've delivered what you're supposed to? - Every project you could ever do will have deliverables which we're calling quality, it will have a time limit, probably, and it will have a budget limit, almost certainly. And the problem is that customers always want something fantastic in as quick a time as they can have it and for the minimum budget. So, you're being squeezed in all three directions and that's a problem and in a way, this is the central problem of project management. You can't have all three. So, we need to work out what it is the customer wants, we need to make sure we're not going to promise something we can't deliver, and we need to find out which is the top one, which is known as the key driver. - Great leaders understand that people can only be successful if they have good goals. Even Aristotle, who gave this advice: First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal. A goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends. Wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. To start with, a goal must be specific. People need to understand and agree on exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Every project runs into surprises and figuring out in advance how these should be handled is a part of resolving to a course of action. The sooner you know about an issue, the more options you have and the less it will cost to resolve it. So, effectively managing the escalation process for your project is also a very important part of managing risk and cost.

PMI traditional project management ::

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(upbeat music) - Good project managers are jacks of all trades and masters of none, at least in the traditional sense, however, when you dig a little deeper, you see that project managers are masters of something, integration management. It's quite possibly the most important role project managers play. Imagine a group of disconnected team members trying to complete project deliverables, but they lack clear direction, communication, alignment and change control. Does this sound like project bliss to you? Without integration management there would be pure chaos on projects. - Have you ever had a jam-packed day of errands and appointments, you probably made a list of everything you needed to do, maybe even put your to do's in order, so you could complete them as efficiently as possible. A project schedule does the same sort of thing. It includes all the work that has to be done, who does the work, and the sequence in which it's performed. - Scope creep is the bane of project managers' existence the world over. If you've ever added work to your project without accounting for it in your scheduling budget, you've been a victim of scope creep. Another way of looking at it is, scope creep requires you to do more work the same amount of time and money as you originally estimated. You see how this could be a problem? Although it may be tempting, scope creep should never be allowed, if for no other reason than it's bad project management practice, to lose control of any of your project constraints, particularly scope. - The project budget is the tool to ensure that your spending doesn't exceed your funding limits. Here are my suggestions for creating a project budget: First, focus on the triple constraints, the schedule, the scope and the costs. Second, think about your project from start to finish. Third, look at your major expenditures, the typical budget specifies costs for labor, materials, cost of financing, and other costs such as travel and communications. Fourth, discuss contingency dollars with your sponsor, it's important to have contingency funds set aside to handle the unexpected. Lastly, consider the information you'll need to support the cost and benefit data for the project. Keeping this in mind can help you manage expectations with your sponsor and key stakeholders.

Program and portfolio management ::

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(upbeat music) - A program is a collection of related projects, so managing a program is similar to managing a project, but it's at a higher level, in that you're dealing with bigger numbers and longer timescales, usually. Some definitions of program management say that program managers deal more with the why, while project managers tend to deal with the how, and that is certainly going to be the case if the program manager is involved from the very start of the program rather than being brought in to implement it once it's been decided that it's going to happen. - So, what does a program manager do, and what skills does she need to have? First off, the program manager needs to manage all the project managers that are working in the program. The program manager is responsible for delivering the benefits to the organization, and this is the work that the program managers are completing. Managing strategy is high on the list of what a program manager needs to manage. Since the strategy is coming from levels higher in the organization, she will need to be the master in managing the relationships with those key stakeholders. - Most believe a portfolio is an extension of projects and programs. They see the portfolio as a roll-up of the projects their employer has approved, a way to group them together. The portfolio is a living thing. It changes over time as a result of numerous variables, such as project delivery problems, but also changing business priorities, new opportunities, and challenges or inaccurate plans. In order to successfully manage a portfolio, you must cover all elements of the portfolio lifecycle, starting with the capturing of ideas and suggestions for projects, and continuing through the analysis and selection of the initial components. - Having a clear vision statement is essential to help everyone understand the desired end goal of the program. It's a powerful communication tool that can generate engagement and commitment by all stakeholders. One of the best descriptions I've ever heard of a vision statement is that it's a postcard from the future. It describes the future so compelling that stakeholders feel they want to take the journey to get there. It should engage both the heart and the mind. - Just the way you have an accounting department within an organization that manages all things related to accounting or an IT department responsible for everything around technology and data, a PMO is a business-driven entity within a company that takes care of its project management-related activities, tools, and people. Once a PMO is in place, you can expect your company to experience these benefits: projects getting deliver with predictable consistency, transparent reporting of project status and financials, effective investment in projects, improved stakeholder satisfaction and employee productivity, and finally, long-term cost savings through strong execution of initiatives.

Agile project management ::

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(upbeat music) - Okay so you've decided you're going to try Agile, that's great, but what does it really mean? It's definitely changing more than just the processes, it's changing the way everyone thinks, that's the big paradigm shift. - To get real benefit from Agile, you have to start by addressing your team's mindset. You have to take a hard look at the reality of how your team works together. It's better to be a team that's terrible at Agile practices but understands the mindset. A truly Agile team should be able to ask tough questions about the way they work and be open to continuous improvement. If you see Agile as just an updated set of project management tools, then you'll probably be disappointed. Then best way to start Agile in your organization is to think small. Begin with a small core team, and make sure they correctly follow the Agile framework. If you work at a mid-size organization, then the team could have as little as four people. Then you expand Agile in your organization through conversion by contagion. So you convert one team to Agile, and then share their contagious excitement with the rest of the organization. Try to keep this core team happy. If they like Agile, then they'll be your strongest advocates for change. Give them time to be successful, they should see the benefits of the change. Being Agile means that you allow your customer to change the product. It doesn't mean that you're free to change the framework. Your team shouldn't think of Agile as a free ticket to work however they like. One time I worked with a team that was starting to use Agile for the first time. They didn't have the people available for a full Agile team, so they merged some of the roles. The scrub master and the product owner was the same person. One of the developers also acted as a project manager. They made all these changes and declared that they were creating their own Agile framework. It's important to not take this approach when you're starting out with your Agile team. Start out by following the framework as closely as possible. Only after your team is well formed should you even consider making changes to the Agile framework. In many ways the retrospective is about the team being Agile with their own improvement. They use the same ideas to turn their efforts inward to reflect on how they can be a better team. Typically the team will meet for two hours on the last day of every sprint. Then they'll reflect on things that went well, and what can be improved. Agile retrospectives are a very lively area. The retrospective is a time for improvement. Also, keep in mind, retrospectives are one of the most misunderstood Agile events. Some development teams see this as a bi-weekly brainstorming session, they focus on the software. This isn't the purpose of a retrospective, it's about improving the team, it's about helping the team work better together.

Scrum ::

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(upbeat music) - Agile is a broad umbrella of many methodologies that follow the same principles, Scrum is one of them. The focus of Scrum is to maximize the efficiency of the team. Since scope is the point of flexibility for Agile projects, Scrum's focus is how to deliver the most possible value within the constrained time and budget. - There's a saying in the Scrum community, Scrum is simple, but hard to apply. There are very few rules, yet their application is as complex as the problems it is trying to solve. For this reason, the role of the Scrum master is meant to be a coach who is continuously learning the framework and how it's applied. - The creators of large scale Scrum are to quick to point out that LeSS is Scrum. So what does this mean? Almost all the enterprise Agile frameworks include Scrum. It makes sense because Scrum is the most widely used of all the Agile frameworks. What they're really saying here is that Scrum is enough to scale Agile. Scrum is a very simple and lightweight framework. It only has three roles, five events, and even a fewer number of outputs, or what they call Artifacts. - Scrum wants you to fail. In fact, it's known for the slogan, Fail Fast. Traditionally, project managers and developers who had worked for months or years before seeing the results, most of the time, around 80% in fact, the software and projects failed. Failure is okay as long as you're learning from it. But if you have to wait too long, you're not going to learn nearly as much from it. Scrum takes the Agile manifesto and its key principles and boils them down to a very simple framework that encourages small-scale focus and rapid learning cycles. That's what fail fast really means, learn fast. Scrum is simple to execute but really hard to master. So be sure you're celebrating successes when you have them. If you only celebrate at the end, you could lose a lot of momentum. Recognition shifts the focus off the team's obstacles and on to success. Every Scrum team faces challenges and problems. Every time you celebrate overcoming one, you're building the team's confidence that they can accomplish anything.

Business analysis ::

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(relaxing music) - Many are predicting that the changes coming in the next few years will outpace what we've seen in the last 50 years. Newer technologies of today can speak and listen accurately, determine and express emotions, find patterns in millions of records and build their own logic. And that's just the start. When we combine these with new advances in how technology can analyze disparate and unstructured data in unthinkable speed, we get innovations that can be applied to business process and customer interactions that are mind-blowing. Like an organization without customers, I can't imagine an Agile project without analysis. Being an Agile BA is about facilitating dialogue about customer value with the team, making the product owner's decisions more efficient, and analyzing for gaps and impacts. Agile, as an approach for projects, is all about insuring what is built is valuable. We can build a solution really well and really fast, but if it doesn't provide value to the users, it doesn't matter. And that's where BAs come in. Your work is crucial to Agile's value driven mission. - The value business process modeling represents to the organization is to visually demonstrate the flow of activities between various stakeholders and the interaction that enables outcomes to be achieved. Modeling is an awesome way to leverage the use of visuals. With these diagrams, you can capture, analyze, and determine future ways that organizations perform the work required. Bringing all of these business process modeling practices into your tool kit, will make you an indispensable asset whenever an organization is looking to make changes.

Additional technical PM methods ::

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(upbeat music) - Have you ever had a jam-packed day of errands and appointments? You probably made a list of everything you needed to do. Maybe even put your to-dos in order so you could complete them as efficiently as possible. A project schedule does the same sort of thing. It includes all the work that has to be done, who does the work and the sequence in which it's performed. - Budget management is critical for controlling your project and ensuring that you deliver the value your sponsor and key stakeholders need. To fine tune your budget foresight, use a mix of three types of reports in your project manager's toolkit. There are project reports which looks from the beginning of your project to now. There's the status report which asks, where are we right at the moment? And there are forecast reports which take your actual spending and compare it to your plan to plot what future spending might be. - Part of the agile mindset it encouraging individuals and interactions over processes and tools. So right from the beginning, your agile team is going to have a very different way of looking at their tool set. While the best agile tools are the ones that don't detract too much from individuals and interactions. You don't want the software to become the focus of the project. You always want the emphasis to be on the self-organized team. - Testing is one area where tools can be extremely valuable. There are many different types of testing tools available. The team size and complexity of your product will determine the tools required. In addition, if time is of the essence, tools may be helpful in automating some of your test activities. You'll need to perform analysis to determine which tools are required for your project. As useful as these tools can be, I suggest using the minimum number of tools required to get the job done. Try not to over engineer the testing effort.

Certification focus ::

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(upbeat music) - We all want to be the best at what we do every day. We can say we're the best at what we do, but how do we prove it to those around us and those that might hire us for our next role? In the field of project leadership, certifications can play a vital role in proving that we know our stuff and can be entrusted with the most important business objectives. You may have heard that Agile is like the rule-breaker's version of project management. At the same time, you know more and more companies are adopting these practices. So why is that? Well, Agile has a much higher success rate than traditional methods. So many companies are trying it out. Since that's the world we project leaders live in, it only makes sense to learn more about this family of Agile practices. Understanding them can help you hone your skills so you're a more valuable team member to your organization. One of the top certifications in the field today is the Certified ScrumMaster, or CSM. The CSM demonstrates your knowledge of and ability to work in the Scrum framework. It's a great launching point to refine your skills as a ScrumMaster or to get started in a ScrumMaster role. - The exam will use the language of the Agile Extension and horizons and not necessarily the language you've used every day with your team or the exact methodology or framework that your team follows. If you haven't opened up and looked at the Agile Extension yet, it's a must. Besides being a great resource for Agile BAs and Agile analysis, it's what the exam is based on. To pass the exam, I highly recommend reading the Agile Extension in detail. Reading the Agile Extension, perhaps multiple times, will make you think, make you a better Agile BA, and prepare you for the exam. - Becoming a PMP-certified project manager can be a great way to further your career, increase your earnings, and become an in-demand resource for your company. As the project management profession has grown over the years, so has the need to have a documented way to practice project management. Out of this came "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge", otherwise known as the "PMBOK Guide". I remember how I felt the first time I saw the "PMBOK Guide". I'll admit, I was a bit intimidated by how thick it was and all the data that was packed into the chapters, but I soon discovered that the "PMBOK" was broken down by different components which made it easier to understand.

Business acumen ::

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(energetic music) - Business acumen starts with an understanding of the problem that your organization exists to solve. Who is it that you serve? And what value do you provide to them? All of the work that an organization does should tie back to achieving this purpose. And that's why it's important to keep strategy, tactics and operations fully aligned. - By understanding how your everyday actions impact the business and bottom line, you'll be able to build trust with stakeholders and truly make a difference in the organization. Business acumen is about seeing your work through the eyes of the leaders in the organization and from a business point of view. Aligning strategy to execution is what every executive wants their teams to do. - Spend at least two hours a month speaking with colleagues in other departments or other functions. Learn about what they do. Learn how their part of the organization contributes to broader performance. Do research on your public financial filings. Look at internal financial documents. If you can get copies of your strategic plan or any major documents that the leadership team is putting out, those will help you understand how the business is performing and how it's set up to be successful. It's that understanding that will enable you to contribute more to the organization than just your job description calls for. Matrix organizations give people exposure to functions and areas they might not ordinarily deal with in any depth. It's a great learning opportunity. In a traditional organization, someone might be responsible for product development, but only have a cursory knowledge of technology. In a matrix, that individual might be responsible for the product development and the technology used to create it. That type of learning builds business acumen quickly and effectively. - Business acumen plays an important role in structuring business data analytics. After all, data does not exist in a vacuum, and the context provided by your business clarifies and puts your analyses into perspective.

Innovation skills ::

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(upbeat music) - A very common question that people ask is, what is innovation? What's the difference between innovation and creativity, for example? I like to think of innovation as the steps, the process that you take to create an idea and get it into the marketplace, and it's a long process, depending on the complexity of the project. Creativity, on the other hand, is what you do in your head to generate the idea. - When you have a design mindset, you see the world in whole new ways. Quite frankly, you see a world that doesn't exist yet. Traditional design is problem-focused. When we talk about a design mindset though, we're not focused on problems anymore. We're imagining solutions. Design thinking takes the science of technical feasibility, what's possible, and matches it with what people need. - Culture and environment can and do feed creativity. The value of this insight is that organizations can foster creativity by encouraging an open, learning-focused culture that values collaboration and the sharing of ideas. When organizations provide time for employees to take a break from the daily grind of work tasks and demands, it provides opportunities for new growth and to practice learning and absorbing new concepts and ideas. - For all the good that can come from AI and automation, if organizations aren't careful, and I mean really careful, they'll inadvertently allow automation to reduce projects to nothing more than repetitive processes with little room for creativity. Machines might be able to handle repetitive, technical tasks better than humans, but you still need strong project management skills. As long as you continue to focus on improving your creativity and interpersonal skills, you should be fine, for now.