Dear PM Advisor. May 5, 2014

Dear PM Advisor,

I work at a small company where all the team members are on multiple projects and wear multiple hats. As a result people are not even showing up to status meetings and I can't seem to hold them accountable to complete tasks on time. 

Any advice?

Under-resourced in Connecticut.

Dear Under-resourced,

Cookies always help.

First of all, make sure your status meetings are well organized and take no more than 25 minutes. Check out a previous post for how to accomplish this. Never waste any team member's time.

Schedule these meetings when most team members can attend. Give them no good excuse for missing them.

For the few who still miss your meeting, corner them at their desk and ask them about their tasks and give them new ones that came out of the meeting. Make sure they are held accountable even if they miss the meeting. Pretty soon they'll realize that their best defense is to attend the meetings.

Good luck,

PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

Nice graphic showing income disparity

The Times graphic department did another great job, showing a lot of data in a clever way. How have American's incomes increased (or decreased) over thirty years by percentile compared with other countries. I'll let the graphic speak for itself:

Pretty cool, huh. If you want to read the article, click here.

Dear PM Advisor. May 13, 2013

Dear PM Advisor,

I have a team member , representing Finance, who is critical to the success of my project but her only activities appear at the beginning and end of the project. Is she a core team member? Does she need to attend every status meeting?

Disjointed in Delaware

Dear Disjointed,

A core team member is anyone who has active contributions to make on activities for the project but is not an extended team member. An extended team member contributes to the project but through an extended team leader (ETL) within their function. That ETL is the core team member and should attend all status meetings.

You have a typical project where some team members are with you through the thick and thin of the project and some only make occasional appearances.

Meeting my philosophy of never wasting anyone's time, I recommend talking with this occasional team member and telling her that she does not need to attend team meetings after she finishes her first activity until it is close to her next activity coming due. She should continue to read the status reports but she needn't waste her time in weekly meetings.

If she wants to attend the meetings, by all means allow her to do so. You don't want to alienate her. But show respect for the value of her time by allowing her to make that choice.

Good luck,

PM Advisor.

Send your questions to bfieggen@gmail.com

Al Qaeda in Mali

I would find it amusing to hear of barely educated Madrassah boys from Al-Qaeda telling the Islamic scholars of Timbuktu that they knew better what Islam was all about if it weren't for the destruction these savages caused. Fortunately, tens of thousands of priceless scrolls and documents were spirited away to protection before they were destroyed.

Too bad the people of Timbuktu had to endure Shariah law at the hands of these interlopers. This NY Times article details some of the hardships the residents had to face until they were liberated by French soldiers. Beatings of women who showed their faces, amputation of thieves' hands, executions.

Ripples from the Arab Spring are still hitting Saharan Africa in ways that frighten me. Which country will next feel the crushing blow of Hezbollah-financed hordes? Morocco?

Does time off make you more productive?



Vidhya Nagarajan



I read an interesting article a few days ago that suggested that software engineers are more productive in the long run if their schedules are adjusted for the seasons. Jason Fried, the CEO of 37signals has instituted some revolutionary work hours in his company and it is paying off dividends.

Work from May to October is 32 hours a week, spread over four days. He finds that better work gets done in these four days than in a traditional five day work week. Why? Because people waste less time. They focus on getting the projects completed because there is less time to spend together.

In June they give every employee a month to work on whatever they want. These independent ideas are presented in July and result in the greatest burst of creativity all year. In addition to a huge morale boost, productivity spikes.

What do you think?

How to plan a project

Here's an article I wrote a few years back showing how to plan a computer systems validation project. The methodology works for any project and it's the way I've been successfully planning projects for twenty years.

Project management techniques are universal. The proven, time-honored disciplines that make up project management can be effectively utilized and applied by virtually any manager, leader, or team member—regardless of industry, profession, or job title. The same skills I have used to develop and bring medical devices to market I have used to remodel my home and, most recently, validate pharmaceutical systems.

As Vice President of Project Management at QPharma, I train my project managers in a system I have developed over the years called Progressix^SM. The word is derived from three concepts central to my teaching:

1. Progressive elaboration. The concept that a project needs to be elaborated progressively as we move from Idea^*, to Purpose^*, to Objective^*, to Work Breakdown Structure*, to Responsibility Matrix^*, to Schedule^*, to Budget^*, to Risk Analysis^* to full Project Plan^*. The project continues to be elaborated through execution and into closeout. (I first learned this order of project elaboration 9 years ago through a class I took from Cadence Management Corporation and have used it successfully since.)
2. Six honest serving men. I use a poem from Rudyard Kipling to illustrate the key things that need to be known about a project to ensure a good, manageable plan.

I keep six honest serving men

(They taught me all I knew)

Their names are WHAT and WHY and WHEN

And HOW and WHERE and WHO

3. Progress. Using the Tuckman Model, progress is made when the team moves from an awareness phase (which Tuckman refers to as FORMING*) through a conflict / control phase (STORMING*), a cooperation phase (NORMING*), and, finally, a productivity phase (PERFORMING*). This concept is evident with any group and is particularly useful in project teams.

So how do I go about this progressive elaboration? Let me use the example of a computer system validation we recently planned for a client. I became involved in a project that was already underway, because it was in trouble and the client had seen the success I had at projects in other departments.

The project was a corrective action tracking system. I was present at a very contentious meeting where two sides, the Clinical and the Information Services departments, were pointing fingers about how the project should progress. The meeting was very acrimonious, with little likelihood of any work being accomplished in the future.

Someone suggested I intervene, so I asked a simple question: “Who is the project manager?” Two hands rose, and I nodded, expecting them to glare at one another. But they had a different problem. One said she was the project manager from the programming group, and the other claimed to be the project manager from the users’ group. They added that they loved working together. I announced, however, that there can be only one project manager, and they needed to decide who it would be. The programmer was decided upon.

I requested that all the project participants, including the users and heads of the clinical and IS^* departments, be present the following week at an all-day project kick-off session, which I would facilitate. They all agreed and, when the meeting time was decided, I sent out an agenda as shown below:

AGENDA

Time	Item	Led by..
9:00 – 9:05	Check in at room, Introductions	Bruce
9:05 – 9:15	Icebreaker exercise	Bruce
9:15 – 9:30	Project Background	IS & clinical heads
9:30 – 10:00	Project Objective	Bruce
10:00 – 10:30	List of Deliverables	Bruce
10:30 – 10:45	Break
10:45 – 12:00	Work Breakdown Structure	Bruce
12:00 – 1:00	Working Lunch
12:00 – 2:00	Responsibility Matrix	Bruce
2:00 – 2:15	Break
2:15– 4:30	Schedule	Bruce

I arrived early, and posted my responsibility matrix and schedule charts on all the walls. People were slow to arrive (is this an IT thing or is it just me?), but they were all present just before 9:30. I scanned the room and, sure enough, Clinical was on one side, IT on the other.

I started with introductions and then we went into a quick icebreaker exercise, which melted rather than broke the ice in that room. The one I chose was participant bingo, where I had a 5 x 5 matrix filled out with things like: “Drives a red car; Has more than three children; Loves the show Survivor,” etc. People tried to achieve Bingo by taking it around and getting people to sign their names in the appropriate box.

Next, I entered the six serving men scenario by answering the first question: WHY? Both department heads were able to speak their piece. Why are we doing this project? Why is it important to the company? Why is it important to the various departments and participants?

During this project background session, the location of the project, WHERE, was easily answered as only the US offices, nowhere else in the worldwide offices of this company

Then I took over. The room was clearly in a FORMING mode,

Wasting Team Member's Time on Celebrity Apprentice

One of my cardinal rules of Project Management is "Never Waste Team Members' Time!" I constantly preach that a good Project Manager should monitor meetings and, if they see team members are not needed for the rest of the meeting, send them out to be productive.

In last week's Celebrity Apprentice Nene, the Project Manager, was faced with an interesting situation. The team had worked together to create and film a video and the last task was the editing of this video. This task required two people but she chose to involve her entire team. Most of the team was excited by seeing the project through to the end and wanted to be there with her. But Dionne Warwick, the oldest member of the team, wanted to go home and get some sleep.

At this point several mistakes were made in a row.

1. Nene should have offered to let team members off the hook. Instead she asked that all attend.
2. Dionne should have been clear about her needs and ask to go home. Instead she just hinted.
3. Dionne, after seeing she was not needed, should have asked to be excused. Instead she simply declared she was going home.

When it came time for the board-room and someone to be fired, Dionne became an obvious choice. But rather than call Nene on the carpet for neglecting her team members, Dionne lied about asking to go home and was roundly criticized. Then she made the fatal mistake of daring Donald to fire her. Big mistake.