Dear PM Advisor. Nov 10, 2014

Dear PM Advisor,

A low level team member on my team is the brother-in-law of the company's Managing Director. How do I treat him on my project?

Stepping on Eggshells in Bangalore

Dear Eggshells,

I guess it really depends on how much the Managing Director likes his brother-in-law and what his plans are for him. Does he plan on grooming this team member as his replacement or is he just finding a job for him as a favor to his sister? Does the Managing Director want him to succeed or fail? Does he view it as your job to make him look good or are you required to test him to see if he has what it takes to make it in this company? 

The bottom line is that the Managing Director is a major stakeholder of your project. You need to talk to him. First about the project like you would with any other stakeholder. Ask the typical stakeholder questions:

• What does he want to have the project accomplish? 
• What are some potential pitfalls?
• How often does he want communications about the project, what type and in what media? 
• Who else cares about this project? 

But add another question just for him:

• What is your goal for your brother-in-law over the course of this project?

You may not get a truthful answer so you also need to ask other high-level stakeholders the same question: 

• What is the Managing Director's goal for his brother-in-law? 

Then set out to manage his expectation just as you are trying to manage all the other stakeholder's expectations. 

Good luck,

PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

Dear PM Advisor. Jul 14, 2014

Dear PM Advisor,

I attended your class in New Jersey and have a follow-up question. As a teacher we are often subject to decisions made by higher-level administration. They decide which  projects are run and these projects often result in additional or even nonsensical work for us lowly teachers.

What is your advice for us?

Peeved in Pequannock

Dear Peeved,

These are projects for which you are not a team member I assume. But since you are affected by the outcome of these projects, you are, by definition, a stakeholder. You and the other 100,000 teachers affected by some of these high level projects.  It’s almost as if you share a common core.

Stakeholders should always be considered during proper project management. Those running the project should place you on a Power/Interest grid and deal with you appropriately. Your level of Interest should be rated as extremely high but your Power, unfortunately, would be rated as low. What can you really do about these demands pushed down from above?

Your union, however, should also be on this grid and their Power is high. If you and your fellow teachers ensure that their Interest level on new projects is high also, new projects will be forced to deal with them.

I suggest you ask your union to require that a representative teacher be involved at the earliest stages of any new project. This way a high Power, high Interest stakeholder can be fully informed about what is going on and can gather comments from teachers and ensure that their interests are being met on future projects.

Good luck,

PM Advisor

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

 

Dear PM Advisor. May 12, 2014

Dear PM Advisor,

I hate my job. Every day as I get in my car to go home, the old Tony Orlando song goes through my head: "I'm coming home, I've done my time.' Because that's the way I feel. 

For the last two months I've been working really hard trying to complete this project that got way behind schedule and I was brought in to try and rescue it. I spend all my time on it, keeping the critical path moving, putting out fires and planning the parts that were being managed in an ad-hoc manner until I arrived. But that's the fun part. 

What is really getting me down is the Director of Quality who keeps adding new things to these documents that should be pretty much cut and paste from a template. The things she wants to change add no value, only time to the documents. Then she insists that these new changes be retrofitted into older versions of the documents that had progressed past her review. Any time we miss one of these changes she gets all bent out of shape about how careless we are and how she has to keep pointing out mistakes again and again. 

She is extremely critical of the work my team and I do, pouncing on every mistake and ridiculing us in front of her peers. She does petty things like interrupting me if I happen to be speaking and someone on the phone starts to talk. Or she'll insist I go over everyone's action items at the end of the meeting even though I went through them all and wrote them down as I did so.

Another annoying habit is that she sits with her laptop open during the entire meeting and seems to only be paying attention half the time and insists on sitting down during the daily stand-up meetings. 

Any advice you can offer me?

Fed up in New Jersey

Dear Fed up,

I'm sorry you have to work in this hostile environment. I'm sure the actions she takes are the opposite of the motivation she thinks she is applying. In my experience there are people who were bullied as children and, rather than adjusting and being kind to people as adults, they seek out positions of authority like policeman and Director of Quality and use that position to abuse others as some kind of retribution. Usually the position they put themselves into makes it hard to unseat them. You just have to survive the best you can.

She could also be what I call a 'fireman arsonist.' One who loves to cause problems so that she can be seen to rescue the project when it looks like it is about to fail. Because she is causing the delays, she has the power to make the delays disappear.

I was once in a position similar to yours and my solution was to find another job. That may be the best thing you can do. But if the project is only going to last a couple more months, it may be best to stick it out and treat it as a learning experience.

Good luck,

PM Advisor

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

Obamacare Project Doomed to fail

The online sign-up portion of the Affordable Care Act, affectionally known as Obamacare, was rolled out last week to a resounding failure. Why did it fail? It was set up to do so by the government. Let's look at some key strategies for failure.

1. Force participation by people from every congressional district so that there is no clear leadership
2. Put it on hold during the sequestration crisis
3. Maintain an artificial deadline that is linked to elections, not the likely date that the system is actually ready to go
4. Put it on hold again during the goverment shutdown
5. Have half your stakeholders working to force it to fail so that they will feel vindicated by its failure (I love this great example of negative stakeholders to use during my training classes)
6. Refuse to delay the go-live despite to all the previous delays
7. Cut the testing time to a couple of weeks to ensure the go-live occurs on time

The company I work for now spends a lot of effort doing computer system validations. While I usually stay above the fray, concentrating on the project management aspects, I recently jumped in to assist in the testing phase of a moderate computer system at a small pharmaceutical company. This testing phase will take four months when complete. How did anyone expect Obamacare to be tested in a matter of weeks?

I'm glad to see the Project Manager taking responsibility for the failure. I only wish she had stuck up for her team and refused to honor the artificial deadline imposed by the president. It would have been late but it would have been properly tested. A poor roll-out spoils the program for future users. 

Dear PM Advisor. Oct 15, 2013

Dear PM Advisor,

Last week 'Ignorant in California' asked what stakeholders were. I defined the term and how to identify them but didn't explain what to do about stakeholders. In this post I will go over the next step in dealing with stakeholders: Stakeholder Management. 

Once you have your list of stakeholders, you should get together with your team, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, and fill out this grid:

Power Interest Grid:

You do this behind closed doors and hide the results from the stakeholders because you don't want the VP Human Resources to find out that you consider his power to be minimal. It's a simple job to fill it out. Write the stakeholders names on post-its and move it around the grid until your team agrees where they stand. Then manage them accordingly.

Nex tthing to do is come up with a communications matrix. Here's an example from my novel in progress. You list your stakeholders on one axis and your types of communications on the other axis. Then visit each of the stakeholders, explain your project, show the different forms of communications you will be putting out and ask them three questions:

1. Which of these communications do you want?
2. How often do you want them?
3. In what media would you like them? (Verbal, face-to-face, electronic, paper, etc.)

D = daily, I = as issued, Q= quarterly, W = weekly

You'll have to either color code or put a slash through each box to indicate the media or frequency of receiving communications.

Then do what you promised. 90% of a Prokject Manager's job is communication. Make sure you do this right.

Good luck,

Dear PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

Dear PM Advisor. Oct 7, 2013

Dear PM Advisor,

I feel dumb asking this question but I've never heard a satisfactory answer. What is a stakeholder?

Ignorant in California

Dear Ignorant,

I can't resist answering your question with the one carrot top style joke I use in my project management class. With a broad Australian accent, I hold this up and say: 

"Stakeholder. Australian for fork."

I know it's corny but it gets a laugh and keeps my students interested. 

But let me give you a serious answer. I'll start with the official PMI definition and then I'll tell you what it really mean.

Stakeholder: Person or organization that is actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected by execution or completion of the project. A stakeholder may also exert influence over the project and its deliverables. (PMBOK 4th edition)

Not very useful. The fifth edition doesn't make it much clearer:

An individual, group or organization who may affect, be affected by or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity or outcome of a project. (PMBOK 5th edition)

Here is what I teach in my class: 

Stakeholders are people who care about your project. They come from five different groups. Four are easy to determine, the fifth is what makes your life difficult.

• Project Manager
• Team Members
• Customer
• Sponsor
• Functional Management 

One of your more difficult jobs will be to determine which of the many functional managers, directors, vice presidents etc. care about your project and are going to actively involve themselves in its success or failure. (Yes, some may lobby to have your project fail. Think about projects where the goal is to transfer production from one facility to a cheaper one or the shutdown of a facility.)

Your sponsor is the first place to start when identifying all your stakeholders. He/she can tell you the political climate surrounding your project and who cares about it, what power they wield and how to satisfy them. 

Add to this list the managers of each of your team members and ask them who they know who might be concerned about the project. 

Those combined lists become your list of identified stakeholders, the only thing other than creating a project charter that you need to do during Project Initiation.

Next week I'll talk about how to deal with this group.

Good luck,

Dear PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com