1. Be prepared

It should go without saying, but know the status of your project before you attend a meeting! Don’t be on the back foot, as nothing spells ‘unprepared’ more quickly than stakeholders or other team members in the room who know more about the latest project issues or progress than you. Talk to your team members in advance, and make sure that they know to update you beforehand. There should be no surprises.

Bring along copies of reports from your enterprise project management tool. If you are chairing the meeting, be sure to have spare copies of any documents, like reports or slides, as you can guarantee someone will have forgotten to bring along their copy. If you are an attendee, bring a copy of the meeting papers, or your laptop so that you can review them on screen.

2. Have an agenda

Have an agenda and stick to it. It isn’t difficult to do, but in our experience many project managers still don’t do this. You can create a standing agenda to save time. This is a list of all the key things you want your status meetings to cover every time, such as updates from various team leaders or a financial report. The final item should always be Any Other Business. Circulate the agenda in advance so that people know what to prepare.

If you are inviting people along to only a section of the meeting make sure that they know when they are expected and then stick to that slot. Be respectful of their time and don’t keep them waiting outside for you to finish a side conversation.

3. Manage the meeting housekeeping

Make sure that everyone knows where the room is, and set the temperature of the meeting room to something bearable for everyone (which is easier said than done). If you plan to have coffee, remember to order it. If you are hosting a conference call, circulate the call number and pass code. Start on time. Finish on time.

Set ground rules about the use of gadgets in your status meetings. If you allow people to bring their own laptops to review the meeting papers or reports, make sure that they understand that checking their emails during the meeting is not allowed.

Make sure that your own technology works, especially if you are using a projector for the first time. Get to the meeting early so that you can set up your laptop and projector properly. If you are presenting, close all the other applications that are unnecessary. There’s nothing worse than trying to talk a group of important stakeholders through a project dashboard than an email alert popping up in the corner, letting everyone know what your lunch plans are with your best friend.

4. Get the right people in the room

Invite the smallest number of people possible to the status meeting, and make sure that one of them has the role of scribe. Sometimes people aren’t available to attend, so let them know if it is OK for them to delegate attendance to someone else. Deputies may be acceptable at some meetings but not at others.

You can also brief attendees before the meeting. This is particularly relevant if you plan to make decisions in the meeting. In fact, don’t make decisions in the meeting unless you really have to. A better approach is to decide before the meeting, and have the meeting attendees ratify the decision. Speaking to individual stakeholders prior to the meeting can be an excellent way of making sure that this process is as easy as possible.

5. Cancel the meeting

Why have status meetings at all? Could you report status in a different way? Talk to your project stakeholders about reporting by exception instead – they may be grateful not to have to attend meetings where they are told that everything is progressing to plan.

Consider creative ways to communicate project status. You could provide senior stakeholders with access to the project dashboard of your enterprise project management tool. They won’t want to see all the detail, but could you set up a view just for them? If you need to brief a much larger group, could you do so through a pre-recorded telephone message that people dial up to listen to? Or a podcast? Even a few bullet points in an email every Friday afternoon provides a quick weekly report for key stakeholders and assures them that everything is on track.

However you manage your project status meetings, make sure that you know what information your stakeholders and project team expect, and find the best, most efficient ways possible to provide that.

With more and more project managers and PMO staff taking to the internet to write about their projects and professional lives, or to share experiences through forums like LinkedIn, you never know who is going to be listening. We don’t know of any projects that have been stopped because information about them was leaked on social media sites, but there are plenty of examples of people losing their jobs because of things they have written online. There’s even a word for it: dooced.

In 2002, web designer Heather Armstrong, lost her job in Los Angeles because her employer decided that what she had written on her blog was inappropriate. Her blog was (and still is) called Dooce, and a new word made it into the vocabulary of the internet community. Today, Armstrong makes a living from her writing, but not everyone is lucky or smart enough to be able to turn being fired into a new career opportunity.

Keeping your project safe

Here are our tips for protecting your project information online.

1. Read your company’s policy on confidentiality. Make sure that everyone on the project team understands what they can and cannot share outside the confines of the company. That goes for third party partners too.
2. Get suppliers to sign confidentiality agreements. It’s unlikely that a supplier would jeopardize their relationship with you by posting information about your project or company online, but it never hurts to be safe. We have no problems signing confidentiality agreements if that’s what our clients want, and neither should any other reputable company.
3. Be careful if you publish photos. What might seem like photos of a fun project team night out could seem to someone else as invading their privacy. Don’t upset your project team by publishing images without their permission.
4. However low the readership figures of your personal blog, or however few people respond to your LinkedIn question, remember that the internet is a very big and very public place. Asking for help on a project may seem like a great idea, especially when people online are often very willing to help you resolve issues. Just remember to phrase the question in a way that doesn’t give away anything confidential about your project or team members.
5. Watch what other people are saying. Keep an eye out for what other people are saying about your project or company online (this is particularly helpful if you are working on a project in the public eye). Then if anyone comments negatively you can alert your PR team and move into damage control. One way to do this is to set up Google Alerts for the name of your project or company.

Protecting your own reputation

While you are busy looking out for incidents that made affect the success of your project, don’t forget to look out for yourself as well. Here are some tips for keeping yourself employable.

1. Read your company’s social media policy. They probably have one somewhere, but if you can’t find it, talk to the PR team. Make sure you know what you can and cannot say online, and abide by any disclaimers they specify. For example, it’s common to add a disclaimer to personal blogs and other sites to say that your views do not necessarily reflect those of your employer.
2. Think before you click submit. It might seem obvious, but have you checked to see if your comment, forum posting, tweet or similar makes you sound the most professional possible? If you read it back and the tone isn’t clear, don’t click submit. Rewrite, or don’t comment at all.
3. Keep work profiles and personal profiles separate. You can keep one account for your family and friends and another for work colleagues. Don’t feel that you have to merge work and your personal life if you are not comfortable doing so.
4. Don’t blog, tweet or comment if you are tired, cross with someone or just not thinking straight. Move away from the keyboard and leave it until another day.

Things stay online for a long time, so as a rule of thumb, make sure that the footprints you leave are the ones that you will be proud to share with your future employers. An online presence is a must for professional project managers today, and you can maintain this without putting your personal credibility or that of your project at risk by following a few simple guidelines.

Now you know where to find us online, why not come over and say hello?

It’s that time of year again when we all get the chance to attend the premier Primavera conference in Europe, the UK & EMEA Primavera Conference 2012. This one day event is being held in London on 8th March at the CBI Conference Centre.

The great thing about this event is the blend of real world user experiences and presentations from Oracle’s Senior Management team including Simon Noble and Dick Faris. You’ll get to hear from speakers on a range of topics including the roadmap for Primavera P6, business intelligence with P6 Analytics and a variety of user experiences covering implementation and use of the tool suite.

Venue

First Floor
Centre Point Tower
103 New Oxford Street
London WC1A 1DU

Tel: +44 (0)20 7395 8014
Fax: +44 (0)20 7395 8016

Cost

Members of the UKOUG – free
Non-members – £150+ VAT

You can register directly on the UKOUG site here

As always, these events are a great way to network, exchange ideas and experiences, learn best practices and get practical knowledge on how other companies have solved problems.

For more details on this event, visit the UKOUG site here

We look forward to seeing you all there.

With the Olympics just around the corner, 2012 is going to be an exceptional year for project management professionals, predicts Janet Parkin, Managing Director of UK-based enterprise project management consulting firm Kinley Consulting Ltd. She shared her predictions for the project management industry this week.

1. More companies will make use of virtual teams

“After the issues we had with the cold weather last year, we’ve seen more companies embracing technology to enable people to work remotely as part of virtual teams,” said Parkin. “It saves travelling time and allows people to continue to work when they cannot get to the office.” Another benefit of enabling virtual teams is that they allow project managers to choose the right people for the project team, not just the people who happen to work locally. Virtual teams mean that companies can choose from a wider talent pool.

2. Enterprise project management tools will incorporate social technology

Social media is here to stay, and many project managers are already incorporating social media tools into the way they manage projects. “Enterprise project management tools are incredibly powerful and provide a suite of solutions for planning, scheduling and controlling projects,” said Parkin. “However, project managers are also collaborating outside these tools.” She predicts that we’ll see solution vendors and project managers working out ways to incorporate the collaborative benefits of social media into project management tools.

3. Green projects will rise in profile

“This year is the first that businesses will feel the impact of the UK’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme through buying allowances to cover carbon emissions,” said Parkin. Companies will be looking at projects to lower their carbon emissions, reduce the financial burden of paying the ‘carbon tax’ and improve their position on the league tables.

4. Project teams will begin to better define project ‘value’

It will take a while for Project Management Offices (PMOs) to fully embrace the concept of ‘project value’ but the days of only managing by the triple constraint will soon be over. “I think we’ll see project managers starting to define project value on a project-by-project basis in conjunction with teams and project sponsors,” said Parkin. “The triple constraint of time, cost and scope will remain important, and the project tools on the market will have to adapt to incorporate alternative ways of measuring success.”

5. The PMO star will continue to rise

“Even in a recession, we’ve seen PMOs grow over the last 12 months, and I expect that to continue,” said Parkin. PMO positions remain a good choice with the career path extending from entry level jobs to PMO leaders. “The new challenge for PMOs is managing the multi-generational workplace, where we have potentially 5 generations working together on projects,” she added. “We’ve not seen that before, and PMOs will lead the way in ensuring that working practices suit all styles and ages.”

About Kinley Consulting Ltd

Kinley Consulting is dedicated to helping its clients implement effective project and programme management solutions. Kinley specializes in enterprise-wide programme and project management, including project performance management and technical solution implementations.

Letting your project team improvise on projects sounds a little unconventional. After all, the point of having a plan and good change control procedure is so that the team knows where it is headed and stays on track.

However, today success is far more about people than processes, and the environment in which projects operate is often ambiguous, flexible and complex. Issues materialize that have not been foreseen and clients change their mind about their requirements as a result of situations beyond the project’s control. Projects are not as predictable as we once thought they were and sometimes sticking to the plan is not the best course of action.

Improvising in action

Improvising on projects is not about throwing out all the existing plans and making it up as you go along. Instead, it’s about being able to equip the project team with the tools and skills they need to be able to deal with the unplanned in a constructive way. However good your enterprise project management tools, a Gantt chart doesn’t deliver a project: people do. So it’s important to make sure that the people on the project aren’t blindsided when they have to react to the unexpected. If the team can’t think outside the plan, they can’t help get the project back on track.

Improvised work can be the result of unforeseen circumstances, changing requirements, changes in the political or corporate environment, poor planning, poor or no specifications or a lack of leadership and direction for the team. Some of these are good reasons to improvise, some less so.

Improvising in a project environment means shifting the mindset of the project team to thinking about trying new things, within the boundaries of risk management and project control. Improvisation relies on intuition and creativity, which provide the space to develop new routines, and this is usually achieved in a flexible environment.

Managing the project requires stable routines and a controlled environment: great when things are going well, but when the team hits an unexpected issue, the management processes don’t provide the flexibility to work outside of these as required to get the job done.

Encouraging improvisation

You can’t expect the project team to improvise a new plan or a come up with a creative solution to a problem if they haven’t had the opportunity to first practise these skills. Create the time and space for people to try out creative thinking. 3M allows its employees to use 15% of their work time to come up with and work on their own projects, provided they are broadly related the company’s objectives. Google’s employees work on their set tasks for 4 days a week and use their remaining day to work on their own initiatives. That much time might be too much for your project team (it would be too much for many companies).

You could, however, allow the team to come up with a solution for a small problem, or to decide for themselves how best to plan the next section or work, record and track requirements or do quality audits. You can share successful practices and praise people for using their initiative. You can schedule their time at less than 100% so that they have a little bit of slack to think about what they are actually doing instead of working at full pelt throughout the day and never having time to take stock of whether there is a better way to achieve it.

The most important thing to encourage improvisation is a no blame culture. This can be hard to achieve in some companies where apportioning blame is the norm, as going against the prevailing corporate culture can be difficult. Try to create a little enclave of no blame culture that starts at the PMO and spreads through the project teams.

Controlling improvisation

Left unchecked, improvisation in a project environment could end up with teams producing no schedules at all and dealing with issues on an ad hoc basis instead of actively carrying out risk mitigation to prevent them from materializing in the first place. Improvisation does require some boundaries.

Improvisation can work well when the tasks are not on the critical path. You can introduce the opportunities to improvise bit by bit as trust is earned by the team. A strong risk management framework will also help, as will being very clear about the boundaries. Using project tolerances and mature methods of tracking work using enterprise project management tools will also help.

Improvisation isn’t suitable in every situation, but when it works it can be very powerful and open access to a wider knowledge base than just the project manager. How have you supported your teams to do the right thing through improvising? We’d love to know!

This article was inspired by Steve Leybourne’s presentation at the PMI Global Congress North America 2011.

Thanks for your business in the past year and we sincerely wish you a successful 2012.

The Kinley Team

Luckily, creating a sustainable, robust approach to managing quality in a project environment isn’t difficult, if you gather the right tools around you. Many enterprise project management tools even give you the data to be able to assess the results as you carry out the project. Here are five tools for quality management that you could use on your projects.

Checklists

OK, calling checklists a ‘tool’ might be stretching it a bit. Checklists are typically tables in documents or spreadsheets with a list of questions. You review the questions and tick off your responses. It’s like a to do list for quality.

Checklists have had a significant impact in improving quality in surgical operations: the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist almost halved the number of deaths in hospitals piloting the checklist. Checklists are also used in the cockpits of aircraft before takeoff, but in our experience at Kinley we don’t see them that often in a project management environment.

Checklists can be used to show that a number of steps have been carried out before the deliverable is released to the business user.

Histograms

Histograms are what you used to call bar charts in school. They are used for recording numerical information, such as the number of users trained on a new IT system each week, resource hours spent on fixing problems each day, or the number of complaints from customers per month.

In quality terms, histograms represent data in a very visual format. They are a good way for taking numbers out of an enterprise project management tool and putting them into a format that every stakeholder (even the busy ones) can understand at first glance. They are particularly useful for trends, so if you want to demonstrate that quality is improving, you can use a histogram to display that complaints are going down.

Pareto charts

Back in 1906, Vilfredo Pareto commented that 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the people. Joseph M. Juran crystallized this into the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. Effectively, this says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In quality terms, that means that if you focus the project team’s efforts on fixing those 20% of causes, you’ll have the most impact in improving quality.

Pareto charts show data sets in size order, so you can instantly see which cause (or other variable) has the greatest impact. You could apply this to project management processes, such as reducing the number of business cases that get rejected by looking at the reasons why they are completed incorrectly and then providing training or more detailed guidance about those factors that rank the highest. You can also use them for assessing the quality of project deliverables, for example, tracking the main causes of customer complaints about your software so that you focus on fixing those first.

Flow charts

Hurrah for sticky notes! Flow charting is a fun aspect of project management. Stick a few sheets of flip chart paper on the wall and then cover them with sticky notes and arrows to map out a process.

Understanding the steps of the process can help diagnose where quality issues are occurring. Again, this could be with the project management processes or the project deliverables themselves. Drawing out the change management process might identify why changes constantly get rejected, even when they are good ideas. Plotting the customer service process might identify the handoffs between teams and work out why it takes so long to deal with a customer complaint.

Scatter diagrams

Scatter diagrams help illustrate cause and effect, so they are a good tool if you have lots of data and want to compare variables. For example, do higher paid project managers actually get better success rates on their projects? At a portfolio level you could plot salaries against whether projects were completed to the required criteria and compare. Of course, you might want to start with something less controversial! You could look at whether your focus group participants rank the most feature-risk software prototype as the best one. You could ask them to rank their views on the software, and you’d expect to see that as you showed them prototypes with more features, they would rank the tool more highly. A scatter chart will show if that is actually the case.

Some large programs or projects may even have a quality manager assigned to them, or your Project Management Office may have a quality manager working to support all projects in the organization. Either way, ensuring projects deliver a quality outcome in a quality way is something that all project managers should aspire to. There are a number of tools to help you, as we’ve seen, so the first challenge for you is picking the right one!

Some management theorists have spent their lives working out the best mix of team roles. Meredith Belbin came up with a model of 9 team roles, including Shaper and Plant – terms that don’t mean much to people who haven’t studied his theory. The Strength Deployment Inventory looks at how you interact with others with the aim of helping people understand why conflict happens in teams.

However, sometimes you don’t have the choice of whom you work with on a project: the team is assigned to you, and you just have to make the most of it, whether you have a Shaper in the group or not. So what if you don’t have a diverse team and instead you’ve ended up with the usual suspects? Can you still be a success?

Diversity is everywhere

Diversity has a wide meaning, wider than most of us generally acknowledge. While we know, logically, that all Sales people can’t possibly be alike, there is still the temptation to conjure up that stereotype of ‘Sales’. And ‘IT’ and ‘Finance’. Part of creating a diverse team is understanding that you already have a diverse team.

There are different types of diversity: some types you can visually see. What’s the balance of men and women in the team? Where are they based? Geography also makes people diverse, even between towns. There are some types of diversity that you can have a guess at if you know the person a little, such as age (although you might not want to guess out loud), educational background and family situation. Then there are some that it might take you a while to uncover, such as appetite for risk or tolerance for ambiguity, and some lifestyle choices like whether they prefer dogs or cats.

OK, that last one may seem a little flippant, but the point is that however similar people may appear – especially if they have been operating in the same corporate culture for several years – people are different.

Encouraging diversity

Sometimes it is easier to gloss over the differences and focus on the similarities. There is the perception that this approach helps avoid conflict and therefore contributes to smoother-running projects. But that can just push the differences further underground to rise up at an inopportune moment.

The first response to difference is often fear, and while that doesn’t manifest itself so much in the workplace, it can stimulate the caveman response of fight or flight. In turn, this means conflict on the project team. A slightly better team behaviour is where diversity is tolerated, and this is usually in response to legislation. An even better team behaviour is acceptance that the team will not always agree about everything. You do not need to be completely in agreement with someone to accept that they have a different view of the problem or task in hand.

This response will, with any luck, evolve into valuing and celebrating the differences in the team, where each individual is appreciated for what they bring to the project.

More stakeholders, more views

Diversity in teams is important on all projects, but especially so on larger initiatives. Enterprise-wide projects tend to have a lot of different stakeholders, each having particular views on the project and how it should be done. A diverse team will have its own views on how things should be done. It would be great to hear, “Your way of thinking is a bit like our Marketing Director’s. Let me run this presentation by you so that you can tell me how she’s likely to respond.” Using the diversity in the team provides more options and more opinions, and while this can be difficult to manage at first, it can provide contribute to better project results.

Don’t know where to start? Think about your current or next project. If it is a project of strategic or operational significance you are likely to assign experienced resources. What about if you added a team member with less than 6 months’ experience? This would give the team a new, valuable perspective and the new team member learns in the process.

At Kinley we work with diverse teams all the time. The best teams are the ones that know they are diverse, and value the contributions of each team member for what they can bring to the project to help achieve the greatest degree of project success.

Probably the most obvious, and talked about change, after the release of Oracle Primavera P6 R8.0 was the shift of administration from the desktop client to the web application. This shift was further emphasised in Primavera P6 R8.1 when the Web Access application was given the name of “Primavera P6 EPPM” and with the desktop client was called the “Primavera P6 Optional Client”. Oracle is trying its best to move as much as possible to the web and leave the Primavera P6 Optional Client to focus on the needs of the more hard-core project planner.

Unfortunately this change has caused a huge amount of dissatisfaction among users who either don’t want to or can’t run the Primavera P6 web application. Only the enterprise class Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere application servers are supported for these newer versions. These products are usually way beyond the capability of standalone Primavera P6 users. If not due to the power of their PCs, then the knowledge to install and run an Application Server puts them out of reach.

Enterprise System, Standalone Behaviour

On the one hand it seems such a pity that so many users have been disenfranchised, but then again it is called Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) for a reason. As long ago as the last century when TeamPlay and P3e first hit the streets, it was an enterprise system aimed at many people working on projects in the same database. I remember being in the old Primavera Hammersmith offices, the one with the big fish tank, and being told how Primavera was moving to the web as fast as it could and focusing on people working together.

Ten years later, I imagine that as soon as the web technology is available in Primavera P6, Oracle will say good night to the P6 Optional Client and move on. Over the years, it is always challenging to move planners from a standalone product where they are in charge of everything to an enterprise deployment where they lose some of that power. The technology is always to blame, but I believe the real issue is more than that.

By way of illustration, one of our global clients with operations in Australia, India, UK, North America and other countries in between has found itself with many Primavera P6 implementations. They have at least three Primavera P6 related initiatives to support different central processes and a number of departmental and standalone copies of P6. Not all the Primavera P6 implementations are the same version and on top of all that, the IT department uses Microsoft Project Server.

One of their biggest problems is the clashes that occur when activities from two or more projects want to do something with the same piece of kit, department or location at the same time. Something has to give, and the priority isn’t always given to the most strategically important activity.  Having all the work in a single database looks like the right answer, but that’s just a small part of the solution.

Changing Behaviour

One of the central processes aims to solve this problem by introducing a way of working that encourages people to focus on the most important work and fit the rest around it. It identifies those activities across many projects and follows the work from a strategic plan, stretching many years, to one looking at scheduling the work in the next week.

Having set up a Primavera P6 EPPM installation, they embrace other processes and encourage a community of practitioners. Whereas other initiatives in the company have focussed on either the process or technology first, this one begins with people. It puts people before process and process before technology.

This approach has proven to be quite successful, with 9 countries embracing this particular way of working. It tends to shine a light on issues with other processes and gets people from different departments to work together. This is the process where Kinley is engaged.

The approach is to start with the essential component of any enterprise, namely the people. The process is implemented in each country through an adaptive change program that compares current behaviour with desired behaviour. The underlying reasons for existing behaviour are hypothesised and interventions to bring about desired change are considered and chosen.

The aim is to institutionalise a way of working that will ensure that activities that implement strategic objectives are given priority over others. It would be easy to just give everyone a Primavera P6 login to the same database and claim that enterprise is now working as one, but that is unlikely to be true. It is more likely that one would have moved the standalone data from a PC into a shared Primavera P6 system, but left the standalone way of working in tact. Implementing an enterprise system is often far more about changing human behavior and developing processes than it is about the
technology.

At Kinley Consulting we believe it takes more than technology to achieve high-performing project and portfolio management eco-systems. It often starts with changing behaviour and building communities to get people pulling in the right direction before they are ready to receive new or improved technology.

Charles has listed the date fields with a detailed description of the data you will find therein. He has also indicated whether the field is available in the EPS or Activities view or both in some cases.

Thanks for sending this in Charles. This is useful reference material. Many fellow Primavera P6 users will undoubtedly be pinning these tables up on their office walls. You can download these tables for both Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM (web client) and Primavera P6 Professional below.

Download here for Primavera P6 EPPM (web client) 

Download here for Primavera P6 Professional