Under-planning for contingencies leads to a project whose duration tends towards infinity. Over-planning for contingencies leads to a schedule whose duration tends towards infinity.
Anatomy of Trusted Project Manager
Dr. Ellen Weber‘s lessons from a positive experience with a contractor also applies to project managers. The post outlines five game-changers:
- Offer Reasonable Rates — Reasonable implies profitable for the vendor and affordable for the customer. The contractor in the story gathered the requirements, scoped the work, and talked about pricing. The contractor then went away to analyze the job before quoting the effort. This led to an on-budget delivery.
- Optimize Resources — Can you use customer documents to build your requirements document? Can you re-purpose an existing training program? Have you looked at what is already available?
- Inspire Collaboration — A project is a partnership with the sponsor. Discuss the work, give expert advice and listen. The sponsor is a member of the project team and your job is to deliver the solution to their problem.
- Project Vision — Future phases that complete a solution mean the first phase was incomplete. Future phases that take the solution to the next level are visionary.
- Build Trust — Earn trust by delivering on many factors: fairness, expertise, honesty … . Fail to deliver on anyone of the factors and trust is lost.
The story dissects and shows the benefits of delivering great service. Who needs advertising when the quality of your work earns you a case study on a widely read blog.
Related:
Eleven Behaviors of a Good Project Manager
Are You In Demand?
What’s Wrong With Why?
Project managers are taught to ask why and encouraged to ask it many times. Remove it from your vocabulary!
“It’s not an excuse, it’s a reason”
Why is a confrontation. Why asks for motives. Motives justify. We are saints and all others are psychopaths (Actor-observer asymmetry). We are getting a lot of biased information with why. How, what, when, where and who are curiosity — friendly questions about facts.
A project is how, what, when, where, and who. We want processes and facts. The why is a conclusion based on facts: Costs, Benefits, ROI…. Removing why and rewording your questions will get you the facts more quickly.
| We Need A Faster Server | ||
| Why do you think we need a faster server? The system is too slow. Why is it too slow? It takes forever to prepare management reports. |
vs | What problem does the faster server fix? The management reports take too long to prepare with this server. |
| Why does it take forever? I need lots of data from different places. | vs | How long does it take? Two days to gather all the data for the management reports. |
| Why do you need lots of data? I need it to assemble the management reports. Why do you need to assemble the reports? I don’t have all information I need in one place. |
vs | What do you do with the data? I need to pull it all together in one place to run the management reports. |
Ask friendly questions and you may only need three questions to ask five why’s!
Classy Project Management
5 Ways Project Managers Can Display Project Management Class from the ProjectManager.com blog gives project managers tools to lead successfully.
- Project Managers that Say “Thank You” — Appreciate the things others do for the project. Their work is helping you deliver the project. Thank them.
- Project Managers that Brag About Their People — Bragging about your team member’s contributions makes them want to keep their reputation for good work, and, seeing that contributions are recognized, makes others voluntarily more cooperative.
- Project Managers that Keep Their Cool — Stay calm when the going gets rough and objectively analyze the situation. Deliver a measured response.
- Project Managers that Take the Blame — It’s your project and you are its manager.
- Project Managers that Share The Credit — Team work, team credit.
A class act acts classy!
Eleven Behaviors of a Good Project Manager
Brad Egeland gave his advice on how to react to feedback in two posts on the Project Management Tips site. A good project manager applies the suggestions in all situations.
From Reacting to Negative Feedback on Our Projects:
- Be truthful — A good reputation is essential for a project manager. Getting caught in a lie will give you a reputation for dishonesty along with a questioning of the integrity of your work.
- Deliver on your promises — Set expectations that you can deliver on. Creating unrealistic expectation means having to discuss unmet expectations later.
- Ask for clarification and confirm your understanding — Make sure you understand the other’s objectives. Efficiently achieving the objectives requires clarifying the objectives.
- Admit it — Admit mistakes. Admit shortcomings. Admit ignorance. Apologize and learn from the experience.
- Remain calm — Control your emotions and act rationally. Be a professional.
- Always accept the blame — As the project manager you are at least partly responsible for everything on the project. Accept the blame and work on resolving the problem.
- Correct misperceptions with tact — Telling someone they’re wrong will embarrass, and/or anger, and/or strengthen their resolve, and/or…
- Follow-up quickly — Identify the next actions, set due dates, monitor and regularly report on progress.
From Reacting to Positive Feedback on Our Projects:
- Listen carefully — Listen what they are saying and pick-up on what they are leaving unsaid.
- Share the praise — Team members will give unequal efforts. It’s still the whole team that delivered the project.
- Acknowledge accomplishments — To share the praise for a job done well, you have to recognize the achievement.
PMPer's Paradise 