Eat Your Muffins Calmly

Muffin with melting butter“Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.” — Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The Project Manager is the leader of the project team. When the leader overreacts, everyone on their team follows suit and it creates chaos and drama. When the leader is calm, the team works on their tasks. When the project members concentrate on their jobs, problems are solved.

Learn to stay calm and control your emotions. The title from The Tao of Project Management‘s post The Source of Your Ability underlines the importance of restraint in managing projects. Restraint is the source of power and excellence. A sign of leadership.

Are You In Demand?

Wikimedia: VictoryUse how often customers ask for you to manage their projects to measure your success.

The Community Post “How do You Measure Your Success as a Project Manager?” on the PMI’s site looks at the definitions of successful project management. It is a digest of a conversation in the PMI Career Central group on LinkedIn and it looks beyond the classic triple constraint (Iron Triangle) of in scope, on time, and on budget.

Measuring success only by scope, time, and budget is ignoring a key measurement of true success — customer satisfaction. If your definition of success stops at the triple constraint, you risk upsetting the people who help you get more projects to succeed with. Riding roughshod over people to meet all the three constraints is a hollow victory. Match the importance you attach to the triple constraint to the customer’s attachment to scope, time, and budget.

Your definition of success is the goal you work towards and a happy customer who wants you back is great goal to have.

Stay Calm and Improve Your Reputation

Oslo BeachA big part of successful project management is the ability to stay to calm in the storm of activities and issues.

The relationship with the customer is one of the biggest sources of stress and conflict for a project manager. Dan the Project Manager Man tells the story of his adventure with an upset customer. He reminds us that just by staying calm and responding rationally, we can solve a problem.

A rash reaction makes problems bigger. A careful answer stops a situation from getting out of hand. It creates a setting to get to a solution and, sometimes, like in Dan the Project Manager Man’s Adventure, it solves the problem.

Composure during turbulence is a visible sign of a good a project manager. Stay calm during the storm and improve your reputation.

Are You Managing Checklists or Projects?

ChecklistThe post Energy and focus by Craig Brown on the Better Projects site asks, what if we spent more energy on outcomes, benefits and learning instead of focusing on controlling plans, business cases, schedules and budgets.

This, intended or not, is a call to end CYA project management and start managing projects to deliver outcomes and benefits. The plans, business cases, schedules and budgets are supposed to be about delivering outcomes and benefits.

The Agile Manifesto is a similar reaction to the time spent on controlling the project:

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
Are you focusing on recording there is an issue or working at getting the issue resolved?

 

Six Practices For Project Success

CIO.com outlines six practices from Project Assurance.

  1. Context analysisIdentify the real issues — Understand the context and analyze the issues objectively.
  2. Set realistic time frames — Monitor dates in the schedule, adjust dates when the schedule changes and remember to check for effects on the dates of related deliverables.
  3. Align the work streams — Watch the dependencies between deliverables. A smooth running project has the nail ready when it’s time to shoe the horse.
  4. Look beyond the indicators — Project health indicators are often trailing indicators telling you how well the project has performed until now. Look for leading indicators that will tell you how the project will perform from now.
  5. Manage the expectations — Set realistic expectations from the start of the project and continue managing them by communicating project changes;
  6. Seek objectivity — Find experts from outside the project and review the project with them.