Milestone Tracking

Every project has several milestones enroute to the eventual delivery/go-live. A detailed project plan with built-in task dependencies, resource loading and milestones enables tracking the correc status of the project at all times. At a higher level, the milestone based tracking helps measure the progress as well. If a particular task has a certain deliverable date, it helps to remind the task owners of the upcoming date as the date gets closer and making them aware of the escalation that will be required if the date slips. Educating the teams/task-owners about the purpose of escalation is important, so that everyone is on the same page with regards to delivering on-time and the benefits of doing so. There are always situations where the original estimate turns out to be less than actual work required, and mitigating actions such as adding more resources, de-scoping some items, etc. might be required. However, the team members should be empowered to raise those concerns/risks as soon as they see it, so that executives are made aware of any schedule/scope changes that may be required to meet the planned go-live date.

Project management crisis management basics

Several well managed projects or relatively simple projects go awry for variety of reasons. Some of these could be because of factors that are out of control of a project manager. In these situations the project team needs leadership to stay focused and get back on-track. If the project manager gets frustrated and stressed in these situations, it has a direct impact on the team. This is where leadership is required. In these situations when the project manager stays calm and looks at the situation objectively, the path for forward progress can be identified and successfully navigated. This may take some time however, a focused yet calm demeanor of the project manager will have a positive impact on the team. The team will get direction, and know that it is being supported. If a resource crunch is experienced, either the work will be limited to the resources available or resource augmentation would need to be made.

Minimalist Project Manager

The word "minimalism" means "a style or a technique that is characterized by extreme spareness and simplicity". Minimalist is someone who uses 'minimalism' as his style of working. To do a good job of managing a project, a project manager needs a solid work plan. The work plan lays out the tasks and activities that are necessary to achieve milestones during the course of the project. Once the work plan is created, it gets (needs to be) tweaked throughout the life of the project to reflect the current situation and future opportunities or risks. Its very often the case that the project manager keeps track of every single task (in terms of planned and actual completion) to track the progress of the project. This process is usually time consuming. In practice, the project manager should focus on the critical path and the tasks/activities that have a direct correlation to those tasks and activities. In addition, the project manager should share these set of milestones with the core team on a weekly basis to keep them focused on those activities. We know that the critical path changes during the project, so project manager should tweak the tracking accordingly and keep his team focused on the altered critical path. The management of tasks at detailed level does not go away, because the core team will start owning the tasks that contribute to the critical path milestones.
As they say 'don't fix something that's not broken'. The project manager should focus on those exception situations affecting the critical path adversely. This is the role of a minimalist project manager. The minimalist project manager identifies those exception situations, elevates those to the right levels by focusing on those and addressing those swiftly. These may have an impact on critical path, which, the project manager would communicate to the core team and all stakeholders.

Bite sized communication

In todays world, where we are inundated with information from several mediums - social networkig sites, blogs, internet, and communication at work, people are unable to keep up with the information that they need to make good business decisions. Several emails are not read on a timely manner,and when things are changing fast, these become outdated very quickly. It seems that information that needs to be communicated in executive reports, should be bite-sized. It should be at a fairly high-level, and should be embedded in the body of the email itself (with links for detailed information). A report that typically fits on one PDA screen without having to scroll, is most likely to be read, and actioned. This gives the executives sufficient information to stay abreast of things in-progress and check the details, on an exception basis.

Inspire a shared vision

Majority of projects that a company undertakes has goals and objectives that support one or more strategies of the company. As we all know, every company executes strategies to win in the marketplace and realize its vision. So, on a project, it is the responsibility of the project sponsor and the project manager to clearly define the purpose of the project. It is very likely that if you ask people who worked hard on a project, if they knew the purpose of the project they worked on, you might get a quizzical look. One of the most common responses to that question is "I did what I was told to do." I feel that this is a failure on part of the project sponsor and the project manager (to certain extent) that the team members are uninformed or unaware about the objectives of a project. On those projects, where the team members are clear about the objective(s) of the project they are working on, they tend to be more committed. There is a sense of pride that the work that they are doing, is creating value for the company. This helps the project team members stay positive even during difficult times. They are more willing to go above and beyond to make sure that the project is successful. In order to make sure that every team member fully understands the objectives of the project, the project sponsor and project manager and their team leads need to continually communicate the vision. Every project has team members that are on-boarded throughout the life of the project, depending the needs of a specific phase of a project. So communicating the vision just once, at the beginning of the project is not sufficient.

Managing part-time resources

As a project manager, you 'play the hand you are dealt' in terms of managing resources, among other things like scope, cost and schedule. The ideal scenario for the project manager is to have the right resource available at the right time, and be 100% productive from the get-go. Several project managers make this assumption when they are planning work, and then have a rude-awakening when the actual output/progress is slower than expected, often times because the productivity is much lower. This is even more apparent, when a team is comprised of some full-timer's and some part-timer's. There are couple of key assumptions that need to be addressed in managing part-time resources on the project:
1) Say it takes 8 hours to perform a job by 1 person, which requires some thinking and then doing. It is a bad assumption to make that if the same person works on the job in say two 4 hour chunks, on two different days, the work will be complete.
2) Full-time resources on the project that need help from part-time resources, assume that part-time resources are available as and when needed. This again, is a bad assumption

Part-time resources are working on more than one project, and hence multi-tasking. We have often heard people say that they multi-task very well. However, several studies have been conducted to prove that wrong. Put this in context of a resource working part-time on two projects, in order to switch between performing tasks on two different projects, a 'switching time cost' is incurred. Depending on the skills required, sometimes the switching cost can be significant. Consider this: Say a project resource is doing a mundane support task one week, and doing project work the next. He is thus available 50% of the time to the project. Say a resource starts working on a task in week 1, does not finish it in week 1, and then has to start working on it in week 3 (because in week 2 he is doing a mundane task), how realistic is it to assume that in week 3, the resource will lose no-time and have the same productivity as he had when he was working in end of week 1? So a task taking 80 hours (2 weeks), more often than not will not be completed in 2 weeks in the above mentioned scenario

As a project manager you need to plan for some buffer when utilizing part-time resources. Unfortunately, its not an exact science, because different individuals will have different 'switching time cost', so to plan for it requires some judgment. Also, it is a good idea to get a better understanding of vacation time or any other time off the project, especially in case of part-time resources. It is the project manager's responsibility to set expectations of the full-time resources on the project that they need to work with their part-time counterparts to plan the work better for optimal productivity.

Project RACI

RACI matrix describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or a process. A Project Manager should always create a RACI matrix for a project and share it with the team at the project kick-off. This helps in clarifying the expectations of the entire project team, including project manager and thus mitigates the risk of 'lack of ownership'. The project manager should take time to educate those who are not familiar with a RACI matrix. Also, team members are added during the course of the project as well as new roles are defined for the existing team members. In these instances the project manager should again clarify how those individuals/roles fit into the RACI matrix. Thus creating and sharing RACI is not a one time activity, but may need to be used as a means of communication multiple times during the course of the project
The projects where this tool has been used and well understood by the project team, there have been fewer gotchas in terms of 'who does what and why'. Project manager can harvest the benefits of this tool throughout the project