Although Alexander Graham Bell considered his most famous invention, the telephone, to be an intrusion on his real work as a scientist, I don’t think you’d find very many people today who would be willing to give up their cell phone.

We live in a world of instantaneous communication.  Cell phones, the Internet, text messaging, social media—all keep us connected and communicating, right?

There are times when I feel like technology has made communicating more accessible, but does it really make communication easier?  For project communication to be effective, we need to be thoughtful in how we utilize technology.  It’s important to remember that we may be writing an email or updating a status report, but the person on the other end of that email or status report is a person.  It’s probably just the nature of technology, but sometimes I think it’s a good idea to remember what makes effective communication, effective.

Here are a couple of techniques that aren’t original with me, but might help you improve the quality of your project communication:

The Sundown Rule: 

Unless you work at Walmart, you’ve probably never heard of it.  According to their corporate website: "It’s really just a twist on ‘why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?’  Observing the Sundown Rule is very simple.  Whether it’s a request from a store across the country or a call from an associate down the hall, we do our very best to give our customers, and each other, same-day service."

I work with a colleague who did a college internship in Bentonville, AK at Walmart’s corporate headquarters.  He said the Sundown Rule is the real deal.  It didn’t matter who he reached out to during the day, he would typically get a response before the sun set.

Would you treat email or other project correspondence among your project team members a little differently if you knew the expectation was a response before the end of the day?

No Email Fridays:

I heard about U.S. Cellular’s No Email Friday rule a couple of years ago.  COO Jay Ellison thought it would make life a little easier and lighten the load for employees, but instead it initially caused a fire-storm.  In an article written by Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal, she quotes  Kathy Volpi, a marketing director who said, "I thought, ‘He just doesn’t understand how much work we have to get done, and how much easier’ it is when using email."

With the exception of responding to urgent matters, normal email is considered taboo.  The initiative was designed to encourage more face-to-face communication with customers and co-workers, raise productivity, or provide a break from the ever-filling email inbox. 

It looks like it’s been a success.

Even Ms. Volpi, now U.S. Cellular’s director of product management and marketing, has become a fan.  According to Shellenbarger, "Gradually, she realized that reading and responding to all the email she was sending was probably a burden to co-workers.  Now, she makes a point of visiting co-workers on Fridays.  Business, she says, isn’t only about emailing ‘cold reports’ and being efficient, she says, ‘It’s about human beings and interaction.’"

Would either of these techniques work within your organization?  I don’t know.  There are so many project collaboration and communication features incorporated into many traditional or online project management solutions, that completely eliminating that type of communication might be problematic.  However, regardless of the project management software or work management tools you use, everyone can step out of their cubes for a few minutes and have a real conversation occasionally.

I have to admit that sometimes it’s easier for me to ping a colleague 10 feet away with an Instant Message that it is to get out of my chair and actually go talk to him or her.  I wonder how many of us have forgotten how to really talk to each other as we IM, text, and email our way through life?  Give these two approaches a try and see if they will work for you and your project team.  You might be surprised at how effective your daily communication becomes when you incorporate a little face-to-face time once in a while.

A recent article published by TechRepublic and written by Rick Freedman, Adaptive Project Framework: A new level of agile development, caught my eye the other day.  As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway in the movie Heartbreak Ridge. 

Without spoiling it for anyone interested in watching an old Clint Eastwood movie (1986), Highway is a hard-nose gunnery sergeant who gets stuck training a bunch of "indulged" Marines who wind up in Granada.  Although the movie is predictable (and the language is what you’d expect in a Marine barracks), Gunny Sergeant Highway says something that I think is applicable to Freedman’s article.  When asked why his squad advanced on an enemy position despite being outnumbered and without support, he says, "We’re Marines, sir.  We’re paid to adapt, to improvise."

According to Freedman, when teaching Agile Project Management classes, the first thing he does is write two words on the board.  "The first word is adaptive," he says.  "I emphasize with my students that adapting the project approach to the specific effort at hand is a fundamental concept that underlies all agile methods."

I couldn’t agree more.

"The second word is hybrid," he continues.  "I assure my students that, while some agile proponents are almost religious in their insistence that Project Management Institute (PMI)-style, traditional methodologies have no place in an agile environment, my philosophy is that almost every project, every client, and every organization will require us to incorporate some traditional methods into our agile approach.  It’s my experience that very few organizations desire, or are prepared for, a complete migration from traditional tools, such as project plans and Gantt charts, to a total agile approach founded around the idea that, if you’re running a traditional product development life-cycle and applying PMI standards, everything you know is wrong."

I have to agree with Freedman.  Sometimes I think we forget that the entire project management process is about getting work done—not the particular work management methodologies that are used.  I like his suggestion that we should consider "hybrid" approaches to the process.  There are some things that agile methodologies do very well, but to say that everything in the PMBOK is a bunch of hogwash would be like suggesting that there is no need for a hammer because we now have a nail-gun (or vice-verse).  I don’t know a carpenter who would make either of those outlandish claims.

If getting work done, or rather getting the right work done, is the ultimate aim of the project management process, using whatever method makes the most sense for the type of work undertaken just makes sense to me.  After all, it’s people that get work done anyway, the particular approach used is to make it possible for people to be successful, isn’t it?

With that said, I think our job as project managers is to adapt and improvise depending upon the particular work challenges we’re faced with.  Some projects might require sophisticated online project management software while another might require a simple task list—or PPM software that incorporates traditional waterfall or agile methodologies.

If you haven’t read Freedman’s article I suggest you give it a look.  He also introduces a new book written by Robert Wysocki that looks interesting, Adaptive Project Framework.  It’s a book I’ve put on my summer reading list.

How do you incorporate different project management methodologies into your work management strategy?

Although Alexander Graham Bell considered his most famous invention, the telephone, to be an intrusion on his real work as a scientist, I don’t think you’d find very many people today who would be willing to give up their cell phone.

We live in a world of instantaneous communication.  Cell phones, the Internet, text messaging, social media—all keep us connected and communicating, right?

There are times when I feel like technology has made communicating more accessible, but does it really make communication easier.  For project communication to be effective, we need to be thoughtful in how we utilize the technology.  It’s important to remember that we may be writing an email or updating a status report, but the person on the other end of that email or status report is a person.  It’s probably just the nature of technology, but sometimes I think it’s a good idea to remember what makes effective communication, effective.

Here are a couple of techniques that aren’t original with me, but might help you improve the quality of your project communication:

The Sundown Rule: 

Unless you work at Walmart, you’ve probably never heard of it.  According to their corporate website: "It’s really just a twist on ‘why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?’  Observing the Sundown Rule is very simple.  Whether it’s a request from a store across the country or a call from an associate down the hall, we do our very best to give our customers, and each other, same-day service."

I work with a colleague who did a college internship in Bentonville, AK at Walmart’s corporate headquarters.  He said the Sundown Rule is the real deal.  It didn’t matter who he reached out to during the day, he would typically get a response before the sun set.

Would you treat email or other project correspondence among your project team members a little differently if you knew the expectation was a response before the end of the day?

No Email Fridays:

I heard about U.S. Cellular’s No Email Friday rule a couple of years ago.  COO Jay Ellison thought it would make life a little easier and lighten the load for employees, but instead it initially caused a fire-storm.  In an article written by Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal, she quotes  Kathy Volpi, a marketing director who said, "I thought, ‘He just doesn’t understand how much work we have to get done, and how much easier’ it is when using email."

With the exception of responding to urgent matters, normal email is considered taboo.  The initiative was designed to encourage more face-to-face communication with customers and co-workers, raise productivity, or provide a break from the ever-filling email inbox. 

It looks like it’s been a success.

Even Ms. Volpi, now U.S. Cellular’s director of product management and marketing, has become a fan.  According to Shellenbarger, "Gradually, she realized that reading and responding to all the email she was sending was probably a burden to co-workers.  Now, she makes a point of visiting co-workers on Fridays.  Business, she says, isn’t only about emailing ‘cold reports’ and being efficient, she says, ‘It’s about human beings and interaction.’"

Would either of these techniques work within your organization?  I don’t’ know.  There are so many project collaboration and communication features incorporated into many traditional or online project management solutions that completely eliminating that type of communication might be problematic.  However, regardless of the project management software or work management tools you use, everyone can step out of their cubes for a few minutes and have a real conversation occasionally.

I have to admit that sometimes it’s easier for me to ping a colleague 10 feet away with an Instant Message that it is to get out of my chair and actually go talk to him or her.  I wonder how many of us have forgotten how to really talk to each other as we IM, text, and email our way through life?  Give these two approaches a try and see if they will work for you and your project team.  You might be surprised at how effective your daily communication becomes when you incorporate a little face-to-face time once in a while.