Project and Portfolio Management

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“Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood”

2 November 2011 - POSTED by Kristyn Gunderson

I recently had a discussion with a friend from college about a leadership seminar we attended together about a year ago. The seminar highlighted “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey. The fifth habit particularly stuck out to me, “seek first to understand, then to be understood”.

Described by Steven Covey, the fifth habit is to “use empathetic listening to be genuinely influenced by a person, which compels them to reciprocate the listening and take an open mind to being influenced by you.” I thought about different ways we gather information: books, the Internet, seminars, colleagues, etc. There are so many ways, especially with the help of technology that we can continue to learn and grow.

I had the opportunity to talk with Krystal Guerra, Event Marketing Specialist at AtTask, about the new AtTask webinar series, another way to gather information to expand our learning.

Kristyn: What sets the new AtTask webinar series apart?

Krystal: We take a little bit of a different approach with the AtTask webinars. There is a three part series to help us identify with all audiences: the PPM (project and portfolio management), TalkingWork, the popular podcast hosted by Ty Kiisel and Raechel Logan, and thought leadership, which will typically be an analyst.

Kristyn: Please give a description and goal of each series.

Krystal: With the PPM and TalkingWork series, the goal is to be able to talk about common work place problems, concerns or issues in a neutral environment. And the nice thing about the TalkingWork webinar series is it is a different format so it adds a little bit of uniqueness to a typical webinar format and attracts a different audience. The PPM webinar is geared towards best practices and tips directed towards product managers. The third series is geared towards thought leadership with analyst. This gives us the opportunity to see where the industry is going as a whole and to see how things are aligning in the industry with best practices in software.

Kristyn: Where can we look for information on upcoming webinars and how often will they be held?

Krystal: Right now they are once a month. November’s webinar will be our first thought leadership webinar with Forrester Analyst Tim Harmon on the 30^th. All information on upcoming webinars as well past webinars can be found at www.AtTask.com/events.

I anticipate seeing these grow. The webinars are more educational and fun with the Q & A pieces. It’s an opportunity for attendees to give feedback and it becomes a realistic scenario. It allows for people to actively participate and have an opportunity to be an engaged audience member to get some of their concerns off their mind and have questions answered.

Upcoming Webinar:
November 30^th with Tim Harmon, Forrester Analyst

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Four Simple Questions

2 June 2011 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I came across an article yesterday with some interesting insight that is worth thinking about. SmartBusiness (sbnonline.com) published an article titled, How Employee Engagement Can Add Dollars to Your Company’s Bottom Line.

The article asserts, "A landmark study of Performance Management Effectiveness by Hewitt Associates demonstrated a 35 percent employee productivity benefit from utilizing employee performance management systems as a result of staff working on projects and tasks that they should be working on. With clearer visibility of goals and how they will be monitored, employees work harder and focus their efforts on appropriate tasks. A conservative 5 percent increase in overall productivity results in a weekly gain of two hours per employee."

I have long been a believer that small and incremental gains in productivity will have the greatest impact on project success, however this is not the only benefit of engaging the team. "According to Gallup (2008 and 2010), engaged employees average 37 percent less absenteeism. Employees with preset, time-sensitive objectives are less likely to take unscheduled time off, unless truly necessary. If each staff member understands they are part of a larger team and their performance is crucial to overall success, unnecessary/unscheduled time off will be reduced." I’ve observed this to be true. When everyone understands the importance of what they’re doing and how their roles are interconnected, nobody wants to drop the ball and let down the rest of the team.

Details of Engagement What’s more, I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree that employee turnover is an expensive problem. "In the same study, engaged work groups show 25 percent less turnover in high turnover organizations, and 49 percent less turnover in low turnover organizations. Replacing those departed employees has a negative impact on a company’s financial resources. Engaged employees are loyal employees and loyal employees are less likely to leave. Continuous feedback through performance tools helps employees improve, succeed and feel valued."

If I told you that team members who know the answers to four simple questions create these results, would you ask your team the questions? And, more importantly, would you take action once you know the answers?

Here are the questions:

What is your job?
What components of your job are most relevant?
How well are you doing?
What part to you play in the company’s overall success?

Pretty simple questions aren’t they? If you ask these questions of your project team, you might be surprised at the responses you get. Some studies suggest that only 20 percent of managers and employees can answer these questions with any confidence.

The difference So what does that mean to you? As important as project management tools or project and portfolio management software may be, the tools and methodologies we use to manage the process aren’t as important to the bottom line as ensuring that everyone on the team knows with certainty the answers to these four simple questions. What’s more, I’m convinced that ensuring that the team understands their role and how it relates to the overall success of any endeavor needs to be a continual focus as we lead the people on our project teams.

Do you know the answers to those four questions in regards to your role?

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Three Fundamentals of Project-Based Work

5 November 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

During the first 85 years of the Tour de France, no American had ever won.

In 1986, Greg LeMond was the first American cyclist to win the Tour de France. He won again in 1989, and again in 1990. This makes LeMond one of only nine cyclists to have won the Tour three or more times. A powerful competitor and fantastic racer, LeMond has said, "Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time."

I think the same can be said of successful work management. Experience comes after fundamentals. Let me suggest a few of the fundamentals I think apply to successfully managing projects and project teams:

Make sure the project has a clearly defined business objective—and that everyone involved in the project understands what it is: It’s important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they’re doing. Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what’s important.
Make sure the project has executive commitment to see it through: One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull the funding out from under it. A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
Make sure there is a shared sense of determination to finish the project: If the only member of the team committed to finish is the project manager, it’s not likely the project will ever be completed. Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination. Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.

Mastering (and practicing) the fundamentals isn’t very exciting, but it’s often the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn’t.

Project and portfolio management software, along with other project management tools, offer both experienced and new project leaders a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies. That being said, nothing can substitute for establishing a good work management foundation.

Do you have any fundamental skills you would add to the list?

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Project Prioritization and Project Management Tools

1 November 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I call them "drive-by" projects.

Basically, "drive-by" projects are all those ad-hoc tasks or initiatives that get dropped in your lap at random intervals every day. They suck up time, they suck up resources, they distract project teams, and have the potential to push active projects behind schedule. Often they are emergency projects that have no strategic initiative attached to them, which is critical for organizations that rely on project-based work to keep teams focused on the right projects.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that they are of no value. In fact, it’s not always about separating the good projects from the bad projects. It’s usually a matter of choosing the best projects, the projects that will provide the most business value from a list of good potential projects. Unfortunately, when project teams are faced with dealing with a "drive-by" project, all the work to keep teams focused on those initiatives that drive the most business value gets thrown out the window.

I believe that’s why the "get’er done" or "drive-by" project is such a problem. They may be worthy, but if they don’t measure up to the "does this provide the most value" test, they ultimately limit an organization’s capacity to work on the things that do. And that negatively impacts productivity—and ultimately profitability.

In theory, everyone agrees with this, however, practice is something different. In the heat of the moment, it’s difficult for decision-makers to step back and ask the question, "Will this "drive-by" project provide enough value that someone should drop what he or she is doing to work on it?" Sometimes the answer is definitely yes, but there are times when the answer should be NO. If nobody asks the question, project teams can be chasing around working on projects of minimal value (at least projects that haven’t be vetted to make sure they are the best projects for teams to be working on).

Project and portfolio management best practices revolve around the concept of identifying those projects that meet certain criteria, creating a plan, and then executing on the plan. Project management software does a pretty good job of helping do that. However, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, "How does my work management methodology address ‘drive-by’ tasks and projects that come up every day?"

It doesn’t have to be a catastrophic failure that causes an organization to falter. Sometimes it’s the accumulated weight of a thousand insignificant inefficiencies that cause the most damage. How does your work management methodology address the "drive-by" project? Even if your software doesn’t, feel free to share what you do to keep your project teams focused on the right projects.

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Four Things You Should Expect From Any Project Management Solution

16 September 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

As complicated as we try to make it sometimes, getting work done should really be pretty simple. If you break down what organizations really need to successfully execute project-based work, the list is relatively short:

A solution that will help business leaders sift through project requests and evaluate each request based on business value, alignment with strategic objectives, and any potential risks compared to the project rewards.
A solution that will help manage "the process" of project planning, implementation, and execution to ensure that projects stay on track and are completed on time, on budget, and with the desired functionality.
A solution that makes it easy for project team members to participate in the project management process. Making team members jump through hoops or forcing them to become project management experts to complete tasks will only accomplish one thing—discourage them from participation.
A solution that gives business leaders access to real-time data validates that decisions made in the board room are being executed by project teams, and guarantees that they are looking at timely and accurate information for making future decisions.

Looking at the above list points out three obvious requirements any project management solution must include in order to make a work management methodology more effective and efficient:

It must meet the needs of project teams: I look at this from a garbage in, garbage out perspective. If project teams don’t have an easy-to-use way to input timely and accurate project data into the system—they won’t. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated a project and portfolio management solution’s reports or dashboards may be, if it’s difficult for team members to use, it will only provide inaccurate and out-of-date information of little or no value to the organization.
It must meet the needs of project managers: Helping project managers "manage" the process doesn’t mean forcing them to manually input status information to push up to the executive suite. It means automating the collection of project information so every time a team member updates their status, that information is automatically rolled up into the appropriate report or dashboard. That way, managers can spend more time helping team members be effective and successful, and less time collecting data and building reports.
It must meet the needs of executive decision-makers: Formalizing the project selection process makes it possible for business leaders to make data-driven decisions about which projects to pursue and which to abandon. This enables them to make strategic decisions rather than knee-jerk reactions. In today’s economy, business leaders need a handle on what’s happening within their organizations right now—not yesterday, last week, or even last month. Accurate and timely information is often the difference between a business that is successful and thriving and one that is losing market-share and failing.

How do your project management tools address the needs of executives, project managers, and project teams?

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5 Keys to Effective Status Reporting

26 August 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Long before the prime-time police drama Law and Order, there was Dragnet. As a kid, I used to watch Dragnet’s Joe Friday interview people, investigate crime scenes, and catch the bad guy every week. Every episode started with, "The story you are about to see is true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

When interviewing witnesses, Friday was famous for his deadpan, "Just the facts, ma’am." He didn’t have the time to waste with superfluous information, if he had the "facts" he could solve the crime.

In reality, reporting the status of all project-based work to stakeholders isn’t much different. Here are five suggestions that will make your project-status reporting run smoother:

When you do your reporting is often as important as what you report. Make sure the timing of your report will provide the most benefit to the stakeholders involved. For example, reporting on a problem when there is still time to do something about it is valuable—waiting until it’s too late, isn’t.
Make sure the information you are reporting is accurate and trustworthy before your presentation. Out-of-date or inaccurate information is of no value for making decisions. Validating that status information is timely and up to date is critical for making well-informed decisions.
Present information that is relevant to your audience. Different information is important to different individuals and job roles. For example, information that would be important to share with the project team would probably not be relevant to the CEO.
Ensure that the information presented is in the medium best suited for the audience. A PowerPoint presentation might not be necessary for a team meeting, but could be important when presenting to the executive team.
Make sure you have all the details of what you’re presenting. There’s nothing worse than sitting in front of a room full of stakeholders not knowing the answer to your CEO’s questions. If you don’t have the full details of what you’re presenting, make sure you have someone there who does to help with the presentation.

Leveraging your project and portfolio management software to capture status information as tasks are completed is valuable, particularly if your project software provides the reports and dashboards stakeholders need to review information and make decisions. However, taking a little time to consider each of these elements before your next status meeting will help make your presentations more effective.

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Selecting Projects for Your Pipeline

5 August 2010 - POSTED by Jessie Warner

Harvey Levine, in his book Project Portfolio Management, discusses the processes that comprise PPM. On page 24, he provides some great insight into how projects should be selected for the pipeline. He explains that during the selection phase you should establish a structured process to:

Guide the preparation of project proposals (business case) so that they can be evaluated.
Evaluate project value and benefits.
Appraise the risks that might modify these benefits.
Align candidate projects with enterprise strategies.
Determine the most favorable use of resources.
Rank projects according to a set of selection criteria.
Select projects for the portfolio.

By establishing a clear process for project selection, you have created a template that can be used for all future projects. The best way to establish this process is to create it using an online project and portfolio management tool. With PPM software, you have a central repository of information and quick access to all of the projects within your portfolio.

The software allows you to create a project or process template that outlines the steps needed to properly prepare a business case, evaluate project value and benefits, and align the project with enterprise objectives. The criteria you establish in the beginning will make it easy for you to measure risk, rank projects, and determine the most favorable use of resources.

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The Need for Project Portfolio Management

21 June 2010 - POSTED by Jessie Warner

The CEO of a company is typically responsible for implementing the strategic goals and objectives of an organization. He/She gives the direction and leadership needed to achieve the organization’s philosophy, mission, strategy, and its annual goals and objectives. Or in more simple terms, the CEO needs to ensure that the company is making profits!

And how do CEOs help a company make more profits? They hire talented executives and then give them the direction and vision needed to do their jobs. Each executive is charged with specific duties and is measured on a set of objectives. The VP of Sales, for example, is charged with driving more sales to the organization. To monitor his/her success, the VP uses a combination of software and othere tools to track the efforts of the sales department. The tools help answer questions like: How many phone calls were made this month? How many sales were closed today? What’s in the pipeline? CRM tools, such as Salesforce and ACT, provide dashboards and reports that help the VP of Sales do his/her job better, providing a bird’s eye view of the entire department.

In a similar way, the VPs of Operations, Marketing, IT, and other departments, need dashboards and reports that help them monitor the success of their departments. For a project-based company, such as a Website Design Firm or a Construction Company, the roles of a CEO and in particular, the role of the VP of Operations, are very project centric. The success of the company is based on the profitability of the projects it undertakes. With so much riding on the success of the projects, executives have shown an increased interest in how projects are selected and managed.

To ensure success, Executives want a standardized and automated approach to project management. They want to see projects that are on time and on budget. Project portfolio management (PPM) software, such as @task, allow project managers and executives to see an overarching view of all upcoming and current projects. Similar to the way a VP of Sales might use a CRM system, a VP of Operations can use a PPM system to monitor project deadlines, see budget and scheduling conflicts, and forecast the future profitability of projects. The PPM tool provides dashboards and reports that help keep all projects aligned to corporate objectives and ensures that each project is a profitable investment for the company.

Without the use of project portfolio management software, project managers and executives are forced to spend an unnecessary amount of time managing and tracking project schedules and budgets. They often lose site of the big picture, investing time and money into sunken projects or projects that were doomed to fail before they ever began. Harvey Levine explained, “In PPM, it is assumed that the enterprise positions itself for increased strength and profitability through its selection and execution of projects and ensures that it continues to thrive in a world of constant change and the threat of competition.”

The bottom line is that Executives need project and portfolio management tools to help the company make more profits. All CEOs, and especially CEOs of project-based companies, need a bird’s eye view of what’s going in their organizations. They need a PPM tool that compares one project against another and then makes recommendations on how to best proceed. Does the benefit outweigh the risk? Does the project align with corporate objectives? Should more resources be allocated to one project over another? Which project will provide the highest ROI? Project Portfolio Management helps answer all of these questions, helping CEOs do their jobs better, leading to higher company profits and happier customers.

project portfolio optimization

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Icebergs, the Gulf Oil Spill, and Project Management

8 June 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Driving into work yesterday I listened to yet another story on what I’ve started calling BP’s "Nightmare in the Gulf." This is the story of a disaster that just doesn’t seem to get any better. No matter what BP does, the situation doesn’t improve. The news seems to be worse than originally reported and there is no real end in sight.

The particular story I’m referring to was broadcast by NPR, Scientists: Dispersants Compounded Oil Spill. Quoting the author Elizabeth Shogren, "Everybody feared the oil would rise to the surface like in a salad dressing, causing big problems in the marshlands and on the surface of the Gulf. Now some scientists are focusing on contamination thousands of feet below the surface."

I’m not planning on starting an environmental rant on the pros and cons of deep offshore drilling. I’ll leave that for another forum, suffice it to say that there is so much oil spewing out of that damaged well a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf, that scientists like Dr. Frank Muller-Karger of the University of South Florida can do nothing but ask, "How large is the impact? We don’t know. Where exactly is it happening below the surface? We don’t know. So all these things are very frustrating."

There are cleanup plans and strategies for gathering the oil on the surface, cleaning the marshlands and beaches—but have you heard anything about a strategy for cleaning up the oil in the deep water? I think this is much like an iceberg, as bad as it looks on the surface there’s even more underneath. What’s more, I think this is a great example of how a lot of project problems get handled.

Although there might be a tendency to hide bad news and hope that things work themselves out over the course of the project, often the most dangerous problems are those left intentionally or unintentionally under the surface, out of sight. I’m no expert on the problem in the Gulf, but here are a couple of suggestions for project-related problems:

Foster an organizational willingness to take the bitter with the sweet: Sometimes the tendency is to shoot the bearer of bad news. Granted, it may not be what you want to hear, but it may be that you need to hear it. Sometimes the difference between an inconvenience and a full-on disaster is a matter of timing. Business leaders need accurate information to make the best decisions.
Make honesty the best policy: Sometimes when problems crop up, it’s easy to soft-pedal the situation, put a good spin on it, or intentionally underestimate the potential damage when talking to the boss. It might make you feel better for the time being, but that will only last until the boss finds out the truth—which he or she will. Resist the urge, it hasn’t been a good idea for BP and it won’t be for you.
Realize that organizations can only address the problems they can see: Problems that are unseen, or deep under the surface, won’t get addressed until they bubble up and make everything stink. By then, they will more than likely be bigger, more difficult to address, or worse—the death knell for the project.

The right project and portfolio management software will provide a number of tools and alerts to help you identify potential problems, but for any work management solution to be effective there needs to be an established culture of identifying, isolating, and dealing with problems early—or the workforce will keep them hidden and lingering under the surface.

How does your organization deal with problems? Share some of your successful problem-solving best practices.

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Don’t Forget the Fundamentals of Project-Based Work

28 May 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Most nine-year-olds I knew, played little league baseball. Like most teams, we practiced several times a week. Throwing, hitting, running, and other drills were never the fun part of baseball practice—we wanted to play the game. I’ve since come to appreciate how learning the fundamentals is important in any field of endeavor. In my opinion, managing projects is no different. Here are some of the fundamental project management best practices I think apply to successful work management:

Make sure the project has a clearly defined business objective—and that everyone involved in the project understands what it is: It’s important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they’re doing. Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what’s important—and that keeps scope creep to a minimum.
Make sure the project has executive commitment to see it through: One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull its funding out from under it. A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
Make sure there is a shared sense of determination to finish the project: If the only member of the team committed to finish the project is the project manager, it’s not likely the project will ever be completed. Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination. Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.

With anything, mastering the fundamentals isn’t very exciting, but is often the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn’t. With the benefit of hindsight, I certainly would have spent more time working on the fundamentals of baseball if I had little league to do over again.

Project and portfolio management software, and other project management tools offer both experienced and new project managers a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies. That being said, nothing can substitute for establishing a good work management foundation.

What are some of the fundamentals you would add to my list?

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