It might have been a soggy month, but there is still a lot happening in the project management world. Here’s a round up of the news.

You don't need to get a paperback version any more - get it on Kindle!

Social Media for Project Managers now in Kindle Format!

Amazon’s Kindle is a great way to access books quickly (I have just downloaded The Hunger Games with one click) and you don’t have to find the space to store them.  My book, Social Media for Project Managers (published by PMI), is now available in Kindle format.  So if you’re curious about how social media can help you be more effective then this book will share case studies, interviews and valuable insights about how you can utilise social media to your advantage.

No news yet on when it will be available in Nook format, and PMI confirmed during the EMEA Congress this month that they had no plans to translate it into Italian, although if someone wanted to volunteer they were open to discussions.

Royal Mail links with APM in drive to improve project professionalism

Royal Mail has initiated a drive to improve the standing of its project management community through the Association for Project Management’s Registered Project Professional (RPP) standard.

The UK’s main letters and parcels service is encouraging its project managers to work towards achieving the designation and currently has 26 members of staff at different stages of the process.

With the cost of stamps going up, more competition in the sector, massive change programmes underway at its parent company, Royal Mail Group (RMG) and people using more electronic correspondence, Royal Mail has been considering ways to enhance its project management capabilities.

Ian Jones, director of the Royal Mail Operations Modernisation Programme, explained: “The imperative for RMG to drive efficiency is widely known, and we are now half way through an intensive modernisation programme that has so far involved a spend of £1.6bn and will impact all 141,000 of our employees.”

PMI® Distinguished Project Award for Sears Holdings Corporation

PMI presented Sears Holdings Corporation with a Distinguished Project Award for its Business Management System V2.0 Transformation Program – for implementing project management software.

The company got the award for moving from a legacy project portfolio management system to Métier’s PPM Central™ software in just one year. The software upgrade has driven a raft of improvements because multiple business units can now collaborate on projects. I don’t see why their old software stopped them from working effectively as a cross-business team and aligning all projects to strategic goals, but apparently it did.

This transformation has been heralded as enabling Sears to “become more agile and to achieve higher levels of portfolio, program and project management maturity” according to the press release.

The 20-strong team included consultants from the software vendor. The program was completed on time, on budget and on scope (OTOBOS in action).

Launch of PMD Pro Level 2

Back in 2010 PM4NGOs launched a specialist certification for project managers working in the development sector. I attended the launched; you can watch my video of the event here and read more about how the qualification started here.

At the time, the team only had the materials for the lower level qualification, PMD Pro Level 1 and now over 2000 people have taken that exam. Now they have put together the higher qualification, unsurprisingly called Level 2.

Level 2 launches formally next week and Don Sucalit from World Vision International will be at the event talking about how PMD Pro has benefited them. It’s a really effective scheme and anything that equips organisations to minimise waste, structure their time and get the best out of their resources has to be a jolly good thing.

APM President Martin Barnes and Chairman Mike Nichols with their big cake

APM celebrates 40 years

APM is finding a multitude of ways to get into the press at the moment, including announcing speakers at their conference one at a time to get a media release out of each one. But this is a valid reason for them to be in the news.

On 2 May 1972, 78 people paid their £1 subscription to become the first members of the Association for Project Management (APM). Back then the Association was simply known as the British arm of INTERNET – an organisation that later became the International Project Management Association (IPMA). Forty years later APM is now the largest professional body of its kind in Europe with over 19,700 individual and 500 corporate members.

APM have a year of activity planned to mark its 40th anniversary culminating in an extra special celebratory awards dinner on Thursday 1 November. They are also running a photo competition.

My Project is going to be a collection of photos illustrating project and programme success from all over the world. The aim is “to build a fascinating picture of the profession in action, whether it is a sketch of an idea, a screenshot of your team’s painstaking beta-testing, the view from the top of your latest construction project or a post-project team celebration taken on a mobile phone. Regardless of the size of the project, where it is or the stage it’s at, we want a picture that captures our profession in action.”

You can submitting a photo of your project by emailing your photo and a short description to myproject@apm.org.uk  or tweeting your photo with the hashtag #myproject. See all the submissions so far on the Pinterest page.

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A bit of bright weather and suddenly the pavements are full of people waving clipboards, trying to get you to stop at the end of a busy day and donate to charity. While the causes are always good, the method of extracting direct debit details from passers by is low-tech, and if you are trying to get somewhere in a hurry, you will have learned that it’s best to give the chuggers a wide berth.

The term chugger comes from ‘charity’ and ‘mugger’ and is a catch-all word to describe people who flag you down in the street and engage in small talk while trying to get something out of you that you may or may not be willing to give.

Change the context of the street to the office corridor, and project managers are just as guilty of being chuggers – and we don’t even collect money for charity. We’re just after information from the project team for status reports, emails and because we feel insecure if we don’t know what is going on all the time. Every time we see a team member walk past we jump on them for the latest news, even if we saw them only a couple of hours ago.

Do you recognise yourself? Lots of project managers are project chuggers, without realising it. Unfortunately for our teams, it’s not easy to work for a chugger. There’s the constant worry that you don’t have all the information to hand and that you’ll be asked for the details when there aren’t any to tell. On top of that, you have to be prepared for any eventuality: who knows what your project manager will ask you about this time? There’s no structure to chugging for information. And there is always the risk that it’s easier to make something up or try to baffle the project manager with science if there isn’t anything to say, rather than see the disappointed look on their faces when you tell them you have nothing to report.

There is some good news: if you are a project chugger there are steps you can take to curb your addiction to project information and make it easier for your team to give you status updates.

Get updates at regular times

Ask your project team to give you regular updates at specific times such as every Friday afternoon, or first thing every day. Make this once a week at least. This way your team will get into the habit of giving you information on a continual basis. They will know when to supply it and you will know when you will receive it, so it won’t feel like you are working in an information vacuum.

Define what you need

It’s great to know what the latest status is of every last detail, but do you really need to know?  If you trust your team to get on and do their jobs you can implement reporting by exception.  If you don’t feel comfortable going that far at least define with your team what the important elements are and focus on those.  Better that you know about the big issues so that you can do something about them, instead of listening to issues that your team can resolve perfectly well without you.

Who gets the update?

Do you all get together for a regular round-the-table update? Or do you speak to each team member individually? It is useful for everyone to have a view of what the whole team is doing, so if you can all join in and listen to the status updates from each individual then make the time to do it. Finding out what your colleagues are up to can alleviate problems, prevent rework and generate a more cohesive team atmosphere. If you get the updates in writing decide who is on the circulation list. You could get each individual to email you directly and then you can produce a consolidated report.

Set a time limit

Be flexible

There will be times when you need to get information outside your set status update framework. That’s fine: it happens, and as the project manager you do need to know what’s going on. However, you can approach this in a non-chuggerish way. Don’t pounce on your team member. It’s appropriate to check if they are in the middle of something and be prepared to come back – in half an hour or so, not three weeks. If you need to speak to them straight away, make it clear that it’s necessary. Get all the information you need in one go: don’t go back several times with “just one more question.”

Most people respond well to being allowed autonomy and the benefit of a trusting work relationship. However, there are some people who will never give you status updates, regardless of how many times they promise faithfully to send you a report every Friday afternoon. For those characters on your project team the more direct approach will work better, or else you risk not getting any updates at all. Don’t chase everyone though – save your chugging to those who respond best that way, and keep it to once a day at a maximum. You don’t want your project team to start walking the long way round to the photocopier just to avoid your desk!

No related posts.

Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects is a practical guide to choosing and setting up a social media tool in a project environment

Communication is always a problem on large projects: making sure everyone on the outside has a similar view of what is going on and that everyone on the project team knows how their role affects the others. You already have meetings with detailed minutes, phone calls with each team member, maybe even a dedicated intranet site, wiki or collaboration tool. What could a blog offer on top of all the communication you are already doing?

Here are 4 ways that you can use a project blog.

1. A blog by your sponsor

A blog can bring your sponsor closer to the project team: on a large project it’s possible that some members don’t even know who the sponsor is. It’s good to wheel out your sponsor when they need to inject a bit of motivation during a difficult patch, but it is rarely practical to invite them to every team meeting. A quick blog post from the sponsor will help the team members feel that someone high up does care about what they are doing, but without the intrusion of an email.

A large legal firm in the Southeast USA used this technique to engage project teams. The project sponsor added content to the blog several times a day. He used the blog to ensure that the team knew that he knew about their big milestones. It also helped build excitement towards significant milestones on the plan when the team knew they would be celebrating their success with events like go-carting.

The blog enabled him to stop sending out so many emails. It gave project team members more control over when they read the information. It also provided a forum for them to comment, ask questions and give their perspectives.

2. A blog to engage people outside of the project team

Another function for a project blog is to communicate to a wider audience than just your immediate team. Allowing other people in the company to read the ‘story’ of your project via a blog can help prepare them for the changes that may come when your project delivers its objectives.

Matt Down, a project manager from London, gives the following example of using a project blog as a communication tool:

For the last six months I have been using one to provide a brief weekly update on progress for the project team and other internal stakeholders. I normally include a relevant photo showing progress or an event that has taken place. I’m using Microsoft SharePoint which is the corporate tool we have for collaboration and have found it easy to use with a little guidance from another user at the beginning but otherwise no training. Using this rather than the weekly email I previously sent has been well received as people can look as and when they need the information and look back at what was said previously without trawling through emails. My only regret is I didn’t use it earlier in the project. I will definitely be looking to use something similar again on my next project.

3. A blog to help team members collaborate

This is an old-ish example, but still an interesting one, especially if you wish you could save time when documents are doing the round for being reviewed.

In 2006 I interviewed Paul Wormelli, who was then Executive Director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute. The Institute is an industry consortium of companies that provide IT systems and products to the US Department of Justice. He told me how they had launched an enterprise blog in January 2005 using Traction software. The objective was to share information between the different committees.

Prior to setting up the blog, the Institute used to send out copies of reports for review in Word format. One person was nominated to collate the comments. Paul explained that if the document went out for review to 25 different people they would all pick up the same errors. The blog enabled the committee reviewers to communicate in real time. One committee was able to cut the number of phone and in-person meetings it held by half.

4. A blog to help team members communicate across distances

A blog can help the team communicate asynchronously – in other words, not in real time. A project blog offers a 24/7 informal reporting mechanism. Team members can post updates and progress reports to the project blog instead of calling a meeting to summarize progress. This can be especially helpful to those team members who do not have English (or the majority team language) as their first language and who find it difficult to contribute effectively during conference calls. They may be better at expressing themselves in writing.

Kandy Crenshaw has experience of using project blogs with team members in multiple time zones. She says:

I am currently managing 4 projects and have created Microsoft SharePoint project blogs for two of them. Originally, I intended to create a blog for each project but by monitoring the site analytics reports I quickly realized that the only staff members visiting the blogs were the core team members. Our project sponsors and outside stakeholders just weren’t interested in the level of detail provided there. The blogs were not (in my case) effective for sponsor and stakeholder communications. However, they have been an invaluable tool in projects with a large team based in multiple time zones. We have even used them to facilitate decision making between meetings.

As Kandy says, a project blog can help structure and organize project work and assist decision making. The ability to share views collaboratively can also help combat the silo mentality that grows up around projects. A blog is a level playing field, owned by the project and not the IT team, and easy enough to use for everyone to feel they can get involved.

How do you use blogs on your projects?

This is an edited extract from Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects (3^rd Edition). I have recently revised and updated the ebook. The latest edition has over 15 additional pages of good stuff including lots on privacy and security considerations of using social media on your projects.

Get your copy here.

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This is a guest post by Jon Swain, President of Ten Six Consulting.

Strong project sponsorship is critical to ensuring that your project is a success. One of the roles of a sponsor is to champion the project and the project team. This includes making sure the project gets the recognition and resources it requires. But it is not only the project sponsor who can shout about the project and spread the word about the team’s achievements.

Your project team can be ambassadors for the project and sell the story of the change you are delivering. People often worry about using the word ‘sales’ but really it’s about ensuring that the rest of the organization gets to hear about the work the team is doing and the benefits that the project is delivering.

Every project manager and team can be a sales force in disguise. You have a number of tools at your disposal to generate interest in your project. Here are five ways you can sell the story of your project.

1. Perfect your elevator pitch

You have probably heard about having an elevator pitch – a short statement that sums up the project that you can use if you are ever in an elevator with the CEO and are asked what you are working on

Everyone on the project team should know the elevator pitch. Don’t drill it into them (there is no benefit gained by having them repeat a stock phrase verbatim). However, they should all be clear about the project’s benefits and goals. In other words, if asked, every member of the project team should be able to articulate what they are working on, why it is important and how it contributes to the company’s overall objectives.

2. Tap into social media channels

Social media, like wikis and blogs, can be useful tools used within the organization. They are a different type of communication channel to monthly status reports and they can reach a different audience. They also offer a higher level of interactivity than ‘standard’ communication channels meaning that you have the opportunity to respond to comments made by the people you are trying to reach.

You can also use social media channels like Facebook pages and Twitter to reach the public outside your organization. They may also be a key stakeholder group and if you are working on a public sector project or an initiative that is very much in the public eye, then this could be a good way to sell the story of your project to a wider audience.

3. Use your allies

The sponsor is not the only person who can generate interest in the project. Tap into his or her network and try to find other key people in the company who can sell the benefits of the project on your behalf. Ask them to mention the project to their colleagues. Find other people to co-opt onto your stealth sales force and share the key messages with them too.

4. Ask questions

You are selling interest in your project, and one of the best ways to find out what people think of it is to ask questions. When you meet colleagues at internal networking events or at meetings, ask them how your project is going to help them. Hopefully they will know, but if they don’t, this is another opportunity to spread the word about what you are achieving.

Questions are also a low cost way to gather insights into the problems colleagues are facing. You can learn a lot from listening, and good sales is as much about listening as it is about offering information.

5. Create internal PR

This is perhaps the most traditional way of talking about your project. Use all the internal channels that are available to you. You probably have a staff magazine – could you ask the editor to include updates about your project? Check out the corporate intranet. If the PMO or the department who will benefit most from the project has an intranet page, could you post regular news about the project there? Most company intranets will have a section for internal news and announcements, so even if there is no central PMO page for project updates you could write a regular news piece for the intranet.

Think about ways you can generate interest in your project before it is finished: the story of the project probably includes some interim milestones. If you have a project celebration, take photos. Use them to sell the benefits of the change you are delivering. Print them on mugs or mouse mats, along with a short statement explaining the goals of the project, or achievements to date.

There are plenty of creative ways for the project team to become ambassadors for your project. Work with them to help them become a sales force in disguise, championing your project and its benefits whenever they can. What other ways have you found to spread the word about your project?

Jon Swain is President of Virginia Beach-based firm Ten Six Consulting. Ten Six specialises in enterprise project management tool deployment.

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Poster at Reading train station

This is a photo I took of a poster at Reading train station. It’s advertising a hardware store, but I thought it was relevant to project managers. I think “Happiness is a ticked list” is going to be my new motto!

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