Journeyman Project Manager

Don’t Compromise on the Good Part

Bert — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:46:07 +0000

There are 3 parameters everybody wants in any project.
The project has to be:

Cheap
Fast
Good

The golden rule is you can only have 2.

A fast & cheap project is rarely gonna be good.
A fast & good project isn’t cheap.
And a cheap good project won’t be fast.

So please choose whether you want it cheap, or fast.
Don’t compromise on the good part.

a Hoss Gifford quote – via Claudio Capodifoglia

Creative Industry Project Management

Bert — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:51:25 +0000

Creativity in art and advertising requires a certain amount of chaos, after all creating ideas is an organic process.

These are some actions I noticed that can make the difference under such conditions.

Keeping a good risk log, thinking up correct mitigations.
Having a stakeholder list and a communication plan.
Practicing disciplined asset management.
Putting exceptional effort in illustrating the technical and time-based constraints, so everyone has the correct expectations.
Practicing active quality assurance, involving creative direction from start to finish.
Having people challenge each other with great mutual thrust.
Creating opportunities for people with all kinds of skills to communicate naturally. (the brand team philosophy)

The advertising industry is creativity driven. The message of a campaign needs to get across in all it’s aspects.

I look at it as very harsh quality assurance. Sometimes that means making an unplanned iteration, or starting over in the middle of a project.

And that unpredictability factor is where I think the greatest challenge lies, to be able to still deliver within budget and on time. This is hard and requires good strategy and business insight.

Last month I started to work as a project manager for Duval Guillaume, a big advertising agency based in Belgium. The core business of Duval Guillaume is creating strong brands using an idea-centric approach.

Just so you know, my professional headquarters remains at Nascom.

4 Classic Planning Proverbs

Bert — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:42:45 +0000

“The more you plan the luckier you get.”

“The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.”

“If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.”

“Murphy, O’Malley, Sod and Parkinson are alive and well – and working on your project.”

The One Minute Manager

Bert — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:22:09 +0000

I read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. It’s a classic management book.

Some things I learned:

Be specific and compact in the goals you set for others.
Learn how to delegate correctly.
Take a step back, see if your behavior matches your goals.
Let people know up front that you are going to evaluate their work.
If you have to reprimand someone, finish with an encouragement.
If you have to reprimand someone, reprimand the behavior not the person.
If someone does something good, praise it, do it soon.

The book is a short story about a man who wants to learn about becoming a manager, you read about how he learns these lessons from a successful manager known as “The One Minute Manager” who does all sorts of things in one minute. It’s easy to look past the story and that’s the point of the way the book is written. The advice the book dispenses is really good. On the back it says …

… a powerful recipe for getting big results from people …

… and that’s true.

There are a lot of good one-liners and lists taking up a full page making the book even shorter than 112 pages, it really takes a very short time to read but it’s powerful stuff.

My score: 8.5/10

Project Management Inspiration on Twitter

Bert — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:48:01 +0000

I like Twitter you can follow me if you want, it’s a place where I micro-blog about just about anything that’s on my mind and I announce my new posts there as well.

There’s a site called Twittgroups that parses all the tweets for group tokens, words that start with a hash (#) character. One of the groups I like is “Project Managers on Twitter” (#pmot) for instance.

Here are a few tweeters I follow, check ‘em out, they are a cool bunch

Project Management related (at times Agile, PMI or PMP):

Some of my personal PM friends (mostly Dutch):

Inspirational tweeters:

Don’t forget Twitter search, it’s great if you want to keep up-to-date about what people are tweeting about a specific subject, the service creates RSS feeds of a search so you don’t have to come back to the site. I heartily recommend it.

By the way, please comment should I’ve missed you in the lists!

The Key Method to Prioritizing Efficiently

Bert — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:52:05 +0000

Chances are high that you and your team have a lot of things to do at the moment and a long list of tasks is currently on your plates.
There’s a cool way to find out what’s the smartest thing to do first by putting each task in one of 4 group in terms of saving time.

Have a look at my sketch drawing in the picture …

important things that are urgent
important things that are less urgent, but not less important
not so very important things that are urgent
unimportant things that aren’t urgent

You can put everything you have to do in one of those 4 groups. Groups 1 and 4 are the obvious ones, do stuff in 1 now, never do anything that gets into 4, easy. But the things in groups 2 and 3 could trick you in wasting your time if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t rocket science, you already know this but I think it’s a good way to visualize the choices you have to make.

It takes discipline and courage at times to focus on the tasks you put in group 2, but often they are the ones that help you grow out of hard situations. Stuff that goes into group 2 for a PM for instance could be making a detailed planning or a strong risk log, or something strategical like writing out a new process and presenting it to your own project office or to your executives.

Have a good look at what your project teams are doing, it’s the job of a PM to indicate the urgency and the importance of different things for them but also to help them make the correct assessment and maybe the drawing can help you with that when things get fuzzy (like they do).

I got a lot of things like this explained to me in far greater detail by Inge De Bruyn from De Groeipraktijk and use the advice quite a lot, they do training workshops and seminars on all kind of soft skills. This post isn’t endorse by them but I’d recommend them to you if you’d ask me.

How to Deal With Angry People

Bert — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:06:42 +0000

One of the things you just come by when you work with people are angry people. It’s normal, people get mad about things at times.

There’s no sense starting an argument against a

wall of emotions.

Arguing just doesn’t work at that moment. It’s easy at times to go into offensive mode yourself before the storm goes down, just don’t. If someone is very very mad about something they almost certainly didn’t chose to feel like that.

Here are a few thing to remember that will help you to stay calm yourself:

Everybody has the right to their emotions, even the angry person in front of you.
Get yourself some time and give the angry person time, wait until the anger fades, only then a real discussion is possible.
The more compassionate you are toward an angry person the higher the chances are on a positive outcome for you if there’s a discussion.
It is always possible to be compassionate without yielding to an argument by confirming that it is an argument.
Venting anger doesn’t relieve it.

OK, I just got angry myself, now what?

Apologize for the angry moment, explain how you felt.
Realize it’s a matter of emotional discipline, learn from it.
It’s a natural thing, don’t be too ashamed.

Same advice goes for people who go into drama mode or start to cry. Having a strong emotion is not a choice. Deal with it in the best way you can.

3 Tools to Make Work Breakdown Structure

Bert — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:37:24 +0000

After making a preliminary scope statement and some high level planning, most contracts can be signed and actual production can start. The direction of the project is clear but more details are needed to efficiently control the work. For this I get the project team together and make a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), it’s a detailed scope description where you try to put everything into that’s needed to finish the project. I found a few fun ways to do this:

Make a mind map. You can use a tool like Freemind for this. A mind map has a tree structure just like that of a WBS. Most mind mapping tools are made for brainstorming so they allow you to work fast.
Work with Post-Its. Sit together at a fairly big clean table or whiteboard and group the elements of work in columns of Post-Its. Use at least 2 colors, a color to write group names on and a color for work elements. Take a picture of the whole thing after you’re done.
Use SCRUM user stories to find and define the tasks. SCRUM is a methodology for agile software development, but most of it can be applied to just about any industry. SCRUM calls a collection of tasks a project backlog, which are derived from user stories. This video I found at Agile Software Development explains everything you need to know in about 8min.

Most of the projects I manage are a bit too complex to make a WBS on a presales budget but if it’s possible for you to do this exercise up front it’s an excellent basis for estimates. You need the full team for this unless you’re a complete domain expert yourself.

How does a project get a year late?

Bert — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:41:47 +0000

One day at a time.

This little piece of wisdom is one of my favorite project management proverbs. It’s number 40 in a long list of PM jokes and proverbs I found the other day. Interesting stuff, but be warned, you’ll notice about 95% of it is horribly corny.

How to Bring Bad News

Bert — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:59:45 +0000

Here are a few things I learned:

When some bad news for your team stresses you out or makes you angry for some reason, take care not to contaminate other people on the project. Take some time to cool down before you bring the message. Keep things objective and focused when you do.
If you need to get a higher sense of urgency in a team, emphasize goals, values and time constraints. Hard situations always have an optimal directions to steer things into, never panic.
If a stakeholder (any kind) screws up badly, it’s still a stakeholder who most probably wants the best for the project. When you talk about this in your team, play the ball, not the player.

A mood is a contagious thing, when you see happy people you tend to feel happier, everybody does, it’s the way our human brains work. In that light you as a project manager are regarded as a kind of mood barometer of a project because you are supposed to have the most parameters to be happy or sad about the way things are going. Happy people are good.

Think about this when you are having a bad day. It’s easy to get caught in complaining about something to team members, don’t do it, you don’t have to lie when things are looking bad but that doesn’t mean you have to moan about it or start a speech and list your personal frustrations. You have your own boss to do that to

Watch “Saving Private Ryan”, there’s a part where Tom Hanks says complaining always goes up the ladder, it’s true.