Let’s say you pour a cup of coffee, and you want to add a little cream and sugar to it. What happens if you don’t get that mix just right? Maybe it’s too sweet, or there’s not enough room for cream. Well, the result is that it’s not as enjoyable. It just doesn’t work for you. Or maybe you put too much coffee in and overfill the mug. Now you’ve got a big mess. Through trial and error, though, you’ve probably gotten pretty good at managing the capacity in a coffee cup. You can gauge the amount and the proportions pretty well.

In fact, throughout your life, you’ve learned from experience to control the amount you put in containers, whether it’s paint in a five-gallon bucket, cement in a wheelbarrow, beer in a pint glass or items in a purse or wallet. But there’s one area where it seems like most of us haven’t learned much over the years—the container that is your organization.

There are only so many people in your organization, and it only has so much capacity for work. Yet how often do we get the mix wrong between day-to-day activities and the initiatives that are supposed to make the organization better? How often do we try to overfill the organization with work, loading more and more on until we’re left with a big mess? In business terms, that mess might mean failing to hit critical goals, turning out substandard work, or ending up with a staff that’s completely burned out.

If you get the mix wrong, you could end up with a mess of a different sort, where you’re able to get all the day-to-day work done, but unable to complete your initiatives and, as a result, never improving as an organization. In that case, you might as well be using dial-up Internet while everyone else blazes past you with fiber optics, because if you’re stuck at the same level of efficiency and productivity as you’ve always been, the world is going to quickly outpace you.

Managing the Variables

Of course, in business, things are dynamic. Work isn’t always consistent in terms of difficulty. Some is easy, some is hard, and some turns out to be harder than you expected it to be. People’s skill levels also vary. Some can handle a heavy workload effectively and efficiently, while new employees are still learning the ropes. And sometimes you have many different people involved, which can create a variety of coordination and communication issues.

But if you think about it, it’s a lot like pouring a beer in a glass. Each beer has different levels of carbonation. The temperature of the beer isn’t always constant. Glasses are different shapes. Because of these differences, sometimes the pour has a lot of foam and spills over, making a mess. Other times, there is little foam, and it all fits in the glass just perfectly. With practice, experience, attention and the right technique, a mature pourer will get it right every time.

So, what’s the foolproof technique you can use in business? Let’s take a look at how you can correctly fill the container of people in the organization with work.

The Basics of Capacity Management 

Work effort is measured in FTEs. It’s a way of thinking of the work unit and describing the effort. In other words, if you have two people who work for you full time and two who work for you halftime, you have a total of 3 FTEs working for you. This is important to know as you start scheduling staff.

To identify your total organizational resource capacity, first, convert people’s availability to FTEs. Then add together all of the organizational resources (FTEs), subtracting out administrative and managerial FTEs (i.e., people who aren’t directly involved with producing), and you’ll have a number that represents the total FTEs available to you.

Next, from any demand forecasting and workflow efficiency you’ve done, you’ll be able to figure out how many day-to-day (Operational) work FTEs you need for the next period of time. For example, if you have 50 FTEs total in the organization, and you know you’ll need 40 FTEs to produce what needs to get done in the next month operationally, that means you have 10 FTEs available for initiative work. You might decide to put someone full time on initiative work, or you might divide their time between operational and initiative. The point is, this information gives you a lot of flexibility when you start assigning people work.

Now it’s time to focus on the initiatives. Let’s say you have six initiatives that you want to do. Based on your scheduling and prioritization, you’ve decided to start three of those first. You know from your estimating how long it’s going to take and how many people you need to make that happen. As you go through this process, you might realize something: You don’t have enough FTEs available for the initial work you want to get done. This is where you can make a mess and try and do too much. Start fewer initiatives where you find yourself in this situation.

Getting Staff Scheduling Right

Now that you know how your FTEs are split up and what initiatives you’re going to start, you can assign people to the FTEs. In the typical scenario, a manager will say, “I want you to work on operations, and when you get the chance, work on this initiative.” But what happens when you mix operational “oil” and initiative “water” in the same container? The operational work will always stay on top of the initiative work.

As you assign people to FTE allocations for operations and initiative work, some will be assigned to only operational work for the work period, while some will be assigned to only initiative work for the work period. Others will be assigned to split their time between operational and initiative work for the work period.

For initiatives, the best option is to schedule a person 100% to that work so that they can be focused and get it done. Sometimes, this isn’t possible, but if you’re going to split the work, never go less than 50/50. In those cases, it’s best to segregate the work by whole consecutive days. If you can’t do that, then separate the days into four-hour chunks. Keep the schedule breakout consistent until the initiative is complete. You need strong container walls to keep the work separate.

With lots of observation and practice, you can get the mix right and not overfill the container. To be sure, it does take practice, but eventually, it will become part of your way of doing things. And it will be worth it. It will keep you from ending up with a big mess on your hands — in the form of low engagement, high turnover, and a reputation for not being able to deliver results.

The post How to Avoid Stuffing 10 lbs. of Work in a 5 lb. Organization first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

Likewise, R&D teams and innovation task forces aren’t just sitting around thinking up ideas. They have specific processes and a discrete workflow. Every organization has a workflow of some sort, and by concentrating on your value chain and how it runs through your organization, you can uncover yours.

Even though the official definition of workflow may sound somewhat complicated, you’ll find that the people in your organization can easily state what and how your organization does what it does. The issue, though, is whether the workflow is defined to the point where everyone has the same understanding of it and is following the same practices. We each do things differently in some fashion. Sometimes this makes sense personally for that individual, but sometimes there truly are differences in the workflow.

If everyone’s not doing it in the same way, it makes it tough to get better. That’s because the changes you make might benefit one person more than another based on the way each person performs their work. However, when everyone is doing it the same, the benefit of the change can be measured with little variance from person to person. Even better, you’ll automatically improve just by getting to one workflow because you’re reviewing and finding the best-in-class among you. As you continue to get better, you can then measure and decide to change a specific area and see how that affects your output.

Step 1: Document Your Workflow

Even though the goal is to get everyone following the same workflow, that doesn’t mean you should have everyone directly involved in the process of documenting it. Select two or three people to lead the effort and have them interview the others, get their input, and collect best practices of how people do it.

Based on this information, this small group should then:

• Define the workflow
• Send it back out to the organization for comments
• Review the comments and decide what to incorporate

Remember: The job of this group isn’t to produce a great workflow; it’s to produce a great workflow that everyone will follow. Getting everyone’s input is an important step in getting their buy-in to the newly defined workflow.

Now that you’ve defined your workflow, you can identify points in the workflow that can measure (a) the flow and (b) the quality of work.

Step 2: Identify the Transformation Points

A workflow can be made of one process or many processes and sub-processes, but in all cases, these processes transform information and materials. Every step or sub-process typically involves an input and an output — the input you have is someone else’s output; the output you create becomes someone else’s input.

We use the word transformation here deliberately. When you think about these steps as transformations, you’ll view them completely differently. You aren’t just checking the box and getting it done; instead, you’re considering, am I performing this transformation in the best way that I can do it?

Each of these transformations takes time and delivers different levels of quality, so you need to measure the throughput and the quality of what you’ve done. People often ask, “What’s considered ‘good’ quality?” The answer is, you have to find out. You have to think about what you’re trying to accomplish and how you can make sure it’s the same every time. Once you’ve figured that out, you can do it that way for a few months, measure it, and decide: Is that good? Or do we need to do better?

When you’re merely working with data to identify norms, patterns, and variances, some of these methods will be easy to do in a simple spreadsheet. When it’s more complicated, you can always hire a consultant to work through the data and get you the answers you need.

While the statistical methods themselves aren’t difficult, make no mistake about it: Measuring what your organization does isn’t always easy. It takes work and effort. But consider the alternative. If you don’t drive how you’re being evaluated, someone else is going to determine it for you.

You’re going to have to dig deep into the details, and it’s going to take some time, but you’ll end up with a bulletproof case for why you do things the way you do them.

The post Workflow Efficiency: How You Do What You Do first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

4 Phases

Every successful initiative goes through four phases:

1. 
   

   Planning: Documents the who, what, when, where, and how.

   
   

Activities:

• Establish a common understanding of the projects goal, objectives, deliverables including the end product, service or deliverable.
• Create a list of tasks that will produce each of the deliverables of the initiative.
• Estimate the duration of each task and the number of people required to work on it.
• Identify the dependencies between each task to establish their order for starting.
• Create a schedule of when each task is to start and finish.
• Create a budget for each deliverable and expense type.

2. 
   

   Specifying: Details the characteristics of the end deliverables.

   
   

Activities:

• List the stakeholders and users of the end product, service or result.
• Interview stakeholders and users and identify their expectations of the end deliverables.
• Create requirement for the end product service or result from the interviews, and get them approved by all parties.

3. 
   

   Building: Turns the vision of the end deliverable into a reality.

   
   

Activities:

• Design the end product, service or result.
• Build the end product, service or result.
• Test the end product, service or result.
• Verify the end product, service or results meets all the established requirements.

4. 
   

   Implementing: Establishes the final state of why the initiative was undertaken.

   
   

Activities:

• Create a transition plan to launch the use of the product, service or result.
• Ensure user adoption by reducing the resistance to the change brought on by the new product, service or result.
• Resolve any anomalies related to the use of the product, service or result.

People managing initiatives often tend to focus partly on specifying and fully on building the end product, service or result. In these cases, you might be successful in meeting the goals of the initiative, but because there’s no planning, the execution of the initiative will likely be very chaotic and inefficient. Also, since the transition into use is completely overlooked, there will be lots of surprises and resistance to the change. Sometimes, it’s so bad that the users reject and do not use the end product, service or result.

4 Functional Roles

There are also four functional roles that have to be present on each initiative for success:

1. 
   

   Project Management: Project management is predicting, with as much certainty as is possible or required, the project’s scope, time, and cost at completion, and then embracing reality and influencing activities to meet those predictions.

   
   

Project Managers:

• Provide leadership and motivation.
• Maintain focus and commitment.
• Coordinate team member tasks, and use resources efficiently and effectively.
• Ensure that the planning they perform, the tasks they delegate, and the course corrections they make move the project closer to the negotiated endpoint.

2. 
   

   Business Analysis: Business analysis is acquiring knowledge of an organization’s structure, policies, and operations; identifying areas needing improvement; and recommending solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.

   
   

Business Analysts:

• Understand the business goals and objectives as well as the background of the organization.
• Identify cost saving opportunities, increase efficiencies, and decrease errors and issues.
• Identify business users at various levels to gather and validate information.
• Identify the impact of a solution inside and outside of their organization.

3. 
   

   Product Development: A product is the end result of an initiative. It might also be called a deliverable or some other term. Product development is creating products, tangible or intangible, with new or different characteristics that offer benefits to internal or external customers.

   
   

Product Developers:

• Fulfill the role of the product developers, creatives and builders.
• Have the domain knowledge to advise the project manager when needed.
• Develop their portion of the product as specified.
• Integrate their work with the work of the other subject matter experts.

4. 
   

   Change Management: Change management is effectively supporting the implementation of a change within an organization so as to minimize stress and ensure its sustainability.

   
   

Change Managers:

• Ensure acceptance, adoption and sustainment of the product or service.
• Ensure the overall change is clear, resistance is identified and the change strategies are developed and effectively implemented.
• Coordinate with communication, learning and reward specialists available on an as needed basis throughout the change.

When organizing the project team and planning for the initiative, consider who on the team can take on each of these different roles. For some roles, it might be the person assigned to manage the initiative. In some cases, others might need to be brought in specifically to play certain roles. Either way, the people who take on these roles don’t need to be experts, just occasional practitioners. Some training will likely be required, but there are cost-effective methods to do this. And regardless of who fulfills what role, it’s important that each person understands what the role means and entails.

Initiatives often require a significant investment of time, money and resources, but it’s all with the intention of making your organization better. Follow the 4×4 Framework to make sure that investment pays off.

The post The 4×4 Framework for Successful Initiative Management first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

To keep initiative work on track, you need a specific initiative management approach, one that’s different from the way you manage your operational work. Let’s take a look at the key elements of initiative management.

The first step is identifying the deliverables needed for a successful completion. What are the success criteria? What will you have to deliver to be able to say this initiative is successfully completed?

From those deliverables, you can then begin identifying the tasks that need to be completed to produce those deliverables. Once you have the tasks articulated, you can move to estimating the duration and number of resources for each task. Here’s where you start assigning people to tasks and determining how long it’s going to take to complete them.

Since some tasks have to be completed before others can start, sequencing puts the tasks in an order that accommodates those dependencies. With that information, you’ll be able to start scheduling tasks to a calendar start and finish date.

Next, you’ll need more detail on those deliverables that you’re going to produce. To get it, you have to go through a process of understanding customer requirements by interviewing people, asking questions about what they prefer and listening to different opinions.

Once you get started, you’ll find some tasks are taking longer than you’d estimated, which means other tasks will start late. This is why monitoring and taking corrective action is an important part of the work. When your schedule gets stretched out because of delays, you have to take steps to correct it or bring it in as close as possible to the estimate.

Finally, planning and monitoring resistance to change is critical. Even though most initiative work is designed to bring about change for the better, change is still change, and some people will struggle with it. They may not understand why they have to change, what the future will look like or whether they can really do it. For the initiative to be successful, not only does it need to be delivered based on requirements and within timeframes, it also has to be done in a way that helps minimize resistance to the change.

Dividing and Conquering the Initiative

How you schedule people to work on initiatives will be a major factor in whether the initiative succeeds. Because of the nature of operational work — it’s immediate and has to get done — it will always take precedence over initiative work. For this reason, you have to not only schedule time for people to work on the initiative, you have to keep operational and initiative work times separate. It can’t be, “Go do your regular job and do your initiative work, too.” This assumes people have all the time in the world leftover to do initiative work. If you pit the two against each other, initiative work will always lose out.

Plan weekly work scheduling with clearly separated times for initiative work. You might try allocating chunks of time by giving people specific half-days during the week (four dedicated, uninterrupted hours) to work only on the initiative. Or you might assign them to work exclusively on the initiative on specific days of the week. Either way, it has to be distinctly separated, and everyone needs to know about the schedule.

When you create a schedule like this, people will get into a routine that will become a habit, and that will make it easier for them not to get sucked back into operational work. They’ll also be in a much more peaceful mindset when working on operational work because they won’t be worried about when they’re going to be able to get their initiative work done. They’ll know they have the appropriate time to do it.

Test the Value of Initiative Management

If you’re questioning whether this is something you really need, try it out and see for yourself:

• Investigate the seven essentials of initiative management above, and consider whether your people are doing this when they manage initiatives. Survey them if you’re not sure. And what about you? Are you doing it?
• Look at your operational and initiative work, and notice the different characteristics of each. Pay particular attention to the differences in what it requires of the employee to work on them.
• Try scheduling people’s work differently, either half-days or dedicated days where they’re exclusively devoted to initiative work. The important thing is to pick a schedule and be consistent.
• If it works, make some permanent changes in how you do things.

The post Stop Approaching Work Like A Dog Digging Up A Bone: Part 2 first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

Given all that…initiative work is a little different than your day-to-day work. The intent of initiatives is to change how things are done in your organization — to help that environment get better over time. This may involve updating a process, implementing a tool, increasing customer capabilities or some other way of improving the way your organization produces what it produces.

Most people get assigned to initiatives, and you’re just as appropriate as anyone else to be put in charge. After all, you’ve got the subject matter expertise. And the common belief is that subject matter expertise is the most important thing to know when it comes to managing an initiative. It’s also widely assumed that managing an initiative is so basic that it can be done in the midst of all the other day-to-day activities you have to do.

Historically, though, the track record of successfully delivering on initiatives has been pretty poor. And initiatives don’t always meet the mark in terms of the results they’re supposed to achieve. Clearly, subject matter expertise isn’t enough to ensure success.

One Approach to Work Management Doesn’t Fit All

To be fair, these kinds of initiatives are a fairly recent development, so anyone who’s climbed the chain prior to this may not have a clear sense of what initiatives are. They may call them initiatives, but they don’t have a specific process or tools to manage them. And since they don’t see that managing initiatives is something special, they wouldn’t even know why special processes or tools would be needed.

To understand why initiatives have to be managed differently than day-to-day work, let’s get back to the title of this post. A dog has a certain approach to digging up bones. They don’t take their time; they get after it, and they take it seriously. They’ll move their arms as fast as they can, throwing dirt everywhere, and they’re usually very successful at eventually uncovering that bone.

But would you let a dog dig up an ancient bone at an archeology site? They’re subject matter experts in uncovering bones. They’re efficient and effective at it. They would no doubt dig it up.

But they’d also rip into the ground and likely end up damaging the delicate artifact in the process. Instead, you’d probably choose an archeologist who also knows a lot about digging up bones but using a different approach.

In the same way, people assigned to manage initiatives need to use a different approach from their day-to-day workflow in order to be successful. You may be an expert in what you do and how to do it, but you might not be an expert in how to change it. Professionals do this work for a living. It’s an art and a science. You don’t need to become a professional, but you do need to recognize that it’s a high skill.

Just as a dog digging up a bone is doing different work than an archaeologist excavating a site, operational and initiative work are different. Operational work, the work you do every day, is repetitive, in the moment and very important. You can’t afford not to do it, and if it gets slowed down, you’ll be in trouble for it. It also typically involves a short timeframe.

Initiative work, on the other hand, usually stretches out over longer periods of time, as much as six weeks or more, and it doesn’t have to be done on a daily basis. You want to get it done, but the reality is, operational work will take priority. As a result, the timing on initiative work tends to get pushed out — and sometimes it won’t get done at all.

The post Stop Approaching Work Like A Dog Digging Up A Bone: Part 1 first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

Why Focus on Value?

The biggest benefit of changing the perspective to value is that it forces you and your team to focus on your customer and their benefits. It moves you past what you do to what customers get and give up. Why does this matter? When your organization focuses on what you do, you’ll do things the same way you always have done them. The only reason you might change is if you do something wrong or there’s a problem and it forces you to change.

By contrast, focusing on value opens up opportunities for improvement and gives you new paths to value contribution. Put simply, if you don’t focus on value, you’ll just end up doing the same thing over and over again.

Understanding Your Organization’s Value Chain

A value chain is officially defined as a set of connected activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product or service for the market. But in terms of your department, think of it this way:

My organization’s value chain is a set of activities we perform in order to deliver a valuable product or service for our customers (internal or external) at the smallest expense to cost, peace of mind and enjoyment.

To move employees from task focus to value focus, you need to connect them to your organization’s value chain:

1. Determine what competencies your organization has that makes it uniquely qualified to deliver its value contribution. If your employees are just focused on what they do, they may have a hard time coming up with an answer. They won’t have a sense of their specialness or their strengths to be able to see what makes them uniquely qualified. If that’s the case, focus instead on answering the question, What are our unique competencies that very few other departments in this organization have that allow us to do this work? In other words, Why us?

2. Connect employees to the value chain. Every employee has to connect to the value chain, and this is usually based on function. Every effort they perform should also contribute to the value chain; if it doesn’t, then they shouldn’t be doing it. If it needs to be done, then you have to uncover what it adds to the value chain. Even roles that provide secondary support should be connected. For example, an administrative assistant enables the person they support to do bigger things that contribute to the value chain.

To connect people to the value chain, list what each person produces and who their customer is. Describe it in a way that: 

• Is inspirational and has some motivation and meaning to it (Example: The receptionist connects people with people.)
• Creates an opportunity for innovation and improvement

3. Move people from completing tasks to adding value. Completing tasks is an end unto itself. Adding value always leaves room for improvement. Encourage employees to question what they do and how much value it provides to the customer. Let them think of ways to improve what they do, and reward them when they do so and increase their value contribution.

Linking people to the organization’s value chain will not only increase the value to your customers, it will decrease the amount of time you have to put into managing your employees. So make sure you’re giving them the why, not just giving them tasks to check off a list.

The post Get Your Employees Connected To Your Value Chain first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

Project managers have the best of both worlds: they oversee the daily tasks of their team where they focus on improving efficiency and workflow on the individual level, but they also work with executives and shareholders to achieve bigger-picture goals. By providing effective project management, you are that magic link that connects the two facets of the workplace, and it’s not an easy job by any means.

Becoming a better project manager should be a goal for your entire career, because the demands of the job are only going to get greater. The better you are at your job, the more responsibility you will be given, the more successful project management you can provide, and the more valuable you will be to your team and company.

Here are three tips for every current or aspiring project manager to help you become better, or even the best, at your job.

1. Become detail-oriented

Coming to the end of your project means many different paths have finally merged and it’s important you oversee each one of those paths to ensure they were followed correctly. Your job is not only to deliver the end result, but to find ways to improve your strategies and skills that lead to that result.

In order to produce more successful project management, look for ways to improve communication, speed up processes, and come in under budget. Be resourceful and, most importantly, be available. While it may not seem like effective project management to have an open door, your team knowing that they can come to you with any tiny detail will identify and solve problems before they become monstrous, especially if you have constructive advice and ideas to share with them.

2. Exude relaxed confidence

There will be many instances when your team gets overwhelmed. There will be times when things go wrong. Deadlines will be missed. Budgets will be overspent. Clients will be disappointed. While part of your job is to ensure these things rarely happen, it’s also your job to deliver successful project management, which means instilling a sense of trust to your team members and clients when these situations arise.

If you handle yourself professionally in stressful situations, not only will you provide your team with the confidence to push through, but you’ll also put your clients and stakeholders at ease knowing that they can trust you to handle the situation. If either of those parties see you lose your cool, they may lose their trust in your ability to handle the project and re-think their decision to hire you, or lose trust in your successful project management ability.

3. Take on any task

Your job as a project manager is not just to manage. To provide effective project management, you must not get so caught up in the title that you forget your role—to make sure things get done. Sometimes that means you have to get your hands dirty and jump into the work.

When deadlines and your reputation as a productive and effective project manager are at stake, you must be flexible and willing to fill in as needed to ensure your project meets expectations. Identify tasks where you can let some of the responsibility go and delegate them to people in your team you know will deliver. This successful project management will free you up to focus on other important tasks which need to be completed.

These are just a few suggestions for projects managers or aspiring project managers to add to their skill set, and it is obviously not exclusive nor exhaustive. To learn more, check out this article by Workfront on 81 Tips from Project Management Experts.

—

Brooke Cade is a freelance writer with Workfront. When she is not writing, Brooke is committed to learning more about helping businesses and marketing professionals succeed with their project management goals.

The post Three Important Strategies That Will Lead to More Successful Project Management first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

 
Maybe one of these situations sounds familiar…

1.  The marketing strategy you and your team implemented for your company’s new innovative product that, according to consumer research, will to take the market place by storm is failing badly. The project sponsor has mandated a complete change in direction but has cut your budget by 20 percent and accelerated your timeline.
2.  After nearly a year of development on a technical system to integrate several disparate processes within customer service, end user testing results are showing a very low usability and adoption rate. Leadership is demanding a solution. Now.
3. You’ve just found out your resources have been slashed by 30 percent, but the sponsor won’t budge on the workload. More with less is the mandate.

Breaking bad news is never easy. With the evolution of technology and Internet usage now well over three billion people worldwide, today’s business climate requires quick change to stay competitive. The speed, reach, and consumer options now available mean organizations must be nimble, creative, and able to adjust quickly to shifting market conditions.

The upside of the ability to change quickly is market edge. The downside? You need to know how to deliver bad news. Agile, rapid change impacts people, which can be perceived by stakeholders as bad, difficult, or challenging, which means you may need to break bad news sometime in the future.

And what about the situations at the beginning of this post? They likely will be viewed as bad news to a team because it will require quick change on top of the other million other things they also need to do.

Change allows organizations to re-invent themselves, move in new directions, and recover from misfortune, but in the project trenches change is at risk for being viewed as a disturbance to their (and our) way of seeing and doing things. Large or small, change of any size makes an impact. And guess who is on the hook for breaking the bad news?

Yep, that would be you, project manager.

So let’s consider this. When giving and receiving news about change, how do you and your project team members view it?

• Interruption to stability or the start of a journey
• Response to a disturbance or a path to innovation
• Problem or an opportunity

If you said, “It depends,” that would be a more than fair response because it does! If you and/or the stakeholders tend to see it as a negative then it will be tempting to postpone, avoid, and stress about it.

When it comes to breaking bad news, consider this: The trees are still in the forest even if we’re not there to see them. The bad news will still be there even when we don’t address it. The problem with that is the longer it’s put it off, the higher the risk the situation will go off the rails. It’s not a matter of if you should deliver bad news, but how to deliver bad news.

Finally, a great way to deliver bad news…

When you have to break bad news to stakeholders, it’s important to prepare for it because of the likely emotional impact.

In my book Delivering Bad News in Good Ways you get a 3-step process to do just that – turn difficult conversations into purposeful dialogue, positive outcomes, & focused results using the SED Method, a process I created over the years while working with companies and government agencies around the world.

SED Method: Separate, Evaluate, & Deliver

Before jumping into breaking bad news, we must separate the people from the problem, which is similar to the principle noted in Roger Fisher and William Ury book called Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. This, however, is a little trickier when it comes to delivering bad news.

Project support is driven from some level of emotional investment.  Contrary to popular belief and supported by research there is a point when the paycheck is not what compels us to do our best in our work.

Whether we are driven to help others, innovate, learn a new skill, collaborate, or get recognition, these things are fueled by emotional investment. With studies from groups like Gallup, we’re learning that intrinsic rewards (personal interest, enjoyment of a task, learning growth) are a much stronger motivator in the workplace than extrinsic rewards (pay, benefits, stock options).

But what does this have to do with breaking bad news? Whatever the motivation every project manager hopes to have that intrinsic, high level of passion and commitment on their team, BUT it comes with a price:  The higher the emotional investment people have in the project, the harder time they will have bouncing back from bad news about it. Keep this in mind when you’re determining how to deliver bad news.

So, you might be wondering this: why is it so hard for stakeholders to get past “bad” and just get the work done?

The globalization paradigm means information can move 15,000 miles instantly. That means people are hit with roughly 11,000,000,000 bits of information at once. Of that we have awareness of about 40 of them, but our capacity to process the information deeply is limited to around seven bits.

When it comes to breaking bad news, it’s this limited capacity that creates a cognitive load paradigm – an inability to adapt to change as rapidly as technology.  So, the net-net is it takes time for people to adapt to the change that companies need for projects to be delivered quickly.

When the team is in synch, excited, and feeling empowered, the sky is the limit and energy and enthusiasm are running high it is clear the heads and hearts of the stakeholders are engaged. While we want that, the old cliché of “the higher they are, the harder they fall” comes to mind. In other words, breaking bad news for a team like this can make or break it.

Part I: Prepping for delivering bad news

The tipping point for how stakeholders respond to bad news is the way you assess, frame, and share it. That’s why, when determining how to deliver bad news, we address with the SED Method, which stands for Separate, Evaluate, & Deliver.

The Separate gives us a chance to investigate and collect the facts, opinions, and details of the situation so we can act rather than react to challenging situations.

The Evaluate step gives us time to sort through that information, determine what is relevant, and identify options in preparation of breaking bad news to the receiver. It is in this step that you have a chance to evaluate your feelings, assess the possible feeling of others, and identify options.

The Deliver step helps to determine how best to craft and present the news in a way that can be heard. It also gut checks you on timing, materials, and location.

Part II: The Talk

Preparing for breaking bad news is the first step. The second step is the discussion that follows once you’ve share the bad news. The Talk model outlined in the book gives you a brief process to follow to facilitate to next steps.

When it comes to delivering bad news, most of us tend to avoid it like the plague. We sweep it under the rug and put off dealing with it, but it’s always there – an ugly, festering lump deepening stress with each day it’s not addressed. Wondering how to deliver bad news? The SED Method offers an alternative.

When it comes to breaking bad news, facing up to it early and often is healthy for businesses, projects, and life in general. The method takes a tough, common problem and shows you why bad news needs to be delivered in a timely, thoughtful manner and how best to deliver it in good and productive ways.

And as project managers on the hook for facilitating and managing change, a helping hand (or process in this case) is always welcome.

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Delivering Bad News in Good Ways is available in ebook and paperback.

The post Breaking Bad News – 3 Easy Steps to Tell Stakeholders What They Don’t Want to Hear first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

So what is project management?

If you’re responsible for project management, you play a pivotal role in getting the project delivered as expected so the organization can realize its benefits. When it comes to different project management methodologies, you must wear many hats simultaneously. You have to be a prognosticator—able to predict the project’s scope, time and cost at completion—and you have to be a pragmatic influencer—able to embrace reality and stimulate the activities to meet those predictions.

Companies depend on their project managers to keep the forward momentum going and ensure meaningful progress is happening day in and day out throughout the duration of the project. So when asking what is project management, the answer covers a great deal of ground. Requiring excellent facilitation, communication, organizational and motivational skills, it’s a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional job.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the primary responsibilities of project management.

Project Management Responsibilities: 8 Key Elements

1. Project Charter: When you’re planning initiatives and budgets for the year, the project charter helps you think through what’s to come and establish clarity around roles, responsibilities, milestones, and other expectations and objectives. But for ad hoc projects that will kick off within a few weeks or so, this is a step you can usually skip because the charter will inevitably have considerable overlap with the soon-to-be-developed project plan.
2. Project Plan: A big part of what project management is; once a project is initiated, you need to set the context and define how it will be executed and controlled through to completion. With a purpose of documenting the time, cost and scope baseline, the project plan helps minimize project risk and keep it on track. No matter your project management methodologies, you must create and stick to the project plan. It’s also a living document that will necessarily have to be updated as the project progresses and more information becomes available.
3. Project Scope: You have to know what your project entails to be able to manage it. That’s why defining and managing project scope from the outset is so important. While it’s often thought of just in terms of features and functions, project scope also encompasses the desired quality of the product or service. For example, is it going to be used in extreme conditions, or is it just for everyday office use? Those quality questions help you better articulate scope so you can better manage it.
4. Project Approach: On the surface, when outlining all of what project management is, defining the project approach seems like a pretty straightforward task: it’s about describing the strategies the team will apply to get to the desired end result. But depending on the project, the organization and the project manager’s prior experiences, it’s not always as simple as that. Don’t fall into the trap of overthinking it. Use the roadmaps and best practices available to both augment the best fitting project management methodologies and to meet your project’s challenges.
5. Risk Management: We regularly hear from directors wanting to shore up their project managers’ risk management skills after projects fail to be completed as expected. The root cause of these failures is usually unexpected events or risks. When asking what is project management, knowing how to deal with struggles is an often unexplored, but vital skill. But encountering unforeseen risks isn’t a sign of poor risk management; it’s a sign that the PM isn’t practicing good project management fundamentals.
6. Work Breakdown Structure: Part science, part art, the work breakdown structure is one of the most important tools in project management. It’s a dynamic document that provides the foundation, framework and structure for nearly everything that happens in project planning. To make sure the work breakdown structure is useful, the key is finding the right level of decomposition, without breaking it down so far that it loses its purpose.
7. Gantt Chart: When asking what is project management, we want to hear more about the Gantt chart. These bar charts have many applications, but in project management, a typical Gantt chart depicts the project schedule, i.e., tasks, major milestones and project duration. It doesn’t take any special software or skills to create a Gantt chart, nor does it conflict with any project management methodologies—and that’s why it’s so important to understand how it was created and when it was last updated. Charts with integrity are those that were produced following best practices and reflect today’s reality.
8. Project Team Management: If the project team is doing all the work, then what is project management? What are PMs even doing all day? In fact, project team management is an essential responsibility that continues throughout the life of the project. Because you’re often leading without authority, you have to be able to build relationships to get things done while enabling the team to do its best work and managing the flow of skills and talent required. In some cases, project team managers will also have to find a balance between working in the project and on it.

It’s clear that these are not only critical individual responsibilities of project management—they’re also interconnected. So keep in mind, when it comes to being a successful project manager, especially in today’s project-intensive organizations, there is no one without the other. All are essential aspects of the job.

The post What is Project Management: Understanding Your Responsibilities first appeared on Project Management Training | Systemation.com.

Of course, that’s a pretty broad statement. To understand how the function of business analysis actually operates in the real world of an organization, it can be helpful to break out the various responsibilities and see how they support the overarching purpose of enabling an organization to reach its goals.

Let’s take a closer look at each of those individual responsibilities.

Drilling Down: Key Business Analyst Responsibilities

• Developing the Business Case: Discovering a problem and finding a better way is only the first step in enabling change. To gain the confidence, support and approval to move forward, you need a compelling business case. Business cases are essentially communication tools, and as such, they shouldn’t be overly complex or highly technical. The most effective ones document the key points in clear, simple terms and include these five sections: business need, solution scope, stakeholder concerns, estimated time and cost, and overall ROI.
• Stakeholder Analysis: Business analysts have to interact with wide-ranging stakeholders to get the necessary information, engagement and involvement to move a project forward. One of the most important business analyst responsibilities, the IIBA points out that business analysts are the liaisons among stakeholders and may even serve as the “translator” between stakeholder groups. But every stakeholder is unique, bringing different attitudes, perspectives, levels of interest and motivations to the project. As part of your roles and responsibilities of a business analyst, conducting a stakeholder analysis allows you to understand these nuances so you can determine the best way to involve and engage each to meet the project’s needs.
• Use Cases and User Stories: Every project has users—those people who will interact with whatever it is the project is designed to deliver, whether it’s a product, a service or some other result. Getting their input is an essential part of business analyst responsibilities, and there are two tools you can use to ensure you get the information you need: the use case and the user story. While both can be applied to any project deliverable, user stories, which provide context for the use cases, are typically higher level and more conceptual. Use cases go into more detail and describe specific actions and behaviors.
• Business Requirements: How do you make sure the end result of a project is what the business really needs? While the project management organization will develop a project charter and project plan, this documentation doesn’t address the business side of the project. That’s where the business requirements document comes into the picture. A key part of business analyst responsibilities, developing business requirements allows you to set the context for both the stakeholder and the solution requirements, ensuring that the project scope is aligned to meet the business purpose.
• Functional Requirements/Non-Functional Requirements: To get to a successful end product, part of your roles and responsibilities of a business analyst you have to determine what it should do and how it should work. In business analysis terms, these are the functional (what it does) and the non-functional (how it works) requirements. Both functional requirements and non-functional requirements play a role in defining the capabilities of the final product or service. As product categories mature, however, greater importance is typically placed on non-functional requirements. That’s because once the product has become part of a user’s day-to-day life, you can begin building on what it does to increase its value.
• User Acceptance Testing: Your business analyst responsibilities don’t end once the project’s needs and requirements have been identified. In fact, one of the most important business analysis responsibilities is making sure what’s delivered to the users not only satisfies their requirements but also works in the environment it’s designed for. The only way you’ll know you’ve achieved this is through the process of user acceptance testing. While the project is in the development and deployment stages, you should be actively working on preparing user testing, via testing scenarios, to get to user acceptance—the best indication that the end product will deliver the results you intend.

Mastering each of these business analyst responsibilities is key to success for anyone who has been tasked with the work of business analysis. Together, knowing the roles and responsibilities of a business analyst will help you create the conditions for the organization to continually improve and achieve its goals.

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