By: Brad Egeland

With the common failure rate of the projects we manage coming in at more than 50%, managing just one project to success is enough of a challenge. In reality though, rarely does a project manager have just one project on his plate – unless it’s a huge project that requires 110% of this time. A more likely scenario finds the project manager usually managing anywhere from 3 to 6 projects at time…maybe more.

If we are going to have any chance of experiencing regular success on the projects we manage, then a few things really need to be in place from a PM infrastructure perspective. The overall list could be incredibly long, for certain, and I welcome reader input on this subject as to their own thoughts and experiences. Here I present my list on what our organizations – and project management offices (PMOs), if applicable – should provide to help ensure ongoing success on the projects we manage.

Training

Let’s start off with training…it may not be necessary, but it’s usually never a bad thing. And from an overall company perspective, hiring experienced project managers who fit your industry and have experienced many project success is important and can be very helpful. These individuals can mentor less experienced PMs giving the project management infrastructure a well-rounded composition. However, there is still going to be needs for ongoing training. And it’s not a bad idea to aid the project managers in achieving PMP certification through the Project Management Institute (PMI), the recognized leader in project management certification. One training method to turn to for aid in getting your PMs through that training and certification process is The PM Prepcast which gets your PMs ready to pass the PMP exam and helps them keep their training current post certification. This can keep you and all of the PMs in your organization on the same page and talking the same language – which can make following a structured, repeatable project management process much easier.

Solid PM leadership

PM organizations need a strong leader who is well versed in project management but is not actively managing projects. A PMO director who spends too much time with hands-on project management won’t be there to fight for his project managers, cater to their training needs, and help with onboarding critical resources to highly visible projects. A PMO director focused on the needs of the project managers in the organization can often be a much greater contributor to project successes than one who is too focused on the daily project leadership grind of managing a handful of their own projects.

A good resource and scheduling tool

Equipping the project managers with a good resource planning and scheduling tool is very important to the success of your projects. Having a tool that enables this as well as providing you with a firm grip on the resource forecast for the entire project and across all projects is essential. Several web-based tools can do a fairly good job of this for you and so many are now available that you should be able to find one that fits both your functionality needs and your budget.

Executive leadership buy-in

I can’t say enough about how important it is for the organization’s executive leadership to buy-in to the project management infrastructure. Any PMO without high-level leadership support is doomed to fail. If your executive leadership doesn’t support your project organization, then funding may not be there when you need it, critical project resources may not be available to you or may get pulled to other tasks, and highly visible mission critical projects may completely circumvent your PM processes as executives in the organization hand those projects to other departments or ‘favorites’ that are not part of your PM structure.

A workable PM methodology

No project management structure can succeed long-term without a sound project management methodology in place. There must be project plan shells and templates, reusable processes, practical policies, and a shared knowledge of project information available to the project managers who make up the PMO of project infrastructure in order to achieve ongoing and repeatable success. Without these things in place the PM organization will be relying far too much on luck rather than proven successful practices to deliver ongoing project excellence to the customers they are serving.

Dennis Brooke has been using web based project management communications tools since the late 1990s. In his recent interview on The Project Management Podcast he discussed how Enterprise 2.0 project management tools can make the most of communications between team, sponsors and stakeholders. PMPs can earn 30 free PDUs by listening to the entire series of podcasts

Effective Distribution

Once you complete a report, distribution is the next step. Most people send it as an attachment to an email but that isn’t the most efficient way to make sure that everyone sees it. This is because email, although very convenient, often gets lost in the maze of folders that people use to organize their inboxes. They will read a report, file it away and often forget where they put it when they want to refer back to it. Thus, the PM will receive repeated requests for duplicates which will, again, be filed away and lost!

Enterprise 2.0 project management tools give you more options and are more effective in getting your message out. It takes traditional one way communication-email-and turns it into collaboration, a two way conversation that engages both parties. A PM can set up an internet portal for a project that allows everyone to access the report repeatedly, at their convenience, and see all of the information that is pertinent to them. Successful projects depend on effective communication and that means that all parties need to contribute.

Easy Access

Enterprise 2.0 gives you a format that lets you find everything you need very quickly. It’s visible, interactive and easy to locate. It fosters communications between the team, the sponsor and stakeholders by putting information into a place where people can find it easily.

Enterprise 2.0 is interactive, too. Anyone can comment on a posted document and see others’ comment. “So it’s like sitting around in a room but you’re able to do it on your own time and everyone gets to get their say without having to compete with everyone else,” says Dennis Brooke.

Customizable Features

One of the best features of Enterprise 2.0 is that you can tailor it to your audience and make the best use of their limited time. You can create portals with a summary and drill down into areas like scheduling, status reports and other information that your audience is looking for.

There is, however, the potential for abuse. Just like email, you have to train people to use these tools. And like email, everything that is entered at the portal is there forever. People must realize that they need to be just as professional, diplomatic and responsible as they are when they use email.

Enterprise 2.0 saves an astounding amount of time. Enterprise 2.0 makes it easier to find the things you need, saving people time and frustration. Best of all, it has templates that can be customized to serve the best purposes of the audience you want to reach. It has a dashboard that gives people visual access to what they want to see and inspect then drill down into the details that they need in order to find out what they want to know.

Plus, since Enterprise 2.0 is online, it’s accessible to people all over the world immediately, whenever they want to see it. Even team members offshore can access it with a satellite connection. With Enterprise 2.0, there are no limits except those that you impose.

The source for this article is an interview between Dennis Brooke, PMP (www.dennisbrooke.com) and Cornelius Fichtner, PMP on episode 187 of The Project Management Podcast. You can listen to the entire interview and hear more of Dennis Brooke’s techniques at www.project-management-podcast.com.

About the author: Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a noted PMP expert. He is the host of The Project Management Podcast and The Project Management PrepCast where he has helped over 15,000 students prepare for the PMP Exam.

Andy Kaufman, PMP recently participated in an interview on The Project Management Podcast. PMPs can earn 30 free PDUs by listening to the entire series of podcasts. Kaufman is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Institute for Leadership Excellence & Development (www.i-leadonline.com), specializing in the development of project leadership skills; that is, what PM leaders can do to help their team members take on more leadership responsibilities. One important trait of a project leader is the desire and ability to help others lead.

Developing Leadership Skills

It is important to a project’s success that there is focus on developing leadership skills among the team. Just because there is a group of people working together it doesn’t make them a team. When the team is formed there will be conflict even among the most congenial group - issues about how to do things, personality clashes and other minor issues that can become bigger than you expect. Problems aren’t usually foreseen but they should be; there is always conflict when two or more people are thrown together and expected to cooperate to achieve a positive result. These conflicts should be anticipated and dealt with before they can disrupt the group dynamics.  

Junior project managers who get their first team usually have an overwhelming moment when they wonder how they are going to lead and what they should focus on. Kaufman observes that, “we think we can’t ask for help because if we ask for help then we’re showing that we’re weak. And we need to show that we’re not weak. And what I find is in fact you have to be careful on how you ask for help. I mean you have to do your part of it for sure, but the advice that I would give somebody who’s a new project leader is network with other people that have been doing it longer. I’m amazed at how much people are willing to help.” Asking for help or advice is the mark of a mature leader who has the interests of his or her group at heart.

This is good advice for both junior and senior PMs. People get set in their ways and it’s good to have others sit in on your meetings and critique your style. Constructive criticism can keep us going what we do well and correcting habits that may contribute towards impeding our teams from doing their best. New perspectives can help you improve your style and techniques.

Developing Trust

Andy Kaufman has a unique approach to the trust that a team needs to develop with each other in order to be effective. He agrees that trust is a key to success but disagrees with the tools and exercises generally used to create that trust. He states, “I was at a company and they said: “We’re going to develop trust.” And I was ‘how’s that going to be?’ They said: “Pair off. One of you close your eyes and the other person is going to hold on to your elbow and lead you around the room while you have your eyes closed and this will develop trust. I have to tell you… the whole time I had my eyes closed walking around the room, I was thinking to myself that this is the stupidest exercise I’ve ever gone through. I didn’t develop trust.”

Establishing purpose is the beginning of trust rather than the usual mundane, run of the mill exercises. The team needs to understand why they are doing the project so that they know how they fit into the overall project structure. If they understand how the project impacts the business and what their roles and responsibilities are they will develop trust naturally. Trust is like a concentric ring with purpose at the center; the next ring is accountability and that leads naturally to the third ring, which is trust. The components of trust - ability, intent and integrity - are the offshoots of accountability. This cause and effect theory has served Kaufman’s purpose of establishing trust within a team much better than established “trust” exercises.

Setting Guidelines

Another unusual technique Kaufman uses to develop teams and their leadership skills is a team charter. The PMBOK Guide states that a project charter is needed before a project can be started but a team charter is just as important. A project charter makes it clear why the team is there while a team charter outlines the roles and responsibilities of the members. A project cannot go smoothly if people don’t know exactly what is expected of them; RACI charts are ideal for this purpose. The third component is values; what does this group value as a team? It might be respect, punctuality or any number of things that the team agrees that in indispensable to their effectiveness. The last aspect of a team charter are performance indicators, the signposts that let the team know they are successful at every stage of the project. This builds moral and cohesiveness and thus greatly contributes toward successful leadership.

The source for this article is an interview between Andy Kaufman, PMP and Cornelius Fichtner, PMP on episode 185 of The Project Management Podcast. You can listen to the entire interview and hear more of Andy Kaufman’s creative techniques at www.project-management-podcast.com.

About the author: Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a noted PMP expert. He is the host of The Project Management Podcast and The Project Management PrepCast where he has helped over 15,000 students prepare for the PMP Exam.