project_management_made_easy

Tool: Understanding When the Project Is Done

Is It Done?

Teach this to everyone on your team for project success. It will help with teamwork and communications (Chapter 10) and keeping everything on track (Chapter 13).

Project management is about getting things done. In Chapter 1, I introduced the ideas of a task and a deliverable. I said that if you are doing one step and I’m doing the next step, then your output, your deliverable, is my input. If you don’t do your job right, I can’t start my job on time.

Now, I’m going to rant about this for just a minute. Why? Because I want to save you a lot of time and frustration.

Here’s my rant: project management won’t work unless every team member understands tasks and deliverables. You could spend thousands of dollars on project management training and get everyone professionally certified, but if these really simple basics aren’t a habit for everyone, then you’re all spinning your wheels, wasting money and time, and getting nowhere. Here are the things everyone needs to understand:

Either it’s done or it’s not. There is no such thing as “nearly done.” That means nothing; it’s like being “a little bit pregnant.” If you’re done, you have nothing else to do. You could put your deliverable on a shelf for six months and then a total stranger could pick it up and use it with no problems. When your task is done, you’ve delivered: you are not needed any more for that task; others can do it without you. If there is one tiny loose end, it isn’t done and you say, “No, it’s not done.”

All deliverables should be written down clearly, so that everyone understands them. In a small business, there is no room for “Oh, just one more thing” or “I thought that was what you wanted.”

Plan your time, do what you say you’re going to do, and get it done on time. It takes a lot of practice to get good at this, but it pays off in credibility, respect, and the bottom line. In fact, it’s worth working on every day, for the rest of our lives.

Consider writing a statement like this one and making sure everyone understands it. Help all members of your team see their strengths, weaknesses, and next steps of growth in these basic skills.

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Form: Task Description

Task-Description Form

Use this form and the instructions on the next page to delegate jobs to team members so that they can get it done right and contribute to project success.

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Tool: Giving Project Instructions

All the Instructions for a Job

What are all the instructions a person needs to do a job? Let’s assume that the job requires either no special training or special training that the person has already. What is required so that the person could walk in the first time, read the instructions, and do the job right?

■A description of the starting point and the end point. This would be the work request or project plan.

■Any safety rules and procedures related to the environment and the tools. Office safety procedures should be in place and equipment safety should be properly posted and included in training.

■Information that makes the person comfortable and confident. This is part of job orientation.

■Step-by-step instructions. For routine work, this is the SOP. For a project, this is the work breakdown structure and the activity list.

■General ground rules, such as when and where to get help and report status. These can be office guidelines or guidelines specific to the task.

■The instructions that come with each tool. That would include equipment operating instructions, computer program help files, and any useful manuals.

■Special instructions on how to use the tool for this job in this work environment. This part is often missed. Some programs—graphics programs such as Adobe PhotoShop® come to mind in particular— can do so many things in so many ways that it pays to have instructions on what part of the program to use in what ways to get particular results. Even in Microsoft Word®, it pays to have instructions in your own office for how to prepare document headers and footers, how to print letterhead, labels, and business cards, and similar tasks.

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Form: Multiple-Project Tracking

Multiple-Project Tracking Form

Use this form to keep track of the status of all your projects and tasks. Update it every time you get the status of each project using the tools in Chapter 13.

Worker:

Updated:

Projects

Small Tasks

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Tool: Assigning Work

Assigning Work

This tool will help you apply methods from Chapter 10, Teamwork and Communications.

When we’re running a project, even a small one, we need to be able to assign work to other people. There’s an art to that.

One time, I was teaching project management to a class of computer technical professionals. One of them said to me, “I don’t understand how to manage people. I tell two computers to do the same thing and they both do exactly the same thing. But, just recently, I became a project leader. I told two people to do the same thing and they went and did completely different things.”

I replied, “Welcome to the human race. People are like that; we’re inherently unpredictable.”

And that is the challenge of management. Our language—unlike computer languages—means different things to different people. Our memories— unlike computer memories—are not perfect. There is a real plus in each person’s unique perspective and talents. But when it comes to assigning work, it can be difficult to make sure each person understands the job to be done.

All of the tools and templates we’ve introduced will help. The tools are even better if you teach people to write them and use them, not just to read them and follow the instructions. In addition, it helps to do these things when delegating work:

Let people know you want them to be proactive and self-managed.

You want them to own the work, to take responsibility for making sure it gets done right.

Let people know that you want them to stretch—a bit at a time. Don’t hand someone a job twice as big as he or she has ever done before and expect the person to succeed. But do ask everyone to do a good job, learn from mistakes, and get better and better as time goes on.

Support people in making mistakes—and learning from them. You can’t expect people to grow without making mistakes. And you can’t expect people to make mistakes if they get yelled at, criticized, or warned they could lose their jobs when they do. Yes, mistakes cost a lot, but they are a part of doing business. It is our job to make sure that people can’t make big mistakes. If we put someone in a position where he or she can make a big mistake, then we’ve given the wrong job to that person or put the wrong person on the job. We want people to be

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Tool: Assigning Work (continued)

able to stretch, take risks, and fail sometimes, as long as they learn from those mistakes, do better, and make different mistakes next time.

Make everything clear in writing. That’s the only fair way to check to see if the person did the job right.

Give people training when they need it. Give people a chance to tell you they don’t know how to do something, even if you think they should already know it. Then give them a way to learn it—spend a little time with them, let them do some self-guided study, send them to a training class, or just give them some time to figure it out. One great way to help people learn things is to have them write instructions for themselves. The instructions make the job clear and also give you a training tool for others.

Make sure they tell you that they understand the job. When giving someone work, have him or her read the Task-Description Template. Or, perhaps even better, tell the person what you want, have him or her write it, and then rewrite it with him or her to fill in the details. Then have the person go over the questions in the template and make sure he or she understands the job in every way. Sure, it takes longer to get the job started. But it takes a lot less time to get it done.

If you give a person several jobs, make sure that the priority and due dates are clear.

If jobs, priorities, or due dates change, make sure that the worker understands and that the latest instructions are written down.

If we take these steps, we can delegate more and more work. Team members can become self-managed on larger and larger jobs. Then the whole team becomes more flexible. We solve more problems and everything runs better.

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Tool: Building a Team To-Do List

Building a Team To-Do List

This is an excellent way to do Work Breakdown Structuring. See Chapter 6 to learn more.

There is a very good reason to help team members build their to-do lists. With experience, a person can make a good list by himself or herself. But, until we’ve practiced it for quite a while, we tend to leave things out. Working in pairs, we can help each other. One person pictures the work he or she will do, while the other person asks questions and writes down the answers. This works well because the best way by far to make a good to-do list is through visualization—actually picturing the work. But it is very hard to visualize—a nonverbal, right-brained activity—and write—a verbal, leftbrained activity—at the same time. So, the person who will do the work visualizes and the other person thinks logically, asking questions and writing down the results.

Here is the best way to do this:

1.In advance, set up the to-do list with initial situation, milestones, and room for steps in between.

2.Set up some uninterrupted time.

3.Ask the person to picture doing his or her work.

4.Ask him or her to name one thing he or she will do.

5.For each step named, ask, “If you were starting today, could you do that right now?”

6.If he or she says, “Yes,” very clearly, write it at the top of the list. If he or she sounds uncertain, ask what he or she would do first. If he or she says, “No,” ask, “What else would you have to do first?”

7.Write down the steps he or she would do first and then the step named.

8.For any big step, ask, “How would you do that?” Then, indented under the big step, write the smaller steps he or she would do to do the big step.

9.Walk through each step from the beginning—the initial situation—to the goal—the milestone. Ask him or her if, doing all those steps, he or she would reach the goal and complete the job. Add anything else that either of you think should be done.

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Tool: Making Use of Expertise

Making Use of Expertise

Here we apply ideas from Chapters 10 and 11 to build a team that uses both our own staff and outside experts. Also see Chapter 21 for the story of how one small business owner does this really well.

Most people get locked into thinking that they have to figure everything out and do it themselves or they have to get someone else to do the job. That kind of thinking is bad for projects and bad for business. In reality, a little bit of the right expertise goes a long way to reducing project cost and preventing project disaster.

Projects are unique—they always contain something new. And the only way we can be confident that we know how to do something is if we’ve done it before, lots of times. So, on a project there will always be some things the team doesn’t know how to do. The most important thing to do in project human resources management is to identify those things early and close the gap.

Of course, on most projects, the work is familiar. It is similar to what we’ve done before. It’s just not quite the same. And it’s those little differences that will trip us up every time.

What can we do about that? Well, think of it this way. An expert is someone who knows his or her way around so well that those little differences don’t cause problems. He or she can see them ahead of time.

And there is always an expert available—always. We live in the information age. We complain about information overload. Make use of all that information. If you need to know something you don’t know, you can count on this: someone already knows it who probably has a book or a web site or will talk with you on the phone for free or for a small fee.

Find that expertise. Do it now, during planning. It’s a lot easier to find the information and close the gap now than in the middle of the project. That’s when you find that the expert you want just went on vacation and his or her book just went out of print.

I’m hoping you’ll take this advice. But many people won’t. Why not? In a word—ego. Most people are locked into thinking in one of two ways:

Some think, “I can’t do this; I have to hire someone expensive.” That’s the sign of a weak ego, a person not confident of being able to learn and grow and solve the problems.

Others think, “I have to do this all myself.” That may be a person who

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Tool: Making Use of Expertise (continued)

overrates himself or herself, thinking no one can do the job, or a defense for a weak ego that needs to prove something by going it alone.

Well, sorry to be blunt, but get over yourself. You and your team can do the job, and yet you’ll do it better—at lower cost and with lower risk of project failure—if you get the expert help you need early in the project.

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Tool: Preparing a Communications Plan

Preparing a Communications Plan

This tool will give you what you need to develop a communications plan, as suggested in Chapters 6 and 10.

1.Identify which project customers should be included in each gate review and which documents or components they need to approve.

2.Review the quality plan to define what constitutes a review of each document or component and ensure that all necessary inputs are available at the gate.

3.Plan to distribute all review documents at the opening of the gate review.

4.Schedule gate review meetings with team and customers.

5.Define all possible outputs of the gate review, including approval, minor and major rework requests, and calls for project cancellation.

6.Inform customers and technical staff of the gate review schedule, including educating them about the time that will be required of them.

7.Schedule the gate review, ensuring all information and people will be available.

8.Repeat steps 1-8 for each gate review and for final product delivery.

9.For final product delivery, add appropriate customer acceptance, project closure, and contract closeout activities.

Plan communications with peripheral stakeholders with these steps.

10.Identify peripheral stakeholders and the project deliverables that each peripheral stakeholder needs to review and approve.

11.For each stakeholder, prepare a schedule of when he or she will review documents, test components, and perform final tests on the components that concern him or her.

12.Contact each stakeholder and identify his or her preferred forms of oral and written communication.

13.Include time for review and testing and, for each of these reviews and tests, steps for all possible outcomes (approval, change requests, or rejection). For the final test, include final customer acceptance sign-off.

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