A Girl’s Guide to Project Management

There’s only one thing worse than being told bad news, and that is being told about bad news late.  When a programme is failing, you should define the problem and potential solutions, and alert stakeholders at the first sign of trouble, according to LeRoy Ward, Executive VP at ESI.

I attended ‘Managing and Saving Programmes in a Changing World’, an audio/Webex conference with Ward recently.  Last week I wrote about the first half of the presentation, managing change programmes.  This is what Ward had to say about recovering troubled programmes.

Ward started off by explaining what a ‘troubled programme’ is.  There are several things that can go wrong in programme management:

• Business case deterioration:  the programme started off with a good business case but it no longer stacks up.
• Stakeholder evolution:  people change and new leaders at the top change the direction of the programme.
• Technical failure:  this creates a programme integration risk as what you are building might not sit in the organisation’s architecture any longer.
• Resource collapse:  either in the form of strikes or a key resource leaving.

So what can you do?

Don’t focus on wrong issue.  The wrong issue is how you can catch up and finish on time. The right issue is how do you finish at all and gain something realistic benefit.

You need to regain control.  ‘Control’ is the scope, dates and roles on the programme which have been lost in through planning or execution in the first place.  The way out of this is to make big, targeted changes quickly.

This conflicts with the advice Scott Berkun gives in his book Making Things Happen.  He warns that if you make large changes you push the project off course and it can take a while before you see what you have done.  Then you over-correct by making another big change and you just weave from one crisis to another because you can’t keep your project on course.  So be careful about making big changes on a project that isn’t going that far wrong.

Ward identified several problems faced by failing programmes:

• Completing an accurate assessment of programme problems is difficult for the programme management team because they lack objectivity.  Using an outside assessment team creates objectivity.  Bring in technical specialists as required.
• There will be pressure from stakeholders to commit to a new schedule.  Measuring progress in small steps will help tremendously.
• It takes time to determine the work remaining.  Data about how far off the original estimates were is needed to make accurate forecasts.
• You need to sustain progress while planning recovery.  Additional temporary resources will be needed to do this.  The programme manager should direct the current workflow plus do all the work required to make progress with the recovery – no easy task!

Ward cautioned against declaring victory too soon.  Sustained control is necessary to prove that something has been turned around.  It takes teamwork to turn a programme around and then keep it on track.

Next week I’ll let you in on the 5 steps to recovering a troubled programme.

This month in the Office Goddess series, I’m talking about training.

I meet a lot of dynamic, switched on women doing what I do. After all, most people who attend conferences and networking events, or who get in touch with me through this blog, are people who are already aware that it takes a bit of effort to get on. Sometimes though, I meet people who forlornly say that they would be more successful/confident/financially secure/[insert any other word here] if only their company would pay for them to go on a training course.

Training courses are great – I should know, I’ve been on plenty over the years. Training courses paid for by someone else are even better. Of course, it depends on the quality of the training company and the efficacy of the trainer, but if you pick well you can get a lot out of a training course.

The problem with training courses is that they are just that – courses. You sit in a classroom, learn stuff, go back to the office and do things the way you always have. It takes a serious degree of action planning at the end of the course, follow up with your manager and personal commitment to make training course lessons really stick. So while training courses are good, they aren’t the only way you can learn things.

Frankly, that’s just as well. Companies are cutting back on courses. I can tell that because I get more marketing emails from desperate training providers now than I ever did, and not because I have asked to go on their mailing lists. Training providers are struggling and companies are investing their money on things other than sending their employees on courses. All this adds up to the fact that if you are in the ‘if only I could go on a course’ school of thought then you’re unlikely to get lucky.

However, training is not all about training courses. There are plenty of other ways of learning things if your company is cutting back but you know you have areas that you want to develop. How about:

Workshadowing: want to work in Marketing? Call someone up and ask to follow them around for the day. You might have to make a couple of calls before you find someone and a convenient time, because everyone’s busy. Frame it as if you really want to find out more about what they do – which, of course, you do. People are generally flattered that you’re interested. (As an aside, I learned this lesson during the summer holidays one year temping at a management college. One of my tasks was to help the Research department by ringing up people and asking if they wouldn’t mind speaking at a conference the college was organising. I dreaded each cold call, but every single person said yes.)

Mentoring: have you got a mentor? If not, get one. It’s free and it would be a cold manager who wouldn’t support this idea. If you already have a mentor, try mentoring someone else. It’ll help develop all kinds of skills and will introduce you to some other people.

Industry press: do you even read your industry press? And not just PM Today in paper format and PM Forum online. Put project management aside and read the press related to your company’s main focus: insurance, law, construction, whatever. If you aren’t a member of your professional body (like the Chartered Insurance Institute or the CIPD etc) then find someone who is and get them to donate you their society magazine once they are done with it. You can pick up a stack of information by reading – print or online. Many online publications have forums, and you can get training and development hints from the experts who haunt those virtual coffee rooms.

And if those ideas don’t take your fancy, try these:

• Online courses/workshops
• Industry webinars or virtual conferences (like PMXPO)
• In-house run training events – talk to your HR department
• Networking events and conferences: broaden your horizons by listening to expert speakers
• Volunteering: want more experience in leadership? Then join a club/sports team where you can practise leading!
• Trial and error: get a copy of the software you want to learn, and sit down with the manual and learn it
• Colleagues: ask a more senior colleague if you can go to a meeting with them so you can see how they do things
• Feedback: you might not be as bad at something as you think; ask people how they see you

See? You do need to keep continually develop and keep your skills up, but you don’t need an expensive residential course to do it. Anyone got any other ideas? I’d be interested to hear them.

I joined in with Managing and Saving Programmes in a Changing World, an audio/Webex conference with LeRoy Ward, Executive VP at ESI, recently.

I couldn’t see who else was on the call (apart from the presenters) and I joined a bit late, so I felt sorry for them that they had started the presentation with no one listening to it.  At the end of the call there were several questions from other people so I gather that was just a participant privacy setting rather than a reflection on the fact that nobody wanted to learn about programme management.

It wasn’t radical – the ESI approach to managing programmes in a changing world is obviously to be great at the basics – but it was a good revision session and a reminder of the differences between projects and programmes.

The presentation was in two parts: managing programmes and the complexities of this, and saving a troubled programme.  This post looks at the first half of the presentation: managing programmes.

Sometimes managing with one sponsor is difficult enough.  However, multi-person sponsorship is more common than having a single sponsor in programme management, especially in large and complex programmes.  Ward highlighted some issues with programme sponsorship:

• The sponsor needs broader knowledge of the projects and business areas impacted by the programme.
• The programme requires more resources so the sponsor needs access to those resources in order to secure them for you.
• Multiple sponsorship means sponsors from different business areas and this can cause conflicts.

Ideally, a programme sponsor should be someone with a sound knowledge of business processes, able to effectively manage resources and help with securing and managing the financials.

In addition to a programme sponsor and a programme manager, the programme management team could include a change manager, a business analyst, a risk manager and a financial manager.

Part of effective programme management is effective change management.  Change management is all about conveying the need for change with a compelling vision of the ‘to be’ state.  Key to this is understanding the environment and culture so you can phrase the messages appropriately.

Ward suggested applying a regular ‘learning milestone’ by which I think he meant reviewing progress to date, making any tweaks and then shifting your approach to do things better.  And I would also add checking to see if the change you are making is sticking.

Ward also talked about choosing key programme team members wisely – just because someone thinks they understand change management doesn’t mean they do.  Apparently change management is a professional discipline in its own right.  I don’t dispute that, but I would love to be on a programme where I could employ a professional change manager plus all those other people to do risk, finances and analysis as full-time jobs.  In my experience it is much more likely for people to muck in and do what needs to be done to reach the end goal without having fancy job titles that delineate their roles from that of other people.

Ward said that to build the full commitment of the organisation to the change you need to acknowledge the impact of it on people.  He said that you need to give people empathy, not sympathy.  People want to be listened to more than they want to be talked at.  I have held ‘Town Hall’ style meetings before, specifically for groups of new recruits, but they are time consuming.  Still, all stakeholder management and project politics is time consuming, but it needs to be done to oil the wheels.

Next week I’ll fill you in on how a programme starts to fail and the main problems faced by teams trying to turn around troubled programmes.  After that you’ll get to read Ward’s 5 steps for recovering troubled programmes.

Please be patient with the video: it takes a while to load.  More notes from the launch event will be here in the days that follow, and I’ll also be covering the differences between the versions.

PRINCE2:2009 has it’s official launch tomorrow, so for those of you who aren’t clued up on what it is and why it’s changing, this will help.  Watch this space for feedback on the launch!

This is the last part in the Making Projects Work video debate series that has been running this week.  It’s short enough to watch during your tea break and the speakers talk about embedding change, better ways to do lessons learned and continuous improvement.

This is the third part in the Making Projects Work video debate series.  It’s a really short video, and it looks at whether or not we are making it too difficult for ourselves!

The final video will appear here tomorrow.

This is part two in the Making Projects Work video debate, which talks about teams and people.  Part one was yesterday, and there next bit will be here tomorrow!

This is part one of a video series on making projects work, looking specifically at the impact of change and how that contributes to the perceptions of project failure.

The talking heads are BCS Managing Editor Brian Runciman  and three CEOs: David Hicks of Radtac, the lovely Melanie Franklin of Maven Training and Paul Major of Programme Framework.

Watch part two tomorrow!

Are you still not feeling like an Office Goddess, despite all the tips so far this year?  This event will have you feeling like work is a breeze and you’ll be ready to hit the town.

And it’s in aid of Refuge, so you can feel all worthy at the same time!  What’s not to love?

It’s organised by the WeAreTheCity team: read the interview with Vanessa here and read about one of their other fab events here.  Check out the WeAreTheCity website for more info and to get your ticket.