I’m willing to wager that most of us have experienced rapid growth in a company we’ve worked for.  During stages of rapid growth, we may feel we’re pulled in different directions or we have too many projects. And then, we feel overwhelmed and unable to succeed in our role which often leads us to look for solutions.

Undoubtedly, our quest for solutions brings us to a common corporate buzzword that seems to solve our problems: Project Manager. A project manager seems like a superhero that can save us from our overwhelming project work. Why wouldn’t we be excited? This person has an impressive role description with skills we feel we’re missing. Skills like:

• Team organization
• Create and maintain the scope of work for our projects
• Breakdown overwhelming project work into manageable pieces
• Create a timeline and identify the critical path
• Balance team members’ work load
• Complete projects on time, at or under budget and at the required quality level

Now, we get very excited because this must be the solution.  We look for the perfect person with enough experience and a successful project management track record like we read about. Let’s hire a project manager and they’re going to help us turn things around!

Okay, Start Managing Projects!

We find and hire that project manager with all the right experience who seems to fit our culture. Now we feel confident our new team member will help us not feel overwhelmed. And so, they jump right in to manage our projects.

They immediately start setting up all of the structure they used at their last company. They call meetings to start getting status updates on our projects and in those meetings, they use all of those tools, techniques, and methods we read that a Project Manager uses.

Almost certainly, our Project Manager is at “Expert” level in managing projects, and our team is currently at “just get things done” level. What is our project manager even saying? Things like, schedule variance, cost performance index, a WBS, or even task duration.  

Our team just completed work in the early days and didn’t use any technical terms or jargon. But now our Project Manager is trying to implement five-plus years of project management experience in a matter of weeks, all the while, our team’s anxiety level goes through the roof. We have to plan work now and not just complete it.

Wait, Why Does it Seem Like it’s Getting Worse?

Hiring a project manager was supposed to be an immediate solution to feeling overwhelmed. Now, we have to quickly learn five-plus years of project management experience and still produce our regular work.

Since we don’t have time to learn new things, we end up putting Band-Aids on our current systems. A common Band-Aid is just hiring more team members to do the extra work. When those team members start, we do our best to relay the tribal knowledge we’ve learned over the years, to teach them the Excel tracking systems we use, and to lead them successfully through our projects. 

Meanwhile, our project manager is still trying to track projects using the project management software and structure they built when they first started at our company. There seem to be two or more sources of critical project information, and if we remember the Gossip game from childhood, huge miscommunications are inevitable.

Maybe a Project Manager Wasn’t a Good Idea….

We may start to ask ourselves, “Why does it seem like a Project Manager isn’t working out for us? Project managers worked for other companies; why are we not seeing the same results?  In addition, did we hire the wrong Project Manager who really can’t do the job we thought was the solution?  Perhaps a project manager doesn’t fit our culture or business model. Maybe we need to go back to the way things were and just keep hiring more team members.”

This scenario may sound familiar and the reason I know it so well is because I’ve experienced it! I’ve worked in three different industries ranging from construction to consumer goods, but all three had similar stories.

These companies were amazing and growing rapidly because they were successful, but they came to a crossroads. So they hired a project manager to improve work flow. They were expecting a project manager to produce results right away as well.

The problem is that a project manager alone is not the best or the quickest way to start moving a company from an early growth stage to the next one. Primarily because a project manager plans future work which puts them at odds with a culture of just getting work done now (often referred to as firefighting tasks).

Therefore, the current culture influences a project manager to manage projects as the culture is now, not what we need it to be.  They often get the response, “That’s not how we do it here.” And that is precisely the point. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll only get what we’ve always gotten.

Let’s go Back to the Drawing Board

Feeling overwhelmed with our projects and tasks was why we hired a project manager in the first place. Now we feel even more overwhelmed because hiring a project manager wasn’t a direct solution and just seemed to complicate work flow. But it’s important to go back to the drawing board to understand why hiring a project manager alone wasn’t enough.

A project manager with experience brings with them a level of excellence, usually in a more established project management culture.  The project manager is expecting a team to perform at whatever level of excellence they came from, but our current team doesn’t have that understanding or skill yet.

In my experience, going back to the drawing board has shown me how important it is to set up a project management culture driven by habit. Furthermore, the necessary skills and project management understanding for our team will be established through a cultural shift.

Lesson Learned, We Need a Culture Shift

Each company has a feel or personality of what it’s like to work there. That personality is the company culture and that culture is driven by the behaviors of everyone who works there. If project management wasn’t a part of the culture, it likely won’t be a part of team behaviors either. And so, if we want a culture shift, we have to focus on new project management behaviors.

A cultural shift sets up a structure of roles and responsibilities, proper definition of work, team member accountability matrices, and performance standards for success.  As a result, every team member with a role in the project management culture holds themselves to that same cultural standard. This applies to the entire team continuum, from interns, all the way to corporate executives.

As this culture develops, team members begin to take on roles that match their skills and passion. Roles help set up a foundation that a project manager needs to guide teams the way we read about. Undoubtedly, It becomes an investment in a project management culture. The return on investment is getting our products to market faster and with better quality.

At the point where every team member understands their role and how important they are, work begins to flow cohesively. Team members begin to feel confident with themselves and with their teammates because work comes together.

Practice New Habits Leads to Mastery

We started SP Anderson Tech as an agency focused on project management. We designed our agency to help you create a project management office and foundation that focuses on every project team member as an individual first. Then, once team members understand their roles and importance on the team, we can help the team perform together without the need for heavy task management.

We help you create a project management office based on leadership and growth. Our team does this by setting up the cultural standards in four basic areas we outline in our article How to Establish a Simple Project Management System.

We will create your custom Project Management Office plan as our service deliverable. From there, we will collaborate with you and your team to help build new habits to support your plan. Habit drives every culture, so we’ll help you untangle old habits and straighten out new ones.

We will help you lead your company through this process and realize the return on your project management investment. We look forward to collaborating with you! Visit us on our contact page to get started.

The post Why Start SP-Anderson Tech; A Project Management Agency? appeared first on SP Anderson Tech.

Since we’ve started managing projects, we’ve seen the most project success when teams establish a project management foundation which includes both team leadership and process management. Taking what has worked from those teams, we’ve designed a simple project management foundation to reduce project variability and complication.

When a project management foundation creates predictability and a clear project path, our team members are free to focus on their expertise.  This allows the Project Manager to lead the team through a project more dynamically.  The foundation also forges a connection between the work team members do and the task management system.  Teams create habits to know what they are doing and how their work affects other team members within the project as a whole.

We believe in establishing processes to support habits in order to free our minds to create better products and services.  Process automation, wherever possible, will augment habit formation and increase project success rates.   We believe project leadership depends on being able to record what the project management foundation is, to train and establish habits, and to adapt as processes and environments change.

Project Leadership unlocks the true creativity and potential of the people who make a project successful, while Project Management shores up the high quality systems, processes, and consistency needed in today’s competitive environment.

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Project Managers love to use their tools and techniques, and Team Members just want to get their function, or piece of the project, completed.  Team Members often comment that they don’t like to use any project management software because it takes too much time to keep up to date.

Adding some complexity to the Project Manager side of the gap, project management software is far too feature-rich and complicated to understand unless that’s what you do all day as a Project Manager.  Since they understand most of the features and how they can benefit managing a project, Project Managers try to use all of them.  When there’s such a selection of features, even two Project Managers within the same department may use a project management software just a little bit differently.  That makes reporting to management teams difficult.

Also looking at the Team Member side of the gap, we start to realize the project management systems and software are quite old and still look and feel like old spreadsheets in many cases.  Those older formats make it difficult to compete for a Team Member’s attention because of all the advances in software and apps.  Team Members seem to consistently say project management software feels clunky or not very user-friendly.  I believe that from the team member’s point of view, it does take more time than it should to enter information into the software because it’s not simple, feature specific, or intuitive.

I thought about this problem and realized it’s similar to how I use a computer.  I don’t fully understand how a computer is built at the hardware or software level, but I do expect it to work so I can get my work done.  So then I started to model how to establish a project management system in a similar way by having all of the complicated tools and features running in the back end, and focusing on the team member’s user experience in the front end.  I believe establishing a simple project management system will narrow the gap, so let’s take a look at what the front end and the back end should look like.

The Front End:

The team is the focus and the project is the reason the team exists, not the other way around.  Without a team being effective to get the work done, it really doesn’t matter how powerful the tool is.  Team members need to feel like the tool they use is at least somewhat modern and easy to add updates, track tasks and give them the data they’re looking for.  Getting into the details of the front end of a system, it must be something like this:

• Simple
• Direct
• Easy to use and habit forming
• Accurate
• Specific to the user
• Delivers the content they’re looking for as quickly and plainly as possible

The Back End:

The back end is where all of those goals come to life.  The proverbial tip of the iceberg is the front end, and in cliché terms, the back end is the 80% under the water.  There are four elements that I believe are the most important when starting a project management system.  These foundational elements support the structure the user experiences and are outlined as follows:

• Change management system.
• Outline of project management principles to use in the system.
• Documentation retention system.
• Outline of project processes to complete work. 

Each one of these pieces of the front end and back end are important when setting up a simple project management system.  Some of these things are based on my experience to this point, and others are based on research I’ve recently done.  I plan to get into more details and focus on why I feel these are the most important pieces of a simple project management system.  In fact, I’m working on a project currently doing exactly what I’ve outlined here; how to establish a simple project management system.  I’m excited to be working on this project so we can narrow the gap between Project Managers and Team Members and be able to write about it along the way.

More in depth articles will branch out from this outline article getting into more details on each project management element and explain my experiences as we move through this process.  Let’s get started on How to Establish a Simple Project Management System!

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In order to build that feeling into the product, we also have to have a high quality design and development process.  If our teams can feel like they have a high quality design and development process, the products they develop will also carry that feeling of high quality.  Building a solid foundation allows our project teams to feel free to manage projects successfully and influences a positive emotional response for them to develop the high quality products of tomorrow.

A high quality design and development process is often governed by a project management system.  We have to put in the effort at becoming experts at the basics of project management if we want to develop a high quality design and development process. Let’s review four basic elements of a project—scope of work, time management, cost estimates and defining the desired grade of quality.

When I think about project management, I tend to draw similarities to sporting events. In this case, when we think about how a running race is set up, we’ll see the basic elements of a project.  Think about how we plan a race. We need to know how long the race will be, the route it will take and quite importantly, where the finish line will be.  We may need to know where the check points will be, or aid stations so we can make sure the racers are doing well along the way.  All of these details are brought together to create a collection of project parameters.

A collection of project parameters is generally called a Scope of Work.  A scope of work sets the limits of our project in some fundamental ways.  The scope of work may change throughout the project, but the key here is to keep the scope of work up-to-date when changes happen.  This will become very important as more people are involved in our projects.  Let’s put the scope of work down on a single sheet of paper called the One Page Plan as well as the rest of our project fundamentals that we will cover next.

With the scope of work capturing the general parameters and outputs of a project, we now need to get more detailed to define tasks.  Continuing with our running race analogy, we want to know more specific details like what the date of the race will be, when registration will close and categories for the racers as well as many others.  These detailed tasks define action that need to be taken to complete each one of the more broad project scope of work items.

Project tasks also include time estimates of actual work to complete each task as well as the overall task duration.  There are whole industries and software dedicated to time management, but once again, we will keep it simple and add these time estimates to our One Page Plan.  Estimate the number of hours it will take to complete the task, then estimate over how many days the work can be done. For example, we might estimate that a 4 hour task (task hours) will be completed over the next 4 days (task duration).

Most things in life cost money and our project requires us to identify and estimate these items.  Even the entry fee for our running race is a representation of estimating costs.  We understand how much time it will take from our time-estimating step, and we know the dollar amount of what an hour of our time costs, so we multiply the time estimates with the dollar amount per hour to get our labor cost for our project.

Labor costs are not the only costs of a project so we also need to look at materials and supplies or any other directly related cost of a project and add that to our overall project costs.  Projects never go the way we think, so we need to add a bit more money to the project to make sure we don’t run out of money.  Plan on about 10 to 15 percent of our cost estimates to add to the total project costs as a contingency.  With cost estimates complete, let’s add them to the One Page Plan as well.

Scope of work, Time, and Cost are three main components of a project, but the final project component may be the most important; at least to the end customer.  Customers mostly care about whether the product influences them to feel like they need it, and that feeling influences them to take action with their wallets.  For our running race, it may be having a course well-marked out, an easy registration process or a large triumphant finish line with music cheering you on toward the end of the race.  This level of detail and consistency is defined as the Grade of Quality we intend to assure our product will have.

“What is the acceptable workmanship of the project outputs so that we can meet or exceed the scope of work parameters?,” is a perfect question to ask when deciding on a grade of quality.  As an example, if we are making a pen and we choose a mid-level grade of quality like the brand Parker, we wouldn’t accept our output if it only had the quality of a low-level grade BIC pen.  This grade of quality is also important to establish up front so when project changes happen, we have a standard to measure the changes against to know whether we should accept the changes or not.  To follow suit with the other basic project elements, add the quality grade we choose to the One Page Plan.

At the end of this planning session, we are looking for ways to take action as soon as possible.  It’s similar to someone signing up for a running race far in advance, but they aren’t yet ready, so they can take action and start training.  Taking action as soon as possible is also one of the biggest lessons I have learned in my career so far.  Planning enough to have a direction to take action gives us the best chance of discovering if our product is high quality and strikes the correct feeling.  Iterating and trying things will produce a better result than planning every detail and not taking iterative action.

We should start a project and take action as soon as we feel like we know where we’re going, but that stretches us just a bit to grow.  Focusing on the 20% of activities that affect 80% of the results  at the start of a project will get the best results as we take action.  The final details will fill in when the major activities are complete.

At a very basic level, we just defined a project with these elements:

Project Scope of Work (Scope of Work)

Task Time Estimates (Time)

Project Cost Estimates (Cost)

Deliverable Quality Standards (Quality)

Now is the point where we take action and start running the race.  Think about these elements and what feels right to manage during a project.  The next time you start a project, write down the project parameters as simply as you can on a One Page Plan, and keep them up to date as things change.  Feel free to manage your projects instead of how so many of us have felt before; the projects are managing us!  Let’s feel that positive emotional response in the project management process, so our project outputs having that certain feeling of a high quality product.

The post How to: Feel Free While Managing Projects appeared first on SP Anderson Tech.

I think back to where my foundation came from and I’ve got my parents to thank for the blueprints.  I remember so many evenings or Saturdays that I could hear my friends playing down the street, but I was working outside on a project with my Dad and siblings.  I didn’t know it or appreciate it, but I was being taught to work on something long term and sacrifice what I wanted right now for the investment and payout for what would come later.  Even grater was finally learning that sometimes you’ll have to put more energy and time into something to gain experience and practice than you would receive as reward in the short term.  That same philosophy now translates into investing in my abilities as well as helping friends and family with their projects.

As children, our foundations are so small and we need to be taught everything.  Gradually, we grow our foundations from childhood into what will support us later in life and with always growing our abilities and foundation, we open capacity for something new.  I believe that our life foundation is always expendable with the right attitude and determination for life long learning.  Thank you Mom and Dad (and all of my family) for helping instill that desire for learning to increase my foundation and capacity!

Our goal with SP-AndersonTech is to explain some of these foundational pieces that go along with our projects and tech ideas that we are working on because I find it interesting knowing the “how” sometimes just as much as the “what” we create.  Just as in childhood and starting out with a small foundation, we are starting to build this website’s foundation.  Small at first, but each idea or each project, we want to grow and become an organization that can support a much greater cause.  Now, on to the good stuff.

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