Your organization is thinking of implementing a project management infrastructure. Till now, you've gotten by on managing “projects” on the fly -- grabbing some info off the Internet to help those who have been forced into managing these one-off and mainly internal projects succeed -- or at least not fail miserably.

Now, as you take on more initiatives and your company is expanding, you're becoming more technical, possibly incorporating work you do for outside clients into projects, you begin to see a need for greater structure. Consistent delivery is likely to bring repeat successes, increased customer satisfaction, and as a result, greater, faster company growth. In short, you see a need to create structure and formality so that your staff can succeed at delivering on an ongoing basis.

Making good decisions is hard enough already. Injecting biases and too many assumptions can make them even harder, or leave you with outcomes of decisions that were made contradictory to the best interests of the project and/or customer.
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I'm tired of people making decisions that don't make sense. Or people making subjective decisions based on a poor understanding of the situation. Or a less than thoughtful interpretation of the situation. Or even worse, their own “reality” or assumption of “what happens next” interpretation of the situation.

Project management isn't easy...no question about it. Every project is different. Every project customer and team is different. No two situations are exactly the same. Experienced project managers basically know this...but this list of five things you may not know about managing projects may help some of you and newbies may find it most beneficial.
There's logic, and then there's reality. You may know some of these, but I guarantee you that at least a few newbies will learn something they may not know about project management. Here's my list...

It's a given that your stakeholders are key to your project's success. Your stakeholders include everyone with a vested interest in your project's success.

That list is going to include the decision makers, your team and anyone else in the organization who stands to benefit from or be affected by the project you are working on and the processes that it will implement or change.

As the Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management says: “It’s a chance to benefit from the collective knowledge of your organisation in the one session.”

Plan out the objectives. Brainstorming sessions can be random enough without a poorly planned meeting making it further chaotic. Know what you want and need to accomplish. If you don't go into the meeting or brainstorming session with clear objectives, how can you possibly hope that the session will be productive?

Focus on each stakeholders' area of expertise. Certainly most stakeholder input is helpful during brainstorming sessions. But when you have certain stakeholders offering information or ideas that fall far outside their individual area of expertise, your brainstorming meeting is going to suffer from time wasting discussions and potentially bad information being used to make important project decisions.

Put out an advanced agenda. Productivity starts with being well-informed and prepared to contribute. The best way that you can ensure your stakeholders are coming to your project meetings and brainstorming sessions prepared and ready to participate is to let them know what the topics are and what the expectations will be for the meeting. Knowing what the plan and objectives are help them come to the table with contributions in hand – thus eliminating a lot of chin rubbing and head scratching during the meeting as they are seeing the expectations of them for the first time. Don't let that be the case at your meeting – expect them to come prepared and make that possible by giving them information about the meeting up front.

Stick to the timeframe and schedule. Want the most productivity out of your stakeholders during project meetings and brainstorming sessions? Want to ensure that they are there in their seats for such sessions when you need them to be? One of the best ways to ensure that is to have the reputation of that project manager who only calls necessary meetings AND sticks to the proposed timeframe and schedule for the meeting. If your proposed one hour meetings always last two or three hours then those busy stakeholders who have conflicts for the second and third hours are going to skip your meeting knowing they won't get out in time. Suddenly, you've lost a lot of brainstorming power and knowledge just because you aren't an organized or reliable meeting facilitator. Your poor reputation precedes you.

Keep the discussions on topic. We've all been to those meetings that go off topic several times leaving several people in the room frustrated and often causing you to run out of time and not accomplish everything on your agenda without running over time (see above). . . which I strongly advise against doing. In order to avoid that, you will need to be a strong facilitator who keeps attendees focused on the meeting/brainstorming session agenda and objectives so you can get the information disseminated and the decisions made that need to be made.

Take good notes and follow up. Finally, you must ensure that everyone leaves with the same understanding and on the same page. How? Well, you can ask at the end if there are any questions and then follow-up with a high-level summary of what was decided and/or accomplished. Do this at an absolute minimum. However, I highly recommend a next step. Follow up the meeting by distributing your notes and ask for everyone's input or changes – if they have any – by noon the next day. Stress that it is imperative that all stakeholders be on the same page and have the same understanding and expectations. This follow-up should take care of that.

Summary

Brainstorming to come up with solutions to project issues can be extremely powerful and time-efficient ways to solve complex issues. This is especially true when you have a room full of people – key stakeholders – who have a strong vested interest in the success or failure of the project you are leading. It's a win-win. Still, the process must be handled logically and must be well planned out. Otherwise, it can just end up being a huge waste of everyone's time. The time of up to ten people doesn't come cheap and you could easily throw away a lot of money on a single meeting that accomplishes nothing.

Concerned that you may be out of the loop when you're working from your remote office? Try these five tips to help increase or maintain your relevance in the organization.
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Out of the loop? Hardly. If you're the project manager – the one in charge – you better not be. And, if you happen to be working in the role of a remote project manager, you probably feel like you need to go that extra mile to prove to those on-site individuals that you are fully on top of your game and as in control as is possible for these projects that can go crazy and chaotic on a moment's notice...

In the next installment of my “5 Reasons Why…” series, I will be taking a look at BrightWork, a SharePoint solution for project and portfolio management.

Flexibility is very important to me when I evaluate a project management solution. What I really like about BrightWork is that their “Start, Evolve” approach to project management makes it easy for organizations to get started quickly with project management, delivering immediate visibility and control, with the flexibility to mature their project management practices as the needs of a project or team change.
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Here are my five reasons you should definitely check out BrightWork:

• Best-practice project management templates
• Visibility and control across portfolios
• Simple and intuitive project management
• Streamlined project collaboration
• Continuous improvement of project management practices

Best-Practice Project Management Templates
BrightWork realizes that when deploying a project management solution, there are two things need to consider: 

• The amount of project management that the project needs to be successful
• The amount of project management that the team is capable of absorbing. 

As a result, their range of best-practice templates are designed to deliver project, portfolio and work management with varying amounts of structure. The spectrum of BrightWork templates helps organizations to get started quickly with the right amount of project management.

Visibility and Control Across Portfolios​
For senior executives, BrightWork provides visibility across the entire portfolio of projects – including project statuses, resource allocation, and new project requests.

BrightWork allows for any number project sites to roll up to portfolio dashboards that provide a summary of all the projects across the organization, with the ability to easily drill down into individual project sites for more information. These dashboards can also track the resource allocation across projects, ensuring that resources are not being over- or underutilized and that critical projects are being properly resourced.

Since the last time I reviewed BrightWork, they have added the Project Request Manager template. The new template helps manage demand for new projects and ensure that approved projects are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.

Simple and Intuitive Project Management
Selecting from the range of project management templates, it is easy for project managers to kick-off a project the right way. Each template is set up to mimic project management processes, so they guide project managers through the stages of initiation, planning, managing and closing a project.

One of my favorite features in BrightWork is the Project Status Report, which allows project managers to capture a project snapshot at a given point in time.  Since most of the data is already captured in the project site in the form of KPIs and metrics, all the project manager needs to do is add some commentary about what is happening on the project. These status reports can be created in minutes and are immediately available in real-time for stakeholders.

Streamlined Project Collaboration
BrightWork also enables seamless collaboration for the entire project team. With BrightWork, each project gets its own collaborative site where all the project information is housed. Team members always know where to go to for project updates and to find their responsibilities.
Built into all templates are personalizable “My Work” Reports, which give team members a summary of their upcoming workload. Using the simple work management system, team members easily update the progress of their work or flag any of their work items as an issue that require attention.

Also, the fact that BrightWork is built on SharePoint means that it leverages all the collaborative features of the platform, like document management, social capabilities, newsfeeds, SharePoint Search, and everything else.

Continuous Improvement of Project Management Practices
Finally, BrightWork is designed to help your organization continuously improve its project management practices. As I mentioned above, you start quickly by selecting one of the out-of-the-box templates with the right amount of project management. Then using the simple configuration options, you can organize any site to match your own processes. Individual users can even configure reports for their own personal preferences and working style.

Not only is it easy to configure the templates, the Template Design Sync supports the “Start, Evolve” approach encouraged by BrightWork by allowing you to capture enhancements to a template and roll those changes out to active project sites.

Try it for Yourself!
If you would like to try BrightWork for yourself, I highly encourage you to start a Free 30-Day Trial where you can try out the entire BrightWork solution with a team of up to 5 people.