Remote project management and virtual teams is more about efficiency and productivity than going green. Read here why it's a great concept and get pointers on how to make it happen in your organization.​
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I have long been a proponent of virtual teams and remote project management. It has always worked well for me however it does not come easy or with out some adjustment period.

At first it was easy to push remote project management and virtual teams under the guise of "green IT", "green project management", and "environmental sustainability." From what I've seen many of these types of catch phrase terms have gone the way of the the latest personal empowerment video or corporate continuous improvement program (remember those “centers of excellence”?). We are all aware things need to improve and we need to jointly step it up and do something about it or not...we don't need to be reminded daily by cardboard signs all over the workplace that aren't enforced and seemingly apply to no one. For the “green” aspect, some of us are going care and donate or be good to our environment are still going be Breck girls and spray the dog out their hair with aerosol hairspray everyday...

Are you on the same page as the project customer? Are their expectations of the project solution in line with what you are delivering? It's your responsibility as the project manager to ensure that this is the case.

​Too many times we head into a customer engagement with them expecting one thing and we start to deliver something different. Whether it is the result of miscommunication, not reading emails and documents all the way through, or negotiations done with blinders on it doesn't matter...it's still a bad place to be.

It's hard to explain, but I see it all the time and even run into it myself with clients. They say they understood one thing, but when we go back and check emails and invoices they can see that it was clearly spelled out differently for them. Now I better understand why my wife sometimes gets mad at me...we often hear what we want to hear or interpret things the way we assume they will go...even if that is not what we are reading right in front of us...

There are many different formats and requirements for for status reports in project and program management.

It is always a balance between providing relevant data to make informed decisions without becoming a time consuming bureaucratic task for busy project and program managers.

An additional challenge is how to ensure quality status reporting across a set of projects with different project managers is a successful communication medium.​

Although there are now a number of very good project reporting tools that can facilitate this task, many organizations are still using Excel or PowerPoint slide for project reporting purposes.

​Approving and selecting the right projects can be a difficult task, so much so that you might not have a formal project request management process in your organization.

If you are lacking a process based around this element of project management, it's important that you develop one. It will ensure the right projects are chosen and approved.

But, how do you start managing project requests?

I'm not sure I've ever managed a project that was smooth and had everything going as expected throughout the engagement. I'm pretty sure I can safely say that has never happened to me so far. But I can keep hoping...there's always tomorrow.

However, managing a project and team through great uncertainty – what I'm referring to here – is something much different than just running into the unknown from time to time where you're faced with making some tough decisions. No, managing through uncertainty – as I mean it here – is more like traveling through the Bermuda Triangle in a fog in some nightmare in a dark corner of your mind. Does that sound eerie enough?

I have heard this quote or something similar before... Bad ideas sometimes win because of the skills of the communicator. So true. Loud wins. Crazy sometimes wins. Obnoxious wins far too often. And manipulators sometimes win because they are very good at it. What do they all have in common? The ability to be loud. And that can be meant figuratively. So, more accurately, the ability to be heard above the others. Think of it like voting and you pick a candidate simply because you remember seeing their name often on those stupid little signs in people's yards. It should probably be the reason not to vote for them, but they are hoping the reverse is true...and it often is.

​Think of it almost as a different take on “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” only from a different angle. And a more dangerous angle. Why? Because the squeaky wheel one is the complainer. Everyone knows who that is and they appease them by giving them what they want. Sometimes that’s one of my two year olds. Sometimes that was our oldest daughter, but she's married now. Always that was one of our lead developers at my first employer. But the ‘bad ideas’ one…that’s way more dangerous because that could be anyone on any project team in the history of project management or any project manager in the history of project management offices or….well, you get the picture...

Consider this...a project is temporary, has unique goals to meet, and many different tasks to manage, delegate and coordinate.  Sometimes those tasks run across functional departments and across very diverse organizations, and hopefully have critical impact on a business, organization, industry or customer…depending on the project, of course.

​Globally, companies invest billions of dollars annually on IT solutions. In addition, many organizations offer visionary solutions that all call for knowledgeable project managers to plan, execute, control, and end projects ahead of any competition. Sadly, many of these projects come in behind schedule and over budget, and fail. Much of our project management lives are spent dealing with these unsettling projects and working to get them back on schedule, both within budget and within specification. Many projects are canceled before they are ever completed and many exceed their original estimates. The financial costs of these \failures and overruns are just the tip of the iceberg. The path of destruction left behind from these projects is devastated budgets, unhappy customers, and sometimes ruined project management careers...

Sometimes you do everything in your power and the project still can't be saved.  It may not even have anything to do with anything you or your team did or failed to do right.  Projects can go south for reasons outside of our control. You can follow every PM standard, practice and guideline.  You can produce status reports and project plans that should be placed on some sort of ‘wall of fame’ somewhere.  But no matter what you do, the project is doomed to fail – or at least not truly succeed.  This can be, of course, for any one of a number of reasons.  Some common ones are:

• Funding pulled
• Key staff lost to a more critical project
• Customer direction changed mid-stream due to their own internal issues or changes
• Your own management decided not to pursue this work any further (rare, but it does happen)
• And many, many more…

Projects come in all shapes and sizes. Some are worth millions, some have budgets of thousands. I'd like to say that all projects are created equal and all are equally important. While that may be true of people, it is not true of projects.

Let's consider a few areas where project managers can run into trouble when managing smaller projects – areas that may not be as critical or troublesome on higher profile, higher dollar projects.

Cutting corners. With smaller projects can often come a tendency to want to cut corners. After all, there's a small budget. And when the budget is very small, any deviation can cause a more drastic “miss” in terms of profitability versus the original plan. Leaving out some of those “perceived” non-essentials from the planning sessions can be very tempting. Early planning documents? Why do we need them? Well, you may not, but is that a chance you really think you should be taking? Spend less time on some early planning efforts, if it makes sense, but don't skip them all together. No project ever failed because the project manager, team and customer took time to plan. Many have failed because it was skipped.

Lax budget management. With the small budget comes less need to watch over it...right? Wrong. The margin for error actually becomes greater, not smaller. If something happens and you get hit with a $5,000 consulting fee on a $50,000 project, that's a much bigger deal than if you get hit with a $10,000 consulting fee on a $1,000,000 project. The smaller budget may have just lost half of its planned profit margin in that one consultant charge. The bigger project budget just experienced an annoying charge...not a showstopper.

Failing to simplify the processes. Not all projects are created equal, of course. And there definitely can be a case made – often should be a case made – for simplifying the process for projects that are considerably shorter and with smaller budgets (have a look at this process in The Six-Step Guide to Practical Project Management). In fact, some organizations have scalable methodologies calling for some planning processes and documents to be trimmed down or omitted based on the budget size, etc. That said, there are project managers who – when making judgement calls on such scaling – feel it is necessary to include all formal processes...even for the smallest of projects. When that happens, they can run the risk of going over budget and over time, but not being flexible based on the project size.

Letting resources get away from you. Resources that are assigned to the project manager as his project team members are often working several projects at once. When they are assigned to a small project, that project often is seen as less critical than higher value and higher visibility projects. And if there are any gaps between resource assignments on the project, a resource can easily be lost from the project if he or she leaves to work on a higher priority project during those gaps, and that higher priority project experiences some issues. It happens all the time. The best thing the project manager can do is minimize any resource task gaps or down time...keeping the resource as engaged as possible for as long as he has him assigned to the project. Because the flip side to that may be losing the resource for good and needing to go through the costly process of onboarding a replacement.

Summary

Small projects happen all the time. They are important, but will usually have to bow to the needs of the higher-profile big projects. You can cut some corners, but you need to do it carefully, and you should think about adopting a simpler process (like this one). And budget management almost becomes a bigger issue than it is on large dollar projects due to the potential to lose all profitability trying to fix one issue.

What are your tips for managing smaller projects? What do you consider some problem areas that project managers can run into when managing projects that are smaller in size and value?