IT is responsible for the security of the data in the organization, right?  It’s their concern, their problem, their effort.  Someone else is taking care of it and, as project managers, we don’t need to worry about it on our individual projects…correct?  Ummm…that thinking can get us into big trouble – especially on sensitive projects, big dollar projects or highly visible projects. 

As employees of an organization, we generally assume that the data we are working with is being appropriately handled within the IT and security groups and is as secure or non-secure as it actually should be.  I can say that during my application developer and tech lead days I didn’t worry much about the data.  Well, I did to some degree, mostly because I was working on a government contract with sensitive student financial aid information, but I already had top level government security clearance and I’d already been cleared by the FBI who had contacted just about everyone I knew right up to my grandma.  So, naturally, I figured I had done what I needed to do.  We have that secure feeling of “I’m an employee and if something happens I’ve been fingerprinted and passed my background check so the liability will be on my company.”  At least I felt that way and so did pretty much everyone else on the project.

Project management as a profession has been with us for years. Over those years, it has changed and adapted to fulfil the demand for products and services that deliver customer value.

These six trends keep the profession alive and well. They shape the project management profession today and are likely to continue shaping it in the foreseeable future.

It comes up…project change orders, small development efforts, small changes you want to make to a requirement or shifting a phase around because it makes sense for the project and the solution.  But what happens when you struggle and can’t get anyone to give you an estimate.  I always like to estimate the work myself first – just to make sure I’m in the ballpark and that my developers aren’t trying to pull a fast one on me.  But I’m usually not going to take a big change order to the customer without good input from a project team member or other subject matter expert (SME).

What happens when no one wants to give the project manager an estimate?  Have you ever had this happen?  If you have, then you know the frustration.  Maybe everyone is busy, maybe no one wants to commit to something in writing, or maybe there isn’t enough available information to give the estimator the confidence he needs in order to be able to provide a quality estimate.   People usually want to provide quality work and will shy away from providing less than quality work or information.

How much do we need our customer to be involved in the project management process? How much involvement do we want them to have as we are designing and developing their critical product that is due to roll-out to end users or the general public in twelve months from now?

In the back of every frustrated project managers mind is the answer, “Not at all!” Come on….don’t we all dream of the hands-off customer who tells us what they want and then leaves us alone to do our job for the next few months, only coming back into the picture to test or approve that product, signoff on the project, pay us and then let us move on to our next engagement? Wouldn’t that be so easy? Well, yes…but...

Micro-management is like a bad four-letter word.  At least to me it is.  I know there are managers out there who love it and live by it.  And there are workers out there that need it – including some very needy ones that may actually want it.  But as a general rule, most individuals do NOT like to be micro-managed.  I know I hate it and I’m pretty sure that - with the exception of maybe one or two resources that I’ve had on projects or as direct reports – do not like to be baby-sat on a daily basis.  And in my mind “babysitting” is exactly what micro managing feels like – from both sides!  What professional has the time to do that?  I know I certainly do not.

I’ve spent many years as both a resource manager with direct employees and as a project manager in a matrix resource environment where I had no on-going direct responsibility for my project team members once the project was over.  In both cases, I assumed these individuals to be competent, capable, and skilled resources who were ready to perform on their assigned tasks.  In the case of the direct employees, that’s why I interviewed them and hired them.  In the case of the project resources … well … I always work with what is given to me but I also know that they were interviewed and hired (and assigned to my project) because they are skilled and competent.  Innocent until proven guilty, right?

In the best scenarios project management practices are somewhat rigid, fairly structured, repeatable, and somewhat boring. Unless you really love it, you may be hard pressed to find anyone who would say it really helps get their creative project management juices flowing. But I have found myself that there are creative things you can do when managing projects without ruining the structure of the project and that sticking to the methodology and processes in place help to ensure – rather than hinder the final successful outcome of the project at hand.

Understandably, managing any design or creative projects requires a clearly defined and followed methodology. For complex tasks the project manager must be vigilant and detailed. This is not to say you need to be 'hands-on' and constantly interfering - absolutely not - creative people need to be given freedom to use their abilities or you might as well ask an accountant to do the job (no offense to accountants). However, you as project manager - or the client - need to allow for and anticipate everything that can arise. The key to this is establishing clear positive open communications at the outset, and then maintaining full mutual understanding at all times, irrespective of how much freedom is delegated.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes have project managers leading projects.  These projects may be servicing internal organizational needs or they may be for service organizations leading projects for external clients.  No matter the company size, the type of projects that you’re leading, and no matter whether they are internal or external projects, success on these projects is still critical.   Success and failure on projects can sometimes mean different things to different organizations.  There is no exact measuring stick standard in the project management world.  There really can’t be that many variations, but since the level of project oversight varies from company to company, so to does the level to which different criteria matters to the powers that be within an organization.  We certainly can’t forget about the project customer – they definitely have a say in whether or not a project is considered a success.  Logically, a project could come in on time and on budget, but if the customer is unhappy for some reason, then the project could easily be designated a failure.

So what are the key determiners of success or failure for a project?  Across different industries, different organizations, different customers, different PM methodologies, and different PM infrastructures within various organizations, there will always be variations of what constitutes a successful project from an unsuccessful one. The bottom line – as far as I’m concerned - is that there are three key determiners of whether or not a project is deemed a success at the end of the engagement.  These three determiners are: on time delivery, on budget delivery, and customer satisfaction.  Let’s look each of these in more detail and discuss ways to help ensure project success through proper management of each.

In this next installment of my “5 Reasons Why…” software review series, I want to take a look at 5 reasons why you should check out Comindware Project  for your next project management collaboration tool.  Comindware Project is an easy-to-use, fast-to-adopt project planning and project status tool that covers all the features you need at a great price.  Plus, you can seamlessly bring your previously created Microsoft Project schedules into the tool without the messy re-work.

Let’s look at my 5 Reasons Why you should try Comindware Project, in detail…

Project planning automation

This is a cool feature.  With automated priority-based planning you can schedule your projects just by assigning tasks and defining priorities through a simple drag-and-drop interface. Your project plan will be calculated automatically. And there’s no need to worry about resource leveling, manual task linking, and hard-to-define numeric priorities.

In case you already have a project plan in Microsoft Project, there is no need to re-submit it manually into Comindware Project. Just import the MS Project file into Comindware Project with a couple of clicks.

Real-time project status

Regardless of the project plan, tasks are frequently finished either far ahead of schedule, or past a planned due date. In these cases, the Comindware Gantt-chart automatically reschedules the remainder of the work, so that the overall plan constantly remains up-to-date and shows the real status of your project – as well as actual estimated milestones and finish date.

Team members do not need to fill in misleading percentages of task completion or unrealistic due dates. Comindware Project helps to determine achievable deadlines by tracking the real task progress, based on estimated time minus logged time.

One nice feature I found is that you can use baselines to make snapshots of your project plan as it was at a particular date. This way, you see how your project plan is changing over time and you can make appropriate corrections.

Visual work breakdown structure

As you plan big projects that imply complex leveling, rely on the Comindware Work Breakdown Structure chart. Simply create tasks and activities and drop them into the right place of your project plan.

Maximizing resource utilization

Comindware Project allows you to constantly track resource overload as it is highlighted in your plan.

You know the issue here…it happens to all of us.  The same project resources working multiple projects are assigned to many tasks on their multiple projects resulting in a resource conflict…or several resource conflicts as is usually the case. With Comindware Project, it is possible to resolve such conflicts in advance by allocating resources to different projects based on the distributed workload information.

Use Resource Pools for easier planning and allocation in the case of larger teams and larger projects. For proper project resource management you can assign individual managers to these pools to make sure they are under control.

Unparalleled collaboration

Comindware Project is built is on top of a pre-integrated collaborative platform - Comindware Team Network - that dramatically boosts employee engagement and productivity by allowing teams to collaborate in the context of their work. It allows:

• To keep all the work discussions in the very same place where the work actually gets done and get rid of unstructured group e-mails and collaborate on project tasks and plans within your work environment in organized Activities.

• Connect all parties in Discussion Rooms. You can create separate Rooms to discuss specific matters beyond or across your projects – like product launch, sales collateral, etc. - invite external partners, customers or your colleagues from other departments, so you can effectively collaborate as a single community.

• Manage project-related documents in a single place, discuss documents, upload new versions, and follow documents to keep informed about all the document updates in a user-friendly interface.

• Search people in the powerful social Directory and visual Orgchart. It is easy to find the person with particular skills, in a particular department, in a specific location, for a specific task.

• Award the most prominent team members with titles like “Best performer”, “Employee of the Month”, or any other to support motivation and increase team productivity. Team members can also thank others publicly with a simple yet always pleasant “Thank You”.

Are you ready to see for yourself?

Do you think you’re ready to give Comindware Project a try?  You can signup for a free 30-day trial or, if you still have questions you can reach out for assistance on their contact page.  For more information about the product and pricing visit the Comindware site.

Come on…we manage these projects day in and day out. Most are normal project requests with normal clients. You create your schedule, you kick the project off, you create a solution or a campaign or a design, or a website, or whatever. You test it, your client tests it, you roll it out to them, then you wave goodbye. Done. Pretty straightforward. I realize I’m way oversimplifying it for the masses…a whole lot goes into delivering that project. A lot of headaches, a lot of design work, at lot of marketing strategy, a lot of creative thinking and re-thinking and re-work. But many projects are – for the most part – overall about the same from a process standpoint.

But some clients are different. I want you to think real hard – go back as far as you can. Tell us…what is the strangest request that a client has ever made of you on a project. Keep it ‘G-rated’ please. I’m in Las Vegas and I can say that as a consultant working with various organizations in project management roles for one-off projects, I’ve witnessed some strange requests (a couple were illegal, I think) made of the organizations I was consulting for but thankfully not of me. But I have had strange requests made of me. I’m a project manager and I was asked to basically not manage the project on one engagement. The budget was limited and they thought project managers were useless overhead…so I complied and stayed in the shadows charging little to no time to the project while still overseeing my lead developers work on the effort (believe me…he needed the oversight). By doing that I won the client over.

In Part 1 of this two part series we started to examine the project sponsor and their role on the project and how they share responsibilities with the project manager. In this second part, we will examine key areas of effort that for the project manager that help ensure project sponsor satisfaction on the project and overall project success as a result.

How do you do it?

The next question that begs to be asked then is, how do you, as the project manager, help ensure project success by catering to the needs of the project sponsor (and his organization) and keeping that project sponsor satisfied and engaged on the project? You can’t always bring a project in on time or on budget. In fact, those are somewhat rare occurrences in many organizations. So how do you do it when success in those other determining factors isn’t obvious or frequent? In fact, can you completely fail in those other two and still satisfy the customer? Yes. Absolutely a yes. How?