Excellent graphic from Ki​ssflow - the project management software for non-project managers.

Manage the project, not the software

Kissflow conforms to your style and keeps your eyes on the end goal.As projects scale, it gets harder to accurately measure task time. Kissflow's on-hold feature means you can finally get accurate data about your projects.

Communication is one of the most critical aspects of managing a project. It must be efficient, effective, and must be managed by an organized leader on a project engagement – and hopefully the project manager is up for filling that communication facilitator role.

However, in the project management world – the communication process is only as good as your weakest link in the chain. You will encounter a communication weak link whenever you deal with someone else, and whenever your team members explain, discuss, or speak to another person. In other words, effective communication itself is the solution to the identification and elimination of weak links.

So what I want to do here is examine some key communication points for the project manager – outside the obvious PM == > customer link – and understand where those weak links may be and how to handle them. Why? Because whenever work passes from one person or department to another, or from a project team to a department or other personnel, the opportunity for delay or misunderstanding is always present and always possible. By knowing where the weak links exist, you will be able to ensure that the project moves forward, on track, and on schedule…hopefully.
​
Project Manager to team member. Whenever you speak to a team member, you encounter a weak link. For example, you instruct a team member to “document the issues and summarize it on a worksheet.” Unless you can clarify exactly what you want, the work may not be performed in the way you expect. All issues or just the ones for this task? How should it be summarized? How should the issues be prioritized? What will the worksheet look like?

If you don’t communicate clearly, chances are the work will have to be revised. And whenever that happens, the team member will complain that your instructions were vague. Thus, make sure that your instructions are absolutely clear, that you explain exactly what you want, and—most of all—that the team member understands exactly what you expect.

Project Manager to outside department manager. Your second weak link occurs when the manager of another department is involved—either as a resource for your project or as someone a team member reports to. The more clearly you explain the scope of the project and the time it will require, the better your chances for full cooperation. The other manager has a point of view you need to respect and understand. For example, the project may make his or her job more complicated, as it takes a resource away from the department. An outside department employee might view your project as extra work, while the other manager may see it as a strain on a limited staff.

Respect other managers’ problems and conflicts. Recognize that their priorities are not the same as yours. Although your project may demand you time and effort even more than the work in your department, that isn’t necessarily the case for other managers.

Project Manager to outside resource. No matter how urgent your deadlines or how important the project is to the company, you may have difficulty getting response from an outside resource—a consultant, a vendor, or another division. Their priorities are simply not the same as yours. Thus, the potential weak link is a considerable one. ​

Anticipate problems in the way you schedule, in the timing of your requests, and in the way you keep in touch. Don’t wait until the deadline is upon you, but plan well ahead to eliminate the problem through communicating as clearly as possible.

Many times we find ourselves running the project methodically because we’re busy, we have lots of projects on our plate and things are going fairly well. Kind of like the saying, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” But when we do that, we tend to miss doing the things that we do that can be adding value to the project, helping the project team, and helping to ensure the highest degree of satisfaction to our project client.

If you find that you’re not leading your teams well…they don’t seem to be taking direction and following your leadership, or if you are not experiencing the level of project success that you had hoped for, or if customers never seem quite as satisfied with your project efforts as you would like, then maybe it’s you and not them. And maybe it’s time to ask yourself, “Am I doing the right things right?”

I realize that sounds like a confusing question so let’s look at it this way…am I going through the motions with my project tasks or am I embracing the big picture? Am I doling out information or am I turning it into useful, decision-making tools for myself, my team, and my customer? Do I toss status over the wall to the client, or am I trying on an ongoing basis to gauge their needs and expectations and meet those needs and expectations heads-on?

PM added value for the customer

“I’m managing the project for my customer to the best of my abilities, but should I or could I be doing more to ensure success?” You plan out the financials and resources on the project. Are you managing them closely every week? Are you engaging the customer in that planning and reporting so that they understand and can play a role in managing the budget and timeline and resource progress? Some customers don’t want to play too much of a role, but they almost always want to be well informed. If you’re just going through the motions on these activities then you likely have some dissatisfied customers who are beginning to feel uncomfortable with your level of commitment to them and to their project’s success.

PM added value for the team and project

Likewise, are you adding value for the team and for the project as a whole? I guess the bottom line is, ask yourself if you’re adding value to the project, or just running it robotically. Are you equipping your team to own tasks, help manage the financials, identify risks, play a role in scope management, and present key information to the customer on an ongoing basis. These are key project team member skills that need to be learned and it likely needs to be you who helps them get to that point. This is especially true with the new hires and the maverick developers…the ones who haven’t yet learned the ‘team culture’ and aren’t yet in the ‘customer service’ mode – at least not with the customers your organization is serving. You must help them understand the team concept and how to play their own productive and cohesive role on that team.

PM added value for senior management

Finally, are you one of those invisible project managers when it comes to your senior management? Believe me, they want to know more about your project – even if it’s at a high-level. Your project’s success – especially if it’s a highly visible project – is relevant to their success. Keep them informed. If you’re not reporting vertically – and proactively – then you’re not doing enough. You’re not adding enough value to the organization. Don’t make them come ask you for the information – give it to them and force them to ask you about it. That’s how you stay relevant to senior management – that’s how remain accountable and how you ensure you’re not just going through the motions.

Summary

The bottom line is this: we always (I hope) try to manage our projects well. But there are often some things we can do, concepts we can embrace, and actions we can take that add value and help ensure success. Ask yourself: “Am I doing the right things for the project – and am I doing those right things right?”

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. And 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, but 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.


On time delivery


Some project managers set the project schedule in stone at the beginning of the project and fail to use it as a living, breathing tool of for the project. Those individuals have failed on the project before it even started. Project manages who hope to succeed must choose a good project management scheduling tool. They must then use that tool to revise the schedule weekly, engage the team and customer for real progress updates on tasks and use this revised weekly schedule – along with a detailed status report – to drive project status discussions every week with the project team and the project customer.


On budget delivery


You may not be able to deliver on budget every time, but you can help to ensure you’re very close by reviewing, analyzing and revising the project budget weekly using project actuals from the previous week. The project manager that does this will ensure that his project budget is likely never more than 10% off the budget target. A budget that is 10% over is much easier to correct than one that is 50% over. Watch it closely so you can catch it and correct it before it’s too late.


Customer satisfaction


The satisfaction of your customer at the end of the project is something you can never guarantee. Customers are quirky. No one thing you do can ever completely ensure that your project customer will be happy with how the project is run, happy with how your team executed on the project, or happy with the final solution. However, there are a series of things that you can do along the way to greatly increase your chances of ending with a happy customer. These include:

• Practice efficient and effective communication throughout the engagement and make sure the project customer is always well informed of project status and any issues that are affecting the project.
  
• Engage customer-side subject matter experts (SMEs) and end users during the planning and requirements gathering/finalization phase to ensure that the solution you rollout in the end is going to truly meet the client’s needs
  
• Don’t do it for them, but hold the client’s hand during preparation for user acceptance testing (UAT). Most clients don’t prepare very well for this and end up having a disastrous UAT experience leaving them frustrated and less than satisfied.
  

Summary


In the end, you can succeed at two of these determiners and still have most key stakeholders consider the project a failure. You rollout the project to the client successfully by most individuals’ standards, be very pleased with your team’s efforts in meeting the timeline and the budget, and still end up with a customer who is less than satisfied for various reasons including system usability for the end user if there were any glitches in the requirements along the way. There are no guarantees to project success. The bottom line will always be this…stick to project management best practices throughout, practice good communication with all stakeholders in good times and bad, and closely monitor your project’s budget and timeline and you’ll usually achieve the highest customer satisfaction possible and give your project its best chance for success.

Project meetings are an essential part of every project engagement. It’s where project status gets relayed, issues get discussed, assignments get reported on and clarified, and key group decisions are made. They must happen. And it’s really important that the key stakeholders are in attendance. You know the ones – those individuals that you need to have there to help give and receive that information and play a role in those decisions. That’s usually your team, the customer and whoever else has more than a cursory interest in the project.

Are you finding yourself faced with the challenge of getting people to actually attend your meetings? We’ve all been there and it can be extremely frustrating. Not to mention it can cause critical task delays as well as delaying decisions or issue action or risk action that needs to be discussed as a group and implemented today – not a week from now.

Why are people skipping your meetings? What is going wrong that is driving key attendees away? They should consider your project meetings essential, not optional. Let’s examine three potential reasons this may be happening…

You tend to accommodate the latecomers. Do you find yourself recapping everything for those meeting attendees who straggle in 10 or 15 minutes late every time? This can drive the rest of the attendees crazy and you may not be aware of it – until they decide to just skip the meeting altogether. Remember that everyone’s time is very valuable – not just yours. If you want to maximize attendance and productivity, you’ll need to look at the meeting from the attendees’ point of view, not just from yours.

Try this next time – don’t recap. When they arrive late tell them you need them on time as a courtesy to everyone already there and to help maximize productivity and minimize wasted project expense. Remind them that they are key players on the project and you need their participation. If it keeps up, go to their supervisor. Don’t threaten them with that though, just do it if it continues for the next couple of meetings.

You have trouble sticking to the agenda. You put out a nice agenda, but you have trouble staying true to it. That can be confusing to those in attendance and – if you sent it out in advance as you always should – it can really frustrate those who came prepared to participate on key points of the agenda only to see those things not even being addressed. It’s ok to add to the agenda during the meeting, but at least be sure to address everything that is on the agenda for certain before straying. And only stray if you really have time to do so …see the next key point…

Your meeting time management skills are lacking. Are you starting and ending your meetings on time? If not, you have a tendency to lose people along the way. Their time is valuable and if they see you as a poor time manager, they aren’t likely to allow you to waste their valuable time for very long before they just start skipping your meetings. And that will be your fault, not theirs…so if you go to their supervisor complaining about their attendance, you will definitely get that negative feedback thrown at you. Start on time, end on time and stick to the schedule and topics. Do that and you’ll earn a good reputation as time manager and meeting facilitator.

Summary

Our project meetings are critical to our ongoing project engagement. It’s where we disseminate project information and make assignments. It’s where group decisions get discussed and finalized. Without them, it’s difficult to make progress. So use them wisely. And staying true to the points above will help keep key stakeholders in the meeting seats and productively contributing to your meeting’s and project’s success.

How about our readers? What meeting frustrations have you encountered … either as a meeting facilitator or an attendee? What’s most important to you when you’re heading to a meeting …what keeps you there week in and week out?

Predictions are rarely right on the money and they are just opinions, but they can be useful when coming from experts. One thing is certain when it comes to cybersecurity - threats are likely to continue and the pace of the threats to a typical enterprise will become more common and more sophisticated.

With rapid innovations and increasing threats in the banking and finance industry necessitating better regulatory monitoring, reporting, and compliance, there will be increased interest among VCs for investments in RegTech in 2020. Data being at the center of it all, innovative encryption technologies will play an increasingly important role in shaping RegTech in 2020, as it (encryption) will be a fundamental requirement for compliance moving forward.

Cyberattacks, especially Ransomware, will continue to increase

Ransomware is making so much money. It’s the no-brainer cyber threat that people should be wary of in 2020, especially since Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) alarmingly hastens the rate of new attacks by making strains more accessible and easier to modify and iterate. While Zero-Day Attacks & Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) will persist, both will be overshadowed by the prevalence of ransomware attacks.

We’ll hear more on Artificial Intelligence

It will be more pervasive in the cybersecurity industry. There are simply countless applications of AI. The trick is to find where it fits best – by introducing new techniques or enhancing existing ones? One technique to look out for is Endpoint Network Security, where AI is used to detect anomalies in either user or application behavior. This function is shaping up to be a powerful component of Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solutions.

Fileless Attacks will be the new norm

They are nigh undetectable by traditional AVs and will be a new preferred cyberattack technique favored by malware creators in 2020 and beyond. Detecting fileless attacks is tricky, as so many of these appear harmless. Moreover, there are no clear indicators that tie them back to specific threats, at least until they download a payload, which can also remain undetected and cause real havoc.

Cyberattacks, in general, will focus on Government, Banking & Finance

While the Healthcare industry will continue to make news headlines, it will continue to lag behind in cybersecurity. It believes that it does not stand to lose much from having patient data stolen, at least not enough to inspire greater investment in better security measures. Another industry that may also be a top concern for cyberattacks, especially for data breaches, is the Oil & Gas industry, due mainly to the high value of research, technical, and negotiation data available.

Nice cybersecurity trends and predictions from Dr. Teow-Hin Ngair, of SecureAge. Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/the-key-cybersecurity-risks-set-to-rise-in-2020/article/563939#ixzz69cYggixq

The Vegas Golden Knights are in sole position of 1st place in the NHL Pacific Division and beating the Arizona Coyotes 4-1 at home at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The Golden Knights are now 21-15-6 and 6-3-1 in their last 10 games. Their 48 points lead Vancouver and Arizona by 2 points. Go Knights! Vegas Born and Vegas Strong!

This is my motto. Plain and simple. And it's how I've managed projects and consulted for clients for many years. The customer comes first – their project comes first – what they want and need for that project requires and earns my top consideration as well as my team's top consideration throughout the engagement. I won't be a “yes” man because the customer doesn't always have their technology, or priorities or even the project focus and need right, but I listen, consider and work with them till we find out together what they really need.

What does your organization look for in a consulting professional? A 'yes' man? Do you want someone who will listen to you and do exactly what you ask them to do? Hopefully not. My clients are intelligent and experienced, but they don't always know exactly what they need. They often don't even know for sure exactly what they want - though they may think that they do.

It's not about 'phoning it in' on a project. It's not always about getting it done in 'x' amount of time, either. But it IS always about customer satisfaction. It's about giving you - the customer - something you can live with and be happy with and that your end users can actually use.

Basically, I'm saying put the customer first because no matter how successful you think you were, it's how they feel about it and move forward that really counts, right? I had a big airline client where me and my team did a $400,000 tech project / implementation – even going onsite for about 2 weeks during Christmas to do break / fix testing and get past some key issues. We finally fully implemented around March and I thought everything was fine. When I touched bases with the project customer a few months later to see if they needed any further help I found out that they weren't even using the solution. They had lost their administrator on their end, were beyond frustrated and like some abandoned sports complex after the Olympics, it was just an in the way albatross. What a disaster and what a waste of customer dollars. I felt a bit ill about the money we made and far less happy about the seemingly successful final implementation.

Summary

Bottom line – it's all about the customer. It's not about the level of satisfaction of your senior management even if they think it is. And it may seem at times that you are an island in a storm... butting heads with your senior management to do your best for the project customer. There are two instances in my PM past that I wish I could take back... both with the same employer. We lost over $2 million in revenue over two different customer projects because I listened to my senior management over the needs of the customer. Those were both over 11 years ago and I won't let it happen again.

Are you ready to prioritize what’s best for your business, control project financials, and use real-time information to report how projects are performing? I just discovered ITM Platform and I think it's worth the time and effort to try it out - for free, of course.  Their offer is a free 14-day trial. ​

Some highlights listed on their page that I agreed with ....

Portfolio and programs. Manage your entire portfolio in a fully-featured solution. Structure your projects within business programs. Set goals and assess results.

Align strategy with execution. Make project decisions based on business priorities and real-time data.

Integrations and API. ITM Platform coexists happily with your current software. Report efforts from Slack, import your Gantt charts from MS Project, or connect ITM Platform with your existing systems using our API for developers.

Classic and Agile. Manage your projects in predictive mode using our Gantt Chart or in agile mode with Kanban boards.

Resource management. Manage all your project resources from a unified portfolio view. Match demand and allocation effortlessly.

Check out for free - powerful PM tool and with the free 14-day trial giving it a test drive is risk free. Or ask for a demo - they are very accommodating.