1. Who’s on our team? Understanding your resources is the first step. Your team may consist of internal staff, external consultants, contractors, vendors, and business partners.

2. What’s our budget? Knowing your funding capacity and limitations will be necessary to spot potential problems—such as hiring expectations that don’t jive with the dollars you have available—and will help you avoid over-committing.

3. Who are our stakeholders? You need to know who expects information from you on a regular basis. Knowing your stakeholders will also give you some insight into the visibility of your project or team, and the kind of support you can expect to receive.

4. Who makes higher-level decisions? From budget approvals to personnel changes, chances are good that someone else will have a say in how things happen. Don’t wait until the next budget or hiring cycle to find out where final approvals will come from.

5. Where and how is information stored? Locating data on timelines, budgets, resources, and other project details underpins all your other efforts, so become familiar with your dataset right away.

6. What are our current obligations? If your PMO has signed contracts with vendors, consultants, or other external providers, it’s important that you know those details. Your ability to negotiate may be limited by existing agreements.

7. How is continuing education and ongoing training managed? You (and your team) will need to keep your skills sharp, so find out what resources are available, who approves new requests, and what level of continuing education is needed to maintain the certifications within your team.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Set objectives for every meeting. Your team’s structure and personality will tell you if every gathering requires a formal agenda, but every meeting should at least have a clearly stated objective. This open framework will allow team members the opportunity for freeform brainstorming (which is often not compatible with rigid agendas), while still defining a measurable, expected result. Even if the objective is simply to produce additional ideas for discussion at the next meeting, everyone involved knows the expectations, and will understand the need to stay on-target.

Use meeting facilitators. If possible, employ the use of a meeting facilitator for events that are likely to wander off-topic. Facilitators must have a keen understanding of the meeting’s objectives, and shouldn’t interrupt discussions that are slightly tangential but still relevant. Nudging the team back toward the meeting’s central focus should occur only when the discussion becomes unproductive. It’s a fine line to walk, but leveraging the skills of a knowledgeable facilitator can help increase meeting productivity tremendously.

Monitor individual performance. Collaboration does not equal a lack of individual accountability. It’s not uncommon for project leaders to focus solely on their project’s overall performance, and realize much too late that particular individuals are distracting other team members, or aren’t contributing sufficiently to the project’s success. By closely monitoring individual performance, you’re more likely to spot—and successfully correct—trouble behaviors such as excessive chatting, inattention to critical details, and lack of progress on tasks. The rest of your team will quickly see that they’re taking up the slack for less productive members, and your efforts to address and resolve individual performance problems will help you avoid energy-sapping morale issues later.

Allow time for socializing. Make peace with the fact that employees will engage in some level of non-work-related socialization. If your team’s dynamic is one of strong collaboration, then discouraging this type of behavior is setting yourself—and your team—up for failure. Realize that successful collaboration is built on a foundation of trust and understanding. Each team member must understand the perspectives of others in the group, and trust their coworkers enough to give full consideration to their ideas, as well feel comfortable sharing some of their own.

Consider proactively providing activities that encourage folks to mingle, while also building subtle limits on distractions. Thoughtfully implemented, the following activities offer socialization opportunities without detracting from the team’s productivity.

Brown bag gatherings allow employees to engage in a bit of lunchtime chatting while gaining new information. These typically work best for visually intensive seminars or presentations, where munching employees won’t interrupt other attendees. Not recommended for highly interactive meetings, as employees could feel they must choose between eating and participating.

Late afternoon parties give employees time to blow off a little steam, and knowing they’ll have a chance to socialize later may help them maintain better focus earlier in the day. Good for combining groups with infrequent face-to-face contact, such as remote team members or faraway business partners. Parties are particularly successful when held after a team meeting, as employees often choose to continue informal discussions of work issues if there are unresolved points or new action items.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Preparing for vacation

• Be practical when planning to tackle work items during your vacation. Long travel times, attending to children and just plain enjoying yourself will all limit the amount of time you have available to address office-related tasks. Determine which items can be delegated to others, which must be handled before you leave, and which can wait until you return.

• Set realistic communication expectations. Time zone differences, availability of communication services, and access to reference material could all limit your ability to maintain contact during your vacation. If you’re likely to be incommunicado, be up front with your team and let them know your limitations. Setting unattainably high expectations for your ability to maintain contact will only cause problems for you and your project team members.

• Take care of outstanding invoices and purchase orders before you leave. Delaying these items could cause significant problems.

• You’ll have items requiring follow up soon after your return—write these down and put the list on your desk or in your tickler file. Include notes such as contact information, part numbers, order or tracking numbers, location of related files, and who was handling the matter during your absence to facilitate a low-stress return to work.

• Change your voicemail greeting and e-mail out-of-office response to reflect your absence. Give callers your return date, and who they can contact for assistance in the interim. You should also indicate if you will or will not be checking messages while you’re gone.

• Consider leaving a note on your door or inter-office mailbox with the dates you’ll be gone. Your note should also direct coworkers to the person handling your correspondence and other matters during your absence.

• Block out time on your calendar for your first day back, to give yourself an opportunity to sift through any communications–e-mails, voicemails, inbound mail, memos, etc. If possible, it’s also a good idea to schedule a brief meeting with your team to quickly get up-to-speed on the status of your project.

Returning from vacation

• Your first priority should be to review your schedule for the next few days. New meetings and meeting requests must be noted early, and responded to if still pending.

• If you followed the preparation tips above, you already have time blocked out to get up to speed on new e-mail and voicemail messages, as well as to look through your incoming mail and other communications. Sort your e-mail inbox by sender, giving first priority to your supervisor(s), fellow team members, and administrative support folks. Listen to all of your voicemail messages before taking action on any of them—later messages may give additional information or set you on a new course.

• If you didn’t have a delegate available to handle incoming invoices and purchase requests during your absence, you should address these next to avoid late fees or project delays.

• Touch base with the key members of your project team to get an update on outstanding issues, the current status of items you were working on before your vacation, and anything that may have come up while you were gone.

• Bring out the list you created of follow up items and begin addressing them in order of priority.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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1 – Maintain regular communication. Team members will have an easier time managing their own slow periods if they’re aggressively connecting with others in the group on a frequent basis. Team meetings help to focus attention on the project’s overall progress, members receive regular reminders about upcoming activities, and any issues brewing in one area can be tackled by the group’s collective expertise.

2 – Identify interim milestones. Critical path items are always at the top of the list, but don’t forget that many other mid-project deliverables are worthy of recognition, too. With the project’s final success a long way off, it’s important to show folks that today’s efforts continue to be important. Letting the team know that their hard work is recognized and appreciated offers a good morale boost.

3 – Remember what you’re improving. A glimpse at the problems or inefficiencies your project will address is often a quick way to give folks new enthusiasm. Whether it’s struggling with an outdated piece of software or visiting a too-small manufacturing facility, your team can once again see how their efforts will make a tangible difference.

4 – Consider shifting resources. If team members possess the expertise to contribute in different areas of the project as time and needs allow, it may offer a good way to minimize the use (and cost) of external resources, while also giving folks a taste of something new or different. Understanding your team’s strengths is the key to successfully mixing things up once in a while.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Compose — Respond — Send

1. Keep e-mails concise, clear, and relevant. By following these three guidelines throughout your communications, you’re less likely to waste time on overly verbose messages, or messages that require additional clarification (and composition time) later.

2. Whenever possible, respond to or forward an existing e-mail instead of composing your own from scratch. Leveraging the original sender’s text allows you to reduce the amount of time you must spend summarizing or restating information, without reducing the usefulness of your communications to your recipients.

3. Utilize distribution lists at every opportunity. Organize them by project, functional area, or reporting structure, and you’ll spend less time looking up who should receive each message. It’s also a method that prompts fewer interruptions later when you realize you forgot to include someone, and must now locate the e-mail and forward it to them.

Store — Locate — Retrieve

4. Create project-specific folders in your e-mail program to produce a framework for storing e-mails that allows for quick retrieval later. A logical and consistent structure will make the archival process more efficient, too.

5. Be judicious in what you save—electronic storage space seems unlimited, but documenting multiple projects can quickly occupy an enormous amount of server space. Duplicate information should be consolidated, outdated information should be made current, and extraneous information should be discarded.

6. Take the time now to become familiar with your e-mail program’s search function, so you can quickly and efficiently utilize it later. Narrowly focused searches will be faster and more fruitful; apply as many filters as possible, and target your key terms to return only those messages you’re most likely to need.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Explain what your budget includes. It isn’t always obvious to those outside your core team exactly what’s included in a project’s scope. By showcasing everything your project will accomplish, both near-term and in the months or years ahead, you’ll demonstrate the true value of each dollar allotted.

Highlight costs you’ve already cut. Your current budget is better able to withstand scrutiny if you can name a number of costs your team has already chosen not to support (premium materials), or has skillfully avoided (expedited shipping).

Demonstrate your bargaining success. Were you able to negotiate better-than-market material costs? Use an industry group’s buying power to reduce labor expenditures? These savings show that your budget has already undergone the right level of value engineering.

Leverage third-party benchmarking data. Offering comparisons to past internal projects is helpful, but the objectivity of outside comparison data is an even more powerful persuasion tool. Information is generally available by industry, company size, project type, and region.

Show the consequences of additional cuts. Negative impacts to end users, the reduction of future cost savings, and the loss of your organization’s market position are all serious consequences—are the cost savings worth it? If your project will result in cost reductions (in manufacturing expenses, materials, energy consumption, headcount, or anything else), then now is the time to add up those dollars. Today’s financial impact may look more prudent when compared to reduced expenditures in the future.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Before beginning the process of moving beyond a failed project, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between problems and people. Allowing emotions or egos to blame someone for the project’s failure will do nothing to improve the team’s prospects for future success. Our interest here is in identifying the functional issues that contributed materially to the project’s failure. It’s true those issues may eventually circle back to personnel, but it will generally be in the form of inadequate staffing levels, an inefficient hierarchy structure, or lack of expertise within the team. If individual performance issues are identified during the process, they should be dealt with separately (and privately).

Turning a failed project into future success requires asking the right questions. For each phase of the process, we’ll cover an array of questions designed to put you on the right path.

Your first step after a failed project is to identify the problem(s). Look carefully at the project’s objectives, and then study the progression from planning through execution. Identify where the problem first appeared, along with any potential triggers. Common root causes include lack of resources (including funds, staffing, and availability of outside vendors), improper or inadequate scoping, and a failure to sufficiently communicate small glitches before they snowballed into significant problems.

Questions to ask: At what point in the project did the problem begin? Was there a single root cause, or several working in concert? Did subsequent actions (or inaction) contribute to the failure?

Next, you must devise solutions to address these problems, and work to improve processes. Once your team is clear on the problem’s root cause(s), it’s time to formulate workable solutions and aggressively vet each for potential side effects. If functional changes require outside support or approval, take your team-crafted ideas up the chain for the necessary buy-in. This approach is generally preferred, as it eliminates the common problem of “externally” devised solutions that have all the necessary approval, but won’t actually work in the long run.

Questions to ask: Is a cumbersome or inefficient organizational structure contributing to the issue? Are responsibility levels (signature, supervisory, etc.) appropriate? Have communications occurred in a timely manner, and to/from the right people? Have you had sufficient stakeholder involvement and support? Were outside factors adequately accounted for during the planning and budgeting phases?

Once you have solutions in place, it’s time to apply the lessons learned to future projects. Along with normal milestone updates, consider incorporating additional checks and balances to ensure the solutions you devised have effectively resolved the problems. Build in frequent trigger points that prompt the team to evaluate progress, and scrutinize the problem areas closely for signs of trouble. Addressing and resolving small-scale issues will generally lead to greater success than trying to tackle an entrenched problem that’s already causing widespread mayhem.

Questions to ask: What signposts of the original problem did the team miss? What should we watch for to ensure the problem doesn’t repeat itself? Have we inadvertently swapped one problem for another? Is anything occurring within the project framework that might impact our ability to meet this project’s objectives?

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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1. Underestimating the scope. Ensure your small project has adequate resources, funds, and other support, and recognize its potential impact on other active projects. Dedicate ample time up front to ensure your small project can reach its objectives, and get firm stakeholder buy-in, even if it’s trifling compared to other initiatives they’re supporting.

2. Inattention to budget. Create, defend, and adhere to your small project’s budget just as aggressively as you would any of your larger projects. Don’t settle for a smaller budget than the project needs, in hopes you can “find” a few dollars later. Sticking to a budget is critical for small projects, because the lower dollar figures leave less wiggle room—even a small overage will be glaring.

3. Failure to dedicate enough time. It’s easy for small projects to get lost among the larger (and potentially more visible) projects your team is also juggling. Fitting a small project in amongst larger endeavors without dedicating the necessary time to proper project management could lead to project failure. Carefully plot your tasks, milestones, and deadlines. Get them onto your calendar, plugged into your master timetable, and then stay on top of them.

4. Lack of adequate resources. Don’t expect to “borrow” resources from other projects if you discover your small project is lacking something. Earmark sufficient funds, personnel, space, and time to each project individually, otherwise your larger projects may suffer, and your smaller project still won’t receive the support it needs to be truly successful.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Group tasks when possible. Not only is it good time management, it will also help you get into the groove on tasks you really dislike. If you can tackle all your phone calls, e-mails or memo-writing at one time, you’ll get through the tasks faster with less opportunity to dread doing them.

Take advantage of downtime. Get a handsfree headset and use your commute time to handle phone calls and check voicemail messages. If you commute by train or bus, see if you can hop on to a WiFi or other wireless signal to tackle your e-mails. You’ll feel great when you arrive at the office knowing you’ve already sifted through your new mail and answered the important stuff. This is also a good opportunity to delete spam, so you aren’t saddled with a list of worthless e-mails upon arrival at your desk.

Do the tough stuff first. Procrastination is more likely to grip you when facing a task you don’t like, so get it out of the way early. You’about also less likely to stall on other things if you can check off the distasteful items first. For tasks requiring focus or concentration, tackle them as soon as you reach your most productive time of day.

Delegate if you can. If you can delegate your least favorite tasks, then do it. As long as you aren’t constantly handing off the sludge, you’ll be using the resources at your disposal while accomplishing your objectives. Be sure to delegate fun stuff from time to time as well, to keep the rest of your team from avoiding you.

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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Keeping your objectives straight, knowing what needs to be done now (and what must wait for later), maintaining various channels of communication, and adhering to each project’s budget and schedule takes focus, excellent organization, and winning time management skills.

Color code

The simple act of visually separating projects is often helpful in creating order when things are busy. There are several common methods; choose the one that’s right for you:

• Assign a different color to each project
• Assign colors based on each project’s phase (pre-approval, active, punchlist)
• Assign colors to different locations, departments, or project leaders
• Assign colors based on the type of project (software, construction, training)

If color coding isn’t a viable option, then consider a naming convention that contributes to better organization. You may want to start all software project file names with SW, all active files with ACT, or all projects in New York City with NYC.

Prioritize your tasks

It’s important to prioritize your project activities – so that you’re always sure to be working on the tasks that are most important for moving your projects forward. However you choose to manage your task list, you should always be able to quickly sort all tasks by priority as well as by due date, project, area of focus, person responsible for the task, and the resources needed for completion.

Tame your information

Create files for each project, in both paper format (manila and/or hanging folders, binders, etc.) and electronic (folders in your e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheet programs). Once a new piece of information arrives, whether it’s an e-mail message, a memo, this week’s status report, or updated budget information, immediately move it into its proper folder.

Do the same for any shared documents—again, both paper and electronic—that your group may use. Be sure everyone on the team is using similar naming and filing conventions for anything that may be accessed by more than one person. If possible, assign someone to take charge of your group’s shared documentation to ensure it’s tidy, always current, and readily accessible.

Keep important information easy to find

Contact lists, budget data, and pending tasks should be included in your project folders, but this type of information should also be in your go-to place—pinned to your cork board, entered into your smartphone, or in a single file folder on your desk that you can quickly grab. This leaves you less to locate when an impromptu meeting is called, and ensures you have the majority of data you may need at a moment’s notice.

Schedule dedicated time

Blocking out time on the calendar for each project is a useful way to ensure you’re on track. While it’s usually most effective to group like tasks together (phone calls, filing, etc.), you may want to buckle down on each project once a week for some uninterrupted working time.

Create distribution lists

Remembering who should be copied on each project’s communications can eat up valuable time. Instead, set up a distribution list for each project. Creating and forwarding information will happen more quickly, and you’ll be sure that all the appropriate people have been contacted

PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project office development services.

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