Project Management Software Implementation and User Adoption Tips

Any project manager has heard the following from at least ONE team member:  “But I sent them an email!”

I have been managing software development projects for over 25 years and speak often on topics in project management, project leadership, business analysis and process improvement across the country.  A topic that comes up in many of these sessions are the frustrations project manager have with inappropriate uses of email communication. 

Misuse of email communication tools can lead to miscommunication more often than not.  In addition, the Project Manager must understand a bit about human nature and our own tendencies.  This blog will address some key best practices that I have successfully used for many years and can help you as well.

Best Practice 1:  Do NOT use email as a way of storing key facts and status about the project.  Using email to communicate status is NOT the same thing as storing key facts.  Central repositories are always better than email tools.  Email is not centrally located and cannot be searched across individuals’ email.  In addition, a person’s email record may be missing a key point that may have been communicated to others in a separate email.  The discipline the project manager MUST instill in his/her team is that key status’ MUST be documented in a centralized source—some place that all team members and stakeholders have access to.

Best Practice 2: NEVER assume someone has read your email.  As the quote states above, I regularly hear individuals having the expectation that EVERYONE reads EVERY email that is delivered.  I know, personally that in any particular day, I may get 200 – 400 emails.  Now, approximately 25% are “junk”, but regardless it is physically impossible to read thoroughly and respond to every email in a day and still get your regular job done.  Recognize that the higher the level the person is you are communicating to, the less likely they will read all of their emails.  Therefore, If there is something important that you require a response on, sending a single email is NOT the best method.  Some suggestions to improve the timeliness and quality of the response would be to:

·         Address the email to ONE person and not several.  You can copy several persons, but if you are looking for a response from one person, address the email to them specifically

·         In the subject line add RESPONSE REQUESTED so that the person “scanning” their emails has a higher probability that they will read yours.

·         If you are addressing an email to multiple individuals, highlight the individual within the body of the email that you are requesting action.  Many times I see email used as a meeting follow-up with actions.  Each action needs a responsible party.  Specify the responsible party and BOLD it so that the reader is drawn to it.

·         Make a phone call.  If your request is truly important, make the phone call and let the individual know you are looking for a response on the email.

Best Practice 3: NEVER allow an email to bounce between multiple parties more than 3 -5 times.  There was a time once that I noticed an email chain continuing for 3 months that started with a simple question from the client.  Basically no one had responded to the client in 3 months!  My rule of thumb to my teams is that if the email bounces more than 5 times, then they are responsible for coordinating the meeting and resolving the issue!  Give it a try!

I’d love to hear your ideas and experiences as well.

These two roles are very different and it took me a while to really understand and to separate these into distinct deliverables.

The project manager isn’t responsible for validating nor confirming the achievement of the project objectives.  They are responsible for leadership and ensuring the deliverables are delivered with the assumption that these deliverables will provide the expected outcomes to the client. 

The project management process allows for an iterative approach that can respond to the results of the business analyst's validation efforts.

So what is a PDU? Why should I care?

For those of us who have achieved our PMP credential obtaining the 60 PDUs to maintain your credential over 3 years can be a daunting task.  I’m here to tell you not to worry, it is actually pretty easy if you do a little planning—fancy that, a project manager who can plan.

PMI (Project Management Institute) provides a variety of ways in which you can achieve this elusive goal and I’m going to tell you a few simple ways to do it.

First, did you know that you can earn 5 PDUs per year for just managing projects?  For those of us who have the title of project manager, that should really be a no brainer!  Category 2H states: “Practitioner of project management services for a minimum of 6 months in a calendar year.  This includes work in a project management office.  5 PDUs can be earned per 6 – 12 month period with a maximum of 15 PDUs per renewal cycle."  You may even qualify if you are a team member acting in a leadership role within a project.

Participate with your local PMI Chapter. Two very easy ways to earn up to 20 PDUs are:

·         Attend a dinner meeting 5 times per year you can claim 1 PDUs for meeting attended. (assuming you stay to listen to the speaker)  Typically these will be identified as Category 3 events as long as the chapter is considered an Registered Education Provider.  If not, report them as Category 4.

·         Volunteer a couple hours per month—Category 5C.  You can earn 5 PDUs per year maximum for volunteering.  (Ask your chapter how they determine a volunteer can earn the 5 PDUs, but generally it is related to continuous service even if just 1 hour per month.

Finally, Category 2SDL is Self-Directed Learning.  There are a lot of free or “near” free content on-line that you can read and capture within this category.  It may include formal or informal activities such as reading articles, books, instructional manuals (how about reading the next updated PMBOK® Guide cover to cover?), watching videos, discussion sessions with colleagues, even being coached can count.  You are limited to a maximum of 15 PDUs in this category over the renewal period.

So in summary, the chart below demonstrates that you can earn your 60 PDUs with hardly even opening up your pocketbook.  All you need is a little commitment to being involved and a little PLANNING and SCHEDULING, Mr./Ms. Project Manager.  It's not too hard to reap the rewards.

Most project managers understand that prioritization of projects within an organization is a good thing, however, many times the best laid plans get derailed within a few months of an agreed upon plan.

As a best practice, a Project Management Office or similar group would gather the organizational stakeholders at a minimum on an annual basis and go through an exercise of what projects are important to the organizational goals and put together a list of projects that are ranked.  This list is distributed throughout the organization and everyone posts the list on bulletin boards, within cubicles, on websites and on project management systems.

More often than not, organizations and project managers tend to respond to these distractions in a variety of different ways that don’t help the situation.  Sometimes they:
• Jump in and react to the distraction
• Ask the team members to put more time in to handle both the prioritized projects and these distractions
• Use the distraction as an excuse as to why the project is off plan

So often I talk with project managers who feel their company does not give them the right resources to deliver on the projects they are expected to deliver.  Project managers are regularly asked to do “with what they have” and have to make trade-offs which potentially impact the success of a project.

If you feel this way, you are not alone.  

Based on my experience, the issue isn’t the amount of resources a company has to allocate to projects—the issue is actually that companies really don’t know how many projects they have!

One thing you can do as a project manager is to take a true assessment of the projects in your organization or department.  For example, you work in a large IT shop and your senior management has identified 10 projects that are critical to deliver this year, you believe that the entire organization of 300 employees is working on possibly 30 or 40 projects because your organization tracks on project management software any projects over $50,000 in cost.  Do the following:

1.       Ask each department manager for a list of all the projects that his/her team is working on.

2.       Compile that list between all of the departments and eliminate any duplicate projects—you only need to account for the project once.

SURPRISE! My expectation is that the list of 30 or 40 projects is really something more like 120 projects. And for a staff of 300, that means just over 2 resources are allocated 100% to any project.  Yikes!  Why is that?

For one, when you work in a large IT shop (or any large organization) there will always be projects that do not get reported into corporate management.  These are the smaller, department-specific projects that the manager is aware of and is delivering them as part of his/her department budget.

Secondly, and especially in IT shops, there are always the “urgent” projects that must be done that aren’t part of the top 10 projects.  These are customer down time, urgent bug-fixes, small enhancements, etc.  Although there may be a support team that is supposedly dedicated to these projects, resolving these issues requires tapping into resources that may be allocated to the larger more “important” projects.

Thirdly, departments inherently work in their silos and may not be aware of other projects going on.

Finally, just because a project doesn’t cost $50,000, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accounted for!

My recommendation is:

1.       Capture all projects you have on your project management software.  All projects require resources and to manage resources effectively you need to understand the work that is needed in your organization.

2.       Utilize resource pools to assign resources to projects.  Resource pools and calendars within your project management software can give you visibility into where resource availability and scarcity lies in your organization.

3.       Prioritize projects as a team, utilizing corporate goals and objectives.  If there are truly only 10 top projects for your organization, then they should be given every opportunity to succeed.  That will mean that resources may not be available to the other 110 projects!

There is a reason why organizations create goals and objectives.  It is to keep the organization focused on reaching its mission and vision.  You need to do your part and make sure these projects are NOT resource strapped.

We had a recent webinar about the work breakdown structure (WBS) and the size of project activities that should be included in your project management software. As part of that, we acknowledged that your existing software will allow the team to create an activity list that has a very small duration, e.g. one day, one hour, one minute. 

There have been many cases where a large project is decomposed into very small activities. One advantage of doing this is that all work to be accomplished can be identified. It’s less likely you will forget anything. Critical activities can be highlighted using various project management software tools. Activities can be assigned to one team member and there is no confusion as to who has responsibility for it. The team sees a lot of progress when many activities are reported complete.

As we rambled through our webinar, it occurred to me that one of the disadvantages of very small duration activities is that it discourages active project planning. Because so much detail is expected, it seems like a hopeless waste of time, especially when there’s work to be done! It’s difficult enough to get team members to spend time planning, and to get project sponsors and management to allow time for planning. By creating micro-activities, teams spend time decomposing the WBS when they could be focused on other planning activities, such as identifying and evaluating risk. In addition, small duration activities encourage micromanagement. It would be better for most teams if the project manager would just get out of the way and let the individuals assigned do their work. Also, a larger activity allows the team to include work that may come from different team members, departments, functional groups, etc. It leads to better integration of different components of the project.

Most of us know that project managers have to wear many hats.  They are a communicator, a counselor, a drill sergeant, a negotiator and even an accountant at times.  But did you ever consider the project manager and their role as a sales person?

While most of the time, I try to keep my posts project management solution agnostic, we've had some new ideas here about making our process here at Project Insight better which I will share with you here.  

We have 40 unique live training webinars that we offer to our customers. We also record these sessions so that our team members in far flung corners of the globe (we serve project teams in Papua New Guinea, Japan, India and other locations that are asleep while we conduct live webinars) can watch them later. We have developed best practices modules that are like courseware. Alongside these training resources, we have other self serve resources like tutorials inside the software, online help, tool tips, FAQs in the Community, and more. 

With all these resources on hand, we are now encouraging customers to select the webinars that are right for them. Select the project team members that should attend each webinar, breaking the team down into the following groups (at a minimum):

-Administrators

-Project managers

-Project schedulers

-Resource managers

-Executives 

You can even break the groups down into business units, departments, and/or process groups. Once that is done, select one webinar to watch as a group. Follow that up by performing the best practice module on the same topic. Then gather as a group and decide how your project team will use the software.  

Once you have outlined the best practices for your specific organization. DOCUMENT those processes. This documentation may be as detailed as you wish. From those documents, develop one to two page 'Quick Start Guides' for each group listed above. That way, if new team members join the organization, they may refer to these Quick Start Guides that are particular to your organization and specific to their role.

I’m always talking about having three elements in your project management software implementation: people, product and processes. In order for your implementation to be successful, you need all three. Within each element, there are many segments, variables. I’d like you to make sure you have thought of the following:  

Product – Project Management Software

-Make sure that you are actually looking for project management software, and not task management software, or time tracking tools, or a help desk. Be clear on the business challenges you are trying to solve, then make sure you are looking at the right TYPE of solution.   

-Make sure that the project management solution provider is mature and well-proven in use at other organizations with requirements similar to your organization. Many software companies are popping up and may not have the track record to serve you well.

-Make sure you select a flexible, customizable and USABLE project software solution. If the system is flexible it will serve your needs now and in the future. If it is integrate-able, then you can pass data from one application to another eliminating duplicate effort. 

-Make sure there are no major GAPs with respect to your needs and requirements. Make sure the vendors do not try to steer you in a direction that is not a part of your goals. You would be surprised how many people get distracted by the ‘shiny object’ or feature that looks sexy, but has no relevance to their needs. 

-Make sure you have enough resources to actually implement the portfolio and project management software you select.  

-Make sure you select a product built on an industry standard platform. Project management products built with graphic artist platform tools are often lacking when it comes to robust scheduling and resource management.  

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned needing three mission critical elements to a successful roll out: people, product and processes. Similar to only having two legs on a stool, if you need all three for a successful implementation. This week, I talked with a customer that had, early on in the implementation process, decided to let people have the option to use our project management software or not. It was going to be their choice. The problem with this is kind of like saying, I'd like you to go on a diet, but it's your choice. As we all know, change is difficult, and for some organizational cultures, it is more challenging than others.

One of the most positive systems of rewards I've witnessed of late comes from one customer that decided to all team members profit sharing for accurate and timely time tracking. Now, the point is not about the feature of time tracking, rather it is about the system of rewards for the behavior we desire. This is having a very positive effect on the team and compliance, as you might imagine is very high, as the reward is MONEY!

The point is that the company's leadership must communicate what behavior is desired, clearly and frequently, as well as develop strategies for compliance or lack thereof. If the message your leadership is sending is 'I don' care one way or the other,' people will do what is easiest for them to do. This is either nothing or the old way.

If you've finished the project template creation process discussed in the last post, then you are ready to start thinking about how your tasks and activities link together. If you have worked with Microsoft Project, then you know about task dependencies. If you are migrating from Excel, then the idea might be new. Basically, tasks have relationships. That is, often one task must be finished before another one can get started. This is called a finish-to-start task type.  There are four task types:

Attend the webinar 

Read the Best Practices

Do your homework

Input the information

We hope you had a good laugh over this list. Feel free to add your fun reasons as comments here.

Like David Letterman's Top Ten list each night, this Project Insight customer surveyed their team as a way to get buy in from all team members. Creating  this top ten list was their way of incorporating all team members in the initial effort to get compliance on entering time. 

#3 - Maybe this will finally end the East coast West coast wars Wait a couple more days for the final installment......