The foundation of ViewPoint Visual Project Management is expressing the project plan visually with a Visual Project Board (VPB).

Presenting the project as a graphic highlights critical information in ways that can’t be ignored. After a Colorado (US) software company introduced a VPB, an executive responded, “As simple as [a VPB] sounds, to actually see that come to life is a real clarifying moment for the entire organization. Everyone knows exactly where we are every day.”

Brain research shows that we decipher visual information simultaneously to seeing it. In contrast, humans process language and text sequentially.[1] A visual aid drastically reduces the time needed to understand information, promoting rapid understanding of any situation.

[1] Parkinson, Mike, The Power of Visual Communication, http://www.billiondollargraphics.com/infographics.html

"Everyone has a plan: until they get punched in the face"

Mike Tyson

Professional Boxer

To deliver successful projects, you need more than a plan. You must deal with the reality of projects: missed time and cost estimates, unforeseen complications, rework, and everything else that makes a project a project. There is no such thing as a perfect plan, so for successful delivery, you must have a process that compensates for the uncertainties of project life, one that uses the map but is not a slave to it, a process that sees and resolves risk during the project’s life. Think of the visual project board as a map for project delivery. The VPB catalyzes the plan with action at the right time to deliver your project successfully.

ViewPoint uses The Project Execution Maturity Model (PEMM) as the structure of the project delivery process. The PEMM lays out the behaviors and processes needed to deliver your project in a straightforward progression from simple to sophisticated ones. It has three levels of execution capability: Basic Collaboration, Improved Coordination, and Integrated Planning and Execution.

Basic Collaboration is the foundational element of execution maturity, focusing on task completion velocity or flow. It extends to a local workgroup or portfolio, and the timeframe managed extends to completing the tasks presently in progress. The central questions to answer at the Basic Collaboration level are:

• Can we finish our work?
• Can we get it done quickly?
• “Can we complete work in the agreed-upon time?”

Basic Collaboration addresses short-term goals: eliminating task waiting time and increasing productivity. Achieving this level of execution maturity enables the team to shift their focus from reporting on what happened to identifying actions to move the project forward.

The processes at the Basic Collaboration level use the VPB to systematically identify obstacles, risks, and bottlenecks in the workflow. It enables the team to concentrate on the goal of project completion while dismantling organizational silos that hinder prompt action. Conflicts related to priority resources and tasks are addressed constructively without finger-pointing and blame. In essence, the VPB promotes transparency in execution, allowing the team to collaborate intelligently.

Moving from ad hoc execution methods to Basic Collaboration significantly improves financial performance. It typically increases productivity by more than 20%, boosts task completion rates, reduces project duration, and substantially improves on-time delivery performance. Mastering this level of maturity creates a new reality for your project teams and sets the stage for further improvements in project delivery performance.

Defining behaviors involves establishing the rules for managing your project. Well-defined behaviors and outcomes set expectations and enable you to identify issues before they delay the project. The definitions allow you to see delivery risks early and ensure that you meet your customer’s expectations. The Viewpoint methodology lays out accountability through specific, measurable actions and the scope of decision-making. For example, project managers are responsible for identifying opportunities for improvement, but the direction of process improvements is the responsibility of executive leaders. Task managers are accountable for eliminating risk, not project managers. Defining the roles and decision rights helps the team work cohesively and the project sponsors identify where they may need to intervene.

These accountabilities are then posted to the VPB, showing what is to be done and who is accountable for accomplishing the work. There is never any question about who will deliver the work. The image is a sample work package card.

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Let’s suppose your teams are delivering one project every other month; that’s 6 projects annually.

If each project is worth $600k, your revenue over the year would be $3.6MM

Before I go on, think for a moment about your car. Or cars in general. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors said, “Most cars are only in use by their owners for 5% to 10% of the day.”

Just like cars, projects are idle most of the time. The work or tasks are not active, they are waiting.

The project duration is comprised mostly of waiting, not working. Waiting for the next job, waiting for approvals, waiting for information; waiting, not working

What would happen if you concentrated your resources to focus on a single project at a time? What if they focused on finishing projects, not finishing tasks?

You could reduce all project durations, and do more.

If you made a modest change – simply changing priorities to focus effort on the completion of the critical chain, you could reduce durations by a third or even half.

Your $3.6MM in revenue could climb to $5.4MM or even $7.2MM. With the same resources.

This is not a fantasy; I have seen this many time with many of our clients, using ViewPoint Visual Project Management and the Theory of Constraints.

FMC Technologies had many remote teams and getting collaboration between design, supply chain, and production was critical to their success. They reduced their project duration from 31 days to 8, increasing shipments 326%, with the corresponding profit increase.

This just one example of real world success. Focus on completions – get more done. Ship more. Bill more. Earn more.

Time is money.

The post Is Time Equal to Money? Part 2 appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Do you have genuine insight into your project’s delivery risk? By risk, I mean, do you know the chance your project has of delivering on time or late? By genuine, I mean, something quantifiable?

Most of the time, managers look at task completion dates or schedule compliance to judge the risk. If you’re on planned timeline, your risk is deemed to be low. The problem is that you can’t know if that plan is a good one. You only know it’s good so far. Good, in that your progress matches the plan. What if the plan is padded with extra time? Your team is only going as fast as the plan tells them to. What if there is risk later in the project? Only “so far” won’t tell you if you can speed up, or if there’s an obstacle ahead.
 
Most managers don’t know if their project will be on time, until it’s not.
 
I’ve written before about the most important measurements in projects and the behavior you need to deliver on time: proactive and speedy resolution of problems. These metrics are based on the premise that behavior is the precursor to results. If you want to know if you’re going to get the results, you should measure the behaviors.
 
Managers are at the core, influencers of behavior. What needs to be done, is done by people, behaving in specific ways to accomplish specific results. Managers exert influence to:

• Increase some behaviors
• Decrease some behaviors
• Initiate new behaviors

No matter what you’re doing, whether you’re improving quality or increasing productivity, it’s the behavior that drives that result. I’ve often said the best project managers are the best negotiators. The best project managers are the ones that know what behavior they need and are successful at getting it.
 
Do you know the behaviors that will deliver projects on time?
 
If you don’t know the behaviors, you can’t measure them; you can’t influence them.
 
Any project worth doing is worth doing quickly. Shorter completion times mean more revenue, sooner. If your project is not moving, the risk of late completion is rising. Therefore, the on-time behaviors to watch and measure are geared towards speed and flow
Several people have roles in keep the project moving: Executives, Project Managers, Functional (Task) Managers, and the Resources that are doing the work.
 
In this post, I’m focusing on just the executives. The owners of the projects. It’s the project manager’s responsibility to manage their behavior, as much as it is to manage the activity of the project.
 
The most critical on time behaviors for the executives are around engagement. They are engaged in the process of delivering projects; governing the portfolio schedule, establishing project priorities and resolving resource allocation conflicts to keep the projects moving. They’re directing and leading process improvements.
 
You could ask, “Why should I care about process improvement?” After all, you’re a project manager, you don’t own the work practices of your resources (engineers, subcontractors, welders, etc.). While the project manager doesn’t “own” anything except the project, you do care about schedule risk. You should care about speed (or flow). Speed is a function of the process. That puts you (the PM) in a kind of governance role, overseeing process improvements. You can’t implement the improvements, but you can make sure there’s a process in place to continuously reduce schedule risk.
 
How do you know if the senior managers are engaged? Not by the number of emails you get, that’s for sure.
 
Measure the blocked and critical tasks, the quantity, and the number of days to resolve them. I keep a list of process improvements and watch if the number of items is stable or falling and the rate of the completion of process improvements
 
If blocked and critical tasks are languishing, it means someone is:

• Not watching the impediments to progress
• Conflicts are not being resolved
• Resolution priorities are not assigned correctly (for speed)

Each of these are governance responsibilities.
 
If you don’t have the right behaviors at the top, you’re not going to get them in the middle or the bottom. As the person accountable for on time delivery, you must know, measure, and manage the behavior to get what you want.
 

The post Spot Delivery Problems Early – Part 1: Governance appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

What does it truly mean? Does time equal money in my project?

If I lose time, I waste money? or If I delay, I get the money later?

If it’s the first definition, you are saying, money is like time. If I waste it, it’s gone forever.

If it’s the latter, you are saying that the delay causes a loss or missing opportunity (during the delay), never to be recovered.

Which is it?

As a practical matter, for a manager delivering a project or results, the main issues are waste and opportunity.

Is all time “wasted” truly lost? How do you know?

Managing Time

Most managers break their projects down into individual tasks with individual deadlines. Like this

Straightforward, isn’t it? Make a list of tasks, estimate durations, link them together and you have your sequence and completion dates. Day to day, your job is to keep those tasks completing on time. To deliver on time, meet all your dates. Don’t be late, each task is important, each resource is important.

Opportunity Time

The problem is that not all task sequences are the same. So, you manage the critical path; if you’re sophisticated, you’ll manage the critical chain. Certain sequences will dictate the overall duration of the project. You’ll give higher priority to one sequence over another.

Here’s the thing about time. By declaring one sequence of tasks more important than another, you are choosing some time to be more crucial than others. Losing time on a non-critical sequence is less important than on the critical sequence. Therefore, in some cases, time is not money. In other cases, time lost is a loss of a LOT of money; the value of the entire project!

During the life of a project, the manager makes tradeoffs between time now and time later. Completing the project delivers a certain value; the value of rental income for a building, the value of a new capability, the value of entering a new market, the value of a new feature, etc. Every project worth doing, is worth doing sooner.

When you’re the project manager, to make an educated decision, you must determine the value of a day. What’s a day worth? And, is the task on the critical chain (which is the shortest time to complete the project)? IF your task is on the critical chain your decisions could be very different than if your task decision is off the critical chain.

Time is Expensive?

You could argue that wasting time on the non-critical tasks costs money. Maybe.

Let’s pick a resource. Let’s say your engineer completes 2 tasks this week, but she can’t do more because she’s waiting for some information. The week before, she was much more productive, she completed 4 tasks. Does that mean that the week where 4 tasks were completed your expenses were lower? Your expenses change only when her pay changes. Only if she was paid less the week 2 tasks were completed. Time equals money only if the expense varies in direct proportion to the work delivered.

For most of us and for most resources, time lost does not equal money lost. People are not paid to produce work; they are paid to show up. The view of the enterprise is that expenses are a function of the number of people on the payroll, not the amount of work that is done. Payroll costs are fixed costs, not variable. Expenses are related to hiring decisions, not production. We can never say time = money when it relates to work, because expenses don’t vary with production. Time = money when look at how many people are on hire per day, week, month, etc.

So, time equals money, sometimes. Not all time is equal. Not all time is costly. Some time is worth a great deal. The cost of time is not the same as the value of time.

Most lost time is simply lost, because most resources are not on the critical chain. And that’s ok. Some lost time affects the critical chain and it’s not ok. What matters is the effect of lost time on the completion of the project, not the completion of an individual task.

The skilled manager must know the difference.

The post Is Time Equal to Money? Part 1 appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

The old adage isn’t necessarily untrue. Having a plan is crucial. But research shows that the common approaches to project management fail to produce the outcomes that managers expect—and that customers want. Good planning, as it turns out, isn’t necessarily the answer; it’s part of the problem. Not because planning in itself is bad, but by focusing solely on planning, we aren’t looking at the rest of the equation for success.

Independent project management research shows that what differentiates the best project executors from everyone else are just a few strategies and processes:

• Schedule stability
• Having a culture of delivery excellence
• Executive sponsorship
• Skilled leaders

Schedule Stability

A stable schedule is only the first step in successfully delivering a project. No schedule is perfect. The uncertainty in project is what makes a project a project, rather than say, an assembly line. That uncertainty is what causes variation. However, that variation doesn’t mean your schedule should be changing every day or every week.

A stable schedule takes uncertainty into account so you don’t have to change it every time Murphy strikes.  So if your schedule is constantly shifting, take a look at your planning methodology. Managing uncertainty doesn’t mean planning in more detail, it means giving yourself permission to make a schedule that is good enough. Good enough to manage, good enough to take variation into account.

Instead of changing plans, change behaviors. Don’t make your first response to variation changing the plan. Keep your team focused on the path forward. Get the team back on schedule rather than get the schedule back on the team.

The key to schedule stability is not more detailed planning, but intelligent execution – creating and sustaining a culture where moving forward to completion is more important than meeting the details of a plan that was built months ago.

A Culture of Delivery Excellence

So much work passes for accomplishment, but while work is being done the final step of finishing seems elusive. Many team members feel they are spinning their wheels, never seeming to finish anything.

The definition of the word “delivery” is rooted in accomplishment. Delivery is about completion. To build a culture of delivery excellence, you must develop the processes to execute well (to finish!) and establish appropriate governance to reinforce behaviors that drive accomplishment.

Consider what it takes to finish a project:

Collaboration and Problem Solving

Few project managers have a structured process for team collaboration. Collaboration, working together to solve problems, is often left to having some meetings each week. What happens at these meetings is rarely structured, so the meetings turn into status reports and excuse delivery. How does your team work together?  Are they focusing on action?  Holding each other accountable for results? Working together to solve problems?

Collaboration requires a shared vision of the direction of the project and a clear understanding of the obstacles standing in the way. Only then can the team actively engage with the critical items and resources to remove them.  

Making the project visual is by far the simplest way to show the team where they are, where they need to go, and the obstacles in the way. They can then work on moving ahead, instead of living in the past.

Measurements

Do you know the critical diagnostic and KPIs for your project teams? When one member wins, does the project benefit? Having the right measurements means you know your critical processes and have aligned your team member’s individual performance with the project’s (rather than the individual’s department) objectives.

Remember, what gets measured gets managed. What’s important gets the most attention. If the objective of the project is to complete as quickly as possible within budget, how you translate the day to day activities to that objective will point your team in the right direction and have everyone who is on the project, on the project team.

Risk Management

Are your project teams spending a lot of time fighting fires and solving problems? Reacting rather than looking ahead? These are the classic symptoms of a broken risk management process.  Your team should be systematically identifying and resolving risk. Risk management isn’t just for the project manager, the entire team should be raising and resolving risk during the entire project.

Governance

One of the biggest complaints of senior managers is that they can’t get a sense of where things are until the wheels have fallen off. Do you have a formal executive governance process that provides a clear view into the full portfolio of projects? A dashboard of the most important risks and actions? Without a governance process, there can be no focus for executives and project teams. You will find it difficult to align project objectives and project outcomes with the overall organizational objectives.

“Culture” is more than what people feel, it’s what they do. As a leader, you can shape behavior. After all, isn’t that the main job of a project manager? Shaping behavior to achieve the project outcome?

Executive Sponsorship

It’s no secret that having an executive behind your project will certainly make it easier to deliver. After all, the executives have the organizational authority and resources to make or break your project. I’m amazed that this is even a discussion, because I don’t understand why a project would be undertaken without an executive sponsor.

Have you identified the executive “owner” of your project? Someone owns it; not a committee. Who benefits from the deliverable of the project? Who is harmed if it doesn’t deliver?  Get that person on your team. Sell them your project. Involve them or you will have no one to fight for your project.

Skilled Leaders

The best project managers are not the best technicians, they’re the best leaders. How do you know if you have a leader?  They have followers! No one is coming to your meetings? Responding to your email? Check your leadership style. If you’re in charge of projects, make sure your project managers have the right skills.

Great Project Teams are Great at Executing

Planning is important, but don’t overlook execution; this is where the leverage is. Execution is a process, as much as planning is a process. Leave it to chance and you’ll leave your results to chance as well.

Learn more about how to improve your project execution by reading some of our eBooks or watching more of our videos. Particularly, our eBook Why do projects succeed or fail? Discover What Really Makes a Difference includes some very practical information you can use right now to improve your project performance.

The post Top 4 Project Management Challenges & How to Solve Them appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Projects, by their nature, are uncertain, but not all uncertainty can be treated the same way. Knowing the where your project’s uncertainty lies will help you pick the right approach to managing your project and delivering the best outcome for your team, your customer and the project owner.

Many projects are time bound, with specific dates that must be met. There are known parameters to the project outcome, but how you’re going to execute are uncertain. If you your project is software or product development, which is iterative, most uncertainty lies in the deliverables; you’re not sure exactly what the deliverable will look like. In essence, you don’t’ know what you don’t know until you develop a prototype; you’re learning as you go. In these types of projects, there is little uncertainty in the process, but a lot of uncertainty in the outcome. This is different than say, construction, where the deliverable is quite well defined. What is most uncertain is the events (like weather or errors) that lead to the deliverable. The process has the most uncertainty, the outcome has little.

Two Approaches to Managing

Scrum and Agile methods that focus on iterations to reduce the learning cycles and reduce the uncertainty. The problem with these projects is when there is a date attached, it’s difficult to effectively manage schedule risk without significant time buffers.

If the uncertainty is in the process, what most project managers do to reduce it is create more detailed plans or (attempting to) closely managing the details in the plan. These projects have many moving parts and lots of detail to manage – along with the normal uncertainty they cannot manage, like the weather and mistakes. So – with all this comes complexity.  That complexity is difficult to manage. Project managers lose control of their schedules. Project owners lose visibility into schedule risk. Project run late, firefighting ensues. It’s difficult and messy. Deadlines are missed. Costs go up. Customers are unhappy. Business is lost. Profits suffer.

Detailed Planning is Not the Cure-All

So, the solution is not in the direction of more detailed planning, but in the direction of improving management effectiveness. This is what ViewPoint and VISUM does. Stripping the project plan to its essence. Doing simple things that leverage what we know about process behavior (little’s law, priority control, etc.). Making the process visual to communicate the critical items quickly. Providing feedback on the project AND the delivery process to allow the team to act early on risk and improve their delivery effectiveness.

Taming complexity.

With ViewPoint, the team always knows the most critical items to work on. They are focused on those items. There is less chaos in the project, so less stopping and starting. People can focus on the work, not on the next meeting. Tasks get done quicker. Project durations are reduced. Costs go down. On time delivery goes up. More projects are delivered. Revenue goes up. Profits go up. Project owners have visibility into the schedule risk so they can intervene when they must. Customers are happy. Project Managers are happy. The CEO is happy.

The post Where is Your Project’s Uncertainty? appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Stop Losing Time

One of the biggest challenges in project that is behind schedule is stop falling further behind. So the first priority is “stop the bleeding”. Preventing things from getting worse has little to do with the plan, no one’s using it anyway. Rather than re-baselining the plan, focus on the process of execution first. Change what people are doing. This is where you’re losing time, so let’s focus on the things that will make the biggest difference in the least amount of time.

• Get your team looking and working forward to get out in front of any problems
• One team, one goal to speed decision making
• Control task priorities to reduce multitasking and boost productivity
• Go faster by systematically leveraging the bottleneck of the project
• Set your execution tempo and quickly respond to problems

Once you have accomplished these things, you can turn your attention to regaining time.

Looking Forward; Visualize Your Project

A visual representation of the project helps your team: they can see where they are, where they’re going, and the major obstacles to moving ahead. Making your project or portfolio process visual prevents information overload, exposing previously hidden process problems. This is not a substitute for your project plan; the basics of a plan or process is required to build to your board. The visualization is a summary of your plan, to be managed by the team.

A visual project board (VPB) provides tangible feedback that everyone can see and understand. If there’s a bottleneck or a gap, team members don’t waste time finding the focus areas, they’re obvious.  They problems are visible, no longer hidden. It solves the “living in the past” problem because the VPB points the way towards completion. It helps get the team out of the weeds and into sorting out only the biggest problems that block progress.

Present your project visually – so your team can quickly communicate and grasp the project status. It eliminates the debate about where things really are, so you can move into action. It sets the stage for the next thing you must accomplish: active collaboration.

Check out this video and this video to learn more about visualizing your projects

Build the Measurements that Reinforce the Behavior You Want

When your project is in trouble, you typically have only a few concrete measures of success.  Delivery date – you’re late! Budget – it’s out of control! Scope – it doesn’t work! These outcome-based metrics are not very helpful in telling you what’s wrong. After all, if you know what to do, it would have been done already!

Going back to the early warning signs. These are the problems; you must find solutions. How can you know if these behaviors are occurring? If these behaviors are happening, your project will continue to lose time. To refresh your memory, the early warning signs are:

• Living in the past
• Conflicting Goals
• Shifting Priorities
• Wandering Bottlenecks
• Slow response to problems

Turning your troubled project around begins with deciding what you want to see, every day. To stop losing time, you much change the team’s behaviors to the opposite:

• Focus on the future – proactive management
• Alignment with the project goal
• Stable priorities – less multitasking
• Focus on the project bottleneck
• Quick response to problems

Focusing on the Future – Managing Proactively and Promptly

The project team that spends all its time on status updates and fighting the fire of the moment has little time or ability to manage what’s coming. To manage what’s coming, the team must be able to see what’s coming. That’s why visualizing your project is important. Once the project is visualized and broken down to its deliverables, you can measure your team’s future focus.

To know if your team is focusing on the future, you must identify on what they should be focusing. Focusing on the future could mean they look forward to the weekend. I want my project team to focus on risk. What could go wrong? What could create a delay? What is not known?

Once they’re identified, are they being mitigated? Resolved? When your team is focused on the future, risks are systematically identified and resolved before they affect progress.

Focusing on the future has three elements:

• Identification of risks
• Mitigation or resolution of those risks
• Before they affect the project

To measure the behavior, you can simply count risks and how many of those risks never become obstacles. In other words, they do not delay the project, (within limits, because risk mitigation is not free) increase costs, or sacrifice project deliverables.

When we visualize the project, we use a red dot on cards to identify tasks that are stopped and yellow dots that are risks.

Your measurement of this behavior is the number of yellow dots per week versus the number of red dots. If people are systematically identifying risks, yellow dots will be rising or will be stable and red dots will be declining or stable. Managing your project team’s ability to focus on the future is as simple as that.

To measure promptness, we measure the duration of a red dot. What we want is quick response to any problems that stop project progress.

Reinforcing the future oriented behavior will transform the dynamic of your team. Rather than excuses, they’ll bring solutions. Rather than surprises, you’ll find alternatives. Fewer obstacles, faster progress. You’ll stop losing time because your team is looking ahead. They’re solving problems. Systematically. That’s what you want!

The visual project management solution I’ve invented, VISUM, has the metrics already built in.  Have a look at VISUM here

Next up: More Measurements to Drive Good Behavior

The post The Most Important Project Measurement; Looking Foward appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

You don’t see it coming until it’s too late. Everything was “green” until it wasn’t. All parts of the project were close to being on time. At least until they weren’t.
If you knew earlier, you could have made changes that wouldn’t be as costly and damaging to your customer relationships as the choices you’re making now.

That light at the end of the tunnel? Definitely a train.

So what to do?

Most project managers and executives assume that since the schedule showed the project was on time, it must have been a bad schedule that caused it. If we had planned better, we would have finished on time!

Well, maybe.

Projects are not abstract things, lived out in spreadsheets or software.

There is no such thing as a perfect plan, no such thing as a 100% accurate forecast. After all, who can predict the weather?

Here’s the thing. Uncertainty is What Makes a Project a Project. When we start the projects, we know many things we will encounter on the way to completion, but not every thing. That means surprises are a way of life in the project world. Any plan is made up of educated guesses about what will happen in the future. How accurate could they be?

Experienced project managers develop coping strategies: negotiating for more resources, disguising contingency, stakeholder management, risk management processes, increasing the amount of detail, frequent re-planning, and more. All of these are good to have, but they don’t get at the root of schedule variation; they’re coping strategies for the surprises that plague every project.

No matter how good you are at planning, you will never have a perfect schedule. You can make them better, but they will never be perfect. Improving your planning is not where you’re going to find the biggest opportunity. You be nimble during execution. If you’re not, your great plan will not matter anyway.

Let’s agree that your schedule will not be very good. How do you know if you’re in trouble? How can you quantify your nimbleness? How do you pull out of a bad situation?

The Early Warning Signs of a Project in Trouble

Project planning is a bit like time travel. Who knows what we’ll find there?

So rather than be the best forecaster, build the best time machine, the project delivery process. Your execution behaviors are the best predictors of project success.

While we can find opportunity in every plan (I started my career as a scheduler), look first at what the project team is doing.

• How they’re managing the project.
• How flexible are they?
• Do they respond quickly?
• Decisively?
• How are they responding to the day to day surprises that are presented to them?

There are behavioral indicators of whether your project will be on time. They can be observed, measured, and improved.

1. Focus on the future; what needs to be done, not what has been done
2. One team, one goal; the team members’ functional objectives are subordinated to project objectives
3. Task priorities are stable; they do not change from day to day so resources are able to work on each project task until completion
4. We know where the leverage points to accelerate progress; bottlenecks are clearly identified and communicated
5. All leading to rapid resolution of the unexpected

So let’s look at your team. Are they doing any of the following?

Living in the Past

In many projects, reporting progress is a substitute for moving forward. True, you must understand where you are relative to where you’re going, but reporting completions is not a substitute for managing the future.

If your team is living in the past, they’ll be spending a great deal of time reporting “progress”; percent completed and giving the reasons why things are not done. They’re a little stuck; working to understand where they are in the project. Project meetings are spent sorting out what has been done and negotiating priorities. They’re not looking forward and project progress reflects it.

You won’t get to your destination looking through the rear view mirror.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Conflicting Goals

Many times, the only person who is actually on the project is the project manager. He then spends his time on enrollment and buy in activities, rather than the core task of moving the project ahead. It happens so frequently, there is a section of the body of knowledge devoted just to stakeholder management.

If any team member has conflicting goals, they will not be fully engaged with work of the project, they may even make decisions that make completing the project more difficult. They don’t respond to questions quickly, don’t come to meetings, are not working with the rest of the team to move the project forward.

In order to win, everyone on the team must have the same goal.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Shifting Priorities

The project team members are spending their time sorting through the work to determine which tasks should have the highest priority. They’ll respond to the latest communication from a customer or a friend, or a boss. They’ll be switching – changing priorities for the resources (people) doing the work of the project.

When priorities are changing, more work is added to the project, time and productivity are lost, and the project is delayed.

Priority shifting breeds multitasking; the number one killer of productivity.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it.

Wandering Bottlenecks.

The project never has enough resources to complete the work at hand. Finding more resources is a constant battle. There’s never enough time or budget. It just seems that the right resources are not available when you need them. The team may feel a little like they’re playing project “Whack-A-Mole”.

There is always a constraint that limits the rate at which the project can be completed, but if it’s always moving from week to week or day to day, it indicates a poor grasp of the resource requirements to complete the project.

The bottleneck is where you get leverage to go faster. If you don’t recognize it, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Check out this video to learn more of this symptom and you can do about it

Slow Response to Problems

Many projects are riddled with the “I sent an email, but have not gotten a response.” kinds of problems. Yes, the different time zones are an issue. Yes, we get hundreds of emails a day, but a delayed response to a critical problem slows the entire project down.

A slow response to problems indicates a team that is not engaged. They have a poor understanding of what the important issues are, who owns them, and what is needed to resolve them.

The single largest aspect of project duration is wait time. The more you wait, the longer it takes.

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Experienced project managers and executives may still point to the plan as the biggest cause for troubled projects.  Or the assumptions behind the plan. They have a point, I have never worked in a recovery project where the plan was acceptable or was even being used to drive the day to day behavior. I’m talking about leverage. In a recovery situation, you must focus on the most critical elements that will get your project back on track as quickly as possible. You can’t fix everything that’s wrong, you have to fix the things that will give you the biggest results as fast as possible. Re-planning your project is an excuse to delay taking the necessary medicine to get things moving. Focus on execution. that’s where your leverage is.

Next up, a project recovery strategy. If you’re in a hurry, you can watch the webinar on this topic here

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1. They Avoid Multi-tasking

Even though many people think multitasking is good, research shows just the opposite. It shows that dividing attention across multiple activities is taxing on the brain and often comes at the expense of real productivity. As much as a 40% loss. And it can also increase stress for the people multitasking.

In another way, multi-tasking adds work to your project because of task switching. For any task, there is a certain amount of time to setup – to begin doing the real work. For example, to re-start a task, I have to review the work I’ve done, determine where I left off, and then decide what to do next. The more complex the task, the longer this set up time takes.

The more complex a task, the longer the set up time is, causing even more delays. The more switching I do, the more additional work I must do, and the longer every project takes.

The successful project manager guards himself and his team from multitasking.

2. They Communicate Visually

At the ground level of the project, communicating information such as status, obstacles, priorities, and risk are a constant and never-ending challenge.

At the governance levels, program and portfolio owners are often faced with situations where they have either too little or too much information. The quality and timing of the information provided can be subjective, and is usually dependent on the person delivering it. So, if better execution is a goal, and effective communication is the top challenge in execution, it follows that improving communication will lead to improved execution and better business results.

By providing a visual representation of the work, the team develops a shared understanding of where they are and what needs to be done. This improves communication, because they share the same objective viewpoint. People spend less time reporting information like status, obstacles, priorities, and risk and more time on action.

Good project managers give the entire team a view of the playing field so they can act.

3. They Collaborate Intentionally

We know that in under-performing projects, issues are identified very late, and important communication is delayed. The right problem solvers are brought in too late to prevent the problems, and additional work—putting out fires—is then added to the workflow. Capacity runs short, the project is delayed, and costs go up.

Focus on face-to-face accountability – emphasizing what will be done, rather than what has been done.

Create a few simple rules to focus your team on what is to be done, not what has been done. History debates are for analysis, not collaborative execution. Establish guidelines and structure to bring the right people and good communication to the forefront to create action.

4. They Build a One Team, One Goal Approach

Most project teams consist of multiple disciplines from a variety of sources. Each of these team members are placed on the team to accomplish the project’s objective, yet, they bring with them the objective for their functional disciplines as well. Delivering the project is important, but not their main goal. In which case, we have people on the team whose goals do not match.

When functional goals are aligned, each member of the team is free to act in the best interest of the project, without being hindered by conflicting goals from other areas. This eliminates a major source of internal conflict, and speeds decision-making and action.

The savvy project manager pays attention to conflicting objectives among the team members and resolves conflicts between them.

5. They Control the Work in Progress

It seems like common sense: start sooner, you’ll finish sooner. The problem is that everyone starts sooner! Increasing volumes of work in progress increases confusion and conflict—and decreases real productivity. Having a lot of work does accomplish the objective of keeping people busy. However, while everyone is busy, the true picture of the overall project is obscured until deadlines approach, when the failure to complete the right tasks becomes all too visible.

To control work in process, managers establish and enforce pre-release criteria to match work releases with the rate of work completion and ensure no work is started that cannot be finished.

Keep the volume of work under control. Don’t overload the team with too much. Don’t start on projects just for the sake of starting. Successful project managers are focused on finishing.

Successful project managers don’t try to do everything, they focus on the few critical elements that make the difference between doing the work and delivering the work.

Learn more about what is working and what isn’t working in delivering projects. Read The State of Project Management Practice Research

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