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.

The post What is Visual Project Management appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

The post Spot Project Delivery Problems Early Part 2: The Fundamentals 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.

The post Amplify Your Team’s Productivity with Visual Project Management appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

If collaboration in one location seems challenging, then collaboration among far-flung teams in different offices—or different time zones or continents—probably feels impossible. Different locations cultivate different work cultures and loyalties, which naturally impede alignment and synchronization, and the potential for miscommunication increases with every additional mile separating team members.

With remote teams, you have all of the same challenges you had in your local team before you achieved Basic Collaboration:

• Work is done out of sequence.
• Resources are unavailable when needed.
• Work priorities are incorrect, and team members don’t know what those priorities are.
• Resource overloads in remote locations will go unnoticed.
• The risk involving those teams is difficult to see and understand.

All of these have the same effect: slowing the project and increasing its duration.

To close the gaps among team members, managers must conduct collaborative meetings across distances to share information, expectations, updates, and responsibilities in a timely (and therefore relevant) way. However, we’re not just going to have a get-together. Effective communication and synchronization across distances—Remote Collaboration, the first element of the Improved Coordination layer of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model, pictured below—demands a different and higher communication discipline.

Since time shifting and distance are unalterable conditions, your team must be purposeful in two dimensions: frequency and content. The collaboration process must explicitly identify what value-added information (the information that causes forward progress) must be communicated and how frequently communication must take place.

To ensure that your team’s communication is relevant, you must be clear on the content of your communication (what information is critical?), and focused on the issues (what problems need to be solved?) that will make a real difference (what action is needed?) to the project results.

To create meaningful collaboration, you must consider how you’ll be sharing the project status or your Visual Project Board (VPB). Whatever you do—whether it’s video, duplicate boards, or a software version of your VPB—it must allow all of your team members to easily contribute, distribute, and share the most important information in an orderly format that visualizes tasks, timings, and responsibilities to be completed; in short, a shared, clear vision of the project (functional alignment!).

For Remote Collaboration to be effective, you’ll need a slightly revised set of collaboration and meeting rules to foster the appropriate behaviors in all participants. As Collaborative Execution, these meetings require a facilitator, but with remote collaboration, you’ll need one at both ends. Ideally you should have everyone standing up in front of a board, with no muting, so side discussions don’t take place. The facilitators should make an effort to foster interactions among all participants while focusing on issue identification, pressing for accountability, and addressing all other facets of Collaborative Execution.

With a shared vision of the situation, your collaboration with remote teams will be more effective. When you can accommodate on-the-fly contributions and insights, your time together will encourage innovative problem solving and accountability that reinforces team action. Instead of preparing defenses, your entire team will work quickly and collaboratively to tackle problems together and move forward.

The Remote Collaboration process replicates the basic collaboration strategies beyond geographic or organizational boundaries so that the remote teams are fully in sync with the local teams. In short, the remote teams:

• Have a common view of the work status, issues, and work plans
• Make decisions that reflect global organizational goals
• Understand the relationships between current project status and achieving project, portfolio and organizational goals

As a result, the remote teams get the benefits of Basic Collaboration:

• Increased employee engagement
• Improved situational awareness
• Identification and elimination of bottlenecks
• Increased productivity
• Reduced project durations
• Quick response to problems
• Increased accountability for results
• Reduced inter-functional conflict

Remote Collaboration brings the entire team to the same level of execution maturity, so the organization can turn its attention away from fighting fires, to improving the project delivery process –further increasing productivity and achieving consistent on time delivery.

Next week, we’ll be discussing the second element of Improved Coordination, Managing Bottlenecks, so subscribe to my blog today to receive the updates straight to your inbox, or download our webinar, Getting Your Distributed Team to See the Big Picture – How to Successfully Manage Distributed Teams to learn more about how to manage and improve the collaboration in your remote teams.

The post Why Do Projects Succeed or Fail? Remote Collaboration appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

As we grew older, maybe we got involved in sports or group activities. We were taught an easy mantra: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work.

At some point once we entered the real world however, we lost sight of these simple ideals. We quit articulating the things we need, we quit working together to achieve our goals… we stopped communicating all together. And yet somehow we’re surprised that our projects are running weeks to months to years behind schedule, and we can’t get anything done on time.  And it’s not fun anymore.

Successful projects stem from basic concepts similar to the ones you learned as a child. These help improve productivity and reduce project duration. Together, they comprise the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model, pictured below.

Basic Collaboration is pivotal to successful projects. It is the simplest level, but it creates the foundation for all the others to build upon, and is instrumental to boosting on time delivery, task velocity and productivity as a whole by killing the biggest threat to project success: multitasking.

I’ve written about each of the four elements involved individually, but here’s a refresher, and next week, we’ll move on to the middle level of the model, Improved Coordination.

Collaborative Execution

For projects to be truly successfully executed, informed collaboration is essential. Both managers and team members must be able to see past the limits of their individual tasks, to the overall direction of the project. They need a map. The roles, reporting and accountability must be crystal clear (Who’s going to drive?), so that everyone knows what needs to get done today, instead of driving through the rear view mirror. Collaborative Execution makes tasks in the team’s work visible to everyone involved, allowing the team to be truly informed so they can collaborate.

Functional Alignment

Everyone comes to a project with objectives from their individual function. Functional alignment takes people out of their organizational silos and puts them on the project. Each member of the team acts in the best interest of the project as a whole, instead of their individual silo’s objective, eliminating conflict between departments or teams, and accelerating decision making and action. They need to know the right behavior. Functional alignment happens when every single person involved in the project is focused on the project’s overarching goals, rather than their own silo’s objectives.

Priority Control

Managing priorities is essential to eliminate multitasking and achieving Basic Collaboration. By collaborating more effectively and aligning functional goals, you can easily create a priority system that is transparent and simple.  Through a simple priority system, teams can ensure that people work on the right tasks at the right time and most importantly, everyone’s working on the most important priority to advance the project.

Control WIP

A very important aspect to reduce project duration is to eliminate the task wait time in the workflow. Establishing control over work in progress is the final building block of Basic Collaboration. Managers must establish criteria to control tasks to ensure that nothing is started that cannot be finished. By controlling the amount of work in the queue, teams simplify the task of project management. They can have clear criteria for work release, have clear methods for managing work, and have established targets for total system work in progress.

These four elements work together to lay the building blocks for ultimate project success to reduce project duration, deliver on time, and boost productivity.

Learn how one of our clients recently implemented the Basic Collaboration level of the Viewpoint Project Execution Maturity Model and increased their productivity by 360% and on-time delivery by 20%. Download the case here.

The post Back to Basics: Building Blocks for Successful Project Delivery appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Picture this:

Your project has one goal: Build a mountain. Now, think of your project as two tectonic plates: one is called Planning, one is called Results. You are standing right in the middle, trying to push the two together to create the mountain, but unfortunately, as a result of forces beyond your control: nature, the plates are shifting further and further apart.

Your mountain is becoming a valley, and you’ve fallen right in. You’re trapped in the valley and can’t find a way out.

Unfortunately, once the valley has formed, there’s no going back, but there is help, and you can fix it.

The Secret to Fixing your Projects

If you’re a follower of my blog, you know I talk a lot about Project Execution Maturity, and how skillful and successful execution comes from a series of deliberate and repeatable processes. Successful project execution is not by chance.

We created our Project Execution Maturity Assessment to provide a way for project managers to not only identify the weaknesses of their project delivery processes, but provide them with an actionable path forward to fixing them by placing them on the ViewPoint Project Execution Maturity Model, pictured below. Essentially, it’s a way to remove yourself from the valley and build a bridge between planning and results.

The first assessment is a quick and simple diagnostic to help you measure the health of your current process that drive on time delivery and productivity. This assessment only takes about 10 minutes, but it’s a great start to help you to identify your gaps, and outline a path to improvement.

The second assessment is a comprehensive and customized evaluation of your processes. It’s a great way for organizations to achieve maximum clarity on their business processes and develop a consensus plan for moving forward.

The post The Secret Weapon for Successful Project Delivery appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

There are a lot of moving parts, people and processes. Your projects may not be planned properly. Your communication may not be very good. Your resources might not be as productive as they could be. Maybe there are no standardized processes, and everyone is winging it.

Which are affecting YOUR projects?

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Project Delivery Processes

The Project Execution Maturity Model (PEMM), which is pictured above, is the key to understanding the basic behaviors and processes that dictate the effectiveness of your execution. It lays out a path from ad hoc processes, to systematic and disciplined execution.

Knowing where your organization stands in the model will help you target the critical areas that will make a difference today. If you’re doing a process transformation, the PEMM guides you as it progresses from local, ad hoc execution, to fully assimilated, repeatable processes that systematically deliver desirable and deliberate results from project to project.

Each level of maturity reflects an organization’s ability to manage activity and time across all areas of the projects, with movement from level to level resulting in significant strategic gains, from improved rate of task completion and overall productivity, to increased timely delivery and reduced costs.

Where do you fit on the spectrum?

Understanding the Project Execution Maturity Model is step one, but understanding where you fit within it is essential to actually improving your ability to deliver on-time and on-cost project performance consistently.

If you’re wondering why your projects are late or over budget, the Project Execution Maturity Model Assessment will help you find the gaps, clearly identify the targets for improvement, and provide a structure to move forward and start improving your results.

Change with Confidence

We have created an assessment instrument – a diagnostic – to measure your processes that drive on time delivery and place you on the maturity spectrum so you can define an actionable path forward, and giving you confidence in the direction you’re going.

Taking advantage of the ideas and behaviors set out in the PEMM helps organizations achieve:

-Better Collaboration between team members, regardless of location
-Simplification of management Improved synchronization of work
-Improved situational awareness
-Quicker responses to problems
-Increased productivity

And the best part? Organizations who embrace the PEMM make huge strides to lower costs, shorten project durations, and consistently and reliably deliver, every time.

The post Why Are Your Projects Always Late? Deliver on time with the Project Execution Maturity Model appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Not More Planning, More Cooperation

For too long, project managers have believed that the right planning leads to the right results.

Yet time after time, independent research shows that the current approach to project management fails to produce the outcomes managers expect – and clients want. Researchers report:

• A staggering 39% of IT projects with budgets over $10 million USD fail.
• Only 2.5% of the companies successfully complete their projects.
• 44% of IT projects run over budget, 7% run over time, and 56% deliver less value than expected.
• Most other projects typically overrun the schedule by almost 70%.

What’s Going Wrong?

Despite the emphasis on better planning processes and improving project skills, project performance is not getting better.

We know that between planning and execution, there is a gap – a wide gap. Inside that gap, there are conflicting priorities…a multiplicity of tasks in progress…a misalignment between what is measured and what is meaningful…a failure to identify and adjust for risks…undetected obstacles and bottlenecks that block progress…and more ground-level factors that have not been, and cannot be addressed by planning alone.

The key to improving project performance is not planning, but execution – creating and sustaining a culture where the right processes and behaviors deliver consistent, quantifiable results.

However, there is a gap between project execution practice and project execution knowledge. It is relatively unexplored area in the project management body of knowledge. For organizations that want to improve their performance, there are three questions:
– Is there a best execution practices?
– What are the principles we can employ?
– How do we put them into practice?

Fortunately, the processes and behaviors to deliver consistent results are well defined and quantified, forming the Project Execution Maturity Model.

The Model proposes three levels of execution capability:

• Basic Collaboration,
• Improved Coordination, and
• Integrated Planning and Execution

Each level of maturity is a reflection of the organization’s capability to manage activity and time, from local teams and the now to remote teams and portfolio life.

Collaboration During Execution

The main emphasis of Basic Collaboration is task velocity or flow. Improved Coordination emphasizes meeting deadlines and extends capabilities to remote work groups. Once an organization has established a foundation of appropriate behaviors and focused communications, Integrated Planning and Execution focuses on creating and executing detailed, optimized plans.

Achieving greater maturity drives greater value. Our firm’s research since 2011 shows that moving from ad-hoc to Basic Collaboration significantly increases financial performance:

• Productivity increases by more than 20%.
• The rate of value creation (project completion) grows by nearly 30%.
• Significant gains in on-time deliver performance are achieved.

Similarly, further gains can be found as the organization moves to Improved Coordination and Integrated Planning and Execution.

In the next few blog posts, I identify the twelve elements that drive effective project execution excellence, giving you a measurable means to assess your status, to target areas of improvement, and to make meaningful progress in the way you deliver projects.

Get a preview and learn more by reading my free eBook “Why Do Projects Succeed or Fail? The Project Execution Maturity Model.”

The post Why Do Projects Succeed or Fail? appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

We find that the biggest problem that project teams face is that they are simply unable to clearly see where they are in the project and what they need to do to move ahead. Sometimes, running a project feels like running full speed into a dark room!

Watch the video below to learn how to drive your project team forward.

Living in the Past; How to Drive Your Project Team Forward from Pinnacle Strategies on Vimeo.

This video includes a couple examples of how you can make your projects visible and get your team focused on the future. For more, our Visualizing Projects eBook introduces visual project management, which reduces the number of meetings and improves the productivity of your entire team.

The post Living in the Past: How to Drive Your Project Team Forward appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.