Jeff Floyd on Project Management

Justin
What are some good ways to improve project management awareness, understanding, adoption, and execution in a project team?

Jeff
Let us assume that the culture of the team is one that does not understand project management. In this case, I have conducted 3 to 5 day “quick start” project planning meeting. In these meeting, we cover each of the initial project planning steps as a team. First, I teach the theory, then we apply that theory to a real project. For example on day one, I spend a couple of hours on the purpose of a project charter, and then we write a project charter. Next, I talk about WBS, and then we do a WBS. Then comes activities, tasks, sequencing, resource assignments, effort, risks, etc. We end with a list of action items that must be completed to baseline the plan.

This technique educates this project team on techniques and sets expectation for performance. It also goes a long way to build the team.

Use this approach project by project and soon the organization will understand PM.

Justin:
I like your approach and will look to adopt it going forward.

Over the last few days, I have participated in a discussion with Justin on various Project Management Topics. With his permission, I am sharing our discussions with you as a series of posts.

Justin:
The first topic on project management that I’d like to discuss would be the barriers to establishing strong project management practices and baking project management into the culture of companies big and small.

Jeff:
Primary barrier is the value proposition. Many folks jump on the project management band wagon without a basic understanding of what it is, what it does, how it works, and most importantly what it means to the culture.

Therefore, we want project management. OK, Why? What problem will it solve and how? What form or project management do we want? Are we prepared for decisions to be made by project managers? Will we have a PMO? If so, what will that look like? It is strategic or tactical PMO? Do we understand the difference?

Next if the company does not have the PM skill set in house, how will you go about getting it? It takes a great PM to interview PM’s and select a great PM. Any idiot can interview and select a bad PM. How long will it take to find out?

Justin:

I fully agree with your response and see teams continue to struggle in project execution and management make knee-jerk decisions based upon superficial and often inaccurate data. All due to poor project management, bad project managers, and the lack of organizational adoption and understanding of project management practices.

You mention the value proposition. An issue that has recently been researched by PMI. They should have or soon will publish their finding. I watched a webcast on it, I liked what I saw, and the information presented.

While driving home from work tonight, I heard Clark Howard tell a story about a Mutual fund investment manager. This manager would visit a company before he invested money in the company. He would make an appointment to talk with the CEO, COO or CFO then travel to the company to talk with them. When he arrived at the reception area he would ask to use the bathroom. If the bathroom was filthy, he would return to reception and say that he had to reschedule then not invest in that company. His reason was that if the management cared so little about the employees to not even give them a clean bathroom then “he knew all he needed to know” about that company.

Apparently another criteria he used was assigned parking spaces for the executives. His thought there was that the executes were advertising loud and clear that they were better than the rank and file.

What do you thing of the investment mangers logic? I love simple and elegant solutions. This one qualifies. It is effective, It is simple to implement and understand, Best of all I think it works.

Vendor Evaluation Template is an excel spreadsheet that will allow you to do a simple evaluation of multiple vendors responding to a procurement activity. The template is a good example of the “weighting system” of vendor evaluations.

What is a weighting system?

A weighting system is a method of quantifying data to minimize the effect of personal prejudice on source selection.

High level process:
Step 1: Define the evaluation criteria

Step 2: Assigning a numerical weight to each of the evaluation criteria

Step 3: Rating each prospective sellers on each criteria element

Step 4: Multiplying the criteria weight by the vendor rating for each criteria element

Step 5: Totaling the results to compute an overall score

In this example the highest scoring vendor is the vendor that is the best fit to the evaluation criteria. This vendor may not be the best overall fit. That determination is made after negotiations.

Comments are welcome.

Use at your own risk.

Hello All,

I spent some of Monday night and tonight adding plug-ins to the new site. These features are now live:

• Backup the DataBase - WP-DBmanager from Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
• Users can email posts - WP-Email from Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
• A new Download Manager is ready for my next feature - wp-downloadmanager from Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
• A user can sent me email on the contact me page wp-contact-form-iii from Kristin K. Wangen
• The categories are now in a tree format thanks to wp-dtree from Ulf Benjaminsson

All of the above plug-ins are avaiable on wordpress.org.

So far I am quite happy with wordpress.