Project managers are the hub of all project communication and as instant communication technologies mature, there are more and more ways of distributing project information and equal numbers of methods for escalation of issues. Unfortunately, all too often the “instant” nature of communications in emergencies has lulled us into a sense of complacency about planning. Organizational culture is evolving in the direction that mass media has already gone; The timeliness of information is now considered more valuable than the quality of the communication. In other words, information that is partially correct or even wrong, delivered sooner is considered better than good, thorough and contextual stories that help us to think about problems and solutions. But these habits can breed other problems.
Take the example of a project that is experiencing a Web site outage. E-mail, text messaging, pagers and instant messaging communications can essentially indicate immediately to the team that there is a problem. For better or for worse, this typically leads to an instant response from everyone! If there is planning in place for this outage, which means that a) the team has considered before now that an outage is a possibility and b) they have planned how they will respond, then an instant response from everyone is likely to help the problem be resolved sooner. However, if the planning is absent, chaos is sure to ensue.
Everyone on the team will start to do what they do best. Technical people will likely start trouble-shooting to find solutions, project managers will think about communication damage control and the help desk will start updating the problem tickets. However, without a previously designed plan of action, it is likely that these activities will contradict each other and are more likely to lead to more problems and a longer outage.
Project managers should work to minimize their own “instant communications” addictions and instill these habits in the people on their team. For example, minimize the number of conversations and project decisions that are made via e-mail. (You may also win a prize for reducing e-mail storage capacity requirements for your company.) Provide project information in well-formated, predicable, contextual format, such as a weekly newsletter, status report or on a project Web site. Do this at a regular time each day or each week, so people will know when to look for information and will know that they can get a thorough and comprehensive view of the project when it is needed. This will avoid “getting pinged” about project information outside of regularly scheduled meetings and updates.
The more project managers learn about the successful use of different types of communication devices, the more successful projects will tend to be.

To learn more about our coaching and communication services, please visit What If Project

Overloaded managers run the risk of making bad decisions and alienating themselves from important information

Everyone has had a conversation with someone who clearly wasn’t listening. You know the signs. Maybe their eyes keep drifting toward their computer monitor or they keep making faces at people in the hall. This person probably thinks they are multi-tasking, a favorite pastime of the overbooked, but mostly they are just absorbing less information and being rude at the same time.

Running from one meeting to the next or spending lots of time responding to e-mail and voicemail actually can be a recipe for becoming more out of touch. It seems like a paradox, but using all this new technology to stay in touch, might be sending the wrong message to people who really need to speak with you. And it’s probably not giving you much time to really process the information, either.

Consider this scenario: A project manager got a funny sense yesterday that there was really something wrong with the data center. (Smoke was coming from a few of the servers, but not a lot of smoke.) But the project manager doesn’t want to alarm you, and isn’t sure whether or not smoke should be coming from the data center, so she sent you an e-mail. You didn’t respond. She thought that you lack of response meant that smoke in the data center wasn’t a big deal, so she decided to wait to see what would happen.

The next day there was even more smoke coming from the data center. Now, she was more worried. Maybe you didn’t get her e-mail, so she decided to stop by your office. You’re there, but running off to a meeting. You give her all the signs that you’re doing something that is a very high priority (lack of eye contact, shuffling things around on your desk, grabbing a cell phone, ignoring a ringing desk phone). She starts to tell you about the smoke coming from the data cemter, but you are interupted by a call on your cell phone.

The next day the data center blows up. You, the multi-tasking manager, can’t believe that this is happening. You are so accessible. You have an open-door policy. You have e-mail, a cell phone, a work phone, a Blackberry and people like YOU! How could you not have known that the data center was in so much trouble?

Well………. In spite of what you think you are doing, you are out of touch. Rushing around being really busy might make you feel like you are doing more in less time, but you’re sending the wrong signals to key people who should be telling you important information. And don’t even try to blame them! (I know you’re thinking it.) Furthermore (and this is probably the bigger problem), all that rushing around isn’t giving you any time to think. Good communication takes concentrated, conservative effort.

A single, well-constructed set of e-mails, phone calls and meetings is much more effective at communicating a set of well-constructed ideas than 100 meetings, phone calls and e-mails to see “what people think,” “brainstorm” or “get some feedback.”

The reality is that we are often getting too much feedback. Without the time to stop and consider what it all means, we’re not really communicating at all. We’re just throwing words at each other. So, stop reading this article and stare at the wall for 15 minutes. You just might learn something.

In partnership with Ajilon Consulting, What If Project has signed an agreement to develop performance metrics, process improvements and project management tool recommendations for its 20-person project management team. The project will require What If Project to complete an in-depth analysis of project performance to streamline project management processes and ensure that the organization meets SOX requirements.

“This is an ambitious project with a tight time-frame and challenging cultural issues,” said Sarah Gilbert, president of What If Project.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
What If Project LLC offers project management consulting and coaching services. To learn more about our services, please visit What If Project

Determining the right rate for your services is difficult and sometimes an arbitrary process. A survey of the rates negotiated by IT service providers for the State of Colorado shows a very wide range of rates with the highest rates sometimes three times larger than the lowest rate listed.

With the current expansion — after almost 5 years of contraction — of IT services, experienced consultants and service providers should expect to be able to negotiate within the higher end of the band. However, this will be limited by their ability to offer newer technologies or solid experience in particular methodologies or industries. More than ever, it is becoming important to specialize, as most recruiters won’t consider candidates that don’t have experience in particular industries or with particular sets of tools.

Average hourly rate using data from 39 IT services companies serving the State of Colorado in 2005-2006.

………………………………………………………………………………
What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how to market your consulting services or receive a complete copy of the survey contact us via What If Project.

In collaboration with Critical Pathfinders, What If Project leads a teambuilding and brainstorming event for Microsoft’s UX hardware group.

Approximately 20 team members from the main Microsoft headquarters convened in downtown Seattle on January 19 to stimulate new innovative thinking and bond with their team members. Using a combination of a scavenger hunt and a brainstorming exercise, participants were asked to come up with a unique and innovative piece of technology for 19 to 25-year-olds who are obsessed with buying environmentally friendly products.

To learn more about our coaching and teambuilding services, please visit What If Project

Seemingly erratic behavior by customers or managers cannot be understood without considering their beliefs and circumstances.

I had worked in technology consulting for less than a year when I started to realize that all of our clients were “crazy.” At least that’s what most of my co-workers thought, and I was starting to agree with them.

For a while, I wondered if it was us. Was there something special that our company offered that seemed to attract the biggest loons? So, I changed jobs to work with different clients and different co-workers. But those clients were crazy, too. (Even crazier, actually.)

By that time, I had a large enough sample size that I needed to start re-thinking my hypothesis. It wasn’t statistically possible that everyone in our organization was sane while everyone in their organization was nuts. This re-considering also happend to coincide with moving to a more senior position within my new company.

In spite of what my former peers might have thought, I hadn’t joined the dark side or become a bubblehead after sticking an upper management title on my business card. I had simply acquired more context, because I had more access to the beliefs and constraints that were driving the clients’ decisions. And although I was able to confirm that a few of them were really, truly nuts, most of them weren’t.

Instead of wondering why we were suddenly trashing a component of a product that seemed to be central to its appeal in the middle of the project (leading me to conclude once again, that the client was crazy), I saw it as a rational decision made under budget or competitor duress. I also started to get the sense that the client might think we were crazy, too. Maybe we were.

I have since come to the conclusion that most people are almost always acting rationally IF (and that’s a really big “if”), you take into consideration both their circumstances and their beliefs. And that is where the rub is. Most people don’t go around spouting what their beliefs are. In fact, some people aren’t always aware of what their beliefs are. Further complicating the issue is that most of us also assume that our beliefs are the same as others.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a manager and I believe that technology is the same as magic. So, as your boss, I would like you to invent a perpetual motion machine. You, the proud owner of an undergraduate degree in physics, explain to me that it will not be possible. Because, according to important laws of the universe, eventually our machine would come to a grinding halt.

“But why?” I ask.

“Because of laws that have to do with friction and thermodynamics,” you say.

“I think those are just excuses,” I say.

This could go on forever, until, ideally one day you uncover the fact that I believe in magic, and I actually believe that you are really a magician, even though your job title says technical developer. Making this discovery is unlikely to make you change my belief, but at least now you have a better understanding of my point-of-view. This is crucial to your communication with me (and my communication with you, incidentally).

So, next time, you think someone is just crazy, poke around and try to find out why they might be acting that way. Consider who they are and what circumstances they’re in. If you can get outside your own crazy ideas, they might just seem a little more sane after all.
………………………………………………………………………………
What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how we can help you communicate with the crazy people, visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.

Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles

This is a good book with a few fatal flaws. First, the author — obviously a very intelligent and passionate person — makes a critical reasoning error by mistaking correlation for causation. Just because two things happen together, doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other.

The particular example that made my skin to crawl was the idea that the economic boom during the last 50 years has caused the degradation and the dismantaling of the nuclear family. In particular, Stiles says that this is because women entered the workforce en masse driven by feminist ideology and market forces (the need for cheap labor). This put stress on traditional family roles and organization and has led to much higher rates of divorce.

Politics aside, there are other plausible explanations for this phenomenon. For example, women who might have divorced prior to 1950 simply could not afford to because they knew they would have no money and no way to get a good-paying job. Therefore, they stayed married in spite of what it might have done to their emotional, spiritual or even physical health.

The second problem with this book is related to the first. Because the author is prone to sweeping generalizations about market causes and social effects, right-wing (and some left-wing) political rhetoric bubbles easily to the surface. This degrades the quality of many of his arguments and observations.

However, if you can tolerate this part of his writing, there are some interesting ideas to be mined from this work. Specifically the idea that The Market — the economic engine that drives our country in tandem with all its behaviors and point-of-view — needs to be moderated by human values and social and environmental justice.

We cannot, as a country and as a people, build tract housing, warm the atmosphere, turn a blind eye to white-collar crime and gobble up pornographic and violent media without ultimately degrading our quality of life. The main, and important point, made is that the free market is amoral. If we use free market principles to define who we are and what we value, then we will be left lonely, empty-handed and surrounded by the trash that is now our planet.

Don’t use lame excuses as a reason to avoid improving your business practices.

Small businesses — even one-person companies — need to learn and integrate the best practices of project management because in small companies project failure is more likely and other project risks are higher. A project that is behind or over budget in a large company is often cushioned by access to more resources in the form of more money and more or better people. Small businesses don’t have this safety net. A project that goes off the rails for a small company can mean the difference between keeping the doors open and returning to a “real job” in Dilbertland. But many of these agile, innovative groups of entrepreneurs are the most resistent to picking up and trying out many of the best project management tools.

Why?

Excuse No 1: Project management methodologies are too bureaucratic.

Bureacracies are a characteristic of organizational culture and always exist because someone benefits from slowing things down or bungling things up. It is highly likely that this same someone created the metholodology that is being used. In other words, project management methodologies only create bureacracy if the leadership or members of the project team have the intention of mucking up the project. (Or at least lack the motivation to fix it.) But if the company (your company!) has the intention of creating higher quality and cost effective projects, then project management methodologies will help not hurt you.

Excuse No 2: We’re so small we don’t need a metholodology.

Do you tie your shoe a different way every day? Would you ask your employees to do the same? Without having a methodology, this is what small companies are asking themselves and their employees to do — re-invent the wheel for every project. This way of doing things can be very tempting, especially if you’re creative, innovative or just a freaking cool person. However, this also makes you really annoying to work with, more expensive to hire and less likely to deliver the quality product your customers have asked for. There is absolutely room for creativity and innovation on every project, and by definition, this is what a project is. However, if you plan to do everything a different way every time, you will undoubtably do something worse or much worse than you did it last time. Having a methodology allows you to keep the good stuff from the last project and re-invent the bad stuff. Try it. You’ll like it.

Excuse No 3: (My favorite) Our customers are special, and they have unique needs. We can’t serve them using traditional project management practices.

Well, well, well. Now the truth comes out. You are so good that you are above exhibiting basic human behaviors and possibly the laws of the universe. Now close your eyes and picture one of your customers or a member of your team. Is this individual a person? (I know, sometimes it’s hard to tell.) Traditional project management practices are designed to help real people and real projects succeed. They are designed to help you ferret out places where things could go terrible wrong (making you look really stupid). They are designed to help you make important, universe-alterating decisions (chocolate sprinkles or no chocolate sprinkles). And they can even make you more popular. Using good project management processes makes you a more knowledgeable, consistent and organized leader. People on your team will like this, and your customers will love it. It might even make you younger and better looking, too.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What If Project offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. For more information visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.

Don’t dilute your opportunities by making your sales pitch too general.

I recently attended a EXPO for interactive designers sponsored by the AIGA in Denver. As a small social experiment, I went around to each of the exhibits, located the sponsor of that table and asked:

“What do you do?”

“We do everything,” said a young, hip designer from behind a folding table.

“So, you shoot film for product promotions,” I said, pointing to the large, image of a man in a compromising yoga pose on the screen behind him.

“Well no,” he said.

“So you integrated that slice of film into the overall piece,” I said.

“No,” he said.

At this point, I started giggling. The hipster boy started getting the drift of where the conversation was headed. He started smirking at me and happily answered “no” to each of my subsequent questions about what his company did.

I wish I could say that he was the only one making this lethal marketing mistake at this event, but he wasn’t. More than half the people I talked to “did everything” just like everyone else. And soon enough, “everything” to most ears actually starts to sound like “nothing.”

One of the most important and most free pieces of marketing material that you will ever have is your elevator speech. This is the two or three phrases that you use to describe what you do, what you’re good at and what you live for. A lot of this comes across in how you look and how you act, but at least give yourself a chance to send the best message you can about your talents and skills.

If my aforementioned designer guy had said “I crab walk to work” that at least would have been a more memorable answer than “we do everything.” There are a number of reasons that people either don’t have or don’t use an elevator speech and even more reasons why you should have a good one.

You’re afraid.

If you tell people specifically what you do it might not be exactly what they want to buy. But this is a good thing! If I want to pay you to write COBOL in my crawl space and you don’t love that kind of work then, you don’t want this job. And furthermore, if you do tell me what you do and it doesn’t match my exact needs, then you still have shot at learning that I have a friend or collegue that DOES need exactly what you do.

It’s not interesting enough.

The world is full of millions of people, and I can assure you that there are people, aside from your mother, that will be impressed by what you do. If you have already done your market research (and you have, right?!) then you know that there are customers out their who will need your services. You don’t need to have something radical and transformative. New technologies, for example, are interesting, but they’re hard to sell, because no one knows what they are. Don’t be afraid to offer something simple and be really good at it. If you’re still not convinced, consider the iPod. It just plays music. That’s it. Seriously.

You don’t know.

If you don’t know what you do, then you need to go back to the drawing board. You should not be at a networking event, and you certainly shouldn’t be giving a short speech in an elevator. You might not know what you do because you are just starting out, but you also might not know because the market for your services has changed so much that you’re suddenly left holding an outdated product or technology.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What If Project LLC offers leadership and project management coaching and consulting for small and medium-sized technology companies. To learn more about how we can help you with your elevator speech, visit What If Project or contact us for a free consultation.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick M. Lencioni

This book is good, but not that good. The first problem is that this book is an allegory. While this is a helpful method of teaching, it also tends to oversimplify problems and their proposed solutions. Teamwork, especially at the leadership level, is one of the most challenging problems that companies face. This is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is leadership egos — something that the author does a very nice job of describing and deconstructing.

However to apply the principles presented in this book would be difficult unless you are an especially creative or powerful leader. Most leaders don’t have the opportunity to fire people or remove them for the team (something that happens not once, but twice in this book). While I agree that this can be the most effective method of improving team dynamics, for a lot of leaders, it isn’t a realistic option for most people.

I did appreciate, however, how much the author focuses on trust and the willingness to have, and work through, conflict. This is true of any relationship, including co-workers, friendships and even marriage. This book is an easy, enjoyable read, but it runs the risk of simply being a platform for Lencioni’s consulting firm. Please give us more depth or consider marketing this as a case study.