This in and of itself is not a bad thing.  If you can help reduce stress by taking on a little extra escalation during hard times, you should.  The real danger in this is, as you see more escalations, more “negative” things will be flowing to you.  Worse, the same thing will go on with your peers.  If you manage shared resources in the company, such as in IT or Marketing, your names will show up to more and more of your peers- and pretty soon, if the same people are mentioned in the same discussions as problems, a dark cloud can start to form around otherwise perfectly normal activity.  Somehow, with all the increased escalations and contention, things that are actually running just fine may become painted in a bad light.  Just like surrounding yourself with negative people, getting surrounded by negative news has a bad effect.

The answer in times like this is simple:  get out of your office.  Bad news (or bad news-like information) will be flowing to you, and in increased amounts.  Get out of your office and go talk to people.  Pick your busiest people, your most productive people, your most honest clients.  Do reality checks.  Yes, more escalations are flowing to you, but are things actually going wrong?  Are your clients still getting good service?  Other than more busy, are your people really having problems?  If there’s positive out there, go find it.  As people get more and more busy, the positive won’t flow to you.  People will get things done, then  move on quickly to the next thing.  Track it down.  Make sure things are okay.  Encourage the same in your peers.  Don’t let “busier” get confused with “out of control”.

Consider this approach for a moment in the light of the concept of technical debt.  Increased features and new products mean more maintenance costs.  Increased speed to market means increased bugs.  Rising technical debt means that your team will be able to contribute even less in the mid-term and long run.  Contributing new, buggy things rather than increasing the value of what you have simply lowers your perceived value to the business.

Before deciding to add new projects, products or features, ask yourself this:  is it time instead to pay down existing technical debt?  What can I do to lower support costs?  How much better can I make what I have?  Do I have any open requests from the business to solve old problems?  Can I increase my perceived value by simply focusing on lowering overhead and getting rid of ‘old’ problems that have been lingering?  Turning your efforts inward to improve now will give you a stronger position in the mid-term and long-term.  You will have lower maintenance later when you ramp up new projects, and by clearing your backlog, you’ll be surprised at how much support you will garner from your business partners.

Project and Operational teams work like this.  I think we’ve all experienced a “bad apple” on a team.  Dealing with the one person who, for whatever reason, is doing a bad job, invariably seems to drag everyone down.  Your best performers will vary as to why they get worse at what they do- resentment over everyone not pulling their own weight, frustration at obvious incompetence, impatience with poor communication skills… the list goes on and on, but it always happens.  Not only does the poor performer not do well, but they drag down the team.

This is not just random observation, although it’s likely many of us have seen it, but it’s shown up in research.  Here’s an interview from This American Life Of Will Felps.  Felps is a researcher and professor at the Rotterdam School of Management.  His experiments with inserting bad apples into work teams showed that not only did bad apples damage work teams, within 45 minutes other team members would begin to take on the characteristics of the bad apple.  Everyone on the team’s work would degrade.

Another effect of a bad apple is that their presence is often seen as a challenge to your leadership.  Your failure to do something about bad performers reduces both the trust and respect of the rest of your team in you.  I’ve heard this said to me and of my colleagues more than once in my career: “If you/mangement/whoever can’t see that (insert bad apple here) is wrecking this project, you/they are an idiot.  If everyone else can see it, why can’t you/them?  If you can, why don’t you fix it?”  Or, here’s the worst one of all:  ”If you/they don’t care that (bad apple) is wrecking the project, then obviously you don’t care.  Why should I?”

I’m not saying can everyone who does a bad job on something, but the one thing you must do is take action quickly. Correct the behavior if you can; if you can’t, get that person off the team they’re screwing up and get them on to something else- either in your company or not, but get them out of there.  Too many times companies sit on their poor performers.  I myself have been guilty of this before.  The instinct is to give people a fair chance, but ‘fair chance’ does not get the job done.  Action does.  Take action to rehabilitate or remove your bad apples.  Don’t drop the performance of your entire team.

Something my company has been struggling with for years has been how much detail is enough for project reporting.  This has been even more complicated by the founding of our PMO.  Here’s a few of the issues you run into when the business folks look too deep into the project details:

• Reporting overhead:  the deeper you look, the more effort is put into telling others what’s going on by the managers who are supposed to be spending time getting things done.  If you pull away too much of their time, the project actually starts to fall behind- because you so busy looking at it that you monitor it to death.  At some point, you have to trust the project workers to handle the details that they gloss over in meetings.
• Knowledge transfer overhead:  this goes in part with reporting overhead.  The deeper a detail you look at, the more explanation goes along with it.  This is especially true in the IT world.  Some tasks and problems require a very in-depth technical knowledge to understand.  The deeper you look into them, the more background information and technical detail that has to go along with it.  All of that communication overhead pulls people away from the real work.  They are talking about doing rather than doing.
• Executive attention syndrome:  if the reporting goes deep enough down the rabbit hole on every project, your company’s leaders soon find themselves spending all their time drinking from the information firehose and not enough time actually leading.

What about operations?  How does this fit in?

The reality of most companies is that they do not have seperate project-based resources versus operations-based resources.  Major operational initiatives and problems can derail your project quickly.  An over-abundance of projects can rob Operations so thoroughly that needed maintenance is ignored, and your operations deteriorate (just ask the american government about this).  Major operational problems clash with major project initiatives.  Huge political battles can ensue, creating inaction as people who need to do do the work in question instead go sit in meetings waiting for a decision on which work to do.  People end up making decisions on an island at times, just picking a direction based on their own personal knowledge rather than wait on the corporate machine to find a direction.

Rather than get lost in these situations, get a grip on your Operations.  Include them in the resource planning process.  Most importantly, include them in your prioritization process.  Is the most important project in the company more important than maintenance of the most important existing product?  What about the fifth most important product?  The fifteenth?  Which customers’ business is more important than your projects?  Customer problems can just as easily steal resources.  Not all of your customers will be more important than the development of your company’s future either.  You have to count them as part of your prioritization process, and you have to make hard decisions like this.

Doing this type of process is hard.  It is also vital to your company’s ability to react quickly and decisively to the unexpected.  You, and more importantly, your team, need to understand and agree on what comes first.

In the summer after high school is when I truly became immersed.  I got a summer job before college at my father’s company.  I got first-hand experience with business and all the strange things that seemed to go wrong.  Through conversations with my father, my boss, and other folks, I started piecing together how management really worked.  By this time, Dad was starting to specialize- he was working in Tooling management.  If you don’t know what tooling is, that’s the specialists who build the special tools and fittings and whatnot that factories use to make things.  It’s that special part of manufacturing that fits in the same place that developers do for business.  Every fall and spring I went to college and learned… well, mostly about women, but nearly every summer I went to work in the factories where my father worked and gathered the education that put me where I am today.

I never really realized it until the past few years just how much what I learned from my father really mattered.  So much of what he said and did and taught me applies directly to what I do today.  Even the things he didn’t teach me directly, he still originated.  I still remember the first time I finally cracked open one of Tom Peters’ books.  I picked the book up at a yard sale after remembering having seen it in Dad’s books; I read it on a trip to Seattle, and it changed my worldview.

Today is my father’s birthday.  He’s getting closer and closer to retirement by the year.  Last year was the first year I finally caught up with him careerwise.  My father’s position in his company is on par with mine, but the title is different.  He could have climbed higher if he wanted; Dad stuck with the level he felt was right for him.  If it weren’t for him, I’m sure I would still be learning my way up the ladder at a pace that, with my famed impatience, would probably be hurting my career more than helping.

Over the last year in my new job I’ve had somewhat of a new mentor in my career.  It’s the second mentor in my life, and I am still feeling my way.  I still rely on my first mentor for advice here and there (especially when I need guidance on how to deal with my second mentor).  I find as I get older that I grow impatient and frustrated with Dad’s advice more often somehow, that in what I’ve learned on my own I have more trouble stepping back and looking at it from the right perspective to understand.  Perhaps I grow set in my ways as I grow old.  Still, when I finally can step back and see things without letting emotion get in the way, the advice always seems to fit and help and guide me.

I find myself now quoting my father more and more.  I also find myself starting to mentor others in their careers.  It’s amazing the people who become interested in management and leadership when you put the right guidance in front of them and offer up a bit of responsibility.

My main point here, besides honoring my father’s birthday, is that you should honor your mentors in life, give them credit, and when you are struggling with their advice, be patient, be patient, and think it through one more time.  Pass on the knowledge and, when the time is right, be a mentor to others.  Most but not least, don’t forget to thank them.

Thanks Pop.

The end of the business quarter typically marks a reporting milestone for the accounting and finance folks. For better or worse, it’s become a time when the measuring sticks come out. Businesses have come to measure progress in 90-day sprints. Think about some of these goals we end up saddling ourselves with:

• Close the sale before end of quarter! -why?  Will the money be worth less next week?
• Wrap up the project so we can get the billing in on this quarter  -again, I ask, why?  Does money become worth less next week?  If it shows up this quarter, doesn’t that just take away from next quarter?
• We need to make a buy decision this quarter, because we have budget now  -aha, maybe this is it, if money magically has a shelf life of 90 days…

Some of these decisions do, I realize have real financial implications to the accounting and finance world, so please don’t fill the comments with explanation.  I work for the NASBA- I do know something  about accounting.  My point is this:  too many times in business we make decisions or we hurry work and get sloppy results, not because there’s a business imperative, but because there’s a perceived financial imperative driven by the need to look good on paper.

This happens in projects as well.  Sometimes something comes up in a project that warrants changing the schedule or cost- the company’s future is at stake on the project, and it can’t be done wrong- and yet PMs will escalate and try to force the hand of the people doing the work because they don’t want to look bad by having a note on the PMO’s executive summary for that month saying that they’re off-schedule or over budget.

My point is this:  is it ever a good decision to allow how you look on a report drive cutting corners and hurrying processes?  Of course you can’t just ignore reports.  They’re there for a reason, and it’s a good reason.  Still, you must consider trends over time and how you will be judged long-term.  If a sale or project close out after the quarter mark, yes, it robs this quarter, but didn’t you get a nice bump in the next quarter as a result?  Even if you cross fiscal years, is that really so wrong?

Don’t let pressures to look good drive you to make poor long term decisions- not for your department, your company, or your project.  Keep your eye on the long-term ball and stick to strategy and delivering successfully.  Delivering a shoddy product early has never been a successful strategy with customers- delivering the right solution at the right time does.  They don’t care about your quarterly report; they care about receiving quality.  Companies succeed over years and decades, not 90 day sprints.

Here’s what was happening on Undocumented Features for the third week of August 2007:
PM-Fu:  Organizational Planning when using Matrix-based Project Management
Great article.  Long title.  We’ve improved on that.  :)

Management Magic 101- How to Delegate Well

The Self-Project: Simplifying Your To-Do Lists To Get More Done

PMing on the cheap: OpenProj free PM software

Always Strive for the Best! (and Never Get Anything Done)

PM-Fu: Keep Your Eye On The Ball

And that, folks, was the first week of UF on the new blog.  Enjoy! 

Many project managers worry that they are not going far enough with their plan.  The opposite scenario is just as bad.  How can you tell when you’ve gone too far?  Here’s some criteria I suggest:

1) Client Satisfaction:  If the Sponsor, business owner, and other major stakeholders are happy with the results they are getting, but you are not and the processes that you’re using say you’re way off target, this is a warning sign.  There’s times when the project will get off the schedule you set.  There’s times when scope MUST expand in order for the finished product to meet the business’ needs.  There’s times when you’ll be dragged off schedule simply because (gasp) another project is more important to the company than yours, and you have to wait for resources.

If the team, the stakeholders, and the company are satisfied, and you are not, then something’s wrong.  If your PMO’s policies say that the project is at risk, but the everyone else says it’s not, then you need to re-examine your methods and criteria.  Reality is always more correct than policy.

2) Employee Satisfaction:  Do project team members avoid you when you approach, even if they’re not off-schedule?  Are people skipping your meetings whenever possible?  If so, you need to revisit your methods.  Project Management is about, above and beyond all else, communication.  Consider this:  Person A is an incredible communicator and detailed person, but they know nothing of formal PM process.  Person B is a terrible communicator but can quote the PMBOK in their sleep.  If you give each of them a project with a team of ten people, which one stands the better chance of success?

The truth is of course Person A.  Doubt that if you will, but the fact is that projects were accomplished for thousands of years before formal project management began.  The military carried out campaigns of brilliant coordination, timing and logistics without it.  It can be done without any of the tools.  The tools are useful and can make you more accurate, but they’re tools.  The craft itself is still in your organization, leadership and communication.

If people are avoiding you, there’s two possibilities:  either your tools are offending people, or your personal skills are.  You had the skills before you were a PM for someone to recognize your ability to be a PM, right?  I wouldn’t doubt those skills now.  Examine the methods you are using.  Talk to the people avoiding you and ask what they hate about the process.  Work to make the process work without being a burden.

3) Valid Outcomes:  If someone goes ‘off the reservation’, uses methods that were not part of the original project scope, but they achieve effective results that the business approves of and client is satisfied with, is that a problem?  If your methodologies say yes, then you need to consider your methodologies.  After all, you work for the company.  If the company says the new method is okay and so does the client, why don’t you?  What part of your process prevents it?

4) Over-Communication:  Believe it or not, this is possible.  I have been in a situation before, at more than one company no less, where I devoted more of my time per month communicating with the PMO than I did with two-thirds of the departments or people I managed- and in none of those cases were any of the projects I was involved with actually in trouble.  Any time that happens, the PMO is getting in the way of my effectiveness as a manager.    I’m no longer on my department’s payroll; I’m on theirs.  If we communicate that much, I don’t have time to pass on what’s communicated to my own team so that they can act on it.  How is that effective?  The data flow officially stopped at me- the team members below in the organization never got it.  The hyper-communication of the PMO failed because it choked the bottleneck (in this case, me).

Try to keep your communications, follow-ups, and meetings to what is truly needed.  This can be a balancing act at times.  It involves trusting people.  If you don’t, though, you will not only overwork yourself, you will create a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure- by monitoring closely the process too closely, you break the process.

These are examples of just four things that can go wrong if you go too far.  Choosing the right mix may seem like magic or art, but it’s not- it’s science.  All you need is observation skills.  Watch your team members and stakeholders.  Monitor their attitudes and what’s going on.  If people are unhappy, there’s invariably a reason for it.  Don’t drown the process in your attempt to manage it.