Change Management: The Key to Corporate Success?

by: stacey - January 23rd, 2012   Filed under: Project Management Add Comment

There is nothing that can damage a project more than changing lanes midstream.  Business owners change requirements, changes in the business force project changes, discovered requirements add to things… the list goes on and on.

This is where Change Management enters the picture.  We’re all familiar with the premise of Change Management:  identify the change, identify the impact of the change on the project, and get sign-off.  How good of a job are you doing at that second part?

Evaluating impact must weigh several things:

  • Effect on the project timeline
  • Effect on the project cost
  • Effect on other projects in the company

What’s that third one, you say?  Other project in the company?

Unless your company just has available resources sitting around, then yes, every change to your project affects other projects- in both time and money.  The money for your change has to come from somewhere.  So does the labor.  Adding to your project must therefore, reasonably, set back other projects.  Even if you work overtime to make your project happen, you take away capacity of all of the potential overtime that could be used for other projects for things like recovering from falling behind schedule, getting ahead of schedule, or even, you know, even change management.

In a nut shell, all changes to your project not only impact your project, they impact the company as a whole.  Never forget to assess that third step and, if the impact is significant, get executive sign-off.  Don’t forget to include the need for executive signoff on signficant project scope changes in your Change Management plan as well.

Tags:

Great Goal! Can You Reach It?

by: stacey - January 12th, 2012   Filed under: Leadership, Project Management Add Comment

I have posted in the past on how establishing good service levels for your website might be a good idea, but if you have no idea how to achieve the goals you are setting for yourself, you are wasting your time and paper. In fact, this goes for any business (or personal!) goal. Let’s look at what it takes to achieve a truly high level of service for a website:

1) a reliable web server
2) reliable power for the web server
3) reliable physical location for the web server
4) reliable network connection to the web server
5) failover capability in the event that the web server fails
6) reliable backups in case the server crashes
7) physical colocation of servers in the event that one server site is damaged in a disaster
8) multiple network connections in the event that a network connection fails
9) personnel who are experts on each individual component of your website (available 24/7)

and so on, and so on…

See what I mean? Unless you have the budget and manpower to support a 99.999% uptime, you are wasting paper if you set that as your SLA goal. In fact, if your business falls too far short of the goal or the goal sounds too unrealistic to your people, then I guarantee that eventually your staff will become pessimistic about it. The uptime will become an unhappy point with them, an inside joke in your company, and it will tarnish the reputation of anyone who was foolish enough to sign off on it.

This line of thinking applies to other goals in your company as well. It is important to think high and stretch your people. Challenges make your people stronger. They make your company better. If you are not stretching your people, you may risk your competitive edge. Setting too unrealistic goals, however, will simply set your people up for failure- and they will remember you for it. Being set up for failure is demotivating.

For that matter, setting too many ’stretch’ goals is just as bad if not worse than setting one unrealistic goal. Your people will get sick of every single win being a struggle to the finish. They will start to whisper things like “Who does he think we are?” and “Sure, just pile on more to the load, I’m stretched too far now anyway!”. Do you want to be thought of that way by the people you lead? Or, to be more specific, do you think your people will follow someone who they think these things of?

Never set goals that you or the people you manage do not have the resources- time, money or otherwise- to reach. Stretching is good for your business. Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is not. Others can see whether or not your goals are reachable given the resources available. Your people may see this as lack of respect for them (”He thinks we’re miracle workers!”), lack of ability to plan (”He doesn’t care how many hours we work!”), or a lack of knowledge (”Doesn’t he know that can’t be done with what we have?”). They will mistake it for incompetence, and your credibility with your people will take a huge hit that your ability to lead them may never recover from.

Tags: ,

How Much Did That Discussion Cost?

by: stacey - January 10th, 2012   Filed under: Management, Planning, Project Management Add Comment

There’s a cool little tool called Meeting Miser that has been making the blogging rounds.  I first saw it on Download Squad, then Lifehacker, then Raven’s Brain, and they all raised good points about it as a fun little tool.

I love this tool and have used this concept for years.  Not just as a fun tool, but as a very serious tool.  Meetings seem like a way of life in some companies, and you can easily spend tons of time in them, but you always have to ask yourself the cost, especially if you are holding those meetings to solicit information to help you make decisions.

I was once involved with a series of meetings that centered around studying and deciding whether or not to make a business decision that was going to cost our company around $10,000.  That’s not a small investment and worth talking about.  Still, after a few weeks it was out of hand.  We were including too many people and agonizing over the decision too much.  I brought the problem to the attention of my boss (the ultimate decision-maker).  The conversation was something like this:

“Hey, we’re spending a lot of time on this.”

“I know, I need to make a decision, we need to think a bit more about it I think.”

“Well, think fast, you’ve spent $5,000 on this decision already.”

That got his instant attention.  It was a rude jolt, to be sure, but it was a needed one, and well-received.  He asked what I was talking about.  I pointed out the number of hours in meetings, pointed to the average cost per person’s time that we use for pricing project resources for the people in those meetings, did a simple math calculation, and poof.  $5,000, give or take a few hundred.  That ended the meetings right there.  He made the call the next day based on the information he had.

Being cautious and risk-averse is a reasonable approach to doing business, but never be so cautious you overrun your costs just trying to make a decision.  Keep your meeting costs in mind.  Calculate the estimated cost of a meeting BEFORE you call the meeting, then decide if what you’ll be accomplishing in that meeting is worth the cost.

Tags: , ,