New Plugin: Collapse/Expand All Groups At Once

If you work with large schedules and you want to be able to collapse or expand all groups at once, this is the plugin for you. It allows you to get a quick overview of your project. Click on the 'settings' button in the toolbar, click the 'plugins' tab and select 'add collapse/expand button to the toolbar'.

In the Setting Menu click the Plugins tab and select the plugin

This button will automatically be added to the toolbar

Click the button once and all the groups will collapse and allow you a quick overview of your project, click the button again and all the rows will be displayed.

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Improved Feature: Sharp PDF Output

It is now possible to get an amazingly sharp image of your schedule when exporting & printing to PDF. We have made a great step forward with this improved feature! Uptill now we always recommended exporting to an image (.png) if you wanted the sharpest output, but that is no longer the case. Exporting or printing to PDF will give you a great result!

Click on the 'print' button in the toolbar and the PDF option will automatically be selected but you can also choose to print to an image. Set other options like printing the whole schedule or part of it and printing full color or a printer friendly version and you are good to go!

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The Art of Good Project Closure by Peter Taylor

THE VALUE OF LESSONS LEARNED: THE ART OF GOOD PROJECT CLOSURE

Either you have been missing something, or nothing has really been going on

‘As we know, there are known knowns; There are things we know we know
We also know there are known unknowns: That is to say we know there are some things we do not know
But there are also unknown unknowns: The ones we don't know we don't know’

Donald Rumsfeld (Department of Defence news briefing).

That is one crazy set of words but actually there is a lot of sense in the whole thing. Here you are at the end of the project. It has been a success or, at the very least, is has not been a complete failure, and you are about to head off to the next project. But wait, do you really honestly know everything? Do you know what you don’t know? Well of course you don’t, you can’t possibly. So don’t fool yourself that you do!
So what do you do about it? Well what you do about it is to do something about it – now is the time to conduct a retrospective of your project, a review, a considered and open activity that will allow you the opportunity to learn what it is you don’t yet know.

Just as at the start of the project, remember ‘a brand shiny new project… at a point in time that is full of peace and love and general wellbeing between all parties involved’, well the end of the project is a special time as well. It is a time when project team members are far more likely to talk to you openly, equally and honestly. Therefore it is a time you should really focus some effort on to learn how to be more effective (and even more ‘Productively Lazy’) next time around.

Applying the ‘Productive Lazy’ approach

Finish what you started
As the Mastermind  question master says, ‘I’ve started and so I will finish’, and you should make sure that you do the same. Finish the project in a correct and complete manner. Avoid all of those normal pressures and temptations to head off on the next juicy project that is calling you to.
Make the very most of this second opportunity of peace, love and harmony (hopefully) and learn everything that you can learn. It will be worth it I guarantee.

Know what you know
Start first with yourself. What do you ‘know’ about the project? Well a whole bunch of stuff that’s for sure, but what focus less on what you already knew at the start of the project and think more about what you have learnt new during the project.

Much of what happened will have been processed, dealt with, handled through the reapplication of past experience or knowledge, but some will have not. You learn through each project, so consider what it is that you learnt this time.

Now you know what you know and probably also know what you don’t know, gaps in your experience on the project, questions you can ask your team.

Find out what you don’t know
Now focus on the unknown unknowns

The ideal way to do this is to conduct a full retrospective, if you can’t do this then at least gather input from key members of your project team. One the best reference books for this Project Retrospectives by Norman L. Kerth (see references). I love the prime directive that Kerth governs his retrospectives by; Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

There are treasures out there, not one person knows all there is to know about the project, and certainly not you the project manager (you don’t honestly think your team told you everything that went on do you?).
So go gold mining, there are nuggets of gold in ‘lessons learned’ or at least lessons to be learned if only we pay attention. At least one of your project team will tell you something that will aid you in the future, and let you be a little more productively lazy. And the best way to make this happen is to plan for it to happen, right back at the ‘thick’ front-end of the project, back at the very beginning.

Ask what you now need to know
As part of this retrospective process make sure that you also take the opportunity to ask questions that you want answering. Remember?  The things that you know what you don’t know, the gaps in your experience on the project, the questions should ask your team.

Complete your knowledge by having an open and honest dialogue with the team. It may surprise them what you don’t know, and they will most doubt be pleased that they were able to help out during the project.

Learn the lessons to be learned
OK, now let’s sum all this up. Carefully and slowly.

• You know what you know.
• You also know what you don’t know – and received answers on the gaps in your knowledge hopefully.
• You now know what you didn’t know you knew, through feedback from the team, and other sources.
• And, through the retrospective you at least know a little more about what you didn’t know that you didn’t know – if the team have been very open with you.

Simple isn’t it?

Tell others what you now know
And finally, don’t just sit on that knowledge. Share it out amongst everyone that could benefit from it.
Lessons learned should be lessons shared, so don’t be mean, share it out!

The grid of self-development logic.

All the above can be summarised in this diagram. To move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, not knowing what you don’t know and just not caring, you need awareness – the retrospective can aid this awareness.

To move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, knowing what you don’t know but caring about that fact – again the retrospective can aid along with a learning plan based on the outputs.

And finally, to move from conscious competence to unconscious competence – well just requires a lot of practice, so get to it!

A project manager’s tale of escape without cause

A story, and yes, I am the project manager in question, much to my shame.

For the most part I have really enjoyed all of my projects. That is not to say that there haven’t been challenges over the years; high points and low points, moments when I felt that I had had enough but equally good moments that I wanted to never end.

This tale is of a project within a manufacturing company that had a lot more low points than high points.
The project was ‘challenging’ (and it seemed close to impossible at times), the steering committee were ‘difficult (to say the least), the project team were ‘mixed’ in their interest and capability (to put it mildly), and I was a long way from home. The entire experience really tested me as a project manager pretty much from day one, but I felt that I had acquitted myself in a good way. In a good way until the very end of the project that is.

So, to quickly move to the point of this story, the project reached a conclusion. The deliverables were delivered and the company reluctantly agreed to signing off the project. The job was done.

Except it wasn’t.

I had had quite a hellish experience over the months and just wanted it all to come to an end. And so, when that final steering committee meeting was done and the minutes signed off, I have to admit that I almost ran to my car, jumped in and tore out of the car park deliriously happy. The motorway home called to me and, with some rock music blaring out of the speakers, I decided to right this one off to history and to never return again.

I was one happy project manager.

Then I was asked to go back and to a post-project review!

My heart sank and I began to make up 101 reasons why I was too busy, too sick, too mentally incompetent, too ‘about to go on a spontaneous holiday’, and too ‘I just don’t want to go back’, in order to, well, avoid going back.

I didn’t go back. Someone else did.

And so that was that.

Except it wasn’t. My inquisitiveness eventually got the better of me and I sat down with the other project manager, sometime after the review, and I discovered many things that I had never known about my own project.

I discovered (obviously through this other project manager) that the company had had a very bad experience in a similar previous project and, as a result, they were nervous about this project, very nervous indeed.

I discovered that the project had been strongly championed by one of the steering members despite a lot of resistance from others in the business and a lot, their reputation and possibly career for example, depended upon a successful outcome.

I discovered that two people on the project team had, shall we say, personal ‘issues’ during the early part of the project and this led to some residual tension between them.

I discovered that there was felt to be a ‘black hole’ in one particular business area where the purpose and benefit, the justification, of the project was never explained.

I discovered that they thought that I was a very strong and competent project manager, but one that focused perhaps not enough on the human side of the project.

And I personally discovered, and I did not have to be told this by my project management colleague, that I had missed a great deal by leaving the project before its final conclusion.

I personally discovered that I should have stayed for the full and proper closure, I would have learnt so much.

A final comment

These days I always try to complete some form of project retrospective, however light, whatever is practical – the benefits are many  (and they can be a great deal of fun as well).

'Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.' Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)


****

Peter Taylor is a dynamic and commercially astute professional who has achieved notable success in Project Management.

His background is in project management across three major business areas over the last 26 years, MRP/ERP systems with various software houses and culminating in his current role with Infor, Business Intelligence (BI) with Cognos, and product lifecycle management (PLM) with Siemens. He has spent the last 7 years leading PMOs and developing project managers and is now focusing on project based services development with Infor.

He is also an accomplished communicator and leader and is a professional speaker as well as the author of ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ (Infinite Ideas) and ‘Leading Successful PMOs’ (Gower).

More information can be found at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com  – and through his free podcasts in iTunes.

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Visualize Your Progress

Tracking Progress is high on our To Do list. We are planning to implement this as a special column or maybe as a plug-in. For the time being there is an easy way to visualize your progress by inserting a text column to indicate a percentage and using one specific symbol to indicate the progress visually:

In this example we used a green arrow to visualize our progress, you could also use a yellow, red or blue one or just a simple triangle. Check out our symbol selection in the tool for more options.

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Tips and Tricks: Adjust Month Settings

If you have set your project settings to a month, you will probably have noticed the month width is quite broad. If you want to schedule more than a year, it is possible you don't need al that space and might actually prefer a more narrow width. 

There is a little trick that could possibly work for you. Select just one day as a working day and exclude all the others in your timeline settings. It makes the months smaller. You will be able to plan in steps of one whole week. If you need to plan in steps of half a week you could include Wednesday as a working day as well.

Select all but one working day to make the width smaller.

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The Campaign for Real Project Sponsors by Peter Taylor

We all know that critical to any projects success is having a good project manager but after that then it is pretty important to have a good project sponsor; but, like the saying goes, ‘you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives’ and the same is true of project sponsors.

The job specification
But what exactly is a project sponsor supposed to do? Well the responsibilities for project sponsors typically include:

• Providing direction and guidance for strategies and initiatives
• Negotiate funding for the project
• Actively participating in the initial project planning
• Identifying project Steering Committee members
• Working with the Project Manager to develop the Project Charter
• Identifying and quantifying business benefits to be achieved by successful implementation of the project
• Reviewing and approving changes to plans, priorities, deliverables, schedule, etc.
• Gaining agreement amongst the stakeholders when differences of opinion occur
• Assisting the project when required (especially in an 'out-of-control' situation) by exerting their organizational authority and ability to influence
• Assisting with the resolution of inter-project boundary issues
• Chairing the Project Steering Committee
• Supporting the Project Manager in conflict resolution
• Make the project visible in the organisation
• Encouraging stakeholder involvement and building and maintaining their ongoing commitment through effective communication strategies
• Advising the Project Manager of protocols, political issues, potential sensitivities, etc.
• Evaluating the project's success on completion.

OK, nice list but do we really have good project sponsors out there that work in harmony with project managers the world over?

The good, the bad and the confused
To judge that we need to look in more detail at what makes a good project sponsor.

The project sponsor is the key stakeholder representative for the project and provides the necessary support for the Project Manager with the primary responsibility of achievement of the project objectives and benefits. An inappropriate choice of project sponsor can seriously impact the possibility of success of the project and provide you, the project manager, with an unwanted additional overhead.

Now you can’t practically ask a sponsor for their CV  and put them through a formal interview process, nice as it would be sometimes to utter the phrase ‘I’m sorry but I just don’t think that this is the job for you right now’.

A potentially bad project sponsor will exhibit some or all of these behaviours.

To be a successful partner in this project then they need to be connected to you the project manager and to the project team, if they are remote then that is a red flag for sure. And if they are too busy to meet, to discuss, and to aid then that paints that red an even darker shade. If they avoid helping in the assignment of project roles and responsibilities and never have time to ‘timely’ approve documents then you have a problem that is reaching critical status. Throw in a dash of blaming anyone but themselves for any problems then it is probably time to walk away. You are in real trouble (and so is your project).

A bad sponsor is potentially your worst nightmare.

Conversely a good project sponsor will behave in the opposite manner in these areas and will happily act as advisor to the project manager and will focus on removing obstacles in the path of project success.

All this is well and good but to be truly fair to project sponsors around the world how have they managed to gain this position of importance and how have the companies that they worked for supported them in this critical activity?

Let the campaign begin
It is said that a project is one small step for a project sponsor and one giant leap for the project manager. Wouldn’t you feel so much better if you knew that the project sponsors’ one small step made sure that your giant leap offered a safe and secure final landing?

It has been my experience that the skill profile of project managers continues to grow and more and more organisations are developing project managers in a disciplined and mature manner. But the same cannot be said of all project sponsors, many wrongly believe that the project sponsor is just a figurehead that is never called to active duty.

How wrong. How very wrong.

There is a lack of personal development support and sources of information and guidance for project sponsors and it is needed urgently I believe. And so I would like to launch the ‘Campaign for Real Project Sponsors’ where we see real investment in anyone who acts in such a key role.

******

Peter Taylor is a dynamic and commercially astute professional who has achieved notable success in Project Management.

His background is in project management across three major business areas over the last 26 years, MRP/ERP systems with various software houses and culminating in his current role with Infor, Business Intelligence (BI) with Cognos, and product lifecycle management (PLM) with Siemens. He has spent the last 7 years leading PMOs and developing project managers and is now focusing on project based services development with Infor.

He is also an accomplished communicator and leader and is a professional speaker as well as the author of ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ (Infinite Ideas) and ‘Leading Successful PMOs’ (Gower).

More information can be found at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com  – and through his free podcasts in iTunes.

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Project Management and the Alien Encounter by Peter Taylor

I suspect that you will all know this story:

Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body.

The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.

A wise man explains to them: ‘All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned’.

This is a good story which shows that to explain and understand something that is complex requires the full picture. Each of the blind men was correct but together they had the greater understanding.

Through a number of LinkedIn discussions I asked the following question:

‘We all know the terms of definition for project management but, to get outsiders to understand what we do, how would you simply describe project management to someone who has no idea what it is.’

Now it may just be me – but I am pretty sure it isn’t – people outside of project management don’t get project management. My family have no idea what I really do and here’s a test, ask any project manager you know to answer one simple question. They must answer quickly, no thinking time; just respond! OK. Look them in the eye and ask them ‘what does a project manager do?’ – I bet half them will mumble something along the lines of ‘they manage projects …’

Not very helpful.

So back to the ‘alien encounter’ and I feel that we need to get a few things out of the way here. Naturally as expected people responded with comments ranging from ‘If an alien arrived here from outer space then they probably know more about project management than we do’ – a fair point – to a comment written in ‘Klingon’ (and thank you to another contributor who sent me a translation) – and of course the classic ‘I thought that project managers were aliens’ – very good and ‘no’ but the sponsors could well be.

So here are some of the good suggestions along with some of my comments (and I of course thank all of you who submitted ideas):

‘Making sure that it doesn't cost you more and take longer than planned to do something all the while anticipating any adverse conditions or obstacles that may stop you from achieving your goals and planning how to overcome those if they occur. Coordinating people to do the different activities as they occur and making sure that we achieve the end goal. Actually when I explain it in simple terms like this people look at me as if to say well that doesn't sound very hard surely anyone can do that!’

[Lesson: Describing things in a simple way may make them appear simple to do.]

‘A way of reducing the pain’

[This makes us sound like a headache pill]

‘Project Management involves thinking before acting, making good choices based on good knowledge, keeping everyone informed who needs to be informed and balancing the need to do a job well with the limits of our purse.’

[Nicely put]

‘If they got here, shouldn't we be asking them the question? No offence to the team from NASA, but we must learn from the market leaders.’

[Warned you about this type of response but I like the market leader concept]

Getting something new and exciting done with a group of people!

[Sweet and looking at it from a different angle]

The true definition of a project, according to modern acceptation, is a vast undertaking, too big to be managed, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing.

[A little negative perhaps but I hear the pain]

‘As we travel through the space and time continuum, project management is the universal tool that enables our journeys to take the shortest route through space, over the shortest duration of time while using the smallest number of qualified carbon units possible.’

[I like the agile style here and there were a lot of ‘journey’ based explanations suggested]
‘It's worth pointing out to the aliens that project management also requires the ability to perform miracles, and that project managers are actually miracle workers. Like Jesus who fed multitudes with two fish and five loaves, we also have to miraculously deliver unrealistic expectations in unrealistic timescales with a limited budget. That takes a very special skill, which makes project managers very special beings.’

[I go along with the proposal that we are special beings but not quite sure of the supernatural skills – I am hearing more pain]

‘A recursive scientific art aimed at achieving the goals that were set at the beginning and which needs to be achieved within the boundary of inherent applied or existing constraints. Of course this would have to be followed with the legitimate explanation…’

[Over my head for sure]

‘Project Management is a Verb, not a Noun.’

[A good thought, slightly off topic but I do like it]

And so they went on (thank you to everybody again) – a mixture of desperation, humour, and deep thinking.

So why is it so hard? 

Here we are with an alien (or friend or relative or neighbour) and we have 5 minutes to tell them what we do. Surely it should be simple?

Albert Einstein said ‘If you can’t explain something simply; you don’t understand it well enough’

Really? I think that we know project management pretty well and we certainly have plenty of documentation on the subject to help us out and we have been doing it for quite some time now.

Leonardo da Vinci declared ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’

So we are all unsophisticated now as well? Definitely not. It feels like I have started a journey but have not reached any destination with this one. If you wish the LinkedIn discussions are still out there so maybe add your thoughts and see more of what other PMs have volunteered.

In a final desperate attempt to get something useful to conclude this article I texted the online answer service 36663 who declare themselves ‘the UK's most accurate text question and answer service, knows pretty much everything’. After 5 minutes I got this reply:

‘Project management is the planning, execution and finalization of projects. It involves identifying resource requirements and controlling quality.’

I mentioned this to the alien that lives in my teenage son’s room, mostly playing on the X-box, and he just said ‘What?’

Life!

******

Peter Taylor is a dynamic and commercially astute professional who has achieved notable success in Project Management.

His background is in project management across three major business areas over the last 26 years, MRP/ERP systems with various software houses and culminating in his current role with Infor, Business Intelligence (BI) with Cognos, and product lifecycle management (PLM) with Siemens. He has spent the last 7 years leading PMOs and developing project managers and is now focusing on project based services development with Infor.

He is also an accomplished communicator and leader and is a professional speaker as well as the author of ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ (Infinite Ideas) and ‘Leading Successful PMOs’ (Gower).

More information can be found at www.thelazyprojectmanager.com  – and through his free podcasts in iTunes.

Read More