What Is Expected of a Project Manager?

This is what I expect from my project managers.

1. Know your customer.

• understand what they want
• understand why they want it (so you can make intelligent decisions)
  
  Remember that you have both internal and external customers. The internal customer is the person or department inside your organization that you are doing this for. This could be your direct manager, or it could be someone from another department. The external customer is whoever is paying the company for your services. The primary customer is the one funding the effort. Because specifications are always open to interpretation, you must know why the customer wants this to help you make the right decisions.

2. Talk to your customers. There should be regular reports to the customer about what is going on.

• Schedule
• Budget
• Resource Plan
• Risks and Mitigation Plan
  
  Make sure both the internal customers and the external customers are getting the message. Too often project managers stay silent about project slips or budget overruns in hopes of recovering later. The earlier you highlight these things the more help you will get to recover. I know delivering bad news is painful, but if you regularly don’t deliver bad news until the eleventh hour then I don’t want you on my project management team.

3. Drive completion of the task

• Drive the schedule – not just report it
• Secure the budget – if the budget is insufficient, scream for more
• Secure the resources – if the resources are insufficient, scream for more
• Manage the risks – discover them early and communicate them

  Never say you could not do something because of fiscal constraints if you did not first go asking for more money for that particular task. Never say you could not do something because of resource constraints if you did not first go asking for more resources for that particular task. In general asking once is not enough. Senior management have thick heads, you need to be persistent or we don’t believe your complaint is real.

That’s it.

Customer Leadership

“I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent…” – Thomas Edison

“Find out where the parade is going and get in front of it” – Ralph Klein,
Former Premier of Alberta (never lost an election in his political career)

“My role is to make money for our customers so they can share some of it with us. To do this I must provide them with real, tangible value.” – Daryl Cowie, Product Manager, GE

“The Customer is god” – Japanese proverb

“Find out what that Customer wants and give it to them” – many sources

These quotes all point to the same universal business truth: the way to succeed in business is to help your customers succeed. The customer is central to all things. They lead the way, they set the direction.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in business is to assume you know what the customer wants, or assume you know better than the customer. The customer is the leader.

Let’s take a look at different types of customers. Not all customers are external to the business. If your job is front line sales, then your customer is whoever purchases your products or services. If you work as an executive assistant, then your customer is the executive staff. They ask for things of you. You deliver items and services to them, and they pay you for it. They are your customer. If you look around your organization, you will see that the relationship between most departments is that of vendor and client (or customer). Product Management for example supplies specifications to R&D, who in turn develop and supply a product design back to Product Management. Product Management secures funding (IE. pays for) the service. In this transaction Product Management is the customer, and R&D is the vendor. Most relationships within an organization can be characterized like this.

If an executive assistant fails to consistently provide value to the executive staff, then he/she will not be successful as an executive assistant, and at some point the relationship will be terminated. If the widget manufacturer fails to consistently provide value to the widget consumer, they will not be successful as a widget manufacturer, and at some point the vendor-client relationship will be terminated. Both situations illustrate the reality that you must satisfy your customer to be successful. Both situations also illustrate that the customer is the one who terminates the relationship. They are the ones who ultimately decide what is needed, albeit often in consultation with the vendor.

In a strong organization everything can be tied back to the end, external customer (If you get enough customers together we call it the market). The trick is to understand what the leader wants, and influence the leader whenever it is beneficial to you both. You must always recognize who the real leader is, and the ultimate leader is the customer.

Tell Your Boss Where to Go This Year

My resolution this year is to tell my boss where to go. Not only am I planning to tell my boss where to go; I expect him to thank me for doing it.

Every year most of us go to work day after day, and do the things our boss asks us to do. Our boss makes decisions, sometimes thoughtful and practical, but often arbitrary and contrary to our own common sense. For our part we provide at least partial compliance, and complain to our peers in the hallway, and our partners at home, about the latest misguided directive from above. Well, rather than enduring another year of working to the whims of management, this year I suggest you start telling your boss where to go.

Perhaps the strongest misconception people hold onto about their managers is that they should be handing you a task list and prioritizing it for you. This is the model for entry level staff. If you are new to the job, or new to being a manager then you may expect some period of time where your management team directs your activities on a daily or weekly basis. But if you ever hope to move beyond that position, to a place where people look to you as a leader of the organization you cannot wait for your manager to always tell you what to do, and you cannot go on always telling every member of your team what to do. There is a term for this: micro-management. There are times when it is called for, but if this is your normal mode of operation then you can expect to stay exactly where you are for the rest of your career. Micro-management is one of the least effective long term leadership strategies there is. Strong leaders create teams of productive people. Their objective is to set direction and delegate both responsibility and authority to the strong leaders around them. Consider this management progression chart showing the evolution of a manager from entry level to business leader.

As managers progress though the four stages they move from left to right on the chart from needing to be supervised or monitored closely, to being capable of having things delegated to them with little or no supervision. Obviously your manager would like you to move from left to right as quickly as possible, because delegating takes up a lot less of their time than monitoring and supervising does. In short, it is more productive for them. As a first stage, new manager you need to be given direction and supervised. “Customer X has a problem with Product Y. It sounds like something we need to address. Get Hank and Mary in a room and try to define the problem and brainstorm possible solutions. Let me know what you come up with tomorrow.” The new manager will pull the team together and coordinate, but their boss probably told them what the problem is, what the next steps are, and when he wants a status update. You have been directed to a specific task, and your boss plans to monitor progress closely.

If we look at the same problem after you have progressed to the level of intermediate manager you don’t need to be given as much direction, but instead need encouragement to help build your confidence and move you to the next level. “Customer X has a problem with Product Y. I know you can handle this. Let me know what you come up with tomorrow.” Same problem, but instead of being directed to the next step, you are encouraged with statements of confidence in your ability to handle the situation. The plan is still monitored closely, not only so your boss can keep and eye on it, but also so he has plenty of opportunity to encourage you by saying “great job, I knew you could handle it.” This is where you will first see your manager start letting go of the reigns and letting you handle things your way.

Let’s move on to the senior manager. “Customer X has a problem with Product Y. I need you to handle this because I need someone I know will follow through” Same problem and still a lot of encouragement related to your boss’s faith in your ability. What’s different is that you are no longer asked for status updates. A good boss trusts the Senior Manager to handle the situation, and update him as required. At this stage you have crossed a very important threshold where the boss no longer needs to pull information from you. They can rely on you to push information their way in an appropriate manner. You can start to see how this drives towards productivity. Instead of regular progress meetings, you are now in the land of on demand, as required progress updates which are much more efficient. You may well still need to be having regular update meetings with your team, but you have grown to a level that no longer requires this level of micro-management.

And finally we get to the business leader. “Customer X has a problem…” at which point you interrupt your boss to say “I’ll take care of it”, and you do. Your boss may never even hear the resolution to this problem until you’re shooting the breeze over the coffee pot one day, and he asks more out of curiosity than concern, “Hey whatever happened to that thing with Customer X?”, “Oh, Mary took care of that weeks ago, there was some confusion over how to correctly apply the product, we talked them through it and we’re updating the documents to make it more clear”. The level of encouragement is no longer required, and we move back towards directing mode. The directives however have changed in scope. With the new manager the directive was fix this problem for this customer. For the business leader it becomes take care of this customer, or this region, or this business unit. The business leader does not wait to be told what to do, he understands his objectives, sets the direction, and tells his boss what direction to go.

So this year whether you want to move up in the organization, or just be the best at what you do now, make a positive change and start telling your boss where to go instead of waiting for him to tell you

I Work Hard, So Why Don't I Feel Productive?

Everybody works. Many people work hard. Only a very few are truly productive.

 

Let me get something out front right away. All of us are unproductive at times. When we feel we are being unproductive there is usually one reason for it. That reason is that we are being unproductive. You feel unproductive because you are. I want to make this point very clear because the next step for most people is to rationalize it away as something out of their control. Nothing could be further from the truth. Productivity is your responsibility. If you are being unproductive, do something about it!

 

You feel unproductive because you are unproductive

 

Why are so few people productive at work? Over the course of the next few sections, we are going to look at the top three excuses:

1. Lack of Leadership
2. Unrealistic Goals
3. Poor Time Management

 

Let’s get started with a discussion on Leadership

 

Leadership

Early in my career I believed that hard work was the key to success. Most of my first jobs were doing manual labour, and I was often complemented for how hard I worked on a consistent basis. The harder I worked, the faster we got things done, and so I believe that hard work was the key to success. After graduating with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering my first corporate job was testing and developing software that required me to be somewhat creative and perform certain tasks, and I did them to the best of my ability. I looked around and saw 30 other people doing the same. As long as everyone was pitching in and working hard I figured we must be making a lot of progress.

 

A few years later I moved into a position managing a team of software designers. They had been without a manager (and hence without leadership) for some time, and I still remember the day I moved into my new office. There was round table in one corner piled 6 inches high with a messy pile of white, orange and yellow papers. The papers were strewn out covering most of the table top, many just managing to not spill off the sides. On quick inspection I realized each paper was filled out with some type of product deficiency report or action request from various departments. I pulled the team together for our first meeting and during that initial conversation I asked them what they did all day. The answer I got was this. “You know that pile of papers in your office? We look through that for things that seem important or things that seem interesting and we try to fix them.” After a few minutes conversation I asked “So what do you do if you can’t figure out the solution?” There was a brief silence before someone sheepishly (and honestly) responded “We put it back and take a different one”

 

Was this a hard working team? Absolutely they were. They were young and eager and all willing to go the extra mile. Were they a productive team? Not on your life. Not without a leader.

 

Everybody works.

Many people work hard.

Only a very few are truly productive.

 

In the days and weeks that followed I proceeded to measure and analyze the problem. Then I implemented improvements to bring direction to the team, segregating work into different groups, and outsourcing certain types of work so we could focus on addressing the key issues. Lastly we put additional controls in place to ensure open issues were being properly prioritized and closed with top-quality solutions so they would not be opened again, and to ensure people were always focused on the top priority tasks and not distracted or redirected from our new goal with tasks from other managers that did not drive towards our objectives. Did we ever deviate from the plan? Of course we did. Business needs are fluid and new requirements come up regularly, but we recognized them as deviations and they were taken on as exceptions with the main objective always being to get back on track and address the backlog of open issues that were affecting the productivity of other departments, and more importantly, the satisfaction level of our customers.

 

It took over a year to address all the issues in that pile and it took a lot of focus and determination to not let other things distract us from that task. But everyone knew the objectives, everyone was working towards them, and everyone could see the progress we were making. We were working as a team, to a focused goal with defined objectives. And when that goal of eliminating the backlog of open issues was achieved, we all felt good. For that year we had been productive.

 

…when that goal was achieved, we felt good. …we had been productive.

 

Where should leadership come from?

The example earlier may seem like an obvious one, but similar, often more subtle versions of this exist in every business. All businesses have people spending time on the wrong things, and the end result is always the same: poor productivity. It is easy to recognize that strong leadership has a direct correlation to productivity. What seems to be unclear to people is that your leadership comes from many places, not just one. I’d like to suggest it comes primarily from 3 places:

1. Your Managers
2. Your Customers
3. You

 

I’ll talk some more about each of these types of Leadership soon. For now just remember, ultimately your personal productivity is up to you.

What is Productivity?

BoundlessThinking.com


Introduction

Friday afternoon. The end of a busy day at the end of a busy week. A simple question spins through my mind as I walk the hall towards the exit: “What did I accomplish this week?”, and the answer with not a moment’s hesitation: “Not much”.

This disturbing thought sets me to thinking. What did I do all week, and why is the end result so under whelming? The inevitable list of meetings, support requests, hallway conversations, status updates, and last-minute scope and direction changes fill my head. I start to realize that I did actually help a lot of people this week, and much of the help was with business critical items. We had to close those orders by month end after all. That development schedule absolutely needed to be examined and pulled in. The commercial orders team needed those status updates, and document corrections to meet that important bid deadline. This week’s distractions were really not under my control. Sometimes you need to be flexible and I did what had to be done. Next week I’ll get back to my agenda and things will start to move forward. Feeling better after successfully rationalizing my performance I pause just before the exit, shake my head and sigh, and move on out the door.

Deep (or not so deep) in my subconscious the lagging knowledge remains that even though unexpected things came up; even though I worked long and hard; even though the demands of customers, bosses, and peers are out of my control; even though I helped a lot of people this week, with things that absolutely needed to get done; even though,,, the undeniable cold hard fact remains. What did I really accomplish this week? Not much.

What is productivity?
The interesting thing about productivity is that one person’s ideally productive day can be another person’s disaster. The rules about what makes a productive day change with your role and responsibility in the organization. Suppose your job is working in a call centre. A day where you took 7 customer calls per hour, answered questions and logged case details for follow up would be considered a very productive day. If your job is developing software, then a day filled with taking customer calls, answering questions and logging case details for follow up would be considered a productivity disaster.

Why? The answer, quite obviously, is that the software developer’s primary responsibility is to develop software, and if she is on the phone fielding questions all day, then it is unlikely any software is getting written. This doesn’t mean software developers should never field questions from customers, they should. It just means that is not their primary function within the organization.

Productivity is getting the right things done, not filling your day with activity, or getting other peoples work done. The “right things” are whatever moves you closer to accomplishing your goals. To be productive, you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish.

What are we trying to accomplish?
Do you know what you are trying to accomplish at work? Do you keep it in your mind, and use it to make daily decisions on what you should and should not do? Unless you work for a charity, no matter what your role, or position, you are there ultimately for one reason and one reason only: to make money for the company, and you do that by providing real value to the customer. Say it with me, “My role is to make money for the company by providing real value to the customer.”

What do I personally need to do?
So how do I, me personally, provide real value to the customer? The answer to that is the key to productivity. We will be exploring many aspects of this going forward, and looking at real, practical things you can do to get more productive.

For now let me leave you with two things:

Your entire organization has been designed to provide real value to the customer. Each piece of the company was put there to drive value to the customer. You were put there to drive value to the customer.

Your entire organization has been designed to work together as a single business unit. Each piece of the company was put there to perform a specific function. You were put there to perform a specific function.

Your objective is to figure out what type of value your company provides, how your team contributes to that value, and how you personally can contribute the most to your team.

Then you just need to do it

Getting Started

Productivity is getting the right things done, not filling your day with important activities. The "right things" are whatever moves you closer to accomplishing you goals. To be productive, you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish.