Category: Uncategorized

As project managers and a project team focusing on delivery avoiding friction is almost a daily event, whether that be with stakeholders maintaining scope or vendors. But another aspect to consider is being torn between priorities and having to switch tasks at a whim to achieve daily targets. There’s a difference between elapsed hours on the job and effective available hours. If people don’t incorporate friction factors into their planning, they’ll forever underestimate how long it will take to get work done.

People do not multitask—they task switch. When multitasking computers switch from one job to another, there’s a period of unproductive time during the switch. The same is true of people, only it’s far worse. It takes a little while to gather all the materials needed to work on a different activity, access the right files, and reload your brain with the pertinent information. Changing your mental context to focus on the new problem and remember where you were the last time you worked on it. That’s the slow part.

Some people are better at task switching than others; however excessive task switching destroys productivity. When deeply immersed in work, focused on the activity and free from distractions, a mental state called flow is entered. Creative knowledge work like software development requires flow to be productive. It is understood what is being worked on, the information needed is in your working memory, and you know where you’re headed. You can tell you’ve been in a state of flow when you lose track of time as you’re making great progress and having fun. Then your phone pings with a text message, an e-mail notification pops up, your computer reminds you that a meeting starts in five minutes, or someone stops by to talk. The flow is then lost.

Interruptions are flow killers. It takes several minutes to get your brain back into that highly productive state and pick up where you were before the interruption. A realistic measure of your effective work capacity is based not on how many hours you’re at work or even how many hours you’re on task, but how many uninterrupted hours you’re on task.

To achieve the high productivity and satisfaction that come from an extended state of flow, you need to actively manage your work time. There are several recommendations for reducing context switching and its accompanying productivity destruction.

• Time block your schedule to create clearer focuses boundaries. Planning how you will spend your day, with dedicated blocks of time allocated to specific activities, carves out opportunities for extended deep concentration.
• Employ routines to remove attention residue as you migrate from one task to the next. A small transition ritual or distraction—a cup of coffee, an amusing video—can help you make a mental break into a new work mode.
• Take regular breaks to recharge. The intense concentration of a state of flow is great—up to a point. You must come up for air occasionally. To minimize eyestrain, periodically focus your eyes on something in the distance for a few seconds instead of the screen. Short mental breaks are refreshing before you dive back into that productive flow state.

At-work hours seep away through many channels. You attend meetings and video chats, respond to e-mails, look things up on the web, participate in retrospectives, and review the next task. Time gets lost to unexpected bug fixes, kicking around ideas with your co-workers, administrative activities, and the usual healthy socializing. Even if you work forty hours a week, you don’t spend anywhere near that many on your project.

Besides the daily frittering away of time on myriad activities, project teams lose time to other sources of friction. For instance, most corporate IT organizations are responsible for both new development and enhancing and repairing current production systems. Since you can’t predict when something will break or a change request will come along, these sporadic, interruption maintenance demands usurp team members’ time with unplanned work.

The team composition can further impose friction if project participants speak different native languages and work in diverse cultures. Unclear and volatile requirement priorities can chew up hours as people spend time researching, debating, and adjusting priorities. The team might have to temporarily shelve some incomplete work if a new, higher-priority task inserts itself into the schedule. Unplanned rework is yet another time diversion.

Distance between project participants can retard information exchanges and decision-making. However, the long-distance reviews took longer than expected, as did follow-up to verify the corrections made. Sluggish iteration to resolve requirements questions and ambiguity about who the right contact people were for each issue were further impediments. These—and other—factors put the project behind schedule after just the first week and eventually contributed to its failure.

It is best to estimate how long individual tasks will take if no distractions or interruptions occur, that is just focus on productive time. Next, convert that ideal effort estimate into calendar time based on effective work-hour percentage. Also consider whether any of the other aforementioned sources of friction could affect estimates. Then try to arrange the work to focus on a single task at a time until it’s complete or hit a blocking point.

If people always create estimates without accounting for the many ways that time splitting and project conditions can slow down the work, they’re destined to overrun their estimates every time. Let us know your thoughts on the subject; we would like to hear from you. All the very best on your project management journey.

Project managers and their teams depend on processes to ensure that a project runs smoothly. Too often processes are relied on as if they were somehow perfect and cannot be touched. That type of thinking is what will quickly send a project off track and possibly cause it to fail, meaning there is always room for improvement.

Constantly analysing processes is the best way to reach a successful end, through a technique called process improvement. Implementing what is learnt through process improvement is done by creating a process improvement plan. Document’s outlining how to improve processes after identifying and analysing them.

The process improvement plan is part of a larger, overall project plan. It guides the project team on how to analyse the project processes and outlines where there’s room for measurable improvements. It tends to be an iterative process that occurs throughout the project’s life cycle.

The point of a process improvement plan is to find weak links in the process chain or bottlenecks that are impeding work, and then figure out ways to rectify those inefficiencies. This leads to processes being completed faster, more efficiently and with a greater quality of deliverables.

A process improvement plan will also help to reduce wasted efforts and keep teams working more productively. It helps to reduce any friction that exists in the processes, and ensures processes meet regulatory compliance standards when required.

To do the work of identifying the weak points in a process and do nothing about it is counterproductive. It might feel like the effort of creating and implementing a plan is not worth the investment.

If there is a belief there are flaws in the process and don’t respond to improve them, there will be a bigger problem down the line. Therefore, it’s always beneficial to respond to the problem and work towards resolving it. To do this requires a plan. The process improvement plan can be broken down into seven steps.

The first step is to get a full overview of the process that needs improvements. Take that process and break it down into a map. This assists in getting an idea where the weaknesses are in the process.

Commence the analysis of the process to see where the issues might lie. Look closely at each of the steps and see where there was a problem, such as delays, over-allocation of resources, too much money spent, idle team members and so on. Once known, trace back the issue to its origin in order to address its cause and how to avoid it in the future.

Once the cause of the problem has been uncovered, it’s time to redesign the process to improve it and avoid the issue when next using it. At this point, it is best to involve the whole project team.

They are the ones who have the most intimate knowledge of the process and hands-on experience with it. They’ll make sure that there are no stones left unturned and everything has been documented in the process. They’re an invaluable resource for process improvement and should be listened to.

Get their ideas on how to redesign the process and brainstorm with them for more solutions. Then analyse all the solutions offered and figure out which one is the best and most likely to improve the process.

Assigning resources is the next step; they are the go-to people or team members who are impacted by this process and its change. Once the team is assembled, give them detailed instructions on how to redesign the process and why it’s important.

Implementing the process improvement plan is then put into action, which means creating a detailed task list and assignments. This part of the process is just as any project plan is created, breaking down the deliverables into tasks and assigning each team member with those tasks. Create a schedule with a timeline and add tasks, their duration, and any dependencies.

Take the time to communicate plans to the team and make sure they fully understand their part. Listen, be open to feedback, and make sure the team understands they will be kept in the loop throughout the whole process. This creates buy-in and helps them embrace the new process.

Once the team is executing the project, it’s important to track their progress. Monitoring is not micromanaging. It provides a window into the project and allows for any tweaks to keep it moving as scheduled.

Being equip with the tools needed to improve any process is important. From making a process improvement plan to executing that plan and monitoring its progress, as this will break you out of complacency and help achieve more in your projects. Unfortunately, it’s easy to stagnate when you get used to the routine of your current processes. You shouldn’t change things willy-nilly—if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it—but you should always be seeking ways to improve. Let us know your thoughts on process correction we would like to hear from you. All the very best on your project management journey.

We know the world is moving through a rapid digital transformation phase wherein various organizations, companies, industries, institutions, and governments are transforming their processes, infrastructure, applications, software products, design, testing, customer management, and other elements into a more robust, automatic and sophisticated foundation to keep themselves business and customer-focused, progress faster with cutting-edge technology and march ahead of their competitors in this disruptive and advanced digital transformation journey.

The transformation occurring is digital with each of those advancements mostly starts with a strategic idea in the direction of transformation aimed at long-term growth, gets converted to a requirement, and then moves on to the fast-paced design and implementation depending on the respective domain and industry where the strategic idea is born and a ‘project’ is born.

While all these digital transformations are executed ultimately as a project, it is also worth noting that in this process, even projects, project managers, and project reporting are also getting transformed into more innovative, cutting edge and erudite resources or execution processes thereby becoming the most prominent factor and the vital launchpad for the success of multiple digital transformation journeys.

Talking about projects and project executions, gone are the days when manual copies of project contracts and other documentation were filed and protected throughout the duration of the project. Project processes are now digital, automated, and saving a lot of administrative time. Project creation, assignments, tracking, and monitoring all happen through various automated tools and applications. These management tools are also web or network-based such that these can be accessed and updated by a project manager (PM) irrespective of where the PM is located. 

Digitalization has revolutionized the project execution processes to be implemented in a completely remote manner without the need for a team to be physically present in one location. Communication channels, stakeholder meetings, project testing, and training are all web-based thereby removing the barriers of physical presence and additional admin time to be invested in projects. These progressions and reserves also indicate and prove that cost saved is cost invested in executing more projects than was the case before.

This transformation of projects is the vigorous and the most effective instrument that plays and will play a key role in the larger picture of implementing scalable digital transformation programs within giant organizations.

The main drivers or the pilots for the progress, execution, and success of digital transformation projects are the so-called “Project Managers” who have themselves automatically transformed over the years and with the dawn of automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud technologies, they have found competent ways of getting projects executed at a much faster pace without an impact on the quality, timeline, and other relevant execution parameters.

Thinking in the grand scheme of things, it would be more apt to say that Project Managers are spending less time on individual projects but still delivering them within the boundaries of scope, time, cost, and quality and have also transmogrified themselves into a state where they are executing more projects than before within the same amount of time – which means more transformations are actually getting executed at the base level, resource usage is optimized, revenue generation is at its maximum possible thereby putting organizations on a growth trajectory in this intense, disruptive and competitive transformation journey.

The combination of automation and technology has been a boon in disguise for the PM’s in recent years due to the fact that these two elements take care of the intelligence that needs to be analysed in the back end and presenting the most valuable decision making information to the PM’s – thereby saving more time for the PM who otherwise would have to spend a lot of mechanical effort to decrypt the available data and convert it to a form that can be analysed easily.

One other important element that measures the success of these transformations and the accuracy of mechanisms used for execution the digital transformation is the financial and other reporting that comes out of this “technology-processes-automation” combination being used by PM’s and organizations for digital transformations of all sizes. For any program or a project (large or small), organization always need some kind of a measure to check whether their project (and or investments) is progressing in the right direction and or need some kind of a corrective action(s) to be implemented in case of deviations from the growth path. It is for this reason that PM’s and stakeholders always have a continuous feedback loop based on measurements coming from automated tools. These measurements contain vital information about the various project financial and non-financial reporting which give the stakeholders enough food for thought on what’s causing the current issues and/or if something is going to cause panic in the future.

It is to be noted that though there are a lot of non-financial reporting parameters that could have an impact on the overall progress and hence on decision making; it is also evident that at the end of the day all of these parameters eventually impact the financial numbers associated with the project progress or execution or results. It is not always the profit that the project should aim at but also on the value or the projected return on investment that’s expected from the digital transformation. It is here that the automation/tracking of all the financial information comes in handy and serves as the most important instrument for PM’s and stakeholders to review how and which direction are the transformations going.

In Summary, the three dimensions of projects, project managers and project reporting together with their fast-paced evolutions are a vital ingredient to the progressions of the digital transformation journeys. While success of digital transformation journeys may vary based on domain, technology, and other aspects, it is worth noting that these three elements may form the foundation of most of the transformation journeys when we look at it from a bottom-up approach.

A concept without a clear execution path or project, without a central focused leader and without measurements of the progress could lead it to failure and confusions. To add, it is also evident that in the recent years, these three dimensions have taken leaps and bounds in their specific areas and have embraced “technology-processes-automation” combination to such an extent that any projects or transformations that are built around these dimensions have a higher success rate – due to the fact that these combinations not only have the ability to automatically analyse and report, but they also provide a very high value in enhancing quality decision making which is the key to resolve bottlenecks and spearhead the digital transformation projects onto their completion, success and growth trajectory. Let us know your thoughts, we wish you all the best on your project management journey.

Ever heard the term “There is room for improvement”? At some stage of our project management career we would have heard it at least once. Regardless of how skill full or experienced you maybe as a project manager, it’s important to understand that there is always room for improvement. This is because every project presents a new set of challenges that may not be familiar.  The following are some ways we can be improving as project managers

As a project manager, you need to have a great team with you to help you execute the project in the best way possible. For a successful project, you’ll need to assemble qualified and competent individuals who are ready to work together seamlessly for a common goal.

After assembling the team you’ll need for the project, the next step is assigning representatives. It is these team representatives that will help you run the project in a more organized manner. The team representatives are responsible for communicating any messages from the team members and attending meetings.

As a project manager, before proceeding with any project, it’s very important that you outline it to the rest of the team. You might know everything about the project, but this doesn’t basically mean that the rest of your team is aware of everything that is expected of them.

For this reason, you need to educate all the team members about every important detail of the project. For example, you want to ensure that everyone working on the project understands the project goals, the estimated time of completion, and their job descriptions, among other aspects.

This means that before the project officially begins, you need to present the project outline to everyone involved in it. As a project manager, it’s very important to understand that communicating the project goals from the start plays a critical role in achieving them.

If you’re looking to improve your project management skills for the best results possible, you need to improve your communication skills. You could be a very great planner, but without good communication between you and your team members, your project is bound to fail.

For this reason, if you’re going to improve your project management, you need to be ready to communicate your expectations, project goals, deadlines and always provide updates to the team and the stakeholders in the project.

With good communication, you can undoubtedly transform any team and get the best out of it. It’s important to note that good communication doesn’t only improve the performance of the team, but also enhances the overall quality of the project.

For better project management, you need to establish firm goals for the project. This is very important because it lets your team members know what exactly they’re aiming for and what they have to accomplish for the project to be labelled done.

After you’ve established clear project goals for the entire team, the next step is to ensure that you prioritize these goals. You need to ensure that every task that is carried out by the team is only focused on achieving the set goals within the time limit set.

By doing so, your team will gain a better understanding of the expectations you have for the project and the deadlines to meet them. In simple terms, prioritizing the project goals will optimize the project progress and put you in a better place to succeed.

Everything from good project planning, communication, and getting the best out of the team is fueled by realistic expectations. You can never build a successful project if the goals you’re setting for the team are not realistic.

You need to consider your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and all the challenges they might encounter throughout the project before setting any goals for them. When you set realistic goals, it will motivate the team, and you’re likely to achieve great success by the end of the project.

Setting goals that way above your team’s capabilities will only demoralize them and derail the whole project.

These are only some tips to help guide project managers to be better and improve project management. However, you should always be open to new ideas and particularly new learning opportunities to perfect your skills. Let us know your thoughts we would like to hear from you. All the very best on your project management journey.