While reading about information science in Ambient Findability by Peter Morville I came across the concept that gossip is an important source of information and that gossiping is an important mechanism of finding information.

One aspect of gossip is that, while it may not be 100% accurate, it can provide advance knowledge on an upcoming event or help the attuned listener prepare for what’s coming in the future.

This type of information can be incredibly valuable when managing projects. The more advanced knowledge you have on the status of tasks, projects, budgets, etc. the better prepared you can be, the better you can manage the project/plan for changes and the better you can communicate to stakeholders about it.

So I was thinking, what are the informal/gossipy type cues or communication channels that one can build into a project management process that will give managers advanced knowledge?

This question is central to project managers and clients.

Its a tough question because every project has its own unique characteristics. Even if its something that you’ve done before, many factors can throw off a schedule.  As a friend of mine says:

Its not the stuff you know that throws you off. And its not the stuff you know ‘you don’t know’ that throws you off -you can cover that by doubling your estimate or so. Its the stuff you don’t know that you don’t know that can throw you off, 5x or more.

Nevertheless, an estimated due date is a reasonable thing to ask for.  In fact, it is critical to successfully scheduling work, achieving goals and managing people.

So, what’s the best way to answer the question?

First, understand that a due date is a best guess of how things will turn out.  It should be based on the most accurate information available like:

• past estimates of the amount of work tasks took
• past estimates of the calender days tasks took
• comparisons between those estimates and the actual data from past projects
• familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of the project team and
• the current resources available for the project.

But when you present the schedule to your client, frame it as a basis for communication.  Let them know that, while based on the best information available, it is not a definitive prediction of the future. What it does do, though, is become a definitive guide for you to provide them updates on the schedule and for them to ask for the status of the project in very specific terms.

Second, carefully understand the constraints at play on your project. Every project has at least three constraints:

• Time,
• Money and
• Scope - all of which should center around
• Quality.

Explain to your client that each of those constraints directly impacts the others.

If your client requires a hard deadline, you need to have the right amount of resources and a limited scope. Your ability to meet deadlines further improves if you can scale up the resources allocated to the project to meet unforeseen challenges or pressures on the scope.

In any case, it is the project manager’s job to help control these factors and, most importantly, to communicate to the client how changes, challenges and surprises impact the estimated due date of a project.

That’s what a friend who heads the client service group at an interactive agency complained about over lunch. He wanted to know how he could stop his implementation team from being late.

I asked how they currently communicate.

“For each implementation we submit a ticket through a home-grown Microsoft Sharepoint based system. The ticket has the date submitted, the general scope of work and the due date.  They then let me know when an implementation is ready to go. Or, I have to pro-actively call to find out the status of an implementation. Then, inevitably, I have to call the client and tell them their launch is going to be late.”

I suggested putting together a short work plan that described the steps the implementation team goes through to prepare for a launch. In his case, there are generally 5 major steps, each with around 10 sub-tasks. To start with, skip the sub-tasks. Make a bullet-point list of the five major steps. This will give you and the implementation team a single point of reference to gauge the progress of the project. 

Instead of touching base only when it is due, you can touch base at each of the 5 major steps.  This will bring more visibility into the process. It will also give you early warning of when an implementation is starting to run late, before it is actually due, so you can do something about it.

This is a first step. 

This also sets the foundation for more sophisticated and accurate planning using start and due dates for each step and estimating hours, as well as being able to scale the process through resource planning and project templates. But that can come later. The first step is to map out the implementation process in easy, big block steps that become a basis for meaningful communication.

Estimating a project’s schedule can be a real challenge.  There is potential uncertainty and unkowns to consider when creating a schedule.  I’ve found it helpful to categorize projects when estimating a project’s schedule so you know what kind of margin-of-error to build into it. Three categories I find useful are:

1.  New Work
2.  Old Work
3.  Combo Work -Combination of New and Old

New work is an effort or process you’ve never done before. This could be using a new technology, an upgraded tool, developing a new type of solution, implementing a new program or designing an entirely new asset e.g. a website, if you are used to designing print pieces.

Old work is an effort or process you’ve done many times before with the same tool set.

Combo work is a combination of new and old. This could be doing a standard project using a new tool or technique or working on something you’ve done before but which you wouldn’t call yourself an expert at just yet.

MARGIN-OF-ERROR

Each of these categories carries a different degree of uncertainty. You can capture that uncertainty by creating a margin-of-error for your schedule estimates. Here are some guidelines for margins-of-error. 

1. New Work - a margin of 8x.
2. Old Work -a margin of 1.5x
3. Combo Work -a margin of 4x, though you can shift that higher or lower, depending on how much is new vs old.

DON’T FORGET CLIENTS

Clients are another element to consider when deciding what category to put a project into. Doing work for a new client or a new contact person at the client can add as much uncertainty as using a new tool or developing a new solution.

1. DON’T OVERPLAN
2. Change the plan as needed
3. The more you invest in a plan the less likely you are to want to change it
4. The more you invest in a plan the less likely your team will be to give you accurate information
5. Leave room in your schedule for changes to the plan
6. Don’t try to predict everything that will go wrong
7. Just leave room in your schedule for things to go wrong
8. Not every process can be dissected into easy to monitor steps
9. Let team members update the status of their tasks

10. FEAR SILENCE
11. Keep stakeholders appraised of your progress, always
12. Tell stakeholders ahead of time when the plan looks like it’ll need to change
13. Insist on feedback from your team on their progress
14. Give your team the detailed blueprints they need to develop
15. Don’t ask your client or stakeholders to build that blueprint
16. Don’t even ask your client to sign-off on the blueprint
17. Spend time understanding your client’s needs, in detail
18. Spend time understanding your team’s skills and abilities
19. Trust the feedback you get from your team
21. Relay relevant information to your client
22. Communicate always -especially when things go wrong.

23. TEST EXTENSIVELY
24. Test early and often
25. Test proven techniques a lot
26. Test innovation even more
27. Test functionality to make sure it works
28. Test the implementation of it to make sure the functionality works when put into a workflow
29. Test its deployment to make sure the functionality works in the users’ technology environment
30. Monitor users’ interactions with your solution to make sure it works for the user and that the user gets it
31. The latest greatest techniques are not always the best solution.
32. Users prefer not to learn new habits
33. Find solutions that seem effortless to your users

My presentation on effective project management, entitled GET MORE DONE! is now available for viewing online at http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p78705036/

This is the presentation I gave at CFUnited 09 and is aimed at providing project management tips and techniques for getting more done.

It is a touch over an hour long.

Different project management techniques impact the type of information you can collect on projects and therefore the level of visibility you have on your processes - both for single projects as well as for reports across all projects.

One of the advantages of a more classic, Waterfall approach, is that time is a variable that can shift and be measured.  With this approach you:

• create a task list or work breakdown structure,
• assign resources,
• assign estimated hours,
• enter start dates and due dates for each task.

Then, you can measure how long it takes to actually complete the tasks in several dimensions.

1. First, in terms of calendar dates: when the task was started and when it was completed.
2. Secondly, you can measure in terms of duration: the number of days it took to complete.
3. Thirdly, in terms of actual hours: the amount of people hours worth of effort it took to complete the task.

When measured and kept over time it creates a robust data set that can be used to improve estimates on projects.

If you bill by the hour or by project, this data can help improve your pricing and profitability by providing visibility into the actual time it takes to do the tasks or projects you are charging for.

If you bid on projects, this same data will improve your understanding of the variables you can look at when pricing your bid.

In a more Agile project management approach, time is generally held constant and it is the functionality or amount of work that shifts.  The amount of work that can be accomplish shifts according to the time allocated, the skill set of the team and the complexity of the work involved.

This can provide a benefit for the project manager -they don’t have to worry about schedules and effort estimates in the same way as a Waterfall approach. It also makes it easier to track progress and shut out distractions for the team.

However, it comes at a price of reduced visibility and decreased data for management to use to make strategic decisions. The variables often left to management for decision making then become ones of:

• hiring more people,
• working on the team’s skill set,
• firing people or
• limiting project scope to the constraints of the team’s historic performance over a fixed period of time.

It limits the information that can be generated from projects and therefore the data that can be used for strategic decision making, portfolio management or long term planning.

Here are simple steps you can take to have better visibility on resources and answer the question: “How much more work can we do?”. They are geared towards answering the question how much can we do this month. But the same principals apply if you want to look at it for a week, a quarter, a year, etc.

1. Break your project down into separate months.
2. Put in all the team members on that project (the whole project team).
3. Add in each person’s total availability to work for the month.
4. As you enter in tasks for that project, put in the estimated hours each person will spend on that task.
5. Keep a rolling sum of estimated hours per person for the month.
6. Subtract that rolling sum from total availability.

This will show you how much time each person has left for the month, based on current workload.  If you are considering adding on a new task, think about how much time it will take a specific team member to do that task. Then, see if that person has the availability left to take it on.

These type of calculations are automatically done by Vertabase project management software. Project management software also makes it far easier to see this information across all projects and to scale for large numbers of people with varying schedules (including holidays, sick days, etc.)

One of the first steps to getting buy-in for more project management is to make the need apparent.

The first step to achieving this transparency is to put together a list of every single project that’s being requested, match it with the departments or people involved in making that project happen, and matching it, as well, with the requestors.

This simple list will show you how many total projects there are on the table, how many projects are requested by each requestor and how many projects each department has to be involved with.

For an average size group the number of requested projects is generally in the 50 to 150 project range -with the lion’s share of the projects touching IT and/or a marketing or art department. Summarize these statistics and share them with key decision makers. It provides a simple but powerful view on everything going on within a group.

By seeing the amount of requested activity it should highlight the need to prioritize projects, really ask the requestors which are the most important projects to get done and to track the progress of projects by department so that the decision makers and key stakeholders can have visibility into how shared resources (namely IT, marketing, HR, procurement etc.) are being spent.

Project management as a practice and project management software as a tool can help facilitate this transparency and present it in a non-threatening way.

Tasks lists can be super helpful for creative firms or creative departments (e.g. art departments, interactive agencies, internal marketing or communications) to get more done, manage processes better and to get better information on their work (including tracking billable hours). They can also kill well meaning attempts at implementing project management.

People usually get tripped up by making task lists overly detailed, trying to map every single step in a process. On the other end of the pendulum, people make tasks are so broad that they become meaningless and don’t add any value to getting things done or to providing information to managers.

For project management efforts to succeed in a creative environment, you have to get the task list right. It has to be the right balance between a traditional work breakdown structure (WBS) and an MS Excel based to-do list.

The way to figure out the right combination is to start out by deciding exactly:

A. Why you want a task list i.e. what you are using the list for and

B. What do you want to track i.e. what kind of information you want to track on your projects.

Here are a few of the things tasks lists can be used for along with some guidelines for building truly usefull tasks lists and project schedules around them.

1. Creating Templates. Templates make life so much easier. Once you’ve come up with the right level of detail on your task list, make a template out of it and re-use it for every project. If you do several different kind of projects, create different templates for each one.

Templates have a ton of benefits.

• Templates make it fast and easy to populate a schedule with tasks, dates and even resources and time estimates;
• Templates provide consistent names of tasks so that you can run task reports that compare the status of the same task across all projects and you can;
• Compare how long specific tasks take on one client versus the other or one project versus the other.

2. Categories for Entering Time. The task list becomes a framework for items your team can enter time on. As a rule of thumb, each task should be something to which at least 20 hours of time will be spent. Group together related activities to make up those 20 hour plus tasks e.g. “Browser Testing of Website” instead of “Testing Website on Safari”, “Testing Website on IE8″ etc. On projects lasting 3 months or more, the threshold for a task should be 40 hours or more.

If multiple people are assigned to the same task or if different bill rates are used on different projects, use work types or categories of effort to distinguish the work one person does on a task from the work another person does on a task.

3. Controlling a Process. Here, the manager or team lead creates a task list so they can monitor and give team members specific direction on the steps they need to take. This is an illusion. A manager can specify the projects, goals and deliverables on a project but it is pretty near impossible to make a list of all the tasks that go into the work a creative professional does. Set up major goals as milestones or critical tasks. This will make it easier to track progress (see next item).

That’s not to say that a manager can’t better manage the resources on a creative team. But instead of trying to map out every step of the process, focus on prioritizing which projects and deliverables are most important. This will get you a lot farther than telling someone which steps of the process to work on.

To get a handle on how long a process takes or where there might be room for improvements, spend time with the creative professional to understand how they do their work. Be open to learning, start a dialogue with the professional and be constructive in working together to find process improvements.

4. Track Progress on a Project. Here, the task list is a tool to get a sense of how far along you are in the process of producing specific deliverables. Given the above mentioned difficulty of listing every step that goes into the creative process, focus on having the team members give you an update on the percent complete of a task or deliverable.

For example: instead of having 10 subtasks under “Testing a Website” and determining percent complete by seeing how many of the 10 subtasks are checked-off as done, creating a single milestone task called “Testing a Website” and have the team member enter in that they are 40% done with that task.

(Project management geek-out note: If you track actual versus estimated hours on tasks, as well, you can compare the number of hours used against percent complete to get even more information. This is back of the envelope earned-value management.)

Flagging a few tasks as milestones or as critical tasks will help you focus your project management efforts on those items that impact delivery the most. And if you have trouble getting team members to update the status of all tasks, asking them to update the status of only milestone or critical tasks can be much more palatable.

A Word About Schedules
As a side note, much of traditional project management and traditional management software (like MS Project) will use a critical path to auto calculate a schedule. This idea comes from a world where processes flow linearly and in a relatively predetermine way -and where people often have a small number of things on their plate. This isn’t the case with art departments, agencies, marketing, interactive or with just about any creative processes in general. For a creative group, project management can’t really be about critical path. Its more about getting the right information on a process, increasing efficiencies, great delivery and making good decisions. Other approaches can stifle.

In a creative process, therefore, instead of an auto-calculated critical path, the schedule should be determined

• By your commitment to your client (whether internal or external) and
• Critical tasks should be those which you manually indicate as being of critical importance to your project and schedule.

This gives you and your team the room to apply your own experience and expertise to setting up a project schedule. While, on the other hand, you’re still setting up crucial project gateways that need to be met to effectively track progress, manage the project and delivery on time.