Start dates tell your team members when things should begin.

It sounds obvious, but many teams manage by due date alone.  It is even embedded into some project management software -due date only, no start date.

If a team member only has a due date, they are always playing catch-up.  Project managers will only know when the milestone is late.   Communication becomes all about getting status updates.  People will perpetually be scrambling to keep up with what’s on their plate.

What’s more, planning becomes a matter of staggering milestones based instead of making strategic and informed decisions.  Prioritizing milestones and juggling fires becomes the main mode of operation. Discussion is limited to “what are you working on? how is it going? can you squeeze one more thing in?”

Adding in a start date, along with an end date, gives people a sense of how long the milestone should take. It also gives them a sense of how long they have to complete it, compared to other milestones on their plate.

This allows you to plan work, strategically.  It also allows you compare your estimates of how long you thought a milestone would take against how long it actually did take.  You can then change that the next time somebody needs to do the same thing. You and the organization can learn from past experience.

Here’s another reason to use start dates. It impacts your bottom line.   Since many companies bill clients based on the duration of a task, I’ve seen client’s double their revenue and increase profitability by starting to keep track of start and end dates.

Should trust be a part of your project management style?

Yes,  because trust expands the value of communication.

It is still important to verify.  “Trust -but verify ” as the Cold War proverb says. Because the project is your responsibility. You need to confirm the accuracy of information in order to properly manage the project and expectations.

But build your relationships on trust. Build it in, starting when you gather requirements through to putting together estimates and building your schedule.

It allows communication to be a two-way street of information and education - instead of second guesses and confrontations.

“Never has a simple list been so informative…”

The Enhanced Project List page in Vertabase 5.0 shows you all your projects along with overview data on the projects and their status.

Here is a video of the Enhanced Project List page.

You can search, filter and sort your projects by a variety of criteria. For example, you can create a quick portfolio view and sort by project priority.  Or, search for all projects being done for a particular client and sort by percent complete.

On the list, you can see overall project health, schedule health and budget health, as well as other meta information on the project like budget amounts and the departments involved.

You can launch a calendar view of the project, its tasks and who is responsible for those tasks.  Or, you can drill down deeper into the project’s schedule, documents, budget or issue and discussions.

It is an easy to use way of getting information on your projects.

We announced Vertabase 5.0 to our customers yesterday.

One of the new features in Vertabase 5.0 is a desktop widget for uploading documents into Vertabase projects without having to open a browser.

You can upload documents simply by Dragging and Dropping them onto the widget!

Here is a video of the Vertabase Document Uploader

You can upload multiple files and different file types like doc, psd, pdf, jpg and xlsx.

Vertabase 5.0 is the 10th major release of our project management software in 12 years, and the most significant release in the last 5 years.  We’ll be blogging about it more as the public release comes closer.

The Vertabase Document Uploader was written in Adobe AIR and works on MAC & Windows.

“Out of sight, out of favor,” as a colleague phrased it.

We tend to trust the opinion of those who we’ve seen last.

This is especially true when managers of parallel level are away on vacation for a while.  If you’re minding the shop for them, this distance can color the way you interact with management above and the team below, particularly if you share resources.

If you’re coming back from vacation, keep this in mind and prepare to re-insert yourself into the organization and ongoing processes.

A further application is In virtual teams or virtual work environments. It pays to take things with a grain of salt, remembering that both your opinion, and the environment which is receiving it, might be colored by distance.

A great example of this is an interview I recently conducted for a developer along with a team mate who was remote.  The team mate picked-up on a communication issue with the developer. I listened to him but was skeptical. I’d sat with the developer and talked to him. He seemed like a fine communicator and gave off a good vibe.  We gave the developer a test project. Within an email or two it became clear that communication was an issue. He wasn’t understanding the words we were using (basic words that were fundamental to the domain).  My team mate had been proven right and we stopped further interviews with the developer.   Being physically in the same location had influenced my ability to pick-up on the issue my team mate had sensed.

That knife cuts both ways - giving an edge to those nearby and harming those farther away.

Its been called the oldest question in management.  Who makes better managers: a professional manager or a person who is expert in their particular field?

For example, are auto engineers the best people to run car companies?  Are programmers the best people to run software companies?

Corp! Magazine recently published an article of mine addressing this question.  It pulls specific examples from GM, Ford and Apple.

My conclusion?  Its all about management for execution. However, you need to have vision, often product focused vision from a specialist, to know where to point the execution.

Meetings are not about you.

When organizing and running a meeting remember that it is not about telling everyone what you know or waiting to critique, comment on or approve updates from other people.  You can do all that with email, phone calls and project management software.

Meetings are a team effort. They are a mini-project. You are pulling together a group of people to do something collectively that couldn’t be done individually.

• What is it that you want them to do?
• What is the goal of the meeting (why are you having it)?
• How will you accomplish the goal?

Like any good project, you should define and plan these items out well ahead of time.  If you can, circulate the “why” you are having the meeting to key participants well before the meeting for their feedback.

The “how” to accomplish the goal should be spelled out in a well-crafted meeting agenda. An agenda should be more than an order of events.  It is a plan that coordinates how everyone in the meeting will work together to accomplish the goal, complete with the assignment of the individuals that will make specific contributions to each goal.

Keep in mind that when you have people in a meeting you are spending a valuable resource: people’s time.

Interestingly, according to a statistic quoted by Steve Kaye (who inspired much of this post):

80% - 90% of all managers consider how someone runs a meeting as an important factor when deciding on promotions.

Anecdotally, the same can be said when running client meetings. Clients will gauge your performance on a project, in part, by how well you run meetings with them.

…and join in the conversation

There’s a new website for project management questions and answers.  It is hosted by the people who do some of the most popular technical Q&A sites on the web, Stack Exchange. But the questions and answers are completely community driven.

It draws its questions and answers from some of the most active names in project management (including myself).

It is an outgrowth of the  Ask About Projects site which I wrote about a few months ago.

The project management Questions and answers range from the basic to the highly specialized.

I’ll be tweeting about particularly interesting or relevant questions at my personal twitter account.

Vertabase released a case study today that documents the tremendous success Webbed Marketing, an online marketing firm, has had managing their workload during a phase of rapid growth using Vertabase project management software.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

The time we spent on tracking our own tasks and manually generating reporting can now be spent on direct, revenue generating work for our clients.

and

Everyone from the CEO to an intern can use Vertabase with very little training or explanation.

You can read other great quotes in the case study online or the PDF.

Found these golden nuggets in the PMBOK Guide (4th Edition).

“Monitoring the expenditure of funds without regard to the value of the work being accomplished for such expenditures has little value [my emphasis] to the project other than to allow the project team to stay within the authorized budget.”

“Units of cost are applied per unit of time for the duration of the activity.”

These obtuse phrases are whispering  “keep track of costs” and “tie them directly to deliverables.”

A schedule is a path for creating value within a specified period of time. (It is not simply a long task list with deadlines.) You can measure the value of each point in time on that schedule by attaching a dollar figure to the value being produced. Comparing the dollar value produced against the dollars being spent gives you a great way to measure the worth of your project.

It also helps you decide where to put additional resources when you projects are competing for the same people or dollars. Choose the one that will give you the most bang for the buck, as it were. Where will that dollar spent deliver the most value for the project.