That misspelled slip on an instant message chat says it all.

So many managers “hear to talk.”

They listen to find places they can interrupt, contradict, assert power, make a correction or effortlessly start talking on their own.

Take the time to actually listen.  So the next time you “hear to talk” you really are there.

On the Flipside

The most effective managers do the opposite.

They “talk to hear.”

Spend time asking questions and move the conversation to learn what the person talking has to say. That is the benefit of working with a team - getting each person’s unique contribution.

This phrase exemplifies the power of exclusion.

I heard it from a successful businessman. He started many projects and companies on his own because he was shut-out from other opportunities. By keeping him out, they created their own competition.

By excluding people, you create impediments to your project’s success.  It affects driven and capable people the most (who are exactly the people you want on your team, the linchpins).

Take the time to listen to people on your team. Make people feel included.

Emotions can propel you. Emotions can bog you down.

Emotions hang on a framework of expectations.

Expectations hang on the plans we carry with us. Whether in our heads, in software or on paper.

Understand plans (and how they change over time) and you can achieve growth.

This applies to organizations and to individuals.

Good project management can be the missing piece in revenue growth.

Here is a simple test to know if project management could help you grow revenue:

How long does it take you to generate a list of all projects you’re working on?

If the answer is anything greater than 5 minutes, you could benefit from more formal project management and project management software.

A quick case study that demonstrates this point.

A client of ours targeted a division for revenue growth over the next 5 years. They allocated sales people and marketing dollars to capture the opportunity. They saw a market opportunity to grow this division significantly.

Management, though, was worried that the division wouldn’t be handle to handle the growth. They were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the new orders.

Why were they worried?  They asked a simple question.

They asked the head of the division to show them a list of all current projects.

The head of the division said she’d get back to them in a day or two.

That’s when red flags started to go off.

If it took the head of the division one to two days just to compile a list of what was going on, there was clearly no process in place.  They were flying by the seat of their pants. Without process, the division couldn’t scale. That’s why management was worried.

If growth came, they might get lucky at the beginning, like they have been. Key individuals and long-standing relationships could be relied on to push the work through.  But longer term, things will start to break. There are only so many items those key individuals can do. Tasks will fall through the cracks. Deadlines will be blown. Customers will be upset. And all the money spent acquiring new customers will go down the drain.

Project Management is a Foundation for Growth

Management knew they had to create a more mature and uniform process. They needed to formalize their processes into projects and implement project management software to keep things together and provide instant access to information. This initiative became part of the overall investment in revenue growth for that division, as critical as sales people and marketing dollars.

Once complete, the head of the division was able to generate a list of projects in one to two seconds, instead of one to two days.  The division was on firm footing to grow revenue.

So if you want to see if a lack of project management is holding back growth, see how long it takes to put together a list of all ongoing projects. If its anything longer than 5 minutes, you have a problem.

I had the pleasure of speaking to a group at the Shifting Gears program this morning in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

These are motivated individuals in mid-career who saw the world change around them as the auto industry in Detroit underwent its massive transition.

They are taking courses on re-learning how to compete and shine in a world of entrepreneurs, small businesses and risk takers. To use a phrase from Seth Godin’s Linchpin, they are being taught how to fight the lizard-brain.

One of the key messages I conveyed was the need to constantly be innovating. The group  has the basic skills to do this, but need to learn how to reapply those skills to generate innovation.

Most of the people in the group are engineers or worked in environments geared to engineers.  They are very accustomed to thinking about and structuring formal processes.

This is wonderful. You can create processes that generate innovation.

The problem is that most of them have been taught to build processes that eliminate costs by standardizing output.  What needs to be taught is how to develop processes that maximize innovation.

The way to generate innovation is to build processes and standards that measure output for its value to the customer.  And by value, I don’t mean providing widget x for the least money. This is what they have been doing for 20 years.  By value, I mean providing a good or service that the customer truly appreciates.

Its great programs like Shifting Gears that can help drive this re-learning in Michigan and help harness the talent that’s here.

Its also this kind of mindset shift, particularly in project management, that can foster a flurry of innovation and lead the economy forward.

Fusion Authority published an article of mine describing a road-map of process improvement.

It puts project management in the context of the overall way an organization delivers its product.  Basically, project management changes depending on how “mature” an organization is and how much of their processes they’ve standardized.

By understanding where your organization is on the map, you can know how to improve your products.

The road-map is one developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. Despite the name, though, it can be applied to almost any work and not just software projects.

I came across a great question asking about using email to manage issues or tasks.

The short answer is that email is terrible for managing issues and tasks.

Sending or forwarding emails may make the sender feel like the issue is being handled (particularly if its a long email, with many threads and lots of names on the cc line). But in truth, sending or forwarding emails is just a fast and easy way for the sender to get the issue off their plate without investing themselves in the resolution of the issue or accomplishment of the task.

Not Enough Information

1. A forwarded email often does not have enough information or context to convey how the issue should be handled. Even though there may be a ton of discussion in the email itself the sender is assuming

• a) that the recipient will understand the discussion in the way that they do and
• b) that the recipient will understand the senders intent and come to the same conclusion as to how the issue should be resolved.

It is also extremely time consuming for the recipient to troll through the entire email, rather than get clear direction from the sender.

Who is Responsible?

2. Forwarding email has no clear way for the sender to see who is supposed to be handling the issue or task. They just know who they forwarded it to.  The next person in line (or all the people cc’d on it) may turn around and forward it to other people.

No Feedback. Just More Email.

3. There is no clear feedback loop on the status of the issue or task with email. While the email might contain a deadline or language conveying urgency,  the sender has no clear way of seeing how close to being done the issue is nor does the recipient have any way of updating the timeline on the issue -other than sending more email that then needs to be sifted through to get to the status information.

No Reports

4. It is cumbersome and difficult for the sender to see the status of all issues or tasks at any point in time. They need to search their inbox/outbox issue by issue or person by person.

Incidentally, the same things that are wrong with using email can apply to open-ended project collaboration software or task management systems that work like message boards with multiple posts.  Like email, these are easy for people to use. But, they provide limited information for project managers. A manager often needs to spend a lot of time sifting through posts to find information they need to make strategic decisions or to update clients.

Seth Godin’s post from today trash talks compliance, in favor of teaching initiative and intelligent problem solving. Surprising to many, I’d like to speak up in defence of compliance.

There is incredible value in compliance.

It is valuable for a person to be able to follow a plan and consistently perform. 

It is valuable for an organization to have people who can follow plans and perform consistently. 

To grow, an organization needs to be able do what it does, consistently.  It needs to be able to teach and train people to be part of doing it. That’s the value of process and project management.  

1. A process or plan is developed, then executed.
2. The work product is evaluated and;
3. The plan is evaluated and improved. 

The goal of management, as a field of study, is to get people with different skill sets to work together to produce remarkable results.  Compliance helps managers accomplish this goal, measure results and rework.

Be consistent, evaluate results and rework.

Seth often talks about consistency and plugging away at building a brand or product. Rare are the overnight successes and instant home runs. A much more sure path to success is to focus on base hits. Be consistent, evaluate results and rework. You can’t do that if people don’t follow the plan.

There are few things more frustrating to a project manager than team members who do not communicate. Non-communicators can single-handedly eliminate a manager’s visibility on a project and be a source of unforeseen, and therefore, uncontrollable risks.

Within this group, the most frustrating are those that ignore direct requests for information or who only talk when they feel like it.

• To the extent that a project manager can pick their own team, non-communicators are generally the last people picked.
• To the extent that a project manager can influence HR decisions, “better communication skills” is the area of improvement most often recommended for non-communicators.
• To the extent that a project manager can limit a non-communicator’s participation in a project, they will.

But when it can’t be avoided here are a few tips to managing a non-communicator on a project.

Find the communication medium that works best. Some people respond to phone calls, others to emails. Some respond to instant message and some prefer talking one on one. Find the medium that works best for that person and stick to it.

Experiment with Non-Traditional Ways of Communicating. All of the above mentioned media are conversations or openings for a dialog. They are in a question/answer or solicitation/response format. Some people simply don’t work that way. Get creative in finding other ways of getting information that don’t involve a “conversation.”

For example, I’ve worked with non-communicators who are best at giving information as it directly relates to the completion status of a task. Instead of asking how things are going, I’ve found it more valuable to assign a task in a project management tool and let them indicate its status. The options I set in the project management software are simple: done or not-done. To maximize the value of information from this technique start with the most detailed level of a task you can find. Think of it like 20 questions where the person can only answer yes or no. Make each question (or in this case, task) count.

Be Patient. People have their own time lines when it comes to answering questions. Don’t mistakenly categorize someone as a non-communicator just because they take a long time to respond to you. I know some people that take 10 minutes or more to respond to a question on instant message. It can be very frustrating when you are expecting an “instant” answer on “instant message” and instead, get a response 10 minutes later.

Sometimes, people are thinking about the answer. Other times, the answer might be more complicated than the asker thinks. Learn how long it takes people to respond and budget in the appropriate amount of time.

Know How to Get Information When You Absolutely Need It. The corollary to being patient is to have a clear way to get information in an emergency. For example, call the person on their cell phone or go directly to their desk. This requires that the project manager prioritize their information need or, at a minimum, have a clear understanding of when to really bother someone. To be effective, use emergency procedures sparingly or, like the boy who cried wolf, it becomes just one more thing the non-communicator doesn’t respond to.

Be Persistent and Consistent. Make sure you get answers to the critical questions you ask. Make it easy for a non-communicator to distinguish between hearing your communication and needing to participate in the communication by providing information.

In the best case, by finding ways to get the information you need from a non-communicator you can potentially find a new, more productive way to make use of their skills on your projects. And if that doesn’t happen, you can at least reduce unforeseen risks to your projects and increase visibility.

Milestones and sub-tasks are a powerful tool-set to improve communication on projects.  When used together in a project schedule you can consolidate the informational needs of the client, project manager and team without having to use multiple project management systems or spreadsheets.  It allows the schedule to be a single point of truth, as it were, and single reference point for project communications.

Here’s why it works.

People involved in a project have different informational goals.

• The client wants to know when things will be done and how they are progressing.
• The team wants to know the specific tasks they have to do.
• The project manager wants to coordinate the work, meet deadlines, manage resources, spot problems and improve processes.

Without a reference point, each person has trouble communicating. The client demands to know what’s going on. The team explains it in terms of the specific tasks. The project manager tries to translate between the two, or complicates matters but bringing out a Gantt chart, dependencies, a critical path or other project manager specific tools. The end result is frustration (or an exhausted project manager).

Here’s How to Do It.

You can avoid all this frustration and improve communications by creating a schedule using milestones and sub-tasks.  The milestones are the major deliverables or key points for the client. They are what the client wants out of the project and places they need to be directly involved. 

For the team, think of Milestones as parent-tasks and create sub-tasks underneath them. The sub-tasks are the specific, detailed, tasks that the team needs to do to get the project done.

When speaking to the client use the rolled-up version of the schedule showing the milestones only.

When speaking with the team use the drill-down version of the schedule showing all the sub-tasks.

This schedule then becomes the single point of truth, or reference, for all communication on the project. It has all the details needed for the team and a rolled-up view for clients.  The project manager can use it manage the project and facilitate communication without double-entry of data into other systems.

When something changes on the project you can use this schedule to show how the change impacts the milestones (for the client) or the sub-tasks (for the team). 

Taking it Further

Here are a few ways to use sub-tasks to create even more specific information that can improve communication on projects.

1. If your project management software has the capability, you can sort the sub-tasks by each team member or by due date to provide specific to-do lists for each person.
2. Using the same capabilities, you can create custom lists for your clients of all upcoming milestones in the next month across all projects.
3. Depending on the number of people involved, you can use multiple levels of sub-tasks (e.g. 6.1.2) to further categorize project information for different teams or departments that may be involved.
4. The multiple level of sub-tasks can then be rolled-up, as needed, for department meetings or meetings of team leaders.