These three techniques you can control and be successful with any type of project.
Project Processes
- When initiating your overall project, infrastructure, work to define all processes affecting your project team, and to get them accepted by everyone in advance.
- Clear, unambiguous, high-level project documentation is essential for project control.
- A tactic to improve your project control is to outsource as little work as possible.
- The best time to consider infrastructure decisions is at the start of a project. Once a project is fully underway, no one has much time or inclination to think about infrastructure questions.
- Successful PMs inevitably become generalists and assume less responsibility for technical work over time.
Influence
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Building cooperation:
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Team-building activities
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Formal group events (such as project startup workshops)
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Informal one-on-one interactions
-The surest path to cooperation starts with establishing strong social relationships in which people don’t want to disappoint each other.
-When you ask anything of anybody, always formulate your request with a “because statement, followed by a reason. And, whenever possible, find a reason that the other person responds to favorably.
-A PM is the spokesperson of the project
-WIIFM: What’s in it for me? The tools to influence rely on reciprocity-an exchange of something that the individual wants for the commitment to complete work that the project requires.
-You can understand what the people in your team want through communication. The earlier you can detect problems, the more solutions you have.
Measurement
- What gets measured, gets done.
- Always be sensitive to context, and work to tailor your measurement goals to the people involved.
- Type of project metrics:
- Predictive
- Diagnostic
- Retrospective
- Discuss each metric that you intend to adopt with all affected team members. For each candidate metric, work to get consensus from the project team on the definition, the planned collection and use of the data, and the meaning of the results.
- Prompt response to escalations
- Sometimes even the best of us end up wearing blinders or don’t stop long enough in the daily battles to ask whether where we are headed will get us where we need to be. The real challenge in this situation was that although the need was recognized, doing something about it seemed impossible. Overcoming resistance to do what is right takes courage and leadership, not authorization.
Project Initiation
-Project Charter: Regardless of the name, format, or primary author, what matters most for project control is that you capture initial project expectations in writing. Review the information as you collect it, then validate that what you have written is consistent with your sponsor’s understanding.
-Documented priorities for your project help you assess trade-offs and develop alternatives, during project planning, negotiate project changes, and support disciplined change control for your project.
-Some main elements for creating a good team environment:
- Encourage open communications and build trust
- Address team needs, and understand that not all team members have the same needs.
- Value team members’ contributions, and provide them with feedback
- Discourage criticism and remain positive
- Negotiate to achieve a win-win situation
- Involve individual team members in goal setting, decision-making,planning, and risk assessment.
- Enhance motivation through challenges and self-development.
-Sometimes, you need to compromise on how, but never whether you conduct your project start-up workshop. If you can’t arrange a face-to-face gathering, hold your workshop via video conference or teleconference. The important thing is to do it, using the most effective means available.
-Never assume others hold the same values and operate in the same way as you do
-Conduct an effective project start-up workshop to get your project off to a healthy start.
Put extra effort into building relationships and trust with your team members in distant locations.
Project Planning
-The overall process for gaining commitments using reciprocity starts with understanding what the people on your team care about and want, so that you can then offer something they desire in exchange for their commitment.
-In your discussions with your team members, be guided by the fact that people appreciate working as they choose, building expertise in fields they enjoy, and contributing to undertakings they care about.
Project Execution
-Recovering from a single disruption during intense concentrations; figuring out where were before the intrusion and then coming back up to full mental speed-takes about 20 minutes.
-When people are evaluated while trying to do two things at once, they do neither very well.
→ Do what you can to establish an environment where your contributors have protection from needless noise and interruptions.
Tracking and Monitoring
-It’s impossible to over communicate
Conclusion
Ultimately, succeeding with any project is all about gaining the cooperation of all the people involved. Marketing guru and motivational speaker Zig Zaglar says, “You can get everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want.” Controlling projects when you have little authority comes down primarily to aligning your project activities and goals with those of your sponsor, your team, and your stakeholders.