Gantt chart in Execl 2013 and 2014

Thousand of users download this sheet every year when it is updated. It is in Dansih with Danish banking holidays etc.

Happy Hollidays and a Very Happy New Year

Why do we continue?

An analogy to your job as a project manager could be the following:

"Every morning your boss calls to offer you a new job, an unknown place with unknown deadlines and unknown partners. Without hesitation you say ok and thrusts you into the day. Each evening you will come deadly exhausted home to your family who have become accustomed to, you never get home on time. The morning after your boss is calling ... "

Canadian Martin Cobb's paradox of 1995 is about the same: "We know why projekter fail, we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?” David Hillson tries to answer it in this months Risk briefing here.

Henry L. Gantt 1861 - 1919 didn't event the Gantt Chart!

- and nobody seems to know who did - read a lot more about this here.

Excellent communication with little effort

Heard today Ann Mark (her who ran the program Knowledge about for several years on DR2) talk about communication. Exciting exciting.

She started with this dear little video clip - as well says it all about communication?

As project managers, we must be able to: manage people, leading change, understand customers and users, selling ideas and plans to the Steering Committee groups, be an ambassador for our project etc. etc. The tool for all this IS communication. Yet we spend very little time on increasing the quality of our communication. When we wake up and understand our role as project managers?

Instructive and inspiring speech

This has little to do with the project management but may nonetheless. I have enjoyed this brilliant lecture by Peter Hinssen several times so maybe you will also appreciate it. At least you get probably the most dynamic powerpoint show ever! At the same time there is much food for thought for all of us, especially if you are dealing with technology and essential if it is with IT. The joke after approx. 43 min. might fit some of us?

Follow this link and click on the tile at the top left - Keynote. Among the four videos, select the top left. Peter Hinssen comes on after approx. 12 minutes.

 

Enjoy

A crazy can ask more than ten wise ...

Situation: You have a good project model / Stage-Gate model with precise steps and accurate descriptions of the information that you must provide as basis for decisions / Gate report to pass a gate and proceed to the next stage. You have collected the required information for decision making in the Idea stage for an exciting new project. You are meeting with the Steering Committee / Gate-keeper group and has just presented your report and recommended a Go!

 Action: The group also felt it all sounds exciting, but is a little uncertain about risks, and asks you to go a little more in depth with the risks. They are also a little uncertain about the market assessment is valid, and therefore ask that you sacrifice a significant investment in a comprehensive study. Finally, there is little doubt about how the final product actually looks like, why they ask you to sacrifice some design money to develop some plausible sketches of the final product. You all agree that you convene another meeting when you have the information sought.

Reflection: What the decision the group has just asked is probably the main constituents of the subsequent analysis and planning phase. They have thus deferred the decision to go ahead until they know more! They think, then, that by postponing their Go they can for free get all the information they would otherwise have to invest significant amounts of time and money in getting in the subsequent phases? Sorry, this does not work in really! Information and security costs! That is why we must have the Go, so we can ensure these things!

Moral: You can not be 100% sure on a project. Projects are business decisions, and in business is nothing is given. Business is basically decisions about taking some chances and run some risks, but certaint, it will never be. Project Models is about to do the most important thing for given times in relation to the decisions to be taken. Therefore, as a decision-maker you have to realise that this stuff takes time and especially cost money. The further we go in the project model, the wiser we become, but we can never be sure, and we can never avoid wasting time and money on projects that are underway proves to be unhealthy.

The lesson: When a decision group asks such questions as described here, you should take it as buying signals. Just answer: "I can hear that you would like to know more, and it can be done. You have to just give a Go to invest ex. £ 30,000 in the next phase and then you will get answers to all your questions. What do you say? - Is it a Go so? "

'Free' PDU for PMI re-certification

There are many opportunities to gather PDU's for free - see example this article by Patti Gilchrist on Projectmanagement.com (You might have to register before you can access the full article.)

She initiate her article as follows:
 

1. So let’s start with the easiest and the most obvious. You are a PM, right? Did you know you can get credit for just showing up?! If you are currently employed as a project manager, then you qualify for PDUs under Category F: Work as a Practitioner. You can claim five PDUs per year (and 15 PDUs per cycle) for being a practitioner of project and/or program management services.Note that this category (Category F) is part of the Giving Back to the Profession category, which includes Categories D, E and F. You can claim 45 out of the required 60 PDUs per three-year cycle by giving back to the profession.

Team role profile tool

I was recently made ​​aware of http://www.123test.comhttp://www.123test.com. Here are several exciting 'tests' or rightfully tools to show your profiles in many dimensions.
You will find one on your team role profile (not Belbin, but in that direction), a personality profile DISC for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Certainty (not DiSC, but very similar) and even a little deeper personality profile Jung (not MBTI but that the direction).

It is of course mini versions with only few questions, so use them as inspiration and direction encoders, before you get the 'right' profiles from established provideres of the original 'tests'.

Acid test of your objectives

It is certainly not unknown that the deliverables your project generates are aimed at the use of an audience? Customers, colleagues, etc.

This means that there are two purposes: Your project's purpose and the customer's purpose. For example is your project aimed at designing and producing a new standard house; while the customer's purpose is to cover the need for safety and security for the family in a house. How are the two objectives linked together - or rather, how are the two objectives linked tso that both parties are satisfied? Or how can your company make money on customer needs?

To find out you have to break down both objectives as usual - and continue until you meet the common goals! Common goals may be:

cheap price - because we can manufacture cheaply
smart design - because we can precisely do that
green house - because we can all taht about lifecycles
quick house - because we can logistics
affortable house - because we can finance

Only when you have found the common goals you understand your own project!

Fortryd redigeringer

What is a combined goal?

We have regulary discussed Objectives / Success criteria respectively Deliverabler / Acceptance Criteria.

One can occasionally miss a dynamic between on the one hand Deliveries and on the other Purpose. Paybacktime constitute such dynamics. Paybacktime is a combined goal.

A desired paybacktime of for example one year establishes a link between the cost of the project (which is the project manager headaches) and revenues from the project deliverables (headache of the one requiring the project). The gola of one year provides an interesting dependence between the two parties.

Do you know other kombinerde goals?

What do you think you are?

To get the project completed and accepted on time and budget does not make us good project managers in everyone's eyes - at least not necessarily in customers.

It's a bit like a supplier - what do you want: 1) what you requested? or 2) what you need? The last right?

Suppliers deliver what you order. Business Partners deliver what you need - or making an effort to do so.

The supplier you can rely on the quality, time and cost. Partners are in sincerity, empathy, focus on your business, etc.

Suppliers can be obtained anywhere. Partners are more rare.

Supplier role is easy. Role is difficult because you often must make unpleasant and provocative questions. You have to ask again and again - even when the customer has had enough - "just to be sure ....".

Want to be a good project manager in customers' eyes, you have to cover the whole playing field:

Change the game

If you want to change something, start to understand it first! Only when you understand it completely, you understand why and how the rules can change for the better. As changes occur, you change what you originally wanted to change.

The rule of change:

Play the game
Change the rules
Change the game
Try to help making more changes to perish in this sequence - and not in reverse order!

New from The Risk Doctor - Customization

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David Hillson explains how the seven steps to good risk management can be scaled to the actual situation.

I'm often annoyed by managements having so little focus on the amount of risk in planned and running projects. This small overview would tell everything.

Map or landscape?

Have you ever thought about why we say: "we are behind schedule" or "we are not at the plan"?

The reality may no longer be as we planned it, but it's not reality that does not fit into the plans. It's always plans that do not fit with reality. We do not change the landscape to fit the map - it's the other way around. Therefore, we should get used to saying something like "schedule is ahead of reality" or "the paln is not where we are"!

How strange it may sound, it makes us all more humbled to reality. We have to respect that reality does not change just because we make plans. Henry Mintzberg has said it very well: "Reality has a tendency to constantly get in the way of the plan!"

 
Have a nice weekend

Here is why you can not close your project

You can not close your project, and you could especially not dream of closing your project - because you are so busy with your professionalism - the exciting study, the needed re-organization, the attidue project etc. it's simply the dream project, where you can give and show the best you can offer - purely professional. You pull on your professionalism and long experience. Life is good!

But who is up in the helicopter and keeping an eye on whether the project is worthwhile? Stands effort targets with the effect that (perhaps) can be achieved? Should you fight on if the chances of success are slim? Is it a Sisyphean project, which is no longer relevant or perhaps should never have been started?

But if you still choose to propose to close your project, then you should know that the professional may be a problem, but that project professionally, it is a success - a sensible decision!

 As expert a failure - as project manager a triumph!

Status and consistency are two things

You're a little behind schedule and therefore signals YELLOW in your progress report. However, you are very close to the deadline, so probably you do not have time to catch up. Should you rather signal RED?

No, because then you mix the status and impact together. Status is a measurement of the distance between plan and reality. The impact is, however, what this status means to the project. The consequence is the next step argument for the proposed action to address the situation:

Plan -> Execution -> Status -> Impact -> Proposal for handling -> Decision-> Action -> New Plan

It is the year of the Project Sponsor!

Finally got a chance to see some of the annual Chaos Report (Chaos because the report monitors the amount of chaos in projects) from the world's most recognized organization in the field: The Standish Group. The report from June this year called: CHAOS Manifesto 2012: the Year of the Executive Sponsor ($ 1,500 at The Standish Group here). The reason for the words Executive Sponsor is to be found in the reason for the growth in the number of successful projects, the report actually documents:

 

 - and declare that the reason for success is mainly attributable sponsor! The reasons are here:

Notice that Project  Management is 7th! We have long ago passed the point where projects and their success was an inside-and-out process. Today it is an outside-in process. Many more actors, interests and forces in play. In that arena, there are entirely different playing rules.

Are you and your sponsor ready?

The culprit is found!

I think I have finally found the cause of all our problems in projects! Hold on! This is gonna be big! The reason is where nobody has looked. Right at the feet of you. The reason is simply the word Project! That's it!

When I say project - ziiiip zaaaaap, then you have immediately a picture of a project in your brains, but do we have the same? and is in fact one the right image or a real definition?

There are lots of definitions - some are even standards (eg. Here at PMI), but common to them all is that they all come from or fit a certain age - the so-called Modern Social Period - the period governed by reason and knowledge.
I think many today feel that reason and knowledge is no longer the most important thing in projects now a day. We are in the Postmodern Social Period - the period ruled by discourse and rhetoric. An appropriate definition of project nowadays might be:

A discourse of legitimation and an arena for social games and power tests. The project is an instrument of powerful stakeholders.
Yes, it was a little fluffy. Back on earth one could just have fun with defining success in projects? is it:
• process terms: managed within time, quality and resources?
• product-wise: it can be used and they are happy about it?
• business: was it worth it?

- We are allready three completely different views of projects. So do not come here and say that the word project makes sense!

So what I'm trying to say is that the word project is a too poor word - and therefore it is dangerous - and therefore we must find another or a different way of talking about 'projects' further on.

There are great prizes for the winner!

Yes to option or no to risk?

Since project work was invented, we have used risk assessments to enhance the security of the projects that we have chosen to implement. We have removed the most obvious obstacles to success.

All together well enough, so long as the decisions at the start of the projects have been good. They have had the opportunity, because the pace of change and the scope has been more modest in the past.

This is no longer. Now we have to bring forward the risk assessments for the choice of projects. It is no longer about refining successes, because no one can longer guarantee any success. On the other hand, there is by now no limit to how bad things can get. It goes instantly today.

I therefore believe that the challenge today is:

• not about saying YES to the opportunity for profit, but
• to say NO to the risk of loss.

Which is something entirely different.

Challenging structure fascism 2

Obliquity is a philosophy and not at least the experience many of us probably have, namely, that you often end up somewhere else than where you was expected to end - or, conversely, a goal best isachieved indirectly. (book on the idea here).

If we believe in this principle in our projects, so would:

• plans more serve as a starting point, rather than as a way to the goal!
• it be more important to relate to developments in the near and distant environments; than trying to stick to the plan!
• planning of how we capture, interpret and react to change and events be more important than the project's schedule!
• process be more important than results! - Perhaps even more important than the purpose of the project?
• many classic project managers be on thin ice in regard to management and control.

It could all be true.

 

Challenging structure fascism!

Just to show (not least to myself) that I understand all those who can live without all the structure that I normally advocate, I will write some posts on a number of questions that I'm curious to get some responds on. Here comes No. 1

Top management has long recognized that strategic planning - especially over longer periods - no longer fits our great volatility. Flexibility and the ability to detect and respond to impulses in the world is probably just as important. You could say that rather than planning, it is important to be prepared when opportunities arise.

Here comes the question: When top management has realized that planning does not help so much, why is it that we in the project management just making a big deal out of that plan? We are equally affected by volatility! If we continue down on the personal level is the same: why do we continue to dream that the daily scheduling helps us very much?

Now> 1 Million PRINCE2 certificates

PRINCE2 is the most widely used certification scheme for project managers. Number two is PMI with over ½ million and the third is IPMA with estimated 1000.000 +. The majority of the certificates have been issued in the three schemes' homecountries i.e. UK, North America and Europe. More interesting graphics on PRINCE2 here.

PRINCE2 is also running at full steam in Denmark - 13,500 certificates at the end of 2012, the forecast right now - of which the vast share of approx. 5,800 only expected to be published in 2012. Details of this development can be read here.

MS Project 2013 Preview

Went to Microsoft today and heard about the major improvements. Together with the good guys from Projectum I heard about:

1. As always new and more easy reporting tools. One can wonder why they pay more attention to the output than the input?
2. Tast path is a really nice thing - point to a task and see all direct predecessors and successors.
3. SkyDrive - of course
4. Presence information - yes now you got all contack info at each resource - Project is going Social!
5. And fianlly a store where you can get or buy nice customermade reports, setups, forms etc. - ex. you can find an Agile form!

How is it possible?

It is a good exercise to grab a cup of coffee / tea and then think about why projects comes trough in your organisation? Is it because of the project model? or the project manager? or the project schedule? No, probably not.

It is more likely the culture you have. There is often much more trial-and-error than you would think. Problems and challenges arise in the project, but becomes usually very quickly a disturbing sliver in the organization. More and more attention is paid to the sliver - more and more resources and competencies are used until the sliver is gone. It is precisely this fluctuating attention and help that project rarely see or underestimate the extent of. It is the many free longhours, it is the neglection of more important matters, it is the enthusiasm, the optimism, it is stubbornness and much much more.

The more mature with project you are in an organization, the more predictable are these efforts, and the more you can plan with them and manage them. In less mature organizations one must as with the bumble bee ask: ""How is it possible?".

Week-end and an empty To-Do List

I'm starting my week-end with a good conscience...

 

Dangerous Risk - Newsletter from The Risk Doctor

This time David writes about the 'risks', which are actually not risks, they are more uncertaint uncertainties.... Read the Newsletter here.

- And I got inspired to create this 'sales poster' for Risk Management - for your free use. Get it here.

Going to Denmark for an assignment?

We now have got a Linkedin Group for foreigners staying in Denamrk - sign up here.

The value of project management?

In the recent edition of the magazine Danish Project Management it says in the editors column:

The values ​​of project management are the generated conditions for the execution of the project and for it's surroundings - conditions that increase the likelyhood for both project results and benefits to be achieved. These values ​​are directed towards the project participants and other stakeholders.

Taste a moment on this definition - and a bit more, thanks! This is what it's all about for the project manager. This definition focuses on the essentials, creating the best possible conditions! You're the one with the sweeper in the picture - you are not the stone or ice!! (perhaps the sweeper).

You can try to record your daily time spent in this small (Dansih) screening tool to see if you use your powers in the most efficient manner in relation to the project.

Enjoy a very long project in a few minutes

It's probably just that excitement you have to aim at from the very start?

Enjoy ...



- And have a good week-end.

Decision Speeds and development speed

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It is interesting that the decisions obviously can keep up with the higher speeds projects claim to move with nowadays (Agile, SCRUM, etc., etc.).

Decisions have always be the bottleneck in any change ie. projects.

So we have set up speed - without having heard anything about how decisions have been able to keep up with? - Either we have not put speed up (we only think it) or the decision makers are around with a secret.

PMO - Project Management Office - study

I just found this survey from ESI with over 3,000 respondents on important issues of PMO's. It seems that they are still struggling to prove their worth - and I think they should always have to fight for that, so they do not become administrative monsters.

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