The career path for a project manager is pretty straightforward.  Start on project support and small projects, manage bigger and bigger projects, then become a programme manager.  Some people would argue that programme management and project management are different skill sets and programme management is not necessarily the natural progression.  But programme managers earn more than project managers – and most people would see more money as a step up on the career ladder.

But going up isn’t your only choice when it comes to moving jobs.  Taking a sideways move can be very profitable as well.

“There are actually more reasons to take a lateral move than to accept a promotion!” says Martha Finney, co-author of Unlock the Hidden Job Market.  She lists the following as incentives to hop sideways:

• “You love the company but hate your boss.
• You love the company and want to build your portfolio of skills and experiences to make you more valuable on the corporate track – such as different corporate functions or global experience.
• You love the company but recognise that maybe the days are numbered in your particular business unit and you want to switch over to a more promising division.
• You love the company but see that the only available opportunity for you to stay there is a lateral move (your current job is being phased out, you want to live in a specific geographic location, etc).
• The lateral move is part of a formally established developmental program that you trust.”

A sideways project management move means picking up a similar role to that you have now in a different organisation or division of your current company.

Nancy Mellard, executive vice president and general counsel for CBIZ Benefits & Insurance, puts it like this:  “I define lateral career moves as when you can take on a new department, project, people or responsibilities. These moves should always be made,” she adds.

Diane Youden, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers specialising in HR effectiveness, agrees that moving sideways can be advantageous.  “Without a doubt, more senior roles require the ability to quickly assess a broad range of situations and their impact on the business strategy,” she explains.  “Experience is the most impactful ‘training’ you can receive to broaden your points of view and enable you to think more holistically and strategically.”

If you are going to take a new project management job that moves you sideways, you want to be sure that it really will help your career in the long term.  “Ensure that the lateral move is perceived as an enhancement to your career,” says Youden.  “As companies look for the talent of future, attributes such as adaptability and flexibility in dealing with change and new situations are key to being considered for more senior roles.”

Project managers adapt to new situations with every new project, so that type of challenge will be nothing new to you.  However, the difference between taking on a similar project in the same team and switching companies to do a similar role is huge.  Learning about a different company culture – not to mention their project management vocabulary and processes – will give you the variety and breadth of experience that looks great on a CV.

You don’t have to move companies to take a lateral move.  Mellard believes that if your company has a mentoring scheme you should take advantage of that to gain experience in other areas through lateral moves.  “Mentees should be challenged and encouraged by their mentors to find what lateral moves they can make in their current position,” she explains.  “Mentor programs should focus on the breadth of experience the mentees are obtaining and lateral career moves can provide this span of knowledge.”

Regardless of whether you are considering staying put or moving on, any new project management job offer needs to be carefully thought through.  “As with all aspects of your career, seriously consider all the opportunities that have been put before you,” says Finney.  “Don’t make emotional or hasty decisions.  Also factor in the question of where you are in your career. If you are just beginning your career, you can afford to take more, but calculated, risks – even if it means passing up on a small financial increase in your take-home pay. The experience is far more valuable than the cash.”

Related posts:

1. A question of shopping There were plenty of questions about project management at last week’s womenintechnology event on how to be a successful woman in IT. Mainly people were...
2. Taking the guess out of success Organisations don’t define failure. We don’t document how we will know if a project has failed – what failure looks like – because thinking about...

And my favourite submission this month is from Lindsay Scott who sent in Does Programme & Project Management have a “Long Hours” Culture? posted at How to Manage a Camel – Project Management and Recruitment. How can you not love a blog with such a great name?

A close second is Buck Jefferson’s piece on Critical Path Method posted at Project Management for Beginners. He writes, “This article may seem a bit elementary to you, but it’s aimed at beginners and young PMs.” I suppose I’m a bit biased towards Buck because he recently interviewed me.

Here’s another article aimed at beginners:  Kathy C’s What is Project Management? posted at The Thriving Small Business.

Adi Gaskell, whom I met recently through the Chartered Management Institute, presents What is scrum and how can it boost success? posted at The Management Blog.

VyrtuNet presents A Project Managers Dream Tool: Project Workbook posted at P3 Peak Performance.

Rich Maltzman, PMP writes about green project management in Will ‘Bloom Boxes’ Bloom next to Michelle Obama’s Organic Garden? posted at Earth PM.

Brian Mossing sent in The Right Way to Admit You’ve Done Wrong posted at ClearPM.

Gilad Lev-Shamur presents Why projects fail? Start with your management commitment posted at The Project Management’s Thinker. This is an interesting take on the perennial issue of why projects fail. I don’t think it is written by a native English speaker, so overlook the grammar errors please.

Hauke Borow presents How To Build A Project Structure Plan posted at HaukeBorow.Org.  Good, but why center the entire post? I think it makes it hard to read.  Hauke also submitted a piece about the 7 Basic Principles Of Effective Project Management. I’m not sure if everyone would agree that these are the basic tenets of project management, but we can argue about that in the comments!

Howard Vaughan presents Project Management and the Four Cultures posted at PM Lotus.

Divinelysmile presents The Gender Gap: 10 Surprising Stats on Women in the Workplace posted at JobProfiles.org.  If you find all of these stats surprising then you haven’t been reading my blog for long enough.  Women get paid less – we know!  Still, there are a couple of interesting points here.

That concludes this 31st edition.  You can submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of project management using our carnival submission form. Past posts can be found on our blog carnival index page, or search this blog for ‘Carnival’.

Related posts:

1. Carnival of project management #1 Welcome to the August 14, 2006 edition of carnival of project management, a round-up of PM articles on other blogs. Pawel Brodzinski presents When Everything...
2. Carnival of Project Management #23 Welcome to the October/November, 2008 edition of the Carnival of Project Management.  Over 90 entries, most of which were dross, so I have sorted...
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I’m giving a webinar for The Project Management Bookstore on Friday.  It’s on the subject of managing money on projects, and you get a PDU for attending.

From the website:

“The author’s book, Project Management in the Real World, covers five key areas for project managers: budgets, teams, scope, plans and personal productivity.  During this live event, the author will explore the first of those—Managing Money on Projects.

More than one third of projects have a budget of over $1.5 million so knowing how to handle the finances is an essential part of a project manager’s repertoire. During the webinar, Elizabeth will discuss:

• How to create a realistic budget for the project.
• Managing budget tolerance.
• Managing a contingency budget—and get your project sponsor to agree to one!
• Sharing the project budget with the team and encouraging collective responsibility.

Join Elizabeth and the webinar to see how clever budget handling can benefit you and your projects.”

You can register for the webinar here.

Related posts:

1. Inside PRINCE2: Fixed date projects Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed...
2. Failing projects: the presentation I’m giving a talk in Nottingham next month.  It’s been a while since I’ve been that far north.  I always got really excited being driven...
3. Managing programmes in a changing world I joined in with Managing and Saving Programmes in a Changing World, an audio/Webex conference with LeRoy Ward, Executive VP at ESI, recently. I couldn’t...

PRINCE2 is a well known qualification, but that doesn’t make it incompatible with other qualifications or project management methods.   OGC has recently produced a white paper looking at APMP for PRINCE2 Practitioners.   The white paper looks at the differences between the APMP qualification, which is one offered by APM and based on their Body of Knowledge, and PRINCE2 Practitioner.  The paper puts forward the view that APMP and PRINCE2 Practitioner are complementary and there are bits of each approach that will support the other.  The video below also looks at the synergies between the two approaches.  Do you think you could blend the two in your workplace?  Or do you already mix and match different methods?

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1. Methodologies matter: PRINCE2 Last month I was interviewed by Diego Nei, for the Brazilian blog, Papo GP (Talking PM – I think I’ve got that right).  We were...
2. Inside PRINCE2: Fixed date projects Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed...
3. Ever wondered what happened to the PRINCE2 bear? Do you remember the bear I got at the PRINCE2:2009 launch?  (He was on the video.) Well, I got rid of his PRINCE2 shirt, and...

Would you like to slow down and get more done?  I have a copy of Christine Louise Hohlbaum’s book, The Power of Slow, 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World to give away.  You can read my review of the book here.

Send me a message saying ‘I want to be slow’ before 19 March 2010 to be in with a chance of winning.  The first name out of the hat after then will receive the book.

If you can’t wait that long or want to be sure of getting your hands on a copy, buy it now on Amazon.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Book review: The Power of Slow Normally when I read books to review I take notes as I go.  But I have read The Power of Slow a couple of times,...
2. Giveaway reminder: PM Crash Course It’s not too late to be in with a chance of winning PM Crash Course: Premier Edition by Rita Mulchay. If you would like to...
3. Giveaway (only for lazy people) I had a huge response to my book review of The Lazy Project Manager, so I have a copy signed by Peter Taylor himself...

The blog giveaway of access to the closed beta trial of The Plan Is is now over, but you can still get your hands on a licence through the medium of Twitter.  Tweet me @pm4girls including the phrase ‘The Plan Is’ and I’ll enter you in the draw.  Before the end of this week, please, and I’ll contact all the winners after that.

I have a new giveaway starting for you on Friday, so check back then.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. The Plan Is Giveaway Richard Revis is the brains behind The Plan Is, scheduling software that has been designed with fixed date projects in mind.  It is still...
2. Fun Works giveaway – closing date Well, it seems as if lots of you are not having fun at work, given the amount of entries to the book giveaway. It’s not...
3. Giveaway – last few days! Have you entered the giveaway for a copy of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology yet?  If not, you have three days left: the draw...

Last week we saw that PRINCE2 doesn’t really have much advice to offer the project manager stuck with delivering to a fixed date.  I also gave you some advice from another expert, J LeRoy Ward at ESI.  Surely some other project management experts have tackled this problem?  I trawled my bookcase for what other people had written on the subject.

Stanley E. Portny, in Project Management for Dummies (don’t laugh, it’s actually pretty good), says that managing this way is ‘backing in’.  Backing in is when you start at the end of the project and work your way backwards calculating task estimates until you reach today.  So you automatically shorten task lengths when you realise you are out of time.  That’s why it is not a good idea.  He points out three major pitfalls of planning this way:

• “You may miss activities, because your focus is more on meeting a time constraint than ensuring you identify all required work.
• Your span time estimates are based on what you can allow activities to take, rather than what they’ll actually require.
• The order in which you propose to perform activities may not be the most effective one.” (p. 92)

Linda Kretz Zaval and Terri Wagner also talk about the practicalities of managing to fixed dates in their book, Project Manager Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to PMP Skills, and I picked out the bit about making the plan fit in my book review last year, long before I knew that this month would focus on fixed dates.  They propose three strategies for reducing the project duration to give you a fighting chance of hitting those dates:

• Crash the project by reducing the duration of activities located on the critical path, focusing on working out the cheapest tasks to reduce and concentrating on them.
• Fast-track the project.  This is doing tasks in parallel instead of doing them in series.
• Calculate the cost per day of crashing the project (which is called slope) – then maybe your stakeholders won’t be so keen on making you hurry along.

Meri Williams’ book, The Principles of Project Management, is another one I enjoyed.  And it talks about dealing with fixed date projects, which it calls set deadlines.  Backing in, fixed date, set deadlines, it’s all the same thing.

“First, work out how much trouble you’re in,” she writes.  “Break down the deliverables, gather the estimates, and decide how much contingency you’d have liked to have.  You work out that the realistic deadline for the Next Big Thing project is actually December 1st.  But now what?  How can you convince management that you need an extra six months in the project plan?

If you’re in a wonderful, supportive work environment, you may choose to tackle this issue head-on.  Go and explain that the deadline is unachievable, that you simply can’t make it.”

Williams predicts that either management will replace you with someone who says they can deliver to their ridiculous timescale.  Or management will offer you more cash and more people in a bid to get it all done on time.

“The most important point is to take the emotion out of the discussion. Get everyone to calm down and face reality, making it about what needs to be done, rather than the emotional reaction of a boss who’s being told she can’t have what she wants, and a team that’s being asked to achieve the impossible.”

And of course my book, Project Management in the Real World, includes a chapter on managing fixed date projects with more advice.  Hopefully you are no longer seriously at a loss now as to where to start with your fixed date project.  Enjoy – sometimes the challenge of hitting the date is part of the fun of project management.

Related posts:

1. Expert advice on fixed date projects As part of this month’s focus on managing projects with fixed dates, I asked J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, Executive Vice President Product Strategy &...
2. Fixed date projects are like weddings Some projects are already time-bound when you receive them, and while this way of planning is not the most controlled way to manage a project,...
3. Inside PRINCE2: Fixed date projects Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed...

Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed date projects in the PRINCE2 manuals.  There isn’t.  Fixed date projects only get a passing mention in the Managing Successful Projects book, and you’d have to look really hard to find a mention of managing time constraints in the Directing Successful Projects book.

That’s because PRINCE2 expects you do to do project management properly, with sponsors who commit to realistic plans and don’t expect you to deliver the world on plate by Tuesday lunchtime.  Unfortunately, when does any methodology get applied perfectly?  Project managers still need some guidance on how to manage projects that have a fixed date.

PRINCE2 advises that the fixed date time constraint is managed as a planning risk.  It identifies planning risks based on fiscal boundaries (for example, where you can’t move the project budget from one financial year to the next) and also on calendar boundaries (for example, delivering something before the end of the tax year).  It cites the Millennium Bug projects as calendar-bound planning risks, but there have been more recent examples, like last year’s 53 week year which messed up some software.

If you are doing your product based planning properly, you will end up with a schedule that shows exactly how long the project is going to take.  You then take this to the sponsor and ask for agreement.

Project Board members are supposed to make a commitment to provide adequate resources to successfully deliver the project, and time is one of them.  The Directing manual does acknowledge that there are factors that can upset the agreement process.  For example, people may not be available to resource the project adequately to enable it to hit the scheduled dates because they are working on other things.  PRINCE2 advises that the Project Board members decide between themselves how best to meet all the organisation’s commitments and manage competing priorities.

The good news for project managers is that the Project Board are clearly advised by PRINCE2 that their role is to endorse the Stage Plans as realistic representations of the work required to achieve the deliverables.  That is, by agreeing a Stage Plan, they also agree that it is completely possible to do all the work in the required time and they sign up to providing all the resources necessary to make that happen.  They can’t agree a Stage Plan, take away half your project team and then blame you when you can’t get the work done on time.  Has your Project Board done this to you?  Point them to page 26 in the Directing manual which says:  “Project Board members cannot subsequently distance themselves and blame the planners.”  So there.

While there isn’t a lot about managing fixed date projects in PRINCE2, the reason is that you shouldn’t be managing fixed date projects.  PRINCE2 is all about managing in a controlled environment (that’s the C and the E of PRINCE), not one where everyone is rushing around panicking to get things done by a date some executive thought up on the golf course.

If you are expected to manage a fixed date project in a PRINCE2 environment, question how that fits with the method – because it doesn’t fit very well.

I’ll have reviews of both the new Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 and the new Directing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 books for you in August, as part of this year’s Summer of Books event.  All the Inside PRINCE2 articles are drawn from these texts, which are the PRINCE2:2009 editions.

Related posts:

1. Fixed date projects are like weddings Some projects are already time-bound when you receive them, and while this way of planning is not the most controlled way to manage a project,...
2. Fixed date projects: more advice from the experts Last week we saw that PRINCE2 doesn’t really have much advice to offer the project manager stuck with delivering to a fixed date.  I also...
3. Expert advice on fixed date projects As part of this month’s focus on managing projects with fixed dates, I asked J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, Executive Vice President Product Strategy &...

As part of this month’s focus on managing projects with fixed dates, I asked J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, Executive Vice President Product Strategy & Management at ESI International for some advice.

What sort of projects have the delivery date fixed in advance?

Projects that have their delivery dates in advance can be found in every industry vertical and around the world. Key ones are projects that are required by law, such as new tax codes that take effect on at the beginning to the tax year, a court order, a regulation, or other governmental or judicial edict.

Many construction projects have fixed delivery dates if the project is being done in an area where the weather prohibits work before or after a certain date or “season.” Think, Sweden, Antarctica, the Middle East or other places with extreme weather conditions which simply prohibit construction during certain seasons.

Many projects that launch new products will also have fixed dates to take advantage of seasonal activities, buying habits, the phase out of an old product for a new one to avoid overlap. Consider the announcement of iPad. Very carefully timed to coincide with a range of marketing and production moments in time.

Fixed delivery dates are found in any project whose end date is critical to revenue generation, service to a client, or maintaining operations. For example, many telecom projects have fixed end dates. In the case where the telecom “switch” (the computer than runs the phone and data system for a large building or group of buildings) is being swapped out for a new switch, this is often done over the weekend. Outsourcing operations or functions are another good example here. When a company moves to outsource services such as payroll, there is a critical date when everything must be tested and ready to “go live” to ensure continuity of operations.

Quite frankly, most organisations, governmental and non- governmental alike, mandate that projects be done by a date certain. So, these days, project managers are faced with such demands and edicts on all projects.

What are the challenges of managing projects where the delivery date is fixed in advance?

The main challenge is resource availability and allocation in order to get the job done by the fixed end date. When a project’s end date is fixed in advance, the project needs to be planned “backwards.” In other words, the project manager takes the end date and develops a plan of action working backward in time to a start date.  It is hoped that the start date is after the date the analysis is done.  If the start date, based on the plan, falls earlier than the date on which the plan is constructed this means that the project is already late.

In this case, the project team needs to formulate a plan that will actually cause the project to be completed when required.  In short, the project manager needs to compress the schedule to meet the end date if it is physically possible to do so.

In classic PM terms, schedule compression is achieved through two approaches:

• Fast-tracking, where project activities are done in parallel or with overlap to the greatest extent practicable; and,
• Crashing, where additional resources are allocated to those activities on the critical path, thus reducing time.

In many instances, the network diagram developed by the project team represents how the project should be done, based on best practice, experience, or desires of the team, rather than how it “must” be done due to physical constraints. For example, it is obvious that you cannot build floor two of a building before floor one is built, but you don’t always have to have the design of a building complete before you start its construction. It is rumoured that Burj Khalifa in Dubai had not completed its design until it was almost complete thus keeping people in suspense to the end as to how tall it actually was going to be.

In reality, and in very tough circumstances, an experienced project manager will employ both fast tracking and crashing simultaneously. Each approach has disadvantages:  fast tracking increases risk because of doing more work concurrently rather than sequentially; crashing, on the other hand tends to increase cost.

Additionally, on certain types of projects, crashing can actually lengthen a schedule because adding more people increases the number of communication channels in a non-linear manner. This is expressed by the formula (N2 – N) /2, where N is the number of people. When adding more people a project manager must put into place a well thought out division of labour. Fred Brooks, father of OS 360 at IBM put it best when he said “adding people to a late software project will only make it later.”

What are your tips for getting these projects right?

The key to success lies in the project manager’s ability to negotiate for the key resources that are going to be required to meet the schedule and making sure they are available when needed. Additionally, project managers need to practice “micro management” more than they otherwise would, or would want to, to make sure they know what the team is doing on a daily basis.  Keeping a close eye on progress and problems is of paramount importance in order to meet the completion date.

How can you convince management to extend the timescale, especially when the date is arbitrary?

The best way to do this is by showing management how much more it will cost to do it by a date certain, as opposed to how much it will cost if planned based on available resources. The question to management is this: Is the time saved worth the cost? With money in seemingly short supply these days, an analysis like this can have a great impact.

You can also show the level of risk introduced by completing on the date that may not exist, or exist to a much lesser extent, if done according to a more realistic plan. Taken together, costs and risks can make a powerful argument for doing things rationally.

J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, Executive Vice President, Product Strategy & Management, ESI International, brings more than 33 years of expertise in project and programme management to the refinement of ESI’s portfolio of learning programmes. He works closely with ESI clients worldwide to guide the assessment, implementation and reinforcement of knowledge and skills that provide for the effective measurement and successful adoption of learning programme objectives.

Related posts:

1. Fixed date projects: more advice from the experts Last week we saw that PRINCE2 doesn’t really have much advice to offer the project manager stuck with delivering to a fixed date.  I also...
2. Fixed date projects are like weddings Some projects are already time-bound when you receive them, and while this way of planning is not the most controlled way to manage a project,...
3. Inside PRINCE2: Fixed date projects Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed...

Richard Revis is the brains behind The Plan Is, scheduling software that has been designed with fixed date projects in mind.  It is still in beta testing, and the final touches are being put to the software based on customer feedback.  There are still some bugs and quirks to iron out – you can read my review of it here – but overall it is a free, alternative scheduling tool which could help project managers tackling fixed date projects.

Richard, who is currently travelling around the USA and coding on the go, has kindly given me access to his closed beta trial of The Plan Is for 35 of you.  I have:

• 5 beta accounts which include a free 6 months of premium service after launch.
• 10 beta accounts which will convert to standard free accounts on launch.

To be in with a chance of winning, leave a comment on this post or send me a message, completing the sentence, “The plan is…”  I will pick the most amusing answers as the winners, so you are at the mercy of my sense of humour!  Responses by 21 February please, and the winners will be notified after that.

That is only 15 accounts, so what about the others?  I’ll be giving these away on Twitter next week, so follow me @pm4girls for details of how to get your hands on those.

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1. Giveaway update The blog giveaway of access to the closed beta trial of The Plan Is is now over, but you can still get your hands...
2. Fixed Date Feb & ThePlanIs.com There are some project dates that you just can’t move.  For example, my first attempt at knitting baby clothes for a friend’s newborn.  I couldn’t...
3. Giveaway reminder: PM Crash Course It’s not too late to be in with a chance of winning PM Crash Course: Premier Edition by Rita Mulchay. If you would like to...

Teri, a project manager from Jeffersonville, USA, was the first name out of the hat for the So What? giveaway.

Congratulations, Teri!  Your book is in the post.

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2. Giveaway winner: The Lazy Project Manager Congratulations to Lissa, from Eugene, Oregon, who won a signed copy of Peter Taylor’s book The Lazy Project Manager. Lissa, your book is on its...
3. Giveaway winner And the first name out of the hat was Tony from Essex, UK. Congratulations:  a copy of Sharm Manwani’s book IT-Enabled Business Change is on...

There are some project dates that you just can’t move.  For example, my first attempt at knitting baby clothes for a friend’s newborn.  I couldn’t say to her to hang on a bit because the jumper wasn’t ready.  It had to be wrapped and ready to go the moment I got the text to announce the birth.  I planned backwards from the due date and because it takes me so long to knit anything at all I added in lots of contingency.  Basically, I started looking at patterns and wool the minute I knew she was pregnant.

This month I’ll be taking a detailed look at managing fixed date projects.  They happen more often than project managers would like.  These are the ones where your boss says he has already promised to deliver the software, open the office, complete on the deal, by a certain date, and you are stuck crunching the critical path to make it happen.  The hash tag for Fixed Date February is #fdfeb if you would like to blog, tweet, podcast etc your own experiences or advice about managing fixed date projects.

First up is a tool to help you manage fixed date projects called The Plan Is.

It’s a web-based scheduling tool.  It doesn’t have lots of extra features like resource management or cost per task, but it does focus on providing a very graphical illustration of your project schedule.  And it flags up when you cannot hit a fixed date.

Say your project starts today and needs to finish by the end of the month.  You have estimates for the task durations.  You can enter all that data into The Plan Is and it will calculate whether there is enough time to fit it all in.  If there isn’t, the schedule shows negative float (and a really cute float icon) on the branch where the problem occurs.  It’s easy to see where some of the dependencies need to be changed.  Alternatively, the constraints need to be relaxed.  You can present the schedule to your sponsor with some options and use it to explain to them why the current dates can’t be met.  The screenshot below shows how it looks on a really simple plan with just one branch.  The feature also works on longer schedules where there is just a chunk that is constrained.  It’s an easy way to flag up issues with the critical path on a fixed date project.

It is a mindset change to move to using this over Microsoft Project or other tools that offer more functionality.  If you just want to produce a Gantt chart, project managers used to using MS Project can knock one up in minutes.  Moving to using a new piece of software comes with a learning curve.  And I don’t particularly like learning new software as I’m lazy (and not in a Peter Taylor kind of way!).  It took a little while for me to get used to this type of horizontal layout, but it’s not difficult once you have had a play around.

However, if you are not skilled in other project management software, just starting out in project management, or simply want a easy way to plan schedules, this is a good tool.  There are frequent little releases (and still a few kinks to iron out in the current version) and the user interface is slicker than a month ago.  You can click and drag in an empty space, for example, to scroll across the screen, much like you can in Google Maps.  It looks clean, and you can download it to MS Project once you have sorted out the time constraints, if you feel so inclined.  You can also keep your plans private or make them available to others by turning on the sharing option.

If you are about to embark on a fixed date project you should have a look at The Plan Is.  Actually, you can’t right now as it is still in beta testing.  Next week I’ll have some more information on how to take part in the beta program – I have 35 licences to give away, and you will find out how to get your hands on them on Monday.

Related posts:

1. Fixed date projects are like weddings Some projects are already time-bound when you receive them, and while this way of planning is not the most controlled way to manage a project,...
2. Expert advice on fixed date projects As part of this month’s focus on managing projects with fixed dates, I asked J. LeRoy Ward, PMP, PgMP, Executive Vice President Product Strategy &...
3. The Plan Is Giveaway Richard Revis is the brains behind The Plan Is, scheduling software that has been designed with fixed date projects in mind.  It is still...

Today, Andrew Filev, who writes the fab Project Management 2.0 blog, and I are swapping posts.  We agreed on the loose topic of social media and project management.  Andrew has a great deal of knowledge on enterprise 2.0 and social media, so I’m glad to have him as a guest author today.  You can read my take on the subject on his blog!

Bas de Baar, Josh Nankivel and Cornelius Fichtner raised an interesting question during their presentation at the PMI Global Congress. The question was, “Why should you care about social media?” Social media in project management is a hot topic, so I decided to elaborate on the question and tell you a short story of two project managers.

The Story

A U.S. company, SuperSonicTeams, Inc. got really lucky last year. It acquired two rather big projects at one time. Both projects came from oversees clients (the first from London, the second from Barcelona) and implied the involvement of SuperSonicTeams’ three offices in San Francisco, Orlando and Dallas. The work on the two projects started simultaneously. The first one was led by Jake and the second by Simon. Both Jake and Simon are experienced project managers and know how to do their jobs well.

Jake’s Project

Jake is always busy. In the morning, he comes to his office and checks his e-mail for messages with project updates. He then spends hours calling his team members, e-mailing them or meeting them in person to collect all the information he needs and to make sure that everything is well and on track.  After that, Jake, as a manager, has to merge these updates into the project plan. Later, the updates also need to be communicated to the upper management. So Jake has to make reports and hand them in to the company’s executives to keep them aware of the project’s progress. Jake also has to follow up on the London client’s feedback or the partner’s actions. How? Via e-mail, phone calls and meetings, of course. He wishes he could see his client from London more often, though, as he knows the importance of personal relations in project management.

During the course of the day, he constantly has to resolve issues through another endless series of e-mails, phone calls and meetings. No doubt, Jake also has to handle matters, like confusion of different versions of the same Word or Excel documents, or to help his people to find where the project-related documents are stored.

Jake’s team members are also busy, as they get 50-100 e-mails per day that they need to check. They do not have direct access to the project plan, so if they want to report progress on their tasks, they need to e-mail Jake about that.  Sometimes they miss important items, but it’s not a big deal, as Jake always remembers to call them up and remind them to check their e-mail (unless he is too busy himself or simply forgets to do this).

Sounds tough, but Jake is an excellent manager who loves his job. He manages to keep everything on track, though he hardly ever has time to think about his project management strategy or his team’s motivation, and he often has to stay in the office overtime. But, well, nothing is easy, right?
Anyway, despite all the difficulties, it looks like Jake is going to complete the project successfully and on time. However, with this crazy schedule, he will probably feel overstressed and dead tired.

Simon’s Project

Simon sees project routine differently. In the morning, he opens his e-mail inbox, just like Jake, but the amount of messages is down to 10-15, so it doesn’t take him long to check them all and send his replies. He believes that e-mail is a great tool, as long as you don’t get overwhelmed with messages. Simon’s team doesn’t need to exchange dozens of e-mails, as they use a Web-based project management system, where everyone can check the project progress online, including the customers from Barcelona and the corporate executives. Moreover, Simon’s team members can update their tasks online, so the project plan is always up-to-date.

At the very beginning of his project, Simon thought it would be neat to run an internal project blog, where he could publish his project development vision, and his team members from offices in San Francisco, Orlando and Dallas could give him their feedback online, instead of calling him on the phone, which is expensive and time-consuming. Later on, his team members also started to publish their ideas on how they can move the project forward faster. This project blog turned out to be a brilliant way to share project-relevant thoughts for the whole team. Everyone checks it as soon as they get an RSS update, and if someone wants to go back to an older post, it’s really easy to find it, thanks to tags and categories.

Simon doesn’t use his phone for project collaboration that often. He prefers Skype, as it has instant messaging, call and video conferencing features all in one place. He runs quick, 15-minute virtual meetings with his team and customers from Barcelona every day, and he doesn’t even have to leave his office for that.  Simon thinks that IM is a great tool, but it doesn’t always work well for team collaboration. This is where Simon finds a microblogging app very helpful. Simon’s team members use it to report what they are working on at any given moment of time. They ask questions. They share links. They quickly share files they’re working on. They announce that an issue turned up, and they are stuck. They get tips and help from their peers immediately. Simon and all his team members check this microblog from their phones, as well, and can respond to an important request even on the go. Everyone will get their updates instantly. This is very convenient for a team that is distributed over 4 different time zones.

Simon doesn’t have to deal with issues like document version confusion, as his team uses a project wiki to create their project documentation. This wiki is a universal reference resource for Simon’s team members, and they love using it, as it’s easily searchable, editable and available online anytime they need it.

Just like Jake, Simon is a very busy man. He is busy thinking through the next step of project work and motivating his team members. In fact, he even made friends with his team and clients, as he knows that personal relations are the key for any project manager. He catches up with them on Facebook and LinkedIn, and he follows them on Twitter.

Simon also is successful with his project. Moreover, the project results and the journey to those results exceed the clients’ expectations. Why? The team collaborates seamlessly, has fewer communication issues and, therefore, makes fewer mistakes that need to be corrected. In addition, Simon managed to create a real project community, even with a distributed team of people who never saw each other. As a result, his team members are really passionate about their work and readily follow their project leader. The clients from Barcelona love the way Simon is handing the project and are going to bring another big project to SuperSonicTeams.

When Simon hears the phrase “social media,” he says that he doesn’t care for buzz words and never follows the hype. He simply keeps up with the latest tech trends and is not afraid to try new things. Some of them prove to be very useful for his project management practices.

When Simon’s project is over, he will immediately be ready to take on a new one. Yes, the one that was brought by his clients from Barcelona.
Who do you think SuperSonicTeams’ executives will value more? Jake or Simon? The answer to these questions is sure to lead you to answer the earlier one: “Why should you care about social media?”

Andrew Filev has been managing software teams since 2001 with the help of new-generation collaboration and management applications. His best practices are based on implementation of Enterprise 2.0 software in project management. Now Andrew is an expert in project management, a successful software entrepreneur and the CEO at Wrike.com, as well as writing regularly for the trade press and on his  popular Project Management 2.0 blog.

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Lots of little announcements today.

So What giveaway: last few days

If you haven’t entered the giveaway to win a copy of Mark Magnacca’s book So What?: How to Communicate What Really Matters to Your Audience you have until Friday.  Find out how to enter here.

Social Media in a Project Environment survey

I’ve had over 200 responses to my social media for project management survey, which is a lot more than I ever expected!  Thanks, guys.  If you haven’t done it yet, I’ll be closing the survey soon, so please take the time to give me your opinions on how social media can help project managers deliver projects better.  You can enter the survey here.

PMI Events

The dates for the 2010 PMI research and education conference have been announced.  It’s 11-14 July in Washington and this year there will be new interactive sessions.

There’s research funding up for grabs as well, so if you are academically inclined and want to bid for a slice of US$50,000 the call for proposals opens on Monday.

PPOSIG Events

The Programme & Project Support Office Specialist Interest Group (PPSOSIG) has also announced some events.  The new London branch will be meeting on 25 February to discuss the new P3O Practitioner accreditation and Peter Taylor (you know him, the Lazy one) will be making an appearance.  And it’s free!

PPOSIG’s next national conference will be 19 March at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

Is your diary full of project management commitments and events yet?  It should be.  This year networking and sharing skills is going to be even more important, as there are still likely to be job cuts and limits on training budgets as we hobble out of the recession.  So make the most of the free project management events happening near you and online!

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The CBI launched a report at the end of last year forecasting the future of the UK business arena for the next ten years.  What does that mean for project management?  I read The Shape of Business – The Next 10 Years and decided to map my predictions for the future of project management based on the CBI’s analysis.

The CBI represents about a third of the private sector workforce in Britain, and their report identifies four areas where fresh approaches will develop as a result of the recent downturn:

• Capital and investment
• Workforce
• Sustainability and governance
• Organisation and location.

Let’s look at each of those in turn.

Capital and investment

“Businesses want to adapt to a harsher credit climate by finding new sources of funding,” says Richard Lambert, CBI Director General.  Nearly 70% of those surveyed (mostly CEOs and Chairs) said that they expect no improvement in credit availability this year and are looking at alternative models for business financing including equity, bond issuance and reducing their reliance on bank debt.  Supply chain finance and sovereign wealth funds will be more important sources of funding.  I know, I started with the most interesting topic first.

Impact on project management

Less money means fewer projects.  However, there will be more emphasis on doing the right projects, so the role of the Portfolio office will evolve.  We’ll be focused on delivering projects with high return on investment.  There will also be a spotlight on risk management; mitigating serious risks more effectively to give projects a better chance of success.  Given the economic ups and downs it’s going to be hard to plan for the long term, so if you are working on projects or programmes spanning several years, expect lots of changes in strategy.

Workforce

The next 10 years will bring further evolutions in the flexible workforce.  CBI is predicting that for some companies that will mean a smaller core group of employees supported by a larger ‘flexiforce’ as required.  There will be more emphasis on collaboration, flexibility and return on investment for training.

Impact on project management

We mostly work collaboratively anyway, so increasing that shouldn’t have any negative impact on project managers.  We will have to come up with great strategies for managing non-colocated teams as travelling lots will be discouraged.  However, the market for contract project managers could increase to supplement companies having smaller central pools of employed project managers.  Oh, and we’ll all work until we are really old, so we’ll be managing teams with a much wider age range than before.

Sustainability and governance

Being accountable is part of what CBI calls ‘the new licence to operate’.  Companies will have to demonstrate that they are good corporate citizens with strong ethics as employees become more choosy about who they will work for.  And there will be more governance.  Lovely.

Impact on project management

Green projects are already on the radar for many of us, as a discussion topic if not in actual delivery terms.  The environmental impact of projects will become our responsibility, and Greg Balestro spoke about this at the PMI Congress last October.  We’ll be doing things in a low-carbon way, but given that our government can’t afford to promote green strategies in the way it might have done two years ago (and consumers don’t have a lot of money to invest in doing things greenly any more) businesses might end up taking a hit from the green agenda – more green projects for us.  We already have various codes of ethics depending on which association you are affiliated to.  Being good will become part of companies’ brands, and so it should be an extension of your personal brand.  Don’t get me started on governance…

Organisation and location

“Firms looking to reduce risk and acknowledge their interdependence are seeking more collaborative ways of working through partnerships and joint ventures,” says Lambert.  Businesses will work on a collaborative partnership model with a wide range of partners, and the CBI includes universities in that.  Managing the supply chain will become more complicated.  Over 75% of respondents said that they were concerned about supply chains failing as key suppliers collapse or can’t get funding.  This means we’ll all have to work more closely together as the risk of supply chain failure will be a significant decision-making factor.

Impact on project management

Projects that generate IP could be affected as companies will rely on protecting their IP assets if they are going to work more closely with partners.  We’ll also end up requiring better supplier management skills.  PRINCE2 assumes a project environment with one senior supplier, but 30% of respondents said they would increase the number of suppliers they work with – we’ll have to juggle multiple supplier relationships on the project team.

What do you think the next 10 years holds for project management?

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It doesn’t bode well when some of the brightest IT minds in the country can’t get the projector to work.  Sue Black covered it up well but yesterday’s BCS event didn’t get off to a flying start.

The evening was to discuss the perennial question of the lack of women in technical jobs and what can be done about it.  I wasn’t expecting a lot of new debate but Sue, who was chairing the panel, kicked off with an interesting point.  In the 60’s and 70’s IT departments were about 50% women.  For the last 20 years the number has stabilised at about 20%.  So all the initiatives that Sue and the other panel members have been involved with have failed.

(Alison Phipps, author of a book about women’s participation in ICT, comes to the same conclusion:  good for us for trying but the initiatives haven’t really made any major impact.)

Rebecca George, a partner at Deloitte and with 20 years experience at IBM, said that the this lack of impact was because we’d been trying small, independent and fractured initiatives.  She chairs the BCS’s Women’s Panel Strategic Forum and is now working with other bodies, networking groups and the government to try to encourage only two or three major initiatives, done with men and other diversity groups, to try to consolidate the effort.  “If we make the IT profession good for everyone it will be good for women,” she said last night.

Getting women into technology jobs, including IT project management roles, needs to start early.  Rob Macredie, Professor of Interactive Systems at Brunel, said that “the number of women studying Computer Science has been woeful.”  He believes that the numbers get lower the more highly the university is ranked.  And this gender imbalance is also reflected in the staff.

Education turned out to be a touchy subject:  someone from the audience pointed out that the reason there was better diversity ‘in the old days’ was that Computer Science courses didn’t exist.  Employers had no choice but to take Medieval History graduates and train them.  Rob said that these days employers expected universities to turn out graduates with the ability to do jobs.  The employment market creates the need for educational specialism.  If you want to recruit a project manager who has learned their trade, you pick a PMP or a PRINCE2 Practitioner, not an English graduate who needs training.  However, as Rob said, if you are going to have educational specialism, you might as well get a good gender balance on the course.

“The reason I’m still here,” said Rebecca, “is because we will make a difference if we keep on trying.”  I hope she’s right, as the best teams – on IT projects and elsewhere – are those that are the most diverse.

You can follow the discussion as it unfolded on Twitter by searching for #bcstwtw.

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The Carnival of Project Management – our 30th anniversary edition – has gone travelling this month. Find it at PMTips.net. The next Carnival will be the February/March edition and will appear early March. Thanks for those people who have already submitted articles: if you want to send me your best project management writing for consideration you can do so through our Carnival submissions page.

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Welcome to this year’s feature spot.  Each month I will have an insight into the world of PRINCE2 – news, opinion or, like today, a spotlight on a particular aspect of the methodology.

Tolerances are a key part of being to work autonomously as a project manager. Having a tolerance means you can be over a bit or under a bit and not have to continually go back to your project sponsor and get any variation approved.  It gives you some slack to manage things in the best possible way and to be a professional about how you deliver projects.

A tolerance is a performance range to which you will keep.  Positive tolerances (the amount by which you can go over) are the most common.  Who cares if you are significantly under against budget or come in three months early?  Actually, negative tolerances are just as important.  Coming in under budget means you have tied up company funds unnecessarily for a length of time, and in the current economic climate no sponsor will thank you for that.  That isn’t to say that you should spend company money on random items just to stay within tolerance, but once you drop below your tolerance levels it would be a good time to reforecast your project budget and free up any spare cash that you won’t be using.

The two most frequently used tolerances are budget and time, although PRINCE2 offers you a choice of six tolerances:  time, cost, scope, risk, quality and benefits.  Let’s look at those individually.

Time
A time tolerance is the amount to which you can be over or under against your project completion dates.  For example, if the tolerance is 2 weeks you can deliver 2 weeks or early or 2 weeks later without it having an impact.  If you are too early you will have created a problem for another project; too late and you have missed the final deadline.

Cost
Cost tolerances are applied as either a percentage or a cash amount against the planned budget.  For example, on a £100k project with a 10% tolerance you can spend up to £110k before having to ask for approval for more spend.

Scope
Scope tolerance is slightly odd, because it is a lot harder to quantify a % variation to scope.  Scope tolerance is measured as agreed variation from the product description, and any potential variation should be documented in the product breakdown structure.  Think priority listing for scope tolerance.  MoSCoW prioritisation will give you a list that provides potential for variation in delivery.

Risk
Each risk should have an impact attached to it, and risk tolerance covers the aggregate impact of the project’s risk portfolio.  For example, financial value of all the project risks should not exceed 5% of the project budget.  You can also set a tolerance per risk, like ‘only two days of downtime permitted for any operational service’.  Risk tolerances give you an idea of which risks you should be escalating to the Project Board.

Quality
Quality tolerances are targets that define acceptable performance for a product, and are documented in the product descriptions.  An example would be that a software product must have a response time of between 0 and 0.5 seconds when a user hits ‘Submit’.

Benefits
It’s hard to think of a scenario where you would want to cap the project benefits, so normally benefit tolerances are set to the lowest levels.  Benefit tolerances are defined as a range and will be part of the project’s business case.  For example: ‘Achieve minimum savings on the cost of electricity of 6% for each of our shops, averaging 8% across all shops’.

Tolerances can be set for the project, for a stage and also at work package level, so they can become very detailed.  The overall project tolerances should be agreed with the sponsor at the start of the project, so you know what parameters you are working to.  They form part of the ‘contract’ you have with the sponsor – and getting this clear up front will make managing the project (and the sponsor) a lot easier as the project gets going.

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There has been a lot in the news recently about the gender pay gap, but unfortunately it has all been pretty descriptive: shock horror, women are paid less than men. As if we didn’t know that already.  The Equality Bill had its second reading in the Lords last month and consultation on the guidance starts on Monday.   There is also an inquiry into the gender pay gap in the financial sector, which is now in Phase 3, which should move us from the descriptive stuff we have known about for ages to some solutions to tackling the problem.  So while we wait for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to come up with their recommendations about how to close the gap between men and women’s pay, I thought I’d do my own research into what companies should be doing to get ahead of the game.

“Corporate HR and talent management leaders should take a close look at their compensation plans to identify if there’s a gender pay gap in their organisation,” says Lauryn Franzoni, Executive Director of ExecuNet, a private network for business leaders.  “If a discrepancy exists, their focus should immediately turn to closing it, as the cost of losing key business leaders, regardless of gender, is far greater than most companies realise.”

Companies should not assume that managers are setting fair starting salaries, and fair annual increases.  It’s not because managers aren’t trying, but the market rate for different skill sets changes depending on scarcity of that resource. For example, after the dot com burst, there were plenty of web project managers around and people who may have commanded a serious salary three years earlier would have had to settle for less.  Over the course of several years, this can create massive discrepancies within a department. Simply looking at the results of internal analysis into who gets paid what for doing what work is a step in the right direction.

The case for pay audits

“At the minimum, companies need to inventory their use of salary dollars at least every two years,” says Cy Wakeman, HR expert.   “One filter with which to analyse is the view of dollars paid to men versus women in similar positions,” she says. “If one or more positions are heavily dominated by men or women, it is also important to review the value of the positions carefully to ensure that the company is not discriminating on a mass scale and disguising it as an issue with the market value of the positions.”

But you do need to be careful what data you seek out and how a pay audit is managed.  “Pay audits can be useful if they are done objectively, openly and comprehensively,” says Dr. Sasha Galbraith, a partner at Galbraith Management Consultants, and an expert in diversity issues.  “Most companies tend to exclude certain data, thus skewing the overall results,” she adds.  “Another useful type of audit is a comparison between education, tenure, pay and gender. When those data are tracked, one often finds obvious examples of pay and gender gaps that cannot be explained by education and tenure alone.”

This kind of analysis can help companies identify bias inside the organisation.  Your company won’t be immune to having these, but you might have to look hard to seek them out, especially if they align strongly with your own personal ideologies.  “It might be a belief that unless you went to a particular university or earned a particular type of degree you aren’t considered among the most promotable,” says Galbraith. “Biases can also be very subtle, such as the belief that women should never be assigned to manage a construction site in a Muslim country – but that experience is deemed necessary to become promoted.”

Beyond auditing:  what else can we do?

Pay audits alone aren’t enough.  “Simple auditing to ensure that men and women are paid equally totally misses the point of using dollars to turn talent into productivity – male or female,” says Wakeman.  “A better approach is to take it beyond the issue of gender and to base pay on the value added to the organization.  Individualise compensation and benefit packages with an eye on performance management and talent management.”

Galbraith also feels strongly that companies need to move beyond their existing models of compensation.  “Companies can do a lot that they are not currently doing,” she says.  “They can stop the forced ranking systems, like those used at General Electric.  They can set forth very objective criteria that state what achievements merit what kinds of pay increases and bonuses.  They can mandate that at least three qualified people be involved in every salary review of every person.  I think that companies need to actively work to bring in a critical mass of women at all levels so that the token woman syndrome is no longer an issue. The more different women there are in an organisation, the more people will see that not all women are alike and that women approach things in ways that are different from each other but also from the male power structure.”

The benefits of equal pay for equal work

Closing the pay gap will hopefully bring more women into senior project management positions and across companies generally.  However, it also has some tangible benefits for organisations.  “Without question, companies that offer equitable pay packages are far more attractive to prospective employees – a distinction that will become increasingly important as the economy improves and the war for talent is reignited,” says Franzoni.  She points out that with hiring at the top of the employment stabilising, companies that fail to eliminate gender pay gaps will see costly increases in management turnover, lost productivity, and lower morale, as key leaders increasingly look outside of their company for better opportunities. Unplanned leadership turnover generally results in unplanned recruiting expenses and a substantial drop in productivity. “Not only do pay gaps put organisations at a competitive disadvantage when trying to attract talent, they can also poison a company’s reputation and corporate culture – creating irrevocable damage that will derail growth,” she says.

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I get contacted often by people asking me to review their software, and I am really bad at getting round to it.  A book sits on my desk until I have reviewed it – a constant reminder that I have reading to do, but software… it’s just an email with a link buried in my inbox.

This year, however, I am going to try to do better at keeping on top of the software revolution that is happening online with project management tools.  No more are you confined to using PMW (remember that?).  Web 2.0 offers the opportunity for more developments in the project technology sphere, and makes it a lot easier for start-ups and small companies to launch their own stuff – and much of it is available free.  Although not all of it is any good.  In fact, some of the stuff I have been browsing over the break was awful.

So it was a pleasant surprise to come across Projec.to.  Odd name for a company; it makes them sound like magicians.  I can picture a project manager facing a troubled project, waving a wand and shouting “Projecto!” and all the project issues disappear.  If only.

Projec.to is a tool that allows you to host MS Project files as interactive Flash Gantt charts.  And it’s excellent.  It looks great, it is easy to upload and the Flash version of my Gantt chart is clickable and beautiful.  I imagine it is easier to do than the Visio conversion John Estrella has written about recently.

This year I have a hen party to plan, so I threw together a quick Gantt chart to give myself an idea of what Projec.to could do.  See for yourself:

There’s huge scope for using a really simple tool like this.  Project stakeholders don’t always have access to MS Project as it is expensive to licence for occasional use.  A Flash version makes the plan available to everyone.  The Projec.to licencing model allows free use for public plans (not suitable for business use) with prices for hosting private plans from $24 a month.  Alex from Projec.to tells me that a new release is imminent, with users’ workspaces and private sharing functionality.

What do you think?  About the tool, not the hen night preparations!

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