Geek | Manager

I’ve just invented a new acronym (yeah, yeah, I know, like the world NEEDED another acronym, right?!): DFPS (Deadline First, Plan Second).

Deadline First, Plan Second describes the all-too-common phenomenon of project deadlines being set before any of the planning and estimating has been done. We’ve all been involved in or heard of such a project — the kind precipitated by a big announcement that The Next Big Thing (TM) will be delivered by March 1. Post announcement, a team is pulled together tasked with actually making it happen.

This throws many good project management practices straight out the window. It doesn’t matter if you do a proper plan, involve the team in estimating and figure out that the project will REALLY take 9 months instead of 5. The announcement has already been made — pointing out that it’s unrealistic is only going to get you accused of not being a team player. Alternatively, your management may view it as a crafty way of getting more money or people. So you may go in trying to convince them that it’s not going to happen and come out with twice the money, but you’re still signed up to an impossible deadline.

The good news? People who pull deadlines out of the air often don’t really understand the intricacies and complexities of your project. Duh, right? If they understood, they wouldn’t be setting impossible deadlines! Although this may sound like I’m just hammering home bad news, there is a flip side to this coin. If the deadlines are arbitrarily set, they are quite unlikely to have a detailed understanding of the scope of the project.

Reality is that you can probably negotiate your way through on all the other project variables - cost, quality & scope - you just need to accept that someone high up has nailed their future to a deadline and so now that is set in stone. So long as there’s a big “we did it” announcement on March 1, the definition of “it” is probably fairly fluid.

My advice? If you blatantly need more money or people, go the “it’s impossible” route at first. Get some extra resource thrown at you. Then, very helpfully, start preparing plans of what actually IS achievable for a Mar 1 go-live. Aim low at first — your project board or management team are going to be horrified at how little you’re saying can be done, so they’ll want to argue you up to more stuff. But be very aware of where your limits lie. Plan to under-promise and over-deliver. Give them something that works, but doesn’t sing, dance & play the ukulele. By then they may well realise they don’t need all the singing and dancing anyway!

PS If you’ve been keen to find a way to introduce a new approach, like Scrum then a DFPS situation might be just the leverage you need. Worth a try!

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One of the things that becomes a problem as your company (or product or service) expands is how to ensure a consistent experience across the board. Whether it’s that you’re operating in multiple countries or just spread across multiple servers, quality of experience can start to vary, not just for your customers but also for your employees.

This is why in huge companies, “procedure” can come to dominate. You want to make sure that all your employees get equal access to career progression, training, personal development. So you mandate that all your people managers follow certain procedures — annual reviews, work plans, etc etc. You want to make sure that anyone who calls customer service receives pleasant, friendly and above all useful service. In an attempt to standardise quality, you give people scripts, mandate that phones must be answered within a certain number of rings, and so on.

Many of us have felt the impact of these kind of procedures — the call centre guy who can’t wait to get you off the phone, because a “successful” call must be finished in less than 3 minutes; the manager who sits you down for a stale, scripted “career discussion” that makes you feel more like leaving the company than going for that next job or promotion.

My theory? These procedures are written in with the best will in the world. The need to write them down is the problem however — the “spirit” gets lost. People become slaves to the letter of the rules.

Have you seen this happen? Ever seen it combated in an effective way?

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I’ve just done my talk on Geek Project Management at today’s Refresh Edinburgh event. It seemed to be fairly well received (fingers crossed anyway!). Some of the content was pretty similar to my BarCampLondon2 presentation, but I’ve done a fairly significant rework on it so I think it’ll be a lot easier to take away some immediately useful tools.

If you’re interested in seeing the slides, then here you can find them in Powerpoint and PDF form.

Tags: refresh edinburgh, refresh, edinburgh, speaking, project management, management, geekmanager.

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The people I really respect are those who can get mountains of work done and deliver amazing results … and still have a life.

It’s really easy to mistake “busyness” for productivity. The folks always rushing around, having meetings and complaining about how busy they are certainly LOOK like they’re doing a lot. But the reality is that effort and output are not always related. Productivity is about getting loads done — how you spend your time should be up to you.

Some busy people are also productive; some productive people are also busy. There are times when you’ll see me running around like a maniac, juggling half a dozen projects and priorities. But if you measure (and therefore reward) “busyness” as opposed to results, then you won’t get what you want. You’ll get an army of employees who are too busy to talk to each other and potentially on the verge of nervous breakdowns, who actually don’t achieve very much.

Measure results. Measure the outcomes, not the actions. Don’t reward someone for working night-and-day on a task, reward them for producing the deliverable at the end. Reward the person who gets the same work done in less time MORE than the person who is missioning for days and days. That way, you’ll encourage your team to be more productive, rather than just busier. They’ll find their own ways to improve the way they work and the entire team will benefit as a result.

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Parkinson’s Law says that “work expands to fill the time available”. If you don’t have much to do, it doesn’t inspire productivity. If you have loads to do, it often inspires procrastination, but I digress.

Today, however, I want to address the corollary to this. Some people seem to believe that since work expands to fill available time, work will also CONTRACT to fit the available time. It usually plays out like this:

Project Team Member: Getting the environment set up took two weeks longer than anticipated, so now we don’t have enough time to test. I think we need to move the go-live date.
Project Manager: No, no, I’m sure you’ll manage it.
Project Team Member: As I said, I think compressing the testing down to just 2 days is a serious mistake. We’d be risking the whole project!
Project Manager: Listen, I’m sure you understand this is a really important project. We MUST make that date. You’ll just have to make it work.

This, my friends, is Management By Optimism. It is probably the most dangerous management trend in evidence today. When you see it, start to worry, because it is probably the biggest threat to your projects and to your careers.

Management BY Optimism is very different to being optimistic. Being optimistic is seeing the cup as half-full — trying to think the best rather than the worst in a given situation. Management By Optimism, on the other hand, is about IGNORING potential failure. Just because the impact of a particular risk is severe, the risk is regarded as extremely unlikely. Rather than facing the problem and dealing with it, it is ignored until a catastrophic point is reached — or until the relevant manager can jump ship and blame the sinking on the crew.

So what can you do if you worry that Management By Optimism will scupper your project? Well, firstly, look out for the signs. Failing to consider real risks, reacting adversely to the suggestion that the plan or schedule is unrealistic are both big warning signs. Secondly, try to address the problem in a constructive way. Sometimes we all delude ourselves into thinking things are better than they are. Holding a team risk-assessment meeting can help — just get everyone to rate how severe and how likely they think a risk is. It will quickly become apparent if the team cannot envision a successful outcome when the leader is dead-set upon it (and vice versa).

Or, if there is no other option, bring in the big guns — take it as an issue to the Project Board and make clear that there are real concerns about the chances of success. Much as “it’s going to be late/over budget/under quality” is unlikely to be POPULAR news, any senior manager worth their paycheck should realise that early warning is significantly better than unanticipated failure.

Do you have some examples of Management By Optimism and perhaps other ways to combat it? Share in the comments!

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Solving problems isn’t hard. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, then for most problems you can see a few ways to get there, so it just comes down to choosing the best course of action and following through.

Problem definition, on the other hand, can be damn hard.

When you’re facing some problem and it’s driving you crazy, sometimes you’re best to stop and wonder whether you’ve really defined the problem accurately. What are you trying to solve? What is the original problem? Why is it such a problem? How else could you frame it? What description would make it more tractable?

If you can get the problem definition right, your chances of finding an optimal solution are greatly improved. Don’t keep soldiering on down the wrong path, refusing to acknowledge that failure is also an option.

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Although I won’t do a full repeat of my talk at BarCampLondon2, today I wanted to talk a little bit about starting out in Project Management. Most folks don’t start their career as a project manager … they come to it later, having been in an operational role or part of a project team first.

One of the difficulties for a first-time project manager is that being a great project resource (i.e. team member) is what gets you the job as project manager, nine times out of ten. Unfortunately, the characteristics of a great project resource are not necessarily the same as those of a great project manager. Standing out in a project team is about getting more done than your fellow team-mates, knuckling down and “getting on with it”. By definition, this focuses you on the executional level of the project — getting tasks done, once they’ve been assigned to you.

In contrast, being a great project manager requires excellence at all the OTHER parts of the project — planning, communication, dealing with stakeholders, managing risk, seeing the “big picture” and so on. There’s also a big part of project management which is more about management than about the project — your team will function best if they are left in peace to do their work and move the project forward, so making sure they don’t NEED to worry about all those factors is paramount.

In traditional project management, there are a number of stages: Initiation, Planning, Execution, Control and Closure. The crux of my talk last weekend was that the real success or failure of a project is determined in the Initiation, Planning and Closure stages, whereas most of the focus is traditionally on the Execution & Control phases. This is not to say that these are the most time-consuming phases — nor that the Execution & Control are not important! — just that they are the structure that allows for success .. or not.

In my experience, some of the most typical mistakes first-time project managers make are in these stages:

• INITIATION — not making sure everyone is 100% clear and aligned on the purpose of the project. Realising this later on when the software “doesn’t do what we wanted it to do” or when the savings/value promised are not delivered is much more costly.
• PLANNING — thinking that the plan, once written down (as thousands of lines in MS Project) will be followed to the letter. Plans are not robust. Task planning is especially fragile. If you spend your time worrying about the fact that task #137 is only 70% complete, then you’re not keeping your eye on the rest of the project.
• CLOSURE — if you think your project is finished and others don’t, then you have big problems. There are a number of reasons this can happen (probably fodder for another blog post), but the most frequent are either that you haven’t met everyone’s real objectives for the project (see above) or that you haven’t provided for the future of the area you’ve been working on. This leads to the “undead stakeholder” phenomenon that seemed to strike a chord with everyone I mention it to.

So, what can you do if you’re managing a project for the first time? Or even if you’ve already managed your first project and weren’t happy with the results? There are a few things you can do:

1. Educate yourself. Even though Project Management may not seem as real or worthwhile as development or design, it is still a valid skillset and there is a lot of information out there, notably some great books.
2. Think back. When you were working on projects, who were the best project managers? Who do you remember fondly? Who do you definitely NOT want to emulate? Learn from their mistakes and adopt their best practices.
3. Ask around. There are probably other young PMs in your organisation. Maybe you could even meet up and swap horror stories.

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I’ve just spoken at BarCampLondon2 on the topic of Project Management Basics for Busy Geeks. Obviously the best way to experience this was to have come on down to BarCamp in London this weekend, but for those who are a little far away, I’ll be doing a write-up later on.

UPDATE:
In the meantime, for those who may or may not have been here, you can find both Powerpoint and PDF versions of the presentation here. (I used PDFOnline to convert from PPT –> PDF, for those interested)

Tags: BarCampLondon2, BarCamp, presentations, conferences.

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