Elizabeth Harrin's Blog, page 39

Business Acumen for Project Managers [Free Checklist]

‘Business acumen’ is one of those skills that you see on role profiles for jobs. It’s also something mentioned in the standards for professional project management bodies. Apparently, business acumen is something that project managers should have.

In 2022, PMI updated the Talent Triangle to include business acumen. It used to be called ‘strategic and business management’. So how is business acumen different?

It really is a core skill for project professionals.

I believe that my success at working with senior stakeholders and on difficult projects is to do with business acumen. Equally, when I’ve messed up, that’s because of lack of business acumen.

So what’s it all about? And how do you know if you have it? In this article I’m going to give you some specific actions you can do to improve your business acumen.

If you like, you can download a summary of this article as a free checklist so you can work through the actions at your own pace. Simply follow the links to the free template library and you’ll find the checklist in there.

What is business acumen?

PMI defines it like this:

Professionals with business acumen understand the macro and micro influences in their organization and industry and have the function-specific or domain-specific knowledge to make good decisions. Professionals at all levels need to be able to cultivate effective decision-making and understand how their projects align with the big picture of broader organizational strategy and global trends.

PMI, 2022

In other words, business acumen is the ability to see the bigger picture and understand and respond to how your work contributes to organizational strategy given the influences in the organization and the industry, and the global world of work as a whole.

Do you have business acumen?

Ask yourself this:

Do you know how your company makes money? I’ve done inductions for a number of new project managers who couldn’t tell me how their new company (i.e. my company) made money. That’s fine; you’re not expected to know everything on Day 1. But you do need to work it out pretty quickly.

Action: Talk to your boss about what income streams the company has. How many main customer groups? How do you balance their needs?

Action: Find and read the last annual report for your company. Even if you don’t work in a company obligated to produce a formal, public annual report, you’ll often find companies do their own for internal use. Ask about the things you don’t understand.

Where does your business invest?

Investment decisions shape what projects the company does.

For example, let’s say a leisure chain owns a number of brands.

Cheerful Coffee shops generate a 46% return.Happy Hotels generate a 16% return.Delicious Diners generate a 3% return.

Your business will invest in Cheerful Coffee shops until the market is at saturation. Why? Because that’s where they will get the best return.

While what counts as ‘best’ return is different for different businesses and in different economic conditions, 10% above base interest rates is good right now. In other words, if you left your money in the bank you’d get the interest rate. Doing a project with the money instead would give you a +10% return on that above what the bank would pay you. Although it’s riskier.

When the market is saturated with Cheerful Coffee shops the company would then look at doing projects to launch some more Happy Hotels. If the bank interest rates are 3% then it’s likely they would bother doing any projects to open some new Delicious Diners because that’s a lot of work and they’d get the same return just by shoving the money in the bank.

That doesn’t mean there will be no projects once all the coffee shops and hotels are built. In reality, the Board will be under pressure to find the next Cheerful Coffee.

Shareholders are unlikely to say: “No worries, just move on and do some projects on a 16% return.” They’ll want the company to uncover the next big thing, the next thing that will give them 40%+ returns on their investment.

Action: Find out if your market is saturated. Read the company’s 3 year plan or their strategy document (this might be a section in the annual report). Make sure you understand where they are headed.

Business acumen is more than money

Well, the money side of things counts for a lot. But there is more to business acumen than just strategic financial decisions.

It’s also to do with the operational context of your work, whether you’re in a traditional business environment, start up, charity or any other sector.

Knowing that gives you ‘acumen’: the ability to make good decisions and to use your professional judgement wisely.

You don’t have to have years of experience to have professional judgement. You just need to – in most cases – apply common sense and good project management skills like involving the right stakeholders, reading the landscape and applying what you see to the recommendations you make.

In other words, it’s being able to see the big picture, understand the commercial reality and act accordingly.

Applying business acumen to your project

Stakeholders are often most interested in project cost and the time it is going to take to finish the work, and your business acumen comes into play hugely here.

You should be able to talk about the business context and financial context of your project as it sits within the wider operational strategy.

Action: Calculate the direct financial impact of your project on the company’s products or services. Is it decreasing the margin on your offerings or increasing it?

Action: Establish how your project is going to affect customer service. If it doesn’t, how could you address customer service through the work you are doing, either to maintain it or make service even better?

Action: Talk to Finance about how best to manage your project budget. Don’t sit on reserves of capital if you don’t need them until later in the year. If you have large bills to pay, make sure they know in advance so cash flow isn’t affected.

Action: Review your project schedule. Is there any value in being able to deliver faster? Perhaps you’d be able to realise some benefits more quickly, which, in the bigger scheme of things, would offset the cost of an additional resource required to do the work faster. Talk to your sponsor if you spot anything.

Dealing with the numbers

I know it all sounds like number crunching. Some of it is. But even I can do it.

I don’t have the ability to deal with numbers in my head. I’m fine with Excel, a calculator and Google to look up even the most basic formula. But my brain doesn’t crunch numbers – I have software for that!

Business acumen isn’t all about being able to hold revenue figures in your head and calculating the impact of a scope change on business benefits with a click of your fingers. If you can do that, good for you. You can be on my team (because it’s important to surround yourself with experts on your project team).

Business acumen is far more about asking sensible questions. Assimilating information and making connections. Thinking about value and what the business values. Thinking about strategic fit. Taking project decisions with one eye on the big picture.

It makes you a better project manager than someone who simply works through the plan and doesn’t look outside the walls of the project.

Having said that, if you lack confidence dealing with numbers, it certainly won’t hurt to work on that.

Want to boost your business acumen? Download my free checklist which summarizes the actions in this article. Access the Resource Library here and I’ll message you back a link where you can download the templates and gain access to my free Resource Library.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

Availability is Not a Skill Set! 5 Tips for Resource Allocation

“Who is free to work on this task?”

That’s something all project managers will hear at some time or another. And it isn’t the best way to allocate work to your project team members. After all, would you have brain surgery done by a surgeon who specializes in feet just because he or she happened to be free that day? Of course not.

Would you ask a colleague to give a presentation to the board, just because they happened to have some spare time? And regardless of the fact their expertise is in requirements analysis and they’ve never presented to senior management before?

That would be a recipe for disaster – you’d both end up looking foolish.

Resource allocation is one of the trickier aspects of leading a high-performing project team. You want to make sure that everyone is fully occupied, but on tasks that play to their strengths. From time to time that might mean someone has to work on something that isn’t their core area of expertise.

But provided they have the support required, that could be a good development opportunity.

However, I strongly believe that availability is not a skill set. Assuming you have the luxury of being able to access a range of resources with varying skills, how should you allocate tasks? Here are my five tips for working out who is best placed to do the work.

1. Skill

Top of the list is skill. Does the person have the skills required to actually carry out this project task and complete it successfully? If so, they are probably the best person for the job.

For example, someone with the skills for managing complex projects is going to be best utilized on a complex project, not juggling 10 small ones.

2. Experience

Has the person in question done this sort of task before? If so, they will have the relevant experience and the confidence to do it again. They probably won’t need much support from you.

If they haven’t done it before, but you believe they have the skills to do the work, then they will need more support. They could still complete the task successfully, as long as the support framework is in place to help them get there.

This guide to delegating will help you support your team when they take on new tasks.

3. Interest

Just because someone has the skills and the experience doesn’t mean that they are interested enough in the work to do the task well.

If they have done the same task a thousand times before and really want to spend some time building their experience, then they aren’t going to be interested. You can allocate the work to them but it might not get done to a very good quality or in a timely fashion.

Talk to your team members before you give them work. Assess their level of motivation to take the tasks on. I know it’s not reasonable to only let people work on the fun, interesting stuff, but you can at least factor it into your decision making.

Recently I volunteered for a project everyone else was reluctant to take on. I said yes because it sounded interesting. I’m not sure I would make the same decision again, knowing how challenging that work turned out to be, but I don’t regret putting my name in the frame.

Being interested in the work helps keep morale high and makes people feel that they are getting opportunities to develop.

4. Cost

Yes, you do have to consider how much a resource costs before allocating tasks! The person best placed to do the work may be far too expensive for your project budget, so you may have to compromise.

Equally, it isn’t worth using a highly paid program manager to do basic admin tasks. If you have someone on the team in a project co-ordinator role or PMO support, it would be more cost-effective to use that person.

5. Location

Where is the task going to be carried out? With a lot of project work it doesn’t much matter and your team members could work from anywhere. But there are likely to be some tasks where location does play a part. For example, configuring servers on site, or working at a client location for a length of time.

You obviously want to pick someone who is the best person for the job. However, if you have a choice of resource, let location play a part in the decision-making process. It’s cheaper if you don’t have to pay travel expenses and it’s probably more convenient for the resource concerned if the work is local to where they are normally based.

It can work the other way too: if you are offering a juicy overseas placement, or the chance to live away from home for a period of time, then you may find volunteers coming forward for the opportunity.

If you are using people on the team who are remote from your office, check out these tips for successful virtual meetings.

And lastly…availability

Finally, you should take availability into account! OK, it isn’t the most important criteria when it comes to assigning work to team members, but it does matter.

There isn’t any point in assigning a task to someone who is already overloaded while other team members sit around waiting for work to come in. Instead, use the task as a good opportunity to improve the skills of someone else. The work could help others learn something completely new, like budget management.

Capacity planning can be the secret to successful projects, but only if you take everything else into account too.

There are lots of factors that come into play when assigning project tasks to team members. You probably do it unconsciously. But every so often it does help to think through why you are giving a task to someone.

Take a moment to check that they really are the most appropriate person for the job at that time. You might be surprised to see other people’s names surface too.

Read next:

How to include project management skills on your resume.

A version of this article first appeared on the 2080 Strategy Execution blog way back in 2014! Shared here with permission.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

5 Strategies to Improve Team Productivity on Projects

Wouldn’t life be better if your team were, well, just a little bit more productive?

If there was less chat and more doing?

It is possible to create an environment where project team members can be more productive, by creating good habits.

You’ve read all the articles, you’ve got ideas about how things could be better. But no one is telling you HOW to get your team to adopt new ways of working. Sharing round a link to one more ’10 ways to be more productive’ article just isn’t making change happen.

Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!

What is team productivity?

First, let’s look at what we are talking about when we’re thinking about how to increase team productivity.

Team productivity is a measure of how much work the team can do, and still get a quality result.

If you work in the North Pole, like Buddy the Elf, you can measure productivity easily, by the number of Etch-a-Sketches produced in a day.

But in knowledge work environments, we don’t actually measure team productivity. There isn’t an amount of widgets to be counted to see visually how productive we’ve been that day.

Instead, productivity is a measure of how the team feels, and how you, as the team leader, feel about their output.

What do you need to be productive?

Productive people have the tools they need to do the job. They don’t waste time looking for stuff or trying to work out how to get things done because there are systems, tools and processes that support them.

A productive team environment is one where people are encouraged to do their best work. It’s part of a positive team culture.

Work is done efficiently. And generally, productive, efficient team members are happier. Win!

How to boost project productivity

HBR reports some very obvious ideas for how to make your team more productive like:

Clarifying expectationsSetting a good exampleMaking meetings shorter.

Whole books (like this one, my favorite) have been written about how to improve productivity.

In a project team, you’ve probably already done those or considered the basics. So we’re looking for next level strategies to get more productive.

Project productivity looks different in different settings, so here are some ideas to improve team performance that you could encourage as new productivity habits.

Provide more autonomy to remove bottlenecks. Delegate authority to the lowest possible level so decision making happens closer to the action.Don’t just make meetings shorter, cancel them. Cancel one meeting a week and see what suffers. Probably nothing. In fact, rethink meetings totally.Encourage small talk and trust and relationship building activities like having lunch together because that makes communication easier.Do the hard stuff and manage out people who are underperforming.Play to people’s strengths so work is appropriately allocated.

However, you’ll have to use your judgement about what you want to see.

4 Drivers for team engagement But how do we get people to actually be more productive?

I’d love to say the answer is to introduce a team productivity tool (especially as I literally wrote the book on collaboration tools for project managers).

But it isn’t that simple.

The rest of this article talks about how to get people to work in the new productive way.

And the secret weapon is… habits.

Habits are the key to productivity

Everyone has different ways they like to work. I love lists, I work with people who are visual thinkers. I’m a morning person, but the rest of my family (at least, those over the age of 7) would rather have a lie in.

But regardless of your work style, if you can help your team members develop great productivity habits, you can develop your team and get more output in a day.

With the right habits, your team can work together with less effort. Collaboration is easier. You see:

less procrastinationfewer unproductive meetingsless general moaning!

But first, we have to create a new habit, and that’s tough.

Why people are reluctant to do things differently

Have you tried to do something different and create a new habit, whether that’s give up smoking, go to the gym every lunchtime or call your mother each weekend?

It’s hard.

Our brains are wired to do something one way, and asking it to do a task differently takes some serious rewiring. It can be done, but you’ve got to work at it.

Research shows it can take a while for a new habits to form. And we aren’t talking a couple of days. Lally et al found that it can take anything from 18 to 254 days for a new habit to be fully embedded in ‘the way we do things round here’.

I don’t know any project sponsor who is going to be prepared to wait 254 days for people to be more productive.

What we need to do is make it easy for people to adopt new ways of working, and make those ways of working worthwhile. Preferably with a near-instant payoff in efficiency so people want to continue doing the new thing.

How to introduce new habits

Let’s look at some practical strategies for bringing new habits into your team’s culture. And we want to make those habits sustainable.

1. Lead by example

I know I was dismissive of the basic advice from the HBR article, but leading by example is a basic that it’s important to get right.

Be the change you want to see. If you want people to use a new collaboration tool, use it yourself. If you want people to feel it’s OK to leave the office on time, leave the office on time.

You communicate the habit you expect by literally showing people what is acceptable.

“I think leadership comes from integrity – that you do whatever you ask others to do. I think there are nonobvious ways to lead. Just by providing a good example makes it possible for other people to see better ways to do things.”

Scott Berkun

2. Use peer pressure

People are influenced by the people around them.

Look at who is already working the same way you want the rest of the team to. Use change management tactics, like having change champions and buddies, to work with others and influence habits.

Empower your inner circle of productive people to share their ideas, and publicly support them to do so.

3. Make changes slowly

You want to introduce a new thing.

You’ve got two choices:

Rollout horizontally: share the whole expectation with one group, and then roll out slowly to the rest of the team as you can prove it is working.

Rollout vertically: break up your expectation into smaller chunks. Roll out the first small chunk to the team, then the next, then the next.

Successful people are simply those with successful habits.

Brian Tracy

4. Reward the change you want to see

Make it a game. Make it fun. Reward people who can evidence (or who feel) more productive. Be proud of yourselves. Thank people for trying, even if they are finding it hard.

Use your imagination and look at ways you can reward people for using their new habits.

Listen for feedback, answer questions, and build in changes to the system so people can see they are also rewarded for contributing to further improvements.

5. Don’t fix what isn’t broken

If an old habit in the team is useful, don’t break it.

Keep what works. Blend it with what you are currently trying to improve through new habits. If people can see that the new way of working fits effortlessly into their existing processes, that’s another barrier to change busted.

Things are easier when they feel familiar.

Get the Project Manager’s Productivity Bundle

Your goal is to create a project culture and environment where people can do their best work together (and individually).

Normally, people know what that kind of environment would look like. Listen to what they are trying to tell you about the tools, systems, processes, communication channels, even something as simple as where the photocopier is (yes, we changed that in one team and life was GOOD).

Sometimes small tweaks are all that you need to drastically improve project productivity, and make your workplace a happier place.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

5 Ways To Use Visual Project Management

Visual project management is simply using graphics, pictures, graphs and charts to display project information.

People with a visual preference for capturing information have always doodled or mindmapped their To Do lists, whereas those with a preference for creating lists opt for an ordered list of tasks.

The idea of ‘preferences’ seems a bit old-fashioned now, but you can probably recognize your own preference. Mine is definitely lists, but I use a lot of visual tools like Vizzlo for creating images that help my stakeholders understand the project environment.

In this article, I’ll share 5 simple ways to bring more ‘visual’ into your project communications.

What we’re seeing now is that project management tools are getting better at catering for both preferences, and making it easier to share information visually with the people who need it. And at the same time, making it easier for everyone else to grasp complex ideas through simple graphics.

Being able to present your ideas visually helps on slides, reports, presentations and simply when sitting next to a colleague drawing out a concept or plan.

Why visual project management matters

It’s a lot easier to communicate complex constructs or share lots of data points on a graph than it is in a paragraph. That has always been the case, but today, technology makes it even easier for us to pull out the data that’s required and present it in a way that is simple to understand.

There is an upwards trend towards visual communication in all formats. According to Alexa, YouTube is the second largest website in the world, with users spending almost 20 minutes a day on the site. It’s a popular search engine as well: people can find ‘how to’ videos on practically anything, from understanding that complicated functionality within your enterprise project management tool to learning how to crochet turning chains.

Screen capture from Alexa.com, 9 September 2021

Buzzsumo reports that average shares for video content are trending up by almost double and as far back as 2010 Forbes was reporting that video is a critical information source for senior executives, highlighting an upward trend to watching business content in online video format.

Basically, the web is changing from a text-based environment to one with many more visuals, graphics and videos. And this is effecting workplace communication too.

Watch my workshop on visual comms for project managersWhat this means for project managers

The project team members you work with are seeing information in different formats elsewhere. The rise of video on Facebook (via reels), for example, means more people consume video content now than before, and we’re more used to seeing it and searching for it. TikTok and Instagram reels continue the trend towards short-form video and moving graphics.

What this means for project managers is that people carry their communication preferences over into the workplace. They want to learn and consume information in the same format as what works for them in their personal lives.

If your project sponsor can download a three minute video on the state of the economy or a complicated piece of health research, they’ll expect the same level of information – distilled into easy to consume chunks – for their projects.

And why not? We have the tools to give it to them.

Example of ideas presented visuallyHow to incorporate visual communication preferences in projects

Whether it’s breaking down a difficult process into an easy-to-follow process diagram, or showing project progress on a visual plan, you can share project performance data in ways that make it easy for your stakeholders to understand your message.

Here are 5 ways to ‘do’ visual project management communications.

1. Visual planning tools

Whether your team uses Agile methods or a waterfall-based methodology (or blends the two), think about ways that you can share your project schedule with team members.

Many project managers copy and paste milestones out of their Gantt chart and list them as due dates in a project report, perhaps in a table. Think about showing a rolled up version of your project timeline instead, or creating a visual plan with milestone tracking that only shows key milestones over time.

Visual representations of schedules are a more powerful way of sharing project progress than a list of dates. And you get to show the story of your entire project on a page as well, focusing on the big project phases.

You can do the same with Kanban boards: create a high-level board that shows the major project steps, important tasks and progress, and include a snapshot of that in your progress report.

A Kanban board is a way of organizing tasks that doesn’t rely on a linear approach to time 2. Mindmaps and conceptual graphics

The first thoughts for mindmapping software are creativity sessions and process flows but you can do more than that.

What does your project requirements document look like? In a project where you have clear requirements documented upfront, it’s probably many pages of detailed notes. A mindmap doesn’t remove the need for the team to have all that detail, but the requirements document isn’t going to be the best communication tool.

How about using a mindmap as well, to pull out the key categories of requirements and the main features that your project is going to deliver?

Auto-generated Peppa Pig Mindmap. We were watching Mr Skinnylegs just the other day!

Conceptual graphics are ways to show complex projects and structures in a simple, diagrammatic form. I use this a lot and teach how to do the same in my workshop on visual comms.

3. Dashboards

The main use of dashboards is for project reporting, and the great thing about enterprise project management tools is that they enable customizable reporting so your dashboards can reflect what’s important to your stakeholders.

You can still share the data with them even if your team members don’t have the same dashboard access that you do. Either print to PDF and share it electronically that way, or take a screenshot of the dashboard and share the image. Think about the best ways to get the information across to people and go with what will work efficiently.

Example of dashboards from SmartSuite 4. Photos

Photos and screenshots can be used in many different ways, even on projects where the output is not something particularly photogenic.

Another implication for the social web spilling over into the way we do work is that people want to connect more with the personalities behind the projects. Sharing photos of your team in a workshop, or out on site, can really make the project seem more real, which in turn can improve engagement.

5. Video

Tools like Loom and Sendspark make it easy to capture and share short videos. These are perfect as communication tools for helping others know what really want them to do or for presenting a quick look at how a deliverable is coming on.

Include a video link in your briefings: people don’t have to click it if they aren’t interested but I bet some of them will want to see.

Whatever you choose to enhance the way you communicate about your project, the important thing is choosing a way that makes sense for the context. There is no value in extracting your current resource utilization and presenting it as a pictogram without the context around what your planned resource utilization is, the gap, why that gap exists and what you are doing about it.

You don’t need fancy equipment to make video: you can use your phone.

What tools are best for visual project management?

If you are looking for software to help you get your message across in a visual way, here are the key features to look out for:

Data visualization: Can you turn lists and tables into graphs or infographics?Interactivity: Can you drill down through the data, for example in an interactive Gantt chart?Usability: Can you use it easily?Compliance with your environment at work: Are you allowed to use it in the IT estate? Does it need installing? Will you be putting confidential information in the cloud without IT’s permission? (Hint: Don’t do that.)

Visual task management tools

These are tools that allow you to represent your project work visually. In other words, most project management software on the market these days that is aimed at professional teams. You can create a Gantt chart, timeline, Scrum board, or some other way of visualizing the work.

Drawing and mindmapping tools

For me, these are more relevant and important for project managers, because so much of what we do in stakeholder engagement requires being able to present complex ideas in a simple, graphical manner.

I do a lot of my images in Vizzlo, but I also use Canva, Picmonkey and plain old PowerPoint too.

Look for products with a free trial so you can check them out and use them in earnest before committing to paying for a subscription.

Visual thinking is here to stay

There’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and it’s visual. Whether you make the most of the data visualization tools within your project management software, or break out your smartphone and capture a video of what happened on a team away day, it’s important to be able to share our project work with a visual focus.

The visual communication trend is here to stay. Just like project teams adopted ‘corporate’ social media tools, project teams will need to adopt visual ways of thinking to deal with the increased expectation that data can, and should, be shared that way.

This is the right time to get involved with learning how to present your ideas visually, so what are you waiting for?

Next stepsI wrote a white paper on this topic. You can get a free copy here.Check out how to use video for project communicationsGet a free project communications plan template

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

15 Practical Tips to Improve Project Communication

Do you want to improve communication on your projects? And yet make it easier to do at the same time?

In this article I’ll share 15 tried-and-tested tips for effective project communications.

1. Use a milestone tracker

The milestone tracker I use is a simple Excel spreadsheet. It lists the milestones in one column, organised by project phase. It also includes the name of the person responsible, the target date and any notes. That’s four columns.

I color-code the date column too, with red, amber and green to show whether the delivery is on track, at risk or needing serious management attention.

When the date has been reached and the milestone achieved, I change it to say Complete. This document is a very simple, yet very effective way of communicating the high-level project dates to stakeholders. And they love it!

Get the project workbook I use here (including the milestone tracker).

2. Use template emails

How many times do you send the same messages to people? The covering emails for the ‘here is the monthly report’ and the ‘please find attached my expenses’ type emails can all be templated.

Either set up templates in your email system or keep a file of template messages. Then copy and paste to save you typing them out.

Get some copy-and-paste email templates for what to say when you are preparing to take a holiday from work.

Communication tip for Outlook users

In Outlook, create your message and save it as a draft. Don’t add any recipients. When you want to use it, click Ctrl+F to ‘forward’ the message.

In Office 2013 and later, you’ll need to open the draft message first. Press Ctrl+F with the cursor inside one of the header fields e.g. where you would put the address.

It will open a new version of the message, and your draft remains in the draft folder until you need to use it again.

Good for:

Sending out responses to frequently asked questionsThe bare bones of your weekly project status report email, so you only have to fill in the progressMessages you send often e.g. invites to project steering group meetings.3. Use checklists

Create checklists for tasks that you do frequently like hosting Project Board meetings or project kick off. Checklists are in use in hospitals and airlines because they help people remember everything they need to do and ensure nothing gets forgotten.

Pick a few tasks that you struggle with (for me it’s creating POs and then paying the invoices) and create a checklist so you don’t have to think about it anymore.

Read next: How to create a checklist in 3 easy steps.

I also have checklists as a reminder for the daily, weekly, monthly and annual project management tasks I should be doing. That way, at least I always have the basic communication points covered.

Get the checklists I use here.

4. Stand up during phone calls

Have you tried this? It really works! Stand up during your phone calls and you’ll get through the conversation faster.

5. Book meetings now

Get all your face-to-face meetings in the diary now for the year. Stakeholders are busy people so block out their time for your project today.

Read next: Overcoming poor communication in project management by dealing with interference

You can always move meetings or cancel them. People will never complain, in my experience, of having a meeting taken out of their diary! But getting one put in at short notice is difficult and causes stress for organizers and attendees alike.

So book your meetings early.

6. Create a communications asset register

A communications asset register is a list of all the communications assets that you have created for the project. That includes:

NewslettersPress releasesInternal magazine articlesPostersFlyers and leafletsPhotos.

Use the register to note the type of asset, when it was created, where it is stored and how it could be reused. Then you’ll always be able to find that elusive picture when you need it!

The register could be as simple as a shared folder on a network or Google drive where you drop all the comms items created by the team. Or you could create a list in a spreadsheet or Airtable to help you locate them next time.

If you store your register in a public place (and I consider anywhere on the internet to pretty much be public in this day and age), just be careful about the kinds of information that goes in there as many project comms will contain confidential information.

7. Write thank yous

Even if it’s just the tag on a gift — handwriting personal thank yous is a powerful message of appreciation.

I got some lovely notecards from Etsy that I use to thank key stakeholders.

I also got personalized holiday cards made from Moo, and postcards too, which I use if I just want to write a quick note to someone.

8. Use a meeting planner

I use the TimeAndDate.com meeting planner. This is one of my top project team communication tips. If you work with international teams then this is invaluable — you absolutely need to know what time it is where they are.

Think about your international colleagues and how you are going to effectively work with them as you put together your project communication plan.

Try to switch your meetings around from time to time so one team isn’t always the group coming in really early or staying really late.

9. Use email mailing lists

Set up distribution lists for your project. Create one for project team members, Project Board members and any other contacts.

My mailings lists save me a lot of time trying to remember to include everyone. As project management communication tips go, this one is golden!

Communication tip for email mailing lists

Make sure there is more than one person on the team who has access to edit the email list. I’ve had issues on projects before when I needed to get the list changed and the owners was out of the business.

It’s also a good idea to get a BAU owner to take responsibility for the email list. On one project, I was still approving people to join the list six months after the project had closed because there was no one else to take over the management of the list!

Of course, there was, really, but they weren’t aware they had to — it was a project handover task that had been overlooked.

10. Create a communications calendar

When you are thinking about how to improve communication in the project, one of the key things to do is make a plan for it.

Plot out your project communications for the year. When are you doing a newsletter? When are you having a briefing conference call? What are the deadlines for your staff magazine?

If I don’t do this I end up not having enough time to do the communications to a suitable standard (and therefore risk being late or working late). A calendar means I can add the dates to my project plan or diary and never miss a deadline.

There’s a communications calendar inside my project workbook spreadsheet.

11. Book meetings with yourself

This isn’t so much a project communication tip as a way to ensure you do project communications by making time for them.

Diary your repeating events like reporting deadlines. Block time out in your calendar to do these tasks or you’ll find yourself sucked into the daily To Do list and squeezing your reporting into half an hour on Friday afternoon.

12. Automate reports

What reporting can you automate?

I don’t use any systems that enable automated project reporting but if you do have project management software that automatically creates dashboards or can produce bespoke reports at a single click then make sure you know how to use it.

If you can’t properly automate reports, how else can you streamline the production of reports with templates or data feeds to save you time?

13. Piggyback on others

Time your project communications around what other people are doing. This is one of the project management communication strategies I recommend often, especially to program managers!

Talk to your colleagues about what they are sending out to department heads, key stakeholders and workstream leads. No one works in a vacuum. I bet that the subject matter experts doing stuff for you are also working on other projects. Plus, there are normal BAU standard communications that go out regularly.

Tag on to another department’s newsletter and use other teams to get your message out where it makes sense to do so. Find the person who coordinates a broadcast message and work with them to slot your project request, update or whatever into the comms they are already sending.

It’s win win! They get to have extra content in their communication (and in my experience, the people who write internal newsletters love not having to put it all together themselves) and you get your message out without having to create a standalone comms.

14. Update your voicemail

I don’t do this enough — it’s something I need to work on this year. I used to update my voicemail message daily in one of my previous jobs but today I only change it when I’m on leave for more than a day.

It is a good idea to update your voicemail message. It is so easy to do and it gives a very professional impression. Change it as often as sensible, for example to let callers know that you are out all day at a workshop or that you are on vacation.

Just remember to change it back!

15. Get some apps

Install some apps to help you be more productive while you are out and about. Make sure your team can get in contact with you so use tools that they use as well.

There are plenty of collaboration tools to try. Download a few and see if they work for you and your team. If they don’t make you more productive, uninstall them and try something else. Unfortunately, it’s all about trial and error. What works for one project manager won’t work for another.

Bonus Tip: Use video

It works! Use video to communicate short messages. It’s much more personal and you’ll stand out, because I bet other project managers aren’t doing it.

Read my case study here.

How to improve communication in project management

These 15 tips will help you improve the way you communicate with your team. As a project manager, you should constantly be looking for different ways to track what you do, and make changes to how you communicate.

Keep trying different things until you find tricks, hacks and techniques that work for your team. Then keep them under review! What works today might not be so good in three months.

Keep track of your project communication with my project workbook – the simplest and easiest way to keep control of all the things that are moving on your project. Get your copy here.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

How To Pick Up A Project From Someone Else: 7 Proven Tips

In the last couple of weeks I’ve turned into a woman who runs down Regent Street in ridiculous heels to get to her next meeting on time.

Who has said, “Sorry, I’ve got a mouthful of lunch, hang on,” too many times on the phone because there isn’t enough time in the day not to work through lunch.

Who has paid library fines even though the books are just there ready to go back, because she can’t get out of the office for 20 minutes to return them.

In other words, life has just been really busy.

The reason for all this is that I’ve taken on a new project. We’ve shuffled things around and I’ve picked up a (big, complicated) piece of work. It’s interesting.

It’s in good shape as the previous PM did an excellent job. The team are committed and know what they are doing. But I got 47 emails about it overnight (that’s between 5pm and 8am) on my first day truly in charge. There is a lot going on and I really don’t feel like I have a clue.

So, here are my 7 best tips for beginning work on a project that someone else is handing over.

1. Get a handover

The clue is in the title. They are handing over responsibility to you, so they need to actually do a handover. Get copies of important papers (especially anything to do with money spent or committed to spend). Ask about the team. Check the milestones.

That’s the formal part of the handover. Now have a chat off the record.

Find out what the stakeholders are expecting and which of them are being a bit difficult right now. The old project manager is a great source of information about the office politics surrounding this project and can shortcut your learning curve drastically.

2. Meet the team

I can’t find the source of this story (get in touch if you know) but someone once told me a tale of two soldiers. The both agreed to talk each other up at every opportunity.

Over the years they described each other’s credentials and experience when their colleague’s name came up in conversation. Lo and behold, they each got promoted more quickly than the norm.

In his book Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Robert B. Cialdini talks about how having someone else introduce you is a more powerful way of making a first impression. Get the leaving project manager to make positive introductions, and ask them to specifically point out that the project remains in good hands.

That’s a message that will give confidence to stakeholders who might be nervous about the change in project manager and it means you’re more likely to get off on the right foot.

Come to think of it, that soldier story might be in that book too.

3. Go through project initiation again (by yourself)

For your own piece of mind, run through what you would normally do when you set up a project. Is there a project initiation document? A business case? If you would set up a Yammer group for a new project, is there one?

Download the Project Initiation Checklist which is in our project management document resource library and get a head start . Run through the steps. Check that you are happy running this project now.

Take me to the resource library

Put in place anything that you feel needs doing and stop anything that doesn’t work with how you want to run the project. Just be sure to tell everyone so that they know what’s going on.

4. Review the plan

Go through all the planning documents and the project schedule. Make sure you feel comfortable with how the work is broken down. If not, now is the time to change it.

For example, I like to have all the project management ‘overhead’ (or level of effort tasks) at the top of my MS Project plan. All the project-related deliverables are up the top. I can collapse them to focus on the other stuff but they are right there when I nee them for reporting.

Work out what the next key deliverables are. Find the upcoming milestones. You’ve got time to get to grips with this new project but those fast-approaching dates should be your priority.

5. Review the meeting schedule

What meetings are in the diary? Is it too many? Cancel some. Perhaps there aren’t enough. Book some more.

Make sure there are project board meetings (or steering group meetings, whatever you call them) for governance. There should also be team meetings at a frequency that works for you.

I would also recommend for these early days of it being your project that you schedule regular one-to-one conversations with your workstream leads or key stakeholders. Then if you do have problems or need further clarification you can address them in those sessions.

6. Review the risks

What’s going to go wrong? This is another area where you want to spend some focus time.

Look at what is in the risk register. If it looks a little light, then consider what else you can add. I have a list of common project risks you can add. Talk to the team about what else might be worrying them at the moment.

If the risk log is bursting with risks, you might want to prune some out. Look at what has already been resolved or where dates have past and the risk didn’t materialize. Get it down to a manageable list.

Then think about how each of the risks is going to be managed. What’s the plan? Who is the owner? Get on top of this area before risks get out of hand.

7. Plan your next steps

Hopefully, you’ve identified some of the major things that should be priority work. That’s where you can spend your time in the coming weeks, along with getting up to speed on the subject matter, starting a project glossary of key jargon terms and building relationships with the rest of your team.

Work out what you are going to do in the next week, month, and three months to fully get yourself onboarded and ready to lead this project. That should involve asking for feedback.

Finally, one of your steps should be to plan a little celebration to thank the team for their hard work during the transition to a new project manager. It doesn’t have to be much — perhaps using one of the daily standups as a coffee and cake session.

It’s now your project

Remember, you don’t have to run it in the same way as the other person did. It’s yours. Do it your way.

Now go and be awesome!

Here’s what to consider next at this stage, when you are picking up a project from someone else:

? How to manage your first meeting with a new project sponsor

? Review project dependencies and constraints

? Read the checklist for taking over an existing project

? Watch this webinar on how to manage multiple projects (because this new project isn’t your only one, right?)

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

How 6 Real Managers Get A Work/Life Balance

Work/life balance comes up time and time again when I speak to people. We’re all desperate for a bit more time in the day, either to fit in more work or to fit in more slippers-and-TV time or something in-between.

An extra hour in my day would probably just mean more pushing Thomas trains around the wooden track while sneakily trying to respond to emails without the boys seeing me on my phone.

Read on to see the advice that 6 real project managers have for getting a meaningful work/life balance. For me, the tip from David about how you treat your loved ones was an eye opener but let’s start with some advice from Helen…

Helen Curel

Be clear where the lines are drawn. If you’re working, you’re working, so try not to get distracted with personal stuff. The same applies for home life, if you’re at home with your partner and kids then your attention should be there and not checking emails on your phone in the middle of lunch.

Helen Curel, UK

Claire Sezer

I work three long days a week. The weekend is for my family, the other two days in the week are for my emails, my housework and my chores. There are always competing pressures however many days you work.

Be efficient. Use time effectively. Delegate more but stay in control.

Claire Sezer, FCILEx, UK

David

I think most project managers are to a certain extent control freaks and find this difficult, but…

All things are not worth doing.All things worth doing are not worth doing well.All things worth doing well need not be done by you yourself – there might be someone much more capable around.Respect your team members’ time off. A manager who sends lots of email in the evenings gives a subliminal message that every team member needs to be available all of the time. “Do unto others…”Try not to check your email for just one evening and see if the world survives. Perhaps the exercise can be repeated another evening?If you have to check your email, do you also have to reply to each item immediately? Perhaps the next morning will do just as well?Try switching your cellphone off when you get home from work. Perhaps the switch can be used to switch it on the next morning? You never know until you’ve tried!Try not to treat your loved ones worse than your business contacts. A sponsor can often deal with rejection much better than a child can.

David, Sweden

 Monica Borrell

Sometimes it’s hard. I get so into my work. My favorite tactics are time-boxing and prioritization. These are project management techniques that are also very useful in making sure you stay sane and balanced as a person.

I also have recently gotten into meditation and have learned to turn the computer off at least an hour before bedtime.

Monica Borrell (Read my interview with Monica.)

Paul Nicholson

The 20/80 rule. 20% percent of the work gets 80% of the result. Time and again I have found that 80% is easily good enough and pushing for the extra is not worth it. Why are managers that don’t seem to do very much so successful? This is why. They don’t waste time on perfection and they spend the rest of the time building relationships.

There are, of course exceptions. Some organizations are really fussy with documentation and if this is not your forte then you need to work at it. However I once worked to rule for a while when I was fed-up at work and found that not only was the project just as successful, it actually seemed to improve performance.

Perfection can make things worse and just creates unnecessary work. What this rule means is that by not being a perfectionist you can manage twice or three times as much as a perfectionist and achieve the perception of three times the progress.

Delegate. Staff love to be involved, especially younger staff that see the chance at some good experience. This is linked to the point above as the only way to achieve perfection, as you define it, is to do it yourself. Let go and let someone else do it differently.

Most of the time, arrive a little early and leave a little late (15 minutes each way). Then managers will more than happy for you to occasionally leave early. If you are always in late managers will assume that you are not pulling your weight and give you more to do.

Occasionally take work home but don’t make it the norm. Projects tend to be heavy on the project manager at the start. If you have multiple projects all starting at once then you will have to put the hours in. However don’t assume that managers will notice, or even care, if you are doing this. Most will not.

They say that working late is like wetting yourself in a dark room – You get a nice warm feeling and nobody notices. It is true though. Working long hours does not typically get you promoted. I have met perfectionists who always take work home every night thinking that managers value the work they do only to get upset when a promotion goes to someone else.

If you have a manager that consistently pushes you to work too late or long hours – leave. There are plenty of good organizations out there that love hard working, capable people that enjoy life.

Paul Nicholson, MBCS, UK

Lorraine Chapman

I have been very lucky as my spouse is very understanding about my work and what I do like as a profession, therefore it is give and take about balancing out my working and personal life. It can be an all-encompassing career, with highs and lows, but very satisfying.

However, when you have down time, you need to make the most of it. Try and work around projects with holidays as it is very disruptive to a project to bring in another project manager (unless it is a major building project). Taking time out and a balance can be achieved, however, it does take working at it, like any relationship (personal or professional).

Being a project manager is not something for the feint-hearted, and sometimes you need to grow an extra skin – but it’s part of the charm of the work. There are times when you do need to take a break – do take that break; and you will come back bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for anything that is thrown your way.

Lorraine Chapman, UK (Read my interview with Lorraine.)

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

How To Motivate Your Project Team

Ruth Pearce knows everything there is to know about motivating your projectteam. She’s even written the book on it.

I caught up with Ruth to find out more about how to motivate teams and whyit’s something you should be actively doing.

Ruth, let’s start at the beginning. Why do you think motivation on projectteams is so important?

Because motivation is intrinsic. It is thereason people do the things they do.

When we connect the goals of a project to those intrinsic motivators, we see amazing results. People will go further, think more creatively and consider more options to get the project done.

Ruth Pearce

When we don’t connect to their own motivation, we are trying to drive behavior from the outside and that is harder work for us, and less satisfying for them.

So how do we do it? What’s your top tip for project managers wanting toinspire their project teams to do their best work?

I love this question. We assume thatinspiring teams is hard, and many of us believe we cannot do it!

In fact, the approach that has the biggest impact is to model the behavior you are looking for. People copy what they see.

We do it as children, we do it as teenagers (often terrifying our parents in the process) and we do it as adults. Modelling is the reason we don’t want our children to hang out with “the wrong sort of influence” and it is the reason we want them to hang out with “the right sort of people”.

We know, instinctively that our kids will copy what is around them and the same is true of us at work.

If you want joyfulness and zest, be exuberantand energetic. If you want dedication and commitment, be dedicated andcommitted. If you want people to be curious and inquisitive, ask questions!

And, if you want behaviors that you find hard to model – maybe you want people to be sociable, but you are shy, enlist the help of others who can model it for you. Not only will they help the team, they will give you a behavior pattern to copy.

When you motivate someone, they engage more with the project. What does‘engagement’ actually look like?

Engagement is closely related to motivation.It looks like enthusiasm, a sparkle in the eye, focus, excitement.

You are likely to notice more creativity andinnovation, the mood in the room is uplifting.

How do you get engagement?

A great way to engage others is to see theirintrinsic strengths, highlight them and help them to find ways to use thosestrengths, even if the official definition of their job does not seem to callfor it.

If you have someone who is curious and loves to learn, assign them work on the project that entails data gathering, or research. If you have someone who expresses love and kindness, ask them to put together some ideas for a team activity, to give back to the team.

Meetings are a great place to spot strengths,and the activity helps keep up interest in the meeting! Make a note of thestrengths you see in people and take them aside afterwards and express yourappreciation. Be specific about what you saw and why you value it!

Your work is centered in strengths-based project management. Tell us about that.

Strengths-based project management is anapproach to project management that focuses on the people rather than theprocess.

We have so much material about what processesto use, and yet it is estimated that 70% – and possibly as much as 81% – ofproject success depends on the human side of projects. (Gertman et. al., 2001.)

Strengths-based project management starts with the project manager to develop awareness and application of their own strengths on a day-to-day basis. The next stage in the process is to take it outward to the project team and then other stakeholders using different tools and techniques.

We cover character strengths, mindset,learning and planning styles and appreciative inquiry to build skills in theproject manager that increases engagement and connects people to their ownpersonal motivators.

And it is not all sunshine and roses. We also explore ways that strengths get in the way, conflict resolution and inappropriate use of strengths.

How can people find out their strengths?

One way is to take the VIA Character Survey at http://CSPM.pro.viasurvey.org. This is a free survey and you receive your ranking of the 24 character strengths right away. And anyone who takes the survey using the link will receive a personalized 3-part follow up to help them take the strengths and start applying them.

We all have all 24 strengths to varyingdegrees, and research shows we can cultivate character strengths, so it isalways an option to boost our lower strengths. One thing that it is importantto explain is that the survey does not measure weaknesses, and lower strengthsare not weaknesses, they are just strengths we use less often and with moreeffort.

How can you use that information to build a more motivated and roundedteam?

One way to supplement our own strengths –particularly at work – is to partner with people whose top strengths aredifferent to ours.

I had a team that explored their strengths, and once they had, they were only too happy to call on others to help them out. For example, our curious, creative people working on new product design would ask those high in perspective, judgment and prudence to sanity check their ideas. Not only does it provide shortcut to getting those strengths, it also fosters collaboration, mutual appreciation and team-building. It is a win win win!

Your book covers all of this. What was fact that surprised you as you werewriting it?

That is a hard question to answer because it was such a special experience. Writing the book gave me a wonderful opportunity to look back on my many projects and savor the moments that were meaningful. I ran a couple of surveys about project managers – to find out what project managers and non-project managers think about the role and that has been fascinating.

I am still compiling the results, but onething that was a pleasant surprise was that both project managers andnon-project managers think that it is essential to have a project manager ifyou want a project to succeed.

And both groups believed that projectmanagers make things happen!

One thing that was a pleasant surprise was that both project managers and non-project managers think that it is essential to have a project manager if you want a project to succeed.

What’s next for you?

Well I am speaking a lot this year which isreally exciting, and I am writing for various publications. I have a newwebsite on the way, and I am building out lots of free resources for projectmanagers who want to take what is in the book and apply it for their teams.

I have a big project that I am the projectmotivator for that I am loving, I believe it is important to keep projectmanaging and practicing and enhancing the techniques that I share.

I will be running some workshops and doing some coaching. And three times a year I teach an ICF approved coach training course through the Center for Coaching Certification. I hope to get more project managers to take the training to build their skills. The courses are all eligible for PMI PDUs which is great!

I hope to write another book in 2020, but Iam waiting to see what my audience wants to know more about before I startthat. In 2020 I also plan to offer a workshop in mindfulness-based strengthspractice (MBSP) for project managers.

I hope to get the book Be a Project Motivator accepted as a course book for some of the newer project management courses that are being developed on the back of PMBOK 6th edition and I want to bring coaching skills and mindfulness practices (2020) to project managers.

Thanks, Ruth!

About my interviewee:

Ruth Pearce is CEO of Project Motivator, an author and speaker, and a practicing project manager. Her 25 years’ experience is in a variety of industries including financial services, state government, and non-profits. Ruth has spent her career learning and experimenting to engage teams to make them happier and more productive and has published a book for project managers about team motivation. She is disrupting the traditional process focus of project managers by bringing awareness and facility with human factors into project management practices.

She is an energetic and engaging speaker with a track record of bringing the new science of positive psychology to the world of project management. She believes that the role of the project manager must change to become more pivotal in this time of accelerating change and disruption. A big part of that change is that it is no longer someone else’s challenge to build engagement and motivation. Project managers have the chance and obligation to change employee experiences in the workplace and to build better organizations for the future.

Ruth has conducted three independent studies into project managers, examining their role from the perspective of the project manager and from the perspective of non-project managers, exploring their relationship to engagement and the part that they play in team engagement and identifying their most prevalent – and least common – character strengths. In November 2018, her book Be a Project Motivator: Unlock the Secret of Strengths-Based Project Management was published by Berrett-Koehler. She is a contributor to PMWorld 360 and is a regular presenter at PMI chapters, and online project manager forums including Projectmanagement.com

This interview first appeared in 2019.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

7 Awesome Meeting Habits That Will Make You Money

Let’s face it, most of us deal with unproductive meetings every day. You know the type of meetings I’m talking about:

When the executives talk more about golf than how to improve profitabilityWhen you spend an hour figuring out which brand of gluten free hot dog to serve at the summer staff bar-b-q (I’ve actually suffered through that meeting)When somebody leaves the meeting every 10 minutes to check their cell phoneOr how about when you spent 2 hours trying to come up with great new marketing ideas and you realized midway through that nobody in the room knew anything about marketing…Gord Sheppard

I could go on, but I can feel your meeting pain shooting through your eyeballs as you read this. I think we can agree that you can’t afford unproductive meetings.

Why? Well, they cost too much money, waste valuable time and frustrate your staff (which could make them quit). Too much bad meeting behavior affects your ability to serve you customers at a high level, and ultimately will cost you a lot of money.

But don’t despair! Here are 7 Awesome Meeting Habits That Will Make You Money, based on my experience in running and attending more than 2000 meetings.

Habit #1 – State your strategic objective at the beginning of your meeting

Here’s what will happen when you clearly state your most important strategic objective at the beginning of a meeting:

It will set the tone for the meeting, and focus everyone’s attention on why you’re all thereIf anyone says something unrelated you can ask “Is what you’re saying right now moving our strategic objective forward?”At the end of the meeting, you can re-state the objective then and ask “Did this meeting move our strategic objective forward?” If the answer is yes, then it was a great meeting. If the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to do to make your next meeting more profitable.

For example, take a look at this Key Strategic Objective for Apple:

To ask less of the planet, we ask more of ourselves.

Now, let’s imagine the beginning of a new product development meeting at Apple. The facilitator could say “Throughout this meeting, let’s challenge ourselves to responsibly use Earth’s resources when we talk about developing this new product.”

Then they could conduct their new product discussion, and at the end of the meeting the facilitator could restate the strategic objective and then ask, “Did our discussion honor our commitment to “ask less of the planet?”

If the answer was yes, then it was a profitable meeting that moved this Key Strategic Objective forward. If the answer was no, then that meeting team should have started to make adjustments to ensure that this key concept was reflected in their next product development meeting.

Read next: 10 tips for great meeting minutes

Habit #2 – Figure out the total cost of all the meetings that happen in your organization and CUT the money losers

Here’s how:

Do a complete inventory of all of your meetingsAssign an average cost-per-meetingDetermine your total meeting cost.

Now give your CEO a tissue to wipe the tears from their eyes when they realize how much money your organization is wasting on bad meetings…

Here are some cost-per-meeting examples:

#1: A company with 25,000 employees in which each employee attends 100 meetings per year (2 meetings per week) at an estimated cost of $500 per meeting.

Total meetings = 2,500,000Estimated cost per meeting = $500TOTAL MEETING COST PER YEAR = $1,250,000,000 (over 1 BILLION!)

#2: A medium sized business with 1000 employees in which each employee attends 50 meetings per year (1 meeting per week) at an estimated cost of $250 per meeting.

Total meetings = 50,000Estimated cost per meeting = $250TOTAL MEETING COST PER YEAR = $1,250,000 (over 1 MILLION!)

Can your organization afford to spend this much on meetings?

Now. Estimate what you would like your MROI to be (meeting-return-on-investment). Cut out any meetings that are not giving you a positive MROI. Then create a bonus program that encourages teams to continue to have more profitable meetings.

Habit #3 – Lock the door when the meeting starts

Would you be late for a meeting with your best customer? No. So if you want your meetings to make you more money overall, then treat each person in the meeting like they were your best customer.

So if people are coming in late for meetings, here’s a suggestion.

If your meeting starts at 9AM, then lock the door at 9AM and don’t let the latecomers in.

I learned this technique when I interviewed Larry Schwenneker in episode 8 of the Create Awesome Meetings Podcast. Larry was a Senior Leader in charge of a 500 million dollar portfolio, and his time, like yours, was precious. So, when he chaired a meeting he would lock the door at the appointed meeting start time, and anybody who was late wasn’t allowed in.

One time, his boss was late and stood outside the room pounding on the door to be let in. And guess what happened? Larry didn’t let him in. Guess how often this happened? Once. Because after that, Larry’s boss would show up on time for meetings.

And while it was fun to hear about how much trouble Larry got into for doing this, I also found out that Larry’s boss adopted this technique and started locking the door at his own meetings, to make sure that everyone was respectful of each other’s time.

How much more money would you make if every meeting in your organization started on time?

Read next: Best meeting transcription software

Habit #4 – Fire a bad meeting facilitator right now

Ineffective meetings are led by money-losing meeting leaders who:

Don’t care about the real cost of bringing people togetherDon’t prepare an agendaAllow talkers to take over meetings with unrelated blatherDon’t have the skills to respectfully manage fights during a meeting which breaks team trust and kills productivityDon’t follow up after meetings resulting in no accountability for anyone.

So if this bad meeting leader is wasting your team’s time, how is that helping your customers?

Here’s what you can do to help/fire a bad meeting leader:

Rotate the chair, as in, assign someone else on your team to lead the next meeting. This will give the current meeting leader a chance to learn something new and hopefully they will improve

Immediately send the current leader for facilitation training so they can learn how to run more effective meetings

If they refuse to get training then you should remove the bad meeting facilitator from the meeting forever. This will allow that team to rebuild and move on, and give their meetings an opportunity to become more productive.

Habit #5 – Place unrelated discussions in the ‘parking lot’

One of the best ways to respectfully keep people on track during a meeting is to set up a ‘parking lot’ for unrelated discussions. This is a place on the whiteboard or on the agenda itself where you can record good ideas (that are unrelated to the current meeting) so you can revisit them later.

For example, let’s say you were meeting with your team to review your budget. If somebody started to go off topic to enthusiastically talk about a new service that you could create, which is clearly unrelated to talking about the budget, then the facilitator could gently cut that person off and say something like,

“That is a terrific idea that you’re bringing up, and we would all love to hear more about it. So let’s put it in the ‘parking lot’ for now and then we can come back to it at a later time. And now, let’s get back to the budget discussion.”

When a facilitator does this with confidence, then not only does that person know that they have been heard and that their new idea will eventually be discussed, but everybody else in the meeting will feel that their time is being well used.

Habit #6 – Ask people to challenge ideas during the meeting

With the pace of change these days, status-quo meetings will lose you money. I have to admit that when I worked in the corporate world I often ‘mailed-it-in’ during useless weekly staff meetings.

You know the type of meeting that I’m talking about, where it’s all about updates and people talking about what they did on the weekend, instead of actually making decisions that move the company forward and ultimately serve your customers.

So, to avoid status quo meetings, the facilitator should occasionally interject and say, “Can anyone disagree with or improve what we just talked about? Because if we can’t, why did this item get onto the agenda in the first place?” This will set a tone of high trust for the meeting and allow people to openly share their best insights.

Habit #7 – Treat every person in your meeting like they were your best customer

If you’re not treating everyone in your meeting like they were your best customer, then you’re leaving money on the floor. So, at the beginning of your next meeting you should make a list of the ‘Top 5 Ways That We Treat Our Best Customers’. 

Here are a few suggestions to get your list started:

We don’t interrupt when the customer is talking, so why do we interrupt each other?I don’t look at my cell phone when I’m with a customer, so why do I look at it during a meeting?I follow up fast after every customer meeting, so why do I not follow up effectively after our meetings?I have all the information my customers need when I speak with them, so why did I come to this team meeting unprepared?I’m never late for a customer meeting, so why was I late for this meeting?Awesome meeting habits summaryState your most important strategic objective out loud at the beginning of your meetingFigure out your organizations total meeting cost and cut the money losing meetingsLock the door when the meeting startsFire a bad meeting facilitator right nowPlace unrelated discussions in the ‘Parking Lot’Ask your team to challenge ideas during the meetingTreat every person in your meeting like they were your best customerConclusion

Now that you know what to do, your biggest challenge is implementation. To help you get the ball rolling here are few reasons that have inspired other teams to improve their meeting culture.

We want to earn more money by improving our MROI (meeting-return-on-investment)We want to become more efficient by getting rid of money-sucking meetingsWe want to make our organization workplace of choice for top talent and one of the best ways that we can do this is by demonstrating that we have the most efficient, innovative and enjoyable meetings

Are you ready to put at least one of these habits into action to turn your meetings into a competitive advantage? Do you want to serve your customers at a higher level? Do you want your company to make more money?

Now it’s up to you…

Many thanks to Gord for letting me republish this article from his website – Elizabeth

A version of this article first appeared on this website in 2017.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management

10 Secrets To Being a Good Sponsor

What does it mean to be a great project sponsor? The project sponsor’s role is diverse. It’s far more than being a figurehead for the project. It’s a decision-making, direction-setting role.

If you are leading a project in a sponsorship capacity, or want to sense-check that your sponsor is stepping up to meet their responsibilities, then I have something for you that will help.

Below you’ll find 10 tips for being a good sponsor, drawn from Strategies for Project Sponsorship by James, Taylor and Rosenhead. The book includes a list of 50 secrets in Appendix D which is a summary of The Standish Group’s Chaos Manifesto 2012: The Year of the Executive Sponsor. While that might seem like a long time ago, I feel they are still relevant today.

Get the right project resourcesMake quick decisionsUnderstand project management techniquesKnow when to pull the plugCelebrate accomplishmentsManage financial changesOvercome ignoranceSet goalsCommunicate the factsUnderstand risk and reward.

Those are the headlines. Below, I’ve added my interpretation of what these mean on projects today.

1. Get the right project resources

Your role as a project sponsor is to make sure that the project can be done efficiently and effectively, and you need resources to do that. Resources can be money, equipment or people (or anything else required to get the job done).

Ask your project manager what resources are required, and be prepared to challenge (project managers have been known to inflate what’s needed in order to make sure they can secure enough resource for the project).

Then negotiate with other senior leaders to give the project what it realistically needs to deliver on its objectives.

Make sure your project plan includes all the relevant types of resources 2. Make quick decisions

Project teams are expensive, so having them hanging around while you make up your mind is not a good idea.

Get the information you need to make the decision, then make it, and tell people what you decided. They might not like your decision, but you’re the boss, so they’ll abide by it. Just be able to justify why you chose what you did.

Not sure how to make that final call? Read my guide on the process for decision-making.

Having said that, don’t rush into a decision without all the facts or you will head the project off on the wrong path.

3. Understand project management techniques

Yes, this is the job of the project manager, but you don’t want them to be able to bamboozle you with jargon. You should also have an understanding of how your work is being delivered and why the team are doing what they are.

If you can spare an hour, go through the PMI Kickoff course. It’s easy to follow, and it will give you the basics of what project management is all about. And it’s free.

Believe me, they’re doing the best they can and if they are following a structured set of guidelines then they are probably going to get you a great result.

But not if you hamper them by demanding they do things differently. By all means challenge the ‘how’ behind the way the work is being managed, but be prepared to listen the results. I mentor project managers who have told they have to be agile, even when agile methods are not the best way to deliver the kind of change they have been asked to lead.

4. Know when to pull the plug

It might be your pet project, but if it’s over budget, late and no longer on track to deliver the business benefits, then it is time to part company.

Throwing good money after wasted effort just to save face is stupid. So steel yourself for any potential conflict and get your project cancelled.

Then get your team working on something that really will revolutionize the company.

5. Celebrate accomplishments

Everyone loves a party, and while you don’t have to be lavish you do need to reward the project team for their efforts. They will work harder and appreciate you and the project’s objectives more.

Yes, it’s a bit like bribery. But think of it more like a boost for team morale.

There are plenty of ways you can celebrate success on a project team, and the act of thanking the team for their work doesn’t have to cost a lot. Or anything. Just saying thanks is valued because it means you have taken the time to notice what they do.

6. Manage financial changes

Project budget changes can kill a project, so make sure that any financial changes are passed down the line to your project manager as soon as you can.

Help the project manager understand what the financial pressures are and work with them to come up with creative solutions to address any fundamental problems.

This may involve cutting scope. That means taking stuff off your wish list! You can’t have everything and pay less for it. Fact. Don’t believe me? Learn more about scope creep.

7. Overcome ignorance

There are bound to be things that you don’t know about the way the project is being delivered and how the goals will be achieved. Software is mysterious. Project management techniques are baffling. Subject matter experts exist on a different planet.

But learn.

Learn as much as you need to so that the team can’t pull the wool over your eyes. Then stop. You don’t need to code and you don’t need to understand why widgets are constructed in that way. Let your experts understand the detail.

Free training! Kickoff from PMI

An excellent free beginners project management course that comes in Agile and Predictive versions. Perfect for accidental project managers and people needing a structured approach to project work for the first time.

Take the course We may earn a referral fee if you sign up #pmiaffiliate #ad 8. Set goals

Projects need goals. Create them. Set a vision. Set objectives. Help your team understand why they are going where they are going.

And give them a map to get there.

Goals give people purpose, so you’ll get better results from your team if you communicate the project goals effectively.

9. Communicate the facts

While you can communicate goals in the language of vision and values, you should keep most of your communication to facts, especially when it comes to project progress.

This is also a great example to set for your project manager. Deal in concrete details, not ‘maybes’ and feelings. Get your project manager recording metrics and tracking what’s important. Ask them to start a decision log to record what’s been agreed.

10. Understand risk and reward

Risks are things that could happen. Sometimes they are bad, sometimes the things that could happen are good. Sometimes taking a risk means a bigger reward. Think about your own risk tolerance and that of the company. Be clear about the sorts of risk you are prepared for your project team to take, and the sorts of risks you want them to ask you about.

Risk is good, but it has the downside of being, well, risky. If you are risk averse your projects will cost more and take longer, but you’ll have more confidence in the outcome. Sometimes taking risks is fun, and it certainly makes projects more interesting, so don’t try to rule it out completely – that won’t work, anyway.

Putting these 10 tips into practice will help you be a fantastic project sponsor — or to guide someone into that role.

These 10 secrets have been taken from Strategies for Project Sponsorship by James, Taylor and Rosenhead. They appear as a list of 50 secrets in Appendix D as a summary of The Standish Group’s Chaos Manifesto 2012: The Year of the Executive Sponsor. The accompanying paragraphs are my own interpretation of the headings.

A version of this article first appeared in 2013.

This article first appeared at Rebel's Guide to Project Management