DUE DILIGENCE

At a recent workshop I was stressing the importance of due diligence and safety on projects. Due diligence “ is the level of judgement, care, prudence, determination, and activity that a person would reasonably be expected to do under particular circumstances”. Due diligence is demonstrated by your actions before an incident occurs, not after the fact. A simple example of due diligence is your company’s safety program where everyone is required to take a safety orientation and sign off or take a test to prove they have read and understood the information. If there is ever an accident, the company... Read More»

Location, Location, Location

No, I am not talking about real estate, I’m referring to location of the project when it comes to project estimating. I was assembling an estimating module for one of my workshops and got into the factors used in estimating. This article will be about some of the factors we use and why. On a day to day basis we use factors for labour productivity. We also take a labour rate from one area and use a factor to get a rate for another area. For conceptual estimates, we may want to evaluate a project by comparing the installed cost... Read More»

Project teams and e-mails

Are you receiving too many e-mails? Yes I am, may be a common answer. Project managers and team members usually receive too many e-mails in a daily basis. In my experience as a project manager, the most popular system of communication for project teams is the e-mail. However sometimes it is not efficiently used. The e-mail does not accurately transmit human emotions and intentions. Too often people misinterpret the content of an e-mail and that may causes a conflict among the sender and the receiver. For example, I can remember the first customer project I managed in a multinational company.... Read More»

Portfolio Management: Lamborghini Body on a Plymouth Horizon Chassis

Having attempted rolling out project portfolio management at several organizations I can state with confidence that the portfolio management process fails to deliver on its promise to streamline an organization’s project pipeline and provide high value. However, it is not the fault of the portfolio management process. Rather, I have found that the fault resides primarily with how organizations are structured (refer to a prior blog post titled Portfolio Management: Is Modern Management Practice Compatible?). Another major issue is a lack of education and understanding of portfolio, program, and project management at the upper management level (think C-suite). It’s easy... Read More»

Project Safety

HSSE - What’s That? HSSE stands for Health, Safety, Security, and Environment. In the old days, it was one of the issues that people had a tendency to let slide. The safety was a concern but health, security and environment were passing interests. Nowadays these are all important issues. They have to be addressed on your projects and you need to have funding to cover them. Companies vary on how serious they treat HSSE so you should be prepared for every eventually. I have worked across several industries and it seems as the liability and risk of death or injury... Read More»

How can I be more positive as a project manager?

Not all the project managers have a positive behavior all the time. I learned over the years that every project manager needs to spend sometime trying to be more positive when dealing with team members, customers and other stakeholders. Some people confuse mood with attitude. A project manager can be in a good mood or in a bad mood every day but his attitude needs to be positive. My attitude is always positive but somedays my mood is not very good, then I need to do an attitude check. I wanted to share with you some of my best practices... Read More»

Is This A Project Managers’ Favorite Task?

You know what task I’m talking about. Your project is up and running, you’re moving on to another project, gearing up, getting organized, motivated, excited about the new project, just can’t wait to get going, when the boss says, “Oh, by the way”. These are words no project manager wants to hear, but I digress. The boss comes in and says, “Oh, by the way, don’t forget, you have to close out your last project”. Talk about being deflated. Project closeout is the least enjoyable project task there is. It is boring, you’re not motivated, the other team members are... Read More»

Managing in Superstar Cultures

Do you want everybody on your team to be a superstar? Having lots of superstars can be an ego boost for a manager and even make the day-to-day work go smoothly but it can also have serious negative consequences. This is an area where courage to deviate from the norm comes in handy. I worked for a company that viewed everybody at a certain grade level –call it grade 10 - as a director candidate. They had to be smart, have a commanding presence and carry a workload that promoted frequent executive visibility. At review time, grade 10s received the... Read More»

A quick reminder: Agendas are important

Sometimes, I'll admit, I get a little lazy. No, "lazy" isn't the right word...it's more like I get a little too "comfortable." I'm comfortable with my project team; I'm comfortable with the work being done; I'm comfortable with our interactions; I'm comfortable with where we're headed; I'm comfortable with my own understanding of what's coming up and what we're supposed to be focused on; and I'm comfortable with my own ability to shoot from the hip. So sometimes, when I'm "comfortable," I come into meetings with an agenda in my mind, rather than published ahead of time. But just recently,... Read More»

7 Things a Project Manager Should NOT Be Doing

There is no shortage of information on the activity, processes, and tasks that project managers should be performing. It is more difficult to find information on those activities project managers should not be doing. Add value by NOT doing these 7 things. Read More»