If your candidate focuses on the project dollars or number of people they’ve managed, don’t hire them.
Projects should not be about how much money was spent or how many people were involved. Projects should be about a return on investment.
If you can turn a two year, 20 million dollar project into 200 million annual revenue at 12% net profit, I want to hire you.
Collaborative is defined as production with two or more parties working together.
Collaboration does not mean just being nice. It’s a highly productive approach to work.
Train your employees to collaborate, to process difficult business elements like problem analysis, decision analysis, and managing time.
The return is higher productivity with reduced stress and conflict.
Contact me if you want to know how to start training your employees.
1. There are none.
2. It’s impossible.
3. Don’t try.
You can support your peers and make them look good.
You can escalate the absurdity or play the devil’s advocate.
Employees who hold their own in these debates should consider Improv, creating reality out of nothing.
YES, it’s super fun AND it’s highly unlikely to increase profit margins
They are idle. They are maybe 30% productive. Many are trying to leave you.
A small percentage are 120% productive. The balance are less than 50%.
Why?
You avoid strategic planning. Their path is unclear. You delay metrics development. They don’t know what you care about. You avoid training and your primary cost is labor. They don’t know how to work. You wait for someone else to do what is boring and critical. No one ever will. You are in charge.
They know all this. As soon as they can, they will leave for a better place. If they can find one.
How do I know?
They call me for help.
IT Portfolio Management proudly reports success of the portfolio management office. We talk about how far we’ve come from the beginning. We report a high percentage of projects complete on time and under budget.
And then we also talk about how our customers, our technology users, are still complaining.
How often do we define and include a measurable dimension of complete during our planning phase? Isn’t the definition of complete the quality of result our users, our customers, agree with? Doesn’t it represent the value, the benefit that demands the time and budget resources in the first place?
Isn’t it worth the time up front to define and harmonize this dimension? Isn’t this agreement the essence of technology change management? And shouldn’t it weigh more heavily in our final success metrics than time or money?
It’s hard work. This work also risks our favored projects being killed. But if this dimension is missing, we might want to be careful with our pride. Our customers may not echo our success metrics.
Whatever you call these two, they are different. One monitors activity, system or human, to provide alerts of activity occurring outside established limits. We call this a dashboard like the speedometer in our car, bandwidth monitors of a network, or reports of the quantity of available components to an assembly line.
The second analyzes activity data as it relates to results over a period of time. We call this a scorecard. In relation to the examples above scorecards could include metrics like speed to accident ratio, network user issues to bandwidth, available components to final production quantity.
A scorecard metric potentially drives changes in the activity being monitored or the activities upper and lower limits. These changes move a process continuously closer to a desired result. The goal is to identify what activity, also known as the input, provides what results, also known as the output. For example, reducing the speed limits and using the dashboard to alert the driver to stay within those limits may reduce accidents over a period of time as reported by the scorecard.
The following link is an excellent article about best practice of metrics and their visual display. Thank you Tamra. Both dashboards and scorecards use metrics.
Most of the examples in this article we define as scorecards because they reflect results, or output, not activity, or input.
Call them score cards, report cards, or dashboards. It really doesn’t matter. However, differentiation will reduce confusion and time as we create and report our metrics.
As soon as gift cards became popular, I received one and tried to use it. At that moment, the mentalist I am, I predicted this system would be a disservice to gift giving and gift receiving. I was also suspicious of the retailers intentions.
I recently read an article in The New York Post which stated that since 2008 Americans have left an estimated $44 billion unspent on these cards. What happens to that money? The article said the value stored on these cards can’t be considered revenue, but what are they doing with the money?
Does anyone else think this system serves someone other than the gift recipient?
Projects to increase productivity and efficiency are some of the most rewarding. However, often there is confusion about what these two words mean. If the team involved doesn’t define them, project success is at risk.
Although these two words are sometimes used interchangeably, it’s important to differentiate. Whatever words are used keep in mind there are two areas to measure. Efficiency is spending more of the time available producing products or services customers value. Productivity is generating those products and services faster.
For example, if you spend 6 instead of 5 of your 8 available hours building computers or solving computer related problems you are more efficient. There is less waste in your work day. On the other hand, if you build a computer or solve a computer related problem in 2 hours instead of 3, you are more productive.
When your project sponsor’s goal is to increase productivity and efficiency through project work effort, ensure everyone understands how they are currently defining and measuring productivity and efficiency. Don’t be surprised if there is confusion about these terms and a lack of objective measures in place.
Also be aware that changing these two areas almost always has a significant impact on current operations. So be ready with some effective change management techniques.
I enjoy cleaning data. It’s like a runner’s high for me. But business isn’t about enjoyment. Hobbies and vacations are about enjoyment. Business is about producing.
When it comes to cleaning data, I’ve found only about 20% of it needs to be exactly right (don’t forget my 80/20 Magic post https://itmentalist.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=410&action=edit).
Following are my four steps to determine what 20% of my data needs to be exactly right.
1. I design my business strategy. I take time to understand my target market, my potential customers, my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I know I can change my strategy later but for now I write it down and share it.
2. After I know my strategy, I ask what I need to be successful (critical success factors). Then I ask what can go wrong (barriers to success).
3. When I have the top 5 critical success factors and barriers to success, I know what I need employees, products, processes, and money to do or not do. I call these my business activities.
4. Then I figure out ways to measure the results of these activities. Even if I don’t have the data right now, even if my data isn’t currently accurate, I figure out how I can measure these 10 activities. I write this down and share it.
NOW I know what data I need. I clean the data that supports measuring my 10 critical activities. And I leave the rest of the cleaning for a later date, or for vacation, or for never!
In addition to physicists, electrical engineers, petroleum engineers, geologists, neurosurgeons, and other technical experts, we add generalists to our business, like project managers, to organize and administrate.
Some of the criteria in job ads for project managers includes skill and experience in communication and collaboration; business analysis and project management; sigma and conditional probabilities; standards and methodologies like PMBOK, Agile, and ITIL; and Excel, SAP, Oracle, SQL, Java tools.
When I read job descriptions for super humans, I worry that means the thousands of employees in that company are so separated and hierarchical that teamwork doesn’t exist. I hear a middle manager crying out for someone to help them implement change within a very resistant audience. I doubt the company has initiatives and processes in place to reward employees who work together and embrace change.
I’m hesitant to respond to those job calls. With decades of experience in large and small corporations, multiple functions, and at multiple levels, including management, I know I can’t do it all. Even if I have the knowledge that comes from decades of experience, I’m just one body.
A tightly integrated team and an open to change, always learning, audience are the best ingredients to realize the benefit and value of a project, of a unique activity, with a beginning and end, to achieve a particular aim.
The successful project managers I know, who intuitively understand this concept, will only take project work if they will be operating at the executive level. They know it increases the probability of success because at a subconscious level they know the best ingredients aren’t available to them.
Why not cultivate an environment where executives don’t have to be involved in every positive change in the organization? Why not begin brainstorming with your HR team today to change the reward system to shape behaviors embracing change, learning, and teamwork? I’ve seen it. I’ve been a part of it. The job descriptions eventually become realistic. Imagine the folks standing in line for those jobs!
ITMentalist 