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As many of you are aware, I am currently a project manager for a software company.  My job specifically has me managing implementation and migration projects.  I have been doing this for a number of years, enough in fact that I have another of the requirements to taking the PMP (Project Management Professional) exam under my belt. 

The PMI (Project Management Institute) is a non-profit organization started in 1969 by project management professionals with a goal of “advancing the practice, science, and profession of project management throughout the world in a conscientious and proactive manner…”  Through the years the PMI has created a set of project quality standards that are published in their definitive guide – the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge). The PMBOK guide is now widely regarded by organizations throughout the world as the “industry standard” in project management.  The PMP certification, which is administered by the PMI, assures that project management professionals understand the project quality standards, adhere to a code of ethics, and embark on a continuing journey of learning and participation in the project management community.

To qualify to take the PMP exam you have to have demonstrated project management experience.  For those holding a Bachelor’s Degree this is 3 years (4500 hours) of project management experience.  For those with a high school diploma it is 5 years (7500 hours) .    You must also complete 35 contact hours of PMP instruction from a company, institution or facility that is registered with the PMI.

Since I have my Bachelor’s degree, and I have more than 3 years of project management experience I decided it was time for me to get those initials after my name.  To do that I needed 35 contact hours of training.

I had researched this a couple times in the past and let me tell you there are myriads of opportunities available.  Just do a Google search for PMP Education and be overwhelmed by the over 3 million results.  As I began reviewing the options I became very cognizant of the costs and since this is a non-company funded activity it became a primary concern.  (The exam itself is not an inexpensive endeavor.)  Costs ranged from thousands down to hundreds.  I had almost settled into a local university offering which would have been about $1800.00 when I decided I would Twitter and ask if anyone knew of anything that was available online.  

It wasn’t long and I got a reply from Cornelius Fichtner pointing me to his PM-PrepCast.  This was an interesting approach that I hadn’t even considered.  A podcast that provides me with the supplementary instruction material required by the PMI.  I read through the content of the site and decided that for $49.99 it was probably worth investigating.   I was even happier to learn that if I wasn’t satisfied he would provide me with a refund. 

I listened to the couple of examples he had on the website because I was a bit concerned about being able to keep my interest.  (I know in reading the PMBOK that if you are having trouble sleeping all you really need to do is open up the guide and you will be sound asleep in a matter of minutes.)  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Cornelius has a very pleasant accent and the podcast was actually not too bad.  I signed up yesterday.   Certainly the price is right.  I don’t know of another way to get 35 contact hours for 50 bucks. 

(Shameless plug:  If you are reading this and you are interested click on the PM-PrepCast link or the image above.  His company pays referrals/commission if you sign up using my link. – You can also get 1 of your own.)

I look forward to this journey and I will keep you updated with periodic posts of my progress.  I have until the end of June to complete the exam using the 3rd edition of the PMBOK.  The 4th edition was released in December and the test will be modified for this edition after June 30th.  So with PMBOK in hand I am off to listen to a couple of podcasts.

Found this great project management article over on informative articles…

Effective project managers know how to get the job done, and get it done right. Success comes not only from wise selection of the team members and utilization of the best project management software tools; effective managers know how to lead, and how to encourage project team members to do their best. This includes clearly setting and communicating project goals, providing proper training and/or equipment, as well as other necessary items and expertise. Effective project management also requires constant re-evaluation of your performance as the project leader. The most effective form of leadership is by example. If your team members see that you strive to live up to the high standards you require from the project team, they will inevitably be more productive.

Set Attainable goals. Project managers should clearly define the objectives of the assignment and then see that each stage of the project plan has reasonable milestones that mark the accomplishment of the included tasks. All project team members should be aware of the project goals, and understand what his or her part is in accomplishing these goals. Break the project down into sections that allow members to see real progress being made at each stage.

Provide Training & Equipment. Project Team members should be chosen for roles according to their areas of exper

Read the rest: Informative Articles » Project Management, A Forgotten Perspective.

Creating basic highlight reports which clients and management can comprehend.

Letting people know how a project is coming along is obviously a key responsibility of any project manager. With so many methodologies to choose from these days, it becomes hard to determine which key pieces of information will be useful to those involved in the project. These methodologies often come with a tangled mass of cryptic terminology, often only recognizable to practitioners of the system (e.g. burn down chart, sprint backlog, concession, story points, etc).

Let’s say for instance your client is in the food transport business and is getting your company to build them an ERP application. Chances are they wont understand concepts from Agile or PRINCE2, and why should they, they are in a totally different industry.

The issue then becomes; what information do you present when creating a status report that will be useful to the broadest audience (e.g. client, senior management, non-technical user advocates, etc). The project information maintained internally for planning and day-to-day management is one thing, but what gets shown to non-technical stake-holders is something entirely different.

via Project Management for the Web: Project Status Reports Everyone Can Understand.

“Good project management is essential to staying organized. I’m not a fan of jargon and industry specific nomenclature, so here is a basic guide as to what it takes to really manage a project.” is the lead in to a great article on project management that you can find on SmartWomanGuides.com .   Using a real world example, Vicki Flaugher walks us through the fundamental steps of managing a project without all the fancy nomenclature and acronyms like WBS, dependencies,  and critical path.

She goes on to conclude the article…  “Keeping your eyes on the true purpose of the project in the first place . . . is the way to not only enjoy the result but also to enjoy the journey. . .  Respect, realistic expectations, kind yet firm actions, and a sense of humor will go a long way to making this project and all the future ones successful.   Great advice!  Good, quick read!

Did you know that only 29% of IT projects are ever completed successfully?  When I read the article The 14 Most Common Project Management Mistakes at Network World’s website I couldn’t help but identify with some of my past projects that went seriously amiss.   Some of the mistakes…

• IT doesn’t follow a standard, repeatable project management process.
• IT gets hamstrung by too much process
• Don’t track changes to the scope of the project
• Ignore problems
• Fail to recognize dependencies between projects
• Incomplete scheduling
• They don’t communicate well

There are 7 other and the nice thing about this article is that it provides some clear and concise solutions that you can consider.

Check it out… I know it was a bit of an eye opener for me.

I’ve heard many different things being compared to herding cats…  Project Management is Like Herding Cats, Managing Programmers is Like Herding Cats, Leadership is Like Herding Cats, Teaching is Like Herding Cats, Getting My Family Together is Like Herding Cats. (You’ve probably got a few things in your life that are like herding cats as well.)

The interesting thing for me as a NON-CAT person is I really wasn’t sure what that whole phrase implied…so I thought I might take a look at it from the standpoint of why I don’t like cats.

1. Cat’s don’t “need” me in the truest sense of they word.  They tend to do just fine by themselves and really to me only seem interested when they need or want something from me.  I’ve been told they “sense” that I am not a cat person.
2. Cat’s never seem to focus on anything.   You can easily distract them with a ball of twine or some other toy.  They can bounce from distraction to distraction and seem to be quite happy doing it.  I’ve been told they focus on the distractions… that’s what they are good at.
3. Cats will climb all over everything.  Boundaries don’t seem to matter.  My kitchen table, the stove, bathroom vanities, you name it and it is their territory. 
4. The incessant need to make sure that you know they have claws.  When you push them away or put them down, they will let you know that they also know how to use these claws.  Make sure you provide them with an acceptable scratching post or they will use whatever they can get those claws into.
5. Cats want to be awake when I want to sleep and if it’s mating season it is absolutely amazing the amount of noise that you can get out a cat when they are on the prowl.

So now look at your [Job or Task] and look at some of the reasons above…  I’ll use Project Management since I am a bit familiar with it…

1. Team members will often think that the PM is really not needed and that their job is to make their life miserable, holding them accountable for their portion of the project.  When people want to go it alone in a project things will quickly start to become problematic.  The sum of the parts is much better than the lone wolf.  (ummm cat)
2. Projects need to be organized, well communicated, structured, etc… If you are easily distracted or have team members that are easily distracted the project becomes at risk.
3. Everyone needs to know their boundaries and work on the things that they have been assigned.  I am a firm believer that you can’t manage ever single task.  You need to allow your team members the flexibility to do their task and all of its sub-tasks in the time allotted, holding them accountable.   
4. Having claws… In a project I might consider this to be the hidden agenda.  Either the project sponsor, the team members or in some cases even the project manager have an agenda that they want to accomplish that is not part of the project but they will wield their claws to get it accomplished.
5. Time management in projects is so important to meet the deadlines agreed upon.  If we aren’t meeting the deadlines we end up with again a project at risk.  Doing things “on your own time” never works well with projects.  I don’t care if you do it at 2am as long as I don’t have to get a call from you at 2am that you are running up against problems or need to discuss a change order.

So I guess the reasons I hate cats can be fit into the analogy…  I wonder if it would work with dogs?  Perhaps another day!

There was a super bowl commercial that was done a few years back by EDS… It was absolutely one of the funniest and well done!  I’ve included it from a YouTube search below… enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE

In this post, I want to show you how you can have a series of checkboxes in a column and when you “check” the checkbox it populates the cell directly to the right of the checkbox with the current date.   I use this in a project management spreadsheet where I have any number of projects all with common tasks that must be completed.

If you look at the spreadsheet above you will see that there are 3 columns… what you don’t see over to the far left in column A is the name of the task that I want to complete…  When I create a new project this portion of my spreadsheet is populated with a series of expected dates based on a set of known criteria.   I want to be able to come to this worksheet and not only quickly review a project and what needs to be completed but I want to be able to quickly update the “work” that was done on a project and have it give me the date that it was completed.   This is where my checkbox routine comes into play…  by simply clicking on the checkbox I can indicate the task is complete and it will make a permanent record of when it was completed… If I check it by mistake I can uncheck and it will also remove the date.

So how do I do this?

Sub Process_CheckBox()

Dim cBox As CheckBox
Dim LCol As Long
Dim LRow As Long
Dim Rng As Range

  LName = Application.Caller
  Set cBox = ActiveSheet.CheckBoxes(LName)

'Find row that checkbox resides in
  LCol = cBox.TopLeftCell.Column
  LRow = cBox.TopLeftCell.Row
  Set Rng = ActiveSheet.Cells(LRow + 1, LCol + 1)

'Change date in cell to the right of CheckBox, if checkbox is checked
If cBox.Value > 0 Then
  Rng.Value = Date

'Clear date in column B, if checkbox is unchecked
Else
  Rng.ClearContents
End If

End Sub

The key lines here are:

• Set Rng line which determines the row and column to place the date… You may tweak these to be +2, +3, whatever you need based on where and how you place yoru checkboxes in your spreadsheet and where and how you want your dates to appear.
• Rng.Value sets the date if there is a check in the checkbox
• Rng.ClearContents clears the date if the checkbox does not have a date

To use the routine you must open the Visual Basic Editor in Excel – Alt+F11, Click on Insert, Select Module and then Paste the Code above.   In your spreadsheet you would then right click on your checkbox and Assign a Macro to it… the macro is called Process_Checkbox.  Now every time you check the checkbox it will run this macro and it will insert the date.

I learned after doing a couple of these extensive WBSs that I needed to trust my team and hold them accountable for their portion of the project but to let them handle the small details that they had control over.  As a result I had a slimmed down WBS that really focused on key components of the project with a few “touch points” within each component that I could effectively monitor and measure.  My team members were empowered to complete their jobs without me hovering on each and every task and instead of me spending hours trying to keep tasks updated I was now able to focus my attention more on the things that really mattered.

In my web surfing today I ran across an interesting website called 4PM.com that deals with a concept in project management called Achievement-driven Project Management.  While I haven’t had full opportunity to review everything they have to offer, there was an article that I wanted to share with you that is similar to my current approach to WBS.   Written by Dick Billows – Work Breakdown Structure: Project Design Issue or Clerical Task – discusses the WBS as a “TO DO” list being the potential launchpad for project failure…check out the blog post and the associated article linked in the text.

I’d be real curious how other project managers deal with their work breakdowns.  Do you poll your team members as to the tasks they believe need to be completed and then compile the final list?  Do you build it yourself and send it out to the team for review and edits?  What tools do you use to assist?   As a “rookie” project manager I’m always looking for ways to streamline the processes.  Anything that I can do to make me and my staff more productive is a positive thing.  What are some of your thoughts?

As a project manager, I am always looking for great tools and utilities that will help me to become more productive and improve customer (internal and external) experience.

I know about the standard stuff that we use like Microsoft Project, Mindmapper, Excel, Outlook and the like.   What I would be interested in is hearing what you’ve found that you believe to be absolutely indispensable.  For example, I have posted reviews on an Outlook addin that I use called ClearContext IMS.  This tool helps me become a much more effective and productive email manager.    I’ve also posted about Excel and some of the things that I try to do with Excel to make me more productive.

 What do you do?  What little tricks have you found that help you out as you work on projects…  Share them with us!