How good is your services company at PR?

Do you large up your achievements? Or do you allow the focus of a client engagement to focus on things that went wrong?

It is very easy to focus on the problems with any services delivery. Because it gets the immediate focus. The attention of all the client management as well as your own.

While all services do, or at least should, strive for services excellence – sometimes things go wrong.  When they do, the issue should be resolved and a permanent solution put in place to prevent it happening again. Standard ITIL stuff.

But things also go very right in services delivery.

• Incidents or problems solved ahead of schedule and to the satisfaction of the client.
• A positive outcome on a project.
• A service improvement program that has delivered a real benefit to the client.
• An internal quality assurance program implemented that will help general service delivery.
• The introduction of new processes that have shown benefits.

Whatever the positives are for your business, these make up your list of positive impact.

The next step is to promote these achievements with your clients. Not at the expense of identifying and resolving the problem areas, but to show the impact that your business is having on their organisation.

If the policy of engagement is to focus merely on the negative, then over time this erodes the impression that the client has on your business.

By highlighting the positive aspects of the engagement as well as demonstrating active engagement in the negatives, the client will have their faith either restored or confirmed as to why they elected to engage with your services in the first place.

Do you big up the positive while accentiating the negative?

Photo: Scalespeeder

I was getting my daily fix of Seth Godin this morning and read his post entitled merging/emerging.

It was a quick post on how a company managers expect you to “merge” in with everyone else to suit the business.

“Emerging” is the allowance of the individual to develop in their own way to get the most out of themselves which effective leadership allows for.

The same can be applied to a project team and how a project manager manages that team.

Project manager as leader

Does the project manager create an open and trusting team relationship that allows people the creative freedom to get the job done to the best of their ability?

Or does the the project manager follow the latest PM methodology to the letter of the law and simply follow a dictated process?

Sure, a project manager is tasked with producing an end result. The project scope.

But the manner in which that is achieved will dictate the quality of the delivery and the “chi” of the team – their ability to work effectively.

The project manager must follow process to get the job done.  The project manager will ensure that work packages are clearly defined. End goals clearly visible. Budgets on track.

The effective project manager will do more than manage.

The effective project manager will lead.

The effective project manager will create a working environment that allows the team to “Emerge”.

An environment;

• Where issues are shared and addressed without fear of retribution.
• Where input is sought from the team rather than just the individual on how to approach a task or challenge.
• Where creative flair is encouraged and fostered.
• Where the status quo is unacceptable and challenged.
• Where credit is given where credit is due.
• Where guidance is given where it’s needed.

“Merging” is destructive in nature. It stifles. Far better to allow your project team to “emerge”.

What are your thoughts?

Photo: SidPix (Thanks Sid!)

“Show me the money” – the classic line from Jerry Maguire.

But how does this relate to project management?

In the movie, the character payed by Cuba Gooding Jr is looking for his agent to give him the opportunity to make some money out what he is good at – playing his sport.

When delivering a project for a client, the same applies. You are in it to make money.

That’s ok by the way. Don’t be embarrassed with that vulgar word!

How much money you make will be determined by the margin you put on top of the cost. Yes I know, obvious stuff – sorry about that.

But why is it then that so many projects don’t make that money?

And you need to be honest, they don’t all do that in your business. Some do, but some don’t!

For projects delivered by a professional project manager who’s sole focus is that project, the reasons are obvious as they have time to track and manage the project as a full time job.

For those of us in smaller businesses, delivering a project to a client just happens to be one of the million and one other things that we are doing during the day.

We simply don’t have time to track every minute spent on a project and are under so much pressure we don’t take lessons learned from previous projects into our latest ones.

This was one of the reasons why we created MyProjectTracker. So that “accidental project managers” can track, manage and understand their costs without having to stress about what they should be tracking and how.

It is so important for us all to track, understand and manage our project delivery costs. If we don’t, our businesses don’t make money. It’s that simple.

How do you ensure that you really understand how much your projects cost your business to delivery? How do you ensure your projects are making you money?

Breaking down borders is a good thing. At least normally. It facilitates closer harmony between nations and is to be encouraged.

The same applies to borders or silos in business. They are generally a bad idea and limits creativity.

But on occasion borders are needed.

The borders I’m talking about in this instance are roles and responsibilities.  The terms of engagement if you will between different areas – project teams, service delivery teams, the client or operational units.

Without defined roles and responsibilities, particularly in a project or services arena – accountability becomes diluted. When problems arise, everyone can walk away without having to deal with it. Or there is confusion on who is supposed to be doing what in an engagement.

To prevent this happening, it is critical to have roles and responsiblities established in any engagement.

• Project teams need to understand what their deliverables are and where their responsibilities stop.
• Clients need to understand the specific of any project or service delivery contract that they are engaged with.
• Operational teams need to understand the elements of any service that they are responsible for maintaining.

The definition of the project roles and responsibilities need to be agreed as part of the project scoping exercise with the client with internal teams have theirs clarified through the work packages.

Operational team should have clear definition on their engagement with any service delivery along with the necessary escalation points into other functional units.

Irrespective of the function, every team and every member of that team should understand how their roles and responsibilities deliver the end result. And also understand the parts that other teams play in the delivery also.

So while borders can be inhibitive, in some instances they do make sense. Just don’t hide behind them.

What are your thoughts?

Photo: Dmealiff

Rage against the machine – a most excellent rock band… but not the topic of this blog.

The machine I am talking about here is the one that I see day and day out in business projects and operations.

The machine that creates;

1. Pointless meetings that cost in lost man hours and achieve very little.
2. The debates on quality and consistency of delivery.
3. Over-commitment but under delivery.
4. Disappointed clients.
5. Stressed out teams.
6. Reduced productivity.

The list goes on and on. Project and operational teams the world over are guilty of some or all of these and indeed many more besides.

But why does this happen? Why do services business continue to operate in this manner?

Clients are largely responsible in many ways. With pressure on to reduce costs and the large amount of choice out there, it is easy for them to push and push project delivery houses to lower the delivery costs while asking for greater scope.

At some point the value proposition is lost in many businesses and it becomes simply a drive to offer to deliver a project more cheaply than the next guy. But a race to the bottom is not where any of us want to be.

But clients only do this because they can.

Because service delivery businesses allow them to do this. By not creating the value proposition that their business provides. By not creating the unique selling point that allows them to be more expensive than the other guy, but to still get the business.

The problem is that by reducing the selling price, then investment to make things better in the longer term because difficult and the circle starts all over again.

So try to find your value proposition. Your way of delivering projects that allows you to deliver solid quality while retaining a viable cost base and profit margin to allow you to get better and stronger.

Rage against the machine!

What are your thoughts? Is there a way of stopping the race to the bottom and the focus on simply delivering cheaply rather than with value?

Photo: IT290

Seth Godin wrote a little post this morning about digging holes for ourselves. And he’s quite right – we do!

In a project management context we dig holes when;

1. We don’t address project issues as they arise in a timely manner.
2. We don’t have a closed project scope.
3. We havn’t relayed to the customer correctly what they will be getting out of the project.
4. We under-quoted to get the job and are now trying to do things on the cheap.
5. We havn’t the right resources on the project.
6. We don’t apply lessons learned from previous projects to the latest ones.

We all have the things we don’t address when we encounter them before, during or after a project implementation.

But why don’t we address project management issues quickly?

Personally, I feel that this is mostly about fear.

• Fear of not getting the job in the first place.
• Fear of displeasing the customer if we don’t jump over ourselves to deliver the world.
• Fear of creating a bad impression with the boss.
• Fear of being “found wanting”.
• Fear of making the wrong decision.
• Fear of failure.

This is human nature. It’s natural to fear what can and does go wrong.

But fear simply makes a small hole bigger.. and bigger….

Better to stick your head above the parapet and make the touch calls when they are necessary. Hiding issues is simply delaying the inevitable and in the longer term can actually make them much larger.

Protect against fear within the project team by ensuring that they have;

• A feeling of openness and the ability to express themselves without fear of retribution.
• Iron tight processes for delivering a project.
• A “people orientated” project manager who can handle team, customer and senior management alike.

There are, I’m sure, lots more ways of ensuring that issues get dealt with quickly so those big holes don’t get dug.

What would you add to the list?

Photo: Coljay72

We have the skills that are required to make that project happen!

We’re all heard it and found out to our detriment that in fact the project supplier doesn’t have quite the right skills to make that project happen.

The chances are we’ve also told clients that we’ve capabilities available for project delivery knowing perfectly well that we don’t – or least we don’t until the order is fulfilled.

There is nothing wrong with the second approach of course unless the resources that are never brought on board and the project manager has to “muddle through” with the resources available. The consequence of this of course being problems with either delivery timelines or the quality of what’s being given to the end project client.

Would it not be better to ensure the correct project resources were available to the project manager?  Even if this means delaying the project for a few weeks?

The challenge with this is the pressure under which clients put project managers or business once the deal is close to being done. The pressure comes on to start right now.

So what’s the right approach?

• When scoping a project and agreeing timelines with a client, include the resource constraints and availability of key resources within the planning and share this with the client.
• Make them aware of options around start dates based on getting the “right people” rather than simply settling for those available.
• Share the benefits of delaying or moving dates around on the message of quality and timeliness of project delivery.
• Make them aware of the impact of rushing or starting before you, as project manager, believe that you have the right team to do the job.

Of course, this does depend on the rationality of the client.

They have an equal responsibility to listen to the options and engage with the right approach. Without a client understanding the impacts or ignoring the impacts of starting without the right resources, the project will run into trouble.

It’s important to have the “right stuff” when delivering a project.

Both project manager and project client will end up winning!

Have you a large collection of project statistics?

Do you know how long each project took. How many resources? How accurate your project budget was? Whether you delivered on time?

The usual sorts of things that are considered in each project.

Now what are you doing with them?

What project management lessons are you learning and then applying to future projects?

Are you collecting project statistics because the process says that you must?

Or..

Are you collecting the project statistics and utilising them to become better at overall project delivery?

Only one of these questions will deliver you a result!

Photo: Nickstone333

How expensive was that project you just ran?

• The salaries of the team engaged?
• The cost of the contractors?
• The cost of the materials used to complete it?

There are many direct costs that are associated with delivering a project. Most, if not all of these, are obvious costs because they can be seen.

The people, the materials that were used, the output of the project as it takes shape.

Hidden project costs

But there are also indirect costs that should be included when you consider how expensive it is to deliver a project.

For consultancy based businesses, revenues only come from the delivery of projects/services to clients.  Without those projects, the business would not exist.

In order to deliver that business, however, there is a minimal outlay that must be factored in. The general costs of running the business in order to deliver those projects or services;

1. Rent and rates.
2. Insurance.
3. Licences for the PC under the desk.
4. Training.
5. Sales costs.
6. Phone bills.
7. ……

Every one of us engaged in business is acutely aware of these costs.  But they are sometimes overlooked when it comes to costing up a project.

It is not true to say that the costs of the projects are purely those that I indicated earlier (salaries, materials for the project).

They should also include a portion of the operational costs that the business is incurring. This ensures that the project reflects an accurate gross profit margin for the business.

By fundamentally understanding the underlying costs and factoring these into each project that is being delivered out of the business, the more complete will be the understanding of the effectiveness of those projects on achieving the bottom line margins set by management.

In essence, these costs should be attributed at a project team member level so that their daily cost to the project becomes;

Salary + cost of employment + portion of operating costs

If a business does not cost its projects in this way, then understanding profitability within projects becomes impossible. It also is difficult to assess how “tightly” margins can be cut when pricing a deal i.e. at what point it starts losing money for the business.

Are measuring all of the right costs for your project deliveries?

Over-commiting project delivery dates

• We’ve all done.
• We all continue to do it.
• We all suffer the consequences in some shape or form.

I was reading this great article this morning which explained the concepts of project management as they apply to any business –including the smaller ones.

One of the areas mentioned was the whole idea of “Magic Dates”.

These are those dates that we put out to clients that we believe that they want to hear or that they have insisted that we meet.

We are so afraid of not getting the business that we agree to do the job on the basis that when it becomes a problem it’ll get dealt with at the time.

End result of over promising on a project delivery date?

Late projects or exhausted teams or poor quality or overspend! (Or all of these)

When you are planning a project, you always have learnings from previous implementations of a similar nature. You understand how long something is going to take. You have already looked at options you could put in place to reduce the timelines e.g. running activities in parallel, recruiting contractors to work on standard items etc.

• You are not making it up.
• This is your business.
• You understand it.

And then the client kicks back and all those careful estimations and plans go out the window and over-commitment steps in – those unachievable “Magic Dates”.

Instead of saying “yes”, why not try to help the client understand the delivery more.

1. Why does it take 10 days to do the design?
2. How you have already applied parallelism where it can be done.
3. How you have your top guys working on it and they simply can’t do it any faster without impacting quality.

If they still want to hit those dates and you can’t bring it in any faster – then it’s a conversation about reducing scope and delivering less.

Perhaps create a multi-phase project with phase 1 containing the key areas of what they are looking for and putting everything else in a phase 2.

It the client still doesn’t want to accept your project implementation timelines – then it’s decision time – walk away or struggle through?

Walk away sounds mad. But is it if you are going to lose money and expect to fail? Which will cause the most damage in the long term?

What are your thoughts? How do you work with clients to help them understand project timelines and how they are made up?

Photo: Loimere