Further, the way projects were managed a decade ago has evolved considerably. Existing PM professionals need to keep up with the growth trends to keep pace with the industry demands. With numerous learning and upskilling opportunities presented in today’s virtual world, what skills should a wise project manager target for upskilling or citing on their CV? 

Project Manager’s Top Skills

A Project manager’s skills can be broadly classified under 3Ps: 

• Project management skills 
• People skills 
• Personality traits

Project management skills

Every project or project context brings with it a need for unique and varied skill sets. For instance, a large project would require thorough planning skills; a project involving a large stakeholder group would require excellent governance skills; a project in a highly uncertain environment may require risk management skills. A single project could be demanding enough to require all of the skills at a time, too. A skilled project manager must be able to handle all of the above in stride. Let’s look at the key project management-related skills.   

Project management knowledge

A project manager must possess project management knowledge in terms of the processes, tools, and their interfaces with stakeholders. Large projects have many internal and external stakeholders, and processes are intertwined with stakeholders besides their workflow. For instance, managing project changes would involve the long-drawn change control procedure as well as integrating it for buy-in from the full set of stakeholders.  

Project governance and control

Upon setting up the processes, the project cannot be left to function independently. Project managers must be skilled in establishing good governance procedures that will help the projects function successfully, align the team, and control the project to the set procedures. 

Also read: Managing Project Scope from Concept to Completion – A Key Ingredient in Delivering the Desired Outcomes

Planning and scheduling

Planning includes both meta and micro-level planning, which makes planning a must-have skill in a Project manager’s CV. A Project manager is expected to be on top of the day-to-day planning like to-do lists, follow-ups, sending reports, and organizing artifacts, to name a few. 

Project managers are also expected to be pro schedulers. Project managers in the past might have simply maintained calendars or Excel spreadsheets, but for scheduling large and complex projects this is insufficient. Hence, proficiency in using scheduling software is a must demonstrate skill in the CV. Some commonly used scheduling software include Microsoft Project and Primavera P6.

Cost and risk management

While a project manager is not expected to be a cost expert in most industries, one must possess a robust understanding of the nuances of cost management from the pre-contract through post–contract stages. Controlling the costs to time-phased cash flow is important as cost is one of the primary constraints on any project. Similarly, Project managers must possess the ability to foresee potential threats and opportunities on projects and use their wisdom to mitigate the threats or enhance the opportunities. 

Also read: The Importance of Risk Management in Construction Projects

Domain and industry knowledge

Although most complex and large projects deploy technical/subject matter experts, broad domain knowledge in the industry of job function is a key point to include. Like any other professionals of today, a project manager also has to stay current with the industry trends and be adaptable to technological advancements. Project management has become steeped in digital practices over the last two years thanks to the pandemic. To demonstrate relevance, project managers must demonstrate hands-on experience in the use of project management software and tools, which vary by industry. Some examples include:

• Project management software like Wrike or JIRA
• VRBIM (Virtual Reality Building Information Modelling), which is used prominently in the architecture and engineering industries
• Digital monitoring tools like Matterport that create a digital twin of a remote project location.

Also read: Wrike vs. Asana: 2022 Review

People skills

While project management skills are easier to learn, unfortunately, there is no book or an online course that can groom the people skills in a Project manager overnight. People skills can be learned from forums offering these, but mostly from mentors, other leaders, and self reflection under various circumstances to integrate learning and keep growing.  

Emotional intelligence (EI) 

While the digital era is shaping how professionals interact, it is ironic that if a professional does not possess or grow certain skills, they may soon be easily replaced by a robot. One such skill for a Project manager is emotional intelligence. No doubt, processes and tools are catalysts for project performance, but it is people who perform the processes and use the tools. 

Project managers, as they reach the mid-senior level and work towards leadership positions, must grow their emotional intelligence if they lack in this area. Some project managers may be innately blessed with EI, however, for the rest, EI can grow through training and conscious practice. A wise project manager with good EI generally does great with teamwork, collaboration, meaningful conversations, empathy towards colleagues, and in turn wins the trust of his team and stakeholders. All of these are subtle ingredients for project success. 

Leadership and coaching 

Managers must essentially evolve to be leaders. Leading includes these skills, which overlap with previous sections, but are worth calling out on their own: 

• Setting the project vision and roadmap
• Building and aligning teams to transform the vision into a positive outcome 
• Serving the team by constantly guiding and coaching them in the journey

While managers teach and train, as a manager transforms into a leader, they must possess the skills to coach which would mean helping or facilitating team members’ learning. 

Personality traits

Some personality traits that would be sought after in a project manager are optimism to deal with challenging situations, adaptability to changing project environment, resiliency to rise up after stormy project situations, analytical problem solving and decision making, diplomacy in dealing with a plethora of stakeholders, prioritization of tasks, and adhering to ethics under any circumstance.

Demonstrate skills and document them on your CV

Knowing the top skills of a Project manager is not enough. One must be able to demonstrate the application of skills under numerous circumstances. A professional CV with demonstrated people skills and 360-degree testimonials speak for themselves. 

As you set up your CV, remember that presenting information precisely is a must-have skill for a project manager. Show this with a well-organized document where skills are bulleted or tabulated and accomplishments are quantified. Because the CV introduces you to the hiring team, it should show a reflection of your work, both in style and substance. 

The post Top Skills in a Project Manager’s CV appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Consider this situation: a workplace design and build contractor’s project is nearing completion. The excited future occupants walked through their near-complete office only to escalate to their CEO that the washrooms were not as they expected. 

When the escalation reached the Contractor, he remembered that the project requirements stated that the washroom walls and doors had to be floor to ceiling, and indeed they are executed in the same manner. He checked the finishes and fittings with the signed-off scope, and everything seemed to be in order. He made further inquiries and found that the occupants’ displeasure was that the toilets in the common core had stall partitions, which were initially a part of the landlord’s scope. However, what the Contractor missed in the signed-off scope document was the list of exclusions. 

The Contractor had no choice but to redo the toilets at his own cost, at an expedited schedule, and with more resources, which led to quality compromises and customer dissatisfaction.

We define project scope as requirements that will be included as well as those that will be excluded. The failure to fully define a project’s scope can result in lost time and increased spend.

The Journey of Scope from Start to End of the Project

Our contractor example addressed the “Why” of managing scope already. Now comes the question – “Who” will be providing the scope? 

While the project delivery approach could be within any framework — a traditional waterfall, agile, or hybrid — for a successful project, one must involve the stakeholders influencing the project outcomes from the initial stages of requirements gathering, mutual buying–in, implementing, and finally validating scope. 

The first step is to understand the stakeholders’ requirements, expectations, and problems before addressing and solving them. Understanding requirements is essential because stakeholders or requirements that get missed initially will inevitably surface later in the project. In a traditional waterfall project, requirements uncovered later are more challenging, time-consuming, and costlier to integrate.

When it comes to gathering requirements to define scope, it is essential to distinguish how scope is viewed in a waterfall and an agile approach and when it is defined in each approach. 

The “How” and “When” in Waterfall

In most waterfall approaches, the aspiration is to define one hundred percent scope, the corresponding schedule, and cost baselines before implementing the project to reduce uncertainty. In a nutshell, the project delivery is controlled to scope. In case of scope changes, formal change authorization procedures are used to approve changes to schedule and costs. It is evident in the waterfall approach, the scope is defined early in the project before implementation. 

However, there may be some overlaps during implementation for scope portions not impacting the schedule and budget. Waterfall approaches are suitable for industries where project implementation is highly material or labor-intensive; hence changes will produce a lot of waste. For instance, no one would like to build and rebuild a wall to decide where one must build a wall. 

The journey of scope in a waterfall approach is illustrated in Fig 1. 

• Once the stakeholders (Customers) from whom requirements are to be collected have been identified, the first step is to gather all the requirements. Some commonly used tools for gathering requirements include – Brainstorming, interviews, workshops with cross-functional experts, surveys, and questionnaires.

• Due to inherent project constraints and competing requirements, teams have to deliberate with the stakeholders to define and mutually agree to the scope that would help adequately meet the project outcomes.
• Subsequently, the agreed scope is implemented by the performing organization and is validated by the customer.

Fig 1: Journey of Scope in a waterfall approach

The “How” and “When” in an Agile

In agile approaches, the focus shifts from delivering to scope to achieving business outcomes early and adding value to the customer. To achieve these objectives, agile teams must be open to leveraging uncertainty in scope to value realization. 

In agile projects, the costs and schedule are fixed along with the most desired features that add customer value. The granularity of features evolves as the implementation starts, which means the features at the bottom of the list could be very sketchy initially. A customer who wants to build a new e-commerce website and wants it to be different from those existing in the market would have the essential features in the first release, and the inputs for building the website over subsequent releases may be provided and refined over time.

The journey of scope in an agile approach is illustrated in Fig 2.

•  In an agile project, the Product Owner is a single identified entity who liaises with stakeholders and helps the project team build the product backlog, prioritize the features, and refine them through the implementation.

• The set of feature(s) selected to be developed in a particular sprint or release is planned with more granularity before development. 

• Once development is complete, sprint reviews are conducted with the Product Owner and the customers for either acceptance of feature(s) or feedback. 

• Based on this, the Product backlog is refined for further development. 

Developing and managing scope can be done using collaboration software like Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel spreadsheet), Google Drive, or OneDrive where multiple user access is required, or project management software like ProofHub, SwiftKanban, or JIRA. Whichever platform you use, constant communication is the key to effective planning and managing of project scope.

Also Read: Top Confluence Software Alternatives 2021

Attention Project Managers! 

While managing project scope, there are some cautions to exercise. 

At all times, the project management team must avoid scope creep on projects. PMBOK Guide 7th Edition defines scope creep as “Uncontrolled expansion to project or product scope without adjustments to time, cost, and resources.” Scope creep often leads to schedule and cost overruns, conflicts and disputes related to costs between the performing organization and the customer, and eventually ruins relationships. Whenever additional requirements are added, it is prudent to advise the customer promptly of the possible impacts on the project deliverables and take consensus to avoid scope creep.

Isn’t it a great idea to make your customer happy by providing freebies? It may sound great at the moment. However, some freebies — like additional features not included in the original scope — may come with additional costs that the team may miss, like the cost of new components, additional resources to build it, and testing. Even if they are real freebies, there is a risk of setting precedence for higher customer expectations that may lead to customer dissatisfaction when you don’t provide similar service for later projects. Offering freebies (often referred to as ‘Gold Plating’) is not a good practice.

Manage scope to define resources

A simple ‘To do list’ would save time and several dollars during grocery shopping. As project implementation and product development are multiple times more challenging than grocery shopping, we can appreciate how important it is to have a detailed scope of what needs to be done to achieve business value within the available resources.

The post Managing Project Scope from Concept to Completion – A Key Ingredient in Delivering the Desired Outcomes appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• Fast growth of businesses that have a presence in diverse geographies
• Necessity of unique talent which is not available locally or available in a different location at an affordable price
• Reducing commute time or save overhead costs of running an office in large cities
• Covid-19 pandemic, which has imposed severe restrictions in social interactions

Jump to:

• What are some of the common challenges faced by a virtual team?
• Solutions for effectively managing virtual teams
• Building a strong team from anywhere 

What are some of the common challenges faced by a virtual team?

Developing a bond among virtual team members requires more effort as they miss small workplace talks, café catch ups, and commuting together. Bonding among the team is necessary to foster mutual trust, effective collaboration, and solving problems. With virtual teams, the opportunity to learn based on conversations or through observations or indirect conversations — known as Osmotic learning — reduces significantly. 

Another difficulty is that the possibility of learning through paralanguage  diminishes considerably, resulting in miscommunications due to perceiving information without finer aspects like facial expressions, pitch and tone of voice, and body language. 

Because of the dispersed nature of many virtual teams, members may work in different locations and coordinating time zones may hinder effective collaboration. To add to this, diverse cultural backgrounds may come in the way of effective communication.

And while leaders generally trust their teams, some leaders of virtual teams may find it challenging to ensure team productivity.

Solutions for effectively managing virtual teams

A precursor to finding solutions is to understand that a virtual team, like any other team, must meet all the criteria of any good team, which is

1. alignment to a shared vision,
2. adherence to team’s ground rules, and
3. holding space for collaboration.

Project managers can effectively manage virtual teams by implementing some or all of the solutions enumerated below:

Early team bonding

Facilitating team-building opportunities, preferable face to face, goes a long way in building relationships, especially if the team members are not familiar with each other. Team off-sites are another alternative to strengthen team bonding. If team bonding activities are virtual too, casual icebreaker games help team members get to know each other better. 

It is best to establish team norms at the time when one sets up a team. Encourage the team to mutually agree on ground rules that explicitly state the acceptable and unacceptable team behaviors. 

Also read: 6 Tips to Reduce Zoom Fatigue

Team size, structure, and calendars 

A research conducted by The Center for Creative Leadership concludes the optimal size of virtual teams as up to 9 members. Optimizing a virtual team’s size helps assign clear responsibilities and ownerships of tasks. It is also prudent to limit the number of projects a virtual team member is working on to contribute effectively, and structure the team by identifying the core and supporting team members early. Core members are the ones who are highly involved in the project to accomplish critical tasks while supporting team members are involved comparatively less. Once the team size, structure, and expected roles are decided, project teams can use generic resource calendars to determine common windows for scheduling meetings (and when not to schedule).

Establishing transparent work systems

This entails documenting the processes required to accomplish the work, assigning clear responsibilities, and a mechanism to review progress periodically. It is best practice to ensure the team agrees on responsibilities to keep the team members self-motivated. Periodic reviews using video conference calls, Kanban boards, or simple deliverable dashboards go a long way in creating an impact

Creating and following through a Communication Plan

As communication in virtual teams has gaps due to a lack of osmotic learning and leaves no opportunity to understand paralanguage, creating a clear communication plan and following it through becomes extremely important. The communication plan must include protocols as to who communicates to who, the format of communication (example – bulleted list, picture of a dashboard update, a summary report), modes of communication (example – email, phone call, videoconference), and common language for teams involving diverse cultural and departmental groups.

On fast-paced/agile projects with virtual teams or with geographically dispersed teams, planning overlapping work hours among team members who need to collaborate frequently is helpful. Team members can use shared communication hubs like Google Hangouts to post important updates. 

Day-long video conferencing links, often called Fishbowl windows, can be set up at the start of the day and live all day. The links allow spontaneous engagement amongst team members as the need arises and minimizes delays in communication.

Lastly, it is necessary to ensure that the team quickly adapts to the communication technologies and tools. Adequate training and troubleshooting support to team members to utilize the tools to their best is critical.

Also read: A Short Guide to Video Conferencing Etiquette

Assessing engagement and team productivity

In virtual teams, assessing who contributes becomes challenging to gauge. However, it is crucial to know how the team is developing, the skill gaps, hand holding for ongoing upskilling, and achieve the desired project outcomes. Project managers can assess team members’ productivity by allocating clear responsibilities and tracking status periodically. Reward and recognition go a long way in motivating virtual teams like any other team. Celebrating even the smallest of achievements and making them visible helps keep the team’s commitment and morale high.

Building a strong team from anywhere

The following will go a long way in building, motivating, and helping virtual teams deliver the best projects:

• Facilitating a positive virtual work environment that breaks virtual walls, establishing team ground rules, transparent processes, responsibilities, a mechanism to review progress; 
• Putting in place a robust communication plan backed with the proper communication technologies

Virtual teams are here to stay even post the pandemic; the sooner leaders can manage virtual teams effectively, the better will it benefit businesses.

The post Challenges and Solutions for Managing Project Teams Virtually appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Stakeholders who had to approve a critical design sign-off were on holiday during the Thanksgiving weekend, which led to a slippage of a scheduled design stage milestone. Two weeks later, the project manager brags to his customer that he still made up for the delayed milestone by requesting his team to work overtime on the design deliverables. 

The action by the project manager is a clear example of poor risk management on a project that affects the deliverable and possibly brand reputation. 

To better understand what this project manager could have done differently, we’ll examine what risks are and how they are different from issues, why risk management is essential to projects, and typical steps in managing risks on a construction project.

Jump to:

• What is a risk?
• Why is risk management critical in construction projects?
• Risk management guidelines
• Early identification and ongoing attention leads to maximum risk management

What is a risk?

Risks are possible future events that may or may not occur. If they happen, they can negatively or positively impact the project. Negative risks are threats like scheduling a critical sign-off around a holiday season, affecting the project if stakeholders are unavailable. Positive risks are opportunities. In our example, while scheduling the project, the manager missed analyzing risks (a future possibility) that may impact the project outcomes, and put undue pressure on employees. 

If a project manager looks at a big picture of the volume of product procurement for 3 of his ongoing projects, he may decide to make a bulk purchase to get products at significant discounts. His goal is to utilize the opportunity for accruing a benefit either for the project or for the organization through extra discounts or increased backlog, taking advantage of a positive risk.

Another manager is testing the fire suppression system in an ongoing project, and gets the pressure settings incorrect. Due to erroneous pressure, the water bulbs burst and caused damage to the installed furniture and carpets. While no one planned for this issue, the next step can only be taking action. 

Why is risk management critical in construction projects?

Risk management helps maximize the probability of project success by maximizing opportunities and minimizing the devastating impacts of threats. But this alone doesn’t complete the importance of risk management. If a risk triggers on a project, it may impact one or several other facets of the project like delaying the schedule, skewing resource deployment, leading to last-minute changes, and leaving the customer dissatisfied. Further, some risk mitigation measures may require careful planning in advance, especially those that interact with costs and procurement. 

For instance, consider a large commercial project in one of the growing business districts where the central power infrastructure is still under implementation. The State Government is undertaking the commission and anticipates involving many statutory approvals and laying underground cables along a high traffic highway. The project manager expects this as one of the critical project risks that may impact the timely operation of the premises. Because of the expected delays, he advises the customer to hold back a contingency for leasing generators if the power infrastructure gets delayed. 

If contingencies like this are unplanned in advance, it may jeopardize projects due to a lack of funds. A common example of risk’s close association with procurement is the insurance clause incorporated in the agreement while purchasing goods and services to make up for damages/losses during transit. 

Also Read: Best Procurement & Purchasing Software 2021 

Risk management guidelines 

Who identifies project risks and when are they identified? 

Risk identification starts as early as the project planning starts, which allows the whole team ample time to plan for the expected issues. Risk identification is a team effort. While the project manager can steer this effort, the entire stakeholders and the project team participate because everyone’s perception of risk is different. Using risk management software can help with this.

Once the team identifies risks, these get tabulated in a risk register. Many construction project management software platforms will include a risk register as part of the software so the team has a central place to document the risks. But the risk identification efforts don’t end here. The risk register is a live document reviewed periodically to implement mitigation strategies for high priority risks and keep an eye for new risks that may emerge.

On large projects, the risk register may include many risks. Analytical techniques, primarily qualitative analysis that multiply the probability of risk occurrence with its impact, helps prioritize risks. Teams can generate heat maps to visualize the most critical ones. When a risk occurrence throws up a range of possible outcomes, teams can use quantitative analysis techniques, which use computer simulation models to find a result for a range of possible inputs. 

A project manager periodically monitors mitigation measures for planned risks. Planning allows the project manager to initiate a response to potential risks based on the timing of when they could arise, allowing risk management efforts to get communicated to all the stakeholders impacted by the risk.

Early identification and ongoing attention leads to maximum risk management

Risk can be predictable, and mitigation measures can be well planned; construction projects can significantly succeed by early risk planning, identification, response implementation, and continuous monitoring. By integrating risk management to permeate with all other facets of project management, construction project managers can deliver projects successfully.

Read Next: Use Project Management for Smooth Organizational Change

The post The Importance of Risk Management in Construction Projects appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Jump to:

• Transitioning systems at the leadership level
• Implementing a change in the organization
• Change at the operational level
• A change requires planning for successful execution

Transitioning systems at the leadership level

To successfully transition a system at the leadership level, the company must organize the leadership for this project. That process happens in three steps.

Achieve buy-in from key leadership

As the need for change is assessed, the first step is to communicate this need to key leadership. This could mean different things to different organizations – leadership could be:

• the ones whose contribution and support is imperative
• those who demonstrate maximum influence among the end-users
• the functional department heads.

A buy-in is sought from the leaders. This step ensures maximum positive stakeholders within the organization to drive and deliver the transition. This also eliminates future risk of uncovering some important system or process features from a stakeholder with a great technical expertise that may be later harder to integrate or come with high costs.

Identify a task-force

The leaders together identify one change champion and a task force (made up of teams or departments) who will implement the change. This would be the team who will be involved in the day to day implementation of the transition. At times, there may be a need to identify if the entire capability to implement the change exists within the organization, subject matter experts, external suppliers or vendors are required in parts or whole. This is best identified at this stage so the internal task force can be aligned with the required competencies.

Communication to end-users

Typically, a town hall is conducted to communicate the upcoming transition to the end-users. At this time the team would articulate

• what the new system or process holds for the future
• why this change is important for the organization
• what are some benefits of this effort
• when the transition would happen

It is important to instill the change mindset in the users, clear the air about fears or hesitations that may present themselves, and enable their technical and operational preparedness to accept the transition. Despite all the efforts, some may welcome the change while some others may express concerns. Be understanding of the users when this situation arises, and give them time to acclimate to the transition in order to encourage smooth adoption.

Implementing change in the organization

There are two main steps to implement change within the organization: make a plan and follow the plan. While seemingly simple, these two steps can cause stress if not handled carefully.

Create the roadmap

The champion and the task force create the roadmap or plan for the change. This will

• Outline activities and key milestones along the transition journey
• Identify external interdependencies for deliverables from subject matter experts, vendors, and others
• Mark out important review and decision points during the development of the new system or process itself
• Establish workflow disruption points like black-outs and go-lives
• Define training and preparedness related dates

The roadmap should also include key dates for all items. A roadmap is an important artifact that helps the team plan, track and monitor the progress of implementation. Depending upon the ability of the task force to use scheduling tools, simple Kanban-style boards like Trello or more complex scheduling software like Microsoft Project or Primavera may be used.

Follow the roadmap, implementation, and acceptance

As the new processes and systems get built, it is a best practice to invite representation from user groups in addition to the leaders, champions, and taskforce for the review meetings. This will increase useful insights and feedback on the UX (user experience) that will go a long way in improving the product along the implementation cycle. For the users, it would offer a sense of being a part of the process, thus maximizing chances for successful integration into the future workplace.

Change at the operational level

While implementing a roadmap to change may feel like the end of a systemic change, you’ll need to keep in mind that turning the software, process, or system on will not guarantee buy-in. Making real change at the operational level requires training and work to fully transition the team.

Assess training needs

Depending upon whether it is an altogether new system or process or change to some parts of the systems, one needs to assess what new knowledge and skills are required by the users to successfully use the new system. It is also a good idea to check with subject matter experts or vendors who would have implemented this across many organizations and hence may be able to give handy tips on areas which need more focus from their learnings in the past.

Training modality and implementation

Several modalities of training are possible – in person instructor led; online instructor led, online self-paced, simple document review over a document that calls out the areas of change with specific actions, pairing with a mentor for ongoing support to name a few.

Picking one or multiple modalities for implementation would completely depend upon the extent of training needs, geographic spread of the users, their calendars, and what works for an organization.

The final transition

Introducing a new system or process into an organization is easier from a transition point of view than making changes or new additions to parts of the existing systems or processes. At this juncture, the first step is to identify the dependencies and parts that still rely on the prior system. This will be followed up with updating and migration of the prior system to a version compatible with the new or changed system.

Good transition plans also identify and communicate the black outs (downtimes) well in advance to the user group in order to minimize disruption to workflows. In addition, it is mission critical to ensure the planned transition related works are completed within the target downtime.

A change requires planning for successful execution

Managing change / transition is an amalgamation of involving key stakeholders for their acceptance of the idea and engagement, careful planning of the steps involved, implementation and continuous monitoring, tying in the dependencies together along with efficient and effective communication. With these kept in mind, transitions would be a huge success.

The post Use Project Management for Smooth Organizational Change appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.