Forward Momentum: Delivering Results

By Rob Zell
This is part 1 of a 3-part series. This article is aimed at learning organizations.

I’ve worked in several organizations supporting schools, restaurants and retailers, and in every one the question is always, “How do we make the learning stick?” In schools, the goal is to make sure students can remember the information to be prepared for college level work or at least to be productive members of society. In business, the goal is to be prepared for challenges in the work place. I’m going to tackle this topic over the next three blog posts: first, what should learning departments do to impart knowledge; second, what should learners do to enhance their retention; and finally, what should managers do to reinforce learning.

1. Build a Better Mousetrap

Learning organizations spend countless hours figuring out the best way for people to learn new knowledge and behaviors that will drive the success of the business. Unfortunately, many organizations get stuck in a rut and find it difficult to break out of their routine of delivering training the same way, time and time again. They produce job aids that look the same or more booklets in a series. The problem isn’t one of creating an internal brand; the problem is that given the available resources it is often easier to use an existing model than to branch out into new territory. For example, the job aid created to help new employees navigate the company intranet is not necessarily the best template to use for other skills.

2. Start With the End in Mind

It doesn’t matter if you are training project management or selling skills, the same set of rules apply to create highly effective training materials.

1. Identify the behavior that you desire and ask what the person needs to know to perform.
2. Design tools that present that information in a way that appeals to multiple learning styles.
3. Provide learners a chance to process the information and try it out through problem solving or experimentation.

This is a very high level look at the tasks of designing the right training tool and there are many steps in between.

3. Provide a Total Solution

You may have an elegant solution in mind but to really serve the organization you should look at the whole performance picture. What obstacles keep people from performing? Are their barriers in terms of time, technology, or other resources? Is the desired behavior currently being rewarded or is it unknowingly punished? For example, while working for a retailer we identified that employees rarely moved onto the sales floor to provide service or suggestively sell. The operations team came to us wanting more “Selling Skills” training. As part of our review of the performance we gave the operations team feedback that the highest priority in the store was placed on “reducing the wait time in line” and customers often became agitated if employees on the floor didn’t open a new register. So along with training materials we also recommended a dedicated floor person and staffing solutions that would keep them on the sales floor helping customers. We also recommended making a change to the Mystery Shopper questions such that on peak nights, the presence of a floor person was a critical success measurement.

4. Don’t Get Caught in a Rut

Learning organizations often go back to the well of ideas when presented with a new challenge. There is comfort and stability in using the tried and true methods: they are easy to use and modify; they are familiar to management and to the end users; and they have proven effectiveness. As long as you have sound success measures in place and you can prove the value of the training, there is no concern. But if you do find yourself in a rut and you seem to be training and retraining the same skills, you should consider challenging yourself and your learning team to develop some new ideas or exploring new spaces.

Reflect on the solutions you have provided your organization in recent months. Do they target the desired behavior or did other non-relevant info sneak in? Are there other factors contributing to poor performance besides lack of training? Are you delivering a hammer because in the past you created great hammers so you keep modifying the hammer design? You fix these things in your organization and in the next post I’ll look at how learners can enhance their own learning experience after they’ve received your elegant solutions.

By Bruce Beer, PMP

Note: This is Part 2 of the Keeping Your Project on Track series. Click here to read Part 1, Keeping Your Project on Time.

The first in this series of “Keeping Your Project on Track” dealt with how to keep your project on track with regard to time. Now let us turn our attention to one of the other key baselines – cost. If you have ever managed a project that has come in over budget you may already realize that this is not entirely or fully appreciated by management! So, how do we keep within budget?

Before we can hope to keep within budget, the first thing we must do is to set a realistic and comprehensive cost baseline, or budget, to keep within. Everyone knows that one of the key elements of cost is the cost of your resources. Most of us know that to determine this cost we need to identify ALL scope, create a Work Breakdown Structure once we have identified all deliverables, break deliverables down into activities, allocate a resource or skill level to that activity, then estimate a duration. At this stage we can calculate a cost for each activity by multiplying the daily rate for the resource due to perform that activity by the duration. Once this is done for every activity (strongly suggest you use a scheduling tool such as Microsoft Project or similar) we can aggregate all these costs into one overall cost for the project – a bottom-up estimate of resource costs.

What many people don’t realize is that this is NOT the budget – there are other costs involved to create the budget, and some can be significant. These include items such as:

• Project Management/PMO costs
• Subcontractor costs
• Outsourcing costs
• Cost of quality (design, measurement, hardware, software, testing, inspection, etc)
• Risk contingency
• Cost of communication (time to create, disseminate, read, respond, etc)
• Costs of hardware, software, applications, tools, etc. you require to complete the project
• Cost of facilities and utilities, etc. if they are allocated to your project
• Travel costs (transport, accommodation, living expenses, etc)

Once we have identified all estimated costs for the project based on a firm solid knowledge of scope, we need to ensure the unexpected does not come along and rock our financial boat. Two key elements that can throw our carefully created cost budget off track are additional costs due to risk and changes.

To ensure we have allowed ample funds for known risk, we should ensure good risk management practices are followed – identifying as many things that can go wrong as possible, allocating the relevant amount of contingency funding for each, then combining these into a project risk contingency fund. 

Change itself is often good for a project – it can breathe new life into a project, improve functionality, and generally make the end result better. However, the downfall of many a PM is the dreaded “scope creep” or uncontrolled change. Each PM should have access to their company’s formal change management methodology, or if there is no such thing, create and distribute one to all stakeholders. Everyone should know that if they want a change they should request it in writing and give it to the PM (always the PM, never anyone else). The PM will log the request to enable them to track progress, ensure an impact analysis is completed detailing any additional scope, time, and cost required to implement the change, then give this to someone who is qualified to authorize the change (normally the customer). Providing a PM does not implement any change at all without prior authorization, their project (and probably career), are as well protected as possible.

In the final reckoning, when managers ask whether the PM has met their cost targets, the PM should add all the authorized additional cost of changes to the original budget and compare that to actual cost. Providing the PM has done a good job on risk contingency planning and rigidly enforced change management, they should be looking for promotion, pay raises, bonuses, appreciation from your management, and an enhanced reputation. Failure to identify and cost all scope to be included in the project, failure to identify and allow for risks that can try and throw you off track, and failure to manage change correctly will certainly lead to all things unwanted, like over time and over budget project delivery, and long waits in the employment agency whilst looking for your next job.

Once a PM has identified the budget correctly allowing for risk and rigidly controls changes, then regular monitoring of costs during the lifetime of the project will enable identification of problems at the earliest opportunity. So what do you do if, despite excellent planning, costs start to exceed estimate and you can see defeat staring you in the face? If this is a cost driven project where cost is the priority, the first step would probably be to remove some scope until costs come back under control. When defining scope you probably defined the “must haves”, the “wouldn’t it be nice ifs” and the “bells & whistles”, so when looking for some scope to remove, we can look first at the bells & whistles, then possibly at the wibnis. Using Earned Value Management throughout the implementation of the project would help identify cost issues as early as possible, thereby enabling you as PM to step in and start corrective action as soon as possible.

To summarize, the key to bringing projects in on budget are:

1. Good scope definition to ensure everything is included during cost estimation
2. Good estimation of ALL project costs, not just team resources
3. Good risk identification, quantification, and contingency funding and planning
4. Very tight change management throughout the project from all stakeholders (including the customer!) such that no changes are implemented unless correctly authorized
5. Regular cost monitoring during the life of the project, resulting in prompt action to correct slipping costs and bring the project back on track.

By Kathy Martucci, PMP

What’s the first thing that pops into your mind when someone speaks of a non-productive team member? Is it, “Well, he needs to shape up!”?

Maybe, maybe not. We can all agree that ultimately the team member must be productive or leave the team for the good of everyone. But who is responsible for identifying the nonproductive behavior and providing an environment and actions to correct it?

Perhaps the responsibility rests with fellow team members.  If individuals want to be part of a successful team, they take the initiative to find out why a team mate is struggling. Therefore, a team member who doesn’t take the initiative because it’s not their job (or for a host of other reasons) is not functioning as a productive team member either. It’s this responsibility for each other’s performance that differentiates a team from other business units.

If the issue can’t be resolved at the team member level, it must be escalated to the project manager before the teammate’s nonperformance hurts the morale and/or work product of the team.  So, then what? Some of the strategies that can be employed to resolve the problem are as follows:

• Be brutally honest about where the problem is

If the real cause of the behavior is truly outside of the person’s control, admit it and seek to fix it. If it lies within the person’s control, be clear about it and craft an action plan that can be followed to improve performance.  Set a reasonable deadline to measure that improvement.

• Be empathetic, but not wimpy

Show sincere regard for the person’s performance and an honest desire to guide her to the desired performance. At the same time, be clear that the team can’t be negatively impacted while one person is making adjustments.

• Be inventive

Unforeseen circumstances are typical of projects. And people are the vital ingredient in projects, particularly when trying to solve problems. Encourage the non-productive person to fully contribute to the action plan and its implementation and evaluation.

• When all else fails

If you’ve exhausted all reasonable avenues, make a decision and stick by it. Decisive action on an unredeemable team member will benefit both the team member (whether he admits it or not) and the team who wants to hit the level of performance required by any project.

By Vicki Wrona, PMP

In the great symphony of life, everyone plays an important role, from the conductor to each instrument. Such it is with project management. If we have a team member that doesn’t pull their weight on the project, either by not delivering, by being tardy, producing incomplete or sloppy work, etc. it brings the whole team down.

Can the team still deliver a successful project with a team member like this? Sure. But at what cost? If it takes more effort on the part of certain individuals or creates more discourse among the team, is it worth it?

We may not always have the luxury of replacing a person, but better to replace that person or remove them altogether than to suffer. However, as managers or as fellow team members, we are often too slow to do this or to escalate the problem to the appropriate authorities. We fear the outcome. How can the project get done without this person or this role? Maybe it cannot, and so we must make do. But maybe it can still get done, and the energy saved by not having to constantly hound this person can be put toward doing their work instead.

In the long run, we may expend less energy to produce the same product. To the untrained person, that sounds like more work, but actually it isn’t. Producing more work with fewer resources is what management wants us to do and is almost always seen as a burden. However, we may possibly be able to do that without having to put in more work individually.

Again, how much energy do we expend by worrying about a troublesome or unreliable person on the team, by constantly following up with them, by chasing them down when they don’t answer, and by scrambling to produce work when they don’t come through? It sounds risky to remove them altogether, but maybe it’s the easier thing to do after all.

What do you think?