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I overheard this conversation at work one day: Manager Shannon: “Jamie, I know you’re doing the usability assessments on the Canary project right now. Several other projects are also interested in usability assessments. How much time do you spend on that?” Team Member Jamie: “About eight hours a week.” Manager Shannon: “Okay, so you could work with five projects at a time then.”

Do you see any flaws in Shannon’s thinking? Five times eight is forty, the nominal hours in a work week, so this discussion seems reasonable on the surface. But Shannon hasn’t considered the many factors that reduce the time that individuals have available each day for project work: project friction (as opposed to interpersonal friction, which I’m not discussing here).

There’s a difference between elapsed hours on the job and effective available hours. If people don’t incorporate friction factors into their planning, they’ll forever underestimate how long it will take to get work done.

Task Switching And Flow

People do not multitask—they task switch. When multitasking computers switch from one job to another, there’s a period of unproductive time during the switch. The same is true of people, only it’s far worse. It takes a little while to gather all the materials you need to work on a different activity, access the right files, and reload your brain with the pertinent information. You need to change your mental context to focus on the new problem and remember where you were the last time you worked on it. That’s the slow part.

Some people are better at task switching than others. Maybe I have a short attention span, but I’m pretty good at diverting my focus to something different and then resuming the original activity right where I left off. For many people, though, excessive task switching destroys productivity. Programmers are particularly susceptible to the time-sucking impact of multitasking, as Joel Spolsky (2001) explains:

“When you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once.”

When I was a manager, a developer named Jordan said he was flailing. He would work on task A for a while, then feel guilty that he was neglecting task B, so he’d switch to that one, accomplishing little as a result. Jordan and I worked out his priorities and a plan for allocating time to tasks in turn. He stopped flailing and his productivity went up. Jordan’s task-switching overhead and priority confusion affected both his productivity and his state of mind. [Read More…]

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Read Alaine Nadeau’s blog post at the link below:

For 30 years, my main motivation as a leader and entrepreneur has been the certainty of facing new challenges, finding solutions, and overcoming them as a team. To date, the global pandemic has been the most challenging crisis our company has faced. How can we navigate these trying times? In which ways can we help slow the spread of COVID-19? Should we abandon our current business processes, policies, and procedures until things get back to normal? How do we lead employees post-covid?

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that businesses are innovative, powerful forces — made up of inventors, designers, dreamers, and doers. As a project management software company, it is my strong belief that collaboration tools can be a huge part of the solution. By addressing our skills with the ongoing problems, we can work toward creating the type of workplace we all need during this time of uncertainty. That’s where we can make a difference.

The Future Of The Workplace Is Remote

While the shift to remote working was already well underway, the pandemic has certainly put the work-from-home trend on a fast track. As restrictions ease, we wonder if “business as usual” will look, well, usual.

Nearly two years after the start of the pandemic, it has become clear that this will be the situation for a while yet. Like many other companies navigating the uncertainties of the times, we have been revamping our processes to ensure we work better together even when we’re apart. Of course, it’s a learning curve. There are still so many questions. What are the new expectations for turnaround? How flexible should the workday be; which hours should everyone be present? Which channels are appropriate for which types of conversations? What does a meeting now look like? It might take some figuring out, but remote working is here to stay. It will continue to grow and bring new opportunities for business application developers and those in the technology sector. [Read More…]

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Black indicates that, “the Work Package is at the lowest level of project planning, control and reporting. The challenge in developing work packages is to connect all of them to some element of the project scope so that all the work required to support the stakeholder requirements is planned, authorized, allocated, tracked, and completed. When all of the work packages are completed, the project is completed” (Black, 2002). Read William Malsam’s blog post at the link below, and return to comment on how breaking work down into work packages has benefited your project management in the past.

For a project to be successful, you need to get organized. By providing structure to your project scope, you get some control over the project work and increase the chance that you’ll succeed.

Before you get started, you need to figure out every step in the project scope. That’s where a work package comes in.

What Is a Work Package?

A work package is a sequence of activities that leads to a deliverable when using a work breakdown structure (WBS). to map your project scope. In a sense,it’s a sub-project of the larger project.

There’s a difference, however, between a work package and an activity in a project. A work package is at a higher level in the WBS hierarchy than an activity.

This distinction is important for project managers, but not critical to the success of a project. Whatever language you use to define these building blocks as you fill in your WBS, they all lead to the same destination—the completion of your project.

Work packages are used in earned value management projects to integrate schedule, cost and scope management data to measure project performance…Read More »

The post What Is a Work Package in Project Management? A Quick Guide appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Black, F. W. (2002). Top down-bottom up project management. Paper presented at Project Management Institute Annual Seminars & Symposium, San Antonio, TX. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

MacAdam states that the goal of applying Lean to project management is “to reduce the amount of time required to complete each project by eliminating wasteful activities, and increasing the amount of time spent on value-added tasks. Doing so will create more value for the customer at lower cost, and the benefits from the project will be realized sooner” (MacAdam, 2009). Read Peter Landau’s blog post at the link below, and then return to comment on ways you have successfully implemented lean principles into your project activities.

All businesses must make money in order to remain solvent and stay in business. The need for profitability is clear—how you get there is the tricky part.

One way is to deliver more value to your customers while creating less waste for the business. This is commonly called lean project management.

What Is Lean Project Management?

Lean project management focuses on delivering a manufacturing project with more value and less waste. It does this by systematically eliminating waste in the value stream of the lean manufacturing process.

To work, lean project management relies on continuous improvement. That means that every process in the overall business value stream is improved by applying the principle of greater value, reduced waste.

Lean manufacturing was developed by Toyota, which is why it uses Japanese words to refer to the elimination of waste in a manufacturing system (muda), waste created by overburden (muri) and waste that comes about because of uneven workloads (mura).

The lean manufacturing methodology has 5 lean principles, value, value stream, pull system, continuous flow and perfection. We’ll learn about those below.

…Read More »

The post An Introduction to Lean Project Management appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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MacAdam, T. (2009). Lean project management: slashing waste to reduce project costs and timelines. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2009—North America, Orlando, FL. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

Read Shawn Dickerson’s post on Project Time Management Strategies at the link below:

Time is not on your side when it comes to project management. Work piles up and deadlines approach quickly. While project managers haven’t figured out how to bend time and space to their bidding, there are time management techniques that you can use to manage the time you spend on tasks.

No, it’s not science fiction, it’s project time management. Managing project time requires planning, scheduling, monitoring and control tasks throughout the project life cycle. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.

What Is Project Time Management?

Project time management is the project management process of analyzing work and developing a timeline to ensure you complete a project within a particular schedule.

There are six steps when managing project time:

1. Define Activities: Define all the tasks necessary to produce the project’s final deliverable.
2. Sequence Activities: Set the order of the tasks and deliverables.
3. Estimate Resources: Identify what resources are needed (as well as the quantity) to complete tasks and produce deliverables.
4. Estimate Duration: Figure out how long each task will take to complete and estimate the duration of the entire project timeline.
5. Develop Schedule: Using the above information, create a project schedule.
6. Control Schedule: Develop a strategy to mitigate risk and address changes to the project schedule when it’s executed.

The time management steps above require input from your project team, but also stakeholders and other parties involved in the project in order to be as accurate as possible. Your project time management plan is not static, and must be reviewed and revised throughout the life cycle of the project.

…Read More »

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All projects have risks, but not all risks are the…Read More »

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You identify them, record them, monitor them and plan for…Read More »

The post How to Make a Risk Management Plan appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Projects are successful when they end on time and within…Read More »

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What is a Risk Register? A risk register is a tool in risk management and project management. It is used to identify potential risks in a project or an organization, sometimes to fulfill regulatory compliance but mostly to stay on top of potential issues that can derail intended outcomes.

While the risk register is mostly used during the execution of the project, it’s part of your risk management plan, which must be given serious consideration by project managers during the project planning phase. There is no time too early to start thinking about risk analysis in your project. Therefore, having a project risk register on hand and ready is essential in managing risk.

While the risk register is mostly used during the execution of the project, it’s a tool of risk management, which must be given serious consideration during the phase. There is no time too early to start thinking about risk in your project. Therefore, having a risk register on hand and ready is essential in managing risk.

The project risk register includes all information about each identified risk, such as the nature of that risk, level of impact risk, who owns it and what are is the risk response mitigation measures in place to respond to it. Download our free risk register template for Excel.. It’s a great risk register example.

…Read More »

The post What Is a Risk Register & How to Create One appeared first on ProjectManager.com.
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Organizational change is a tricky business. There is seemingly endless ambition to progress change initiatives, but sadly practicalities like time and budget always appear to be at a premium. Having competent people on the team who are capable of getting on and getting things done is crucial.  Yet even with competent people on the team, one perennial challenge is the coordination of work. Even if there were world-class people on the team, if they are working in silos and there’s a lack of communication then there would be a problem.

I find it fascinating to watch how quickly Formula 1 pit stops take place (if you’ve never seen this, there are plenty of examples on YouTube). It’s clear that pit stops have been refined, rehearsed, and improved to the point where tires can be changed in just a couple of seconds. There are clear tasks, everyone knows when the car is coming in, and everyone knows what they are doing and how what they are doing fits in with the broader aim (the broader aim, presumably, being to win the race!). I can’t begin to imagine how complicated the technology and engineering that takes place in formula 1 is, yet still this process has been refined so that it consistently works.

Of course, our lives in projects are significantly different to Formula 1. We don’t have the complexity of tires and engines, but we do have complexity of stakeholders and existing processes. We won’t be changing tires, but we may well be making changes to a customer facing process, IT system, organizational unit, etc. Our work isn’t perhaps as repeatable as a Formula 1 pit stop, yet the coordination of work is crucial.  Imagine if a pit stop took place without the usual choreography, and if one of the engineers had to ask “umm, am I changing the front left or the front right tire…. Oh hang on, I thought you were on the back tires?” It would be far less slick, and possibly even hazardous as the car might come in before it was expected…

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