The Quick-and-Dirty Guide to Getting Things Done

(MoneyWatch) 

By official definition, a project manager is a professional who plans,
organizes, directs, and controls company resources to complete specific
objectives.

Hey, wait a minute. That's your job — but no
one has ever called you a project manager. More to the point, no one has
ever trained you to work like a project manager. They just give you projects to
manage.

No doubt you feel that lack of training especially acutely in
this economy. It's no longer enough to get things done. You have to
get them done faster, cheaper, and with fewer heads than ever before. "Our
CTO started out this year saying, 'I'm seeing great work,'"
says Lisa Waits, Nokia's director of corporate business development. "'Now
just do it twice as fast.'" You know exactly what she
means.

So how do you do that? One way to manage projects better is to ask
real-life project managers how they do their jobs during some of the most
trying years of recent business history. To be sure, certified PMs learn a
whole slew of specialized methods to carry their tasks through from start to
finish, and you can't pick all that up in one sitting. Don't
worry. This CliffsNotes version boils down 44 different processes into four
replicable steps.

Be a Control Freak (at the Beginning)

A smart project manager applies the most time and effort at the
start, to prepare for a great launch, and at the finish, to meet the deadline.
If you get the start right, you can let the team take on the lion’s
share of work in the middle, argues Peter Taylor in his book, The Lazy
Project Manager: How to Be Twice as Productive and Still Leave the Office Early.
Projects too often fail at the beginning when direction, momentum, and the
right processes and controls aren’t in place. Here are a few tips for
getting off to a strong start:

Get clear on what you want to accomplish. Define the
business problem, why the problem needs to be solved, and what’s
required to solve it. Almost as important: Be specific about what the project won’t accomplish. That way, expectations are clear from the get-go.

Decide how you’ll track changes to the project. “The fault with traditional project management approaches is that
once people develop a plan, they don’t monitor the changes happening
that could change the plan,” says Philippa Fewell, a managing
director at consulting firm CC Pace. At Facebook, project managers update the
whole company as they’re developing and tweaking new features via e-mail
blasts. Designers at Method, the home-care products company, tack product plans
and sketches on the walls so that everyone can literally watch the evolution of
a new product and chime in with feedback. These tactics might not work at every
company, but the point is, be as transparent as possible as the project
progresses.

Make plan Bs. Most projects go off the rails because “we
don’t lie, but we make optimistic assumptions” about what
could really go wrong, says Frank Anbari, a Six Sigma black belt and a
professor of project management at The George Washington University in Washington,
D.C. Try this exercise: Make a list of all of the potential disasters that
could happen. Then rank the chances that each will happen on a scale of 1 to
10. Rank the size of their impact between 0 and 1.0. A
href="http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=654">numerical system
will help you prioritize where to put the majority of your energy.

Hot Tip

Run a Tight Ship, Creatively

Nokia’s Waits insists that her Friday meetings
start on time. To get her team to comply, she adopted a simple strategy: If you’re
late, you pay $1 into the beer fund. “It’s a fairly common
scrum technique, but it works,” she says.

Don’t Abuse E-mail

By many accounts, a project manager spends up to 90 percent of
her time on some form of communication. But the sheer amount of time you spend
communicating doesn’t mean you’re actually getting through
to anyone.

“Here’s what happens with e-mail,”
says Waits. “We’re mostly jotting down thoughts. There’s
no feedback loop, no context, no follow-up. Thirty to forty percent of our
miscommunications happen because of e-mail.”

The solution?
href="http://blogs.pmi.org/blog/voices_on_project_management/2009/08/the-right-information-for-the.html">Lynda
Bourne, a blogger for the Project Management Institute, recommends you
separate push and pull communications. Limit what you push out to your team via
e-mail to short highlights and issues that require immediate action. Put
detailed reports and reference material in a central location like a wiki or a
shared drop box, where team members can grab them when needed. For everything
else, pick up the phone or get out of your chair.

Danger! Danger! Danger!

You’re Not the Boss of Everyone

When you’re leading a project that includes
employees from other departments, you may think you’re in charge, but
you’re not, says Harold Kerzner, senior
executive director of the International Institute for Learning and author of
project management textbooks. Employees’
loyalty lies with the people who determine their raises and performance reviews
— their managers. Cultivate relationships early on with those
supervisors by keeping them abreast of the project’s progress and the
accomplishments of their direct reports.

Put Out Fires Quickly

You will encounter unforeseen bumps in the road. Accept and plan
for that now. In Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management,
Scott Berkun, a former program manager for Microsoft’s biggest
projects, offers advice for dealing with unexpected catastrophes. Here’s
a condensed version of his steps to get a project back on track:

1. Calm down. Nothing makes a situation worse than basing
   your actions on fear, anger, or frustration.
2. Evaluate the problem in relation to the project. Just because someone
   else thinks the sky has fallen doesn’t mean that it has. Is this
   really a problem at all? Whose problem is it? How much of the project is at
   risk or may need to change? Put things in perspective and then prioritize when
   you will act: emergency (now!), big concern (today), minor concern (this or
   next week), or bogus (never).
3. Get the right people in the room. Any major problem won’t affect
   you alone. Identify who else is most responsible, knowledgeable, and useful,
   and get them together right away. Keep this group small; the more complex the
   issue, the smaller the group should be. Offer your support, but get out of
   their way (seriously — leave the room if you’re not
   needed). Don’t let the meeting break up without identifying who will drive
   the resolution.
4. Explore alternatives. After answering any questions and
   clarifying the situation, list your options.


5. Make the simplest plan. Weigh the options and pick the best
   choice.


6. Execute. Make it happen — and make sure whoever drives the action
   plan has an intimate understanding of why he’s doing it.
   
7. Debrief. After the fire is out, get the right people in
   the room again and generate a list of lessons learned.

Voice of Experience

Catch Balls Before They Drop

“When people don’t understand their
roles very well, things fall between the cracks. Someone thinks it’s
someone else’s job. I always ask my team, ‘If you see a
ball dropping, let me know, even if you don’t think it’s
yours. We’ll deal with it.’”

— Bill Wallace, engineering
group manager for the Volt battery at General Motors

Always Do a Postmortem

Taking stock of what you and your team learned from this project
will make your life much easier next time. But don’t let your
postmortem turn into a free-for-all. The goal is not to air any and every
complaint, but to come away from the project with a clear idea of the processes
that worked and those that didn’t. Here are four keys for making the
most of a post-project meeting:

Pick an outsider to run it. Go with someone neutral —
maybe another project manager or department head — who will stay
unemotional, says Neal Whitten, a project consultant whose clients have
included Bristol-Myers Squibb, Liberty Mutual, and Lockheed Martin.

Set the ground rules. No BlackBerrys or iPhones allowed;
attendance is mandatory; everyone has the right to speak; attack problems, not
people.

No homework before the meeting. If you ask employees to
evaluate dozens of parts of the project in advance, you’ll end up with
an overwhelming number of items to discuss. Instead, use the meeting to
identify via consensus the top three things the team did well and the three
that need the most work.

Take action. Make the lessons learned a prominent part of
the planning process of your next project. For example, evaluate the
performance of the employees who were linked to the top three problems to
figure out if you’ll need a different mix of skills and experience on
the team next time.

More on BNET

• Lessons From the World's Best Project Managers


• How Three Project Managers Stayed on Track