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Top Project Management Trends 2012

A panel of experts at ESI has put together an interesting list of the top project management trends they forecast for 2012.

eTask and Experimentus at EuroSTAR

eTask-it partners with Experimentus at EuroSTAR, the 19th Annual European Software Testing conference in Manchester this week.

eTask-it launches free 30-day trial

At eTask-it we like to try, test and discover how things work by using them. We think there are a lot of people out there that feel the same and that's why we decided to offer a 30 day free trial.

The human side of Project Management

Project Managers should focus on people rather than administrative tasks.

According to the dictionary, a community is "an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location or sharing a common interest".  The same definition can be equally applied to projects, where interacting individuals work together towards a (hopefully) common goal.

But while the word "community" evokes images of people talking to each other, sharing ideas, discussing and taking decisions together, the term "project" is usually associated with flow-charts, Gantt and other technical stuff.  This technocratic view of project management is not completely wrong, as these items are a necessary infrastructure to ensure efficiency and compliance, but it is extremely limiting since the human component is often in the critical path, so to speak, of any project.

Project managers are not F1 pilots, driving a well oiled machine with precise components perfectly engineered to deliver the optimal response to the driver's input. PM are more akin to orchestra directors trying to meld a group of individual voices into a cohesive musical ensemble.  But as any sport coach will be able to tell you, transforming a group of individuals into a team is not a question of rules or tactics, it's about giving purpose, creating a shared sense of identity and an intangible team spirit that translates into a total that it is more than the sum of its parts.

The role of the project manager then is to create the proper environment for the project resources to become a team, to motivate them to see the bigger picture and go beyond simply performing their assigned tasks. It is a complicated activity, requiring both personal skills and the proper tools to foster collaboration and the quick flow of information within the team. Most importantly it's a human activity that needs to leverage and accommodate personal abilities, characters and attitudes. Overall, coaching and managing should take a significant percentage of the Project Manager time in each project, unfortunately this is not often the case because, without the proper support tools, Project Managers spend most of their time firefighting, running around patching things up rather than really planning and managing the work of the team.

Advanced Project Management and Project Automation tools are crucial for empowering the Project Manager to concentrate on managing people instead of processes. The right tool can eliminate useless administrative tasks, increase transparency and enable instant team collaboration, clearing the path for the Project Manager to spend time on solving problems and actively coaching the team resources. On the other hand, the wrong tool (or no tool at all) means wasting time looking for status updates, attributing responsibilities and sharing information, bogging down the PM in the minutiae of the project rather than what makes the final result successful or not.

Project Managers are often resistant to the changes that a Project Automation tool injects in their traditional working flow and cling to outdated working customs, like the weekly, manually updated Excel spreadsheet with magnifying glass-size fonts. PMs may thinks that it allows them flexibility but instead it robs them of the opportunity to concentrate on what is really important to achieve a successful project: managing the people that work on it.

Top 5 Tips for Project Success

Key ingredients for a successful project.

The not-so-secret fear of any project manager is for their project to fall under the "spiralling time and budget" curse.

How to avoid this sad fate? Based on our experience, we have found five things that most successful projects have in common. These are by no means the only important items to achieve project success but without them the chance of failure increases exponentially.

1) Start from a good framework (or the "80/20 rule"). Every project is different. Actually not! Every project may have unique requirements but the methodology, the delivery process and, let's face it, most of the tasks are pretty similar to previous projects of the same kind. As a general rule, I'd say that about 80% of most project is almost identical to a previous implementation of a similar service, and only 20% is different. This 20% is clearly crucial, it's the difference between delivering to the customer a blue, four-doors saloon car or a red, two-doors coupe. Starting from a robust framework model that makes the standard 80% as easy and effective to implement as possible, means not only the ability to deliver consistent services, but also to concentrate attention and energies on that crucial 20% that makes real difference for the customer.

2) Get the documentation structure in place. A project result is only as good as the documentation that drives and supports the deliverables. Find or create templates, instructions and guidance to create all the documentation for the project. This will avoid an enormous amount of time wasting and it will make sure that all team members know what they need to do, how and what is the exact output they have to produce.

3) Right people in the right place. It's important to have the right people but equally important to place them where they can work at their best. Select based on experience, personality, business sense, qualifications or any other metrics you want to use, but think about how to manage your resources in the most effective way.

4) Selectively micromanage. Too much micromanagement is obviously a bad thing as it creates bottlenecks, delays and tension within the team. On the other hand, Project Managers need to be involved and to know when intervention is required to keep things on track. It's a fine balance that needs to be achieved, but the PMs have a vantage point on the whole project that other team members lack, and they need to use it to zoom-in and help when a task is particularly critical, a resource over-streched or there is a conflict of some kind between different activities.

5) Control "during", not "post". The ability to find mistakes when they occur is crucial, but even more important is to spot hem BEFORE they happen. A mistake means re-work, re-testing, re-approving. It means delays, going over budget and probably impacting the rest of the project too. So spotting errors before they happen can be the difference between success and failure. To do so, the project managers need the tools and the skills to control the project's tasks and activities while they happen, in the same way a head-chef controls the actual making of a dish and doesn't just taste the results. The project manager's experience is fundamental in dictating what parts of the projects can benefit from heightened supervision. An efficient risk log can be a good tool to support this supervision, but ultimately it's the PM that needs to decide where particular attention is required.

Following these five tips will not guarantee the success of your project but they will definitely go a long way towards reducing risks and uncertainties, especially if you use an efficient professional services automation (PSA) software like eTask-it.