Project Team Blog

Project management advice: Track your project time.

Organizations perform projects for a lot of reasons.  Consulting companies perform the same projects (often with small changes) for every customer.  Manufacturing and engineering companies build things, requiring complex engineering projects.  Government organizations perform IT and data processing projects.  Every one of these can benefit from tracking project time.

Whether you use a timesheet or computer-based timer, tracking your time provides several advantages.  Some managers have no real idea how long their projects take.  They have a gut-feeling, but no hard numbers.  And trusting your gut only works when steeped in actual numbers from the field.

No more guessing
WIth actual numbers behind you, there’s no need to guess.  You have the hard facts, and they cannot be disputed.

Accurate finish dates
Assuming you have have performed a similar project in the past, setting a finish date will be a no-brainer.  You’ll have details to back up your outrageously long schedules.

Concise records
This is crucial for consulting companies.  Client billing depends on accurate numbers to back up your invoices.  But manufacturing and engineering groups also need good records to back up their project cycles.  In the end, clients and managers want to know what you have been up to.

–ray

Have you ever used a scrum burn-down chart?  Funky name, huh?  It’s actually a pretty handy line chart.  The image below is an example from Standard Time®.  There, it’s called a project history chart.

On the X axis, you see time (weeks, months, quarters).  On the Y axis (vertical) you see the number of remaining hours for your project.  As work is applied to the project, it burns remaining hours down to zero.  Team members can see the downward trend and predict when the project will finish.  This is the “light at the end of the tunnel” chart that helps people push for completion.  Show this in your scrum sprint meetings, and your team members will take heart.

Scrum Burn-Down Chart

 As you can see, there are some up-ticks as well.  Those represent project scope changes.  Some bright individual decided the project needed a slowdown, and added some additional tasks.  Do that at your own peril, because this chart shows all.

–ray

Something finally occurred to this week.  People care (mostly) for themselves.  I’ve been observing some people recently, and have noted their project participation.  When there’s something in a project for them personally, they go gangbusters to finish it.  And when there’s nothing, they lose interest and quit.  At least, mentally that is.  Be it financial gain, or street cred, or just looking good.  There must be something in it for them.

I may be a little slow, but I had never really studied this aspect of human behavior.  I just thought people worked hard for their company and that was that.  Not so.  They work strictly for themselves.  And now that I look back on my career, I see the same pattern.  My own career was carefully crafted to climb the ladder of success.  If a project didn’t fit that model, I found a way out.  If it did, I worked it for all I was worth.  I wasn’t greedy with my time, but eventually gravitated toward projects that benefited me.  That’s not selfish, it’s just natural.

Knowing that gives me something to work with.  It means I must find ways to help people succeed in the projects I expect their help with.  I must find a clear benefit for each team member.  If there’s nothing in it for them, I should expect them to grow disinterested and mentally quit.  Sounds like a real challenge!

–ray

Project management advice: Every project needs a champion.

It took me a while to understand the nature of product development and the need for project champions.  At the beginning of my career, I believed projects just “got developed.”  I was working in a research department at Eastman Kodak Company, building cutting edge photocopiers.  Engineers buzzed around, building microprocessor-based circuits, image-enhancing emulsion, and writing software.  I did my part and just expected the product to come together.  Looking back, I now realize there was one man who made it all happen: a gray-bearded old dude who wanted to change the industry.

Products get developed, and projects finished, only when there is someone with the burning desire to see it happen - like the old bearded dude in the example above.  A paycheck is not enough.  You have to want it badly.  Only then will you fight through all the obstacles to make it happen.  Projects often take 2-3 times their original estimates, and some required several iterations to realize the full glory.  And only a true champion will endure the suffering to see it to completion.

Look around at your project.  Do you have a champion?  A person who refuses to give up?  If not, you have good reason to fear that the project could be canceled or back-burnered.  Have you personally ever been a project champion?  If not, give it a try.  Throw yourself into something that really engages your passions.  You’ll find there’s satisfaction in a job well done.

–newshirt

Being consistent in your management style and personality is important for success. One of the first lessons in parenting is being consistent.  If you discipline your child one time for something, but then ignore that same thing a different time, you are sending a confusing mixed message.  Obviously, your project team members are not children, but the principle still applies.

Our teams depend on us for leadership and direction. As managers, if we are on a roller-coaster of emotion, our project teams will be all mixed up.

My manager when projects are late

Inconsistent behavior stifles creativity and does not allow a tolerable environment for ideas to be exchanged.  If a team member is not sure how you will react from one day to the next, they are less likely to be forthcoming with ideas and suggestions.

No matter how crazy a project becomes or how much stress leaders are under, we must be the model of consistency.  Like the commercial says, “never let them see you sweat.”

–Warren

Feature Creep: Small product feature additions that unexpentantly expand a project scope.

Feature creep is one of the big reasons projects ship late.  Some people simply cannot deny themselves.  They want more and more features in their great new product, and can’t stop adding them  Here’s how it happens.

When a new product feature is complete, there are oohs and aahs from all the project stakeholders.  They love it!  Why?  Because they are sure customers will find it useful and reward the company with more business.  That’s only natural.  But then something else happens…  One of the stakeholders steps up and says, “That’s cool, but can it do one more little thing?”

All the other stakeholders agree.  The new feature you added is nice, but the product should do one more thing to be complete.  And they may be right.  So you add that.  And a few more things.  And a few more things after that.  That’s feature creep.

Little additions creep into your product features until they consume a major part of the project timeframe.  The extra features are nice, but can you afford the extra time?  After all, you now have less time to implement all the other cool features you were asked to do.

Stakeholders often don’t understand this problem.  Later, they’ll come around and ask why your project is behind schedule.  You can’t say that it’s because of all the little things they asked for.  Why?  Because they won’t remember those or they don’t see them as a major time sink.  See the problem?  You can’t win with feature creep. 

–ray

Just for fun, I’ve posted a picture of a bluebird one of my customers sent me.  This picture was taken with a nest-cam outside one of his birdhouses.  Did you know that baby bluebirds go from hatchling to flying machine in only 18 days!  That’s a model of efficiency!

That’s right!  This bluebird is only 18 days old!  Like a machine, every cell in its body knows whether to contribute to flesh, bone, or feather within three weeks.  And then it’s off.

I want our project management organization to work this efficiently - like a machine.  Ever hear of Intelligent Design?  The theory essencially says that when a thing looks like it was designed, then it was designed.  To me, the bluebird looks like it was designed.  So who was the designer?

Can our projects run like they were designed?  Like a grand plan set forth in seven days and then implemented with flawless execution?  That’s the way I want our products to flow.  Wasting time “figuring things out” slows growth and limits potential.  Instead, let’s model our projects after the bluebird!

Okay, that’s a litte simplistic…  Which one among us is God?  We are flawed beings, and our products and projects reflect our limitations.  But we can still strive for it, can we not?  Flawless project execution…  That’s my new goal. 

–newshirt

This post will illustrate how to calculate costs in Microsoft Project.  As you will see below, each tasks has a total cost and an actual cost.  The actual cost are those costs that have actually been incurred during the execution of the project.

Costs in Microsoft Project and Standard Time® are very different.  Each task in Microsoft Project may have an arbitrary dollar value.  We’ll assign some below to demonstrate.  This is not true of Standard Time®.  Standard Time calculates task costs by multiplying hours times rates.  (C = H * R)  There are various rates a project may have, but the formula is always true.  Microsoft Project is different.  Follow the steps below to calculate costs in MSP.

Create some tasks:

1. Add a task named “Task 1″
2. Add a task named “Task 2″
3. Set the Duration to 100h and 40h respectively
4. Remove all columns by the Duration column (right-click and choose Hide Column)

The results look like this:

Insert the following columns:

1. Cost
2. Actual Work
3. % Complete
4. Actual Cost

The results will look like this:

Microsoft Project Cost Fields

Experiment with the Duration, Cost, and Actual Work fields, and you will see updates costs values.  The image below illustrates this.

Updated Microsoft Project Cost Values

–ray

Project Management Advice: Get Corporate buy-in for your projects.

In other words, make sure the corporate executives are active stakeholders in your project.  I suppose this goes without saying, but I’ve seen lots of projects where this is not the case.  Project teams somehow come to the conclusion that their project will be funded and accepted, even though corporate has not explicitly said so.

Just because your team is developing a new product or in-house tool, doesn’t mean corporate will stand by you.  Without vested stakeholders at the highest level, your project could easily be canceled.

The name “Harold” comes to mind when thinking of this subject.  I worked with a man named Harold who was researchinig a product for his company.  Months went by as he studied the features and benefits.  He eventually took a job with another company and I discussed the project with his boss.  His boss said he never knew what Harold was up to, and had no intention of adopting the product!

–ray

Many people know that Phil Jackson coached 9 teams to NBA titles and Bill Walsh was a football genius with many Superbowl wins.

Do you ever hear about Project Managers who take multiple million-dollar projects to the finish line and bring home the victory?  Of course not, but they are critical in setting the tone of a project, defining clear objectives, and pushing all the right buttons to get a Project Team on the same page to accomplish their project goals.

People alone, with all of their various personalities, are tough to manage.  Project Managers are responsible for setting project task dependencies, trying to stay within project budgets, and work to keep a pulse on all the project resources.  Man, that is a lot of responsibility!

In sports, coaches use video tape, advanced scouts, and many other tools to accomplish their goals. In the project world, we use tools like MS Project or a good time tracking/project management tool such as Standard Time® software. Standard Time automatically e-mails Project Managers if a timesheet is insufficient and will warn a project team if a project is over budget.  It allows you to visually manage your resource allocation. It is a very effective tool.

The bottom line is that championships are not only won by pushing the right buttons. The foundation for winning starts with having the right tools. Are you still using antiquated spreadsheets and verbal discussions to win your championship?  If so, you may be setting yourself up for failure.

–Warren

This post discusses how to display WBS codes in Microsoft Project.  WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure.  It is an (arguably cryptic) way to number tasks in a project so you can tell the hierarchy position.  The first number in the sequence represents the task id.  Each dot represents a subtask.  Follow the steps below to show the WBS number.

1. Enter three tasks
2. Right-click in the column header area
3. Choose Insert Column
4. Choose the WBS column
5. The results will look like this

WBS Codes

 Next, we’ll insert some new tasks and demote them.

1. Right-click in row #2
2. Choose New Task
3. Enter some tasks
4. Demote them
5. The results will look like this (notice the WBS codes)

Indented WBS Codes

If you really want to make your WBS codes exotic, try these steps.

1. Choose Project, WBS Codes…
2. Enter a prefix
3. Choose a custom numbering scheme
4. Click OK
5. The results may look something like this

WBS Prefix

–ray

There are a lot of possible reasons for this.  I’ll enumerate the reasons why I think projects cost more than expected, and then discuss the most probable ones.  Let me know what you think!  Got a few more reasons?

1. Forgotten tasks
2. Unknown tasks
3. Customer expectations change
4. Feature creep

My biggest issue is always ‘forgotten tasks’.  In my experience, forgotten tasks results in project cost overruns more often than any other reason.  People tend to throw out a cost before they have listed all the work involved.  Halfway down the road, they remember 25 - 50% more tasks.  That adds up!

Sometimes, one thing leads to another.  Tasks that you didn’t know about pop up.  What are you going to do when that happens?  You can’t just abandon the project.  You have to eat the extra work and absorb the cost overrun.

Once your customer gets a look at the product, he may have a few new ideas of his own.  He may see something he likes, and feel free suggest some additions.  Those add up too.  Just make sure he knows that he must absorb the additional project costs.  Otherwise, you’ll end up eating that too.

Feature creep happens when customers and developers like what they see and want a little more, and little more, and a little more.  Before you know it, there’s an extra 10% cost in the project.  Yikes!

–ray

Last week CIO Insight reported that IT jobs had reached a record high (four million IT workers), and IT unemployment had fallen (2.3 percent).  That’s phenomenal!  See the link below.

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Workplace/Computer-Jobs-Hit-Record-High/

Okay, great news, but why is IT spending down?  While I have no hard facts, I have my theories.  Bear with my madness while I explain.  Post a comment if you don’t agree!

1. It’s summertime.  IT spending falls when the temperature rises, and rises when it falls.  November, December, and January are traditionally big months.  June and July…  Well, they are another story.  :(  People are out and about, and they don’t want to worry about buying stuff.  They’re too busy checking out the next vacation spot on the web.  Yikes.

2. Gas prices.  People bring their personal woes to work.  Got trouble filling your tank?  Then you won’t spend money at work either.  What, you say?  There’s no hard connection between the two.  No, but there is an indirect one.  If you’re worried about finances at home, you’ll worry at work as well.

3. Too many salaries.  Or, perhaps spending is down because there are too many mouths to feed.  That’s always a possibility, but I suspect it’s the other two reasons.  We’ve had other times with low unemployment, and high spending.

–ray

The ‘Green Fad’ really bothers me, especially in the IT biz.  CIO Insight had a big article in eWeek on ‘How to estimate energy efficiency.”  The upshot was that a single Intel server consumes 29 KWhs  (that’s 29 kilowatt hours of electricity) per week.  Yikes!  29,000 watts!  That’s a lot, right!!!  That’s what the article wants you to believe.  Until you think about it…

One kilowatt of electricity costs about 7 cents.  29 x .07 = $2.03 per week.  Huh?  Two dollars a week?  That’s all?  So what’s all the fuss about?

Check this out:  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080624182135AAmXpHF

The article left out this little bit of information.  But it did say that all the data centers in the world consume $2.5 billion per year.  That big number is supposed to scare you.  As if you had to pay the full bill yourself.  You can handle $105 per year, but not $2.5 billion.  What are we going to do???

I say, focus on things that matter.  $2 per week doesn’t matter compared with the thousands of dollars per week we pay for salaries, advertising, operations, shrinkage, etc.  But we like to talk about the ‘cool’ things like ‘Green Initiatives.”  Bunk.

–ray

One of the toughest challenges any business faces is cash flow.  That’s why capital ventures exist, as do loans from banks for solid business plans.

Many business owners will tell you when the chips are down its time to expand!  Ask anyone in real estate from the person just starting out to Donald Trump and they will tell you “when there’s blood in the streets, buy real estate.”

What if you don’t have cash on hand? Have you ever heard of “Gorilla Marketing?”   Remember a few years ago in Boston?  This very type of marketing caused a bad stir, closed down Boston Harbor half a day, all for a little cartoon show.  This happened for the wrong reasons, but it incidentally gave millions of dollars of airtime for what I imagine was a few thousand dollars.

I don’t agree with the scare that campaign inadvertently caused.  However, the point is get creative!  What can you do to expand your company’s profile in a seemingly falling market?  If it’s slow maybe you could streamline processes while you have the time?  Network and make new contacts?  Cold call more people, work older leads?

These are a few suggestions that may not all apply.  But the important idea is to do something to improve your business during slow periods.  Even if it’s a tiny thing that doesn’t cost physical money, it may give you that one percent edge you need on the competition.  We should never stop growing as people in life and business, even in downturns.

–Warren

Project Milestone: A marker in time, usually indicating a the completion of a project task.

Project milestones offer a place in time to stop and analyze your progress.  Have you completed the tasks you had planned?  Is your project on track?

Project milestones are normally project tasks with zero-duration work.  That is to say, no work is expected for such a task, except to stop and monitor your current progress.  They often display in a Gantt chart with a diamond shape to indicate that stopping point.

Milestone task from Standard Time

–ray

Our company develops a line of products.  We sell the same off-the-shelf design to many customers.  They all essentially get the same thing: a downloadable product with a certain set of features.  But there is always somebody that needs something a little different.  That’s when they become “special.”

Developing special features for a single customer can pose special challenges to an off-the-shelf product.  This post discusses three of those challenges.

My biggest concern is punishing 99% of the customers with a feature that only 1% will use.  Suppose you add a new feature to the product that 1% of your “special” customers will use.  The other 99% may not understand it.  That’s a bad thing.  They’ll think they need to understand it, and will spend time studying it, only to learn that it does not apply.  My advice: make sure that doesn’t happen.  Bury it where only the most adventurous will find it.

The next concern is maintenance.  If you create a new feature for one customer, guess what…  You’ll have to make sure it stays working forever.  It will cost you money as long as you maintain it.  Make sure you get that money up-front, or in maintenance payments along the way.

Have you given any thought to the effect your “special” features have on the rest of the product?  In other words, will these one-off features break something else.  The more complex a product is, the more likely collateral damage will occur.

The upshot is that special features cost more money than you might think.  But you have to do them to gain new customers and satify existing ones.  It’s all part of the game.  Just make sure you are profitable doing it.

–newshirt

This post will discuss the simplicity of using master projects in MS Project.  The image below shows a master project with two subprojects under it.  Three MS Project MPP files are required to create the project below.  The master project file is independant of the individual subproject files.  Follow the steps below to create a master project with subprojects.  Notice the green icons next to Sub1 and Sub2.  They indicate the sub-files included in the main master mpp file.

Master project and two subprojects

To create a master project in MS Project:

1. Create a new MS Project file named Sub1.mpp (see the example above)
2. Add some tasks
3. Create another mpp file named Sub2.cpp
4. Add some tasks to it
5. Create a third mpp file to act as the master project
6. Click in the first row of the master project
7. Choose Insert, Project…
8. Choose Sub1.mpp
9. Repeat steps 6 - 8 for the second subproject (the results should be similar to the image above)

–ray

Resource Utilization: Percentage of hours actually worked, when compared with possible working hours.

Formulas:
    Utilization = ActualWork / TotalHours
    EffectiveRate = ActualAmount / TotalHours

Standard Time® contains a resource utilization report that looks similar the to image below.  Notice the ‘Scheduled Hours’ value, and the ‘Actual Hours’ under it.  These number are used in the formula above to arrive at the ‘Utilization Percentage’ of 103.8%.  This person obviously worked an extra 1.5 hours.

The effective billing rate is related to these numbers as well.  In this case, the person worked on some high-value projects at caused his effective billing rate to be higher than normal.  That’s a good thing!

–ray

We’ve all heard the saying, “the customer is always right.”  So when a customer and vendor disagree, it implies the vendor is always wrong.  I realize this is a customer service driven idea meant to teach us to take care of our customers.

However, I have seen companies blame vendors all too often, without examining their own shortcomings.  This is an epidemic in our culture, it’s always someone else’s fault and no one wants to be accountable!

Just this week I had an opportunity to do business with a major U.S. company.  A company most everyone has heard of but will remain nameless.  To my surprise I lost their business at the last moment.  In fact, one of the VP’s had stated just days before, “I am ready to cut you a check tomorrow.”  The deal was done, right?  Well, not exactly…after a lot of meetings and numerous discussions met with many delays.  I was told that we (the vendor) were missing a key component.  What’s ironic is that I did countless demo’s and was assured that the deal was done.  The missing feature was never mentioned.  Then bam, it’s over!

We may have been able to accommodate this last minute need, but we’ll never know! We will continue to do business and press forward and I will examine what I could have done differently. 

How can a major company have a year and a half of meetings, discussions, and reach the end of a path only to find out that they didn’t really know what they wanted and then simply brush it off as a vendor problem?  It always hurts to lose business, but the vendor isn’t always be wrong.

–Warren

Something in Bill Gate’s interview has been hanging with me (see quote below).  I suppose he always says this, whether they are making risky bets or not.  And I suppose Microsoft can make risky bets all the time.  They can afford to.

We’re making sure we take some risky bets.

What’s hanging with me is the effect that ricky moves have on small companies.  The first thing to understand is that risk produces reward, just like the Roman poet Virgil said in 19 BC.  “Fortune favors the brave.”  That’s nice to know.  Its a special promise, just for the brave.  Not for the weak and fearful.

But that fortune can take years to realize.  What do you do in the meantime?  After all, you don’t just get brave on isolated occasions, and magically watch the fortunes roll in.  You must stay brave all the time.  So that’s the second thing you should know.  Staying brave is harder than it looks - a lot less glamorous than one might imagine.  And it’s boring.

Yes, boring.  You slog along through thick and thin, excersing your braveness along the way.  Nobody is watching.  Nobody applauding.  You just fight for your vision, and hope you were right.  Only time will tell.

But how do you inject bravado into your project team?  How do you energize them to fight when everyone else says give up?  The answer is simple: be a bright light in a dark world.  People will naturally follow.  No coersion is necessary, just a strong, clear vision.

–ray

Over half (51%) of CIOs and top leaders dislike telecommuting.  See the CIO Insight article below.  If I were asked, I’d favor it… but only under certain circumstances.

http://blogs.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/workplace/most_employers_resist_telecommuting_1.html

I’ve telecommuted for the past 15 years, and it has worked great for me.  My next-door neighbor, Dean, is an IT manager, and he works from home three days a week.  With a 100-mile RT commute, that’s no surprise.  Personally, I wouldn’t work fifty miles from my work unless they paid me a lot of money!

But telecommuting doesn’t work for everybody.  Unfortunately, a lot of people suffer from a lack of self-motivation.  I personally don’t, except at about 4 PM on Friday afternoons.  Working from home can be a lonely proposition, especially if your family is away, or if you have no family.  What keeps the motor running?  Why work?  You have to be personally vested in your project team’s success.  You have to love it so much you’ll split rails to get your work done.  In our affluent society, that’s not normally the case.

Another problem: project teams can’t easily meet.  Yes, there’s telephone, email, and GotoMeeting, but are you using those tools?  Does your team meet regularly?  And if so, are you just a laptop screen on a conference room table?  Where’s the group dynamic?

I favor telecommuting when there are solid, measureable heads-down project goals, or when employees are financially vested in the project.

–ray