Waterfall and Proud of It

I know that, as a methodology, waterfall development has many shortcomings. On the other hand, from novice to expert, it is the most basic and most commonly used system for organizing group work efforts.

There are multiple styles of agile alternatives, but despite the passion of their adherents, trends like those are, and will remain, “counter-establishment” minorities in digital production and development environments.  Among other obstacles, the required client buy-in and partnership model for true agile development is culturally too far away.

A key to maximizing accurate project planning, especially in multi, interdependent waterfall project scenarios, is not only marking obvious and hidden dependencies between related projects and activities, but also to build project plans that make the right connections to effectively anchor baselines and be able to assess impact and change.

The ability to properly  structure  milestones, decompose activities, and connect dependencies is a skill that goes beyond proficiency with Microsoft Project. It requires a broad, big picture understanding of how all the moving parts are really part of one.

Source: fantastictravelling.com via Melissa on Pinterest.

It doesn’t always translate off the screen…

A common circumstance in creative and technical production environments is that the overall coordination between the various functional teams doing the work usually ranges from haphazard to chaotic.  Between account, creative, copy, tech – let alone BA, SEO and other niche specialists – there is often an overall sense that no one really knows what’s going on. Ironically, even teams dedicated to user centered design are often unable to create systems of information sharing and group collaboration that are user friendly and effective for themselves.

Many believe that the harnessing of team chaos is the project manager’s job, and if the team is out of synch, the PM is largely to blame. The underlying premise is “no matter how dysfunctional we are, you need to make it work for all of us.”  Admittedly, there is truth to this sentiment – after all, it is what we signed up for. However, there is an underlying factor that often contributes to the original dysfunction, and bringing it to light might help teams solve the issues of low coordination, low productivity and low morale.

The prototypical agency model is a matrix organization that has a warp and a weft of functional and project operations.  Team members like art directors and technical developers are pulled side to side by project managers, as well as up and down by their own department managers. This dynamic creates tension and ambiguity in terms of priorities and procedures.  Management will often take a top-down approach – speaking to all groups individually, shuttling complaints and issues back and forth, and mandating new “processes” that are disjointed, out of context and only nominally useful.

The key, IMHO, is to recognize the challenge of the agency matrix environment and solve coordination issues as if it were a UX design challenge (which it is…). The project managers can not figure out on their own how everyone else wants to communicate and collaborate, just like a they would not decide where to place information and links on a web page.  Determinations of meeting schedules, status updates, project plan formats, etc. should be made with the user (AKA team members) needs in mind, and not just what the PM states is “the process.”

The discovery into the user needs must take into account that the users, in this case, are simultaneously members of a project team and functional department, and sometimes those roles might carry contradictory preferences and requirements. While simpler to do, ignoring this fact only creates more imbalance and disharmony.  Getting functional leadership and project management onto the same page to create a holistic salve for agency dynamics is easier said than done, but recognizing the implications of being in a matrix structure is a good place to start.

Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentals

One of the things that separates types of people is how they relate to process, both individually and as part of larger work teams. Even more so how people react differently to the  adoption of new processes that may be personally inconvenient in some circumstances, but promise “soon to be realized” improvements in other areas for themselves, team members and business owners.

I believe it is safe to assume that most people have been part of some effort during their careers to improve internal process, maybe kicked off with a team-building offsite retreat or a 30 slide power-point presentation by an outside expert brought in to fix performance and morale issues.  I also assume that many  people who have experienced such efforts are incredulous about their value and effectiveness. In many cross-functional organizations, optimized team performance (vis-a-vis better processes) is an elusive holy grail that everyone yearns for but few can actually find.

There is an oft quoted adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results. People want processes  to fill the gaps that make their work lives difficult, even when they themselves are resistant to giving up autonomy of their own work patterns. The trick is not coming up with new and improved processes; rather it is getting people to embrace them.

Organizational leaders and change catalysts face a daunting challenge when deciding to invest time and resources in process upgrades.  Here are a few things to keep in mind that can help improve the process of improving process.

1. Mandated from the Top – Don’t excuse top leadership from conforming to newly defined best practices. Busy C-types are some of the first to eschew inconvenient, time consuming practices in favor of the personal ways of doing things that got them where they are, even if it means recording new sales contacts on the back of napkins and not directly in the new CRM system.  Employees hate double standards and will lose interest in anything that is not taken seriously by their superiors at the company. Leaders should not only play along, but publicly demonstrate their commitment to the chosen improvements.
2. Be Proactive, Not Reactive – Do what you can to determine a cohesive vision of what you are trying to accomplish. The actualization of something positive will eliminate the negative. Responding only to a list of broken processes can lead to disassociated initiatives and unmet expectations that things aren’t noticeably better right away.
3. Timeboxing Change – If process roll-outs are too small and frequent, they will come off as meaningless. If the vision is too broad and idealistic, it will seem unattainable. Take a chapter from agile project management and think about 2-4 week sprints that focus on addressing specific needs and issues.
4. Careful with Pilots – It is far to easy to tolerate ambiguous objectives and solutions when “its only a pilot.” The last thing you want is a bunch of people spending time on a half initiatives that never really get anywhere, but seem real enough to breed complacency that things are actually happening.  While there is a time and place for limited implementations of new processes, make sure that decision is driven by the clear need for phases and not a muddled sense that “we have to do something.”
5. Put the “Fun” in Fundamentals – Getting staff to embrace change, even when it can be inconvenient, is the key to success. They must be given time to adapt to new processes, and they must feel part of the shared vision of why its being done. This is beyond getting early adapters on board. It is about bringing the team together in ways that are engaging and forward thinking. Project management and team collaboration fundamentals are not overly complex, and there are ways of surfacing core concepts so that people of all types can understand and relate to them. This is probably the most ambiguous of my recommendations, but also perhaps the most important. For more information, please be in touch.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome posted responses with other ideas for leading internal process improvements in work-place environments.

PMO – Project Management Operations???

Projects are, by nature and definition, temporary in duration. They are completed and closed, making way for new projects in the queue. This is a key distinction between “project management” and  “operations management” (like manufacturing or accounting) that chug along in an ongoing fashion. Thus, project management methodologies, like PMI, are tuned to the ebb and flow that churns projects from initiation through closing.

In matrix organizations, however, where project resources (including the project managers) are often committed to many projects at once, responsibilities to various initiatives are typically disconnected from the larger project life-cycle, and the work is done in an “ongoing” fashion.  For example, a patron’s order in a restaurant, from drinks to desert, is a temporary “project,” yet to the guy making the sushi or the woman making the pasta, it’s just one dish after another after another.  The people in the kitchen produce operationally, even when contributing to a temporary and specific outcome.

One way larger organizations answer this challenge is through the PMO – the project management office. The PMO is a department or group within an enterprise that defines and maintains the standards of project management processes, attempting to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects through formalization of things like documentation, templates and metrics. The PMO seeks to manage ongoing projects as projects in a portfolio, even if the resources themselves are heads down making sushi.

Like a military HQ behind the lines, the project management office gathers information from all projects for high level analysis and strategic decision making that is sent back down to the field level in the form of directives and protocols. Project managers are usually the communication liaison between the teams and the office.  The overall value of the project management office is oft debated, and it is not my intention here to criticize or defend. Rather, I am pointing out the rather top-down nature of keeping multiple projects on track where resources in the field may not even see themselves as part of a specific project team.

In my experience with medium size organizations handling multiple projects at once, the project management office is not a viable concept. Everyone wants good processes that promote efficient performance and quality deliverables, but the idea of a distinct office of project managers dictating formal process from afar is an anathema. Planning outcomes have a short shelf-life of relevance, and by the time the PMO processes and turns around a strategic decision, the reality on the ground has usually evolved into something else.  Resources doing the work, especially in digital and marketing arenas, can’t help but question the intelligence of the directives coming down from on high – and the project managers are usually caught in them middle.

Because of this, I have been exploring a framework of multi project management that seeks to systematize project operations through a combination of processes and schemes that build efficiency and quality into activity areas at the project team level. This means an organized framework where resources, even those working on multiple projects at once, are able to do their work in context of the larger initiatives. It also means a higher emphasis on strategic thinking on the part of the project manager, ensuring each project is progressing according to organizational objectives. Another key component is the recognition that  project planning is rarely completed like the top of a waterfall, and change management is really a convergence of planning and execution during the execution phase.

I hope to expand upon this model of project management operations in future posts, especially as it applies to multi-project environments. If you have specific questions or comments, please let me know!

Planning in 3-D

Most of my colleagues  know that I am a  big fan of Clarizen project management software, so much in fact that I offered unabashed praise in a case study-cum-advertorial last year. There are a number of reasons why I love the software – user friendly interface, robust functionality, excellent support & training, etc. – but the Clarizen feature that really won me over is a fundamental paradigm shift in how I approach project planning, especially the creation of team work plans, whether I am using Clarizen or not.

Primarily, this paradigm shift is linked to an alternative usage of “milestones” in project planning. The general definition of milestones, a series of markers placed along a path at mile intervals, is consistent with how milestones are used in Microsoft Project. The milestone  is a no-time marker that the project progress has reached a certain point along the way, much like a driver keeping track of how far down the road he/she has traveled. It has no duration or resources attached, and represents an intangible point in time that has no work dimension in of itself.

Clarizen takes a different approach to using milestones in project plans, even if it diverges from the traditional “marker along the way” definition. A milestone in Clarizen is more like a 3-dimensional building block that contains any number of activities and tasks. When the activities and tasks are complete, the milestone is complete. Thus, complex projects are  made up of multiple milestones that are completed along the way, eventually yielding a finished project.

Semantics you say? I beg to differ for the following reasons:

1. Thinking of milestones as activity blocks to build  (or buckets to fill) is a concrete visualization that helps team members and stakeholders grasp the structure of the project plan.  It is a sort of like a high level WBS for the execution phase that can be expressed literally and visually.
2. Different resource sets can be assigned to different milestones, so everyone can focus on the part of the plan that is most relevant to them, while delays or issues can easily be pinpointed to the appropriate team members.
3. Top down planning, including work hour estimation, is easier, faster and more accurate when there are discrete project chunks to assess instead of looking at the project as a whole.
4. Libraries of common  milestones can be saved and used for new project planning.
5. Milestones can be compared across projects and clients to assess production performance and efficiency. This is particularly helpful in agency environments.

Really, I could go on and on. Any production / development environment handling multiple projects at once could benefit from this 3-D approach to project planning, IMHO.  It is a simple shift that can align estimation, scheduling and reporting regardless of the software being used to manage projects. However, my props go to Clarizen for building it into the fabric of their tool-set.

To the Cloud, Gently

As a member of Generation X (born in the early 70’s), and as the middle child of three, I have come to accept, perhaps even embrace, my  professional positioning between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials – the two that really matter (IMHO) in the socio-economic dynamics of the day. The spending power of corporate leading and actively retired boomers, coupled with the almost innate “wiredness” of today’s young adults, bodes for a future of even more integrated technological experiences across platforms and devices that actually do make life easier and better.

I am in-between. I have a certain old school way of thinking and approaching life that comes from being a “tween” during Reagenomics. I remember, with fondness btw,  first getting cable TV  and sitting on the floor up close to turn stations because the 33 channel plastic slide box was tethered to the TV by a 3 foot, brown plastic cord.  In college, I first saw the internet in action when a friend placed  his telephone onto a physical modem to “log-in” and register for a class. The rest of us stood in line.  I remember what it was in the human disposition that compensated for things later to be replaced by conveniences in personal computing.

On the other hand, greying temples aside, most people mistake me for being 10 years younger than I am. For whatever reason, my personal and professional lives have kept me in touch with what is going on at the edge – at least in terms of technology and the way it is affecting social dynamics. Beyond being a consumer, I have been an interactive production lead for over 10 years. My experience is from the data management to cross-platform front end-interactions and content.  I understand the power of full,  seamless connectivity – even though a part of me remembers a different way of being.

It is because of this perspective that I often provide professional value  by bridging the gap between the established way and the innovative way. The ability to see and appreciate both sides helps me create win-win scenarios that make sense to varying stakeholders who differ in, amongst other things, seniority, professional role and generational perspective.

The practical difference usually manifests in a decision to adopt a cloud based, SaaS application to replace client side installations of business application software.  This also means paying attention to which cloud solutions offer the best potential integration with other applications to promote ultimate connectedness.  It also shows up as analytical decisions of what success metrics can indicate positive ROI from social media campaigns, and how to define lifetime value for CRM marketing to a new breed of wired consumers. From the strategic to the tactical,  I constantly find myself in the middle of decision making processes that pit corporate momentum against the ever changing interactive landscape.   This is also the case with a number of known advertising agencies that started off in print and are now “doing digital.”

But don’t get me wrong, this is not a case of “out with the old, in with the new.”  As was true in any generation preceding ours, the younger must learn from the older. Wisdom of experience is not a quaint bygone of the pre-Ipad  era, and sometimes the best solutions, whether they use technology or not, are best assessed by people who know what it means to only know life under the cloud. All you need is someone who has been there and back.

Back to the Client Side

On the eve of starting a contract with the national Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (www.JDRF.org)  as a PM  on a number of application customization and roll-out projects, I am struck at how genuinely excited I am to be once again plying my craft on behalf of a client organization, as opposed to a service related role defined by developing solutions as an agent for someone else. While I will miss the intensity and dynamic energy of the agency environment, I must admit a sense of eagerness to once again work from the other side of the fence.

I am also thrilled to have a second opportunity to approach the challenge of integrating  multi-channel constituent information for a caused based organization functioning at national and local levels. [I played a similar role for JFNA (then called UJC) in 2007-2008]. It is interesting to see how the technology leaders of a few years ago have developed, and how the understanding of relevant best practices have evolved. I look forward to getting back into the mix.

Long standing charities have  engaged in direct response donor relationship marketing for decades, developing personnel and data management processes to support mail, telephone and, more recently, email marketing. The convergence of constituent relationship data coming from so many sources, including event attendance and volunteer participation, has pushed the flexibility of the standard database technologies deployed in the 90’s and 2000’s. Compounded by a whole new set of interactions from organization sponsored social web activities, effective and efficient data management for these large charities is a major challenge.

There is an allure for interactive project managers and producers (well, at least for me) to work on the jazzy front end design applications, such as online community portals and killer ipad apps.  As I concluded in an earlier post (The Other CSI Myth), the effectiveness of even the most creative and innovative interactive strategy is only as good as what goes on behind the scenes and the data level. Admittedly, a few years ago this was a black hole for most of us working in the IT management of non-profit organizations in the then current state of web technology.  Only a few years later, it seems the main players have kept attacking the problem, and the maturation of partnerships between applications like Salesforce and Convio have closed the gap considerably.

Success in this arena will still necessitate an elegant orchestration of multiple software services, third party vendors and significant infrastructure choices – and by no means will it be easy. I am ecstatic to join a strong team at the JDRF with an ambitious vision of how interactive technology can facilitate deeper relationships with constituents and stakeholders of all types.

If anyone has related experience or insights to share, please post below.

Home School Project Management 101

Since we are homeschooling our children, I have a fun opportunity to add “basics of project management for elementary aged kids” to their curriculum. We recently did an assignment / activity around organizing a complex shopping trip as a distinct, temporary endeavor with requirements of efficiency and quality.

Our back to school shopping usually overlaps with making sure everyone also has appropriate clothes for the Jewish High Holidays, such as suits, dresses and other dress clothes. Additionally, this year, we were preparing for an October family wedding. With 5 kids to shop for, and some old enough to care about their own style but none old enough to drive, there was a lot to do.

In the midst of the flurry of gathering the requirements – which kids needed what stuff – it occurred to me that I could use a formal plan to manage the chaos of figuring out which kids needed to be taken to which stores, scheduled according to  the sporadic windows of time my wife and I would have available for such activities. 

I gathered the team, my wife and kids, and led them through an “activity definition” exercise that produced an output that we then organized into an actual WBS. This became an input to a series of shopping lists matching kids to stores. We then organized the project milestones by store and matched store by location to parental location and time windows. Parents knew ahead of time which stores to go to on which day of the week, as well as which kids were coming and what exactly needed to be bought for each – information provided by the kids themselves and organized into lists.

Using a WBS framework for helping my children in school has many applications. One child was struggling to get started on an English writing assignment, and I followed a similar process to help him organize a content plan to base his writing from.  It’s really cool to see fundamental methodologies work at the  most elementary levels.

Subjective Objectivity and Vice-Versa

One of my favorite roles as project manager is being the communication conduit between strategic, creative and technology team members, helping to find synapses within production domains, languages, and even ways of thinking. In the trenches it is fun to huddle with the appropriate resources and figure out the best technical implementation of a new or particularly sophisticated user interaction. In brand management the role can be used to facilitate structured strategic planning that is rooted in a realistic tactical roadmap.

From a PM perspective, success in this role lies in one’s ability to understand and articulate multiple business paradigms – seeing the discussion from a (strategic / creative / technical) – centric point of view and translating dialogue between them so everyone is on the same page. From this vantage point, a PM can also be used in tight support with a BA to manage team understanding of project requirements.

This ability to see a project simultaneously as a brand position, creative campaign and technical build requires experience with each individually, and a producer’s view of the world that ties together all aspects of a program. It can be enhanced with a disassociated awareness of one’s own natural communication patterns and how they interact with the patterns of others. (check out www.actualme.com).  This is not stuff you can learn in PMBOK.

Love thy Project

At any given moment, there are two types of project managers in the world: those that love the projects they manage, and those that don’t. OK, that may be an oversimplification but the truth remains that one can become a master practitioner of the project management life cycle without ever developing an emotional attachment to any particular type of project life cycle. Many PM’s enjoy the process of managing process and are agnostic to the substance and context of any particular project.

Sure, experience in a given industry or technology category does grow on a person. Knowing the ropes is key to being a successful PM, and that in of itself is something to appreciate. However, removal of the unknown (the tribulations of doing something new) is not the same as feeling passion for the known (the substance and context of a project).

Factors like “adequate budget,”  “a good team” and “low risk” are not reasons to love a project. They might be reasons to love and appreciate the project management process, but not the project itself. Here are some factors that have more to do with the project as a project:

• The industry – publishing, healthcare, financial, entertainment, non-profit, etc.
• The audience – B to B, B to C, internal, etc
• The technology – infrastructure, database, application, interaction, etc.
• (I’m sure there are others and I welcome responses to add to the list.)

I believe it is important for those of us in this noble profession to gives ourselves the benefit of identifying what are the features of projects that motivate more than our obsession with getting things done on time. In fact, the most dynamic and thriving project managers I know are the ones who are deeply connected to the socio-cultural positioning of their work. While we may not always find contracts and positions that represent that ideal, establishing that vision is an integral first step in making it come true.