IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (31 page)

Some decisions made unilaterally won’t be popularly received, of course, by team members who perceive these as decisions “imposed upon them.” When that happens, you’ll be well served to have a history of democratic decision making behind you, as well as an explanation about how this particular decision was made with the project’s ultimate goals in mind. You may not make everyone happy, but if you do it well, you will be respected.

With the difficult decisions, you may not be sure that the right decision was made, but you can be sure it was a good decision if:

•
All views, concerns, and issues were voiced and discussed

•
All alternatives were considered

•
You can explain (when questioned in the future) the factors and reasoning that led to you deciding the way you did

Once a decision is made, you shouldn’t feel compelled to revisit it unless some of the key factors related to it have changed.

4.8 What to Do If/When the Project Gets Off Track

Managing time and money are your biggest opportunities to succeed in project management—and your largest possibilities for failure. Watch them both carefully. This section provides suggestions for how to deal with the inevitable problems associated with managing time and money.

Regardless of how or why your project is taking more time or money than expected, it’s imperative to keep the stakeholders (particularly the sponsor and your boss) informed. If you try to cover up the problem, it will almost assuredly come back to haunt you. Invariably, the problem will eventually surface, and you’ll not only be faulted for the original problem, but also for attempting to cover it up (which could do more damage to your reputation than simply being late or going over budget).

Some Issues out of Your Control

There will be events in every project that are out of anyone’s control:

•
People get sick

•
Family emergencies come up

•
Long-planned vacations arise

•
Calls from other departments come in for “your” resources

•
Personnel get promoted and move on to other responsibilities

•
Team members move on to other positions

•
Vendors fail to meet their commitments

•
A corporate downsizing is announced

•
Severe weather events occur

•
Changes in the organizational/management/economic landscape suddenly take place

Four Tongue-in-Cheek “Laws” of Project Management

Managing projects can be a complex task and most projects run into some difficulty before they are completed. Before discussing how to handle some of these difficulties, it seems appropriate to let you know about the following four “laws” of project management. They are often presented in a tongue-in-cheek way. However, they prove true more often than not:

1. No major project is ever installed on time, within budget, or with the same staff that started it.

2. Projects progress quickly until they become 95 percent complete and then remain 95 percent complete forever.

3. When things are going well, something will go wrong.

a. Corollary: When things can’t get any worse, they will.

b. Corollary: When things are going well it’s because you have overlooked something.

4. The 80/20 rule: The first 20 percent of a project schedule completes 80 percent of a project’s goals, but the remaining 20 percent of the project’s goals takes 80 percent of the project schedule.

When a Project Gets behind Schedule

If your project falls behind schedule, don’t panic. Consider the following ideas when you see a project slipping:

•
Determine exactly how far behind you are.
If you’re using a Gantt chart, for example, you can track which tasks are behind schedule. (Microsoft Project calls them “variances.”)

•
Try to isolate the problem.
Are you behind on one small, relatively isolated part of the project or is the entire mission going to be late?

•
Try to recalibrate.
Can the schedule be changed easily? If the task involves one person working on a single piece of the project, can you work with him to reset the timetable?

•
Gain perspective.
Reset the schedule for the offending task and the entire project may be delayed, but how big a problem is that? If you promised a completion date for a three-month project on Friday, will having things finished a few days later really matter?

•
Be open to all your team members and stakeholders.
If time is slipping away, you have a responsibility to everyone to let them know the status of the project, and that the deadline is at risk. In particular, people reporting to you (team members) need to know what’s really happening. And people above you (your bosses) need to be kept informed.

•
Lead, don’t just manage.
Here is a chance for you to shine as a leader. When you have to let people know about a problem with the project, make it less about assigning blame (don’t say, “We’d be fine if Jack just pulled his weight,” for example) and more about showing your skills as a leader (“We are two weeks behind schedule but here is my plan for how we can catch up”). See the section
“Leadership vs. Management”
on
page 31
of
Chapter 2, Managing Your IT Team.

•
Involve others.
When someone alerts you to a problem or delay, ask them for their recommendations and suggestions on how to deal with it. Of course, you have to be careful with this technique. Individuals may shy away from identifying problems if they have a sense they’re going to be stuck with the ownership of resolving it. Share the situation with the whole team and invite suggestions on how to address it.

•
Do some research on the reasons for the delay.
The schedule might have been set unrealistically (by you or someone else) at the beginning; if you look into delays as they occur, and you carefully track them, you will be able to better anticipate problems in the future.

•
Be aggressive in solving the problem.
If you need more time to complete a project, tell people and get more time. Hoping no one will notice isn’t a strategy for continued success.

Perils of Adding Staff

Consider, but don’t automatically decide, adding resources. Some projects are either understaffed from the outset or suddenly develop a need for further resources in mid-project; adding staff to these tasks often results in accelerating the project. When adding resources, consider how long it will take a person to get up to speed and productive on this project.

Other types of projects, however, aren’t well suited to the additional staff fix. Software development, famously, rarely benefits from adding developers. Fredrick Brooks, in his groundbreaking book,
The Mythical Man-Month
, states his famous law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Keep in mind that some tasks just can’t be sped up by adding staff. For example, no matter how many women you assign to the task, it will still take nine months to produce a baby.

Your Project Is Costing More Than Expected

Projects run over budget all the time. How
far
over budget is often the most important issue. Consider these solutions:

•
Determine exactly how far over budget you are: $5,000 over on a $300,000 project is not that important; $5,000 on a $15,000 project is a problem you have to address immediately.

•
Do some research on the reasons for the budget overage. The budget might have been set unrealistically (by you or someone else) at the beginning; if you look into the overages as they occur and you track them carefully, you’ll be able to better anticipate problems in the future.

•
Be clear to your boss (and other stakeholders involved in the money side of the project) that there is a problem. A 5 percent variance on dollars can be trivial or critical (depending on the size of the budget), but most bosses will want to know about that discrepancy.

•
Adjust the project deliverables. Many projects are redefined as they progress: If your initial project goal called for all 14 satellite offices to get individual servers, and installation costs on the first five sent you over budget already, it is time to reevaluate your project goals. All the offices may get their own servers, but that may not happen until next year, instead of this year.

•
Look for “hidden money.” Your project budget may have a contingency budget or your boss may have money from another project you can use.

Avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you’ll save money later in the project and in the end you’ll be okay.

4.9 Useful Project Management Techniques

As you gain experience for managing projects, you’ll find, discover, and adapt a variety of techniques that you find helpful. Each project manager does this, and many have adopted styles and techniques unconsciously, barely aware of how effective they are.

Project Teams

Formalizing a group of individuals working loosely together toward a common goal can have tremendous benefits. Calling these people a special group or telling them they are all now members of a “project team” or a “task force” can solidify a project’s goals and make progress toward those goals much more evident. When people feel identified with a project, they are much more likely to feel responsible and accountable for it.

The size and complexity of your project will determine how formal you need to be with assigning teams: getting three new sales people up and running with laptops, for example, may take a day or two and involvement from several different people in IT at various times, but the task probably doesn’t need a formal team.

Moving your company’s offices, however, is a classic project that benefits from formalizing a team. Each member has specific tasks, and everyone can have a clear idea of what the goal is and how they can help with that goal.

Candidates for the Project Team

Who are candidates for your project team? Individuals’ involvement on the team can be quite varied. Some people may be dedicated nearly 100 percent to the project throughout its life. Others may spend only a small portion of their time on the project. Still others may only be involved with the project during certain phases. In addition, a project team will probably consist mostly of employees, but there may also be outside consultants if special expertise or additional resources are needed.

The first people you’ll include on the team are the ones you think it will take to achieve the project’s goal. As you talk with these people, they will offer up suggestions of others that need to be involved. They will also offer you different perspectives on what it will take to make the project succeed. Some of the project’s team members may be on your staff. Others that you’d like to include might be your peers, direct reports of your peers, and individuals from other departments—perhaps some that are senior to you.

While it’s tempting to pick the best and brightest for your project, you may want to temper that instinct. Projects are great mechanisms to allow others on your staff to shine and to give them the opportunity to show what they can do. Since the best and brightest are always in high demand, give careful consideration to balancing your project team with a mix of people that deserve the opportunity to show they can contribute.

Create a
War Room

For some projects, it has become trendy to have a project room or “
war room.” (A movie about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign—a project that used a project room to great effect—is called
The War Room
.) This room provides team members a place to work on the project that is separate from their regular work area. The idea of the war room is to keep members from being distracted from the project by their regular duties and to increase communication (and hopefully productivity, quality, etc.) by having the team members near each other. Lately, war rooms aren’t complete unless they also include a whole host of toys (Koosh balls, hacky sacks, Nerf games, etc.), a whiteboard, an endless supply of munchies and soft drinks, and “open” seating so that team members can communicate easily.

Formalized Project Frameworks

Chapter 8, Security and Compliance
, has a section called
“Methodologies and Frameworks”
on
page 238
. A number of these, such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL),
ISO 9000
,
Six Sigma
, and Capability Maturity Model Integration (
CMMI
), have aspects and techniques that you can apply to your projects to help ensure quality and that goals are met and for managing/tracking progress.

Participate in the Project Yourself

Consider participating in the project yourself—give yourself tasks to do besides managing the project. While managing the project is often a full-time job, if team members see you working on the project, it inspires them. Plus, it gives you greater insight to the project, as well as your staff’s activities. Until the late 1990s, for example, Bill Gates contributed directly to Excel’s code.