digital attitude

2 Keys To Tweak Your Digital Brand After a COVID Lay-off

/ Lorian Lipton / 1 Comment

With furloughs, lay-offs, and slow-downs due to the endless impact of the COVID-19 virus you might be wondering how you stay in the game; how you look fresh and current even when you have lost months, and possibly even a year, actively in your career. If you already have your digital brand (see box below) in place then there isn’t much you have to do after a lay-off.  If you don’t, then that is a whole different blog.

Digital branding is how you design and build your brand online through websites, apps, social media, video and more. – 99design,com

With your digital brand already in place, I recommend two areas that you should tweak to free yourself from anything that may not be authentically you. You see, branding is all about showing yourself in a true, and authentic, manner.

keys

As discussed in previous posts, the first step in personal branding is to focus on what makes you unique. Whether you worked for a public or private company, or even for yourself, if you have your digital presence in good shape, the task to tune yourself up is not as daunting as it may seem.

When ‘Big Blue’ laid me off 7 years ago, I had this nightmare that I had to totally reinvent how I looked digitally to get my next gig. At that point, I reworked my profile, again and again, and again before reposting on LinkedIn, etc. That scared me awake! A big piece of how I define myself, and my brand, was what I did for work and who I worked for. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to look like now. For most of my career, I defined myself as being part of a big corporate machine. Once I started looking at my actual digital footprint however I realized that there was little I had to change to appeal to a more diverse group of employers.

Your brand is your personal message. This message is picked up by the people you interact with (physically and virtually). Branding has less to do with ‘who you work for,’ and is more about ‘what makes you unique.’  So, as I reviewed my dossier for my resume rewrite and social network profile updates, I realize that most of me was the same as I was before unemployment, before COVID, before… (you fill in the blank). My competency had not diminished: my knowledge and skills hadn’t changed; my critical thinking capability was the same as it was; my technical knowledge didn’t disappear overnight.  My appearance was the same; my great sense of style, my infectious smile, the way I enter a room.

So what really needs to change in my brand?

Here are 2 keys areas to look at when reworking your brand after leaving a company or having a break in employment:

return to sender1.  Give your old company it’s ‘Point of View’ back. An important part of your brand is your personal opinions on things, also known as, your POINT OF VIEW (POV). You communicate to the world what you value through your opinions and positions on matters of interest. This is your attitude or the way you view things.

Companies, and even departments within companies, also have POVs. And, when we work in them and do business for them, we take on the company’s POV along with our own. They may call it – company values, organizational culture – but you know what I am talking about. When you negotiate a deal for a particular company, you are doing it from the POV of the company you are representing. If you write blogs or post things on a company site, you are (or should be) representing the company’s POV.

With the large push in digital marketing on the internet, most companies are aware that having a clear POV that the customer understands is a critical success factor. Howard Shutz, CEO and founder of Starbucks, in his book Onward, talks about how he needed to re-communicate Starbuck’s point of view when he returned to the company in 2008 to ensure that customer knew exactly what Starbuck’s stood for. When you think about certain companies (Starbuck’s, Walmart, IBM) their POV in business is very loud.

So, the first hurdle is being able to identify your own POV after being part of a larger and louder voice for however long you were with that company. Many people, when first trying to define their personal brand outside their company’s, have trouble finding their social ‘voice.’ (Hatch and Schultz)

As an employee, we take on our companies POV (which is what we’re supposed to do), but when we leave, we need to make sure we re-find our own. 

answeringmachine2.  Update Your Message. I don’t mean your answering machine tape (no offense meant to those of you that still have them or even know what they are).

After a while in any company, you figure out what the communications expectations are and how to work within the company’s culture. Even sentence structure and vocabulary is influenced by a company through years of interaction. How information is delivered is influenced by the culture and acceptance practices of an organization.

Dale Cyphert, PhD, in a paper about business communications, relates operating in a corporate culture to traveling in a foreign country. She says that “successful travel through foreign lands involves learning to eat, talk and behave the way the natives do.  Similarly, success in a business involves acting, communicating, and thinking ‘like a businessperson.” (Dale Cyphert)

We all learn how to communicate in our company cultures through an “exchange of information and transmission of meaning” (Daniel Katz and Robert L Kahn).  We learn how to operate through our communications with co-workers and colleagues, as well as, across boundaries of departments, regions, and organizations themselves. Over time, the corporate way of communicating becomes part of who we are and, many times, part of our personal POV. No matter how comfortable you were with your old company, it is time to find your personal voice. It is like coming home after being in a foreign country for a long time. You may still like to eat the foods of that land, but you have more options now, so is that still your POV?

Your values and perspectives are uniquely your own. There is nothing wrong with holding on to many of the values and ideas that came from your previous work, but now you get to decide if they really fit who you are. This is your chance to tweak your message and to speak with your own voice.

Article References

  1. Relationship Between Organizational Culture, Identity and Image, Mary Jo Hatch, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University,Cranfield, UK, and Majken Schultz, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 5/6, 1997, p p. 356-365 © MCB University Press, 0309-056
  2. Business Communications Self Study, University of Northern Iowa, College of Business Administration, Dale Cyphert, PhD, 2007.
  3. The Social Psychology of Organizations, Daniel Katz and Robert L Kahn, 2d ed, New York, Wiley, 1978
  4. Images courtesy of Google Images

Want Better Project Communication – Make Your Project The Center Of All Things

/ Lorian Lipton / 2 Comments

Projects are rarely simple local events anymore. Teams are global, multi-culture, multi-lingual, and more complex than ever before. The ease of co-located team communications has been lost with the advent of time and distance. Keeping the stakeholders and team members engaged is essential, so project managers have had to find new and state-of-the-art ways to make project communications happen.

Enter the practice of Social Project Management. Social PM mixes the best elements of traditional project management with digital collaboration and communications tools. It provides an agile way to manage project data and information flow in an accessible, transparent, and secure manner.

The way I do this is by making the project, not the data or the communication medium, the center of all things; the project is our ’email hub,’ the ‘inbox,’ the ‘file archive.’ The project portal (aka the digital project center) is where all data and information flows. The project is dynamic and takes on its own vital life as the glue of the team. The benefits are vast. The PM is no longer a roadblock or taskmaster in the center of communications. Status is immediate.

PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A positive benefit of using social tools is personal accountability. Social communications by its nature makes every team member’s work transparent, and visibility forces accountability (at least on my projects).

THE PROJECT IS THE THING: When the project is the center of everything, everything is organized around the actual work tasks and not the tools used to communicate (email) or store information. This is true projectization. The beauty of working using social tools on a project is that the work assignments are clear to everyone (because they are written), each team member sees what other team members are doing (because the applications are universally visible and available), the team gets out of ’email jail’ (because activity streams are fluid lists), tasks are maintained and supported in a collaborative manner, and, most importantly, working in a social manner allows people to determine the appropriate level of engagement that they need to get their job done.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM CO-LOCATION

Don’t get me wrong, there are many positive things about having your team in the same physical space. When teams are co-located they have a degree of team awareness. Most people don’t realize the amount of constant communication and sharing that goes on in the day to day office environment. When you are face-to-face you have visual cues and other benefits that make a team cohesive. For example, many teams eat lunch together. They spend time whiteboarding, brainstorming and sharing ideas, both good and bad. Many times, they play outside games (bowling, softball) as a team (wearing team t-shirts). Team members know the state of the project they are on because, as a team, they live and breathe it every day, sometimes 7 days a week

As the size of my teams grew and projects became global, multicultural, and more complex, time and distance between the team members hampered team awareness. The co-located dynamic that made us feel like a team was gone. I noticed that communications started to become more and more compartmentalized. People seemed only to pay attention to THEIR tasks and were less concerned with the project as a whole. Information flow became a battle and email overload was common. It was getting harder and harder to get dispersed teams to perform at the same high level of delivery as when they were co-located.

WELCOME TO SOCIAL LOCATION

In the interim period, when teams were being globalized, before collaborative tools were common, there was a definite period of communication breakdown and a loss of team cohesiveness. This was killing delivery and productivity. Around 2007, with major shifts in technology (Apple shipped the first iPhone, Google launched Android, and IBM develop Watson), many of us started to leverage social media and social collaboration software, mixing the best elements of traditional project management with digital collaboration and communications tools. Some called it ‘Social Project Management,’ others were calling it ‘Project Management 2.0,’ but regardless of a name, by leveraging social tools on projects we kept the team, as well as stakeholders, up-to-date through active information streams and ambient online status updates. “This is what put the ‘social’ in social project management.”

It was social networking services, like Twitter, that gave us a different paradigm when it came to information updates on our projects. No longer did we need to receive, open, read, engage, respond, and then archive an email. With small bursts of information (Twitter’s original 140 characters), we kept in touch with precise, to the point, informational snippets, where we learned what was going on in the project in real time from the team players. By reading a stream of information (think Facebook News Feed) my teams are able to know what is going on from the larger distributed team as things are posted.

AMBIENT AWARENESS: One of my goals on every project for the last decade has been to continue to improve ambient awareness for the team. “Ambient Awareness is the idea of being “ambiently aware” of another’s actions, thoughts, and experiences without having to be near them physically.” My teams are constantly ‘in’ the workflow and distributed processes of the project moment by moment. It is our ‘collective present.’ If you harness it, you will be surprised at how data-driven information can elevate your project team to a new level of communications.

Are you connecting with your teams and clients using social media or social collaboration tools? How are you leveraging your ‘collective present?’ What have you found to be the best way to keep distributed teams connected? Let me know. And remember to keep up the good attitude.

5 Tips To Survive The Holidays For the Work Addicted

/ Lorian Lipton / Leave a comment

Do you dread sitting hour after hour socializing with family and friends when there is so much work to be done?  I do. Holiday time is stressful, especially for those of us driven by delivering outcomes daily. In a work culture that can be all encompassing,  pushing for more of our time and energy every minute of every day, many of us suffer from a work-life imbalance. The good news is that the holidays are a perfect time to practice taking back control and learning how to relax.

I find turning my head off, shutting down before all my work is complete, leaving things on my desk (or in my inbox), delaying project tasks, almost physically painful. And holiday celebrations, many in the middle of the work week, can make me sweat when I think about how I am going to get everything done.

Do you feel lost if you are not being productive?  You are not alone. Work Addiction is a common problem for those of us in the project management profession. Psychologists have studied this condition and, though it is the most societally acceptable of obsessions, it still needs to be managed. Work Addition is grouped with other addictions, like drugs, and gambling. It’s called Adrenaline Addiction: being addicted to stress, in this case, work stress.

Signs of Work Addiction

  • Feelings of guilt when idle
  • Obsessed with things that are left undone
  • Strong compulsion to always be doing something
  • Afraid something will go wrong if you don’t do it personally

Steps Toward Management of Work Addiction

Fill in the blank: It is not always easy for me to step away from _______ (WORK, SMARTPHONE, FACEBOOK, etc).

First, you have to believe you deserve to be happy outside of work. According to Dr. Tom Muha, a psychologist practicing in Maryland, “if you really feel that you deserve to have a good life, then decide to make that the main gift you give to you and your family this year.” Give them the gift of your time and presence.

Second, is really hard. You need to face the discomfort that plagues you when you’re not being productive. You might have to fool yourself at first, but here are some things that can help:

  1. Get some exercise first thing in the morning.
  2. Plan your day around pleasurable activities.
  3. Engage in conversations chock-full of curiosity.
  4. Ask other people what would make their day terrific, and then do whatever you can to help make that happen.  (This works really well with kids.)
  5. Pay attention to what you’re seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling.  Be in the moment.

I am going to do my best to fight my ‘must finish everything before I leave for the day’ drive this holiday and focus on having a good time over these next few weeks with my co-workers, friends, and family. I challenge you to do the same.

May the joy of the holiday season be with you and may you keep up the good attitude. See you in 2018!

Soft Skills Are The Game Changer: How To Show Them Off

/ Lorian Lipton / Leave a comment

To select the leader for their next engagement, more and more clients are reviewing professional profiles online. They are not just looking for good technical people anymore, they want to know how you interact with others (are you a team player? a good communicator?). A recent LinkedIn article said that “degrees and credentials are important, but the development of soft skills—skills that are more social than technical—are in high demand.” Soft skills are the game changer when it comes to finding your next project. Being able to show you know how to use them makes a big difference between landing the role or not.

A degree or certificate proves hard skills.

How does one even show soft skills online or on their resume? Let’s discuss the balance between the two types of skills (hard and soft) and then I will give you some tips on how to include them in your digital profiles.

 

Hard Skills Gets You In The Door

Hard skills are easy to define and measure. That’s why resumes are full of them. They are how you do something: a procedure, a best practice, a method. They are proven by the measurement of training and knowledge that you acquire in a specific skill set (PMP certification or Bachelor of Science degree, for example). You spend years learning hard skills in school or on the job (i.e.: machine operations, computer programming, data analysis, a foreign language).

Hard skills are controlled by the left side of your brain. This side controls logic and your ability to perform a task. Common left brain professions are Mathematicians, Statisticians, Computer Programs and, of course, Project Managers. PMs usually have a long list of hard skills that they are good at – strategic planning, requirements analysis, Waterfall development methodology, building work break down structures, and so on.  I am sure your resume is full of good details on your hard skills.

 Soft Skills Gets You The Position

Soft Skills are your personality qualities, habits, attitudes, and even social graces. Unlike hard skills, which can be evaluated by a logic intelligence test (IQ), soft skills tend to use your heart and are evaluated by an emotional intelligence test (EQ). This is right brain stuff – artistic, creative. This is where you solve problems. These skills are harder to measure and difficult to prove.

Some examples of soft skills are: anticipating risk, motivating others, teamwork, innovating, listening, communicating. They are things that you hone and improve with a lifetime of trial and error. They are subjective. These are the skills that make you unique in how you do what you do. You can take classes to develop these skills, but it is your innate personality and strengths that ultimately determine which soft skills you excel in.

Clients today are looking for project leaders that understand organizational values, excel in teamwork and communications, and know how to leverage their personal strengths to maximize project results. The challenge is to show not only that you have certain soft skills, but how they have and will bring value to your role.

Showing Your Value

Before you can show the value of your strengths, you need to identify what they are. There are many EQ tests and online tools that can assist you with evaluating your soft skills. Here’s a list of 28 soft skills to get you started. These life skills are the things that add value to how you work. This is what clients want to know about you – what makes you unique.

A partial list of soft skills strengths.

The way to show that you know your stuff is by using narrative (by storytelling) on your profile and resume. Take leadership, for example, someone won’t know how you applied leadership if it is just a bullet on your resume but show it in connection with a situation, and they will clearly see how you applied it.

According to Jessica Hernandez, CEO of Great Resumes Fast, the way to show your value is by incorporating the skill within the context of an accomplishment that demonstrates it.

Here’s an example:

  •  “Increased productivity of a multi-year software development project by 10 percent by improving communications across geographically dispersed teams and the stakeholder groups.”

What client wouldn’t want a project manager who could increase the productivity of the team? This bullet is impressive because it shows that the PM used her communications and teamwork skills in the context of a real client situation.

You can incorporate soft skill evidence into almost any narrative in this way.

Tell Your Story

According to career expert, Alison Doyle, “Integrating storytelling elements into resumes … can help to paint a dynamic picture of achievement.” Using story rather than a bullet list of skills on your profile and resume shows the reader that your focus is on HOW you improved a business situation, not just WHAT you did.

Don’t be afraid to tell your story, incorporate your soft skills, and show them you are capable and ready for that next great project.

Feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to answer your questions about leveraging hard and soft skills to enhance your digital reputation. Until next time, keep up the good attitude.

 

Everything You Need to Know About Project Life Cycles

/ Lorian Lipton / Leave a comment

Project Management life cycles explained, based on PMBOK© Guide Sixth Edition

When dancing, if you start off on the wrong foot, you may never recover. Sadly, the same can happen if you pick the wrong lifecycle approach for your project. With the wrong approach, you run the risk of cost overruns, long delivery delays, and potentially a failed project. Luckily, there are several project life cycle approaches available to help you control and deliver your projects successfully. This post will explain the current life cycle approaches based on the recently updated A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK ®  Guide – Sixth Edition) and how they affect project constraints.

What is the project life cycle?

The project life cycle contains every phase that your project goes through from beginning to end (cradle to grave). Some projects may have only one phase, others may have many. The PMBOK ®  Guide – Sixth Edition defines the project life cycle as “the series of phases that a project passes through from its initiation to its closure.” (page 19). That seems simple enough.

What is a phase?

Per the definition, every project is made up of one or more phases, which are “a collection of logically related project activities that culminate in the completion of one or more deliverables” (page 20). Phases can be sequential (back-to-back), iterative (cyclic) or overlap (simultaneous at points). The more phases and the more overlap, the greater the risk to the constraints of time, scope, and cost.

What is the life cycle approaches?

The PMBOK ®  Guide directly calls out two life cycle approaches: predictive and adaptive. Then it subdivides the adaptive life cycle approach into multiple phases that they call development life cycles:

  • Predictive
  • Iterative
  • Incremental
  • Adaptive
  • Hybrid

To help me decide what approach to use for a particular project, I focus on how the life cycle approach handles the project requirements, constraints, stakeholder feedback, and resources.

What is the generic life cycle?

Rarely is anything generic, but the PMBOK ®  Guide defines four generic phases in a lifecycle as

  1. Starting the project
  2. Organizing and preparing
  3. Carrying out the work
  4. Ending the project

(Figure 1-5 from page 18). The important things to know about this generic life cycle are:

  • Cost and staffing levels will continue to increase until they peak while carrying out the work
  • Risk and uncertainty will decrease over time
  • Cost of changes significantly increases over time

“All projects can be mapped to the generic life cycle” (page 19), so make sure to know them if you are going to take the PMP® exam.

Why do I care about the different types of life cycle approaches?

When there was only one approach, Waterfall, we needed to develop workarounds and try to contain and control everything within that fixed model (what a challenge). Today, with multiple approaches available, you can find the most flexible, cost-effective, time-sensitive way to deliver (what a relief). Below I detail the approaches mentioned in the PMBOK ®  Guide – Sixth Edition, but there are dozens more you can investigate and choose from, each having their own benefits and drawbacks.

Predictive Life Cycle (Fully Plan-Driven aka Waterfall) – During the previous 30 years of the last millennium (the ’70s, ‘80s, ‘90s), the Waterfall approach was the gold standard for all projects. It is a fully plan-driven approach where the 3 main project constraints (time, scope, cost) are all determined at a detailed level at the start of the project. You need to know your requirements going in and the scope is fixed at the onset. Each phase is then laid out sequentially and managed carefully.

Over time, to allow for more precise planning, the approach has allowed for “progressive elaboration” or “rolling wave planning” (page 185). Remember that scope and planning are two different things. Progressive elaboration doesn’t change the scope. It allows you to roll out the schedule into shorter passes. I measure all other approaches against the benefits and failings of this traditional approach (maybe because it is the first one I learned). Waterfall was great when I managed the very controlled and predictive development of a new hard drive at IBM. The project spanned years and didn’t require much stakeholder involvement (mostly at beginning and end or when we had scope changes that needed approval). The downside is that Waterfall is pretty inflexible when it comes to changes late in the project and therefore leads to significant cost increases when rework is needed. This is why I believe people started coming up with more adaptive approaches.  But Waterfall is still a good lifecycle approach if you have the development time and you know what you want to deliver. Don’t disregard its benefits.

Iterative Life Cycle – As timeframes for delivery got shorter and requirements got less clear, we needed additional lifecycle approaches that could handle the changes faster and less expensively. We found that when you broke large and complex projects down into smaller phases (aka cycles) it gave us more control (decreased risk and cost of rework). As the name implies, you execute the project in small iterations, giving you the ability to better define requirements at the start of each cycle. The PMBOK ®  Guide (page 19) recommends that you still define scope early in the project, but that you modify time and costs after each iteration since you will understand them better.

The iterative approach is like a bunch of small waterfall cycles with the customer verifying the work at the exit of each cycle. This gives you more flexibility and a better opportunity to address changes and reduce risk. You detail the scope for the next phase when you are done with the previous. I’ve used the iterative lifecycle approach when developing software updates. My iterations spanned 3 or 4 months at a time as part of a longer project.

Incremental Life Cycle – Many times you will see the incremental approach grouped with the iterative. They are similar but also different. The incremental lifecycle approach develops a product through the implementation of incremental steps which have predetermined timeframes. Each increment delivers additional functionality for the product and is repeated until the final deliverable is produced. Like with the iterative approach, customers signoff at each exit point. This approach is great when you want to do prototyping and reduce change risk along the way.

Adaptive Life Cycle (change-driven aka Agile) – Everyone wants rapid development these days, so when you need to execute a project fast, Agile is the way to go. This approach was built to handle changes and reduce inherent risk. The new PMBOK ®  Guide provides a whole appendix (Annex A3: Overview of Agile & Lean Frameworks, page 99) on the Agile/Lean approach. I highly recommend you read this Annex to better understand the concepts. Teams deliver software updates in weeks instead of months.

Adaptive projects are quick and time bound with two critical success factors:

  1. The customer must be intimately involved in the process and
  2. You must be able to define incremental requirements at the start of each iteration.

If requirements are not well known, like when you are developing a first of its kind application, the adaptive approach works nicely.

In addition to iterations being sequential, interactive, or overlapping, they could also run in parallel.  But don’t forget, especially when you are going at the speed of light, that each iteration should still be a complete cycle of Plan, Develop, Evaluate, and Learn. (Good project management process is all the more critical when you are going fast.) Iterations usually last 2 to 4 weeks at maximum.

To get a deeper understanding of all the concepts involved in Agile delivery, read the Agile Manifesto.

Hybrid Life Cycle – As it implies, the Hybrid takes the best of all approaches. You can use a predictive approach for the elements of the project that are known and an adaptive approach for the elements that will become apparent over time. “Hybrid methodologies accept the fluidity of projects and allow for a more nimble and nuanced approach to work,” says Jason Westland

Hybrid approaches are not new to project management, but they are definitely gaining acceptance as a way to solve life cycle problems in the 21st century. There is software coming on the market that allows you to blend approaches so you can manage different life cycle approaches all in one application. How neat is that?

Look for future posts on tips for choosing the best project life cycle approach. Feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to answer your questions. Until next time, keep up the good attitude.

————————————————————————–
PMBOK® and PMP® are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Published November 10, 2017, on the IIL Blog

 

 

Communications Management: 3 Fixes for “It Should Have Been Obvious” Syndrome

/ Lorian Lipton / Leave a comment

“Didn’t you read my email?” We’ve all asked this question to our teams before.

communication_problems_web

Do you feel like people only catch about 10% of what you communicate? You are not going crazy, it is actually true. People grasp way less in conversations than we think they do. We assume they know what we mean and what we said, but actually, they don’t get most of it, whether verbal or in writing.

“Virtual teams, lacking contextual cues that the other person hasn’t understood what we’re trying to say, often hear only too late that, “I thought it was obvious that…” or, “I didn’t think I needed to spell that out.” – Keith Ferrazzi. Havard Business Review Blog Network, April 12, 2013

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., calls this the Signal Amplification Bias syndrome (though she jests that calling it the “I’m Sure It Was Obvious” Effect would have been much more to the point. – Too Much Miscommunication in your Relationship? A Simple Fix.)

Signal Amplification Bias is really just a fancy way to say there is a  lack of communication. The tendency is for people to perceive (bias) that they have communicated (signal) more (amplification) information to other people than they actually have.

importance-of-being-social-625x350

The potential for miscommunication was bad enough when we were face to face with people on a daily basis, but now, with more virtual teams and alternative methods of communications, it is getting worse. In the past, I have posted about the lack of contextual cues created by virtual communications and today I will address how you make yourself truly understood by your virtual teams. It is better at the beginning of the project to make sure your team will deliver what you tell them to deliver, then finding out at the end that they misunderstood you when rework can cost you everything.

Here are some suggestions to help get your message across:

Check 4 Times: Ferrazzi, in his article, said that it was not enough to tell someone to “circle back with me” and he is absolutely right. When I want to make sure that my message is understood, especially when giving critical project direction, I check at least FOUR (4) TIMES with the person receiving my message. This may sound like a lot of work, but after many years of managing teams in India, Central Europe, China and other non-native English-speaking countries (as well as across the 50 States – which sometimes might as well be different countries), I have found that spending time making sure my message is understood up front is better than trying to fix a miscommunicated instruction 90 days down the road.

  • Day 1: Tell them what you want to tell them on the phone (or in person).
  • Later that day: Follow up with a detailed email of what you told them. You really need to present detailed instructions otherwise you are leaving your direction open to interpretation. For example, if you want team members to set up a database that lists all the registered participates of your study, do you want them to decide the fields in the database, or do you already have a template in mind? If you want them to do it a particular way, they can’t read your mind, you need to spell it out. Remember, that you get what you ask for.  If you are not specific, then you’ll get what they ‘thought’ you wanted.
  • Day 2: Check that they understood what you told them in another phone conversation. Though I thought, many times, that what I had asked was clear, when I hear it back from the person the next day, I realize what they heard was lacking certain information. Whether my thought process was less than full or lacking some steps on the initial contact or they were distracted, etc. etc., doesn’t really matter. The goal is a complete understanding of the direction from you to the recipient.
  • Later that day: Correct what they misunderstood from your first communication in a detailed email.
  • Day 3: Check that they understood what you said the second time.
  • Repeat the process until you are comfortable that all details are clear.

Using multiple mediums, especially phone and email, ensures that important concepts get repeated in several different ways. This helps, especially, again, for non-native English speakers. When you get directions to a location on your GPS, do you like the map view or the list view? My point is the more ways you can present something, the better chance of it being understood. I like both maps and lists so that I am sure exactly when to turn.

As a young PM, I didn’t realize my signal amplification bias (aka miscommunication) until the first deliverable from the team. It amazed me how much I did not say (or they did not hear). That is when I started using different mediums to catch what might be missed in a verbal conversation, instant message, or email. I learned that details are better sent in writing so they can be discussed, printed and edited by all sides. Today I use social platforms (like SharePoint) so the whole team can see and update the information at the same time.

Breaking communications down into smaller chunks goes a long way toward being understood. Don’t dump a million task on someone all at the same time. If you compartmentalized a few things at a time, then you have a better chance for comprehension. This way you can make sure that the information is understood before moving on to the next chunk. If the communication fits on more than two screens, it is probably too long. (Interesting tidbit: ‘Chunking” – the theory that we remember things in chunks, gives evidence that 7 chunks plus or minus 2 may be all we can handle at one time.) 

Bottom line, whenever you have two or more people communicating, there will always be some communication issues. Keep it short, keep it detailed, and check each parties understanding along the way.  If you do that… the rest should be obvious.

 

Fulfill Your Professional Aspirations at IPM Day 2017

/ Lorian Lipton / Leave a comment

Register today at iil.com/international-project-management-day

And use Promo Code: ATTITUDE to save $10 US

See you on International PM Day!

Controlling Chaos: 6 Agile Steps To Finding Sanity

/ Lorian Lipton / 1 Comment

Have you lost control of your day? Is the pace of everything getting faster and faster, so that you just can’t get done what you need to? Do you feel like your projects are spiraling into chaos? Finding ways to maintain one’s sanity while managing large, fast-moving projects is a creative dance. Recently, while teaching a course on “Managing Projects in e-Business,” one of my students asked me how I controlled chaos on my projects. My answer: “I plan for it!”

chaosMy job as the Project Leader is to keep the project moving forward; to meet deadlines, budget constraints, ensure performance, and most of all to manage the client’s expectations. I know better than to think that I can ever ‘really’ control things, so I put processes and procedures in place to make sure that maybe the roof won’t blow off when the tornado comes through (if you get what I mean), and to know what I might do if, and when, it does. I have been managing chaos for years (long before there was Agile PM), with solid planning,  a deep understanding of my team and client, and with a nimble attitude.

What is Chaos Anyway?

On a project, especially in today’s complex and dynamic environments, chaos can be defined as “a state of the (project) system where the future development of the system is not predictable, or only poorly predictable.” (Avoiding and Managing Chaos in (Construction) Projects, Sven Bertelsen and Lauri Koskela, 11th Annual Conference on Lean Construction – Denmark, 2009  ) Basically,  a small unpredictable event, like the delayed arrival of key resource materials, may seem like nothing more than a nuisance when it happens, but the cumulative effect of many deliveries not taking place over many months can delay you to the point of no return. When you are dealing with complex projects, you are sitting on the edge of chaos most of the time. If you plan accordingly, it is less likely that you will be overtaken by events. (How to Save a Failing Project: Chaos to Control, Ralph R. Young, Steven M. Brady, & Dennis C. Nagle, Jr.. Management Concepts, Inc., VA, 2009)

Sanity = Practicing Good Project Management

  1. PLAN:  Make a plan, work the plan, and update the plan continuously. Do you have a Project Management Plan (PMP)? If you don’t have a roadmap, how do you know where you are going? You don’t have to document a tome of stuff, but as Agile Modeling tells us, “keep your plan simple enough, but not too simple.”
  2. TRACK: Know where you want to end up and keep your focus there. Stay on track. Do you have a Project Charter? Knowing what you are sponsored to deliver is critical to getting there.
  3. MONITOR: Have a metric by which you know how to check the health of your project. Do you have an analytics dashboard? How do you know you’re on track if you can’t show it in a graph somehow?
  4. PREDICT:  You need to know what your mitigation strategy is because something will go wrong. What is your Plan B? Do you have a Risk Management Plan? Chaos management is really just risk management. You may not know what is going to happen but you can plan how you will fix it when it does.
  5. FIX: Prevent everything you can from going sideways. You do this by a continuous (iterative) review. Do you have a Change Management process? Remember to change the easiest things first and get them going in the right direction. Repeat after me:  CHANGE IS GOOD when it gets you closer to your goal. Little changes along the way are a lot easier than a big change near the end. (It’s that cumulative thing again.)
  6. DANCE: Be agile in approach and attitude. You need to be open to alternatives when you need them. Stay close to your client and your sponsor so that you can make decisions when they are needed in the moment.

keep-calm-and-plan-ahead-36

I know it may sound oversimplified, but most of the battle of controlling chaos is staying calm and practicing good project management.  What dance steps have worked for you?

Communications Management: 5 Virtual Team Tips For Better Understanding

/ Lorian Lipton / 1 Comment

When I started to manage global teams, it became apparent to me that people everywhere were generally bad communicators. People tend to talk, not listen, and with the loss of visual cues, multiple native languages, and different writing styles, I saw a recipe for significant misunderstandings. On a project, especially an agile one, misunderstandings can cost time and money.  miscommunications

Virtual environments of communications, (email, text, and phone, to name a few) pose a higher risk of miscommunication because they lack the ‘visual components’ that we find in face to face communications. This poses both challenges and opportunities for us as Project Leaders (“Social Networking, The “Third Place,” and The Evolution of Communications,” 2007). The challenge comes because we lose body cues that help us understand whether the other person is listening, or mulling over our questions, or getting ready to answer. We are not necessarily sure that our communication has been received as intended. On the other hand,  we have the opportunity to incorporate new modes of contact into our virtual communications that can provide us with enhanced team collaboration, knowledge sharing, and understanding. (“Six Sigma Team Dynamics, Roles, and Success Factors,” Skillsoft, 2017)

I put this list together after decades of successful virtual management of worldwide teams to maximize project communications and minimize misunderstandings.

pascal1. Be Brief: Use as few words as possible. Utilize the technology medium (email, twitter, instant message), that will convey your message without extra fluff.

“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” (translation: “I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not the time to make it shorter.”) – Blaise Pascal

martin
2.  Choose Your Medium Wisely:  “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.” – Martin Lomasney

3. Pick Up The Phone or Skype: If a text or instant message dialog goes for more than 5 minutes (5 texts back and forth), it is best to pick up the phone or Skype and talk to the person.

4. Practice Good Emailing:

  • Less is more. (See Rule #1 & #5)
  • Try to make it fit on 1 screen.
  • Be clear about your point and organize using bullets and headings.
  • Write using good grammar.
  • Avoid attachments.
  • AVOID ALL CAPs, emojis, text-messaging language and colored type.
  • Proofread each sentence.
  • Don’t send something you would not want the world to see.

5. Choose the 1 Question you want to be answered: If you send a note with several questions in it, typically, only one question will get answered. Often, it is the last one. Occasionally, it is the first one. But usually, it is the most interesting one.  Why not decide instead of leaving it up to fate?

Miscommunication poses an unnecessary risk and cost to any project.  In a future post, I will talk more about successful global team communications and communication plans. Following some simple virtual rules can make all the difference in being understood.