Project Assumptions Identification

The first and most crucial step in managing assumptions is identifying the base assumptions on which the project plan is established. If assumptions are not identified and made visible, they cannot be managed. Identification of assumptions is important on all projects, but even more so for virtual projects because the validity of the assumptions has to be assessed wherever the work is being performed. Managing the base assumptions is therefore a shared and distributed task on virtual projects. For this reason, it is necessary to clearly document the base assumptions for the project, as illustrated in Table 4.1.

Assumptions Validation

The best-case scenario is one in which all assumptions are validated as truisms during project planning so the team begins execution activities with a full set of knowns. This is an extremely rare scenario, unfortunately. In reality, the validation of assumptions becomes a primary activity during project execution that feeds both the risk management and change management processes. Because of its importance, assumption validation has to be centralized and performed by virtual project managers (with critical input from project team members). As a best practice, the assumption list should be reviewed during each team meeting to maintain focus and effort on validating the base assumptions of the project.

Assumptions Control

Initial assumptions are rarely static. As a project evolves, more will be learned about the future, and assumptions will be proven true or untrue in the process. When an assumption is proven to be untrue, action must be taken. Likely, a project risk will be associated with the false assumption that will require mitigation or elimination. The risk mitigation or elimination action will in turn likely result in a change to the project baseline. Project assumptions, risks, and changes need to be closely managed as they, many times, are closely related and dependent on one another.

Documenting and validating the base assumptions on which the project plan is established enables a more proactive approach to managing the execution of a virtual project. Risks and changes can be identified and responded to in a timelier, and many times in a less disruptive manner if assumptions are tested early and regularly as part of the project execution process.

Start with Defining Project Success

The first principle of good project governance involves understanding and communicating how well project performance is progressing toward achievement of project objectives. Many times project managers become over focused on progress against their cost and schedule baselines and forget that the real intent of a project is to achieve the business objectives driving the need for the project.

The project strike zone is an excellent tool for evaluating and communicating progress toward achievement of the project objectives. It is used to identify the critical objectives for a project, to help project managers and their stakeholders track progress toward achievement of the key business results anticipated, and to set the boundaries within which project managers and teams can operate without direct top management involvement.

As shown in Figure 4.1, elements of the project strike zone include the project objectives, target, and threshold values, an “actual” field that provides indication of where a project is operating with respect to the target and threshold limits, and a high-level status indicator.⁴

Creating an effective project strike zone is a critical activity for ensuring that project managers, project teams, top management, and other stakeholders all understand and agree on the objectives of the project. It is also critical for establishing the success measures to monitor during project execution in order to gauge project progress.

Defining a meaningful project strike zone requires quality information from a number of sources. The initial set of objectives is derived directly from the approved project business case. (See Chapter 2.) To establish and later negotiate the control limits for each objective with project managers, project sponsors also need to know the project team's capabilities and experience and past track record and to balance thresholds against the new project's complexities and risks accordingly. The four steps for creating and using a project strike zone are:

1. Identify project objectives.
2. Set the recommended target and threshold values.
3. Negotiate the final target and threshold values.
4. Use the project strike zone for virtual governance.

Monitor Distributed Work Closely

Project monitoring is a critical aspect of virtual project governance. Due to the distributed nature of work on a virtual project, project managers have to be hyper-vigilant about collecting team status and monitoring progress to plan. They must do so on a schedule specified by their respective senior management and project sponsor in an organized manner.

Many times monitoring cadence is dependent on where the project is in its life cycle, as Jerry Conners, an experienced virtual project manager, explains:

During the early and middle stages of project execution, I rely on our weekly team meeting to collect status from the distributed team members. This is my normal reporting cycle. During final integration and testing, we will go to daily stand-up meetings to make sure action and re-action is quick.

Monitoring is the delicate balance between not diving too deep, because virtual project managers will quickly realize that there is not the time to do so, and not diving deep enough to monitor project progress and team health. Best-practicing virtual project managers realize that as managers, they are part auditor and therefore need to take on a “just don't tell me, show me” attitude (see the box titled “Using Weekly One-on-Ones to Capture Dashboard Data and Build Rapport”).

Project managers need to see work completion to fully trust it is getting done. It is a trust but verify management style and is accomplished in two ways. The project managers intentionally design project schedules and integration points that are closely associated in time. In other words, best-practice virtual project managers never have decision points, milestones, or deliverables that are months into the future. All such key points on a schedule are no more than two to three weeks out, which means there are always touchpoints to verify actual progress.

To facilitate consistent intra-team progress reporting, virtual project managers can require team leaders to prepare and present a team indicator that reflects the work of their team of specialists. Keep in mind that, for some distributed team members, it may be a team of one specialist. Figure 4.2 shows an example project team indicator report that can be adapted for a team's special situation and information requirements.

Project managers must work with the team to determine the best format and content to present in the team indicator. Content includes progress to planned work since the last reporting period, work planned during the next reporting period, critical issues and risks needing project manager attention, changes agreed to through the team's change management process, and performance to a team's performance metrics. By requiring team members to keep their indicators current, project managers will receive a comprehensive yet concise report on team status. As an effective communication tool, the team indicator facilitates the necessary transfer of status information between the distributed team member and the virtual project manager.

Project Reviews

The project review is an organizational meeting in which project status is presented to and reviewed by senior managers, governance board personnel, and other key stakeholders. Given the virtual project team environment, most of these reviews are held by video conference across multiple company sites. Each project manager will present the status for the project he or she manages.

For consistency in reporting format and message, it is most effective to have a consistent project summary status report for use by all project managers. Much like the project dashboard, which is used to communicate intra-team status, the project summary status report is a one- or two-page summary brief that communicates overall project status to a broader set of stakeholders. (See Figure 4.4.)⁷ Much of the information contained in the status report is derived from the most recent team indicators and presented in summary format.

In addition to the summary status report, the project strike zone and project dashboard tools are normally used in the project review to communicate status toward achievement of the project business goals and KPIs, respectively. It is important to point out that the project review serves a dual purpose. First, it provides the data and information necessary to ensure that a project is progressing as anticipated, and second, it provides the necessary information to assist senior management and the governance body to make decisions with respect to business value and strategic direction. In the project review, the objective for project managers is to communicate both operational and strategic status of the project and to use the forum to gain management help if needed for specific issues or barriers outside of the project managers' control.

Gaining Visibility to Change

The biggest challenge to managing change on a virtual project is dealing with changes that can occur remotely before they happen. Proactive management of change can occur only if project managers establish a change management system for their virtual projects. A formal change management system establishes order to the job of collecting, analyzing, documenting, approving, and communicating project changes. Such a system also establishes the protocols, or rules, that define the expectations for how change will be managed once a project is in execution.⁸ Change management protocols normally include these points:

• All changes must be requested.
• Change requests must be made in writing.
• The benefits gained from a proposed change must be clearly articulated and documented.
• The approval process must be documented.
• A decision maker must be appointed.
• Approved changes must be incorporated into a revised project plan.
• Change decisions must be adequately communicated.

A formal change management system is useless, however, if the team is not committed to managing change. Project managers must set the expectation that all changes that can potentially affect the project baseline and task plans be communicated and analyzed for cost versus benefit. For distributed teams, it may make sense to establish a change management hierarchy where change is first managed locally, where the work is being performed. Then approved changes are communicated to the project-level change management body for ratification. Only changes that may affect the work of other team members or may affect the project baseline or success criteria need to go to the project level for evaluation. In practice, this is an effective model for collecting and analyzing change that is occurring remotely.

Establishing a Formal Process

The change management process itself is no different for a virtual project than for a traditional project. There is no shortage of materials available to help readers establish a process, so we will not add to the mountain of information. We do want to stress that project managers should strive for simplicity when establishing a change management process with a minimal number of steps. Seven steps are recommended:

1. Submit a written change request.
2. Evaluate benefit versus cost of the change.
3. Assess impact of change.
4. Make the change request decision.
5. Log and communicate the change decision.
6. Modify project and task plans based on approved changes.
7. Communicate and implement the change.

For virtual projects, these steps will be performed with limited to no face-to-face discussions. It is important, therefore, to establish a dedicated change management team site for the project on the company intranet where fast and efficient communication related to various changes can occur. (See the box titled “Fast-Tracking the Change Process.”)

Communicating Changes

Finally, change decisions are of no value if they are not communicated to all those affected, especially virtual team members immediately affected by the change. Communication, always a critical factor in virtual project success or failure, is vital to ensure that changes that were approved and declined are communicated to the distributed workforce. Responsibility for implementing changes will likely fall on those performing project execution tasks in remote locations. Regular, specific, and formal change communication must come from the project change management body. The most effective means for communicating change decisions are the use of change management list servers and change management bulletin boards. (See Chapter 8.)

Additionally, communication of change should be incorporated into the project governance process. Each team should include information on changes approved and planned as part of their project indicator. Virtual project managers should, in turn, include baseline changes as part of their project dashboard and summary status report.

Managing Interdependencies

The disaggregation and reintegration of work is the centerpiece of integration and systems thinking. Virtual project managers oversee the disaggregation of the whole solution into a project architecture composed of multiple components. They then oversee the integration of work output from each of the components to create the consolidated whole solution. The true value and benefits of the project output can be realized only when the activities associated with each of the team members are integrated together into a holistic solution for the customer.¹¹

Referring to Figure 4.6, we consider the horizontal dimension of a project as the synchronization of workflow across the team specialists. This synchronization is accomplished through cross-project interface definition, coordination of all project activities, collaborative communication on the project, and synchronization of the delivery of the interdependencies.

Although the role of localized teams is to manage the creation and delivery of their deliverables and outcomes, an important aspect of the integration role of virtual project managers is overseeing the handoff of deliverables between team members. This output-input relationship creates a network of interdependencies that has to be established and managed at the project level, not the local level.

Establishing the network of interdependencies is best accomplished through the practice of project mapping (see Chapter 3) and the creation of a project map. Project managers can use the map to manage the hand-off of cross-project interdependencies during the execution stage of the project.

Synchronizing Workflow

For effective integration to occur, synchronization of activities over time is necessary. However, for project managers, time management on a virtual project usually does not just involve managing the duration of tasks associated with each project component. Project managers who attempt to do so would be mired in detail. Rather, managing the project timeline involves ensuring the work outcomes and deliverables are occurring as planned and mapped.

Detailed schedule management is the focus at the local level, and summary, or integrated, time management is the focus at the centralized project level. This coordination requires a modular approach to time management where the schedule is disaggregated and partitioned according to where the work is to be performed. Schedule details for each component are worked by local teams and then integrated by project managers to gain the full perspective of the project timeline and critical synchronization points.

Virtual project managers should keep in mind that the most detailed schedule is not necessarily the best one. Too much detail can divert attention to one aspect of a project—the schedule—and away from the other critical aspects of managing a project and leading a team. If project managers focus on the critical synchronization points occurring over time and let local teams focus on the detailed schedule for their respective project components, a good balance for effective timeline management is achieved.

Moving from Storming to Norming and Performing

It is during the executing stage of a project that the full team is resourced and engaged in interdependent work. It's also during execution that project managers must lead the team from the forming stage of team development work to high performing.

Chapter 3 detailed the characteristics of a high-performing team. The five distinguishing factors of high-performing teams relative to other teams include:

1. A deeper sense of purpose
2. Relatively more ambitious goals
3. Better work approaches
4. Mutual accountability
5. Complementary skill set (and, at times, interchangeable skills)

Achieving high performance is a challenge for even the most seasoned project managers. Conducting such work is much more challenging for managers overseeing virtual project teams.

Many of us are likely familiar with immersion programs. Whether it is a French immersion for a student from another country to become fluent in French and the French culture or a public safety community immersion in which police, fire, and other safety professionals purposefully immerse themselves in an area of the community to build awareness, establish common goals, build rapport, and establish trust. Immersion programs are similar in that they are strategies to quickly understand the community, align with its culture, and establish common ground and confidence. An immersion program would be great for virtual team development. Actually, nothing would be better. However, costs prohibit such a strategy for project planning and executing.

How can virtual project managers develop individuals and the team when they are not face-to-face and immersed with one another? The first step is to understand that project team member development is the responsibility and the challenge of project managers. Many project managers fail to realize their role in team development. Many assume this is the role of the human resources department or team members' direct supervising managers. Best-practicing project managers do indeed realize their role and, perhaps more important, realize the correlation between team development and project performance—from individuals to the collective team.

Beyond awareness of role responsibility, how does this development get done? First, let's start with how it doesn't get done. Team development success is not found in the latest technology. Sure, technology can be an enabler to team development, but often managers seek a technology solution when the problem is not a technology problem. Most problems associated with virtual project team development exist because of one of these reasons: (1) poor interpersonal skills, (2) lack of process discipline and consistency, or (3) team development is managed as an add-on rather than integrated into the team's work.

Based on these problems, the short answer for how best-in-class project managers develop their virtual teams is that they leverage interpersonal skills to know their team members and align developmental opportunities among team members, integrate team development into project work as an expectation and rule, and they spotlight individual knowledge in a way that enables everyone to teach others as much as they learn from others.

Team learning and team development is a social journey. Even if some individuals prefer self-directed learning and activities, they still learn from others in the process. For this reason, virtual project managers must establish a team culture of sharing lessons and best practices as a form of teaching and learning. The old Latin saying is true: “The best way to learn is to teach.”¹⁰

Why is this education so important during the executing phase of a project? For virtual teams, it's because of the need to be intentional and purposeful. Co-located project teams can get together (face-to-face) every week or so to review the knowledge area plans in a status meeting. During that meeting, team members can discuss risks relative to task-level work, milestones, and deliverables and how team members can support one another. They can also (face-to-face) sense frustration or conflict among one another and work through the conflict or schedule a separate meeting to resolve issues. In so doing, the team develops and naturally navigates the stages of team development. Additionally, being co-located allows team members to have coffee breaks together, or meet for lunch, and see what each other values; for example, displaying sports paraphernalia, family vacation photos, or other items in their cubicles allows others to see the personality of the person. All of this helps team members to get to know one another, understand one another, build trust and rapport, which cascades from personal awareness to team member camaraderie. These team member interactions all facilitate team development. Obviously, this rapport building is much more difficult among virtual team members. That's why virtual project managers have the additional role of intentionally seeking ways to build rapport within their virtual project teams.

Whether managers are leading a co-located or virtual team, they want the team to be high performing. It's from this point that collaboration occurs and further enables cross-team integration of work to be completed most efficiently and effectively. Listed in the box below are some additional suggestions from Dale Carnegie for leveraging the power of team members working together.

Delegating Stakeholder-Influencing Duties

Due to the distributed nature of stakeholders on virtual projects, virtual project managers must rely on a number of their team members to share in the project stakeholder-influencing duties. In particular, project managers must tap influential team members who are geographically located near key stakeholders and can establish physical presence with them.

We must recognize, however, that virtual project team members are selected for their expertise in a particular specialty required for the project, regardless of their geographic location and their stakeholder-influencing capabilities.¹⁷

Selected team members must therefore concentrate on building collaborative relationships and alliances with their local stakeholder community. To do so effectively, the team members must be skilled in relationship building, stakeholder analysis techniques, and negotiating. In addition to distributed team members acquiring the necessary skills to influence project stakeholders, project managers must take care to choose team members who also possess an innate ability to communicate with people at all levels of the organization. Obviously not all team members will possess this innate ability or be able to acquire the skills necessary to influence others, so project managers must evaluate and choose stakeholder liaisons carefully. Once the liaisons are chosen, project managers also must take care to create an atmosphere in which team members are fully empowered to influence stakeholders on behalf of the project manager.

Instituting Common Methods and Tools

Since effective stakeholder management on a virtual project requires delegation of influencing activities to a number of project team members, it is essential that virtual project managers establish and oversee a common methodology and set of tools. This means there should be commonality in the way team members identify, categorize, and analyze key project stakeholders, regardless of geographic location.

The primary goal of stakeholder management activities is to establish alignment to the strategic goals, intended business benefits, project objectives, and success criteria of a project.¹⁷ Unless there are only a very small number of project stakeholders, however, it is unrealistic to believe that there will not be conflicting opinions and interests between stakeholders. Such conflicts are common, and for this reason, it is important to develop a stakeholder strategy for the project to ensure that the right team members are influencing the right stakeholders. Developing a stakeholder strategy requires identifying all project stakeholders, analyzing the stakeholders' interest in and influence on the project, and then determining how to influence the key stakeholders.

Creating a Stakeholder Strategy

Stakeholder analysis is about sense making. This means understanding the significance of the information gained about the various project stakeholders. Project managers then use the significance of the information to develop a strategy for engaging and managing the right set of stakeholders—those who have power and influence to affect the outcome of the project.

Most of the literature on stakeholder management classifies primary stakeholders as those with both high power and strong allegiance to the project. This is not completely accurate because it leaves out the most potentially dangerous stakeholders—those with high power and negative allegiance to the project. These people also need to be considered primary stakeholders. Figure 4.8 helps to illustrate why. Stakeholders with high power and negative allegiance require significant engagement.²¹

If project managers use the power/allegiance grid to map their stakeholders, a core stakeholder strategy will begin to emerge. The strategy should consist of a communication and action plan for each of the primary stakeholders. It should also keep the project advocates engaged, describe how they can be used to influence others, and plan how to win over or neutralize stakeholders who are not current advocates. The stakeholder strategy should consider:

• Which stakeholders require the most attention?
• Is there a need to influence a change of allegiance for any stakeholders?
• What message needs to be delivered to each stakeholder?
• Can any stakeholders be leveraged as champions?
• What is the best method and frequency of engagement and communication with each stakeholder?
• Does the strategy reflect the interests and concerns of each stakeholder?

The stakeholder strategy likely will identify the need to focus attention first and foremost on some of the most difficult stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement activities will test the courage of project managers who need to be brave and bold when faced with building relationships with stakeholders who are not fans of the project or may be professionally threatened by the project's outcome. Project managers must not follow the human tendency to avoid these stakeholders. Rather, they should seek them out and, most important, listen to what they have to say. Only by listening can project managers begin to find middle ground to use as a means to positively influence stakeholders.

I Forgot to Check the Box

All projects have both obvious stakeholders and nonobvious stakeholders. Because of the lack of physical presence between stakeholders residing at distributed sites, it is likely that more nonobvious stakeholders exist on virtual projects. Stakeholder identification, analysis, and strategy can only pinpoint needed actions for the obvious stakeholders. Surprises associated with nonvisible, nonobvious stakeholders are likely to occur, as they did for Jeremy Bouchard.

“I forgot to check the box that stated the product I was shipping to Japan for system testing was not for resale. Turns out that was a crucial oversight that had significant impact on the Sitka project. Because the product was in final prototype, it looked like a completed product that could be sold, even though it wouldn't perform like a completed product. The customs agent in Japan who inspected one of the products couldn't tell the difference by looking at it, and he therefore assumed it was not merely an engineering prototype, but could be sold. That raised his suspicion, and our systems test prototypes were quarantined in customs. Three weeks: That's what it took to submit the required paperwork, get it reviewed by Japanese customs, and get a decision to release the test prototypes from quarantine. Three weeks of lost schedule and project productivity. I learned that even a customs agent in a foreign country can be one of my project stakeholders—sight unseen.”

Virtual Project Execution Assessment

Project Name: _______________________________

Date of Assessment: ___________________________

Assessment Completed by: _____________________

Confidential Assessment: ______ Yes, confidential

                                              ______ No, not confidential