CHAPTER 17

Dealing with People
Day to Day

Running the Plan

You have tailored the methodology to match the organization and team culture and experience. You have created a workable plan and communicated a clear critical path and dependencies. The resource plan is realistic and assumes less time will be available than the managers and individuals have committed to. On top if this, you have project manager contingency. Now, you must manage the plan.

This means monitoring progress and taking control actions to remove barriers or respond to missed or poor deliverables. For an agile output, this will be at the daily standup meetings where the team focuses on tasks done, in progress, and to be done.

Manage the plan sensibly and sensitively, push tasks on the critical path, be more relaxed where slippage can occur. The art of running composite projects is knowing when as-homework staff can be pushed.

Never assume the project will have the time it needs from as-homework staff, and you may need to establish agreements on the use of their time. Fortunately, your project plan has lots of small frequent deliverables, so you have a clear accurate view of progress and always have time to make adjustments.

Fend off scope creep like your job depends on it, because it does. Fortunately, your unambiguous deliverables’ definition and your understanding of the people’s project triangle help you manage expectations on these issues.

Similarly, resist attempts to bring deadlines forward—it is never going to work. Our experience is that enough unanticipated events happen and cause all the disruption and challenges to scope and deadlines you can deal with, without adding more.

Meetings

Meetings are vital, and if used well, can achieve a lot. But, everybody has experienced inefficient and ineffective meetings, and everyone hates that type. Meetings fail if they are perceived as irrelevant for too many people for too much of the meeting time. Too many failed meetings and the project can be in jeopardy.

You need to make it as easy as possible for people to meet your ­expectations. The key is to respect everyone’s time. This means tailoring meetings to the needs of the project, the business, and the people involved. Work around busy times in the day, week, month, and year. Where possible, fit into the rhythm of the business by using existing reporting cycles and piggyback on existing meetings.

Aim for short meetings regularly, rather than long meetings, and remember not everyone has to attend every meeting for all the time. Think about using the agile approach to meetings—quick fire stand-up meetings to review progress and agree the plan for today and tomorrow. Consider sub-dividing the team around common interests or design the agenda to ensure maximum participation and engagement. A lot can be efficiently achieved with project manager one-to-one meetings with workstream leaders. In general, whole team meetings should be infrequent, but are sometimes appropriate with a small team.

As not everyone will find everything important, allow people to join just relevant parts of the meeting. Allowing people to join meetings remotely—this reduces travel overhead and aids productivity but must be managed well. There are considerable risks unless the meeting chair is considerate to the remote participants. The chair must ensure they are following the discussion, and they are able to contribute.

Another tip is to book in meetings right at the start for the duration of the project. This way, they are recorded into people’s diaries and are factored into their plans for subsequent weeks and months.

To make meetings as effective as possible, have a clear purpose
and agenda with a logical sequence of topics that lead to outcomes.
This allows attendees to prepare themselves and leave feeling something has been accomplished.

Meeting rules that are outside the organization norms are extremely difficult to impose. So, you might think that no laptops and phones off will improve the effectiveness of the meeting, and you are probably right. However, if in all other company meetings, attendees routinely check e-mails and take calls, then you are almost certainly going to have to accept it, because the lost goodwill is rarely going to be worth it. Choose your battles.

However, you can:

• • Start on time.
• • When you have a group together, use the time for discussion rather than wasting it battling through the plan or risk logs.
• • Efficient use of time is to focus on deviations from the plan—exception management. Time, cost, and quality have tolerances, so only if these are exceeded are they important. Risks that have changed status are relevant.
• • Minute the project boards and project team meetings. Focus on updates, plus decisions and actions.
• • Issue the minutes within 24 hours so that people with actions are not delayed from starting and when it is still fresh in their minds.

Minutes can be the primary tool to chase actions in between meetings rather than using project status meetings to embarrass people with delinquent statuses. Ensure they know they are amber before the meetings.

For non-attendees, then BaU has probably interfered and you need to be patient. Having follow-up contact with people who were not able to attend shows you recognize their issues and puts the project in the front of their mind again.

Reports

The same principle of respecting people’s time applies to reports.
All reports should be concise and focused on exceptions to the plan.
This means they take minimal time to read and only contain relevant actionable information.

If workstream leaders are reporting, provide them with templates so that they can focus on content and not structure, are common across the project, take minimal time to write and read. If available, use in-house reporting tools that focus on efficiency for report writing.

Story: Believable Reporting

Tackle the Day Job Issue

You cannot escape the day job issue; it has to be tackled. It is always easy for the day job to take precedence for reasons already discussed: it has frequent deadlines; their line manager holds hierarchal authority not the PM; day job tasks can seem more urgent and immediate; the day job may simply be easier as it is more familiar.

People tend to mistake urgent for important, so working through that confusion helps staff reprioritize. However, the project manager must accept the reality of composite projects, in that there will be conflicts between the project and day job. The day job is a genuine excuse for lack of work, and it is likely to be so frequently.

Get to know the team, understand their individual BaU pressures, not just at the start, but as the project progresses. Understand their background and motivations: are they are volunteers or conscripts, is the project part of their objectives? The use of annual objectives for the project team can help project and BaU work have similar weight.

Do not forget the motivational power of being listened to and of recognition of effort and achievement:

• • Have one-to-one meetings for workstream leaders and other team members to provide this.
• • Use of the usual company treats—meeting biscuits, small rewards—is symbolic, but often effective.
• • Encourage the sponsor to give recognition to the team.
• • Use a mid-project or post-project jolly or bonuses as appropriate to company culture.

The project manager must ensure the day job is not the easy option and the project the difficult one:

• • Make project processes as easy to follow as possible.
• • Assign small, frequent deliverables.
• • Coordinate project demands with BaU peak demands.
• • Have strong relationships with BaU line managers.
• • Communicate strong sponsor backing to the BaU managers.
• • Create a team spirit so that missing deadlines is letting down real-life colleagues rather than just an intangible ephemeral project.
• • Have formal time commitment agreements in place.
• • Always follow up on missed expectations, such as missed meetings and missed deadlines.
• • Be prepared to use a line manager or sponsor to escalate. Sometimes, you need to just use the positional authority of executive sponsor to get the difficult things done.

What this means is be human and empathetic while keeping clear focus on the end goal.

Story: Simplify with Project Management