Project Delivery Challenges Briefing (Video Compilation)

[Music] project management training teaches you how to manage projects but one of the commonest questions is not how to manage a project but how do I manage multiple projects more than one project at a time and that's the question I'm going to answer in this [Music] video actually there's no simple answer to how to manage multiple projects there's no methodology for it the methodology is project management methodology the challenge is to apply it in parallel across a number of projects at one time and for that I have a range of strategies to offer you the

first strategy and the most important single idea in this whole video recognizes the fact that human beings are just rubbish at multitasking whatever anyone tells you we can't do it multitasking works if all of the things you're trying to do require very low amounts of cognitive load mental processing and if one of those things you need to do requires a high cognitive load you can still do that and carry on with other simple tasks you can drive and have a conversation with your passenger and probably change the CD at the same time safely because although

all of those things require some mental effort most of them you can do without concentrating and therefore you can keep your attention on the road and note also that if you're a beginner driver you can't do that because everything seems to take a high cognitive load even the conversation and therefore when you're focused on driving and it's very difficult because it's new you can't do anything else so what matters if you're trying to manage multiple projects is that you don't try to multitask what you need to do is what I call serial monotasking you do

a thing you put it down and you do something else and therefore my key idea is that of having multiple hat recognize that for each project metaphorically speaking you have a different hat to wear and you can only wear one hat at a time so the secret to managing multiple projects is to wear multiple hats one at a time and therefore when you finish the task on one project take that hat off put it down and pick up a new hat to wear the second key idea is to understand the time cycle of each of

the projects you're trying to manage for some projects you'll find that things hardly change from one week to the next whereas other projects well something seems to happen almost every day and there are other projects where if you turn your back for 10 minutes Everything's changed recognizing that time cycle means you know how frequently you need to check in with each project it wouldn't be right to default to the simple every project gets the same amount of time and I check in with each project on a regular cycle and it's the same cycle for each

project a b c a b c a BC because all projects are not equal and in particular they have different time Cycles you can check in on that slow time cycle project maybe once or twice a week the faster time cycle project may need you to check check in every day and other projects may need you to be constantly alert to what's going on your default attention the third idea I'd like to give you is the idea of the commander's intent this comes from the military the idea and I think probably most famously in early

modern history from Nelson's instruction to the captains of the ships in his Fleet at the Battle of trafala the idea of commander's intent is is you tell your team the most important fundamentals of what you're trying to achieve the commander's intent and you leave it to their judgment their intelligence their common sense to act appropriately based on understanding what you're trying to achieve you don't try to micromanage that way you can turn your attention away from Project a to Project B knowing that the team that are dealing with project a know what you want of

them and can make sensible decisions in your absence without that kind of Delegation managing multiple projects is just going to be impossible my fourth idea is right at the outset build a strategic plan for everything you're handling all the projects you're involved with put them onto one chart represent projects or major work streams as bars on that chart and see how they interact and then shift the timing of activities work streams and in particular of deliverables and Milestones on individual projects so that you don't get crowding you get a reasonable spacing between the major Milestone

on Project a and the next major Milestone on Project B if you find that project C has a milestone at around the same time then shift one of them so that you able to plan how you give each project your attention and you're not trying to concentrate on two project at critical points at the same time strategy five is to focus on the highest value activities that you can deliver and to delegate as much of the rest as you possibly can so the question arises what are those really high value activities the ones that you

can do and you shouldn't be or can't Delegate for me there are four of them firstly facilitating highlevel problem solving the key problems that will define success or failure of your project you need to be in there facilitating the problem solving approach and making sure that it gets done properly and linked to that is decision making there will be decisions that you don't want to or cannot delegate those are high value governance related activities that you need to keep for yourself number three is engaging with principal stakeholders the kind of stakeholders who are so important

to your project and who recognize that importance that they expect you as the project manager to be engaging with them and taking their thoughts their comments their concerns seriously and the fourth thing that you can't delegate is mentoring coaching supporting guiding your team members yes your workstream leads and team leaders can be doing that for their team members but you have a responsible to the people who work directly for you to look after their interests and to help them to develop their careers and to thrive on your project and they can't do that for themselves

so you have to do it for them that's my number four principal high value activity the sixth strategy is to focus on exceptions you know the plan your team knows the plan and your team should be working that plan so your attention should go to the exceptions you should be available for your team to come to you when things aren't going according his plan when they run into problems when they don't know what to do number seven is to prioritize leadership over management this is about creating an environment where your team and individual members of

your team can thrive and succeed and deliver the project for you in another video I talked about the importance of servant leadership and its value to project management and this is fundamentally what this thing is all about it's about serving your teams so that they can get on and deliver the multiple projects that you are trying to control my eighth strategy is to block out your week at the end of each week review what's coming up in the next week the key Milestones important meetings you've got to attend and block out chunks of each day

for each of your projects give each project the right amount of time based on not only its priority as a project but the priority generated by what's going to be happening in that week and always leave time in your diary for surprises blockout spaces to deal with problems that you don't know this Friday afternoon will occur next week when you get into work on Monday morning review anything that's happened over the weekend talk to your people and then either confirm that blocking or shift it around to accommodate the new priorities of your week one of

the things I always like to say is a schedule that has no float has too much risk and too much stress number nine if you're going to manage multiple projects you must be all organized I have four particular suggestions for you here and the first is to make a sensible investment in a system or processes or project management software that will make your life easier and make your projects much more controllable and by sensible investment I mean don't go for the best the wizzi the most fancy software go for the kind of tools that people

will use and that do all you need them to do and very little else my second suggestion is you keep a file of project summaries whether you keep it on your mobile device on your laptop computer or in a physical notebook or a set of folders always have with you key data about each of your projects that means if you need to swap suddenly from Project a to project e and you haven't been working on Project e for a while you can always gather the key information the names the phone numbers the deadlines all of

that is ready to hand so that you can be effective as quickly as possible next I like to keep a multi-part notebook yes I like physical notebooks if you've got multiple projects then carry a notebook where it's easy to go to the right page for the project you're working on and if you're not going to buy a multiart notebook then it's quite easy to Mark the edges of your existing ordinary notebook with color coding so that you can quickly turn to the right section of your notebook and finally make good use of visualization tools that

allow you and your team members to quickly key into What's Going On Tools like a c bar chart like a linear responsibility chart like a strategy chart all of these enable you to mentally accommodate huge amounts of information very quickly indeed number 10 May may be boring to some people but be absolutely scrupulous about keeping up to date with your Administration and your project control of course if you've got the resources to secure a project administrator or a project controller or a program administrator who can handle that on your behalf that's wonderful but if you

can't stay on top of your admin or it will jump on top of you at the worst possible moment it's a rule of the universe that when one of your projects goes into meltdown that'll be the time when HR are screaming for you to fill out some forms and to do some assessments so keep on top of those forms keep on top of those assessments get them done in good time so that you can focus on your project at those critical points number 11 managing multiple projects can be overwhelming it can get to you you

need to be able to handle overwhelm effectively to overcome it and for that we have a separate video so I won't go into that here and finally number 12 get comfortable with saying no you've got a lot on your plate you've got multiple projects to handle and some of them may be moving to a critical stage you need to be able to say no make no into a positive by seeing no as a noble objection Noble objection is when you decline to do something for the right reasons and you decline to do it in a

way that is polite courteous and respectful and what are those right reasons because you have strategic priorities and saying yes would inhibit your ability to deliver more important more beneficial higher value strategic priorities get good at saying no managing multiple projects will always be hard work you will never be in your comfort zone but at some point when you've shown that you're good at managing one project and there isn't a big enough project to occupy you full-time your organization will say here you are here are two projects three projects four projects to manage and you

will need to manage them and these 12 strategies will help [Music] you there are three words that project managers fear above all others could you [Music] just could you just these words mean one thing someone is trying to squeeze their priorities into your project and they want to use your budget your resources and your precious timeline to do it there's a word for this scope creep it's dangerous and you need to stop it happily there's a very simple two-step process for dealing with scope creep and we look at it in a moment but before we

look at how to handle scope creep we do need to acknowledge that sometimes scope needs to change so afterwards I'll discuss two approaches to managed scope change on a well-regulated project but first how do we stop scope creep scope creep occurs when people try to stretch the boundary of your project scope now this can happen because they're opportunists passionate about their own priorities or it may happen because they simply want to take advantage of us you and your Project's resources bastards or possibly they just don't understand the rules maybe they're just plain stupid but the

reality is that more often than not they're just a little bit confused about where the boundary lies because the boundary between what's in scope and what's out of scope is just a little bit fuzzy so in our two-step process step one is to Define your boundary with Precision document clearly everything that is in scope but also document what is out of scope anticipate all of the could you justs that are likely to occur and write them down explicitly as being out of scope or exclusions from scope when you've done this step two is to get

formal sign off take your documentation of what is in scope and what is out of scope to your boss to your client to your sponsor and say to them look if I deliver all of this that is in scope and I deliver none of that which is out of scope will you be happy and when they say yes that's exactly what I want get them to sign formally onto your scope statement so that now when someone comes up to you and says could you just you can say to them I wish I could but I

can't because look I've got a signature which says I mustn't but of course sometimes we need to accommodate changes to scope let's start with managing scope the traditional predictive way for traditional predictive projects the way that we control changes to scope is with the Change Control process I have a whole video on how to manage change control and I'll put a link in the description in essence though Change Control is about documenting and evaluating the case for every proposed change making sure that you fully document why we should do it and what will happen if

we do and handing that documentation over to a decision maker who will make a binding decision which you can then document that decision is available to audit and therefore guarantees the transparency and accountability of your change process but what do we do in agile or adaptive projects let's look at managing scope in the agile adaptive way most agile methodologies and Frameworks manage scope with a backlog again I have a video on this a video which answers the question what is a product backlog and I'll put a link in the description the basic idea here is

simple a backlog is a list usually organized by priority of everything that any of the users might want from the project when we plan a period of work usually called an iteration or a Sprint then we draw requirements down from the backlog to implement during that iteration period at any time or possibly at specific times depending on the methodology you're using and the way you're implementing methodology we can add or remove items from the backlog certainly periodically the team will assess the backlog to consider whether there are any new ideas any ideas that need refining

or ideas that we should remove from the backlog because they are no longer relevant this process is usually referred to as backlog grooming this way the project always has an upto-date list of the items of scope or functionality or capable ability that are required and can prioritize them at each iteration what this means is that agile projects build scope change into the process from the outset whatever approach you use scope creep can be deadly for your project it can increase your costs it can increase your demand for resources it can increase the time your project

takes and it can increase the risk R of your project so you need to deal with it happily now you know [Music] how do you need to take on an Impossible Project something that nobody believes can be done or maybe nobody believes should be done here are eight principles but how to do just that [Music] first and perhaps most important you have to commit to your project and to a willingness to persevere through whatever difficulties you encounter you need to build a plan be prepared to follow that plan but also to abandon parts or all

of it in your effort to deliver the final product and of course once you're committed to your project you have to win the commitment of the team that will help you to deliver it number two control invest in creating strong control mechanisms managerial control mechanisms and good governance think about all of the uncertainties the assumptions the risks the issues the dependencies and the constraints that that will threaten your project and make even harder to deliver resolve some of those uncertainties verify some of the assumptions put in place contingency around your budget your schedule your resourcing

so that you can handle some of the unknowns in your project critically your Impossible Project is not just going to be considered impossible because it's hard to come up with a plan but because we know there are lots of things that can go wrong so you must absolutely prioritize risk management and the building of good contingency plans number three decision work with your stakeholders to build a robust business case that demonstrates the value of delivering this project if there are people who think you should not be working on this project then you have to provide

good solid evidence to undermine their arguments and to demonstrate that there is a positive value to the project and of course that it is possible to deliver it with confidence once you have that business case you need to work with your decision makers to ensure that they make an accountable decision to support your project number number four scope be absolutely ruthless in casting out any component of your project which is not absolutely necessary it's an Impossible Project it's hard enough as it is without any form of scope bloat and once you've established a sensible minimum

scope you need to be ruthless in the way you operate a Change Control process make sure that any changes that come along are subjected to rigorous evaluation and only approved where they add substantial value or can be shown to be absolutely necessary now plan your delivery one step at a time addressing priority scope items as early as possible use the early steps in your plan to establish credibility to generate value early on to build capabilities and infrastructure that will be essential for later stages of your project and of course to learn number five rate of

progress use the idea of pilots and prototypes and test modules as a way of learning and demonstrating capacity these allow you to make m mistakes in a safe way and demonstrate to your stakeholders that you know what you're doing and that you're learning as you go they build confidence both in your stakeholders and in the project team also use a stage gate process not just to slow your project down but to inject proper scrutiny on the work you're doing on your Impossible Project with all the risks that you have in place it's absolutely vital that

Outsiders are able to check what you're doing and give an objective assessment of the potential pitfalls and the mistakes that you might be about to make and finally use the idea of buffer zones in your project to strengthen the reliability of your plan buffer zones allow you to overrun on pieces of work without affecting the overall plan there periods in your schedule where if work overruns you've got the time to finish that work before the next sequence of activities needs to start as a result delays in some streams of work will not contaminate later streams

of work and cause them to be delayed this provides schedule confidence for your Impossible Project number six stakeholders work with your stakeholders learn from them respect their points of view they know stuff that is valuable and can protect you from making serious mistakes on an Impossible Project engage with them in a positive way and win over their support but in doing so always be in control of the messages you put out to your stakeholder groups but be respectful never put out messages that try to control your stakeholders number seven team build a winning team of

people with great experience and a positive belief in their ability to deliver the project get them working together and encourage Lively debate among them easy consensus is a quick way to making silly mistakes take the time to argue out the issues but where you do have team conflict focus it on the ideas and the issues and not the people and the personalities once again your Impossible Project is going to be hard enough without internal team conflicts so let them argue out the issue with passion but then bring them together to agree on implementation and delivery

arrange your skilled expertise into work groups with effective team leaders spend your time coordinating these work groups and motivating and inspiring the team as a whole be a servant leader to your teams number eight brilliance make your project brilliant spell out a compelling vision of what you can achieve together and treat your team like royalty celebrate successes and bring the team together to learn from those successes but also from failings make sure that every day your team gets just a little bit better always be smiling confident optimistic and resilient stay focused on the outcome and

where there are setbacks don't be daunted roll your sleeves up get your team together and work the problem be collaborative and generous and supportive of both your teams and your stakeholders give your people the opportunity to succeed and to shine and to grow and develop as professionals and as people be courageous in how you handle difficult situations show your passion for your project and above all be led by your values in all of your decision making and demonstrate 100% integrity at all [Music] times no one wants a failing project but it happens the solution is

a project turnaround so I will walk you through the five project turnaround steps to rescue a failing [Music] project before we start let's define what I mean by a failing project and I'm going to use a simple definition a failing project is one with severe slippage in schedule budget or quality the definition of severe which is a weasel word depends on circumstances the easiest way to think about it is to ask do we still feel in control of slippage using our day-to-day monitoring and control processes if you don't the slippage is severe you need to

move into project turnaround mode the five project turnaround steps that we'll be following are one spot the signs of project failure the first step is to recognize that you have a failure and to trigger your project turnaround process two evaluate the situation now you need to make a critical analysis of what has gone wrong and what your options are to redeem The Situation Number Three steady your your project this is where you start to stabilize your project and prevent the situation from getting worse number four rebuild your project now it's time to implement your project

turnaround plan and get your project back on track number five maintain your project the last step is to create a sustainable project that can continue to deliver on plan with the minimum of drama number one spot the signs of project failure this relies on two things firstly effective project monitoring and secondly taking responsibility rather than averting your eyes the uncomfortable signs that things are starting to go wrong as part of this you will need to create a break a short pause in the project after you discovered the failure for your team to get a little

bit of time to recuperate to rest and to relax and to refresh themselves ready to take on the project turnaround you need a bit of distance to gain objectivity and you need to be fresh enough to attack the problem with Vigor and enthusiasm we're not talking about weeks here we may not even be talking about days but certainly create a break let your team relax and recognize that something new has to start once you've done this start to gather some facts and start to communicate with your stakeholders to let them know what's going on number

two evaluate the situation with the facts available you need to work calmly with your team to evaluate what the information is telling you what is good that you need to keep what stinks that you need to replace what can you fix and make work well again and what are the controls that you'll be able to assert to keep your project on track when you fix things give your team members responsibility and lead them with confidence and optimism a failing project is likely to have demoralized and demotivated the people around you so stay positive and recognize

contributions that move the project in the right direction however inevitably the team will make missteps and there will be failures along the way so make sure you remain positive and see each of those as opportunities to learn and readjust your approach look for quick wins that will enable you to recognize and celebrate baby steps there is nothing as motivating as success once you have your team fully engaged look for ways that you can extend this principle to your other stakeholders and finally it's also time to undertake a thorough risk review to reassess the threats facing

your project and to re-evaluate the plans that you have to tackle them number three steady your project a steady project is largely about solid relationships work on maintaining morale confirming and improving processes and building confidence in your team's capabilities building the confidence of your stakeholders in your project and building your team's confidence in themselves regularly meet with your team to review priorities to rejig work allocations and to work through the problems that are arising together as a team gradually build new working processes for the team and if if needed a new plan for the project

number four rebuild your project work at your plan steadily constantly refining your project and strengthening your team as you go keep in close contact with your stakeholders using a project Communications plan to ensure you miss nobody out and do not fail to communicate important information this stage is all about taking the confidence You' started to create and maintaining it and step five maintain your project by now your processes should be working well so start to optimize them for efficiency as well as efficacy conduct internal checkpoints and Lessons Learned reviews so that your team can constantly

test their work out and improve it and now it's time to start inviting external review too but be aware that your team may be resistant to external review feeling that things have gone wrong and they're worried that things are still wrong so present this to them as a show of confidence and a necessary way to further improve their processes and improve the reliability of what they are doing ideally invite external review after you have become confident that there are no big issues but when you know that there are still some small issues that you need

to unearth projects will fail there is no doubt about that what's important is that you as a project manager know how to handle that situation and have an approach to rescuing a failing project to turn it around and make it once again a [Music] success it's never a good idea to take over a project that someone else has started there's too much risk that they have failed to set up the project to succeed so what do you do if you have no choice if you are requested or required to take over a project that someone

else has started and has for whatever reason had to step away from that's the question I'm going to answer in this [Music] video you want to make a success of a project that somebody else started what's the problem well firstly there the legacy of decisions that you may not have made you may have made different choices and now you're taking on a project that isn't in the state that you would ideally have got it to it's not so much that you don't understand that state it's that when you find out what that state is you'd

really rather start from somewhere else and the second point is that if that project manager had known at the outset or suspected at the outset that they weren't going to be required to complete the project then they had very little stake in its end success which means that they would have felt able to make the decisions that made their life easy at the time rather than the difficult decisions which would set the project up for long-term success you may be inheriting a project with serious issues built in and certainly you should never agree at the

start of a project to take it over partway through if the project manager who starts it knows they're not going to finish it then they really are unlikely to set you up for success but what are you going to do if you do have to take over a project well my ultimate project takeover formula has six ingredients and I'm going to split each of those six ingredients into three components ingredient number one is orientation you need to get to know the new project and the first component of this is to stay calm to not get

caught up in excitement to cooly calmly and rationally assess where you are then you need to ask questions and listen to the answers the orientation step of taking over a project is all about gathering information like a sponge you have a short window of opportunity where you're not expected to have the answers so you can ask other people anything about the project the more information you can gather the more different perceptions you can harvest the better you'll be set and the third component of orientation is to avoid making any promises at the early stage you

don't know what promises you'll be able to keep and what promises you would have to break so the fewer promises you make the better take on no commitments unless you are 100% certain that you can deliver on them otherwise you are setting yourself up to fail and you are putting your reputation on the line right at the start the second ingredient of the project takeover formula is governance because without good governance a project will not succeed the three components of this this ingredient are to understand to assess and to amend firstly understand the governance procedures

that are already present and the skills and personalities of the people involved then assess them how well suited are they to what you need to get done how well do they fit within the organization's own governance structures are they fit for purpose and then if they are not if you need to make changes amend them early on immediately after you've taken over the project because you have a window of opportunity you have leverage if you want me to do this if you want me to succeed then I need some changes the longer you wait the

more entrenched the governance will become and the harder it will be for you therefore to make changes to it and to get the governance structures that you need the third ingredient is your team and the first component of dealing with them is to meet them to greet them and to start to build relationships with each of your team members to get to know them as much as you can the second component is to convene a team meeting get people together speak to them answer their questions understand where they're coming from reassure them but be honest

remember don't make any promises you can't keep and having convened your team and spoken to them as a whole then the third component is to set up onetoone meetings with each of your team members this will help you to get to know them but will also enable you to deal confidentially with their concerns with their desires and to help you to set up the allocation of Team responsibilities that are going to take you through the first stage of your ownership of the project the fourth component is your stakeholders and again you're going to need to

meet and build relationship with your stakeholders just as you have to do with your team the three components of your stakeholder group are your key stakeholders who will determine the success of your project or its failure and then secondly there are the users the people who will directly be using the products the services the processes that your project generates and thirdly there are the suppliers the people in the organizations upon which you will be dependent for the success of your project the fifth ingredient of the project turnaround formula are your project definition and plans yes

you need to understand the project definition and the project plans that your predecessor has led so the first component is to review all of the documents ation that you have available to you secondly you have the opportunity to revise them you need to build a definition and plan that you can stand behind that you believe will lead your project to success and thirdly you can then take your revised plans definition budget business case if necessary and get them signed off just as with the government structures you have a window of opportunity where you can amend

the plans the definition even a fairly fundamental level because coming in you can assess what you've got and make clear statements if you don't believe they're fit for purpose once you've had the Helm of your project any length of time then changing your plans is going to become more difficult because people will ask the question quite rightly why didn't you sense the need to change them earlier and the final ingredient of a project takeover formula is to move forward you've done all the ground workor now you need to move forward having done that ground workor

and start to deliver the project to move it forward from wherever it has been parked the first key component of this is the Monitor and control cycle constantly be monitoring what's going on in your project and making adjust ments and changes to control the project to keep it on your new plan and within the bounds that have been agreed by the governance structures the second core component is of course communication some people would say and I think with some justice the project management is 80% about communication you need to build the communication channels for day-to-day

communication with your team members with your government structures with your stakeholders with your suppliers with your users with everyone who needs to know what's going on in order to make their own informed judgments and in order to support you and finally the last component of the last ingredient is to consider re-energizing your project with a fresh kickoff you've done all the work you've understood where you are you're ready to move forward you've understood how you're going to communicate you've built a monitor and Control process now get your team together together and re-energize the whole thing

this is your opportunity to motivate the team and to draw a line under everything that has gone before and to let everybody know that you're ready to move forward you're ready to take over the project and collectively to [Music] succeed if you've enjoyed this video please do give us a like And subscribe to our Channel because we'll be producing loads more great content in the near near future and why not hit the notification Bell so you don't miss any of it and I look forward to seeing you in the next video