Just learn it ep4 | Project execution

This is my note from the course: Project Execution: Running the Project.

What’s in this article

• Use and analyze data to inform your decision-making.
• Effectively lead your team to the finish line.
• Team management and the fundamentals of influencing.
• Tools for effective team communication.
• Organize and facilitate meetings.
• Close a project.

Tracking and measuring project progress

A method of following the progress of a project and protecting it from any deviations.

Deviation is anything that alters your original course of action. It could affect the project in a positive or negative way.

Benefits of tracking it

• Keeps all team members and stakeholders in touch with deadlines and goals.
• Used to recognize risks and issues that can derail a project.
• Build confidence that a project is set to be delivered on time, in scope, and within budget.
• Bring transparency to all stakeholders.
• Keep the project on track.

What to track

• Project schedule: ensure that the project is effectively heading towards its completion date.
• Status of action items, key tasks, and activities: ensure that the work is actually getting done.
• Progress towards milestones: ensure that deliverables are ready within timeline, budget, and scope.
• Costs: ensure that a project is not over- and under-spent.
• Key decisions, changes, dependencies, and risks to the project: ensure that unexpected scenarios are acknowledged and handled properly.

Tracking methods

• Gantt chart: useful for larger project teams with many dependencies, tasks, activities, and milestones. It focuses on schedule and is popular in a waterfall project management.

Example of a Gantt chart. Reprinted from Project Execution: Running the Project.

• Project roadmap: useful for high-level tracking of large milestones. It illustrates how a project should evolve over time.

Example of a project roadmap. Reprinted from Project Execution: Running the Project.

• Burndown chart: useful for projects that require a granular, broken-down look at each task. It measures time against the amount of work done and the amount of work remaining.

Example of a burndown chart. Reprinted from Project Execution: Running the Project.

• Project status report: a document that summarizes the current status of the project containing key accomplishments, next steps and issues (if any).

Example of a project status report. Reprinted from Project Execution: Running the Project.

Overall status: RAG (Red, Amber, Green) — also known as stoplight status — is an acronym that indicates project status. Red means the project is off-track and needs significant changes to correct. Amber means the project is off-track and needs minor changes to correct. Green means the project is on target.

Mange changes, risks, and dependencies

Changes

Changes are anything that alters or impacts the tasks, structures, or processes within a project. For example,

• New or changing dependencies.
• Changing priorities.
• Capacity and people.
• Limitations on budget or resources.
• Scope creep.
• Force majeure: change due to a national or international crisis.

Examples of project risks

• A contractor misses a deadline.
• Workload increase due to the implementation of an unforeseen policy.

Dependencies

Links that connect one project task to another and are often the greatest source of risk to a project.

• Internal dependencies: relationship between two tasks within the same project.
• External dependencies: tasks that are reliant on outside factors, such as regulatory agencies, and other projects.
• Mandatory dependencies: tasks that are legally or contractually required.
• Discretionary dependencies: tasks that could occur on their own, but the team chose to make them reliant on one another.

Dependencies management

The process of measuring interrelated tasks and resources within the project to ensure that the overall project is completed successfully, on time, and in budget.

• Proper identification.
• Recording dependencies: may record in a risk register which is a table or char that contains a list of risks and dependencies (what could go wrong? and what could improve the outcome of the project?).
• Continuous monitoring and control.
• Efficient communication.

If your dependencies are met on time, your team is less likely to fall behind schedule.

Risk management

The process of identifying potential risks and issues which could impact a project, and evaluating and applying steps to address the effects of the identified risks and issues.

After evaluating using risk exposure techniques, such as inherent risk, to measure the potential future loss resulting from a specific event.

• Resolved: consider this risk to be address.
• Owned: assign a team member ownership of the risk and monitor the risk through to completion.
• Accepted: understand and accept the risk for what it is because it cannot be resolved.
• Mitigated: formulate a plan to eradicate the risk.

A contingency plan is mostly related to funds the project manager keeps aside (outside of the planned project budget ) to support any of these known risk response plans if they go beyond the planned amount or to manage any unforeseen risks during execution.

Escalation: inform issues to stakeholders

Escalation is the process of enlisting the help of higher level project leadership or management to remove an obstacle, clarify or reinforce priorities, and validate next steps.

• Act as checks and balances.
• Generate speedy decision making.
• Reduce frustrations.
• Encourage participation.

A project manager should escalate an issue at the first sign of critical problems in a project.

What is the signal?

Something that could

• cause a delay on a major project milestone.
• cause budget overruns.
• result in the loss of a cashflow.
• push back the estimated project completion date.
• cause a trench war.

Trench wars occur when two peers or groups cannot seem to come to an agreement and neither party is willing to give in.

How to an effective escalation email

• Introduce yourself and state your connection to the project.
• Explain the problem.
• Explain the consequences.
• Propose a course of action and make a request.

Communicate change to the team

• Email: for changes related to an individual.
• Meetings: for changes affecting a certain group.
• Retrospective: a meeting focused on identifying contributing causes of an incident or pattern of incidents without blaming any individual.

Quality management

Quality is the outlined requirements for the deliverable and meet or exceed the needs or expectations of customers.

• Quality standards: provide requirements, specifications, or guidelines that can be used to ensure that products, processes, or services are fit for achieving the desired outcome.
• Quality planning: actions of the project manager or the team to establish a process for identifying and determining exactly which standards of quality are relevant to the project as a whole.
• Quality assurance: evaluate if the project is moving towards delivering a high-quality service or product.
• Quality control: monitor project results and deliverables to determine if they are meeting the desired results.

Questions to check up with quality

• What outcome do my customers want?
• What does quality look like for them?
• How can I meet their expectations?
• How will I determine if the quality measure will lead to project success?

Tips for communication

• Negotiation
• Empathetic listening
• Trust-building
• Understand their frustration.
• Address those frustrations.
• Find a solution that is beneficial for all parties.

Measure customer satisfaction

• Feedback surveys: a survey in which users provide feedback on features of the product that they like or dislike.
• User acceptance tests (UAT): a test that helps a business make sure a product or solution works for its users.

Best practices for effective UAT

• Define and write down your acceptance criteria. Acceptance criteria are pre-established standards or requirements that a product, service, or process must meet. Write down these requirements for each item that you intend to test. For example, if your project is to create a new employee handbook for your small business, you may set acceptance criteria that the handbook must be a digital PDF that is accessible on mobile devices and desktop.
• Create the test cases for each item that you are testing. A test case is a sequence of steps and its expected results. It usually consists of a series of actions that the user can perform to find out if the product, service, or process behaved the way it was supposed to. Continuing with the employee handbook example, you could create a test case process in which the user would click to download the PDF of the handbook on their mobile device or desktop to ensure that they could access it without issues.
• Select your users carefully. It is important to choose users who will actually be the end users of the product, service, or process.
• Write the UAT scripts based on user stories. These scripts will be delivered to the users during the testing process. A user story is an informal, general explanation of a feature written from the perspective of the end user. In our employee handbook example, a user story might be: As a new employee, I want to be able to use the handbook to easily locate the vacation policy and share it with my team via email.
• Communicate with users and let them know what to expect. If you can prepare users ahead of time, there will be fewer questions, issues, or delays during the testing process.
• Prepare the testing environment for UAT. Ensure that the users have proper credentials and access, and try out these credentials ahead of time to ensure they work.
• Provide a step-by-step plan to help guide users through the testing process. It will be helpful for users to have some clear, easy-to-follow instructions that will help focus their attention on the right places. You can create this plan in a digital document or spreadsheet and share with them ahead of time.
• Compile notes in a single document and record any issues that are discovered. You can create a digital spreadsheet or document that corresponds to your plan. It can have designated areas to track issues for each item that is tested, including the users’ opinions on the severity of each issue. This will help you prioritize fixes.

Continuous improvement begins with recognizing when processes and tasks need to be created, eliminated, or improved.

DMAIC

• Define: identify business problem, goals, resources, project scope, and project timeline.
• Measure: finalize performance metric, data collection, and success criteria.
• Analyze: brainstorm root causes of problems and understand their impact.
• Improve: implement a reasonable solution to the problem.
• Control: stay on top of monitoring the updated process.

PDCA

• Plan: identify the issue and root causes.
• Do: fix the problem.
• Check: compare result to the goal to find out if the problem is fixed.
• Act: fine-tune the fix to ensure continuous improvement.

Retrospective

The purposes of a retrospective are as follows.

• Encourage team building.
• Facilitate improved collaboration.
• Promote positive changes.

When to hold it:

• Missed deadlines or expectations,
• Missed communications between stakeholders.
• Reached the end of sprint.
• Product launches and landings.
• Record key lessons that other people can learn from.

Tips:

• Ensure discussion is blameless.
• Reflect on positive aspects of the project as well as the negative ones.
• Maintain a positive tone throughout the session.

Components:

• Project summary.
• Key accomplishments.
• Lessons learned.
• Action items.
• Future considerations.
• Resources.

Data-enhanced decision making

• Data: a collection of facts and information.
• Metric: a quantifiable measurement that is used to track and assess a business objective. It may be divided into productivity and quality metrics.
• Productivity metric: track effectiveness and efficiency, such as milestones, tasks, projections, and duration.
• Quality metric: track quality of acceptable outcomes, such as number of changes, issues, and cost variance.
• Signal: an observable change that helps determine the overall health of the project and identify early signs that something is not quite right.

Projection is prediction of the outcome based on the current information. Change shows inconsistencies from the initial the requirements of the project. Cost variance is the difference between the actual and the budgeted cost.

Data analysis

• Ask: ask key questions to help frame your analysis, starting with: What is the problem? When defining the problem, look at the current state of the business and identify how it is different from the ideal state.
• Prepare: collect and store the data to use for the upcoming analysis process.
• Process: clean the data.
• Analyze: take a close look at your data to draw conclusions, make predictions, and decide on next steps.
• Share: use data visualization to organize the data in a format that is clear and digestible for the audience.
• Act: the business takes all of the insights you have provided and puts them into action to solve the original business problem.

Storytelling

The process of turning facts into narrative to communicate something to the audience.

• Define the audience.
• Collect the data.
• Filter and analyze the data.
• Choose a visual representation.
• Shape the story: Precise, Flexible, and Memorable.
• Gather your feedback.

Define the audience.

• Find out what’s the most matter to them.
• What would the audience like to know about the project?
• What are their most urgent concerns?
• Which key data points influence the story and project outcome?

Data visualization

A graphical representation of information to facilitate understanding.

• Filter information by focusing the audience on the most important data points and insights.
• Condense long ideas and facts into a single image or representation.
• Make sense of the information being presented.
• Dashboard: a user interface that provides a snapshot view of the project’s process or performance.

Chart type

• Bar or column chart: best for comparing two or more values.
• Pie chart: best for demonstrating composition.
• Line graph: best for analyzing trends and behaviors over time.

Team management

• Work groups: people in an organization who work toward a common goal. They are more likely to be coordinated, controlled, or assigned by a single person or entity.
• Team: a group of people who plan, solve problems, make deliverables, and review progress in service of a specific. project or objective.
• Teamwork: an effective, collaborative way of working in which each person is committed to and heading towards a shred goal.

Factors of team effectiveness

• Psychological safety: an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk.
• Dependability: team members are reliable and complete their work on time.
• Structure and clarity: an individual’s understanding of job expectations, knowledge of how to meet those expectations and the consequences of. their performance.
• Meaning: finding a sense of purpose either in the work itself or in the results of that work.
• Impact: the belief that results of one’s work matters and creates change.

Effective project leadership

• Create systems that turn chaos into order.
• Communicate and listen: learn individual’s preference.
• Promote trust and psychological safety: create a team atmosphere where different opinions are welcome and members remain respectful of one another.
• Demonstrate empathy and create motivation: be present, listen, and ask questions.
• Delegate responsibility and prioritize: keep the team focus.
• Celebrate team success.

Bruce Tuckman’s stages of team development

• Forming — team gets to know one another: PM should clarify project goals, roles, and context about project.
• Storming — frustrations emerge: PM should focus on conflict resolution, listen the team addresses problems to solve, and share insights on how the team might better function as a unit.
• Norming — conflict is mostly resolved and team is working together: PM should codify the team norms, ensure that the team is aware of these norms and reinforce them when needed.
• Performing — team works together seamlessly: PM should focus on delegating, motivating, and providing feedback to keep up the team’s momentum.
• Adjourning — project wraps up and team disbands: celebrate final milestones and successes.

Why team dynamics matters?

• Team have individuals with different skill sets, varying degrees of autonomy, and completing priorities.
• Create a collaborative and psychological safe environment.
• Help understand how to motivate the team.

Ethical and inclusive leadership

• Ethical leadership: a form of leadership that promotes and values honesty, justice, respect, and integrity.
• Inclusive leadership: a form of leadership where everyone’s unique identity, background, and experiences are respected, valued, and integrated into how the team operates.
• Define and align values within t he team.
• Determine how adhering to these values benefits the mission of the organization.
• Create forums, where team members can raise. viewpoints, feel heard, and receive follow-ups on their concerns.
• Foster a culture of respect.
• Create an equal opportunity to succeed.
• Invite and integrate diverse perspectives.

Conger’s four steps of effective influencing

• Establish credibility: utilize expertise and relationship to make the case for why your audience should listen to you.
• Frame for common ground: make the case for how your idea can benefit your audience.
• Provide evidence: make the case through hard data and persuasive storytelling.
• Connect emotionally: demonstrate the ideas to your audience.

Example

(Provide evidence) In reviewing our new hire surveys, 80% of recent graphic design hires have assigned a negative rating to our onboarding process. When I followed up with respondents, I learned that our graphic designers lack access to relevant information that could help them acclimate to our organization faster. To address this issue, I would like to create a digital welcome packet containing design-specific onboarding documentation.

(Frame for common ground) I have met with leaders on the graphic design team to discuss this idea, and they agreed that a design-specific onboarding process might help increase the productivity of new hires, since a better onboarding process would enable them to be better prepared to take on projects in their first few weeks on the job.

(Establish credibility) In my previous role, I designed a similar, role-specific onboarding process, which increased our new hire satisfaction rates by 60%. I think a new process could benefit employees here, as well.

(Connect emotionally) It can be overwhelming to join a new company. A smoother, more personalized onboarding experience might help set the tone for the kind of support new graphic design hires can expect from our team.

Conger’s four common influencing mistakes

• Approach the audience aggressively.
• Resist compromise.
• Fail to establish credibility, frame for common ground, provide evidence, or connect emotionally.
• Assume one conversation is enough to come to an agreement.

Productive meetings

Before the meeting

• Prepare an agenda that states the purpose and goals of the meeting, and share the agenda with participants.
• Only invite people who need to be there and who can help reach the goals of the meeting. Make participants’ roles and responsibilities for the meeting clear. Add non-essential participants as optional to the meeting invitation.
• If you are working with people in different time zones, share the time zone burden by alternating recurring meeting times.
• Evaluate the need for the meeting and cancel if it isn’t necessary. Consider whether the meeting content can be covered via email.
• Schedule shorter meetings. Meetings tend to expand to the time allotted to them, so try to get more done in a shorter amount of time.
• Set aside time to prepare for the meeting. Read the necessary materials, review the agenda, and come ready to participate.

During the meeting

• At the beginning of the meeting, clearly state the meeting goals. Stick to the agenda throughout the meeting to avoid getting derailed. For recurring meetings, review the action items from the previous meeting to ensure accountability.
• Encourage participants to put phones and laptops away during meetings and silence notifications, if possible.
• Practice and demonstrate active listening. Respond verbally (e.g., “That makes sense. Tell us more.”) and non-verbally (through head nodding and eye contact) to show engagement.
• Encourage participation and give everyone a chance to speak, including remote participants. Ask open-ended questions like, “What does everyone think?” instead of “Does everyone agree?”
• Help everyone relax and feel more comfortable by starting meetings with open-ended, personal questions like, “How was your weekend?”
• Capture key points, action items, and decisions from the meeting, and assign action items to the appropriate meeting participants.

After the meeting

• Recap key decisions, action items, timelines, and notes and send out to participants.
• Schedule necessary follow-up meetings with relevant context.
• Assess the need for and frequency of recurring meetings. Schedule meetings less frequently, if possible.

Types of meetings

• Project kick-off: official beginning of a project and serves as a way to align the team’s understanding of the project goals with actual plans and procedures.
• Status updates: it includes regular team meetings where the primary goal is to align the team on updates, progress, challenges, and next steps.
• Stakeholder reviews: the goal is to get buy-in and support.
• Project reviews: retrospect what went well and what could be improved.

Project closure

The process performed to formally complete the project, the current phase, and contractual obligations.

• Assure all work is done.
• All agreed-upon project management processes are executed.
• Get formal recognition and agreement that the project is done from key stakeholders.

The never-ending project exists when the project deliverables and tasks cannot be completed.

The abandoned project exists when inadequate handoff or transition the project deliverables occurs.

Avoiding the impact of project closure oversights

Oversights or skipping steps in the closing phase of a project can:

• Impact the product’s or service’s scheduled launch dates.
• Put your organization at legal risk.
• Result in significant financial losses to your organization.
• Undermine your team’s credibility, and yours.
• Damage your relationship with the customer or client.

Checklists for closing each phase or milestone

• Refer to prior documentation, such as SoW, RFP, risk register, and RACI chart.
• Put together closing documentation.
• Conduct administrative closure of the procurement process.
• Make sure all stakeholders are aware that a phase is ending.
• Execute necessary follow-up work.

Checklists for closing the project

• Provide the necessary training, tools, documentation, and capability to use the product.
• Ensure that the project has satisfied its goals and desired outcomes.
• Document acceptance from all stakeholders.
• Review all contracts and documentations.
• Conduct a formal retrospective.
• Disband and thank the project team.

Impact report

Presentation that is given at the end of a project for key stakeholders.

Project closeout report

• It is blueprint to document what the team did, how they did it, and what they delivered.
• It provides an evaluation of the quality of work.
• It evaluates the project’s performance with respect to budget and schedule.

Tips for the project closeout report

Highlight these key performance areas to demonstrate to your stakeholders how you achieved successful results and outcomes:

• First, describe the goals and objectives you set for the project and what you hoped to have achieved by the end.
• Then, describe how you met those objectives against your KPIs. A KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effective a company is at achieving their objectives. In your impact report, review how you defined the success of your project at the beginning, and highlight the outcomes you achieved that demonstrate this success.
• Finally, showcase your schedule and budget performance by outlining your cost savings and efficiencies. Demonstrate that you met the deadlines set in your project scope and that your project was completed within budget.