Project Management Practitioner

pmpEffective meetings are better yielding meetings than lengthy, grueling and normal meetings.  Familiarizing and following few rules and tools helps to conduct the effective meetings.

1. Meeting Timings

Always choose the ideal time for the meetings. Suggested time slats

a. 10.00 AM to 12.00 AM
b. 03.00 PM to 05.00 PM

Better to pickup the timeslots when the stakeholders are sharp and active. Its good to avoid early morning, post lunch & just prior to EOD. Recommended meeting duration is One Hour maximum.

2. Participants

Invite only required people and don’t sent out the invitation to the entire project team. More people is an absolute distraction and drag the meeting focus unnecessarily.

3. Meeting mode

Choose only the optimal meeting mode depends on the agendas. Face-to-face meetings are ideal to resolve huge conflicts and finding resolution. However, tele-conferences were pretty good enough for focused agendas. Casual chat at the respective person’s desk also be quite handy to resolve few complications.

4. Agendas

Don’t sent invitation to meetings without agendas. Always send out the agendas with the meeting invitation well in advance. This will help the participants to do their home work prior and turn the meeting more productive.

5. Moderation

Moderate as and when required to focus only on the agendas. Don’t allow any distractions and dragging which moves away from the current agenda.

6. Pre-MoM

One of my favorite tool, I always prepare one before my meetings and this is meant only for PM view. Prepare a pre-MOM based on the agendas inline with your expected meeting outcome or current status reflection. This will help to moderate the meeting online and also help to send the MOM shortly after the meeting.

Best of luck and start conducting your effective meetings.

-Dhanasekaran

A good kick-off meeting with all key stake holders will be an ideal start to any successful project. Bit of homework coupled with proper planning helps to organize a better kick-off meeting and stamp a great impression about the PM with all stake holders.

Kick-off meeting is indication of the project commencement and strongly recommended to set the stage and not to find solutions. It can be effectively used for any of these purposes.

1. Establish good rapport with all stakeholders

Good relationship among all the stakeholders is the basic requirement and a face-to-face kick-off meeting can be effectively used to leave a positive impression for all.

2. Showcase the leadership & PM qualities

Demonstrate your leadership qualities to the project stakeholder and establish yourself as a natural leader.

3. Understand the background of project initiation

Set the priority to collect background and necessities which triggered the project rather than requirement gathering. These trivial information will be vital to set the three major constraint of the project.

4. Key information gatherings

Other key information’s such as resource availability plans, planned holiday, any special requirements such as the use of non-standard h/w or s/w should be collected.

5. Set the expectations and ground rules

Define the ground rules and set the expectation to all the stakeholders. This helps to bring standard and common expectations during the course of the project.

Finally, follow-up with a well summarized MOM(Minutes of Meeting) at the end of the meeting to communicate the same to all.

-Dhanasekaran

Project communication involves interaction in 360*. Clear communication is a must for the successful PM to convey his/her messages to the relevant parties. A Project Manager to employ various communication styles while communicating with different level of stake holders.

Higher/Senior Management
This group prefers bottom lined, brief and crisp communication as they may not have adequate time to read bigger emails. Bigger emails. Marking them in TO column and addressing them clearly in the mail beginning, will grab their attention for their action items listed in the mail. Any failure to do so, will not warrant their attention and result in wasting precious time line.

They like the over all project status at higher level and focus on show stoppers to act on.

Middle Management
Majority of the project communication will be exchanged between this category stakeholders for status reporting and escalation. Better structured email will yield the desired results. Most commonly used email structure is

a. Solution/Action Items/Status
b. Issue/Background
c. Supporting documents

This group more interested in the period project progress and proactive measures to handle issues and risks. Issue management and escalation must be promptly made to this people.

Technical/Ground level team members
This group of stakeholders expects very detailed emails contains micro level details. They are one of the toughest group to handle as often miscommunication will occur at this level.

Always they focus on their tasks & activities and tend to act on. Constant reminders and better encouragement will help to perform.

-Dhanasekaran

Processes are mostly hated by almost everyone in all organizations. People always use their innovative skills to come up with various justification to  support their stand. Everybody have their own share to merit their claims.

However on the other hand, organizations emphasis on following processes and procedures. There will a dedicated unit tasked to continuously focus and  refining them.

What is the rationale for this direct conflict between them?

What is the purpose and objective of processes & procedures?

1. Quality
2. Efficiency & Productivity
3. Simplicity
4. Documentation & Archival

These are some of the key reasons for companies to enforce them. Lets dig into little further to understand them better.

Quality
An universal process across the company will ensure the level of quality among the work done by them. Also it allows them to refine the process to enhance  the quality.

Efficiency & Productivity
Improves the working methods and shortens the entire life cycle. Increases the productivity and efficiency to perform the activity in a better manner.

Simplicity
Reduces complexity and confusion. Creates uniformity among all to perform the activity in the same simple manner.

Documentation & Archival
Helps to document the processes and its results for the future reference and audit purposes.

Overall, Processes and procedures helps companies to perform their functions in an efficient, orderly manner to achieve their desired end results. They will  train their employee to follow their in-house process and ensure they adhere to them.

-Dhanasekaran

We often heard the term whenever deal most of the global IT vendors. Some of us may wonder what the hell is this???

Here you can find a dummies for CMMI… This will give a brief idea about CMMI… but you must do your own homework to know the complete picture of CMMI.

Do we really need these processes?

I  hate to follow these troublesome processes! !

We often hear these statements in the cooler talks. Lets take peep into this.

Who says No..
1. I know what to do
2. Processes are time consuming and delays my delivery
3. It requires documentation, I will better use time for my project
4. Its too complex and I’m confused
5. My boss need this by yesterday

Who say Yes…
1. Process framework provides guidelines for the activities
2. Approval mechanism allows the management stakeholder to aware of this initiative
3. Gives accountability and ownership
4. Provides history and trail for the future
5. Gives greater visibility to the higher management

Most of the organization have processes and some of them give greater emphosis on processes. Are they yield any benefits to the organizations?

Yes, is the answer if they have simple, constantly updated and easy to follow processes and management support to ensure the processes. In my 15 yrs of experience, I saw the benefits of following the processes and i favours to follow the processes for the guaranted success.

- Dhanasekaran

Knowledge is wealth in this digital era and we should pay more attention to update at good intervals. This is one of my favorite hobby and I used to upgrade myself with various enrichment classes, courses and book reading. But all these are in small scale efforts and now its time to go for a major upgrade.

Yeaph.. I decided to pursue EMBA at one of prestigious business school, Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. This course contains 18 module spread across 24 months. And hope this will keep me busy for the next two years.

This means, I may have more to share in this blog.

- Dhanasekaran, Sivaraj

Sorry guys,

I was bit busy for the past couple of month due to my various commitments and this has forced me to take some break from the continous blogging.

But I assure you guys to expect more frequent and interesting posts from me now onwards…

Stay tunned…

-Dhanasekaran, Sivaraj

Delivering a project is not an easy task, a PM faces lot of hurtles, issues, overcome several roller-coaster rides during the entire course of project. During this period he may need to handle countless tasks, follow-ups and so on.

How can he/she manages all these and yet to be productive? Is there any solutions available?

Yes..Technology is one of the easiest solution a PM can depend on tracking/handling all his/her project related tasks.

We can use one of very known software program as a very efficient Project Management tool with very minimal effort. I am using Microsoft Outlook as my base productivity tool. I would like to share how I use Outlook for my day-to-day project management.

I classify my usage into the following major categories.

1. Tasks
   a. Create your WBS items as task lists with enough advance reminder setup. Once you have done, it will automatically prompt to remind your upcoming  milestones, pending tasks and etc.
   b. Input all you project related tasks and activities.
   c. Assign tasks to your resource from Outlook and track

2. Contacts
   a. Distribution List(DL)
   Create local distribution list for each project for specific purpose. Eg. Project Status Report DL with all Project Stake Holders and team members. Escalation DL with Senior/Higher management. This will ensure that your project communications reaches all intended recipients every time and no one was missed.
   b. Store your project team members, stake holders as personal contacts. Update these contacts with additional or more contact details such as IM, Mobile, Mailing Address and supplement with some key notes…This will be handy while you need additional avenues to reach somebody.

3. Calendar
   a. Always schedule your meetings with Calendar.
   b. Encourage your team members to update their leave plans in calendar
   c. If you are busy with some meeting activities and don’t want to be disturbed by meeting request from others, better mark those timings as busy in your calendar.

4. Mail
   a. Personal  Folders
   Use project wise personal folders and housekeep all projects mails
   b. Follow-up option
   Use follow-up tag in the email and setup the target date time for the important mails which requires follow-up. This will prompt and remind you and other parties on time.
   c. Keep only a or two weeks mails in the Inbox and Sent Items folders. This will ensure sufficient storage to receive and send new mails
   d. Large Mails - Always move the larger mails into personal folders
   e. Outlook Web Access - If available, setup & test this feature to access your mailbox from home
   f. Out-Of-Office - Encourage the entire project team including yourself to enable the O-O-O while on leave with sufficient informations including backup persons, absence period and so on.
   c. Macros
   If you VBA programming, use to automate some of the regular house keeping jobs

Remember these are additional utilities for productivity and final output is depends on you.

-Posted by Dhana

I am expanding my network connections in LinkedIn and I will accept all invitations.

Please view my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dhanasekaran and add me to your network.

-Posted by Dhana