Tháng: Tháng 9 2021

Đăng trong

Influence without Authority

Depends on different contexts, Project managers and product managers might have different powers/ authorities. They can sometimes act as “CEO” of the team or can own no power in another flat structure. There is an immortal phase in the PM community “influence without authority”. This is a helpful guide/ technique to drive the team through uncertainties and challenges.

Why influencing people is important:

As a PM, we need to work with varieties of stakeholders with different backgrounds, priorities, experiences. Failing to get people aligned with each other will definitely hold the team back. So, it’s critical for the PM to influence stakeholders to agree on vision, approach, prioritization & the team can move forward.

How to be better at influencing people:

It comes from how we behave with teammates, the culture and trust we build with the team. This is not something that happens overnight. It requires continuously cultivation & practice on the daily basis. Each person might pursue his own way to build up a skill. There is some specific advice you can consider:

  1. Start with the why: to make sure that each individual understands the core motivation to drive the team forward.
  2. Active listening: to truly understand your teammates, to show we care and enforce relationships.
  3. Embrace differences: people can have different viewpoints to solve problems. Facilitating teams to make decisions is the key to build a healthy culture where people can contribute. 

Any other advice to practice the influencing skill with teams?

Đăng trong

Lean, Agile, Design Thinking

More and more companies are trying to adopt Lean, Agile and Design Thinking to internal working practices, methodologies. At some certain point, people might feel confused or even chaos to determine what tool they need to use in specific contexts. Some companies might face a situation where tech teams use agile, product teams practice lean and design teams follow design thinking. Are they going in different ways? and where their products will go?

In the Lean, Agile, Design Thinking talk, Jeff Gothelf shares valuable thoughts on how to make those approaches work together:

  • Don’t worry about how we label the process we are following & Hold regular retrospectives to reflect and improve 1 or 2 most important things.
  • Put customers at the center & get alignment, make decisions toward customers’ benefits. Customer value == Busines value.
  • Working in short cycles. So, we have a chance to discover what customers truly need. How the team can move faster or easier.
  • Go and see (or Gemba walk): to find out what works, what doesn’t work with teams. Then, amplify the good things no matter it is lean, agile, or design thinking.

At the end of the day, our customers do not care about what methodologies we are using & those methodologies are actually evolving over time. We should focus primarily on the products, services to deliver value to the customers. Then, we can work backwards to find out what is the better process to do so. 

Đăng trong

Active listening in project communications

Communication is crucial for project management. Poor communication will lead to misunderstanding in deliverables, misalignment on delivery and project failure as a consequence. And communication should be 2 ways when we not only focus on conveying messages but also listening from others. Being a good listener will benefit us as PM in day to day works with variety of stakeholders. Members will feel easier to share, issues are easier to be solved through team collaboration, customers are more likely to get what they truly need. 

How to get those benefits from Active Listening:

  • Focus on the speaker with 100% attention. It shows the care and motivates others to share with us even the hard facts.
  • Be open and encourage honest communication no matter what the hard facts are. Usually, it will lead us to the root problems that need to be solved.
  • Show that we are actively listening: eye contact, body language and confirm how we understand the received information.
  • Respond appropriately with needed questions to discover underlying facts; ideas or proposed actions from the speakers; share thoughts in a brief and clear way. 
  • Silents and pauses are also powerful in conversation. They bring spaces for us to think a bit more deeply and allow the other to finish their sayings. 

More guidance for active listening and high quality conversation:

How to Learn to Listen and Make others Listen to You, Rima Evans, apm.org.uk

The Art of Active Listening, Jorge Martin, projectmanagement.com

Đăng trong

Agile mindset in Fixed Price Projects

The title might be controversial as we might think about how Agile can be adopted to Fixed Price Projects and why we need that. The term Fixed Price Projects refer to projects where the funding is fixed regardless of actual delivery cost. Usually, sponsors and stakeholders will expect a defined scope to be delivered within a set schedule as well. That leads us as PM to start a project with the 3 corners of the project management triangle are fixed.

Source: http://lukeangel.co/

Why we might need the Agile mindset in this situation:

  • It’s hard to predict the future when we need to foresee the needed time, effort to deliver the defined scope (sometimes not fully clear in the details). In addition, a variety of risks should also be factored in the estimation.
  • The end results for any projects including fixed price ones are to solve specific problems/ deliver outcomes to relevant stakeholders. The project team and stakeholders need time to validate, align and fully understand the underlying outcomes behind the outputs as defined scope.
  • Changes might be happening on the way, especially for large & complex projects. They might come from new information discovered when executing or from the external business landscape.

How to approach this situation:

  • Influence even before the project started: from the business case stage or before the initiation phase. The defined scope should have priority orders where the highest priority ones directly impact business outcomes.
  • Involve the project team early from the estimation stage: to minimize the gap between expert estimation and actual execution. If the full team is not available, at least we have the estimator to take a leading role in the project to ensure accountability on the estimates.
  • Re-baseline the scope, schedule, scope on a regular basis like fortnightly, monthly. Monitoring the gap between actual delivery versus original plan helps us to identify issues as early as possible. 
  • Even fixed projects, negotiations on scope, schedule, cost are still helpful to reach the highest possible business outcome. For example, lower priority items in the defined scope can be considered to be swapped out or even eliminated by the right reason.

More guidance can be found:

firm-fixed-price-agile-projects, Fewell Jesse, PMI.org

What are your experiences with fixed projects?

Đăng trong

Project vs Product teams

A popular way to initiate a new team to solve specific problems/ deliver specific scope is by funding a new project. The project team then exists for a limited period until reaching the goals defined in the business case. On the other hand, the product team is usually durable (exist several years) and take ownership of a product. It is not strictly constrained in a specific problem/ scope but is more open to adapt to news, changes from customers or the product context.

A clear cut to explicitly label a team is project or product team is not important. A team can start as a project at first then transform into a product team to take ownership of the newly built product. Or a product team can also experience project delivery to tackle specific problems at certain times. Some key considerations to structure a team are:

  • Delivering outcomes/ solving root problems for stakeholders is the purpose/ mission of the team. Not simply building a function or defined scope. Sometimes, a team might stick to defined output but forgetting why that output is needed. 
  • “The Pool Model” with engineers are fully utilized from project to project could be a myth. Careful attention is needed to distinguish between hours optimization vs value optimization. It takes time for the team to deeply engage with the problem domain and understand customers’ needs. Then, the team can achieve valuable outcomes with customers.
  • Context switching should be minimized to help members stay productive. It’s not only about the domain knowledge, system familiarity but also about people relationships. It takes time for members to get to know each other and form a cohesive team. 

What are your thoughts on structuring teams around products, projects, or functions?

Đăng trong

Meetings That Don’t Suck

Meeting is a part of our daily job as PM, sometimes it’s the biggest part of the day. However, people have reasons to claim that meetings are the least productive part of the day. How can we get the most out of valuable meetings. Here are some thoughts:

Source: https://www.bringthedonuts.com

Kill the status meeting

We all know how expensive a long status meeting with a wide audience is.  The wasteful part of it should be replaced by an Information Radiator where anyone can pull the necessary updates on a regular basis. I personally still support status meetings just to focus on the important topics (sometimes required the wide audience’s attention). Then, the outcome of the meetings should be reflected to a public Information Radiator as well.

One-on-one meetings are important

This is the crucial moment to enhance relationships, surface hidden problems, align on vision with your direct reports, designer, engineering leads, etc. It should be immovable or equally important with other meetings. It helps us to learn about our people, listen to them and show that we care.

Well organized

Of course, all meetings should have an owner, agenda ahead of time with sufficient audience. So, people can be prepared, arrange representatives, provide needed inputs or even the answer to make the meeting not necessary anymore. That helps to save time, effort and people can stay productive.

 A busy calendar doesn’t make us important

We might have the feeling of importance with a full calendar or even double, triple booked. However, it might be a sign of ineffectiveness or changes should happen. We all need to have spaces for ad-hoc, unexpected stuff or just for others to reach us. PMs should also have time to focus or just breath and think about important things to do. 

Calendar bankruptcy

This is a very interesting concept to clear everything and start over again. All the debts or unnecessary meetings will be automatically removed and important meetings will be rebooked again. Some startups choose to do this by Jan 1st – the beginning of the year to remove all of the scheduled and repeated meetings. Then, people need to rethink whether it’s worth investing people’s time or any wastes can be eliminated. It saves tons of effort and productive hours for companies.

Do you have another tip to keep meetings productive?