From a daily standpoint, the Project Manager is interested in completing tasks, delivery status, communication and updates and getting to the end point of the day with both the delivery team and the customer team well informed and the proper progress made on the current tasks.

Daily View

Now, that does not mean that the PM needs an update on every single task every day.  That would be overkill.  However, the critical tasks and the tasks that may be in danger of causing the project timeline or budget to slide – basically what’s hot right now and what’s at risk – need to be watched daily.  At the end of the day, those are the tasks that the PM, the delivery team, and the customer team need to know are being taken care of and are still in alignment with the overall project goals and timeline.

Project View

From a project view standpoint, the end goals have already been set in the sales process with the customer, reviewed by the PM with customer during project kickoff, and well documented in the statement of work as well as the Project Plan. Ideally, those end goals are laid out in detail in the project plan that is being revised and delivered every week and reviewed as part of a formal weekly status meeting with the customer.

Everything that happens on the
Project Management Templates needs to be looked at with the project’s end goals in mind.  That includes issues that come up, risks that are reviewed and hopefully mitigated, and definitely any potential scope issues that arise.  All scope issues must be reviewed in detail and analyzed to ensure that additional work that must be performed is still in alignment with the project’s end goals and the customer’s “to-be” business processes.  If project changes in the form of change orders are not in alignment with the end goals of the project, then the SOW must go back for detailed review to ensure that these potential changes are not moving the delivery team and the customer off track leaving everyone with an end solution that, once implemented, will not satisfy the customer’s needs and goals for the project.

Summary

It is critical to not be blind once the project is underway.  It’s easy to get bogged down with the everyday tasks of managing a project and developing and implementing the customer solution.  What’s sometimes hard is maintaining the high-level view of the project’s end goals and ensuring that the final solution is still aligns with the customer’s wants and needs.

New comprehensive Quality Plan template release announced by Method123

Method123 has just announced the release a new full-featured Quality Plan template as part of their overall Project Management Kit product offering.

Method123’s Project Management Kit provides the project manager and team with over 50 Project Management Templates.  The addition of this new Quality Plan template will definitely strengthen this industry leading software offering from Method123.

The act of creating Quality Assurance Plans and Quality Control Plans is a critical piece of the overall Project Management Templates for any organization.  However, it is an often-overlooked step in the Project Planning process.

Creating these plans at the beginning of the project enables the project manager and team to set quality criteria for the project that will be acceptable to the customer.  These plans are put in place to set guidelines for managing quality, how to measure and audit quality, and how to deal with quality issues when they arise.  Quality expectations of deliverables on the project are a major input to these plans and must be spelled out in detail so the project team knows how best to go about meeting customer expectations and getting deliverable signoff.

“Quality plans are often an afterthought on projects meaning when quality questions arise, there’s no plan in place on how to deal with them,” says Jason Westland, CEO of Online Project Management template leader Method123 Ltd.  “Every project has deliverables.  The project manager and the customer must layout how to measure quality on those deliverables so that they can be formally accepted.  Our full-featured template will guide the project manager through the paces of putting together these valuable plans for their projects.”

Like all the templates in their Project Management Kit, the Quality Plan contains detailed instructions, real-life sample information to help the user create meaningful sections of the document, and lots of tips and helps throughout to make production of the plan a breeze.

With Method123’s template, the project manager can create a Quality Plan to:

•    Document the customer’s requirements
•    Identify the project deliverables
•    Create quality goals and standards for each deliverable
•    Get agreement from the customer on acceptable deliverable quality criteria
•    Gain final signoff on deliverables based on the criteria in the document

“Getting to the end of a project phase and handing a deliverable to the customer is a major milestone.  However, realizing you have no set acceptance criteria in place for that deliverable can be a major problem,” says Westland.  “I’ve seen projects flounder for weeks over a single deliverable because acceptance criteria was never clearly defined.”

By using Method123’s Quality Plan template, that will never be a problem.  Details on each deliverable, the acceptance criteria specific to that deliverable, and how to handle questions and issues with deliverable quality and acceptance is all defined at the beginning of the project when the project manager uses this template.  Think of it as a roadmap to deliverable acceptance.  Once in place, both the project manager and the customer have the necessary policies in place to move forward.

For information on the Quality Plan template as well as all the templates contained in Method123’s Project Management Kit, please visit their site at Method123.com.

How to Deal with Customer Indecision

Indecision is human nature.  You and I experience it every day. So why shouldn’t our customers?  After all, they’re just human, too.  But when you’re working on a critical project, that indecision that you’re feeling on the part of your customer can become frustrating.  And it can become hard to manage.

Fear not. Don’t pull your hair out.  There are things you can do to help you and your customer along the way when you’re sensing too much indecision:

•    Communicate well.  Effective and frequent communication will serve two purposes here. It will maintain your customer’s confidence that you’re on top of things and it will keep you in constant tune with your customer’s needs.
•    Revisit requirements.  If you’re sensing uneasiness from your customer it could be that certain project management software requirements weren’t well thought out. Take some time to revisit requirements with the customer at this point and add detail or clarification where needed.
•    Hold regular meetings.  Again, consistency with the customer will make them feel as comfortable and confident as they can possibly be and may take care of some of the indecision you’re sensing.
•    Make the customer part of the ‘team.’  If your customer understands that they’re part of the main team, then they’ll feel like they’re on the inside and helping. Not on the outside looking in.  Keep them informed and engaged, and their indecisions – which may be stemming from lack of control or confidence – will hopefully fade away.

Summary

As project managers, we often feel we need total control and that we’re well equipped to handle our team, our customer, and everything that goes with the successful project management template implementation of a huge project.  But our customer is important and they’re paying the bills.  So let’s keep them well informed and ‘in the loop’ and they’re confidence will soar and they’re indecision and hesitation will fade away.

If you want to improve your Project Success, then you need to learn something new about managing projects every week. After all, if you’re not learning then how can you improve? So find out…

How to improve your Project Learning

Here are 5 great tips for learning more about Project Management…

1: Get serious

Whether you’re a beginner or novice, you need to invest in formal training to boost your skills. So get serious and take the first step. Either enroll for a formal training course locally, or use Project Management Templates so that you can learn from home when it suits you.

Then set aside 2 hours every week to sit down and read books, materials, articles and white papers about projects. By immersing yourself in the topic, you will spark ideas for your own projects that you can use to improve your success.

2. Widen your scope

Don’t just stick to the classical theory of project management. Instead, widen your scope by reading materials that also cover managing people, money and equipment as well as suppliers, procurement and communications.

3. Write it down

If you’re reading late at night, much of what you read will go in one ear and out the other. So every time you think “That’s a good point!” write it down. Create your own “Learning Guidebook” and in it, record every tip that you’ve learned along the way. Then you can read your own guidebook as a refresher. Even better, you can use it to impart the knowledge you’ve gained to your team. Who knows, you could even publish it as a book!

4. Get specific

When you’ve spent a couple of months improving your knowledge of project management, you’re ready to get specific. Write down the areas that you’re weak in and get detailed materials on those topics. Remember that Project Managers are generalists. They need to know a lot about ALL of the topics in the management discipline. So if there are topics that you’re weak on, learn more about them now.

5. Reward your efforts

By writing down your learning along the way, you’ll quickly realize how valuable that information is to you. So feel proud of what you’ve learnt by rewarding your own efforts! Go out for a meal with friends, buy new clothes or do something special.

By rewarding your efforts, it will reinforce how import learning is to you. And it will motivate you to continue learning more each week.

Good Requirements Mean Everything

There are a lot of important things that go into making a project and project management practices successful.  Good, skilled resources.  A confident and experienced online project management manager.  A project budget big enough to get the job done.  However, none get the project off on the right foot quite as well as rock-solid project requirements.

As the project manager, you have a statement of work in hand and an anxious customer ready to kickoff the project.  You’ve already put together a project schedule to get the project moving forward and you’ll continue to refine it as more details emerge.  The next thing you must do is ensure that you and your customer define as many requirements as possible and in as much detail as possible.  A colleague of mine once said “requirements are the lifeblood of project management templates ” and that is definitely true.  I’ve witnessed projects taking horrible turns for the worse when it became apparent that the requirements had not been adequately defined.

Here are a few things you can do to help ensure your project’s requirements are well defined:

• Review the statement of work in detail with the customer.  Make sure the project starts on the right foot with a mutual understanding of the basic deliverables of the project.
• Require the customer to define their business processes with their own subject matter experts.  These business processes will go a long ways in helping you and the customer mold requirements to properly serve their business needs.
• Make time in the project schedule for a thorough exploration session.  Ensuring that there is enough time to work with the customer to fully define requirements will keep the project from being ‘forced’ to the next stage with question marks still hanging out there.
• Engage the right resources.  Enlist the right members of your own project team to help with the requirements definition process.  For example, on an IT project the business analyst is usually the key person to work with the customer on deep requirements definition.  A data specialist is not.

Summary

Good project management can do a lot to help ensure project planning success.  Careful management of resources, the schedule, the budget and the customer will take care of most things that come up.  However, if you start with poorly defined requirements you may be just one step away from a big project setback that can greatly impact schedule and budget.  Taking the time to define requirements in detail at the beginning of the project can be the single biggest boost to keeping your project on track throughout the engagement.

New Project Management Templates Released for Change Request Form

Change on a project is inevitable.  It happens whether your are adequately tracking it or not.  In the long run, it’s critical to your project’s timeframe and budget success to do the best job you can tracking any and all project changes, and Method123 can help you do that through the use of the Change Request Form.
As Jason Westland, CEO of Method123 Ltd states, “The Change Request Form is the mechanism by which you and your team can easily and seamlessly document all project request.  Change happens and change request forms should always be part of any project management methodology.  Whether or not they get used, is another question.  With Method123’s Change Request Form template you will now have the tool you need to track all changes and your team will have no excuses documenting all change requests because it’s so easy and built right into the Method123 Online Project Management process.”

The Method 123 Change Form not only enables the project team to fully document all changes, it also is setup to help them identify the business reasons behind each change request, show the potential costs and performance benefits of incorporating the change, accommodate change priority, and show how the the approval and implementation of the requested change will affect the project overall.

Some changes fall through the cracks in terms of tracking, only to affect everyone later on.  Using the Change Form will help the Project Manager and project team avoid confusions and miscommunication by providing a formal process to identify upcoming changes before they happen, providing a more formalized approval process for each change, allow for more control over which changes are approved and scheduled, and provide a mechanism for monitoring the implementation of all tracked changes.

Unchecked and untracked changes lead to chaos on a project and no one knows that better than the experienced project manager.  These impacts of rogue and unapproved changes are often seen in the form of schedule slippages on the Project Plan, budget overruns, and customer dissatisfaction – all of which can be avoided through use of the Change Request Form and thus greatly increasing your project’s likelihood for success.

The Method123 Project Management Templates Change Request Form is an incredible tool and will step you and your team smoothly through the process of documenting the change, identifying the benefits, the priority and impact of each change, handling the change approval process and even allowing the inclusion of additional supporting documentation for the change such as revised budget information, technical specification documents from your technical team, or business case backup documentation from you or your customer.
For more information, visit Method123.com

Creating Cohesive and Effective Teams for Your Projects

A team is more than just a group of people doing project management template work. It is an assembly of individuals with diverse backgrounds who interact for a specific purpose. An ineffective team has negative attitudes, points fingers, garners grudges and distrust, and is often not well focused on the end goals of the project. These conditions manifest themselves in high turnover and absenteeism, considerable frustration levels, poor communication, and intolerance.

As the project manager, your goal is to avoid those negatives of an ineffective team and build a team of effective members who display the following characteristics:

Characteristics of Effective Teams

• Acceptance of new ideas and objective evaluation of them
• Sustained common norms, values, and beliefs without excessive conformity
• Synergy through mutual support
• Loyalty and commitment to the project
• Focus on end results
• A trusting, open attitude
• Ability to gain consensus and resolve conflicts
• High morale and esprit de corps
• Information and resources sharing

An experienced project manager knows that a team with these characteristics is hard to achieve.  However, there are some actions that the project manager might take to help ensure that his or her team members have, or acquire, these characteristics:
Set the example. The PM not only espouses certain values and beliefs but also exercises them. Be trustful, open and most of all…committed.

• Encourage communication—oral, written, and electronic. The successful PM knows that communication is more than writing memos, standing in front of a team, or setting up a Web site. It requires sharing information in an open and trusting manner, holding frequent, distributing the critical project info to your team members, and doing everything you can to ensure they are up to speed at all times.
• Focus the team members on results. The PM directs all their energies toward achieving the vision. Whether he or the team makes a decision, it is made in the context of achieving the vision. The project manager constantly communicates the vision and establishes change control and problem-solving processes.
• Maintain high morale by garnering the essential team spirit. Empower team members, match the right person to the right task and encourage consensus building.
• Build commitment to the vision and the project plan. Match people’s interests with tasks, encourage participative decision making, empower people, seek input and feedback, assign people with responsibility for completing deliverables, and keep the project in the forefront of everyone’s mind.
• Encourage greater diversity in thinking, work style, and behavior. Always mindful of the danger of groupthink, the project manager encourages different thoughts and perspectives. He encourages experimentation and brainstorming to develop new ideas and keep an open mind, seeks task interdependence to encourage communication, and nurtures a continuous learning environment.

New Project Plan Template Release from Method123 Sets the Standard

The release of Method123’s new Project Plan template as part of their overall Project Management Tool Kit promises to set the standard for Project Planning and scheduling.

According to Jason Westland, the CEO of Method123, the project plan is most critical tool in a project manager’s toolbox.  “The Project Plan is at the core of every company’s project management methodology.  Without a good project plan, your project is headed toward schedule delays, misaligned tasks, and budget overruns.  Our template will step you through the process of developing and maintaining a rock-solid project plan to keep your schedule in check throughout the project.”

Method123’s Project Plan template can help the Project Manager assemble the proper detail in the schedule to manage everything.  Tasks, resources, milestones, and task dependencies are all critical pieces of the project plan.  With just a few easy steps, this new template will help the project manager create an accurate view of the project schedule in the most efficient manner possible.

With the new Project Plan template you can:

• Define project activities and tasks
• Identify the level of effort required for each task
• Input and assign resources to tasks
• Create task dependencies
• Produce a full-blown project schedule

As Method123 states, no experienced project manager takes on a project without creating a detailed project plan.  The Method123 Project Plan template will become an essential piece of your Project Management Methodology as you see how it steps the project manager systematically through the process.  With this tool, you can create a plan that will keep your project on time and on budget.  Each step contains detailed instructions and is packed with helpful tips and hints to get the most out of your project planning process.

“Our Project Plan template is so easy to use that even the newbie project managers will be able to define project milestones and scope like a pro,” says Mr. Westland.  “Creating the Work Breakdown Structure will no longer seem like a monumental task – our template will step you right through the entire process.”

Method123’s Project Management Templates are powerful tools and this project plan template is no exception.  By utilizing the template to build a plan at the beginning of your project, you’ll show your sponsor that you intend to deliver their solution in the most efficient way possible.

For more information, go to Method123’s website at method123.com