What to do with projects that go wrong – Part 1

You might be involved in several project developments. As part of it you might have come across some difficult situations. How did you resolve those issues or problems? In this post, I would like to suggest you some tips that you can practice to tackle such situations during a project development.

# Control your emotions
First, calm down yourself. Learn to control your emotions in such situations. Sometimes, your feelings make the situations worse. Usually, when something bad happens to you, your emotions or feelings start dominating you. They ultimately influence your thinking and behavior. You may tend to act with anger, fear or frustration. Hence, try to be patient and attentive to the problem rather than over reacting to it.

# Scrutinize the problem thoroughly
When a problem occurs, evaluate the problem thoroughly from different perspectives with a cool mind. Here are some suggestions on how to evaluate the project problems:

# Practice the art of questioning, check if the problem is really affecting your project, what can be the impact of the risk etc. Such questions can make you think rather than react to situations.
# Ensure that you frame the problem in the right emotional and intellectual scale.
# Delegating work to team members can eliminate your assumptions concerning the problem.
# You must have a clear understanding of the problems and its consequences.

After evaluating and developing clear understanding on project problems, you can prioritize the project issues based on their severity.

How to survive ‘Meeting failures’ – Part 3

Organizations conduct different types of meetings. Here, I would like to point out three important types of meetings and the things need to be noted in the meeting by a facilitator or organizer.

Types of Meeting

# Interactive meeting: In an interactive meeting, participation of attendees is of prime importance. Each participant gets an opportunity to have their say. Brainstorming and group discussions are examples of this type of meeting.
# Information conveyer meeting: Usually, participants’ involvement is very less in this type of meeting. The meeting is held just for communicating the decisions taken by authorities to the participants.
# Review Meeting: In a review meeting, participants can have their say if necessary. They just update their project work status and share their ideas about work.

Things to be noted in a Meeting

Here are some pointers to help you at the time of meetings:
# Are right people invited for the meeting? Don’t waste time inviting irrelevant people for the meeting.
# Are you done with all preparations for the meeting? The facilitator and the participants must come with ample preparation for the meeting.
# Do the participants arrive on time? Make sure the meeting starts on the scheduled time.
# Do all participants active in the meeting? Ensure that everyone is actively participating in the meeting.
# Do the meeting have smart ending? Ensure that the meeting ends well with the recap of the things discussed in the meeting. After all, well begun things end well only.

Meetings are not only a useful tool to communicate but also a great way to reach your goals by getting things done in time.

How to survive ‘Meeting failures’ – Part 2

In the previous post, you understood that facilitation is all about leading a discussion in a fruitful manner without dominating the participants. It requires expertise.

To excel in the art of facilitation, you must learn the right methods of facilitation. Here are some measures you as a facilitator can take while facilitating.

#1 When you hold a meeting, first take your position in a place where you can be noticed by everyone in the meeting without any obstructions. Initiate the meeting with a proper introduction.
#2 Observe various communication styles of participants. Help the participants in conveying their ideas clearly by filling all gaps in the communication process.
#3 Direct the discussion to the right track without dominating one another. If you try to dominate, the meeting environment gets disturbed and people couldn’t be able to express their ideas clearly.
#4 Ensure that you keep boundaries for ideas on topics to be discussed. If the discussion goes beyond the limits, bring it back on track. Follow decent methods like posing questions on the main topic, displaying those questions on the projector screen to keep the focus of the discussion.
#5 Keep note of the discussion points in the meeting. This will help you to have a quick recap of the points that are discussed in the meeting. It also clarifies your doubts that occur as a part of the meeting.

Be a successful facilitator to make your meetings or discussions meaningful and fruitful. Remember, facilitation depends on the type of meeting held and the intervention of the facilitator varies on each meeting.

How to survive ‘Meeting failures’ – Part 1

You might be conducting and attending several meetings with your clients and team members everyday. Do they all deliver the desired results? How successful you are in holding such meetings?

Usually, meetings in organizations take place in two situations; one- while informing the employees about the decisions taken; another- while discussing with the employees regarding decisions to be taken. However, all the meetings cannot be effective and completely productive. Some of them go haywire due to the lack of focus and the inability to restrict to the desired topics.

See the following ingredients that are essential for a successful meeting:
# Good Meeting Agenda
# Fixed time schedule
# Good arrangements for meeting attendees
# Active participation of all the attendees
# Presence of skilled facilitators

Facilitation – all about putting things on track
Facilitation is the act of making things easier by settling issues. It is a skill people in organizations adopt who has some authority. Successful meetings include skilled facilitators. They bring back the focus of the meeting if other participants lose the track.

Generally, every meeting starts with some specific topic. When the discussion continues some participants may get deviated from the original topic. In this situation, the facilitator should bring those participants' attention back to the main topic without hurting their ego. This act requires certain skill and authority. Usually, facilitators are the organizers of the meeting or people with some granted power such as project managers or project leaders. Whoever does the task, facilitation is all about putting things on the right track.

It’s the Attitude Stupid – Part 3

Build a positive attitude. It will help you to make things better and ensure your success as a project manager. If you have a constant positive attitude, you can be a good example to your co-workers and management at your workplace.

In this post, I would like to discuss about three more traits a project manager must be aware of handling a project team.

#6 Impatient
Sometimes, disruptions in the form of unavoidable activities – political or bureaucratic- can slow down project progress. Your impatience in such situations may spoil the entire project environment. Being a project manager, you must stand as a “action fanatic’ in projects. You need to develop a sense of “Get on with it” attitude. You must know when to force an issue and when to let things happen.

#7 Fear
Fear of failure is a common trait seen in many project managers. If you are controlled by fear, you will never achieve the desired results. Be confident enough to face challenges in project. You must possess good motivational skills to convince your team members in completing the project successfully.

#8 Skepticism
Never doubt yourself in doing things. As a project manager, you must have confidence in what you are doing. Have a clear picture of the goals to be attained in project. At the same time, you need to be aware of the possible risks. Be ready to challenge the assumptions of others without losing their trust in you and your work.

An efficient project manager possesses only the positive aspects of the above mentioned traits and balances them properly. Many people fail to calculate in balancing these confronting forces correctly. However, these traits can help you in improving your own abilities to make better and smarter decisions in your professional as well as personal life.

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character” - Albert Einstein

It’s the Attitude Stupid – Part 2

Attitude has significant role in one’s career. If you have defined attitude towards your work, you will definitely reap success. Being a project manager, you should know how to maintain a balance of attitudes.

In the last post we discussed about the traits ego and autocrat, the project manager need to be aware of while handling a team. Here i would like to point out some other traits a project manager must be aware of.

#3 Ambiguity
Projects often have ambiguities and uncertainties. As a project manager, you must handle ambiguities confidently. Develop good ideas for your project by eliminating ambiguities. At the same time, bring precision into your work. You need to have a zeal for attaining perfection in doing work.

#4 Communication
Effective communication of ideas enhances the quality of work. You must have proficiency in both verbal and written communication. Being a project manager, you must encourage open communication among your team by holding project meetings, negotiations, discussions and brainstorming sessions. A good project manager knows what type of communication is effective in various project situations.

#5 Complexity
Learn to acknowledge complexities that come in your way. You may face big challenges while dealing with complex-multi organizational projects. In such situations, you need to know how to solve issues and drive the project in right track. Try to ‘keep things simple’ as the project progresses. In brief, you have to appreciate forests as well as trees.

Exhibiting right attitude will help you to gain respect and value from people around you.

“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” - Winston Churchill

It’s the Attitude Stupid – Part 1

‘Attitude’ makes one person to react positively or negatively to a situation. What does attitude mean? It is one’s feelings or mood towards things, situations and people. It happens often that conflicting attitudes can head up when people work as a team in an organization. In projects, you have to work with different people to achieve a common goal. As a project manager or team leader, you must be aware of your team’s traits and be able to react to people or situations appropriately.

I would like to point out a few traits that a project manager must be aware of handling a project team.

#1 Ego
Ego is who you think you are. Being a project manager you may feel like receiving credit and attention for every work you contribute to the project. Never allow ego to get into your way. Learn to avoid your own interest take ahead of the project. As a good project manger, you should delegate work to others and share credit with your team members when project becomes successful. Be careful about your language. If you use “I” and “Me” often in your conversations, your co-workers may think that your ego is stopping you from being part of a team. Hence, include words like “We” and “Us” in your language so that people will understand you are giving space for their contributions too. By keeping your ego aside you can build a good reputation among your team.

#2 Autocrat
As a project manager, you must keep things simple as the project moves forward. Be confident of your responsibilities. Sometimes, you have to take control of actions which are not in your territory, or you must impose certain actions on your team. Suppose the lights of a conference hall went in the middle of an important business meeting. In such a crisis, the person in charge of electrical equipments must take the initiative to resolve the issue before the chief becomes aware of it.

A positive attitude in the workplace helps you to be successful in your job.

“It is your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude” - Zig Ziglar

Create specifications – How & who?

Creating a good and simple specification is a difficult task. Here are some tips to help you in creating good specifications.

# Keep your target audience in mind
# Don’t describe everything by yourself. You can borrow explanations from other specifications using appropriate hypertext.
# Avoid jargons and obscure language.
# Avoid excessive use of flow charts or diagrams. Sometimes, a good paragraph is better than a diagram.
# Keep old specifications which are good. Those may help you in describing a complicated concept or diagram.
# Use simple language to describe (complex) algorithms.
# Seek advices from others. Ask for better ways of understanding things.

When authoring specifications, information that is useful to both project manager and team must be separated. Hence, divide details of functionalities and issues or questions.

Now, who prepares the specifications? It is business analysts, clients, or project managers who create specifications often. The responsibility is given based on the nature of the project team as well as the responsible authority.

In large projects, project manager or designer is the person responsible for feature specifications and programmers for technical specifications. Usually, technical specifications are shorter as its audience is small in number. However, it should map to the supporting design in feature specifications. In small projects, generally the project manager or the lead programmer generates a single document containing all the four specifications.

Specifications communicate a set of intentions so that people know what they need to do exactly for the project. It helps the project manager in gathering useful information about project to accomplish its goals.

Specification – Different types

Generally there are four basic kinds of specifications. Usually, these four specifications are separated on a large team and combined on a small team. Do you know which these four specifications are?

#1 Requirement
A requirement specification consolidates all the requests and obligations to be carried forward in the project. This provides a point of reference for the project. It includes a list of success criteria which describes much about the project end results instead of describing how to achieve them.

#2 Feature
Feature specification is the main outcome of a design process (usually in software projects). It describes the functionality and behavior of a set of scenarios from the customer perspective. For example, it explains software functionality through the user experience, which means it talks about the work in a non-technical perspective.

#3 Technical
Technical specifications talk about the engineering approach required for the feature specification. It details the complex or reused components required for a project as well as provide supporting evidences for the work items required for feature specifications. An in-depth nature of a feature specification avoids the need for a technical specification.

#4 Work-item lists
A work- item list details each work item/programming assignment required for feature specifications. It breaks down each work item into separate tasks along with estimates based on their priority. This list is generated by the programmer and reviewed and approved by the lead programmer or project manager. Technically, this list is not specifications, but plans to fulfill the specifications.

Test criteria will be prepared for new functionalities in the project. In projects, all the four specifications provide groundwork for the next. If the project is complex or the team size is bigger, you need to have more formalized division of specifications.