Project Management Never Takes a Holiday

As we get into the holidays, this is the perfect time to take stock of your current projects and make your resolutions for next year. Things get a little bit quieter, and that creates a fantastic atmosphere for catching up on all of those things that you should be doing all the time... but just don't quite get to. "Project management" covers a wide swath of activities- but they all come back to one constant theme: control. Without clear knowledge of the progress along each of the lanes of your project, you will quickly lose control. Even the most experienced project and program managers can lose control.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for a project to spin out of control without proper measures in place. First, you have to look at your project scope. Is it a many-tentacled monster with smaller sub-projects sprouting out of everywhere? Is it growing rapidly (and by rapidly, I mean by 25% or more over 6 months)? Is it complex? Does it have built-in reporting requirements? if the answer to any of these questions are yes, you need project control in the form of tracking mechanisms and documentation.

Your first response is likely that you know what is going on and you certainly don't need to bury yourself in paperwork that gets completed and then stashed in a drawer, never to be used. I like to call that stuff "shelfware." That's why you have to design your methods of control to fit into what you're doing- specifically to your project and to the way you work, the way your team shares information- both internally and with your stakeholders. There are lots of great ideas, and you can force yourself to get the templates built and the information flowing by scheduling a meeting with your major stakeholders on a regular basis, with a structured format. That structured format will get them used to what you need them to know. Look back over the last 90 days and see where your "fire drills" were. If they were cleared up with a bit of explanation and additional communication- learn from those experiences and put that information out on a regular basis, in a format that the people who need it can relate.

Now that you've done that, it's time to tackle the big beast. Here's how you do it:

• Break your project into "lanes"
• Assign each of those lanes personnel who have those day-to-day responsibilities
• Put in writing (to share with your team and stakeholders) the SCOPE of each of those lanes
• Break up all of your tasks into those major lanes
• Write task charters to lay out what's in scope for that part of the project
• Create a project milestones chart (I like to use a plain-old Gannt chart because it doubles as a calendar of when things are due and where your dependencies are)
• Post your chart where people can see it and follow along

Make sure that if you were to be kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, that the people you work with would know exactly what was going on across your entire project- what people were doing, what those activities are in support of, and WHY.

If nothing else, it will make your life a little easier as the project manager, and the regular investment of time in "housekeeping" sorts of activities like this will afford you control over your project, real oversight, and maybe even some extra time to celebrate holidays... you know, while you're not working.

Statistics are Sexy

In an era of almost unlimited data availability managers are inundated with information of all types from multiple sources. In this environment, the manager must be able to filter out the relevant from the noise, and must also identify the data that can be transformed into something useful. Once you're left with a narrowed down pile of data, you can turn that into information that your team, your stakeholders, and your leadership can use to facilitate informed decision making.

Wait! That's not the end! Information is only truly useful to those people if it is communicated effectively. "Effectively" means that:

• It supports a well-defined purpose or decision-making objective; and
• It's in the right format for the message and the audience, and
• It provides clarity, rather than just more volume.

This is where the statistician on our team comes in. Statistics provides the means to analyze and extract real value from your pile of collected data. They can be descriptive- explaining the current reality in clear, concise terms; they can also be predictive- extrapolating trends to aid in decision making. Unlike other types of information, reliable statistical data when combined with a well-thought-out case for change is difficult to refute. A well-crafted, data-based argument is incredibly effective when trying to gain consensus among stakeholders on the way ahead.

Hal Varian, the Chief Economist for Google, was interviewed about the affect technology has on innovation. In that interview, he talks about how Statistician is the "sexy" job of this decade, as Computer Engineer was the sexy "it" job of the 90s during the tech boom. Keeping a skilled statistician within arm's reach can help you focus conversations and enhance your team's decision making activities by providing support for your business case for change. In a world where data and data sources are growing exponentially, a statistician can extract the value from that data and transform it into the representation needed to support your decision making processes. The statistician can inform and empower your stakeholders. Statistics aren't just critical to determining your path, but are also the key to explaining those choices to others.