Many people like to dream. Some people manage to make dreams come true by launching a change that brings about success.
Today you will find inspiration from well-known founders and CEO’s who have all dreamed big, people who didn’t let fear hold them back to pursue the big ideas and turn them into reality.
Infographic brought to you by Wrike project management web based software.
By Linky van der Merwe
When you find yourself leading a virtual team, you will often need to take on the role as team coach to facilitate optimum performance. In order to do so properly, a good place to start, is with your understanding of what a team really is.
Much about teams and team performance can be learnt from the authors Katzenbach and Smith. No wonder that their definition of Teams became an industry standard over the years:
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
Katzenbach and Smith
In an article: “Organisational Culture” published in the Harvard Business Review, Katzenbach and Smith stated that teamwork represents a set of values that encourage listening and responding constructively to views expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others. They explain further that teams require both individual and mutual accountability. Teams rely on group discussion, debate, and decision, sharing information and best practice performance standards. Teams produce work-products through the joint contributions of their members. This is what makes possible performance levels greater than the sum of all the individual members, also stated as a team is more than the sum of its parts.
A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. The essence of a team is common commitment towards a purpose in which team members can believe. The attainability of specific goals helps teams maintain their focus on getting results. The combination of purpose and specific goals is essential to performance. In essence, goals help a team keep track of progress, while a broader purpose supplies meaning and emotional energy.
In working with teams Katzenbach and Smith have found when a team shares a common purpose, goals, and approach, mutual accountability grows as a natural counterpart. When people work together toward a common objective, trust and commitment follow. Consequently, teams enjoying a strong common purpose and approach inevitably hold themselves responsible, both as individuals and as a team, for the team’s performance. This sense of mutual accountability also produces the rich rewards of mutual achievement in which all members share.
Having the responsibility to facilitate positive change in teams you lead, whether in person or virtually, you have much neuro-science research to back you up according to the Neuro Leadership Institute. How can this help you to coach teams for optimum performance?
Well, virtual team members have differing skill sets and depending on their background also different levels of experience to consider. It is important for teams to have the right mix of skills including technical or functional expertise, problem-solving, decision-making skills and interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills include risk taking, helpful criticism, objectivity, active listening, giving the benefit of the doubt, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others.
As a team coach it is good to be cognizant of behavioral differences in the virtual team. There are a variety of individuals with an even bigger variety of personalities. Having a basic understanding of personality types, will help you tailor your communication plans. Remember also that virtual team members may be at different levels of engagement and motivation.
The Neuro Leadership Institute teaches us that there are some brain based principles for team coaching. They are:
Christopher Samsa from the Neuro Leadership Institute continues to explain important factors to consider as part of brain based team coaching. They are:
Collective intelligence is the prediction of the group’s ability to perform well. There is a correlation to how group members are social sensitive of one another, if there’s an equal distribution of conversation turn-taking and even the proportion of females in the group that can increase the collective intelligence.
As a team leader and coach you can help the team to be more meta-cognitive, to be mindful about planning out their work, tracking their progress, and assessing their own knowledge.
Collective emotion refers to the ability to empathise and to cooperate with one another. Some factors that come into play are:
Collective performance is about understanding the team behaviour at systemic and habitual level. Look at the culture of the team and figure out if they are generally positive. If they are connected to each other and are they contributing to team performance.
A common tool that many of you are familiar with, is the Tuckman model for teams. The Forming Storming Norming Performing theory is an elegant and helpful explanation of team development and behavior.
The principles to use in order to coach for results are:
In their research, the Neuro Leadership Institute shares another very useful Model, called the Co-create Model. Based on this model you need to remember the following when coaching teams for optimum performance.
Visit the Neuro Leadership Institute for more information about Brain Based Team Coaching.
Source:
Managing Organisations during the COVID-19 Vortex, is a comprehensive book to help leaders navigate their organisation through the Coronavirus crisis. From managing day-to-day practicalities, to scenario planning and sense-making, this book offers guidelines from over 20 leading experts to help executives deal with their most pressing challenges.
It helps leaders find the guidance, knowledge and will to persevere through this time, and offers them guidelines for navigating their organisation through the Coronavirus crisis.
Some of the topics covered by the book are:
This book will give leaders the context, tools, guidelines and perseverance needed to face this crisis head-on and lead their organisations into a future beyond the Coronavirus. It is available now in PDF e-format at WWW.KR.CO.ZA
Contributors include among others:
What people are saying about the book:
“A global pandemic is not normal business disruption. It threatens workforce directly. It requires strong leadership, extensive set of activities to assess the risk, stress test pandemic plans and put people rst – safe, productive and engaged. This book will be a valuable resource for leaders during unprecedented times.”
Jeanett Modise, Chief Executive: Human Resources, Sanlam Limited
“As business leaders struggle to come to terms with managing their organisations through this vortex, it is heartening to see a great team of specialists coming together in the spirit of Ubuntu to share their perspectives and ideas on how to plan for this new world of work.”
Ronnie Toerien, HCM Strategy Leader, Oracle
“The multitudinous impact of COVID-19 forces humans to reconnect. An insightful read on a vortex of socio-economic impact and counter strategies grounded on rekindling neglected intra- and interpersonal relationships, novel depictions of leadership agility, re ections on breaking down walls of work and revaluing the power of organisational culture.”
Prof Daneel van Lill, Executive Dean: College for Business & Economics, University of Johannesburg
To buy this ebook today, visit Knowledge Resources. Use the code AUTHOR upon checkout, to receive a 15% discount.
By Christopher Worsley
If you’re working in a structured project environment with a project office, the chances are that you are using a right-size governance approach.
What does that mean? Essentially, the level of management attention and oversight varies appropriately, depending upon the characteristics of the project, such as size and complexity, or the level and significance of the impact of the project on the organisation.
In the example below, projects are classified for governance purposes into three types based upon size and complexity.
Type ‘1’ projects demand formal ratification of key deliverables such as the business case and project initiation document. They will not be allowed to continue (or at least that’s the idea) until there is real evidence that the legitimate governance stakeholders have given their authorisation to proceed stage by stage.
Type ‘3’ projects? Well, they typically take only a few weeks, a few staff, and not a lot of money, and have a very limited impact on the organisation’s strategy. They often simply require a sign-off as an agreement to operationalise and close the project. It’s not unusual for work to continue while the sign-off is being negotiated.
Ultimately, the choice of governance affects the way the project is controlled, monitored, and the way decision-making is managed.
It all sounds good, doesn’t it? Except that it simply isn’t working.
Twenty years ago, most of us recognised that adopting strict life cycles and gateway processes may well reduce risk, but at a huge cost to the agility of delivery. It didn’t matter how many times PRINCE2 theoreticians told us it was ‘just a framework’ and its strictures must be adapted to the project and organizational context, there were methodologist practitioners who were determined to implement a rigid, formulaic system. This was the era when the joke was:
What’s the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist?
“You can negotiate with a terrorist!”
Right-size governance was introduced to proceduralise the judgements about which governance techniques to apply and when. It makes logical sense. In line with Pareto’s law, you concentrate most management attention on the top 20% of projects. But like so many well-intentioned ideas, it had not factored in the Machiavellian behaviour of organizations and their project stakeholders. In a review comparing the actual governance approach taken by projects against the approach suggested by project size and complexity evaluation, we found over 25% of projects were not in line with the right-size governance recommendations. Here are just some of the examples we come across:
In the organisations we work with, the classification of projects for governance purposes is part of the project initiation process. It must be because fundamental decisions to questions are dependent upon understanding the nature of the project. Questions such as:
This works well where the level of simplicity and complexity is obvious, but for those in between, it can be more difficult to predict in their early stages. We don’t know what we don’t know yet. Selecting and implementing the governance for the project at this stage is a problem.
The PMOs we work with report that it is often these projects that get into trouble simply because the management oversight is just wrong. While there may be good intentions to review the project categorisation at stage gates, in reality, what happens is that the project drifts into a governance black-hole with nobody prepared to expose the existing governance regime to challenge.
Clearly, with some projects and programmes lasting over several years, the governance approach must be reviewed. In these circumstances a PMO can add real value, monitoring the risks associated with projects in the wrong governance state and highlighting the need for change to occur. We suspect, however, that many PMOs are subject to the ‘magpie effect’ – they become overly focused on large projects and programmes. Strange really, because these are the ones we assign our most experienced (and costliest) project and programme managers to – exactly because of the known risks. It seems an exercise in project manager disempowerment for the PMO to pitch in as well. Rather it is those middle level projects where changes in context are most likely, and where the skills and experience of the managers involved may be more suspect, that the PMO should focus.
Reviewing your governance approach is one thing – adapting it is something else. Indeed, one might consider that the whole idea of adapting governance is an oxymoron. After all, the purpose of governance is to give predictable approaches, based upon best practices, to reduce the risks associated with the management of projects. Adapting governance – well it sounds like the sort of can that is best left unopened!
Yet if yours is a complex project environment where the organisational context of projects is varied and varying, or indeed if you are working on Agile projects, adapting governance approaches is exactly what you are expected to do.
As governance is about reducing management risk, it has to remain alert to the sources of management risk, and the first and possibly most important is where and by whom are management decisions being made. So often demanding and dangerous stakeholders are involved or included in the decision-making, and yet good practice means that only the decision-makers should be limited to those who have a legitimate right – which means the decisions are made at the right place by the right people.
A second, and in some ways, more subtle point about adapting governance to better suit changing circumstances was made by Cohn, an early Agile theorist. He pointed out that project governance – far from eschewing change – should welcome it and see change as a positive consequence of having learned something and avoiding the mistake of doing something not wanted. A far cry from the rigid, predictive governance strait jackets of yesteryear that saw the role of keeping to the script and frustrating change.
So in the Agile world, governance matters but it’s a much more consultative process. It’s not just about whether the project is complex, but what the clients’ attitudes and desires are around the way the project should be conducted. If the client is open to exploration and the requirements are difficult to define then the Agile space is a great place to be. But if the client needs and demands predictability in the delivery then it probably isn’t.
Bringing those legitimate stakeholders much closer into the project – moving from a negotiative relationship to a collaborative relationship – is key to shortening decision making time. Scrum practices such as the product owner is a good example of attempts to do this. But, as the use of these practices increases, there is a very real danger that (as per the role of the project sponsor) the business will become project-weary and circumvent the Scrum mandate, allowing projects to run without a genuine product owner in place. You may even know instances of that happening in your own organization right now!
As project management disciplines and approaches extend into more diverse areas, as the product development processes projects encompass become more sophisticated, and the demands made by stakeholders increase, project governance must respond – it too has to diversify without losing its role of providing senior managers – the investors in projects – with the confidence they need to implement their organisation’s strategy.
Christopher Worsley has over 40 years’ experience in project and programme management. He is a visiting lecturer on the University of Cape town MSc in project management and is the author of the following books with his wife, Louise Worsley.
Christopher will be talking on the importance of adaptive planning practices at the Project Management South Africa (PMSA) monthly meet-up on the 28thApril 2020.
Adaptive project planning
The lost art of planning projects
By Linky van der Merwe
While the whole world is currently dealing with the Coronavirus, and more specifically known as the COVID-19 pandemic, the project management community has a responsibility to deal with this issue on our projects in a decisive, direct manner. What are the important things to do?
When faced with such an extreme risk, uncertainty and challenge, the first thing to do, is to arm yourself with accurate, comprehensive information to best prepare to manage through this crisis by making informed, thoughtful decisions. As Project Management Professionals we need to be planning for this on our projects. Of course this will include to put it on your Risk Register, including a series of scenarios, the expected impacts and mitigation actions with risk owners.
Take the project conversation to your Sponsor and Steering Committee to consider if the project should be put on hold or delayed. You will need signoff on decisions made.
According to a McKinsey article, on the COVID-19 implications for Business, published prior to the lockdown of several countries, there are 3 potential economic scenarios for the Coronavirus Disease. They are:
The sectors to be most impacted by the pandemic, forecasted by McKinsey, are Aviation and Hospitality, as well as Consumers.
The immediate actions that organisations are expected to take, with application to dealing with this on your projects, are discussed in the next paragraph, based on the McKinsey recommendations.
To this point, do the following:
We should set up a cross-functional Coronavirus response team that should include members from every function and discipline within the organization. The leader of the team should report directly to the CEO.
This response team will have several workstreams, focused on the following areas:
It’s important for this team to think through different scenarios, to create a single source of truth, to provide clear policies and guidelines, to monitor issues with rapid responses, to track adherence to policies, to update demand forecasts, to support supplier stability and more as applicable to the industry or sector you are in.
It’s recommended to have at minimum 3 months of cash at hand, to have an adequate buffer of stock or other parts at hand, to understand how prepared key suppliers are.
The activities related to Supply Chain Management include medium-term risk management in our Supply Chain. In the aftermath, there are long-term actions to take related to Business Continuity Management (e.g. supplier regional diversification).
On projects you should consider procurement commitments, including possible delay in deliveries of materials or bringing in contracted staff. A common occurrence on projects, is where people are outsourced from national or international Agencies and you need to consider the implications for those commercial contracts too.
Engage with customers and ensure transparency.
On projects you need to make communications on of your top priorities to address uncertainty, fear or possible panic. Be open with your team, stakeholders, and your sponsor. Communicate your scenarios and plans, and then update with how events are affecting your project and changes to those plans. Also plan for regular review cycles to reconsider plans and responses.
Look for ways to support the community. We should adopt strong Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices. Some important activities could include targeting nonprofits and community outreach organizations in your local area, encouraging our employees to volunteer. Let others know what your organization has done. The communication should include only the most pertinent details, including the amount of funds committed, the key beneficiaries and recipients, and what you aim to achieve with your donation.
As Project Managers we have valuable skills to offer, so it’s important to link into responses among your wider business and social communities and offer your help.
Finally, you need to consider your own role. Who will step into your role, if you are taken ill? What about work-stream leaders and other key people on your project? Convene your top team and sketch out alternates for everyone – and alternates for those, if your project is big enough. Even consider the possibility of an orderly temporary shut-down of your project.
Sources:
We all know how each year can pick-up speed and we become busier than ever. For this productivity to be sustainable, we need a whole lot of motivation.
Especially in the life of a project manager, there are always many important things to do to keep projects on track. Here we think of:
To all of you who are in the trenches everyday, keeping your eyes on the goals and leading your projects to successful outcomes, I want to share this Infographic, with compliments from Wrike, to bless you with great motivation tips to get more done every day!
By Raj Vardhman
Half of today’s workplaces are comprised of millennials, while in the near future, they will make up to three-quarters of the workforce. Generation X, or people born 1965-1979, sometimes need a helping hand in dealing with them in the workplace. They might not have similar mindsets, and they might enjoy different working styles, but should be able to function properly and as a team in the same space.
Managing a team is a complex task, especially if you are leading a group of people with different outlooks on business and life in general. Being in charge can become that much easier just by understanding millennials as employees.
Regarding their employment, millennials tend to keep an open mind – meaning that they strive for more than just a regular desk job with low career goals. By approaching their work as something meaningful, they will feel appreciated and reciprocate accordingly.
Most of them would perform better at a job that promises a learning experience and the ability to grow within the company. The employer should be there to offer a face to face talk with an employee and land a helping hand or an opportunity to educate them further.
If you, as a leader, recognise a team member’s hard work, they would feel stimulated to stay and continue the good work. A simple ‘well done’ goes a long way.
Even though statistics show that they work one hour less on average than Gen-X, millennials are hard workers. Almost 90% of them think that flexible working time makes for a more productive result. People feel motivated to finish their workload and would do it successfully if met with an adequate need.
Furthermore, many consider that working remotely can make a tremendous difference in how quickly a job gets done. So, a chance to work from home now and then can result in flying colors.
Consequently, if offered a dynamic and flexible working time and place while still delivering results, it will set the team and their work apart from the rest of the pack.
Millennials are curious and tech-savvy; they keep abreast of the latest fashions in technology and consider it to be an important part of progress.
Most of them grew up with electronic devices, and they can offer new insight into how tech can be an integral part of communication with co-workers within and out of the company. Being a part of their group chat can be significant. It is also a big advance in thinking innovatively while leading them on a project.
Over 70% of millennials believe that teamwork is necessary for an effective working environment. They think that being able to rely on another person’s opinion helps their thought process.
Having defined roles in a team is a great way not to allow head bumping. It can be quite an advantage for a project manager to hear different ideas while simultaneously counting on millennial workers to accomplish projects successfully and efficiently.
Most millennials will not settle for stagnating in their work. This is a massive problem for not only millennials but any ambitious person. Nobody expects to be handed a promotion on a platter, but people must see an opportunity for growth. By offering a tip or a hint that an employee is heading up the ladder, you would motivate them to work harder.
A leader should not feel intimidated by younger employees with potential but should take upon themselves to train them to become future leaders capable of guiding and being ready for upcoming endeavors.
Having a good perspective on millennials in the workplace, might help project managers to deal better with them. Though not a different species, they are more conscious about the business world around them and how it works, how cruel it may be, and they are always on the lookout. They value hard and honest work, just like any other generation.
A significant number of them require a support system and solid relationships while still being given the freedom to express themselves through their work, whether that’s in an office with flexible hours or not.
Regardless of the negative connotation that sometimes comes with the word ‘millennial,’ they are tireless workers focused on the future and its perks, as well as constant improvement.
About the Author:
Raj Vardhman is the co-founder of GoRemotely.net. He is a WordPress virtuoso and white hat SEO expert with a passion for developing SEO strategies. His experience and work over the years have driven him to give other individuals lessons about taking control of their work and finding remote jobs.
By Jenny S
In many organisations there are distinct criteria that companies use to pick suitable individuals for leading their projects. The job of a project manager is not easy. You need to come up with good project plans, monitor proper execution and ensure that you deliver or exceed the expected results. It is for this reason that project managers require specific qualifications and some years of experience, including the possession of leadership skills. These are the things that often set project managers apart. With good leadership qualities, you will effortlessly lead a team of people who work efficiently. This article will highlight some of the most crucial leadership skills for project management.
Source: Pixabay
One thing that often ruins projects before they even start is the lack of patience of individuals involved. Patience is among the essential leadership skills for successful project management. You need to be patient with everyone involved in the project, including stakeholders, suppliers, your employer, and your team members. The moment you lose patience and start rushing the project, is the moment you start making errors. Such errors will ultimately lead to project failure and thus you need to move at a consistent pace.
Being a project manager involves a flair for team management. A good project manager has to make sure that the entire team works in synchronization in order to deliver positive results. They should be able to organize the team in such a way that it functions efficiently and are able to ensure that the plan is executed in a coordinated way. A good project manager should keep in mind that high performing teams deliver better results.
Source: Pixabay
Every project manager should have knowledge about risk management regardless of the project type. Such expertise enables you to identify potential problems, identify mitigation strategies and risk owners. You need to consider what the best mitigating actions are and implement them. This ensures that the risks don’t affect the continuity of the project. Your ability to efficiently plan for and respond to any risks, will help you lead your team through complexities that may occur throughout your project. A strategic project leadershipshort course can help you achieve this.
Any experienced project manager will concur that projects requires excellent communication skills. That is because you want team members to understand their roles and responsiblities clearly so that there is no misunderstanding about what is required of them and how to achieve this. You also have to be able to communicate with any additional stakeholders involved to ensure they understand what the project entails, how you will be implementing the project, and what your deadlines are. Remember that project managers spend the majority of their time collaborating with others to keep them engaged and informed about the various aspects of the project.
Source: Pixabay
Effective project management also relies on excellent negotiation skills. It is among the best project management skillsthat any project leader should possess. The question is, why is this skill essential? First, project management involves leading a group of people from different backgrounds. That means conflict could arise at any time. Thus, it is vital that you are able to negotiate with the parties involved in the conflict so you are able to diffuse the situation before it escalates. Negotiation skills could also help obtain the best possible agreement with your suppliers, which will enhance the overall outcome of the project.
Source: Pixabay
Critical thinking is a skill that enables leaders to make the best possible decisions in any situation. You need to be able to think critically in order to come up with appropriate solutions to any problems that may arise throughout the duration of your project. Critical thinking skills can also help you create working solutions to impeding problems that will help prevent them from occurring.
The application of the above leadership skills, will help improve your project management capabilities. By developing and practicing these skills you are ensuring that a project runs smoothly and effectively from commencement to completion.
Please let us know in the comments which of these leadership skills do you consider important and what other leadership skills would you add?
Jenny is a passionate writer and guest blogger. Writing helps her to improve her knowledge, skills and understanding about her industry. She loves to educate her audience about education and technology via her writing skills. Apart from writing, she loves traveling & photography.
by Dr Eben van Blerk
Prior articles in the Emotional Intelligence series:
Emotional intelligence has become one of the top predictors of success in life, in the office and at home. Emotional intelligence can be learnt and can be improved over time as we continue to learn from our daily experiences in life. Improving your emotional intelligence will probably be one of the most difficult personal challenges. You will not become more emotionally intelligent without practicing these skills. You have to believe there is room for improvement in managing your own emotions. Developing emotional intelligence skills is not easy. It requires commitment to the cause, ongoing hard work, persistence and acute self-awareness.
How do you know you lack self-awareness? Some of the tell-tale signs of a lack of self-awareness may be as follows:
· You are not able to easily read a room and pick up emotional signals
· You find it difficult to put yourself in the shoes of others
· You do not know how you come across to others (and you do not care)
· You do not know who you are and how your behaviour impacts others
· You find it difficult to admit and take responsibility for your mistakes
· You do not react well to feedback and often become defensive
· You often do not know what you are feeling and why you are feeling that way
Where does one start? First you have to get to know yourself in order to start understanding how you are coming across and when and how to manage your emotions. Self-awareness is the basis of our relationships with others. Once you have the self-awareness to know when and how to manage your emotions, you can develop the empathy to put yourself in the shoes of others and truly understand their feelings. This will be the ideal position to build and manage interpersonal relationships, manage conflict and effectively collaborate with others. The problem is often people do not know how to develop their self-awareness.
You have to start this journey of self-development because you want to and because you are convinced that there is room for developing your self-awareness. Developing these skills does not happen overnight. If you are not committed and dedicated it will take longer and in all probability lead to frustration with very little personal growth.
Before you can learn the skill to manage your emotions, you need to know what you are feeling. Compile a list of feeling words (emotions) and use the list to label emotions as you experience them. Examples are angry, hurt, inferior, jealous, irritated, happy, frustrated, insecure, anxious, motivated and concerned. Extend the list as you learn to identify your feelings and expand your emotional vocabulary. When you are able to name your feelings, it is easier to start managing your emotions that lead to unproductive behaviour and negatively impact others.
Once you have built a level of emotional vocabulary, you need to know why you are experiencing the emotions you listed. This will help to manage your emotions. Get to know your personality. An easy way is to complete some of the many free personality tests on the internet. This will provide you with a good overview to start. Also, start observing yourself in the moment, during happy times and during conflict. What are you feeling in the situation and why are you feeling that way? How do you respond in the situation and how does your body respond? Additional to a personality test, ask others for feedback on how you come across.
Ask family members, your spouse, colleagues and friends with whom you have a trusting relationship to give you feedback on how you come across. Ask for honest feedback on what they think of you and your behaviour. How they experience you when you are on top of the world as well as in the moments you are not that proud of? Compare your self-perception with your reputation with your colleagues and your circle of friends. Take their feedback to heart. Reflect and use their feedback as part of your development journey. Continue to ask for specific feedback as you work on specific development areas.
The idea of writing your own eulogy may seem grim and make you uncomfortable initially. This could however provide you with valuable insight to live a more fulfilled life. Take time to reflect on your life. Consider how much you mean to other people, what you do for others and what kind of person you are. Think of what have you accomplished thus far in your life. What will you say about yourself if you had to deliver the eulogy? What do you think others will say? Consider what you want to be remembered for and what you want people to feel and say about you after your passing.
Now that you understand self-awareness better and you have the steps to improve your self-awareness, it becomes easier to commit to growing your emotional intelligence. You will find that improved self-awareness will provide a better understanding of your motives, behaviour and thinking. This will enable you to start making informed choices towards healthy and productive relationships with others.
About the Author:
| Eben van Blerk, a Doctor of Technology, has more than 25 years’ practical teamwork experience. He has published articles and book chapters on leadership and emotional intelligence in local and international publications. |
Contact him on LinkedIn if you need a speaker or workshop facilitator on emotional intelligence for your next team engagement. His emotional intelligence talks and programmes are popular in the corporate and private sector. It will equip your team with knowledge and tools for improved communication, effective conflict handling and managing their emotions towards a more productive and fulfilled business and personal life.
Project risks are those unexpected events, that most likely will put your project deadline at risk if they are not identified and mitigated ahead of time. As a small business owner, project complications aren’t anything new, but how you handle these roadblocks, will determine if your company succeeds or fails. There are a few different ways deadlines get pushed and cause you to spend more than expected.
Fundera has compiled 4 of the 8 most common project risks that could threaten your project timeline, with some helpful advice to managing each one.
Scope risks are tasks that endanger project objectives, deliverables, or timeline. This is the most well-known project risk of entrepreneurs. Even though there are various steps to be taken to avoid the odds of this happening.
This type of risk is the most common as it shows the biggest threat to businesses and their financials. Staying within budget is crucial for business owners to make a sufficient profit off their client’s projects while still keeping them satisfied.
If you and your team think there is enough time to complete your project comfortably, or even with time to spare, you most likely aren’t scheduling your tasks effectively.
Technology can get confusing and frustrating at times. Studies even show that only 30% of IT project implementations are successful. Keep your projects in the green by scheduling extra time to brace yourself for implementation delays.
If you are a small business owner, taking risks can be fun as long as you learn from your own actions and keep improving.
See below for examples of the 8 most common project risks and helpful tips for mitigating them.
A project leader has much influence over a team’s productivity. Therefore, it is always good to ask yourself: “How can I help my team to be more productive?”
You want to empower people to solve their own problems, and to be self-sufficient. You want to encourage collaboration, sharing and trust.
Consider taking a coaching approach where you listen more, ask good questions and be slower to rush to action and advice. Also understand the dynamics of behaviour change. The fact that habits are the building blocks of good behaviour, means that you want to encourage good habits and set the example.
Below you will find 10 specific ways to help your team be more productive and motivated to perform optimally, with compliments from Wrike.com.
Some of the best performing companies today have automated up to 75% of their management processes. While this trend is showing no signs of slowing down, it’s important to take a look at how automation fits into project management in order to fully understand their relationship. With automation you strive to remove redundancies, increase efficiency, and eliminate errors from a process. Let’s take a look at why and when automation can be implemented within project management, and when automation should be avoided.
In smaller to mid-sized companies, scaling is a central pillar to the company’s success. Many companies fail when they are at a formidable size because they are not set up internally to scale beyond what made them successful in the first place. With projects being a vehicle to implement strategy, it is one of the means companies will use to scale. When automation is implemented within a project management system, organizations have much more control over the speed at which they can grow.
There are many tools that help project managers manage their processes, one of which has can greatly reduce the “busy work” surrounding projects. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming the new best friend of many project managers who utilize on-premise or cloud-based software to manage workflows. Think of the “robots” in RPA systems as little software employees that can be trained to do the mundane data entry and other repetitive tasks many project managers still rely on humans for. This reduces errors in the system and allows human employees to focus more on strategic or creative solutions for the organization.
Process automation can take over things like creating contracts or invoices and document generation and more. This will allow project managers to quickly generate consistently compliant documents and records without mistakes or the need to review each one. These automated forms will allow workers to quickly and accurately submit information when team members are working remotely or out in the field, ensuring a process does not slow down due to a team member’s availability in the office.
Automation in project management is one of the best ways to ensure that typically disparate software environments can be connected and checked against each other for error. On projects requiring integration between disparate systems, many issues, like inconsistent data, can be avoided if you implement third party automation software to connect all of your different platforms. It will ensure that when data is entered into one system, the other integrated systems are updated or added with the same data. This ensures everyone is seeing the same data and data quality improves. Employees become more efficient and projects requiring integration, are more successful.
Many projects can run into bottlenecks when deliverable reviews are required. Automation can optimize this process so that all approvers are notified when they need to review data that’s been uploaded to the system. When feedback is given, the original assignees receive it all in one place, organized chronologically.
Effective communication is the key to good project management; automating data integration into multiple systems and automating reviews are all examples of automation making project communication fast and accurate
Although automation may seem like the best thing ever, but there are times when it is not appropriate. This is mainly when your project management processes are not fully established or potentially different processes are used per department or per project. Remember that automation is, well, automatic! Once in place, the data entry or data transfers will just happen.
If your processes are not matured or too different from others, data will end up in the wrong places without the right people being notified. Automation in project management should be used once processes are fully established and ready to scale up to meet company demands, not before.
Automation has the benefit of reducing errors while increasing efficiency. When your organization is at the critical point where it needs to scale, and there is a need for better measurement and reduced busy work, automation tools should be implemented to help you grow.
If your internal processes are not mature and solidified, hold off on implementing automation within your project management systems to avoid unnecessary confusion and mistakes due to the volume of data that could potentially be mismanaged.