16 secrets to improve your project

Some of these may be happening on your projects right now and if they are, that's great. The more of these that you are already doing, the better. Let’s consider…

Ref: Rob Wormley/wheniwork.com, Brad Egeland/projecttimes.com

Positions: Project manager, project engineer, project admin, project assistant, project supervisor, project leader…

Related materials:

+ ProjectManager88.info/free-ebook-52-secrets-to-be-professional-project-manager

+ ProjectManager88.info/free-257-project-management-templates

+ ProjectManager88.info/free-ebook-62-tips-to-improve-project-effectiveness

1. If at first you don’t succeed, plan, plan, and plan again

Planning is the heart of project management. For small business owners, taking the time to plan out projects now will save your schedule, resources, and budget later. Think about what will really go into the work and what it will take to get there. Not just what you promised the client – but what it will truly require you and your team to accomplish.

Now is the time to sweat the details. The greatest enemy of good project management is deciding “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” When you get there, are you going to be prepared for what you find? Do you know when a contractor can actually complete their portion of the project? Is a task really as simple as it seems, or will it take more employees to deliver? What about the timelines for supplies?

Practice asking and answering these questions realistically, and you’ll be on the path creating the right expectations for both employees and clients.

2. Engage the team daily.

We engage the team as needed and probably weekly on at least a customer status call. But we need to be engaging them more often as a group – especially if the project is starting to go off the rails. Gold plating, estimate padding, any rogue development, or lost focus on YOUR project is possible when you’ve left too much time between contacts with your critical project resources. Stay in touch – and stay in touch often. I suggest a group page on Facebook or the use of a collaboration tool that – at the very least – allows you to say, “Hi, how’s it going today and what is everyone focused on right now?”. That will allow you to touch base as a group each morning and will keep the team expecting communication, oversight and accountability from you daily. It’s a good thing and a great habit to be in.

3. Check in with the project customer at least three times a week.

Just as we need to keep our project team engaged and on task, we need to do the same with our project client. One project status call and touch base each week may be fine for small projects or during slow times, but for larger and high visibility projects or projects experiencing ongoing issues those touch points need to happen more often and I suggest 3-4 times per week for that.

4. Focus on communication

A recent study found that two out of five projects don’t meet their original goals due to ineffective communications. You can plan as much as you’d like, but how are you going to share your plans with your employees and clients? Can clients expect status updates at specific times, instead of constantly emailing or calling about the job status? Instead of asking about their tasks for the day, can employees walk in knowing what’s expected of them and get right to work?

5. Experiment with the best ways to communicate with your clients and employees.

It may require a weekly email or a morning in-person roundtable to discuss what’s on the list for the day. It may be handing off a paper checklist or keeping everything on the kitchen whiteboard. Once you find a communication strategy that works, integrate it into your project management process.

6. Add financials to the project status report.

The project budget is always important and keeping it in front of the team and the customer only serves to elevate it to a new level of visibility, oversight and accountability. But seriously, I’ve run projects that started to experience serious budget issues. Unfortunately, I was directed by my PMO director to keep the info and troubles out of sight from my project customer on a couple of important and high dollar projects and by the time I could attempt to discuss it with the customer and make a plan for action, it was too late. We ultimately saved one of them after a long work stoppage, but the other one was canceled. It could have gone the other way under better circumstances.

7. Find the right project management tools

Project management can look different for every team. A small coffee shop staff may need daily checklists written down and handed out while a design shop with remote contractors may require a cloud-based resource. However, more and more project management systems are trending digital, and your employees may want a way to check on morning supplies or schedules without calling in or coming in person to check the board.

Luckily, many project management solutions offer free trials so you can get a sense of what works for your team. Popular sites like Trello and Basecamp allow small teams to share updates and assign tasks on their phones. Instead of purchasing the latest app, take a few days to test out what your staff will actually use.

8. Include senior management in your status reporting distribution.

Something most of us don’t do unless the PM infrastructure requires it – including senior management in our weekly project status reporting distribution. Likely, if there is a PMO in place, the director is doing something to report status up the chain of command. I say take it a step further to get senior management aware and involved – especially on the bigger projects. And it never hurts for them to see your name as the PM on a regular basis…unless your project is constantly in trouble.

9. Send out meeting agendas in advance.

This may be something you’re already doing, but if not, start today. It gives everyone a chance to know what’s going to be discussed, know what they need to be prepared for, and allows them to be ready to speak. All of these add up to a meeting that is usually going to be quicker and more productive and – in the long run – better attended.

10. Hold meetings no matter what, but stay on topic.

Nothing really to discuss this week? Don’t cancel the meeting. Say hi, go around the room, and spend 5-10 minutes. You may not get much said or learn anything, but you’ve spoken volumes about your consistency and at the same time shown you’re not a time waster when nothing really needs to be said. But if you start to cancel those meetings rather than going through with them you’ll be telling all the attendees that your meetings aren’t that important and your attendance may dip. Don’t cancel; just don’t waste their time. That’s what the water cooler is for.

11. Revise project financials weekly.

I always say that a 10% budget overage is easier to correct than a 50% budget overage. That is obvious. But what might not be obvious to some is that by reviewing and revising your project financials every week the PM is far more likely to see budget issues before they get out of hand (like 50% out of hand).

12. Understand (and embrace) the concept of MVP

In project management speak, MVP stands for minimum viable product, or the minimum amount of work necessary to get a product or service sellable and out the door. In the words of Eric Ries, founder of the lean startup movement, MVP “helps entrepreneurs start the process of learning as quickly as possible.”

Every small business owners knows that the hardest part is just getting started. By following the principles of MVP, instead of waiting and polishing your business to perfection, you should get your product on the market as soon as possible. That means sending your product out to consumers and requesting feedback even if it’s just a prototype.

For example, if you design websites for a living and spent an entire month tweaking a single website to perfection just to receive client feedback that forces you to start the project over entirely, you could’ve just sent the client an MVP version of the website. Your MVP would have fulfilled the client’s main requirements without any additional features, and you would have spent the rest of the month incorporating their feedback and refining the website until you delivered what they actually wanted. The goal here is getting the work done and learning through the process how to make your work better, instead of waiting on “perfect,” only to fall behind.  

14. Revisit resource forecasts weekly.

Everything I stated about project financials goes for the resource forecast as well. Plus, your project resources are usually the most expensive part of the project so they play into the project financials anyway. Working on one and not the other is certainly not wise.

15. Plan for a mid project lessons learned session.

I say why wait till the end of the project to conduct a lessons learned session. Plus, if you always wait till the end you run the risk of losing most or all of your team and the customer to whatever they are working on next. Get everyone together 2-3 times during the project for quick lessons learned sessions to discuss what’s going well and what isn’t so you can correct things now rather than later. This keeps customer satisfaction higher and allows for mid-project correction of issues. Win-win.

16. Ask for feedback

Did you know that the best leaders are the ones who ask for more feedback, more often? Asking for feedback isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a strategic way to find out what’s working for your customers and employees. How are you going to know if you’re doing well if no one tells you otherwise? Ask for feedback at regular intervals – after implementing a new policy, training employees in a new software, or starting a new project management system. Formal project management may not be the best way your employees work. They may perform better when there’s more time spent on planning and not need the daily check-ins you believe are valuable. There’s no way to know for sure unless you ask.