Not only do businesses lose intellectual capacity and corporate knowledge when employees leave, but, if not managed carefully, the repercussions of employee turnover can adversely affect morale, customer relationships and your corporate brand or image.

Staff turnover is expensive, in addition to the obvious costs, such as termination/resignation, hiring, recruitment and training costs, there are many indirect or hidden costs associated with losing a key staff member, these include:

• Loss of intellectual property
• Loss of corporate knowledge
• Damage to the corporate brand
• Lost business opportunities
• Disharmony amongst employees
• Negative impacts on customer relationships

But how does this affect the bottom line? I have estimated staff turnover costs range between 0.5 and 2.5 times an employee’s annual salary.

Employee retention is ultimately about how an organisation manages its relationship with its most valuable asset – their people. Whilst employee turnover is a complex problem involving many factors, there are a few common rules every business should consider:

• promoting a culture of engagement and learning
• investing in your people and showing them you care by committing to their development and success through training and coaching
• promoting a work-life balance and offering flexibility in working conditions
• providing meaningful work and a culture that promotes a sense of belonging
• managing retention as a business ‘metric’, making leaders accountable for retention
• building a brand that motivates and inspires your people.

The benefits of implementing these strategies to retain your key staff are lasting, and include:

• increased job satisfaction, motivation and performance
• reduced workplace stress and anxiety
• more satisfied customers
• higher staff engagement and productivity.

The bottom line…

In business your people are your most important asset, and letting good employees slip through your fingers can cost you more than lost time and inconvenience.

About the author:

Ian McCully is the State Manager of Nicstar Global and has been involved within the ICT industry for over 30 years. Ian has held senior management positions within both large corporate and government organisations. He is strongly focused on customer service and understands the value of a cohesive team approach when it comes to delivering successful outcomes for all.   

While it might be a blinding statement of the obvious, recruiting is not an easy task. Recent personal experience has also confirmed that it can be an exercise in complete and utter frustration, particularly if you have a need to resort to mass market, web-based services such as those offered by seek.com.

Having just gone through the latest adventure into the job market looking for programme managers, I thought I’d sit down and put my candidate assessment process on paper. I stress that I am not a trained recruiter, but if one potential candidate puts forward a better response because of what is written here I will be a happy man.

I decided to model my needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy to show that I got something out of that Organisational Psychology unit I did in that wonderfully valuable Bachelor of Arts degree I finished in 1986. In short, Maslow said that all human needs could be categorised into five levels, starting with the basic need for physical safety and ending with the need for self-actualisation (my memories of that BA don’t run to a simple explanation of self-actualisation, so please break now and head off to Wikipedia if you feel the need). Critical to Maslow’s Theory was that you couldn’t head up the pyramid until the needs below had been met.

So to the Recruitment Manager’s Hierarchy of Needs (candidates take note; you can’t move up the pyramid if you don’t meet the requirements of the level you are on )

Basic Requirements: If the advertisement says provide a three page CV and a cover letter, do that. If you don’t things will go no further.

 Tip#1 – if a potential programme or project manager can’t meet a basic requirement like this, it doesn’t bode well for you when your trying to identify and meet a client’s requirements.

Relevant Experience: I don’t care about your shelf-stacking night shifts at Woolworths if I am trying to employ a high-end PM. That’s an extreme example, but seriously, if you were a service desk agent in 1984 it’s hardly likely to influence a client’s decision to take you on to a high-value, complex body of work.

If you struggle to find relevant experience to talk about perhaps you should consider if the role is right for you.

Record of Achievements: They say that “success breeds success” and being able to demonstrate a winning record in a relevant role will stand you above others.

Tip#2, I have reviewed several hundred CVs for PMs over the last year and have yet to see anyone list a failed project they were responsible for….someone must be responsible for all these “at risk” projects that every candidate has saved but never created. Be careful of the successes you claim, because it’s a safe bet you won’t be the only one.

Qualifications: Many organisations need to see evidence of appropriate qualifications prior to engagement. I see many candidates with all of the certifications under the sun, but the reality is that they don’t necessarily create a better project manager. They may help you get through the door, but they don’t guarantee success. In my mind, experience and success trump qualifications every time, hence its place in the hierarchy. (For those who would like to argue the point, remember I’m the customer here, so I must be right!)

Value Add: If you can get through the first four levels and you still have space, then you can toss in the extras. Let’s face it there is a lot of competition out there for good roles so these differentiators could push you over the edge.

So there you have it…one man’s slant on what a candidate should do to give themselves the best chance to progress….it’s an opinion and in my mind it’s right. Naturally you have the right to disagree with everything I have said….I really, really look forward to your next application!

Ian Cruickshank is the Service Delivery Manager at Nicstar Global and has been in roles that have required clear decision making for over 25 years. He likes to think that he has put some thought into the way he makes decisions and, he is more than happy to put his thoughts out there, if only to generate healthy debate. He’s even been known to admit his mistakes on occasions (please do not pass this onto his wife). While he has happily apologised for the outcomes of some of his decisions, you are unlikely to hear him apologising for making the decision in the first place…

Worst is what comes next; the false promise to the Sponsor and stakeholders that delivery will occur on a specific date, yet without an effective project schedule the project manager hasn’t a clue if the timeframe is really achievable. This makes their promise worth as much as the paper the schedule was printed on…nothing.

It’s these kinds of individuals that consistently fail to deliver to business expectations. I can hear them now, “We delivered the project”. Yes, I’ll agree the outcomes may have been delivered but at what cost? It’s a rare case when schedule overruns do not equate to budget overruns and under any assessment criteria for project success or failure on time delivery is a key metric for that very reason.

So let’s review the benefits of a regularly maintained, deliverables based project schedule. Having a well-constructed project schedule in a tool like MS Project (or other professional scheduling tool of your choice) ensures that:

1. A clear understanding of the project scope has been demonstrated,
2. There is a clear understanding of the interdependencies (internal or external to the project) of the project deliverables and the activities that make up the deliverables,
3. Opportunities for concurrent engineering have been identified rather than a lazy waterfall approach assumed and then executed. Concurrent engineering+ techniques allow the project schedule to be optimised for the shortest delivery timeframe with balanced risk,
4. The schedule and resource risk is identified and managed by the project,
5. When updated, the project schedule will identify if the project is running early or late, and by how much,
6. There are clear stage boundaries identified to which the Sponsor or steering group can tie financial or other types of governance checkpoints too,
7. The project resource schedule is accurate and effective, and
8. The project manager is able to provide an accurate time phase budget to the business.

So how does the humble neglected project schedule do all this?

1. A deliverables based project schedule is a schedule that has all related tasks grouped by a “deliverable” name. A deliverable is a thing, a document, a bit of software, hardware, a training outcome etc. This good practice makes reading the schedule simple, relaying the ‘story’ and allowing reviewers to quickly identify if scope has been missed, or miss-understood. If a deliverable doesn’t appear in the project schedule, then it’s unlikely it’ll be an outcome of the project.
2. Understanding the dependencies between deliverables is critical for managing the project delivery timeframe. Not creating the dependency relationships in the project scheduling tool is like creating a financial model in MS Excel and then manually entering in the data for each cell rather than using equations to calculate the result for you. You wouldn’t do it with MS Excel, so why would you do it with MS Project?
   Without defined predecessors and successors the slippage of one task would not reflect accurately on the rest of the project schedule. The result is that the tool has no chance of warning the project manager that there is an issue occurring sometime in the future. Too many project managers fail to understand this benefit. A project schedule is a proven tool for warning them if the project is going to run early or late. I’ll be blunt here, if you think you can calculate the project delivery dates in your head, you are simply an idiot. If you’re in this category then you’re putting the project Sponsor and the Sponsors business at unacceptable and easily avoidable risk.
3. Having understood the deliverables and their dependencies, schedule optimization analysis can then be conducted. We can ask ourselves what work can be undertaken in parallel. We can work out what our critical path is (or multiples critical paths if necessary) so we can know what activities are a priority and which are not. This analysis can look at resource impacts, change freeze impacts, staff holiday’s, other projects taking priority over common resources and because the project manager has a project schedule with logical dependencies defined. Then the tool can do all the sensitivity analysis with very little effort.
4. The schedule drives the project resource demands and budget timing. The analysis then helps identify schedule, resource and budget risks. This kind of information identifies to the project manager and Sponsor when a resource clashes can be expected, and when they occur they know how hard they need to fight for the cause.
   Consider this; two projects each needing the same resource in the same week. However as the project manager for one, you’ve done the analysis and you know the work you need completed isn’t on the critical path. The other project manager comes asking for your help as they need the resource and their project is about to go live. You are able to support your team member by rescheduling your own work, confident there is no overall negative impact to you, your sponsor or the business; whilst helping the other project manager and the business succeed in another area.
5. Baselining the schedule is important for two reasons. The first is that the baseline shows the project manager a version of the schedule at a point in time in the past, in comparison to the current updated schedule and forecast completion date. This easily and immediately identifies if the project is running early or late, by how much and from which part of the project schedule the delay is being driven.
   The second is where projects are formally baselined, the project manager has made a promise to deliver outcomes base on agreed schedule dates. The promise is made to not only to themselves, but also to the Sponsor and the stakeholders. The baseline shows this agreement and allows comparison between the promise and the reality.
6. Project schedules can be used to clearly identify project stages or stage boundaries. This allows the Sponsoring organisation to have project governance tollgates in place. These tollgates help to halt runaway projects and minimise financial and other types of risk to their business from ‘off the rails’ projects. Typically there would be some kind of 360 degree review of the project, revalidation of the business case, release of funding for the next stage of the project and authorisation to proceed. Project scheduling identifies when these points occur and what the status of the deliverables is at that time.
7. Project schedules drive the resource plan (obviously!) so without a project schedule how can a project manage know when to engage a particular type of resource and for how long? Engage them too early and you’ve wasted valuable budget, engage them too late and the project is unnecessarily delayed.
8. The resource plan drives the project budget, however just knowing the total estimated cost of a project isn’t a reflection on the business bottom line cash flow impacts. This cash flow impact is what the business accountants and treasury department need to know; particularly on larger projects or in small organisations who might live or die on their cash flow.
   This information is used to then determine cash holding levels or forecast borrowing and repayment details with financial institutions. If additional finance is required this can then be obtained in due course rather than require access to emergency funding, typically at very unfavourable rates to the organisation.

Project schedules are living documents. They need to be updated at least once per week. Me personally, it’s nearly every day. It’s one of those types of activities where the more frequent the update, the shorter the amount of time required for each update. Expected to spend 10-15 minutes each day, or if you prefer 1 day per week then around an hour per project.

Project schedules focus a professional project manager on the activities that are a priority. Significant issues that develop during the life of a project should also be incorporated into the project schedule as a deliverable, so the schedule always reflects the reality of delivering a project. Particularly if the issue has a resource and/or budget impact.

As the corner stone of a successful project, schedules allow a project manager to confidently forecast a future delivery date. This keeps the project Sponsor and stakeholders informed and demonstrates with facts the impact of scope change requests or project issues. The business finance team are happy with you, your Sponsor is happy with you, your project team are happy with you and you can sleep easy knowing you are in control.

Now trying doing all that in your head. Seriously, who are you kidding?

+ Concurrent Engineering is the term used for running related project activities in parallel to reduce delivery lead times. Concurrent Engineering can only be effectively performed where the relationship between the works being executed is well understood, so the risk of rework or other negative effects can be managed and minimised.

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Conrad is a Senior Director with Nicstar Global Pty Ltd and has been working as a career project delivery professional for the last 12 years. Having worked on projects of all sizes including two of Queensland’s most recent mega coal mine projects, he believes that whilst the beginning of a project manager’s career should be founded on a solid project delivery process toolbox, of equal importance, yet significantly more difficult, is the development of their own personal and leadership skills.

Project delivery professionals should commence projects by ensuring their project executive or sponsor (we’ll use the term executive) is fully aware of their role in project delivery, and they understand the behaviours necessary to support a project. Project managers should assess if their executive is equipped and able to fulfill that role. A documented and signed terms of reference for a project board is no guarantee that board members, especially project executives, understand how to support your project. However an open, face-to-face, conversation where expectations are discussed, and roles and responsibilities are described, will have a greater impact and is more likely to build the foundations for strong governance.

Certified project managers will be able to list what PRINCE2 or PMBOK says about the role of a project executive – they are ultimately accountable, they own the business case and benefits realisation, chair the project board, provide the project funding, sign-off end stage reports, business leader, change agent, decision maker etc, etc, etc. None of these “roles” really describes what project managers need.

For project management to become project delivery, project managers require a set of characteristics or behaviours in their project executive. In my experience characteristics of an effective project executive include:

• Decisiveness – projects require executives that can take other’s opinions and guidance, consider, and make a decision. Being able to make informed decisions in a timely manner ensures projects progress and provides project teams confidence in the project governance.
• Accessible – project executives must be able to allocate time to fulfill their role and be available to support the project manager. If an individual is unable to “find-time” for the project the “readiness” of the organisation for the project, or the project’s priority, should be questioned. Better to delay a project before it starts than to waste money and effort on a project that does not have the business imperative or priority.
• Authoritative – sometimes project executives are assigned to a project that don’t have the authority or willingness to make decisions and will often defer to others. If this is the case it is likely the person, or the organisational role they fill, is not appropriate to govern the project.
• Boldness and courage – often these characteristics are required to exercise authority in a decisive manner. Effective project managers will only escalate decisions to their project executive if they are genuinely unable to resolve the issue themselves (refer to article by Ian Cruikshank). Decisions will need to be made without full information and at times under time pressure. Strong project executives understand that exercising authority sometimes takes courage and involves risk.

So when you start your next project, or to re-invigorate your current project, ensure your Project Executive understands the behaviours you need them to portray. Only then should you discuss the project management roles they need to perform.

Let’s make a mainstream start on the topic by going straight to Wiki:
“Work-life balance is a broad concept including prioritisation between work (career and ambition) on the one hand and life (health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development) on the other”.

The phrase “work-life balance” was apparently coined in the 1970’s but the first known laws concerning enforceable work hours date back to the 1800’s.

The work–leisure dichotomy
The work–leisure dichotomy is the conceptual separation of activities in a society. Some societies assume there must be a separation between “work” and “leisure”. This idea was invented with the industrial revolution. From this perspective, work is considered as the main activity and “one’s duty”, consisting of the labour given to an employer. “Leisure”, a label with derogatory connotation attached to everything else outside work, is instead considered of marginal importance.

 Closer to home, according to the Queensland Department of Justice:
“There is no agreed definition of work-life balance but it does appear that the ‘right’ balance for one person may differ from the next. Balance is achieved in different ways for different people and has a different purpose for people”.

Maybe a more apt description might be “life-balance”….

Personal Values
To buy into all of this, you would have to consider the cultural norms, indoctrination and levels of societal trust as to what we consider normal, true, real and/or factual. As individuals, trying to box up and pre package “balance” without taking into account the individuals’ values is potentially an error of monumental proportions.

Values noted in the Wiki example are career and ambition, health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development. Others might be god, fame, status, love, money, learning, family, integrity, beauty and there are many more.

Trying to inflict your version of balance on others without taking into account their unique values is almost going to universally result in stressed or unhappy employees and/or unhealthy relationships.

The workplace – looking outside our world
Amongst our pursuit of balance, it can also be difficult to reconcile our lifestyles and consumerism in the context of the damage and impact it has on others.

Mike Daisey, who is a world-renowned storyteller who specializes in semi-improvised autobiographical monologues, has his own take on the impact of the workplace on people’s lives.

In China and other parts of Asia for example, things that are second nature to us in the first world are not translated to the work places and factories. Instead, dehumanisation is built into the system. Imagine working 16-17 hours a day with no job rotation doing the same thing over and over again. The workers don’t view their lives in the same way we do. They grow up with very little possibility so by actually having a job, they have won the lottery through skill and luck by gaining work.

In the work –life context, happiness appears to be a luxury of the first world (assuming happiness is an ingredient of good “balance”). A factory worker in China might have 20 or 30 people depending on that small salary. This causes immense pressure (imbalance) and a number of them actually suicide in the workplace. When we purchase an iPhone that has come out of one of these factories, can we reconcile a balanced life by buying into this societal construct?¹

 So what really creates balance; thoughts, actions, opinion, culture, ignorance, geography, legislation? I would suggest, like many things, it depend, but personal awareness of the inner workings of the concept is a potentially a good start.

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¹Triple J – Festival of dangerous ideas – Part 1 – Tom Tilley & Mike Daisey

To ensure a positive connotation when referring to a mob mentality, we must define the success criteria for collective intelligence. According to Surowiecki ^(1.) , the key criteria to separate wise crowds from irrational ones are:

• Diversity of Opinion. – Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
• Independence – People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
• Decentralization – People are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge.
• Aggregation – Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

 At Nicstar this mob mentality forms an important part of our culture. We are a tribe, a family, a group of individuals working together to support each other through communication, trust, expertise, conflict resolution, and adaptation.

These essential foundations of a team are fostered within the Nicstar business model. Understanding and promoting successful behaviors and collective intelligence within our team ultimately ensures successful outcomes for our client’s project deliverables.

We achieve this by educating and mentoring our staff to adopt and embrace the following 5 essential components of successful team culture:

Communication

• Ensuring regular communication between team members to keep everyone on the same page.
• Keeping communications between team members respectful.
• Being as concise as possible when communicating ideas to others in the team.
• Being pragmatic and to the point by organizing thoughts before meetings, and try not to stray from the point you are attempting to make.

Trust

• Providing an open environment in which team members can confidently share with one another and have their ideas or concerns heard.
• Making sure team members know what is expected of them.
• Allowing team members “ownership” of the outcome.

Expertise

• Keeping the team engaged and challenged, but not out of the reach of their levels of expertise.
• Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, and how they relate to the rest of the team and the project.
• Being honest and accepting your place in the team without exaggerating your skillset.
• Knowing the difference between subject knowledge and subject expertise.

Conflict Resolution

• Having a conflict resolution system in place at all times.
• Being aware of the various personality traits and types that you are working with to know better how to approach any rising conflicts.
• Handling any conflicts that arise immediately before they have an opportunity to get worse.

Adaptation

• Being adaptable, not rigid when it comes to the project or the team.
• Allowing for compromises to be made in the name of progress, rather than clinging to an idea the others disagree on.
• Picking your battles, and know how long to push, without becoming pushy.

Well-formed teams are built on these foundations. The opportunity to bring together a group of highly skilled individuals and create a platform for collective intelligence, is one that is not only rare but immensely rewarding.

At Nicstar we deliver great experiences in project management through great experience. Our mission is to ensure your success. This is achieved through our ability to build strong, capable and experienced teams, adopting a mob mentality, and working together to get the job done.

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^(1.)  Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York : Doubleday, 2004.

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About the author

Nichole Ciapura is the founder and Managing Director of Nicstar Global Pty Ltd. With over 18 years experience in the ICT industry, Nichole is passionate about delivering successful outcomes for her clients. She is focused on her team and fosters a business culture that is enviable in any market. 

There is a simple method for carrying out this exercise, which is by allocating each stakeholder to one of four groups. Some people prefer this to be done visually using a diagram showing four sections. The names/positions of the stakeholders can then be added to the appropriate section.

I will use the example of designing new CRM software for a Marketing department to illustrate which types of people may fit into each group:

1. Low interest/low power – e.g. Public Relations Assistant:  linked to Marketing department but will not be a user of software so has little interest in the project and has little overall influence.
2. High interest/low power – e.g. Marketing Assistant: will be using the software on a daily basis but employs a junior position in the company so has low levels of influence.
3. Low interest/high power – e.g. Finance Director: not directly involved with the software development but extremely influential within organization.
4. High interest/high power – e.g. Marketing Director: senior, very influential person within organization and direct interest in project as it is for their own department, and costs come out of their budget.

Taking the examples above, the mapping exercise outcome may be as follows:

1. This group are included in a general (e.g. newsletter) communication for basic awareness.
2. This group (or members of it) should be involved in the project team as directly affected by project outcome and should receive regular communication (e.g. via newsletter and project meetings).
3. Should be given status report for high level understanding of project progress.
4. Probably project sponsor/on steering committee, high involvement in project governance, needs status reports and regular communication re: issues or risks where relevant.

The mapping exercise is highly beneficial at the start of a project to enable a clear view of who your project will affect and who, in turn, can affect your project. It is worth bearing in mind that findings should be regularly reviewed as project scopes change, as do people’s roles within organizations.

More information on stakeholder mapping and related subjects can be found at: http://stakeholdermanagement.wordpress.com/

At Nicstar Global we are conscious of the fact that our success comes from good planning, continuously reviewing and improving our business operations and ensuring that our clients are always treated as our partners in the successful delivery of their projects and the outcomes they expect. Whilst our existing clients’ satisfaction is always our number one priority, we are constantly reinforcing the Nicstar message into the marketplace ensuring a continuing demand for our services.

Conducting a business without a formalised plan is much like driving a car to an unknown destination without a map. Estimates show that only 3% to 5% of Australian small businesses starting out prepare a business and marketing plan²; that is, know that their business is feasible and have a formal plan to steer that business towards success.

Peter Drucker, a forefather in modern management principles said business is about 2 things and 2 things only “innovation and marketing”! Numerous studies and surveys of small businesses show something that marketers have known all along – keep marketing through the downturn. The following quote is from Professional Marketing, Oct-Dec 2008 – article titled “All Hands On Deck”: “…companies that increased marketing spend (relative to market size) during a recession, increased their return on capital employed by 5% in the recovery, compared to a 1% decline for the budget cutters.”

Most businesses are either ignorant or choose to ignore the evidence for maintaining or even increasing marketing investment in a weak economy. Ninety per cent of small businesses consider cutting their marketing budget²; yet this is the very area that is the source of most small businesses competitive advantage.

• Competitors tend to cut spending, creating opportunities
• Maintaining promotional spend will sustain or even grow market share
• Stealing share of mind is a bargain during a recession
• Consumers don’t “go away” during a recession, they become more conservative

 A majority of SME business owners view marketing as an expense and not an investment, therefore they do not appreciate the meaning of marketing or branding let alone have any basic understanding of advertising principles to effectively and efficiently reach their target audience. Much of the SME marketing efforts are wasted anyway – just open your local paper, look into your mailbox and see the standard or the lack of it in SME marketing communication.

In 2010 the ABS released an alarming statistic that 66% of Australian businesses do not have a website! Accordingly the 2008-09 MPHS, showed that 72% of Australian households had home internet access and 78% of households had access to a computer. Between 1998 to 2008-09, household access to the internet at home has more than quadrupled from 16% to 72%, while access to computers has increased from 44% to 78%⁴. Businesses need to embrace all forms of technology and media therefore extending their reach into local, national and international markets.

SME business owners have to change their attitude to remain viable in these challenging and highly competitive times. There are businesses still around today that perceive customer service to be a “Thank You” on the invoice. “Ego and advanced ignorance have killed many a business, and continue to do so. …ignorance is acceptable because it means we don’t know. Advanced ignorance, however, is ‘knowing we don’t know’ and doing nothing about it! It’s deadly….there’s information readily available on every conceivable issue relevant to growing a healthier business, but it’s far easier not to seek anything at all.” Brett Lowe of Business Planning Works.

A study of 460 B2B organisations that employed 100+ people, conducted by Strike Force Sales, found that only 6% of Australian companies pick up the phone and respond to a web generated sales inquiry with a phone call. The MD of the company, Chris Moriarty brings this reality home with another statistic that shows 46% of the time auto-response emails are never followed up. SME’s must get smarter and show initiative when it comes to marketing their business and being successful.

There is plenty of professional help out there, admitting you need it, is the hard part…

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^1. CPA Australia website.
^2. Australian Bureau of Statistics.
^3. PwC Survey Private Business Barometer.
⁴ Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008-09 MPHS.
StrikeForceSales http://www.strikeforcesales.com.au/index.php

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About the author:

Ian McCully is the State Manager of Nicstar Global and has been involved within the ICT industry for over 30 years. Ian has held senior management positions within both large corporate and government organisations. He is strongly focused on customer service and understands the value of a cohesive team approach when it comes to delivering successful outcomes for all.    

When I first read Rule #69 I was immediately put in mind of the often stated project management maxim, “it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission”, which is often the refuge of the project manager that either can’t be bothered with process or who has left things until the last minute, depriving him or herself of all but one, often high-risk, option. As I read and re-read it I found myself thinking that a project manager that does not consider up front how decisions can and will be made during a project is setting a harder task than need be.

So how can a project manager set up a decision framework to support effective and efficient² delivery? What follows are merely thoughts generated from a range of experience. There is no question of right or wrong here….add or delete items to this list as you see fit.

1. Clearly understand your objective and the boundaries you have to work within to achieve it. If you have been around an organisation for a while this might be easy to do. If you are a contract project manager who has just been lobbed over the fence into a project in crisis it may be a little harder. If you don’t know, or can’t work out your boundaries, ask. Once you’ve asked get on with it. If you are working toward the objective and staying inside your boundaries (or only straying slightly outside them) why would you need to ask for decisions from others? Rule #69 is on the money here.
2. Try and influence the selection of your governance structure so that it is supportive of your abilities and needs so you can achieve sound and timely decisions. When you speak to them, try asking them their attitude to this quote from General George S. Patton, “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity”. If they wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment welcome them aboard. If they don’t (or they don’t get it), you are better to fight for someone else. It might be a losing battle, but at least you tried.
3. Really, really, really understand all you can about the environment that you are working in. Understand enough about the technology you are implementing, the people you are working with and their needs, the organisation and its strategy. The more you know the faster you can orientate yourself to a situation when a decision needs to be made. Project managers that operate in isolation may get things right for their project, but you won’t get invited back if you’re OK and everyone else in the place isn’t because of something you did.
4. Actually think about your escalation process and how you undermine yourself when you use it inappropriately. It is like the “boy who cried wolf” when you run to your project board (all busy people) for a decision on something that didn’t need them. Eventually when you really do need them they won’t be there and it will be your fault. The sensible application of Rule #69 is your friend in this case.
5. DO, DO, DO! John Kennedy (the AFL coach, not the US President) is famed for a speech he made to his team as it rocketed to a Grand Final loss in 1975. “At least do something! Do! Don’t think, don’t hope, do! At least you can come off and say, ‘I did this, I shepherded, I played on. At least I did something!’” It may seem like a simplistic sporting analogy, but the project manager who thinks but doesn’t then decide to do something is the wrong project manager. Even if the decision is to do nothing, it is a decision made and you can move on to the next line on the schedule.

Rule #69 asks for faith in an assumption, i.e. it’s OK to make decisions because there isn’t something written that says you can’t. Sounds great in theory, but there is another old maxim that says, ‘assumption is the mother of all f#*% ups’. As a project manager you’re going to be expected to apply good judgment in all decisions and you must consider circumstances where you are. Critically, you should always strive to learn and understand how you go about making and forcing decisions in projects…logic says it has to make things better in the long run.

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One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers accessed at www.altisinc.com/resources/rules

^1. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (German Field Marshal – 1800 to 1891)
². Being effective and efficient = Doing the right thing in the right way.
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About the author:

Ian Cruickshank is the Service Delivery Manager at Nicstar Global and has been in roles that have required clear decision making for over 25 years. He likes to think that he has put some thought into the way he makes decisions and, he is more than happy to put his thoughts out there, if only to generate healthy debate. He’s even been known to admit his mistakes on occasions (please do not pass this onto his wife). While he has happily apologised for the outcomes of some of his decisions, you are unlikely to hear him apologising for making the decision in the first place…

The initial project plan will provide a baseline which details critical success factors, tasks and milestones, and the dates by which they should be achieved, as well as costs for the project components.

Taken separately, costs and progress will not give a project manager an accurate picture of a project. For example, it is possible that in comparing planned costs against actual, a project will appear to be well under-budget. However this does not reflect the actual achievements made during the same timeframe and it is no use having a healthy-looking project from the financial perspective if in practical terms, it is failing to deliver.

An extremely simple example of Earned Value Management is a project which is budgeted at $10,000 dollars over a timescale of 10 weeks. The budget is planned out evenly, at $1000 dollars per week. By week 4, EVM shows that $3000 has been spent but only 10% of the planned progress has been made. Therefore, where an analysis of cost alone could give the impression that the project is under-budget at this point, the full analysis suggests that the project is actually over-budget, as 30% of the budget has been spent on just 10% completion of the project deliverables. If the project continued to progress in this way, it could end up costing three times as much as was originally budgeted, and take four times as long as planned.

Earned Value Management provides an effective tool for the project manager to assess project progress, supplying an accurate picture of progress to date as well as making it possible to plan and forecast effectively. By highlighting issues in advance, the project manager can report to the stakeholders, ensuring excellent communication and visibility. EVM also enables the project manager to recognize where issues are building up, enabling them to resolve them and prevent project failure further down the line.

EVM is mandatory within the Australian Department of Defence: http://www.defence.gov.au/dmo/esd/evm/index.cfm. Courses are available on this subject, including with Engineering Education Australia: http://www.eeaust.com.au/Project-Earned-Value-Management and Mosaic Projects: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Training-PMGen%20EV.html.