Money Manages Itself?

No, don’t worry, I haven’t gone crazy.  I obviously don’t think that money manages itself and you don’t have to plan, control and monitor where the project is spending it.  So then why did I choose this title?

The reason is that not long ago, a friend of mine was talking to someone who stated that “money manages itself”.  You would think that it would be someone who just left school and has no experience, especially no experience in project management.  You couldn’t be further away from the truth!  The person saying that has worked for the company for over 20 years, and he has been managing projects and programs for over 15.  And he is now a director of operations, managing a yearly budget which is probably over 50M€.  It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

No matter how crazy this looks, it has an explanation.  This person works for a company where projects last a minimum of 2-3 years, sometimes even 5 or 6.  The company has grown very fast in the past few years.  And we all know that when you run multi-year projects, you can be “creative” when you measure progress on a project.  Using Earned Value Management on a very long project it is very easy to achieve the numbers the company requests by the end of the year.  That will cause, if the project wasn’t properly controlled, that by the end of the project there will be a lot of cost with minimum or no earned value. But that can be “solved” if there are new projects that can help you achieve your financial goals. Read the rest of this entry »

My company has offered me to become a Project Management Professional (PMP®). It is voluntary, so they will provide the means if I am willing to do the effort to pass the exam. So the first question that came to my mind was: Is it worth the effort?  So I analysed what you need and what you get.

What do you need to become a PMP?

The PMP certification is managed by the Project Management Institute -PMI- (www.pmi.org).  On their webpage you can find the requirements to apply to the PMP exam:

• Between 3 and 5 years project management experience depending on your educational background
• 35 hours of project management education

Once you are eligible, you have to pay the exam fee (between $405 and $555 depending if you are a PMI member or not).  The exam is a 200 multiple-choice type questions that you have to answer in less than 4 hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Does technology make us more efficient?

A few days ago I was talking to my brother.  He works at a small consulting company, and he is not very happy with his boss (and I’m being polite).

They are struggling to get new contracts, and they have reached the point where they have agreed to work a few hours less a week, and obviously get paid less.  The funny thing is that his boss is always extremely busy.  He works over 12 hours a day, and it is not strange to receive an email from him at 1 or 5 a.m.  And of course he has a Blackberry so that he can read and send emails from anywhere at any time.

Last Monday my brother sent an email to his manager because he needed an executive decision from him.  On Thursday he hadn’t had any feedback from him and time was running out, so he went to his desk and asked him: “Did you see the email I sent on Monday?”.  My brother was shocked when he heard the answer: “No, I haven’t read any emails this week”.  And not only that, but he had a chance to see how many unread emails he had in his Inbox:  over 1200!!!  He then remembered that his former manager was low-tech, and instead of using the latest mobile, he used to write phone number on paper serviettes.  So that lead to the question: Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished a week of hard work and long hours. I want to share the experience with you because it clearly shows how stopping and planning can help you.

The task

We had to prepare a proposal for  a complex system.  The competition was expected to be high, so our proposal had to be high quality.  We have been working on the concept for this system for a long time, so we had a clear view of what the system should look like.

The challenge

We only had 3 weeks to prepare everything.  We had to discuss the solution with several areas in our company and with a subcontractor.  By the time we had everything agreed, we only had less than two weeks to produce the documentation.  The amount of required documents was larger than we expected, which made things even more difficult.

The plan

We knew all the documents we had to prepare and the clock was ticking.  So what does your body do?  It forces you into action!  For a second we were tempted to start working, because we knew already what we had to do.  But did we really?  We had a mental list of the documents and a preliminary distribution between the (at that time) 2 persons working on the proposal.  But we realized that wasn’t enough.  So we stopped, wrote all the documents on a whiteboard and made an estimation of how long it would take to finish each of them.  The result was shocking.  If our estimation was correct, we had to work over 16 hours a day to meet the deadline!!

Thanks to this 10 minute planning, we had the arguments to convince our boss to give us another person to work full time on the bid and distribute some tasks among other people in the department.

The execution

One of my colleagues had the idea to keep the list of documents on the whiteboard and write the progress at least twice a day to monitor if we were on track.  I have to say that it was a great idea, and not for the progress monitoring, that we could have done in a different manner.  But it was for the motivation.  Every time someone stood up and increased one of the percentages we had a rush of excitement and we knew we were making progress.  And whenever someone felt overwhelmed, we could look up at the whiteboard, check the status and see what the objective progress was.  And most of the times the situation was better than what our mind told us, especially when we were tired.

The conclusion

Even when you know that you should plan, it’s easy to rush into action without much thought.  And we should avoid it.  See what 10 minutes did for us.  Hadn’t we stopped then, we wouldn’t have had the extra help and our technical proposal would have been poor.

And this shows that planning is helpful for every task we have to do.  Some people tend to think that only project managers should plan and monitor progress.  But the truth is, if you plan your everyday tasks you become much more productive because you manage your time instead of spending it.

So, every time you feel overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, please don’t just jump into action.  Stop and plan first.