One of your main responsibilities as a project manager is to manage how the time of your team is spent.  In fact, if you are able to make an efficient use of your team’s time while they are working towards a clear goal, your success is almost guaranteed.

But let me ask you a question:  do you use your time efficiently?  Because if you don’t, how can you lead a person or a team to be effective?

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to check if you are efficient:

• Do I attend meetings where people digress and by the time the meeting is over nothing has been accomplished?
• Could I skip some of  the meetings that I currently attend without causing any problems?
• When I sit down at my desk, do I spend a lot of time thinking what I should do next?
• Do I procrastinate when I have a complex task ahead of me and I don’t know where to start?
• When I start a task, do I get interrupted often, forcing me to stop and start again later?
• When I am working on a task, do I switch to something else because I just remembered there was something urgent to do?

If you answered ‘No’ to all of these questions, congratulations!  If you recognized yourself in one or more of these situations, there is room for improvement.  The first step to improve is to know what your current situation is.  Write down for a few days:

• What you do in a detailed level (i.e. 30 minutes slots)
• What you planned to do one day and didn’t do, and the reasons why
• What the source and frequency of your interruptions are
• The meetings you attend

Once you have done this, it is usually very easy to recognize your ‘time robbers’.  Start with one at a time and commit to do something specific to improve that situation.

And when you manage your time correctly, you can assess your team to do the same, getting an overall performance improvement in your project.

This is another lesson I learnt the hard way.  Being new to project management, I decided to copy what other project managers were doing around me.  At that time, the general trend was to give our Customer the least information that was necessary for each milestone.  In fact, that is not completely true.  We were usually rushing to get the documentation for development milestones, so the immediate solution was to reduce the quantity and quality of the information provided.  Back then it didn’t look that bad… The customer is happy because we are on time and we reduce development time because we don’t have to produce as much documentation.

We were quite wrong!  We didn’t have our design documentation ready not because we didn’t have time to write it down, but because we hadn’t analysed our design thoroughly.  And having a design review without a clear idea of your design is a bad idea! Our customer didn’t review our documentation in depth so they didn’t object to the level of detail.  So we passed the review, which lead to the disaster, because we started working in a direction that was different to what our customer expected.  The result was similar to working without planning.

So the lesson we learnt was clear:

• Identify your stakeholders
• Find out what they expect
• Manage the misalignments between stakeholders’ expectations and project scope or goals

Expectations management is a continuous job.  The Project Manager has to know the direction of his project and communicate it to all the stakeholders.  There will be moments where expectations are much bigger than what we plan to deliver, and it is highly important to address this issues as soon as possible and find an agreement.  Otherwise, what we would do is postpone a problem to the end of the project, when there is no reaction time.

“I can’t afford to stop to plan.  We have to start working if we want to meet the deadline”

How many times have you heard this?  I still shiver every time I hear it, and I hear it much more often that I would like.

It must be something innate to think that you have to start doing something when you feel you don’t have enough time to finish a task or project.  But hey, planning is actually doing something!  But then someone argues that you can finish your project without planning, so if you don’t plan, you save some time and finish earlier.  (Deep breath…)  OK, you start working right away but, in which direction?  Do you even know what you have to do?  Have you defined the scope of your project?

I have seen (and I am afraid I will see) too many people rushing into action to save time, to discover later that they have worked in a wrong direction.  And when you get to that point it is usually too late to get the project delivered on time.  A lot of people don’t realise how important a good planning is.  It helps you discover the dependencies between tasks and find out what the critical path is.  And knowing that allows you to focus all your effort on the tasks that drive the delivery date.

So no matter how tempted you are to start working without a plan, please stop and plan your work.  It will pay off!

I just had an example of bad communication with our customer.  There was luckily a happy ending and I hope I learned from it and not make the same mistake in the future.

We are working with our Customer in a project within a big programme.  This programme has been delayed due to external reasons and both our customer and ourselves are suffering the consequences.
A few months ago, when a big delay was declared, we tried to find a way forward that would be beneficial for our customer and for us.  We reached the final agreement during a telephone conversation.  We hadn’t had any communication problems before, so no one bothered to write down the minutes of the conversation, and that was the MISTAKE!

Today we found out that that day we had understood similar but different things.  Luckily we have been able to find a solution, but I know this could have caused a delay of several months for our project.

Communication has two processes:

• Sending the message
• Making sure the recipient of the message has the same understanding as you

So the lesson today was to never forget the second point, even when it seems unnecessary.