Working as a Project Manager, it is highly probable that one of your project fails sooner or later.  There are always risks that you will try to minimize, external factors that you will not be able to control, or you may just make a bad decision.

I don’t want to be pessimistic.  I just want you to accept that failure is an option, and it may happen to you.  All great leaders and entrepreneurs have suffered failure or rejection.  But what makes a leader a great leader is what they do after failure.  You can deny it and try to fool yourself so that you feel better.  You can blame someone else and don’t accept any responsibility.  Or you can learn from the experience, move on and start your next challenge with more energy and being a better professional.

I heard once:  “It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, but how many times you rise up”.  An example of this is Steve Jobs.  If you haven’t seen his commencement address at Stanford, I highly recommend it.

And you have to remember that being a Project Manager you are also a leader, which means that rising up will not only benefit you but the whole project team.

One of the key points to have a productive meeting is to write down a list of actions with the person responsible to do it and the due date.

But this is just a requirement to get things done.  How many times have you committed to do something in a meeting and then you didn’t do it because your daily  activity made you forget it?  As a project manager, you have to make sure that actions are completed on time.  You have to do a follow-up.

Depending on the complexity of the actions, you may want to do a follow-up meeting, write an email or just make a phone call.  A follow-up meeting is necessary when the actions are complex or when there are interrelationships between different tasks.  In this case it is better to get the responsible of the related actions together and discuss the progress and the problems that may have arisen.

In most cases, an email or a phone call will be enough.  But bear in mind that what you are doing is trying to help someone else to do his job, not just controlling his job.  What is the difference?  Have a look at these two approaches:

• Regarding action X, do you have all the information you need?  If you need  something or find a problem please let me know and I’ll try to help.
• How are you doing with action X?  Have you finished?  Will you finish on time?

I guess you can see the difference.  If your team feels that you are there to help and not just to control, they will work much more comfortably.  Communication will also improve, because when they find a problem, they won’t hesitate to tell you, and you will be able to take action earlier.  And that is key to avoid project delays.

It is also important to know when to do the follow-up.  It is clear that you don’t want to wait until the day before the due date, because you wouldn’t be helping but controlling.  On the other hand, you don’t want to do it too early, because people have to start their task to know if they need help or if there is a problem they didn’t see initially.  It also depends on the person assigned to the action.  If you know that that person usually waits until the last minute to start something, you may want to do an earlier follow-up.  Just follow your common sense and learn from the results that you get and you will be fine.

Have you ever been to a meeting that meets any (or many) of these criteria?

• You don’t know why you were called to that meeting
• The meeting lasts way longer than the scheduled duration
• People digress and no decisions are made
• You contribute to the meeting for 10 minutes but have to be there for an hour
• The meeting started 15 minutes late because not everyone was on time

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been to many of those!  In my opinion, inefficient meetings are one of the biggest time robbers nowadays.  Every time we find a problem we tend to call a meeting with lots of people to decide what to do. Or the project manager calls the whole team to update the status of the project.  Or the boss has a new bright idea and wants everyone to listen to it.

Don’t get me wrong.  Meetings are a powerful tool if used correctly.  Try the following guidelines and you will notice an increase in productivity:

• Send an agenda with enough time in advance so that everyone can prepare the meeting.  This includes the material that has to be prepared beforehand
• Start the meeting on time.  Many people do not consider highly important to be on time for a meeting (in the end it is not a train that would leave.  The meeting will still be there if I am late).  I personally consider it a lack of respect for the ones that were on time.  If you can start the meeting, go ahead without the missing people.  If you can’t, let him/her know that you have been waiting for them, and they will probably be on time next time.
• Set a time limit for each item on the agenda.
• Call only the people that are necessary for the meeting.  And as you have set a time limit for each topic, you could have someone attending only part of the meeting.
• Do not discuss about topics that are not on the agenda.  Avoid going off-topic or you will lose control.  If the topic is relevant, write it down and discuss it either at the end of the meeting (if there is time) or in a future meeting.
• Make a short summary after each item on the agenda.  You have to make sure that everyone has the same understanding after the discussion.
• For each of the actions that arise, identify the scope of the action, the person responsible to do it and the deadline.  It’s very typical to hear something like “we have to do this”, and it usually results in nothing being done.
• Write the minutes and distribute them, identifying all the agreements and actions.

There is nothing is these guidelines that is difficult to do.  It is just a matter of getting used to it and educate your co-workers to do the same.  After a few meetings you it will become natural and you will have much more effective meetings.

Although the steps above assume you are the meeting leader, it also works when you are not.  In that case you are obviously more limited, but you can try to help the leader.  For instance, you can ask for the agenda when you receive something like “Project X meeting from 10:00 to 12:00″ or you can suggest to talk about that new topic at the end of the meeting if there is a deviation from the agenda.  People are usually smart and if they see that their meetings are better when they follow your recommendations, they will end up adopting them.

A few months ago, one of my days could be like this:

• I arrive in the office.  Check my to-do list and start writing a document.  It shouldn’t take longer than an hour.
• One of my sentences in the document reminds me that I should write an email requesting some information.  I have been thinking of writing that email for a few days, so I’d better write it now before I forget again.
• I am half way through the email I remember that the person to whom I’m writing asked me yesterday if I had 10 minutes.  I told him I would call him later… and I forgot.  I decide to go talk to him.  After 10 minutes I realize that there is some confusion in the team and call a meeting to make sure we all have the same goal in mind.  It shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes, but in the end it lasts 2 hours.
• Back at my desk.  I check the email.  There is a long mail from the customer requesting a lot of information.  I decide this is high priority and start gathering data.  I send an email to request the information I’m missing.
• While I wait for the answer I decide to go back to my document.  I have to read everything I wrote early this morning.  5 minutes after I start writing again, another phone call:  my mates are picking me up for lunch.  Lunch time already???
• Back from lunch.  I check my email, and 15 minutes later I decide to go back to my document.  I read it again.  I start writing, but I check the email every 5 minutes because I am waiting for the data for my customer.
• I finally get it half an hour later and continue with the email for my customer.
• Suddenly my heart starts racing!  I haven’t filled the spreadsheet that my boss sent me yesterday!  And he needed it TODAY!  (swearword)
• It takes me 2 hours to finish my boss’s spreadsheet.
• I check the time.  Is it really that late?
• Instead of going home, I finish the email for the customer.  I NEED to feel that I finished something today!
• I feel tired and start shutting the computer down.  I see the document I started this morning, and I sadly realize that I have written less than 25% of it.
• And then I see the email I started writing while I was with my document.  God, I could have sworn that I had sent it… and it is still there.  I finish it and send it.

My day is over, and my very first task is not done!  Something inside me tells me that I didn’t do a very good job today…

Have you ever felt like that?  Do you have days similar to the one I just described?  A project manager has to deal with very different issues, and that is normal.  But we are not designed for multi-tasking, and there is a huge difference between doing many things and having many things in your mind at the same time.

When you have many things in your mind, you keep switching between them and it is very hard to concentrate on one. Therefore you are not effective.  What is the solution?  Transfer all those ideas and pending tasks somewhere else.  It could be a piece of paper, your email application, a PDA, whatever you feel comfortable with.

But writing things down is just the first step.  You have to build a routine to check that list regularly so that your mind feels that anything there will not be forgotten.  This is the key point.  When your mind feels that anything on that list will be done, it will stop jumping from one thought to another.  And the day you get to that point, you will realize how much more productive you can be.

From the different time management techniques I have learnt, this is the one that has had a bigger impact on my productivity.  And not only that, it also helps you reduce the amount of stress you suffer.  I highly recommend it.