Work by Remote

Dr. Hank: You have developed great expertise in Project Management. How did you get interested in this field?

Terry: My love of projects began in high school when I launched a small rocket loaded with guppies. That project earned national press coverage and motivated me to study aerospace engineering. During a summer internship at NASA, I devoured all the project and program management books in their library. This ignited my passion for Project Management and systems thinking, which considers how all the elements of large and complex systems work together to accomplish the big picture goal.

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Global Knowledge recently released a whitepaper that discusses what the formal project management is and who needs it.

For the purpose of this discussion, I will to refer to PM activities in the absence of operating guidelines as “informal” project management. By contrast, project management that takes place within the restrictions of an imposed set of operating guidelines will be referred to as “formal” project management.

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If formal project management means setting standards to do the PM work well, then I totally support this.

Most IT projects involve geeks. I guess 99 percent of the team is geek.  All I can say is that geeks are just like you and me, only smarter, more skillful, and more serious with their craft. In other words, they’re a joy to work with.

About a couple of years ago, Chief Happiness Officer, Alexander Kjerulf, wrote an article titled how NOT to lead geeks. If you were to make each one positive, here’s how to handle your geek team.The inputs are mine based on my experience in working with them.

1. Give them the right training, and on a regular basis. Training in general is empowering. But for geeks, honing their skills is important to them. And they have the passion to learn new things or be updated on what’s the latest on their chosen field.
2. Give them recognition. Like any other worker, geeks too love to be given a pat on the back for a job well done. If you don’t know how or understand their work very well, Kjerulf suggests that you work with them so that you would know.
3. Give them reasonable work schedule. Geeks are humans, too, and although they can be workaholics, they can still be stressed out. What good is a geek if he’s overworked?
4. Talk to them in plain simple English minus management jargon. As Kjerulf said, geeks hate management-speak.
5. Do not try to outsmart or act smart with them. Admit it, if you’re not a geek or do not understand the stuff geeks do. It gets more work done and faster that way.
6. Be consistent. Probably because in IT, structure and consistency is critical, geeks also want consistent and clear directions, and policies. They hate it when they smell uncertainty and indecisiveness.
7. Connect with them. Often, because managers are not geek themselves, they tend to stay away from their geek team, and just concern themselves with the output or in the user interface, for example, of a website project. Talk to them and discuss with them tasks that are doable and not.
8. Involve them in decision making, especially when it comes to your project. For an IT project, who else understands it better than the geek team. Thus, get their ideas and suggestions and how to go about the project. There should be a collaborative effort.
9. Give them the right tools or equipment to do their tasks well. What can be most frustrating for a geek team are slow computers and lack of software. These may cost you a bit more, but just look at it as in investment where you can generate income too.
10. Recognize the creative side of geeks. Kjerulf puts it aptly, “Programming is a creative process, not an industrial one. Geeks must constantly come up with solutions to new problems and rarely ever solve the same problem twice. Therefore they need leeway and flexibility.”

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What saddens me as a project manager is to see good people go.

This may be a form of review on your project deployment. But it’s a good guide for those who are about to start a new project, too.

In every project, it’s really good to start and end with the same people or team. That way, all of you understands the project, what it entails, what the role of each member is.

You would want for example to have each team member participate in the following:

1. Initiation - Introduce the team to the project, its scope, roles and responsibilities, and deliverables.
2. Planning - Develop plans for creating the final deliverables.
3. Execution - Properly plan the work.
4. Control -Ensure that the project is progressing as planned, to account for any changes, and to make midcourse corrections that are needed to keep the project on schedule and within budget.
5. Closeout - deliverable is accepted by the customer of the project, and the project team documents what it learned that could be of value on the next project.

I got the tips above from an article on Baseline Mag. Read the rest of the article and find out how project managers can transform your business by building a process, tracking performance and helping you build best practices that work for your company.

It’s true! Leaders or managers have closed minds or are set in their ways. If this is the general case, then no wonder conflicts arise in the organization, which they often term as politicking.

I’m just lucky that my Boss listens to me, and takes my suggestions well—oftentimes, too well. But for those who are not as lucky, I pity you. And I wish your Bosses could read this article on North Colorado Business Report.

The article likens project management to an endeavor which one must need an open mind. In Zen principles, have a “beginners mind” that displays openness, eagerness and a lack of preconception. It’s like learning a new skill, where you are eager to learn the ropes.

Shirley Esterly, the author, suggests ways on how to project manage using a philosophical approach. Read HERE.

But going back to Zen, I’d like to develop that open mind. This should be the case for every team member, leader or member. That at every new project, they keep an openness to discover new things, to try out new things.

It used to be that quality people would go, If it ain’t broke, then leave it as is. Not  anymore. If it ain’t broke, then improve it.

Just because your projects are all running and seemingly smoothly, it doesn’t mean  you can sit back and relax. At least not with website projects. Websites are probably the most vulnerable and volatile entity to handle. I sure often feel like  watching the shares on a stock market go up and down.

Like a stock market player who watches over his shares and be ready to buy and sell at the ring of the bell, I, too, have to watch out for spammers or hackers, information loading, server overload, etc. at every click of the mouse.

There is really a need to evaluate your projects at all times. You do not know on which page your user lands on your website, and so you have to make sure that every page is accessible and that it contains the relevant information.

Based on my experience, it pays to be evaluating your projects regularly so that you can feedback issues to your team promptly.

I’m sharing with you the ways of evaluating your projects (the word project here is interchangeable with website, as websites happen to be my projects).

1. Start with a plan every day. As a project manager, this is very crucial. You have to plan your day every day. Have a list of to-do for the day only. Breaking down your to-do’s per day makes it easier and definitely makes the tasks manageable.
2. Put criteria in your plan. The criteria will guide you on which aspect or part of the project will you be looking into for that day. Example: (a) check programmers’ progress - how far have they accomplished? (b) check on the shared Task List - is the programmer’s progress match that with the Task list? (c) check the project site - Is the homepage all in tact? Are the links working? Any content development issues from the Admin page?
3. Take down notes. More often, as you navigate through the site, a new idea comes to you. The idea can be about a new feature or content, a new page, a new app, a new layout, a new design, even a new project! Anything that improves the site’s usability.
4. Do your homework. Visit websites and bookmark those that you like. Study how they work and efficiently. Also, research about your projects. With your homework in hand, evaluate your site against the concepts and principles that you’ve gathered. Check out similar business models and try to adopt those that work for your project.
5. Do a group evaluation. Evaluate the project as a team, together. It’s also useful and more efficient, if you and your team do the evaluating together or simultaneously. Ideas are exchanged instantly, and you come up with fresh and often better ideas. Isn’t it that two heads are better than one?

This is Day #8 of 31DBBB

Project Management Blog emphasizes the importance of synchronizing Business goals with PMO goals. “It is imperative to understand the overall Business goals of an Organization while it comes to executing Projects.”

Program and Project Management blog over at Toolbox for IT suggests project management solutions that help managers monitor reports efficiently. “It is for this reason amongst many that I find the reporting element should be as automated and efficient as the PM can make it…”

Over at Journyx Project Management Blog, Curt Finch, CEO of Journeyx, shares insights on finding profit in hard times. “Tracking time and expenses on a per-project or per-customer basis can give you a true understanding of where you are working profitably as an organization…”

At DailyBlogTips are the top 25 web desing blogs. It’s a good comparison of successful web design chronicles. I’m happy to find my favorite web design blog to be there, at number 2 at that! None other than the Smashing Magazine!

Which brings me back to my lates favorite post from Smashing Mag: “15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website.” I already emailed this post to my programmer team, and I hope we’ll be able to tick each item out as we go along.

This is Day #7 of 31-Day (Blogging) Challenge.

First the facts:

According to IDC:

• U.S. mobile workforce expected to grow to 73% of total U.S. workforce in 2011.
• Across the world 30.4% of the workforce will be mobile in 2011.

[Source: IDC, Worldwide mobile worker population 2007-2011 forecast, Doc #209813, December 2007]

According to Nemertes:

• Nemertes estimates that the number of virtual workers has increased by 800% within the last 5 years.
• 60% to 70% of all employees work in locations difference from their supervisors.

The facts show that mobile workforce is no longer a special or isolated case. It is beginning to become the norm. So how do you manage a team that in an office somewhere or working even out of country?

Terrence L. Gargiulo, President of makingstories.net, put out a whitepaper discussing the nature of mobile workforce and outlining ten strategies to deal with it.

1. Focus on building relationships.
2. Streamline communications.
3. Incorporate less didactic forms of communications.
4. Spend more time listening.
5. Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow.
6. Manage deliverables not activities.
7. Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities.
8. Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise.
9. Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers.
10. Leverage technology.

Read the whitepaper now!

For me the key here is not to manage them, but to build relationship with them. Easier said than done, perhaps. But I know it can be done.

*Photo from MorgueFile.com

As a project manager, or any other kind of  manager for that matter, this is always the case. You hold responsibility for everything even the shortcomings of your team.

So whenever somebody questions the performance of any member of my team, I feel defensive. That is because I feel that I have been remiss in my role. I have not managed them as well as I should be.

Following the monitoring system that was put in place recently, I can view what  my team members are doing on their supposedly working hours. I see some of them not really putting focus on the task at hand.

Then Boss emailed me, asking what the specific tasks of this particular team member are. Good thing, I just had the virtual planning. As an offshoot of that, I asked each one about what needs to be done in terms of their role in the general scheme of things. Their suggestions/recommendations now form part of what else they needed to do aside from their usual tasks.

Had I not thought of that virtual planning, I’d have come up empty handed when Boss asked me. Perhaps, Boss didn’t really mean to check on me as PM, but it always pays to be on top of things.

As a project manager, I feel I need to do the following on a regular basis:

1. Check on the performance of my team.
2. Find out if they had been doing their tasks, and how.
3. Get their feedback regularly. Find out their difficulties, or the challenges they encounter every day.
4. Brainstorm with them about the latest web research, web marketing, SEO, web development techniques.
5. Make them feel like a stakeholder of the project. That way they own the project, they feel that they own their tasks.

With three projects on hand, I need some superpowers to be effective and efficient on this. After all, the buck always stops here.

Finally, we have a system that checks on remote employees. The software requires the employee to download it and every time he starts working for the day, he must sign on to it.

Called AGLM, it looks and works like a chat messenger. There is also a message board where the remote employee and the project manager can send each other messages.

What’s interesting about this software is that the project manager can now view the employee activity chart, keystrokes, and the sites he visited while working. In the instance that he stopped working on his project for sometime, his “timer” will also stop.

The program is actually good. I just feel like a voyeur.