IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (32 page)

Offer Project Perks

Group lunches, team T-shirts, coffee mugs, or milestone achievement awards—think of ideas to keep your team active and involved. Consider small rewards along the project timeline (weekly team meeting small prize drawings, for example) instead of awards at the end. Company-paid doughnuts have a very attractive cost-in-exchange-for-information ratio and often get people to meetings.

The Flying Pig Award

At our company, we have a challenging project—one that some people say we will complete “only when pigs fly.”

Every month we have an all-hands meeting where we present a “Flying Pig” award and certificate. The flying pig is a ceramic pig that the winner is allowed to keep for a month—until someone else “wins” (earns) it. Team members nominate potential awardees. People post the certificate in their cubes and sign and decorate the pig when their month is up.

—Karen Hitchcock

Business Analyst

Give Your Project a Code Name

“Operation First Falcon” sounds a lot more exciting and important than “Operation General Ledger.” For projects that are large enough, create a code name and a project logo, put them on polo shirts, and you’ll be flooded with requests for people to join your project. (Not necessarily the people you want on the project, but that’s a different problem.) Use the logo and name on documents pertaining to the project to help create a sense of identity and branding.

Productive Project Meetings

Okay, now you have the project team, or at least the first cut at the project team. The next thing you want is to get all the team members together. Work to make sure every one of your meetings is as effective as it can be. Information should be shared, issues discussed, decisions made, and action items determined.

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Set clear goals in your first project meeting: document the objective and scope of the project, how frequently meetings will be held, have minutes taken, and so on.

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Holding a successful project team meeting involves several simple but effective meeting techniques. These methods are discussed here; use them to increase the productivity of your meetings and your team.

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Don’t forget that you’re in control, and therefore responsible, for the success of both the meetings and the overall project. Watch both carefully.

Meeting Agendas

Typically, each project meeting will follow a consistent format. Develop one that seems to work well for you and your team and that everyone is comfortable with. Typical areas for a project meeting agenda might include the following:

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Status review of open items and action items from previous meeting

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Decisions and agreements from previous meeting restated

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Review of overall status of project and discussion of any major issues

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Updates from each subteam or team member

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Accomplishments of note

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Key tasks and milestones coming up

You will also want to use the meetings for special events. For example, it may be an opportunity to demo a recently completed application component or it may be the right place for a vendor to demo a product that may be appropriate for the project. Alternatively, if the project hits a snag or a particularly important decision needs to be made, the agenda can set aside time for an in-depth discussion of the issues.

Minutes of the Meetings

Have minutes taken so that there is no disagreement on items that were decided, tasks that were assigned, etc. Minutes should also include accomplishments, areas of concern and problems, updates on time frames, and so on. The minutes should be distributed to all team members and project sponsors as soon as possible after the meeting occurs—and certainly before the next meeting. Taking and distributing minutes can be painful tasks that can be easily forgotten or ignored; they can also be critical to the long-term success of the project.

As manager of the project, it’s your job to make sure these tasks get done. You may get volunteers to take minutes or you may not get any. A popular technique is to rotate this assignment each meeting or decide that the person who shows up
last
for the meeting is the one assigned to take minutes. (This can be a clever way of making sure people arrive on time.) Among other things, the minutes ensure that everyone is aware of how the project is progressing.

The minutes may also give senior executives an idea of when they need to get involved; they may decide to rally the troops, motivate, or buy lunch for everyone because a milestone is met. Minutes can chart the progress of activities and tasks from week to week and serve as a reminder of things that need to be done. The minutes can also document who is responsible for each item. Too often, especially in large project teams, it’s too easy for everyone to think “someone else” will take care of it. Although several people may be working on an item, it’s important to identify a single person as the one to take the lead.

The minutes should reflect the key items of the meetings, such as decisions, issues, and project status. For the meeting minutes, consider using the ideas discussed in this chapter and in the section
“Updates to Management and the Team”
on
page 120
. Each meeting’s minutes should follow the same format so that people know where to look to find the information they need.

The Hidden Cost of Meetings

There are, of course, the visible costs of meetings: booking rooms, video conferencing, maybe you all will have to fly to a common city to meet, the cost of setting up and training on the Web conferencing software, doughnuts, and so on.

But the largest cost of meetings isn’t often calculated. One way to think about meetings is to
total up the hourly wage of every person attending the meeting
. This cost is seldom considered, but it should be computed every time. If it were done each time, far fewer meetings would be held and far fewer attendees would be invited. Right now, you are inviting the VP from Sales because she is a stakeholder and you want to do the correct political thing; she may be attending because it allows her to meet with your boss before the meeting. In fact, perhaps she shouldn’t be invited and wouldn’t miss attending; if properly informed, she can get the status of your project from your weekly update e-mail and you can get more done with fewer (non-contributing) people in the room.

Next time, run the numbers and see how much the company is paying for everyone to be in that room. If the meeting has to be held out of town, these calculations are routinely (in these more ROI-conscious times) done. However, “inside the office,” far too many meetings with too many nonessential personnel are still held.

Project Meeting Options

There are now a variety of ways for your entire project team to meet:

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Face to face.
While this is still the most common and often the best option, it is sometimes completely impractical. Even people down the hall from you can’t always attend meetings in person, much less the Help Desk team in India (with your group in New York).

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Videoconferencing.
The price for this option has plummeted. Many companies now have web cameras and speaker phones available for employees. Even an occasional videoconference at a rental facility can save radical money over airfare and hotels for all participants. Larger companies often have their own video conferencing facilities.

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Conference calls.
This is now a very common and more accepted alternative to other types of meetings. Cell phones now come equipped with “conference” buttons. Conference calls, however, have two drawbacks: they tend to drag on, and because people aren’t being watched, they can do other things while in the meeting. “Do other things” often means checking e-mail, but it can mean other, more distracting things, too. Some conference calls participants are 100 percent there; some aren’t even 25 percent engaged.

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Online meeting services.
Tools such as Cisco’s WebEx, Citrix’s GoToMeeting, Adobe’s Connect, and Microsoft’s Live Meeting, used in conjunction with a conference call, can help facilitate online meetings and training, allowing you to do presentations, demo applications, poll attendees, white-board, and more. These tools allow you to do real-time collaboration so that you can pass a document (or control of your desktop) over to another participant on the call. Because these services are available from many resellers, you don’t need to build your own infrastructure to host them.

Useful Meeting Techniques

At each meeting, review the minutes of the previous meeting. It’s a good way to remind everyone about accomplishments and to re-review any action items that were still pending or unresolved at the end of last week’s meeting.

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Stating the desired length of the meeting up front can be an effective technique for getting people to participate. If everyone knows that the goal is to finish the meeting in one hour, people will make more of an effort to get to the point (and will try to force those who don’t to cut things short).

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Meetings held earlier in the day are more productive than those when people are tired after a full day’s work; however, many critical project meetings are held at the end of the day to have a daily project meeting update.

4.10 Funding Projects

In general, when it comes to IT projects, the concerns are primarily about “hard” dollars. Hard and soft money are economic and budgeting concepts. The definitions may vary from organization to organization, but for the most part, “hard” costs are those that the company has to write a check for (hardware, software, outside consultants, etc.). “Soft” costs refer to costs that are less concrete (office space, use of existing staff, time, etc.). When corporate management wants to know how much a project is going to cost, they often only care about hard costs. However, at times, it may be advantageous to add in the soft costs (e.g., when you’re trying to make a project look more impressive in a press release or on your resume). In addition, referring to the soft costs will demonstrate to management that you’re aware that the use of existing resources costs the company money as well.

Your best source for determining a project’s costs might be the members of the project team. It was their expertise that led you to select them for the team; tap this same expertise to evaluate costs. However, it’s very possible that team members may only be able to provide you with information about the technologies that will be required, but not the costs of these technologies. This isn’t unusual. Many technical personnel aren’t interested in, or aren’t exposed to, the business side of the technology. When you face this situation, you may have to go on the Web or contact the vendors and manufacturers directly to get estimates on the products your team members identified. In some cases, a project team may include someone solely dedicated to tracking the project’s budget and other administrative activities.

Estimating Costs: Go High

As a general rule, projects always exceed their initial cost estimates. As a result, it’s common for project managers to inflate their cost estimates by factors of 10 percent or more, sometimes a lot more. There are several reasons for this. When estimating costs, it’s not unusual for smaller, miscellaneous items to be overlooked as everyone focuses on the big expenses. However, these miscellaneous items can add up to a significant amount.

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If management balks at the total cost, the inflation factor provides you with some room to revise the estimate downward without (in theory) impacting the success of the project.

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If the cost estimate is going to be wrong, err on the side of making it too high rather than too low. If it ends up too low, you will end up in the embarrassing position of having to admit your poor planning and shortsightedness and asking for more money.

The inflation factor gives a PM an opportunity to look like a hero if he can complete the project for less than was estimated. Then again, wildly padding your estimate simply to ensure that you come in under budget can negatively impact your credibility in the eyes of management, as well as the credibility of the IT department.

Projects Always Cost More Than Estimated

There are many costs to include within any IT project. In addition to the obvious costs of hardware and software, others common costs to consider include vendor support costs, travel, installation costs,
annual licenses
and maintenance, physical plant expenses (raised floor, air conditioning), training, telecommunications, books and manuals, user group fees, trade shows, software utilities, test equipment and environments, parallel testing, integration costs, incentives for project team members, consultants, and so on. Also, don’t forget some money for the Nerf balls, munchies, sodas, and pizzas for working during lunch or late into the night.

Exactly Who Is Going to Pay for It?

If the company is going to pay for all the costs you’ve estimated for this project, someone has to figure out where the money is going to come from. More than likely, the company’s budget, as well as your department’s budget, has already been set. And unless someone built enough padding into either of these to cover your new project’s expenses, it’s likely that your project may cause your department, as well as others, to go over budget.

This dilemma may not be as big a problem as it initially seems. If corporate management approves your project and costs, then the various department heads will have your project as a ready justification when they have to explain their overruns. If the project is sponsored or initiated by a very high-level executive, she may direct you to charge all the project’s costs to a special department code that she is responsible for, which alleviates everyone else’s concerns about their own budgets.