How to revive a project?

Good day...

In my last posting, I discussed what to do when your project gets early terminated due to your management decision. I'm sure you must also have faced the situation when you were requested to re-commence a project as they now get back to alignment with strategy, or, an extra budget has now been obtained by your organization.

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Now, I would like to share some tips on this case also:

1. Similar with the case when you are about to early terminate a project, you need to re-confirm to your management on the new direction to the project. There are situations when a project is to be re-commenced with a different direction due to recent change in the organization's strategy. Let's be clear on the new direction and make sure that you are leading the project towards the direction.

2. In addition, you also need to re-confirm on the additional budget. The amount might no longer the same as the initial budget you had put in the project plan. Once the budget is confirmed, you might need to adjust your project plan to align with the available budget. Any change you make to the project plan should be well documented and signed-off by the authorized management representative (could be your project sponsor, or even a board of management).

3. The next step is then for you to call your team and deliver the exciting message. In most cases the original team is no longer available as they might be engaged with other projects. In this case you need to re-negotiate for resources with your PMO or the respective department heads. I would strongly recommend that you do another kick-off and assume that it is a new project with a new project team (although some of the team members are the same).

4. Then you will need to re-negotiate with your vendors on the term to continue the remaining work. As on step 3 it is recommended to assume the project is a newly started one, in many cases it is better to completely re-scope the project and issue a new work order to your vendor.

In short, once confirmation is obtained that the project is to be re-commenced, let's assume that it is a new project with re-defined scope, budget, and the entire set of project planning.

Edwin

What to do if your project gets terminated?

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Have you ever been in a situation when your management considered that your project is no longer suitable to the latest strategy and thus, they decided to terminate your project? Or, when the organization decided to re-allocate the budget to something more urgent from the management's perspective? It is even worse when the decision was taken when the project is running incredibly well, when everything was on-track and your team was on-fire. Well, what would you feel in this situation? Did you get upset or disappointed?

It is very normal when you felt uncomfortable about the situation. I suppose every good project manager would feel the same. Nonetheless, it should not be the case. Let's think back. Was the situation a result of you were not managing the project well? Did you contribute to any of the decision? The answer is No, it is not your fault at all and you did not have the influence to the decision.

Now, what you should do when this happens to your project? Below are some tips I would like to share to help you go through the unanticipated situation smoothly:

1. Re-confirm the decision to your management in an official meeting. Call for a SteerCo meeting with all decision makers attend and state clearly whether the decision to terminate the project early is confirmed and final. Document the decision in a minutes of meeting and obtain the necessary sign off.

2. Upon confirmation from your management, the next thing to do is to share with your core team (and extended team when necessary, depending on the situation). You are the one who should deliver the message, do not delegate such important task to anyone in your team. Call for a team meeting and convey the message professionally (see my other post on delivering negative message). It is essential that you are not adding any emotional flavor to your message.

3. Proceed with project closure phase. The hardest thing I found in this condition is re-negotiating the terms with your vendors. You need to carefully assess and agree with your vendor on the part of the project they have delivered and your organization's obligation for paying the completed work.

4. Document all the decisions and steps carefully. In this step, it is also important to make sure that your manager is across every progress and provide her sign-off to the documents as necessary. This is necessary to make sure that your performance is not affected as you did not contribute to the termination decision.

I hope that the above tips help. Please feel free to share your comment and feedback based on your own experience.

Edwin

Project Manager vs Product Manager

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I met some people who are confused regarding what is the different role between a product manager and project manager. Unfortunately I have been both, so I can give some brief introduction on both roles.

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As a product manager, you will be responsible for end-to-end life cycle of the product. Starting from business case, product design, proposal, seeking approvals by management (normally through product committee), obtaining regulatory approval, product development, product launching, marketing, campaign and promotion, further development, and so on until the product is matured and finally decided to be put off the market.

Although in some cases the product manager is responsible as a business project manager during product development, it is not always the case. In my organization we have a dedicated team for project management, who will take the ownership as the overall project manager. In this case, the product manager is positioned as a product owner or primary user, and in some cases as the sponsor of the project.

While as a project manager, your main responsibility is to lead the end-to-end project life cycle. In product development case, the scope of the project could be the same as product life cycle described above, or, focusing only in a fraction of the life cycle, such as product development, product campaign or product launching only. In other words, the product life cycle could be divided into more than one project, with each project has its own project manager. The person running the project manager role could be overlapping between one project to another, however, they are treated as separate projects.

It is interesting that in my experience, a good product manager is very potential into a strong project manager and vice versa. To become a good project manager, the product manager should equip herself with project management discipline. On the other hand, to becoming a good product manager, the project manager should strengthen her business acumen.

I met some colleagues who are coming from product management and end up into very strong project managers, and even a leader of project services team. On the flip side, I also know some colleagues who successfully moved from project management into star product managers once she is passionate about the business.

Edwin

Moving on

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Yesterday was my last day in the organization I have been working for in the last 4 years. I was so touched that my team has prepared a Hello and Goodbye event for me. They demonstrated a great deal of creativity, starting from the way the invited me without myself being suspicious of the surprise they were preparing, the videos, the games, the food, until the people they invited, who have contributed significantly to my career growth.

In this short posting, I would like to say that in many cases you know whether you are being loved or not only when you are leaving, or when you no longer hold a formal authority towards your team's career. It is the time when all of your good deeds and dedication is being put on test.

I would strongly recommend that you bear this in mind in your daily professional life, when you are interacting with your team, your stakeholders, your customers, and your managers. By always look ahead to the time when you are about to leave, you will have the passion and self control to always perform your best and to exercise a genuine care to your team.

For me, as I mentioned in the event, I am so thankful that I have been part of a great team that delivers so much for the organization. Being only one ordinary person given the opportunity to becoming part of such a team is the best thing I have in my career life so far. I can not be thankful enough to my team, my mentors, my managers and my leaders in the organization for all the friendship and support we have been extending to each other in the last four years.

Now as I am moving forward to a new organization, I am excitedly looking forward to the great people I am sure I will find in the new organization, new challenges I will face and the contributions I will strive my best to make to the organization.

Edwin

Being a good leader

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Honestly, I am taking the risk here to discuss this subject. I am fully aware that I am no expert in leadership. You will be able to find excellent references out there in this topic. Books authored by John C. Maxwell, Jack Welch, Steven R Covey, Stephen M R Covey, and many others are a few of the great sources on this domain. Great motivators such as Mario Teguh, Tung Desem Waringin, James Gwee and many others are also experts in this subject. I am sure that the list can go on with yourself adding more names and references.

However, in this posting I will try to give some tips on tips of being a good leader:

1. Be yourself. Do not try to imitate anyone leadership style. Although you admire the person and think of her as your role model, you need to come out from that boundary of trying to be her. You always need to create your own leadership style that is most convenient to your personality.

2. Care about your team. In my personal experience, once you show a genuine care to your team, there is nothing limiting you from doing extra mile for your team's success. Don't be afraid to go beyond their work and career. You can also care about your family, personal aspiration and anything else as long as you stay being professional in demonstrating your care for them. Active listening, attention giving, and trying to extend the support their need in your capacity are things you should never be lacking of as a leader.

3. Being flexible of staying on top of things and going down to detail. In some occassions you need to deep dive into a detailed level to understand the root cause of an issue. However, once you are comfortable enough with the detail, you must not forget to go back to the surface ensuring a helicopter view of the things happening surrounding your project or your team.

4. Continuous development. Your team will highly appreciate you as their leader when you consistently shows that you are passionate about new things and that you are keeping yourself up to date to new developments.

5. Be a good mediator between your team and your management. When you are in middle management position, you are highly expected to deliver your team's message and concern to your senior management and vice versa. A good communication and negotiation skill is key to be successful in this role.

Well, as I said in the beginning, there is a very long list of good leadership tips to which every good leader can contribute to. Therefore, I will welcome your thought and input on how to become a true leader.

Edwin

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Career path of a Project Manager

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So, you are now a project manager. You have transformed yourself from a junior project manager into a senior and seasoned one. You have delivered all kind of projects, from smaller one, large and complex project, a program, a transformation, just name it. You have received a number of awards due to successful project delivery. In short, you are anything a project manager can achieve.

Then, what's next?

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For me, becoming a project manager is a complete package to climb up the next career ladder as a true leader. Why? Because as a seasoned project manager as I described above, I am sure that you have the characteristic of a leader and you must have demonstrated both managerial and leadership skill. Then, there is no doubt you will be successful once you move up to a middle or even senior managerial level.

As for myself, I started as a product manager, project manager and started to step up into project portfolio head, project delivery head, and into a more strategic position heading the enterprise wide project services. I do believe that you will find the career path that best suits your aspiration. I have witnessed some of my project team members stepped into a managerial position. Some even move from IT to business, Finance and other strategic role. On the other hand I also witnessed a successful movement of a business person to IT to become a rising start in IT.

As long as you have the determination and confident to move further, the opportunity will come sooner or later for you to move higher up your career ladder. However, I found that you need to be ready whenever the opportunity comes. Keep up with your personal development (refer to my other posting on personal development), maintain a strong network with everyone within and beyond your organization, and consistently hold on to your values (integrity, care, accountability, etc). Then you can be sure that your name will come first whenever there is an opportunity at a higher level.

I also found that a as a project manager, in many cases you have the access to senior management, especially when you deliver a strategic or organization wide project. It comes back to you whether you are smart enough to take the opportunity to build your rapport and positive impression of everyone working with you.

Coming back to my initial question, you are now a seasoned project manager, then a wide horizon of opportunities is waiting for you to step into.

Edwin

Continuous self development

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Have you experienced the situation whereby you were once considered an expert in a knowledge domain, such as an IT expert during the emerging of PC, smartphones, or dot.com bubble? However, once a new technology emerged, your expertise quickly became obsolete and you were no longer considered as an irreplaceable resource. The same case might also applicable in other expertise area outside of technology. Your managerial concept might be no longer relevant to the current situation with the transition from generation X to generation Y and millennials in the workplace.

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The question is, how to keep your self up-to-date with the current development in technology, new methodologies, new systems, soft skills and expectations? In my experience, the following might help to keep improving yourself:

1. Read. It has been evidenced by a number of well recognized leaders around the world that reading good books has been expanding their horizons to the new developments in the industry. Now, with the availability of e-books, pods, audio books and other online sources, gaining the knowledge is much easier than ever before.

2. Socialize. Being an active member of positive communities of interest, such as project management (e.g. PMI chapter in your country), professional communities, industry communities or even informal communities helps you keep updated on the latest development in the industry.

3. Attending seminars, conferences, and summits. I found this exceptionally useful in particular in relation with the new development in digital technology. Although in most cases the public events will not give you a deep dive into the emerging technology, they serve as a insightful starting point for me to explore further. In addition, the events also provide networking opportunities with the key people in the domain you are interested in. After-event meetings and connectivity are highly recommended.

4. Training. I have a personal commitment that every year I must improve myself either through a formal training, certification, or job promotion and rotation. In addition to equipping yourself with the knowledge in the area, which had not been your expertise, joining a training also serves as a good networking opportunity. You will never know when the training will be useful to support your career progression.

5. Keep up an open mind and have a clear vision on where you are heading to in your professional career. By having a clear career path in your mind, there is a bigger opportunity for you to stay on track in term of self development and career progression.

Hope the above helps. Please feel free to share your opinion and experience in this subject.

Edwin

Being successful as a project manager in the area you are not familiar of

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I believe the above subject is applicable to most of you as you might have the experience being assigned to a project that you are far from being an expert in the particular domain or knowledge. A good example that I have in this topic is when I was first assigned to implement an organization-wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which covered en d-to-end business processes of the organization. With lack of background in Accounting, I found that it was overly challenging to configure the system for an industry-standard accounting postings and financial reporting.

I considered myself very fortunate that at that time my Finance Director, who was entering retirement age, provided me with the guidance and direction I needed to go through the most challenging stage of the project.

It is true that in this type of situation, a helping hand from someone with better expertise in the domain, is something you will treasure. The question is, how you deal with this situation as a project manager. Relying on your team members being expert in the domain might not be always the best case, as there are occassions when your team members take benefit of your weakness. While gaining the necessary expertise might takes time, which your project timeline does not necessarily allow.

In my experience, it is best to gain some insight of the domain you are not familiar with. Finding a good source in internet, interviewing your friends and colleagues who possess better knowledge, reading books of the related topic, could equip you with the necessary knowledge. After you gain the necessary insight, although it is limited, you can delve further by leveraging the knowledge of your team members in parallel with leading the project delivery.

While continuing with project delivery, you can gradually familiarize your self with the knowledge domain through meetings, discussions, and workshops.

While I am not a strong supporter of leading a project in the area that you have zero or very minimum familiarity of, I am neither a proponent to limiting yourself to deliver only the projects you are expert in. For me, new things can be learnt as long as you have the passion and opportunity to.

Edwin

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Motivating yourself

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Good day...

As a project manager it is inevitable that you are the center of the project you are running. In other words, all lights on you. If you are enthusiastic then the team you are leading will be energized with your enthusiasm. On the other hand, once you loose heart about your project, you will set a negative atmosphere to your project.

With this in mind, it is critical to keep yourself well motivated and highly optimistic of the project you are running. Is it easy? Of course not, especially when the project is running for a longer duration, say more than 1 year. As a human you will find that your mood and emotion might undergo ups and downs. Nevertheless, you must try your best to continuously release positive energy to your surrounding.

In this posting, I will try to share some tips with regard to maintaining your positive energy at an optimum level:

1. Keep your professional and personal life balance. It is important to have a healthy personal life outside of your professional career. Managing a warm family, allocating your time to do your hobby, going for vacation and reading more books are examples of things you might to do outside of your working time. Many studies have evidenced that a healthy personal life is well reflected to your professional achievement.

2. When commencing a project, begins with the end goal in mind. Keeping a clear vision what you are going to achieve once the project goes live will keep you moving forward toward your goal. It is also helpful to visualize over and over again the rewarding experience you will get once you announce a successful go live, including cheers from your team, congratulations from your leaders, or even publicity in internal and external media to the organization.

3. Build a positive alliance with your team, key stakeholders, project sponsors, vendors and customers. I found that it is always helpful to build a team with positive mindset and attitude. Surrounded by positive people will keep the positive energy within you. As a normal human being, we always need someone or a group of people to cheer for us and help us up whenever we go down an emotional valley.

4. It is also particularly important to have your team backing you up whenever you are facing a roadblock or a challenging situation. In my experience, we were faced to challenging key stakeholders and high pressure from the management in delivering the digital project. It is the support from each team member and the sense of togetherness that kept us going in delivering the project into its final state.

5. Lastly but very important is to keep your spiritual healthy. Maintaining a close relationship with GOD by taking your personal time with HIM and worshiping HIM in accordance to your personal belief is truly essential to keep your performance and motivation high.

I'm sure you can share more on this topic. Please feel free to share your own tips and experience for others to also learn from you.

Edwin

Effective time management

Good day...

Today I would like to share with you one of the key capability of a project manager and of any leadership and managerial role. It is about time management.

I'm sure that you have read and heard many times before regarding time management. On the other hand I am also sure that practicing a good time management is not as easy as it seems. For that reason, I would try to share some tips based on my experience on an effective time management:

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1. All of your to do things will fall under one of below criteria, either it is important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important. not urgent and not important. Among the criteria it is very understandable that you will put the urgent matters into the highest priority. However, bear in mind that you need to secure some time to do the things that are important but not urgent, before they become urgent.

2. Never over promise. From time to time you will find people and tasks are competing for your time. Think carefully before you commit on the things you will allocate your time to (meetings you will attend, business trips you will make, coaching sessions you will do, etc). It is always better to under promise and over deliver.

3. Once you commit on allocating your time to do something, block your calendar immediately. If it is a meeting you are going to arrange, send an invite immediately to block yours and others' calendars. If it is a task you can complete on your own, block your calendar. You will learn that you might need to move the schedule along with other tasks with higher priority. It is completely alright, at least you already have a reminder in your calendar that you committed to a task.

4. Arrange you calendar with different color indicators. This will let you easily focus on the important things. In my case, I mark high priority meetings with red, lower priority I will attend with yellow, a higher priority overlapping with the yellow schedule with orange, and the meetings I set my self with green. I will then know that it is easier for me to move my own meetings rather than ask the meeting organizer of another meeting to move theirs.

5. Try to take the initiative to send the invitation for a meeting rather than wait for others to invite you. With this trick, you will find that it is easier to move your meetings whenever necessary.

Well, hope that helps, I will share some more as available.

Edwin

Kaizen and Six Sigma in Project Management

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As a project manager, I believe you must have heard about Kaizen and Six Sigma. As a certified Six Sigma green belt, I will try to elaborate further on both techniques and the relationship with project management.

For you who are not familiar with Six Sigma, it is actually a quality assurance technique by standardizing all of the process involved with aim to have a standardized result across different production teams and production lines. When six sigma is reached, the probability of defect is only as big as 3.4 per million opportunities. The technique was first introduced by Motorola in 1986 and widely used by Jack Welch at General Electric.

While Kaizen is literally translated to "change for better" or continuous improvement. In practice, the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check Act) method is widely used to achieve the desired continuous improvement.

Now, what do Kaizen and Six Sigma have to do with project management? As you would understand that the objective of a project management is to deliver a high quality project at the desired timeline, budget, and other constraint. In order to achieve the desired quality, a concrete tool and measurement needs to be in place to ensure a proper quality management process (both quality assurance and quality control).

With that in mind, Six Sigma is highly relevant to quality assurance and quality control of a project. How a testing scenario, test plan, and test cases are defined and standardized, in order to minimize any possible defect in production while aiming for zero defect. In this case, Six Sigma tools, such as 5 Whys, root cause diagram / Ishikawa diagram, pareto chart, and the statistical methods (mean, median, modus, standard deviation) are applicable to plan for a thorough quality management.

On the second topic, the PDCA cycle of a Kaizen technique is highly relevant to project life cylce, As with any project, the main responsibility of a project manager is to plan (Plan), execute the project (Do), monitor & control (Check) and do the necessary adjustment and re-planning (Act). In addition, I also found that we can apply Kaizen method to capture, document, evaluate, and improve from the lesson learnt of a previously completed project. This will allow subsequent project to be delivered with better quality and better managed.

So, I can say that both Six Sigma and Kaizen, along with other standards, tools, and methodologies, can help a project manager in better manage her project.

Edwin

Scrum for beginners

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Good day...

In this post I will try to share some basic knowledge on Scrum, as one of the standard methodology in Agile delivery. As a disclaimer, despite that I am a certified scrum master, I am not an expert in Agile or scrum. For a more complete reference on this topic, you might want to refer to Scrum website (www.scrum.org) or books specifically discussing this topic.

In my understanding, the following are key things that distinguish Scrum for an SDLC / waterfall project delivery:

1. The basic and foremost benefit of running Scrum project delivery is to avoid a significant rework at a later stage of a project, by applying iterative delivery and prototyping technique. The iteration is normally in two to four weeks cycle, with two weeks is found to be the most popular duration of an iteration. One cycle of iteration is called a sprint (imagine of a sprint runner in an athletic game, who will run as fast as possible to reach the finish line immediately after the start sign sign is fired).

2. The success of scrum is highly dependent to strong collaboration within the scrum team, which in IT projects normally consist of a scrum master, developers, and quality controls. In my experience in delivering a project using scrum, we had additional roles of IT Architect, business analyst and system analyst, which could actually be undertaken by the developers.

3. Related to point 2 above, to be successful it is highly recommended that the scrum team consists of dedicated resources to the project (not shared across different projects), who are co-located in the same location. This is recommended to facilitate a closer communication among team members. I experienced once delivering a project using scrum approach across different geographical location. Although the project was completed successfully, we felt that the energy and time we invested could be lessen should the team was co-located in the same physical location.

4. Scrum emphasizes on each team member taking full accountability to their own piece of work by completing the work on time. Any late delivery of a piece of work will significantly impact the ability of other team members to deliver their part. Discipline of team members to attend all scrum ceremonies on time (daily huddles / stand up meeting, retrospective sessions, sprint planning, product / prototype demo, etc).

5. The role of a scrum master is to ensure that every team member is running their role and that all ceremonies and artifact are run and delivered appropriately.

At the end, Agile and Scrum is just a methodology. The commitment and dedication of the team members is the one which determines success.

Project manager in Digital era

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I can say that every business and role within a business is impacted by the emergence of digital technology. Project manager role is not excluded from the disruption.

While the basic characteristic of a good project manager remains the same from time to time, the expectation of the role evolves along with technology advancement. In digital world, the expectation of a project manager does not stop in a person leading a successful project delivery, but also, a person with innovative mindset towards digital transformation, or at least, digital implementation in an organization.

In my own experience, I am starting to shift my mindset from merely ensuring a successful delivery into a set of innovative ideas, which are applicable to the organization I am serving. Here, a project manager is undergoing a challenge on her business acumen. It is very important in this situation for the project manager to have a close communication with business heads of the organization and keep herself up to date with the development in the market.

Once the initiative has becoming a project, in digital world a project manager is expected to be agile. I am not saying that all projects should be delivered in Agile methodology per say, the agile term I am using here is more to the ability to shift priority, re-baseline the timeline, scope and budget, recruit, and manage the suitable resources, in order to adapt with the changes in the market.

A project manager is also expected to keep improving herself to be up-to-date with the latest technology, methodology, and challenges in delivering a digital project.

Another key qualification being required from a project manager in digital world is customer centric mindset, with customer sitting at the top of her mind in proposing an initiative and leading the delivery of a digital project. This is particularly true when the product is directly used by external users, such as digital distribution channels, electronic banking, etc.

In summary, it is essential for a project manager to consistently develop herself to be successful in entering digital era.

Edwin

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Project Manager in Agile World

Good day...

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Today I would like to share with an interesting topic with regard to being a good project manager in an Agile world. As you might already know, in Agile delivery methodology there is no official project manager role as the methodology strongly emphasizes on each team member to take full accountability their own work without relying to a project manager to tell the team what to do or what task to prioritize.

With the above understanding you might now start questioning what is exactly the role of a project manager in an Agile delivery. To be clear, a project manager is not the same as a scrum master, neither the role is supplementing each other. In short Agile does not recognize project manager role as part of the Scrum team (refer to my other posting on Scrum for a further detail).

In my personal experience, I ran a program manager role in a digital transformation project, involving more than one project, with each project has a number of streams. As some of the projects are touching the core system layer, in the program I ran there has been a mix between Agile and SDLC. In that case there was project manager and scrum master role leading different streams of work at the same time.

As the program manager, I oversee the entire timeline, budget, and scope of the multiple projects running in parallel. The program manager role was mainly to ensure alignment between one project to another in term of timeline and the systems being enhanced. In this type of program, a strong project management skill is highly required to be successful as a program manager. All key qualifications of a project manager, including communication, negotiation, and leadership are applicable to lead the program.

While in a pure agile delivery, a seasoned project manager normally transforms herself as a scrum master. It might not be an easy transition as the expectation of the two roles are completely different. While a project manager is expected to manage the team and lead the overall delivery of the project, a scrum master's role is more to ensure team collaboration and that every scrum ceremonies and artifact are run and delivered properly.

However, the characteristic of a project manager is entirely applicable in leading any delivery, including as a scrum master. As in any type of project, a strong leadership and management skill (people management, resource management, technical management) are considered key success factors, which should not be absence in any successful delivery.

Edwin

Powerful negotiation

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What comes first to your mind when you hear the word 'negotiation'? Are you thinking of making the other party agree with your goals and objectives, or, imagining a win-win situation when each party achieve part of their objectives? In my perspective, the latter one is the true objective of a negotiation. However, I can not agree more to the new paradigm being well elaborated in the book '3rd Alternative' authored by Stephen R. Covey, that we need to first try to achieve an alternative, when everyone wins by coming up to a 3rd alternative of the topic being discussed.

Although I do not consider myself as an expert in negotiation, in this posting I will try to share some tips on running a successful negotiation based on my personal experience:

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1. Be clear on the objective you try to achieve. Never enters into a negotiation without a clear mindset of the outcome you are trying to come out with. Be firm with your perspective toward the issue you are going to negotiate.

2. Understand the perspective of your counter party. With this in mind, you will lessen the tendency to force your own goal without considering your negotiation partner's perspective towards the issue.

3. Do your homework by first doing the necessary research towards the topic you are going to negotiate. Getting as much data, insight and feedback from the relevant stakeholders as possible is necessary to adjust your view point toward the issue. It is also best if you can get the support from someone superior to your negotiation partner prior to the discussion. In this case you can be more confident of your own stand point.

4. Be positive. Always enters a negotiation with a viewpoint to achieve a common benefit. A win-win situation, or a middle ground, when everyone gets a positive outcome of the negotiation. Avoid the situation when you enter a negotiation to win as much as possible while leaving your counter party at a win-loose situation.

5. In many cases, negotiation is not finished in one meeting. In this situation, you can always continue the discussion informally outside of a formal meeting, such as during lunch, coffee, or other more relaxing occassions. Again, an informally close relationship with your negotiation partner will lead to a higher success.

Well, that's what I can share about negotiation for now. I might share more tips as I grow more expertise in this domain.

Edwin

Becoming an extraordinary account manager

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Good day...

The title account manager or account management role is normally associated with sales and marketing work. Whether you are agree or not with the statement, I found that project manager role is closely related with account management work.

By definition, an account manager should maintain a close relationship with her customers, either to generate immediate sales or to secure more purchase orders in the future. As a project manager, program manager, or portfolio manager, the objective of applying a good account management skill is more specifically to ensure the  necessary support from your key stakeholders, including your project sponsor, internal customers, and business owners.

In my view, running the role as a project manager indirectly implies that you are selling your project to your sponsors while securing a mutually positive longer term relationship. In addition to that, as a portfolio manager, your role is very close to an account manager (see my other posting on account management). In most cases, within an organization the portfolio you are managing consists of a business or support functions, with the head and members of the particular function are your internal customers. When you are working for a consultant organization, your portfolio is normally the organization you are assigned to. In both situations, a strong account management skill is key to your success.

As with other management role, one key to be successful is close communication with your customers. In this case, a regular account meeting with your key customers (normally the business head and her direct reports) is a must. Once the account meeting is scheduled, you need to maximize the one or two hour session to build an interactive discussion, make the necessary commitments by both sides, share the longer term vision and initiatives of both sides. It is also very important that you use the account meeting to build the trust of your customers to your ability to deliver the project you are assigned to, as well as, to manage their initiatives portfolio.

A concise and informative dashboard should also be shared with your customers on regular basis. in a project, your customers would be interested to understand the progress of their projects on periodic basis, could be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, depending on the project duration and what phase of the project you are currently on.

You might also want to maintain a strong personal and professional relationship with each (or at least majority) of your stakeholders. Consistent and prompt response to their queries through e-mails, phone calls, whatsapp chat, and other means is mandatory to achieve the strong relationship and a high degree of trust. Delivering your commitments and closely communicating the progress of the actions being previously agreed are also key in this realm.

Just a tip, you might want to take a sales or account management course to be more advanced in this role.

Edwin

Portfolio management

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I guess the natural career progression of a project manager is to becoming a program manager and portfolio manager. As a portfolio manager you will be responsible not only to lead one project but more to oversee a number of projects running together in parallel, with each project has its own project manager.

Here, your task is more to coordination, projects alignment assurance, and managing the key stakeholders to maintain high satisfaction level of the respective stakeholders. In many cases, becoming a portfolio manager also serves the function as an account manager, whereby the main responsibility is to understand incoming business initiatives, do the necessary assessment whether the initiatives are recommended to be delivered, perform initial assessment of the involved budget, timeline and resources, and providing regular updates to the respective business owners on the progress of each project of their concern.

As a portfolio manager, in my experience the key tool is a concise dashboard, consolidating progress and health check status of all projects under your portfolio. The dashboard can be distributed to your internal (or external customers) via e-mail, newsletter, or a regular account meeting. For me, the last one is most preferred, as account meeting fosters interactive discussion, which sometimes go beyond project status, but also covers idea exchange and brainstorming of an emerging initiative.

Internal to an organization, your customers usually include business heads of a particular business or support function. Key success criteria to becoming a well respected portfolio manager in my case is the relationship with the business owners themselves. Maintaining personal rapport outside of meetings and informal discussions is always essential in both directions, namely to obtain the necessary support in doing our work, and to show personal ownership to the portfolio we are managing.

As with other leadership and management role, I found that communication and relationship are inevitable should you like to be successful in the portfolio management role.

Edwin

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Program Management

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The initial question I believe most of the readers will ask is 'What is the different between a project manager and program manager?'. According to Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) by PMI, a program is a group of project related to one another. In that case, becoming a program manager, you will oversee a number of different projects with close alignment to one another.

In my experience, I face this kind of interconnected projects usually when I am leading a large-size project, which can be called as a program. A good example of such project is digital transformation. In this  realm, there will be normally some different projects running in parallel to achieve the end state of the transformation. The different projects might include creating new digital channel, digitization of internal process, launching the related campaigns, product development, and so on.

The challenge of becoming a program manager is that you need to have an oversight to different projects, and juggling between one project to another. You also need to ensure cross alignment among all of the running projects to achieve the end objective. At the same time, you will be dealing with multiple internal and external stakeholders, which are normally overlapping across projects.

Based on my experience, to be successful in running this situation you will need to have strong project managers running each of the project. It is essential that each of the project manager you delegate the work to can complete each milestone according to the plan, as slip in one milestone might introduce serious impact to the other projects.

In delivering a program, routine consolidation meetings need to take place and a standardized dashboard needs to be established. The consolidated dashboard will give a clear overview of the projects status and overall program status. It is also very important that each project is being well represented during every checkpoint.

As the program manager, you are expected to play a key leadership role in motivating the team members to give their best performance and to meet the expectation of each project. In order to do so, team building activities, retrospective sessions, and other means of collaboration should be put in practice.

In reporting the progress to the higher management, it is recommended that you start with the consolidated dashboard and zoom in to the project(s) with key risks and issues. While for the on-track ones, you also need to clearly state the achievements and celebrate as appropriate.

Well, for you, who claim yourself a seasoned project manager, be ready for a next step to becoming a program manager.

Edwin

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Enterprise Architect

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The organization that I work for is fortunate to have an Enterprise Architect role. While not every organization has a dedicated team for the particular role, the role is essential to ensure alignment of system enhancement being delivered by a project with the overall system architecture of the organization.

In my organization, the enterprise architect is involved since the early stage of a project, namely to define the most suitable solution for a business requirement. In most cases, the involvement of an enterprise architect is as early as during initiative assessment, even before the initiative is approved to become a project. With this early stage involvement of enterprise architect, the organization can achieve higher system integrity and effectiveness.

Once the project is running, the enterprise architect assigned to the project will organize the necessary forums to decide the best solution among some possible options. The forums are attended by all IT department heads and higher level management to secure a concise decision. Prior to the meetings, the assigned enterprise architect would do the necessary research and perform a thorough assessment in order to come up with a meaningful solution options for the forum members to discuss.

In addition to project delivery, enterprise architect team is also playing a vital role in the formulation of IT strategy and IT roadmap in alignment with the organization's strategy. With a deep understanding of best solution in the industry, the team will provide a resourceful insight to possible IT developments and system enhancements necessary to achieve business goals. Having said that, it is very important for an enterprise architect to keep herself up-to-date with the new technology development and new solutions available in the market.

Edwin

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Vital role of a business analyst

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In the last training I led, I threw this question 'what stage of project delivery do you think is the most important toward a project success?' I was delighted to see that almost all of the participants answered with requirement gathering. Why is it true? As requirement gathering normally takes place at the early stage of a project, any flaw in this exercise will lead to a significant rework at a later stage.

I believe that most of us would agree that Business Analyst is the key person responsible for an accurate requirement documentation. Here a business analysis skill is key to ensure that complete and meaningful business requirement, and also to fully understand the impact of the project to other business processes and supporting units.

A skillful business analyst will do more than merely document what the business people want. With a thorough understanding of the entire business process of the organization and some understanding of the impacted system, she will be taking the role of a consultant, equipping the business people with full understanding of the impact of their requirement. One step further, in the best case the business analyst will advise the business people with alternative solutions, which are normally simpler and easier, with less disruption to the overall business process.

Once an agreement is reached on the solution, the business analyst will then write a complete and detail documentation of the main business requirement, impact to the surrounding business process and supporting units, as well as, any adjustment required to the business process or organization structure. A strong business analyst will also think of and document negative scenarios, namely when the user or customers perform an unexpected behavior in using the solution, or, other possibilities of system usage.

In addition to functional requirement, the role of business analyst has recently been expanded to non-functional requirement, which covers system performance and security measure. The non-functional requirement should also consider scalability of the system, along with the growth of business volume and number of users.

Now I believe you agree that business analyst plays a vital role in ensuring successful project delivery right from the beginning.

Edwin

Strategic Project Management Office (PMO)

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Today I would like to touch base on Strategic PMO. Well, in real life there might not be a dedicated organization called Strategic PMO. The role would be embedded within PMO organization. Hence what I am discussing here is more to emphasize the strategic role of a PMO.

When I say 'strategic' I am actually referring to the contribution of PMO to the overall strategy decision of the organization. In my role, PMO plays a vital role in determining the business initiatives to be executed in the coming fiscal or calendar year.

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In order to run the strategic function, below are some key points to be taken by a mature PMO:

1. The PMO should take the function of central processing of all business initiatives. This will give the team a full visibility towards the objectives and initiatives of each business unit and support function. In order to run the function, PMO should manage a close communication with all business units and act as an account manager accordingly.

2. PMO should have the access to higher level management in order to understand the organization's long term, medium term and short term strategy. In order for PMO to run this function effectively, senior management should share a detailed elaboration of their strategy, including the financial and non-financial target in the next one, three, five years and beyond. PMO should have a regular checkpoint with the senior management on the organization's strategy and roadmap. In this occassion, PMO should discuss the collected business initiatives to the senior management to ensure alignment with the organization strategy. Decision on which initiatives to be executed is to be made by the senior management accordingly.

3. PMO should come up with a prioritization framework based on a certain criteria, such as alignment with strategy, financial benefit, risk mitigation, compliance to regulatory, and operational efficiency / productivity. The framework should be discussed and agreed by the top management. Once the framework is approved, it is used as a baseline to shortlist and prioritize upcoming business initiatives.

Being able to run the above successfully will bring PMO to the next level, not only as an executor of the submitted business initiatives but also as a strategic partner to the senior management in defining the organization's direction.

Edwin

What is a Project Management Office (PMO)?

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During the trainings that I delivered, I learnt that many organizations have project management office (PMO) role supporting their project delivery. Nevertheless, I found that in most of them, the PMO acts more as a project administrator instead of running the real PMO function. So, what is a real PMO should do?

In my role at the organization I am working for, I also oversee PMO function. In my case, the main responsibilities of a PMO includes:

1. Managing project portfolio. One of the key strategic roles of PMO is to have full visibility of all in-flight and pipeline projects and act as a portfolio manager (I will cover this in detail in my next posting). The role includes providing oversight to the running projects, reporting the health check status of each project to higher management, assisting the respective project managers in overcoming roadblocks within the project, and acting as the point of escalation for the issues that a project manager can not resolve by herself.

2. Resourcing. As we understand that sufficient and qualified resource is key to a project success, here PMO plays a vital role in mapping between resource supply and demand, assigning the right resource to the right project. Resource here is not limited to human resources, but also covers other resources such as testing server environment, vendors, etc.

3. Financial management. While project manager is accountable to financial aspect of a project, PMO provides validation service to the incoming invoices from vendors, checking of project expenses, reporting project financial status to management, and highlighting any occurrence or potential of budget overrun. In many projects PMO is also helping project managers in creating budget forecasting using a set of formula designated for each type of projects.

4. Demand management. In my organization, PMO also runs the function as an account manager to business units, collecting the initiatives from each business units, shortlisting the emerging initiatives and making a prioritization list based on an agreed framework. I will touch base this role in my next posting).

I also understand that in more mature organizations, project managers are reporting under project management office. Here PMO has the make sure alignment between one project to another in term of timeline, budget availability, resource allocation, and project priority. Ideally, PMO organization consists of veteran project managers who can help on-the-ground project managers to resolve their challenges, or, if necessary to provide assistance to the running projects both as a consultant or project expeditor.

Edwin

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