The Project Management Systems Story

First, I want to thank you for your overwhelming response to the first video. For your comments on this site, on Facebook, Twitter and emails you sent. I am glad I did that video!

I promised I will talk about why your team does not use your project management system and why your projects fail.

Ok, so this is what happened to me.

It’s a Thursday morning. I check my emails, do a few follow ups and then start on the most important task for the day. I install our new web based project management system on the server. I create a test project and am happy with what I see. I think this tool can bring order to my life. I am looking after 40 projects and I need a good system to keep them on track. I’ve been looking for a system that works for a decade. I actually even created an internal project management system 8 years ago. But this is the best I’ve seen so far.

I am very excited I found it. I go ahead and create user accounts for my team. I also set up all projects and added people to them.

The next day, I show the system to my project managers. They are a little skeptical, but I think they will realize the benefits over time.

I use the system myself over the next two days and am even happier.

Now we have a full team meeting every monday afternoon. 3PM.

I unveil the new system to my team. I go through how projects are setup, how milestones, tickets and tasks work; and how they can track time using the system. I announce that this is the system we are going forward with and it’s compulsory for everyone.

What do you think happened next?

I was the only one who used the system actively. Everyone else tried best to come up with creative answers about why they can’t get on with the system. Some even tried to, but the way they organized their milestones, tickets and tasks – it was better left undone.

I described how I envisioned the system to be used to my project managers in our Thursday meeting. And we came up with an interesting idea.

The following Monday Meeting, we announced that logging 8 hours in the system is absolutely positively necessary. If an employee did not enter 8 hours up to next day 11AM, he or she will be marked absent for the day. They won’t be paid for the day.

Our usage spiked that week. I was happy.

Unfortunately, this did not last long. The very next week, it started dropping. And some smart guys started adding a single entry for 8 hours.

So I went ahead and wrote a script that will check if people entered 8 hours, and if there was any single time record of more than 2 hours. I even checked if their total exceeded 12 hours for the day. On all these events, my script would trigger an email notification to that employee, keeping me in CC.

I started getting dozens of notifications the next day onward. With little improvement in how people used the system.

Over next several months, I tried to incentivize good usage and punish non usage. I met with moderate success. Especially when I created the project plan and followed up closely.

But it was frustrating. I kept wondering why people do not understand the importance of organizing their work. Why would they not enter their time logs? Why could they not understand the simple relation of milestone, tickets and tasks?

Are you in a similar situation? Have you also tried everything you could imagine to get your team to use your project management system? Or to “effectively” use it?

Over the last 15 years, I was directly responsible for over 250 projects, leading nearly 400 people in all. I’ve always been obsessed with being organized and productive. I studied all project management practices, tried them first hand and actively promoted agile development methods.

And I figured why people did not use our project management system. And these are the same five reasons why your people don’t you use project management system.

Reason 1: Because it is boring

Your project management system is a “system”. It defines a set of processes people have to follow. Processes are routines. And routines are boring. We work in creative professions and creative people hate processes. Let’s admit, we don’t like rules. We don’t like a fixed way of working. We feel we are here to get the job done. Not to track time, or post updates on what I did in a system at the end of every day.

When people perceive a process as lengthy or complicated, denial is automatic. Denial is the default behavior for anything that seems big.

activeCollab, Basecamp, or any other system, can seem daunting to your team. It may seem like too much work. A burden to fill it everyday.

Here’s what you want to get: Whatever comes in the way of getting their job done, will become a boring overhead for creative people.

Reason 2: Because they don’t want to look bad

An open, web based, collaborative project management system is like a secret camera watching you throughout your working life. And when someone’s watching you, you don’t want to look bad. The easiest way to avoid looking bad, is to hide. If they don’t use the system, you won’t find out how good or bad they are. They can always cook up a reason for “not being able” to use it later.

One team member once confessed to me. She said she was junior and took longer than estimated times. When we estimated time for tasks, we entered that estimate in the project management system. But she did not log time against the task since she was afraid she would look slow.

When people think you have high expectations, you are watching them, and that their failures will work against them, they tend to avoid risk. Not using the system seems like a safe bet. The other choice is to do just enough to get away. Use the system to the minimal standards set so that they don’t show up on your radar.

The lesson? Most people are afraid of looking bad, hence stick to mediocrity. Your team is no different.

Reason 3: Because they don’t like to change

Why would you learn a new system when old will get the job done? People have their own styles of working, a system requires standards to be followed. Change means risk. Change means more work.

Even if you did not use any project management system earlier, you would have some un-documented / non-standard way of getting things done. You brought in a system because you wanted to standardize best practices and keep track of things. But that change may occur as threat to some.

None of us want unpleasant change. Some people even rebel and challenge the system when they can’t handle the change. It takes strong motivation to defeat inertia and establish new habits. Some people will go to the extent of proving the system wrong. Not because the system is bad, but simply because they don’t want to change!

In other words, if there is no clear advantage for your team to adapt the new system, they won’t.

Reason 4: Because the system is not embedded in your organization culture

For most organizations, a project management system is just another system. They have email, misc documents, project plans in Excel files, conference calls, review meetings, planning meetings etc. for project management. Then there are a bunch of other systems as well. Your project management system becomes an extension of existing systems. This also created multiple reference. A conference call would give a different picture of the project from an Excel sheet. There is no single source of truth.

Some organizations are also averse to failures. Someone who fails to understand or effectively use the project management system, may be criticized. An organization culture that does not accept failures will take ages to accept any change.

At the same time, for them, managing projects is not their job. It’s the manager’s job. So it should be the manager who uses project management system. Their job is to just get work done.

So: If people do not realize the importance of your project management system; if you don’t refer to your project management system in your day to day conversations, they will avoid spending their time on it.

Reason 5: Because of you

If you noticed, all four points I mentioned earlier, are your team’s perceptions. You and your team perceive the project management system differently. For you, it is a way to get organized, it is the tool to succeed. For them, it’s someone else’s problem they are stuck with. An unavoidable change they are struggling to cope up with.

It is not their fault. Neither yours.

Your perceptions are different. You are looking at this from two different sides.

Like me, you may be trying out every new technique to make your team understand the importance of your project management system. But we spend little time understanding them. We do not realize that their expertise and experience levels are different. Their aspirations and struggles are different. They will obey and follow certain rules, but you won’t get optimum results unless you develop deep compassion for them – the end users of your system.

This is the biggest reason why they don’t use the project management system. It’s because the system does not solve their problems. It solves your problems. When you look at the situation from their perspective, listening with deep compassion, then and then only can you get their buy-in.

And what you want to get, is that there is nothing wrong here.

Don’t let early disappointments deter you. Show them a new trick once in a while. Don’t keep switching project management systems because one did not work.

When you start seeing their side, things go much smoother.

Why Your Projects Fail

OK, we now know why people don’t use your project management system. Now I am going to reveal four reasons why your projects to fail.

Reason 1: You don’t know where you want to go

Projects are journeys. If you are not certain about the destination, you can’t reach there. When we start on the project, we only have a top level view of what the project should accomplish. Most clients have a vague sense of what they want. No matter how well we try to define and document the requirements, we discover details when we are closer. We always learn the most about something when we are actually doing it.

A fixed, known target is easier to hit than a target that keeps moving. All estimates are guesses.

Lack of clarity leads to confusion. The easiest action in confusion is no action. And non action and resignation lead to failure.

The point to take home? Develop and propagate the vision of your projects.

Reason 2: You don’t know how to get there

No matter how much experience you have, every project is new. Every project has its own challenges. It could be a new market, team or technology. You or your team may not know how to execute the project. We may have a good understanding of overall implementation, but the devil is in the detail. And we generally have a tough time getting around those details.

Most projects start off well and start struggling midway. Some get stuck on the last 10%, and the last 10% takes 90% of time and cost. These are signs that we do not know what it takes to complete the project. We are shooting in the dark.

Sometimes you have a team that does not have much experience in the project. The challenges of the project are way beyond their skills. This will lead to frustration, loss of productivity and delays. Most projects begin with little risk analysis. And even if they do, they don’t execute riskiest things first. This leads to shocks and surprises later on.

Question for you: do you have clear direction for success?

Reason 3: You don’t track how far you’ve reached

We may take regular status updates, but are we tracking what forwards a project and what pushes it back? What are the key performance indicators for your projects? Are you tracking them on a regular basis? What action do you take when you notice an anomaly? Send an email to the person responsible, and then hope it will be taken care of?

Success is a big motivator. When team members know the project is progressing well, they are more likely to complete it well. Weekly iterations, big visible charts, reviews and follow ups – they are all critical to a project’s success.

Do people know what you are tracking? Have you setup clear and specific milestones?

You must allocate sufficient time every week for tracking and course correction. You want to correct the course of your journey before it’s too late.

Reason 4: Who’s project is it anyway?

Does the project belong to the client? Is it the organization’s project? Is it the project managers? What is your contribution to the project? Do you determine success of the project?

For most people, their contribution to the project is the work they are assigned. Small work that makes little different can not light fire in their bellies. If your team does not get a sense of ownership there is little chance you will succeed.

In our last Monday Meeting, my team members told me they love working on products because they can see their contribution clearly. They know the software they are developing is going to be useful to thousands of people. When the download counter rings one more, their hearts fill with joy. It’s no longer the organization’s product. It’s their own. They drive the show. They make customers happy. They make the difference.

When you can create this sense of belonging and ownership, everything else will fall in place. When they see this is their project, they will do everything to succeed. It’s just natural.

So What Can You Do About This?

With that, let’s move to the most important part of this vide.

Now that you know all this, what can you do about it? What can you do to make your team use your project management system more effectively? How can you improve the chances of success for your projects?

Here are some things you can try.

1. Train your team

Train your team on business. About productivity. About technology. Share your experiences with them. Give them stuff they can learn on their own. Create a common vision. Start looking at things from their point of view. Demand the best from them and give them all the support and encouragement while they get there. Start a weekly joint meeting with your team. Let them know the impact of their work – how it affects the organization and customers – both positive and negative. Share tricks about how they can use the system better. Make them think about how everything can be improved.

Alter your attitude towards them and you will suddenly discover a new team!

2. Iterate weekly

It’s impossible to set clear and specific vision and direction for the entire project. Don’t try to. Have an overall vision and direction for the project. But then iterate weekly to define clear goals and action items. Take riskiest things first. Track and share key performance indicators. Change the project plan as you need to. Strike balance between features, time and cost. Have some deliverable every week. Iterate until you succeed.

3. Adapt the system to your needs

No system will be perfect. No system will do everything you want it to. What you can do is adapt it to your needs.

If you are using activeCollab:

• Uninstall modules you don’t use
• Define system and project roles so that people only see what they need to
• Are you using Checklists or Pages? Can you switch to Tickets and Discussions?
• Use template projects to create new projects. This will bring structure.
• You can use our Tickets Plus module to add workflow status to tickets. Or any of our other modules. We take extra efforts to make them easy and useful.
• Create private, personal projects for each of your team members. Let them use those for non project specific items
• Use the Incoming Mail module and route as much email through activeCollab as you can
• Create some informal communication channel to share success, insights and interesting items. Use a special project for this or use Status Updates
• Let activeCollab be the single source of truth

4. Be a role model

Be a star user of the system yourself. If people see you practice what you preach, they will follow you. Your team always looks up to you for inspiration. Share your insights with them. Tell them how you use the system. Appreciate it when they do good. Be their role model.

A Warning

Now before coming to a close, I want to give you a warning.

See, knowledge makes no difference. Knowing all these reasons or tricks won’t make any difference to you. You probably knew some of this already and it has made no difference so far.

Keep in mind that despite all this, things will not go as per your plans. Projects will be late. People won’t use your system. Everything will go haywire.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Instead of blaming situations and people, shift your attention on what you can do that will give you power.

Focus on a single action you can take that will move your projects forward. Take that action. Review the results.

And iterate until you succeed.

Close..

You can also go over this video again. Note down your insights. Pick one action you can take. Then do it.

I am going to work on the next video – where I will talk about starting your own business and developing products.

In the meanwhile, keep your comments coming.