Project Management Masterclass - Spinning plates: A day in the life of a Project Manager

1. An introduction into the day in the life of a Project Manager: Hi, I'm Matt Corroboy. I'm a software projects director and writer on all things productivity and leadership and project related. In my day job, I run an awesome team of 12 projects and program managers who run a combined total of tens of millions of dollars worth of projects in the life sciences business. When hiring new people, inducting them into the business or trying to get project managers to think a little bit differently about their role that I've got this concept of spinning plates a day in the life of the project manager to really help a project manager think really carefully about what they need to be considering on a day-to-day basis. What I've found is that no matter who I've spoken to when I've interviewed people, no matter what their background is and what type of projects they've run from wherever they come from, that we all agree that some of these basics are fundamental to any type of project. We all have common ground or a set of key topics. This course today is going to step through those concepts that a successful project manager needs to be thinking about. For the class project, I'll ask you to pause routinely after each class to consider the type of question that's being asked and how that might apply to your own project or your own potential future projects that you may work on. The intention here is to create your very own day in the life model. If you're new to project management and this is a future career for you, then this is a sure-fire way of fast tracking you into that business and really standing out from day one in the job. A word of note, this isn't about methodology. This is about having a template or a checklist or a reference of things that you need to do every day in order to deliver successful projects. This is about being ahead of the curve and not reacting to things as they come up. By the end of this class, you will have your own mind map or own checklist that you'll be able to use as a reference that will help you excel as a project manager in the day-to-day. You'll be able to start each day in your job with a clear perspective on what you should be focusing on that day, tomorrow, next week, and where the risk areas for the project may be. I'll also be looking to give you some tips on how to continually refine this model and assess the effectiveness of it as you proceed and we'll deal with that towards the end of the course. So let's get going and let's start getting our head into the right mindset of what we mean by the day in the life of a project manager. 2. This is not about methodology!: If you're in any type of career that deals with projects, then you don't have to go too far before all the talk is about methodology. We've got PMP, PMI, Scaled Agile, Kanban, Waterfall, the Agile PM, and MSP, a whole array of different methodologies, or it could just be a mashup of them all. I'm not going to talk about the good, the bad, the pros and cons of any of these methodologies, they all have their merits, nor am I going to talk about any specific tools that you may be using in order to fulfill your job as a project manager. These also have their place, so no talk of MS project, Jira, Atlassian, Trello, Asana, base camp or any other tool. These are all tools in a locker or project manager and the project teams in order to do their job effectively, and it's great. You may end up spending all of your time in these types of tools day in, day out, because that's the tool of choice for the business that you're in. I want to move away a little bit from the what, and the how a more towards the why, to really understand why we do what we do. Why are we interested in having a schedule and tracking against it? Why would we want to know what the budget is or the business case for the projects? Who are the stakeholders and why should we care to be a great project manager, you need to be able to transcend some of these concepts and start to think differently. That way you can tackle any type of project with a deeper of understanding of what some of these fundamentals are. Methodologies at times can force people through a very fixed way of thinking; a state machine of sort, where there isn't; if this, then do that approach, to the work that you've been given. These things concern to be useful and I'm sure you'll be using them in any of the businesses that you're operating in. But I want us to think a little bit more fundamentally than this. I want you as an exceptional project manager, to be able to talk passionately about why you do what you do, and not need to look at reference manual to decide on what the next steps of the project and they have to be. I talk a lot when I interview people about understanding the job with both the head and the heart. And this is why it's fundamental, to really understand what you should be doing on a day-to-day basis. This class is not about methodologies around project management. This is about what you, as a professional project manager, should care about every day on the job. 3. What are the spinning plates?: Whether it's a short-term project with just a few project members or a large, sprawling, global project with many many different aspects over many years, then I like to think about the job as a project manager, as like spinning plates in a circus or on a stage. The concept here is to think about each critical aspects of the project being one of those spinning plates, and the job of a project manager is to make sure that all of those plates continue to be spinning all of the time, with each critical aspects of the project being a spinning plate. Your job as a project manager is to make sure and is accountable for ensuring that none of those plates falls to the ground. You have to remember that the job of a project manager is to successfully manage projects. Unfortunately, not all projects are successful and there's a clear distinction between the two. How do we successfully manage projects? Well, we have to think about all aspects of the projects all of the time. We have to make sure that things are in hand and are being dealt with on an ongoing basis. We have to know that things are being managed and are in hand all of the time. It's important to note that the spinning plates analogy doesn't mean that you as a project manager is the single person spinning all the plates on a project. You are accountable for all the plates to be spinning and it may be that there's all the people in the project that are spinning these plates for you. You might not actually be spinning any or you could be spinning some, but your job is to ensure that those plates are spinning. That may mean that you held power occasionally in various different areas or you may actually be responsible for a specific plate and keep that spinning but as a PM, it's about being accountable for them all spinning, and at times helping out, and the other time showing leadership to ensure that they all stay in the air. What are the spinning plates that a project manager needs to be considering on a day-to-day basis? Well, in this course, we're going to go through each of those items in a day-to-day list. Now this doesn't claim to be an exhaustive list of every single thing that a project manager needs to be aware of. There may certainly be things that you are considering that isn't in this list, which is perfectly fine, but these are fundamentally the basics that should be considered irrespective of the project that you're engaged in. We're going to talk about risks. We're going to talk about risk management and what we actually mean by this. We're going to talk about change management and how it's so important as a project manager to be proactive in our management of business change. We're going to talk about R and R, roles and responsibilities, accountability on how you can lead to bring the longer team and get the best out of them. We'll talk about schedule management, road maps and tracking which is often a track for project managers where in a spinning plates analogy, you can spend far too much focus there and if you did micro managing the day-to-day and not creating good systems, then other plates will fall. We'll discuss escalation management and how just raising flags up to senior management isn't good enough. We'll talk about stakeholder management and what we mean by that and what you should be considering day-to-day. We'll talk about process management something that's often overlooked, but if you're in any type of industry, which I am, where there is a huge regulatory oversight and requirement, then this is something you really have to pay attention to. I'm also going to touch on being a leader and what we mean by that. We'll talk finance, the business case, and the budget. We'll look at metrics, KPIs, and how we measure success and we'll naturally cover reporting because that's pretty much all we do. Finally, we'll talk about the extended project life cycle, which is if you're a project manager looking after programs of work or even value streams, then these are some of the things you need to consider. Let's move forward and tackling each of these in turn. It's fundamental that a project manager has these in their head and is able to address every single one of them. If you're working on projects now or just about to start on a project and I want you to really think as we go through this about what some of these concepts means for your projects today, ask the questions as I do as we go through this for your project. Hopefully you'll see benefit to some of those questions being there on a day-to-day basis. Let's start with the first topic, let's start with risk. 4. Risk Management: Let's start with an often overlooked component of many projects and that's risk management. Actually, if you only do one thing on a project, if you only took one concept away from this class and took it into your own projects then it should be risk management. Risk is actually the parent of all the other elements within the day in the life model. If you thought for long enough about the success or the outcomes of a project that you're in, then all the other elements of the day in a life model would materialize. If there's risk that the project won't deliver on time, then we may want to track it. If there's risks that the customers or stakeholders won't accept the product, then you might need to consider stakeholder management and engagement. If there's a risk that maybe the fund did not get pulled midway through the project, then maybe we need to be careful and mindful of the budget. What do we talk about when we talk about considering risks? Risk management is not issue management, is not meant to be about reacting to things that have happened, it's about getting ahead of the curve and putting plans in place to ensure that those things don't happen, and are mitigated or in the circumstances where they may occur that you already have a plan in place to respond. Every time I look at the day in a life model, there's probably three questions that I should be asking myself around risk management. Firstly, do I out risk management systems in place? The second one, is there any risk that needs managing today or tomorrow, any actions that need following upon? Thirdly, is there the potential for any new risk that's materialized since I last addressed that question. You could be working on a very sprawling project in a very controlled environment with very clear risk management processes in place, or risk management could be an artifact that occasionally gets talked about and isn't really given justice. Either way, every day, give yourself the prompt. What should I be considering around risk today? I normally like to tie risk management into the concept of issue management as well. If you're really lucky, also look at opportunity management, but the same concepts only applies for issues. What issues have come up? What issues do I need to act on? What issues do I need to follow up on? Is there anything I need to do today, tomorrow, next week, etc, in relation to those issues? What risk measures do you have in place today? Are you ahead of the curve? Are you on the front foot? Or are you always reacting to issues as they occur, not feeling like you're in control? Remember, we can all be firefighters, we can all be heroes, running around, calming a crisis. But actually, the really good project managers, the ones that really make a difference are the ones that keep an even key role, everything's very calm and because of the risk management structure in place, some of those issues, some of those fires never actually happen. A good analogy I like to think about is the film, the 'Minority Report' with Tom Cruise, where you've got this ability to see things happening before they actually really occur, where you really want to try and get to is to be that Tom Cruise character, where you have the ability to see the issues before they happen, capture them as risk, put management plans in place to mitigate them, and then you never have to put those fires out. I want you to pause the video now. Think about risk management, think about what you may need to do on your projects to be better in this area and what mechanisms you need to put in place to consider these concepts every single day. 5. Change Management: As a distant cousin to risk management, there's also a change management and change management is a sprawling field with many different concepts around how we should approach it. Now what we're talking about today is not change management. In a technical sense, we're talking about the management of business change. Maybe in your organization, there's been an org structure, a change in budgets, a change in priority or a very large change in goals, maybe business processes of change. Maybe somebody has left, maybe someone has come in or maybe we're moving in an entire team onto a different projects. These are all changes from the status quo and from the current environment because change happens all the time. But it's absolutely vital as a project manager that we're proactive in terms of the way we manage and address change, we need to think deeply about any changes that may be happening and ask ourselves a series of simple questions. Change can happen overnight, It can happen under our noses without any prior communications. The key for being a project manager though, is to react to that change proactively. Don't be on the side of the curve where you're pushing against that change. You want to be in control managing the change. Some of it you don't have a choice in, but you do have to lead in this area. Change often fails in organizations because the impacts of the change aren't fully considered. Employees resist or push back on the change or even completely rebel against it because they don't understand the why. Your job as a project manager is to do much better here and take accountability for that change. Whether the changes come from you as a project manager or come from the business itself, it's massively important that you manage it proactively. You have to think carefully about it, what change has happened, and why, who is impacted by the change? Can it be explained in detail? Who needs to be involved in helping to manage this change? How should we communicate? What does success look like at the end of the change cycle. Give people the chance to voice their concerns, communicate really well. In fact, over-communicate in this regard, and always make sure you can explain the why. If the change is done for the right reasons, If you're sincere in the message around the change, even if it impacts people, I think you're already halfway there. For your project, be prepared when you review your day in the life model, ask yourself the question, has there been some new change that has come in? Is there any change currently ongoing that needs managing today? Are there any actions to follow through on? Don't ignore change and hope for the best. Take ownership of change of anything that's within your projects and do the right thing. Pause again, think about the project that you're currently engaged in or you may be starting and think about how you might want to manage change. How are you going to see change when it occurs and what type of questions will you set yourself so that every day when you look at your day in the life model, that you're going to be able to assess whether you need to act or not based on what's happening around you. Pause the video now and think about that before we move to the next section. 6. Roles and Responsibilities: Most projects will involve more than just yourself. Now, even if it's just you and your partner it's really important that you get straight who is responsible for what part of the project? Every day when you think about the day life modeling, you talk about roles and responsibilities, you need to ask yourself whether everyone in that core project team understands that the role that they currently have, do they understand what they are accountable for? Is anybody not doing what you or the business expects of them? Working with the project teams early on and the project kickoff phase of any project is absolutely vital to really lay down the expectations that everyone else has of everybody else's roles. Now, I'm not a fan of racy diagrams where you look at who's responsible, accountable, who's going to be consulted or informed on any particular aspect of the project, because I think in reality it's a lot more mashed up than that. Especially, if you're a small project where everyone's doing everyone else's roles or even on a sprawling project, where you wanted to be a little bit more ad hoc and free in some of your decision making at the right time. The reality is that these things rarely work. Invariably working on a project will involve a lot more ad hoc discussions and decision makings at times and even though having very strict adherence to a racy could help in certain circumstances. The opposite and which we want to avoid is the, "That's not my role or why was I not informed? It says so on this piece of paper." Invariably in a project, discussions, and challenges, and decisions often happen outside of those racy diagram pictures and they become a lot more ad hoc. The danger with our racy approach is that you end up with people saying, "That's not my job or they weren't on this list. Therefore, I didn't speak to them." and for me it promotes opposite ends of a spectrum where you can have total disownership of an issue or the opposite where no, I'm the responsible person for making this decision and therefore I'm going to act, when actually, it's normally a little bit more subtle of that and we've got to play sometimes within the gray. What's really important here is that we are fundamentally aware of who's accountable for each platelet spinning. If you think that somebody isn't doing that job to the level you expect in order to make sure that the project is successful, then what you shouldn't do is you shouldn't be taking control of that plate yourself. I've seen many project managers actually fail in projects and fail in leadership because they've taken control of that spinning play. There are potentially two traps here that as a project manager you could fall into. The first one is the track where you end up spinning that plate for them and the second trap is where you then blame that other person for not doing the job that you expect and being better at the fact that you've got to spin that plate for them. Take your own accountability as the project manager for this piece of work. I love the whole philosophy that comes from Jocko Willink, the US Navy seal leader, where he talks about taking ownership and not blaming anyone in there. So ask yourself the question, if we have this issue where somebody isn't doing the job that you expected them, but ask yourself, what have you done to explain your expectations better with that individual? Take ownership of that challenge. You take ownership of the problem with our individual reset expectations align again and then move forward. Now, there are always exceptions to the rule. There's always times where everyone's got a chip in and help someone else out or it's massively important that you roll you're sleeves up and get deeply involved in a specific issue on the project. That happens, but don't fall into the trap of that being the norm, especially if you're on a large projects with lots of people already in these roles, don't do that job for them. That's a sure-fire way of losing motivation and support from that individual when a simple conversation to reset and align expectations could be all it needs to kick start and move forward again. As simple as that, be clear as to who's involved in the projects and the expectations that you and everyone else has on those individuals. Who is spinning some of these plates with you. If your project now, I want you to pause and think about that. Who are the key people involved in making things happen on a day to day basis? That could be a small core team on a large sprawling projects. It could just be a small team on a small project or you could be considering all aspects on a 150 person project. But pause now and think about whether it's clear as to what the expectations are on the individuals and whether there might be something that you need to do tomorrow on this to address those concerns, and what questions would you ask every day to make sure you stay on top of that? 7. Project Tracking: This is the most fundamental. The job of project manager is having a plan, managing a plan, and reporting against that plan. Naturally, it's super important that you understand where you are against that plan at any given point in time. I'm assuming at this point in time that you do have a plan in place and maybe there's another class at a future point in time where I'll talk about some of those tactics, but for now we'll assume that your project has a plan. I have waited software over many years where the day-to-day tactical strategies for managing progress, status, tracking, story points, and burn-down charts are vast and it can be very easy in these circumstances to get uber focused on the detail, trying to get the perfect tool that's going to give you the perfect answer. In some cases is, it maybe the right thing to do, but certainly in others it might not be. Whether you're managing a $3 billion defense contract or managing the extension for your next door neighbors house, then you really do need to be aware of where you stand against that plan. It is really important therefore to establish your mechanism for tracking progress as you start the project. What are you going to look at that's going to tell you how you're proceeding? What is going to tell you how you're progressing? Do you have a work breakdown structure that you're tracking against? Are you doing full-on earned value analysis or are you counting jewelry tickets assuming up the business value delivered? Burn downs, burn ups, road-map tracking and Gantt chart percentage progress, all will have their values at the right time. Just don't go spending all of your time. The worst case scenario is you going from coal to coal, desk to desk getting status updates and an infinite loop looking at individual tasks. What you've got to do is remember the 80/20 principle, Pareto's Law. Because if you're not careful as a PM, then you will end up spending all your time here. You can easily get lost update and plans and percentage progress in repose, thinking that this might be your job, but as is the analogy with the spinning blaze model, other aspects of the projects will fail if you do that. Build accountability in others, set the status intervals, measure, and adjust. I've personally had to speak with many project managers that have spent weeks, if not months, moving things around on a board, tracking the minutia of every detail, so runs over now. It's fundamentally you have to have a way of tracking progress on the project, being able to understand the status so that you can act accordingly on that. Just because you may trigger this question every single day in terms of what are the status of this project, that doesn't mean you have to act on every single day. If your last reporting period or last status update was only three days ago, then you don't need to do anything today, but that mento knows where you were, when's my next interval, and then you proceed with some of your tasks. The fundamental question though is, do we know where we are against that plan? Do I need to act on anything today? Are we ahead? Are we behind? Are all the stakeholders aware of where these projects are? If the wheels of the projects haven't fallen off since the last update, then you don't need to do anything today and you can proceed to looking at some of the other spinning plates. For your project now, for the class project, I just want you to pause again and think a little bit carefully about your specific project. What ways are you able to measure how you're proceeding through the project? Is your coming really strict than what they want to see and maybe there's some discussion that needs to take place to understand whether there's an easier way of doing that. But really think carefully about your status intervals, what measures you've got in place, what you might want to adopt in order to be able to, again, what you're trying to do here, is stay ahead of the curve, be able to understand where you are and put plans in place which will make you better moving forward. What you shouldn't be doing is reacting because you've just realized because the intervals were too big that you're miles away on the projects since the last report. Think about your project. Now pause the video and reflect on the question about, do you understand where you are on the project? What tracking measures you've got in place, and whether there's something that you need to do specifically for your project that's going to get you better and control of that. Again, remembering that 80/20 principle and not doing too much work in there and not getting value back at the end of it. Pause the video now, have a look at that and I'll see you in the next section. 8. Escalation Management: You're running a project, everything is running smoothly and then boom, something happens, the wheels wobble, everything shakes and there's a big issue that it's actually going to put the projects itself into exception of some sort, and you might have to raise a flag and asked for some help or a decision or an acknowledgment of where you stand. Now, whether you're seeking advice from a decision or project board, or whether you need more money or some other aspect of the project that's being discussed, then you need to manage that. You need to manage that message. In complex projects, you may actually have the circumstance where there's many different aspects of the project that are an exception at any given point in time. First of all, please don't hide away from the truth in this, don't sweep those problems in the road hoping that they get dealt with, you have to proactively manage this. Business sponsors, project boards, and business owners are usually very busy people doing lots of different activities, and just because you've raised a flag and passed on some ownership doesn't mean they're actually dealing with our issue. You actually have to manage that relationship and manage that escalation on an ongoing basis, even if the decision or the ask is with another person. The reality is that the escalation remains and it's your job on an ongoing basis to chase up that escalation chase or management of that, making sure that there's a resolution, that resolution could be that you've just been given some more money in the project, it could be that the project extensions been agreed or maybe a critical decision around scope versus time or quality needs to be pushed, and you need to be able to reach out for that information so that you can proceed with the rest of the project. It may be that you just need to compound on that message around that escalation. On a daily basis actually self the question here, are there things that I've been escalated that I need to manage? Are there things that need to be pushed forward? Do I need to follow up on that e-mail again or pick up that phone and speak to that business sponsor? Think carefully about that and make sure each day you are addressing escalations that are floating around the project. As a word of advice of somebody that's sound the other end of those escalations on a continuous basis, please don't raise an escalation in such a way that it's sorry, we're over-budget, or sorry, we're going to be late on a project, just letting you know without actually talking about how you as a project team and you as a project manager or looking at opportunities of managing there for the benefit of the project so that we don't have to react or just accept it for what it is. It's really important that you as a project manager, talk about what you're going to do about it, what's your side of the bargain? How are you going to learn from the lessons that may be of a reason of getting to that escalation? What's going to change on the project to make sure it's better manage moving forward? Once again, I've seen too many projects asking for more money, asking for extensions in time without real justification of why and the lessons learned and how we're going to mitigate further future risk on the project. Be careful, show that your project needs money today. But why won't it happen again? What are you doing about it? It's different. It's really important that you take ownership here. Now, if you're running a really small project, then you might look at this and think, well, I'm not escalate into anyone, I don't really need to be concerned about this, but actually, projects are rarely delivered on time, in full, on budget. Even project managing your names extension will come into issues and challenges that you need to communicate early on, raise flags on and discuss early in order to make decisions around budget, timelines, etc. I want you to pause at this point in time and think carefully about your projects that you're currently operating in, and is there a system in place for managing escalations? If not, then maybe you can look at creating one of those. Are there any escalations that you've made? Do you expect them to get resolved on their own or you are you managing them actively? Think carefully about that question. It needs to sit in your daily life model, I think if you get this one wrong, then it can have real big consequences where there's a whole bunch of assumptions made on your side that things are getting done, and senior stakeholders not acting on escalations because they are under the impression that it's been dealt with by the project. Make sure you manage these things pause the video now, think about what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, and I'll see you in the next class. 9. Stakeholders: On any given project, there are people that are really interested in the outcomes or the ongoings within the project, they have a stake in the project hence the name stakeholder. The day in a life task here of a project manager, is to think about who those stakeholders are and ask yourself whether you are communicating with them effectively, are they engaged in the project on a day to day basis? Are you informing them of progress at the right level of intervals? Has anything changed on the project that need sharing with those stakeholders? Are you happy with their involvement? Is their voice being heard and is there anybody that I'm not considering on the project that could have a negative impact on the success that we're trying to achieve? Again, I'm not going to talk about very specific tactics around stakeholder management here but, often I'm presented with just a list of names of stakeholders, people who are in and around the project with potentially, if you're really lucky, a list of how you they're going to get communicated to, but this is really just the tip of an iceberg around stakeholder management. What I'm really interested in is, stakeholder analysis, starting at the beginning of the project and brainstorming, who's involved in this project and not just their level of involvement but what's their level of interest and also their level of influence in the day to day activities. Doing true stakeholder analysis can really enrich the project you are in and will give you much more focus and much more resolution on which stakeholders may need more engagement than others and which projects need to be looked after. Being a project manager often involves you doing some of the uncomfortable things and sometimes doing things that you won't agree with. I once remember working with a project manager where we identified as key stakeholder, if they weren't engaged in the right way, it could actually have a really negative impact on the project and we discussed the way forward with this project manager as how to deal with that stakeholder and variably ended with the project manager having a weekly one to one with this individual just to keep them happy and feeling engaged in what was happening in the day to day. Now, this may have been 20 minutes, half an hour, a week of the project manager's time and they may have been frustrated by that to some degree. But actually the benefit that came out of that, from stopping that from being a potential issue rise during the project later on. It was invaluable really, but very hard to measure, but it's that tough stuff that we have to do occasionally. Stakeholder analysis often leads then to a communication plan and how you plan to engage with those stakeholders on a regular basis, including in what way, in what media. What you need to do, is not just think about that communication plan and stakeholder analysis as something that happens at the beginning of the project and then gets locked away, a lot of things change in the course of a project, in the course of an 18 month project, many things could change, the stakeholders can come and go, that position when the organization and their interests can change, so it's really important that both the stakeholder analysis and the communication plans related to those stakeholders are looked at on a regular basis. It's also really important that you work with those stakeholders to understand what they feel about that communication plan themselves, are they happy with their level of engagement? Are they looking for more or less? Are they consumed by the information you're giving them? Then you may need to make some adjustments. From a day to day basis, this is quite a fundamental one really, that when we look at stakeholder management, that we really, really pause and think about whether we're truly managing that to the best of our ability because it's one of those plates again that if it isn't managed well, can completely derail the opportunity to deliver a successful project. Again, class project time, I want you to just pause for a second and think carefully about the project that you run today and ask yourself honestly, do you have stakeholder analysis in place? Do you engage well with those stakeholders? Do you ask for feedback from those stakeholders? Think about what you're doing on a day to day basis there and almost rate yourself as to how you're going about your stakeholder engagement. Now what's really important here is to take away from this, that this is fundamental, if you get this wrong, then the whole world could be against you and you really have a battle when you're trying to release a project or release a product and people are disagreeing just because they weren't involved right from day one and you weren't working with them, so pause the video now, think about that in your own day and your life model and I'll see you in the next class. 10. Process Management: There are a few worlds where you can complete a project without having a design history file or some traceability to requirements or compliance to a specific process. Regulations and standards are the norm in most professional organizations if this is in your world than you can certainly skip along to the next video, but the reality is as a project manager, you're not really going to go very far if you're not aware of this subject. So for most of you, you'll have processes and procedures that you have to follow as you go through the course of your project. You will have documents and artifacts that may need producing as you go through various cycles. Your project might have deliverables at different gates with full traceability of being required from requirements to development activities and designs, to verification and validation activities to get you to a release. If you're really lucky then a lot of these process deliverables may come for free as an artifact naturally out of the engineering cycles, but also some might not and you need to be aware of which artifacts have been created by who and which are owned by you and follow up on those. Now where I've seen projects really fail in the past is where some of these critical deliverables are not managed on an ongoing basis. They're not given the attention that they deserve to stay on top of them. Invariably you get towards the back end of a phase or of the project itself, and there's a realization that you need to create all of these artifacts, this traceability and this design history file the back end of the project, and it becomes a mad rush to get those things done. The reality is that this is not good enough.There's too much risk and too much issue management that comes around with that. One thing we talked about his having discipline here. The reality in all of this is that you may ultimately end up delivering a successful project, but you haven't successfully managed the project. So the reality for the day in the life model here is to be aware of what you need to be doing on an ongoing basis around process management. Be aware of where you stand against some of those deliverables and make sure you're planning to be ahead of the curve and the creation of them where that's possible. So ask yourself simple questions like, what is the health of the documentation? What may I need to do today to increase that health, to make it green rather than amber. Make it amber rather than red. So just even pausing for one minute each day to ask a question around what you're doing around process management can actually have a major, major impact. It may result in me just say in a five-minute tasking myself to then go, these are the artifacts that I need to create this week, these are the actions, this is what I am going to follow with, these are the owners. Throw out a couple of meetings, one with quality, one with a senior stakeholder, and start driving some actions. But the fact that I was triggered on just pausing and reflecting on a regular basis around this was really the catalyst for me to be in control and make things happen. You don't need to go too deep on this, this is literally a mental check, 60 seconds knowing where you stand. Do I act? Do I not? and start to feel in control as a result of that. So class project time again, let's pause the video and think about your specific projects. Think about what documentation and artifacts you're expected to create in your day to day. How are you managing that on a day to day basis. Are there things you need to do today and tomorrow in order to improve in this area? Just pause for a second, think about that and then we'll move on to the next class. 11. Be a leader: not by title!: [MUSIC] Let's talk about leading now, this is my favorite section in the day in the life model and the most enjoyable part when I sit down with teams and talk about PMOS and talk about the job of a project manager and what we mean by leading. The reality is as I expect project managers to lead, in fact I expect everyone to lead in their day to day. But if there's a position where it's written down and totally expected it's that of a project manager. What do I mean by lead? Of course we can all be leaders in our day-to-day activities. But what I mean when I talk about a project manager, when I talk about leadership is not by title, not by racy, it's written in the rules of the project manager is accountable for this and therefore when I say this you do that. That's not what I'm looking for here. I'm talking about leading by example, I'm talking about leading by motivating others, by being an inspiration, by being a driver and a positive person within the project to drive things forward is by showing calmness and control, is by being sympathetic to the challenges that project teams may encounter. By being proactive, can-do, sponsor of what's happening in the day-to-day of the project. You've got to have that, let's solve this problem attitude every day when you come to work. The reality is in leading in this way can really be infectious. You can have such a big impact on those people around you, just in the way you act and speak every single day when you come into the office, and you can really drive things forward as a result of how you behave. I have seen project teams and very experienced engineers and even very cynical engineers get pulled along in the enthusiasm and drive a good, strong, leading project manager can have just by that attitude as they approach the work. The flip side of this approach is the clipboard project manager. They do you know who I am? Do you know what my title is? Type project manager where you demand a response, you demand status, you demand people to work for you because you're the project manager. The reality is that might have worked 30 years ago, but rarely has the same impact nowadays. Even as I'm filming this in the current COVID-19 lockdown period. Being a project manager in this environment is too easy to hide, is too easy to push back on requests for information until almost frustrate the project because that relationship is not there. One of the fundamentals that I've got for project manager leading is to build that rapport and trust with the way they act and behave, as the first port of call on any project rather than taking control of the project just by your title. Is absolutely fundamental to have a strong emotional quotient as a project manager. In fact, it's totally vital and that's a subject for another training goals, but it's really important to have that in your view that this has been a leader, not by title, but by how you behave. Leading by example, leading by motivation, leading by drive naturally there's a dichotomy in leadership. You are a project manager, you are accountable for the successful delivery and there's times where you have to assert yourself. There's times where you have to say no we've got to put that extra 10 percent, and no we're going to make this decision we're going to turn right. But if you really want people to follow you when you have to make those decisions, when it's needed to split that dichotomy to be more assertive. Then it's so much easier to do that if you've built up that credit, if you've built up the rapport, he built up the trust with those project teams. That will then enable you to make that change happen in a much more positive way because of everything you've done previous. Some people are instinctively really good leaders and it naturally comes to them to build rapport and have folks on a tensions in the first port of call. Some people are completely ignorant to it and not aware, self-aware of how they come across with other people. Which is why it's massively important in the day the life model. To almost on a daily basis you're asking yourself, how am I coming across as a leader to people have respect for me? Because should I change my approach in order to get more value out of the project, and also build longer lasting relationships that are going to be put up for many, many other projects to come. Is really important and something that I really advocate is that you ask for feedback from your project teams. That you approach your project teams in a very open way. Asking is there anything that you can do more of or better that's going to improve the structure of the project itself? I think that's really fundamental in air. For the class project here, I want you to pause the video again and think carefully about your projects, your role as a project manager, or if you're thinking about a career in project management, to think carefully about who you want to be as a leader. How do you want to come across? How do people want to see you? Think about those leaders that you look up to, that you'd want to bail, you would want to work for and think about exhibiting some of those behaviors because that's the surefire way of really getting benefit from teams by acting and leading in the right way. Pause the video now. Think about the qualities of a leader. Think about how you show them in your projects, and I'll see you in the next class. 12. Finance and the budget: Money, money, money. Project cost money. Invariably in any project you will have a budget to adhere to, which will be a fixed amount of spend. In some circumstances, this may be pitched against the expected outcomes or revenue projections that will come from the product or project that you're delivering. As a PM, you might not get asked to spend much time here or you actually might be given full reigns over the entire budget for the projects. I've seen both instances of that. You may be asked to track costs against time and an earned value type analysis way and make sure that we reach no exceptions or stay within tolerances for the project. But even if your project doesn't have this level of scrutiny around that, I think it's really important in a day-to-day model to keep track of costs. Even if that's just effort or time or days of the week that are being spent on that project. I think it's really important to have some way of knowing where you should be versus where you are. So even if this is just labor then it doesn't actually need to represent dollars, it could just be days of the week. Either way keeping visibility control over where your project stands is really important, like all things in the day in the life model, this might be something that someone else is accountable for. You might have a finance department that tracks this type of information but the level of awareness that a project manager needs to have in their projects around budgets, around finance is really important. If you want to behave as a professional, if you want to keep control over these things and your awareness of what it costs to run your projects, even if that's not a critical metric that the stakeholders or senior management may be interested in, then it really does again set you at par, your awareness of why you're doing what you're doing, what you expect as an outcome from this and what you consider to be success on the project really gets richer as a result of tracking that type of information. Naturally, if you are being asked to track this level of information, then you've got some fundamentals in here that you really, really need to make sure you focus on. Have we got enough money to finish the project? Are there escalations that need to be made here? Why does it cost us more money to complete this phase of the project than was initially planned? Are the revenue expectation still valid considering we're going to deliver this project later than planned with maybe slightly different scope? There are so many questions in here that do need to be considered. But if you keep your head in the game on this on a day-to-day basis, then it doesn't actually sound so scary. These are all professional questions that you should be aware of and as I said, if this isn't even be asked of in your project, just the fact that you can talk at this level really set you out as a professional in comparison to other people around you. Again, class project time. Let's pause for a second and think about how your project tracks the budget. What are the expectations of you as a project manager and what might you need to do on a day-to-day basis to stay on top of those things? What are you expected to produce or monitor on an ongoing basis? Are you doing those activities and are you aware of it? Do you even know what the intended financial rewards of completing this project are? Are you able to freely explain that to somebody else, somebody in a project team? Pause for a second and think about these things. These are really important aspects for a project manager, whether you track at that level or not. So pause the class here, think about your daily life in a model when it comes to finance and budgets and business cases. Pause and reflect on that. Ask yourself what you're going do tomorrow, and how are you going to look at this in your projects. I'll see you in the next class. 13. Success Management: ... We've got requirements, we've got a plan. Let's go, or in a lot of cases, let's go and then let's figure out the requirements and maybe somewhere down the line, we'll also pull plans together. Projects can often be at full steam ahead before you even had a chance to meet your morning brew. Most projects will be so focused straight out the gay on getting features complete and getting products out the door and achieving goals rather than actually thinking about whether the project is being successful now, so try and do things right here. What would make this project successful now and what would we look to measure in order to tell us whether it's successful as we're going through it? Naturally, this could be the basics of budget, scope, and time. We could treat these as some of the key performance indicators or KPIs, but it could be other things as well. They could be really technical things like the number of defects or a number of issues found by the project team. It could be a measure of stakeholder engagement or review of local community acceptance of a road closure project. It could be the count of risks in a project or whether the project is actually meeting its internal milestones, or even some measure of the number of people that are leaving through the course of the project. In my view, it's really great at the beginning of a project, get that core project team together or a wider group of project members and actually ask the question about how are we going to measure success of this project as we go through it? First of all, what does success look like at the end? What are we hoping to achieve and what things along the way are going to tell us as we proceed through that project, whether we are on track to meet those goals? KPIs are certainly not the be-all and end-all for every single project but it certainly allows us to reflect and pause on whether that key performance indicator is telling us something that we may need to act on. If we've done some of that success management right when we were looking at those success measures at the beginning of the project, then maybe this will help us in some way. Maybe there will be some warning signs in here that maybe this project won't be accepted at a level that we'd hope or maybe the budget might be at risk of going way over the top. Maybe the quality won't be right and ultimately we may fail. So unless you work in a very controlled environment, this type of topic may similar to some others, might be completely alien to you, but this is really an opportunity for you to lead. I have seen project managers asked the question around how are you measuring success on these projects to a totally vacant audience, people who have never even been asked that question before and it would be enlightening for people to just think carefully about what that question actually means, because invariably, a lot projects are really focused only on the end point and not actually on the stages within it. A word of warning though here, don't go crazy on this. KPI's are KPIs; key performance indicators because they are the key performance indicators, that's a really a small number. They tend to lose their meaning if they are drowned under loads of other metrics within the projects. So be careful as to what things you measure and make sure they're really valuable to your project. As it's really, really important to be able to see cause and effect in some of these. So here we are again class project time. I want you to pause and reflect on this to some degree. I want you to think about your project or how you as a project manager are going to approach your job in the day in the life model and ask yourself a simple question. How will we measure in success for this project? Are there specific things that we're looking at today, tomorrow or next week that's going to tell us whether we're on track or not? Naturally, it could be the basics, scope, budget, time, etc. But really think carefully about what do we see in on a day-to-day basis that are indicators as to whether we're moving in the right direction in that regard. So pause the video now, think about this for you. It's a key component again of the day in the life moral, so it's worth paying attention to. I'll see you in the next class. 14. Project Reporting: Reporting, so I once interviewed someone for an internal transfer as a job of a project manager and I happened to ask them as the first question because I was intrigued. What they felt the job of the project manager was here, and their immediate answer was, "It's reporting, isn't it?" At which point my shoulders dropped and my internal voice in my head already felt that we'd failed in that conversation, and this person really probably wasn't really fit for the job that I was looking for. But it's certainly understandable why someone outside of the project team may look at the job as a project manager all or being about reporting. A lot of what you see and get from a project manager is communication, whether that's formal or informal. Reporting now is essential on any projects. Finding ways to communicate both informally and formally in the way of a written report is a great way to represent the control you have on a project. It helps to provide clarity to the stakeholders of what's happening within the project, where things are up to, what's happening next, any successes, any failings, any extra risks and what you're doing about it and it really does give you an opportunity to really show the window into the project to people that might not be connected to it on a day-to-day basis. On an ongoing basis as part of the day in the life model, you need to be thinking about reporting. Do people know what's going on? When was the last time I communicated? What can or should I do today? What was communicated last week and what has changed since then? Do I need to do something specific today? Despite a lot reports often not being read by all the stakeholders, for me, there's a fundamental around reports. In fact, there's two fundamentals as to why we do reporting. The first one as a project manager, a good, well-written report template triggers a lot of our thinking around the day in the life model. They tend to talk about where we are on the project? What risk per carry? What's the current engagement with the stakeholders? What are we doing around commercialization on the budget in a business case? It helps us as project managers to think about those things. The second aspect that a report delivers is that visibility into the project. Again, not everyone's going to read every single report, but the ability for some of those stakeholders to get their hands on report when needed to be able to view that key information. When they require it, is massively important in order to breed confidence. If that report isn't there, if the report was several months back, you never know when the circumstances arise where somebody's looking for certain information on our project status and it just isn't available. As I say, it's a really well-structured report template and it's basically another way of looking a day in a life model. There are some key rules around reporting though. They have to be clear and concise. If there are escalations in there, they need to be really well-defined and explained. If decisions have been made within the project then there needs to be a clear narrative of why that decision was made to make sure that everyone is placed and aligned on the motive behind certain changing direction may be. In the past, I've seen many multi-page reports dense with text, that leave the reader not rarely taking anything away from them, just being overloaded with words without really being able to take away the key message that report may need to give. It's really important that you stick to the basics here. What have we just done? What are we planning to do next? What's the overall picture of the project? What's the health from a process point of view? Where is the risks, and if there's any specific asks for the people reading the report then make sure that's in there too. Reporting is essential for projects. One of the things that often gets overlooked is if you have senior stakeholders in a business where their only way of actually viewing information in a project is via file a report. Then they have no concept of the day-to-day activities that are taking place in those projects, and these could be project teams with hundreds of people involved, all working incredibly hard, and these senior stakeholders see nothing of that information. I really do see the report as often a window into the project and if at times you get asked to do a report and you again shoulders drop sigh, I've got to write report again, you really should be thinking about it differently, and thinking about project reporting is a privilege. You are often seen as the figure head, the spokesperson of the project, and you want to do own these people that are doing amazing work behind you, the real people that are holding up. We'll do them justice to these people looking at your report to understand where things are up because that might be their only way of seeing the progress being made. The next time you are asked to produce a report, just think about a window and think about how you want to phrase things to really show off the great work that invariably is happening on a day-to-day basis within the project teams that you were with. Class project time again, just pause for a second and think carefully about this, so what reporting structures do you have in place today? Does report template such on all the projects aspects that need to be talked about? Does it do in a really concise way? If you were a third person reading that report, can you walk away from this with a clear picture in your head of where things stand? What was the real key information that I'm trying to convey? Is the report frequency right. Because actually often I sometimes see reports too frequently that things very rarely change within them and it's a copy and paste between them all. Think carefully about all of those aspects, and think about your stakeholders in that as well, because they are obviously there are people who are often reading those reports. Pause the video now, think about reports and again, it's another massively fundamental one in the day in the life model, so pause it now, and I'll see you in the last main section of the day in life model. 15. The extended project lifecycle: We're almost through with the day in the life model and this is probably the last one in the list of things to consider. Naturally, there's probably more things that you need to consider in your job or want to shift tact little bit now and actually focus on the extended project life cycle. This is not just doing projects up to release and then moving on to the next. This is about looking about benefit realization. What happens in the field, post-release, post-opening of that new car blog or that new road system, of what's this product doing in market, based on what our expectations were when we set forth on the project. Benefit realization, again is something that's often overlooked in projects and especially where there's this hunger to move on to the next all the time. But actually, I see benefit realization has been a little bit of a fly wheel that can help motivate the future projects. If you know the project that you worked on previously has brought success, that it has brought in revenue, that people are happy with the output, then that not only feeds more motivation on the current project you're working on, that you're doing things right and that you're learning as you go and getting better project after project. If you start your project correctly and you had a proper project plan in place, then one of the concepts that would have been talked about last stage would have been what does success look like at the end of this for the customer? What are the benefits we're hoping to deliver at the end of it? Then as part of that, ask yourself the question, how are we going to measure that? Again, that could be pure revenue, it could be feedback from the customer themselves, or it could just be minimizing traffic flow through a certain road network. But make sure that conversation takes place, make sure you have the interval for benefit realization in place, and monitoring. The day in life model here, is to make sure that you as a project manager, again, are remind yourself on a day-to-day basis, how are we dealing with these post-release activities, if you will. Whether that could be benefit realization, it could training in the field with engineers or installations, it could be a number of customer she's found that we want it to be lower than the previous product, and you might have ways of measuring that. Again, really important that we tackle less if we're dealing with programs or extended projects in that regard. If you're charged with this in your day to day, if you're responsible for a product post-release or a project in market or a completion of a project that's now being used by the community or by a consumer, then how are we reviewing that? What are we looking at, that's going to tell us whether it's being successful and delivering benefit that we hoped to achieve when we started that project? If you're tasked with doing these type of things, then pause the video now, again, think about your own mind map in the day in the life model that you're looking at here and try and figure out what questions and what things you need to be doing in order to move that forward better from tomorrow when you look at these things. That captures pretty much the bulk of the things that I wanted to talk about in the spinning plates day in the life model. The next class is really a bonus section on how we actually look at the entire model holistically and look at ways of improving that and managing it on an ongoing basis. Let's move on to the final section where we'll talk about tips for managing this day in the life model on An ongoing basis. 16. Tips for staying on top of it all: When I go through inductions and training for the project members or I'm training entire PMOs and I'm often met with two different reactions when I go through this spinning plate model, I get the either, "Wow, this is absolutely amazing. There's loads to go out and this is really exciting and I can't wait to get out there." Then there's the opposite side which is, "Wow, this is a lot of work. I wasn't aware of any of this and actually almost a little bit of fear that there's a lot going on." My expectations or up here and they weren't expecting that at all. Often this is a bit of a reality check for project managers to where the expectations are of what I want from them in their day-to-day and how they need to think if they're going to work for me. One thing is actually fundamental in the spinning plates model, which is why I talk about not necessarily spinning all a plates yourself is, you shouldn't necessarily be overwhelmed by all of these topics. Your job is to make sure these are running. Most people work in organizations where you do have an array of people that are running these and really the work involved with making sure they're spinning is nowhere near as, intense and as crazy as it sounds when we run through this as fast as we do today. But the reality here is this is why the analogy with the spinning plates concept is so, important. If you've don't on a regular basis, take a step back and look at all those spinning plates and ask yourself "Which ones are spinning and which ones are at risk?" Then you are in danger of losing track of who's doing what and plates will fall and the project will not be a success as a result. As I've said before, I know from experience that you'll get dragged into certain areas. Maybe your favorite areas, maybe trucking, maybe business cases, you might really enjoy working with stakeholders. But if you don't control your level of engagement, your level of management of all the spinning plates, then you're going to invariably end up in trouble as a project manager. So you've got to be really careful and that's why the day in a life life model is super important to be able to look at this on a day-to-day basis. Because I know again from experience I have fallen into these traps myself where you go to help out on one of these spinning plates and the days turns into weeks and turns into months. So if you don't have this model of looking and reflecting on the bigger picture on an ongoing basis and you might lose track of actually where those other aspects are. I never said being a professional project manager was going to be easy and to this accelerate job you've got to really be up for the challenge in figuring out how within your cooperation, within your project you're going to manage all of these aspects successfully. This is the creative part of the job. This is where you can think creatively about how you solve some of these problems. What systems are you going to put in place that are going to enable you to thrive and successfully manage projects, whether they're big, small or gigantic? But I do have a few tips which will help you stay on top of everything here. Let's start with Pareto's principle and look at the 80-20 ruling which is, if you're ever interested in productivity, is a fundamental you need to be aware of. So let's play out the scenario. It's 9:00 AM in the morning and your calendar notification has just gone off to remind you that it's time to do your five-minute review of the day in the life model. First off, this is five minutes. You need to be strict here. This is a scan through of all the aspects that you need to consider. This is a blitz through of the key questions that we've been talking about and just to refresh your mind as to where things are up to. The reality here is this will immediately highlight critical areas that you know instinctively need to be addressed. Five minutes each day or every other day is perfectly fine, but please don't skip these. You need to be honest when you go through this as skipping this is the equivalent of hiding under the duvet, just hoping that some of these things will go away. So the way I like to think about this is by imagining your in a NASA mission control center and you're looking at all the dashboards and lights and dials and graphs and charts that are going to give you indicators as to what needs work and what doesn't, and really you want to be able to glance at this and be able to make some decisions pretty quickly about where your attention needs to be. So if this is the first time going through this project, my advice here is to take a layered approach. So it's your first day on a project. Maybe the right thing to do here is to look at each one of these elements and spend probably no more than 30 minutes on each, timebox yourself to really brainstorm for budgets, for stakeholder management, for tracking, et cetera, what your next steps are going to be. Not probably taking a full day to go through all aspects of the project there. Then you combat run the next day and you start taking on some of these actions and some things are already in progress and therefore you only need 20 minutes and then ten minutes and five minutes, and then probably a couple of weeks into the project you're probably on the five minutes a day type view that we're obviously looking to aspire to. The intention here's that you're creating systems that allow you to manage at this level. So if you know that something is all time consuming, then you need to think more creatively about how that should be managed. So let's say you're in the middle of a project and actually you're drowning now in all of this work that's going on. I have a quite annoying tip for you, which I want you to think carefully about for your specific project. So let's take an example of project tracking. If that's currently totally time consuming and your spending 12, 14, 16 hours of any given week in and around that work. I want you to ask the question of yourself. What would this have to look like if you only spend 30 minutes a week working on that part of the project? So if you only have 30 minutes of any given week to spin up that plate, what would you be looking for? What information would you be getting from whom? What level of detail would you need to be receiving in order to be able to manage the project at that level. Invariably what this does is it teaches you to be a little bit more creative around solving some of these problems. Invariably you don't need to go as deep as you thought you would. Invariably, there are other people that are doing similar activities that can give information to you for free. So it forces you to think a little bit creativity. If you're a complete extremist, again, you can take an even higher step back and say, "You know what, this project in its entirety is taking far too much of my time. What would I have to do to half it or even quarter that time that I spend on this project and still be successful, what new systems would I need to introduce?" What new levels of accountability and the teams and individuals around you, do you need to work with? Think carefully about that. This is all about learning to be more and more efficient. It's very easy to spend all day, every day in the [inaudible] , in the detail and not be able to take anything else on. You as a project manager, needs to grow. You need to learn these things so you can take on other work within the business. If you manage to do that, you start having a wider influence in the day-to-day as well of the entirety of the organization you're operating in. That's a great feeling to start elevating through your career as you figure these things out. So this is the final class project piece of work now and I want you to just pause the video as we wrap up this piece and just think carefully again. This might look really scary with loads of different aspects and that you need to be considering on a day-to-day basis. But actually, if you put systems in place and if you put measures in place, it can be a lot easier. So look at what you've created through or you're going through this and just thinking about how you would manage all of those activities if you had less time than you've actually got today. Which bits stay, which bits go, which bits need to be refined, and which bits do you need to look for other people to help spend those plates for you? So take a step back and look at all of this now. Recap what you've written down and how you're going think about this. What type of project manager do you want to be? 17. The Wrap Up - Class dismissed: That's spinning plates the day in the life of a Project Manager, I hope this has been a benefit. Now remember, this doesn't include everything that you may need to consider in your job and your project, it's really just the basics, the baselines, the essentials of the job that you need to consider. It also doesn't tell you how to do some of those things. Although I did talk about various different elements, there's obviously hidden depth beneath all of these aspects, but what it does give you is a quick reference of things you need to consider to be a professional project manager on an ongoing basis. These are the things that you need to worry about each and every day. Things that you need to care about. I make a habit to personally encourage people to review their own model of this on an ongoing basis. Sometimes that can be difficult and you might need to arrange to take yourself away from the workplace, give yourself half a day and actually take a whole big look about how you are performing as a project manager and where you're spending your time. Is this model capturing everything I need to be concerned with? How am I actually managing to stay on top of these things? and do I need to spend some time addressing the systems that I've set-up. The job of a Project Manager can be as equally frustrating, challenging, and complex as it is rewarding. But it's fundamental, understand the why behind the things that you do. Smile, drive with passion, admit your mistakes and always look to improve. This has been spinning plates, the day in the life of a Project Manager. Now remember, you don't have to spend them all, and if you're fortunate to have a great team around you, then hopefully you can inspire them further with some of the learnings from today. Thanks for joining me in this class today, and I hope to see you in a future class soon.