Michael Zwiener

Here is an email I sent to someone I am helping out a little. I thought this might be interesting and might trigger some good thought processes. I just copy and paste it:

… Before you attempt to get the PMP certification I suggest, you get a substantial amount of PM knowledge. Take your time, check some books and podcasts and learn different methodologies to understand the entire picture (SCRUM, Waterfall, Xtreme Programming…). I would even suggest that IF you really want a certification, maybe forget about the PMP for now and look into the Agile Certificate from PMI as this will be more relevant for software projects. There are SCRUM courses as well which will help you.

Before you decide about that, really start reading and understanding. This is not like math, where you have to learn some inputs and outputs, functions and formulas. PM is more like an art form. The techniques like scheduling, estimating, procurement… that is the easy part. 90% of PM work is communication. Taking influence, facilitating, knowing how to align goals, motivational techniques, stakeholder management, dealing with difficult people… all of the soft skills that can be learned but really only grow by using self discipline and gaining experience.

Instead chasing a certification, I suggest you start reading and understanding opinions and mindsets of successful people. PM is a lot like GM and a lot like live. You deal with people and make things happen. The PMBOK gives you a good framework but it can’t teach you the soft skills.

You are managing already, so you are in the perfect situation to learn. Check out PM podcasts, maybe read a course on organizational behavior (I can send you one) and try to use the things to learn. Implement changes and try to grow as a manager and as a person – at least that is my approach. Being a good manager has IMO a direct link to being a good human being. Giving your team respect, reassurance and trust is more important then creating charts and forecasts. Obviously you will have to be able to do the latter as well.

For the technical part: The material from Cornelius Fichtner (free podcast, PMP prepcast and PMP pducast) helped me a lot. There are other good resources out there. Try to find as much good stuff as possible. This is live long learning. Ask people you look up to for reading lists. Books that are a “must read” are:

Good to great
7 habits of highly effective people
how to make friends and influence people
building happiness
build to last

There are many more, just check some reading lists. All time business classics are almost always a good read even if they are old.

I guess what I am saying is that there is no short cut to become a good manager. It is constant growth and lots of experience.

If I boil it down for myself, I would say the one thing that makes me (hopefully) a good manager is that I genuinely like and believe in people. The more I put trust in someone and the more I like the person the better the work becomes. It is about minimizing what you do. Most of the time you just stay out of the way, remove road blocks and be the servant of the people that are working with you. IMO a manager does not stand above the team but below them. The guys are doing all the work, the manager just clears the road and gives them the resources they need.

Sometimes I feel a bit like a bit of father for my team members (sorry for the terrible analogy). I give the the tools and keep their backs free but then I let them go, make mistakes, learn and deliver as independently as I can. This is all gathered under the principle “theory Y management” which does become best practice.

This all is obviously only my personal opinion and might not work for you at all. It also depends a lot on the people who are working for you and what motivates them.

I guess what I been saying is that the technical part of PM and GM is easy to learn. Just read the PMBOK… no help needed there. Becoming a good manager really is all about the soft skills. Everyone is learning. I am learning from Kevin (I see him as my mentor – if he want’s or not) and I am sure, Kevin has people he is learning from as well …

Hi everyone,

this is not so much an article about a certain topic as it is a blog post about something that just happens in my live.

I focused on project management for the last decade and I love to get high class, top quality IT projects done. That is what I am really passionate about, what keeps me awake at night and makes me look forward to every day I go to the office. The thrill in it was always to create solutions that make the life of others better, make them more effective and offer them tools to be more happy in their jobs.

I always had project teams and I enjoy working with people, creating teams and creating opportunities for team members to grow and take leadership roles themselves. I am a strong believer and self managing teams and that my responsibility as the team leader is to provide infrastructure for communication and information distribution more than to tell everyone what to do.

I never really thought of doing more than that until I moved to Perth. My boss, friend and (involuntary) mentor Kevin opened my eyes to new possibilities. I started thinking much bigger and I began to envision a corporate career – something where I really could move things and positively influence the work lives of many people. Working with a fixed set of employees seems like a great thing to do. Spending years with them, getting to know them, helping them to reach their potential and creating a great work environment where everyone loves to be sounds pretty much like paradise to me.

I see a lot of opportunity around and I am really looking forward to a role that will help me to leave my mark and make a difference for the company I will work with. I believe I have the answer to a lot of the organizational issues, and while I am sure this is just my usual over-eagerness it is still a good feeling to move on to something more challenging and exiting.

I did a lot of reading over the years and I realize now that my interest has always been more than just project management. I believe that I got the potential to become a real leader. I don’t have enough knowledge yet but at least I made enough progress to realize that I have lots to learn. Consequently I started a MBA course and reading the material encourages me even more. This was the last push I needed, from now on the direction is clear.

This career will take a while. It might take place in the company I am working with now or it might not, time will tell. However, my goals are set and I will not rest before I get where I believe I need to be.

One thing is for sure: I will enjoy the hell out of the way there.

Have a nice eastern
Michael

Hi again,

I keep digesting the experiences I make in my every day life as project manager. Here another one. I am managing a big software project in a really good environment. The work relationships are great, no red tape, no big issues so far. We split the project (which indeed is one unit) up into 2 sub projects. The reason was that the project in its entirety seemed a bit much for just one project manager. By doing that we basically have 2 project managers and one program manager as head of the PM team. Each project manager has his own team working on the modules he is responsible for. So far so good.

The project is high pressure and high profile. Now the 2 teams start to get into the stage where they develop on modules that become more and more dependent on each others. The teams are culturally very different and it would be very hard to create real communication (directly from team member of team one to team member of team two). This obviously creates friction. Every little bug is escalated and changes that would have taken only minutes to fix create hours of discussions.

I am not sure how to tackle this situation. I have lead many projects but in every one I have been the sole project manager carrying all responsibility and accountability. Sure, I worked under program managers before but I was always the one entirely responsible for the day to day decision, leading the project team.

Taking over the entire project is not feasible as it is too far progressed and it would be very hard for me to get deep enough into the development of the other team. The same might be true for the other project manager. I am happy to step down and have one leader but I am not sure if that is a good solution. We both are in very deep and though on a personal level we all get along great, small fights are emerging about bugs, bug fixes, who is responsible and who is to blame.

This becomes really counterproductive and is stressing communication and relationships on all levels of the team. Add tight time and cost constraints and you get the picture.

I thought about using a mediator. Using a senior PM team member to decide in cases of overlap, but that seems to be quite an overkill.

Challenges are there to be overcome and this one is an interesting one. I am sure we will come together and find a solution in the end but at the moment it looks like: Lesson learned – a project should only have one PM. This is consistent with PMI and PRINCE2 and I begin to understand why.

I guess I wrote this mainly to get it out of my head and work through it but even while I am writing this I can not think of a solution. The issues will become more severe and I fear for the entire project. What to do?

If anyone has suggestions or experienced a similar situation, please help.

In any case, I will update this post to inform everyone how it went.

Hi,

I have started a new position and I am in the phase where it moves from planing to development. One thing came to me while I was dealing with resource availability which I’d like to share.

This is probably stating the obvious but there is nothing more important in a project or venture then having the right people on board. We need the right managers, the right lead developers and the best developers we can get for the amount of money we have.

But what to do if money is tight and we are not able to put the best people for the job into the chairs?

Well, we will all agree that this makes it a bit more challenging to deliver a successful project. But does it? Let me put something up for thought: Have you ever been in the situation that you had great resources (really expensive ones too) and the project went really bad? Yes, me too. I analyzed what might have gone wrong and (at least for myself) I came to the conclusion that I was so confident in the quality of my people that I neglected the planning.

In the moment that I am scared for the success of a development because I have sub standard people programming, I take extra care to have perfect specifications. My thinking is: If I have waterproof specs, even a monkey can code it. How silly is it to change this process just because we have good people on board?

So my lesson:

Bad people, great specs = good chance for success
Great people, great specs = great chance for success (and also save some money)

I hope this helps
Mike

Hi everyone,

today I would like to share my opinion on the importance of having a good technical lead for IT projects.

Medium to big IT development projects are rarely collocated these days. It is a challenge in itself to manage virtual teams all over the world. Different timezones, mentalities and mindsets collide and what is a given for one person might be entirely out of the question for another.

One example is that many Asians fell that it is un-polied to point out mistakes of others. This leads to the problem of bugs that remain hidden while have been discovered but not reported. Another challenge is the inability of many subcontractors (IMO especially from India) to finish projects. All is going OK during the development but then it becomes a real mission to close the project and tie up all the loose ends. I have experienced this many times and learned to deal with it.

The main thing to prevent this kind of problems is a technical lead who really knows his stuff and is also someone the developers trust and open up to. This is basically the “good cop” in the project management team who is “on the side” of the developer. He needs to be aware of the cultural differences as much as the PM does but he has the advantage of a common ground with all programmers as he himself is a developer and not a manager.

The technical lead should be involved in the entire project lifecycle. He should know or even write the specs, help gathering and developing the team and be the head of development and the head of quality assurance as well. This is a busy guy but I strongly believe that this should be one person and not a team. Relationships are linked to people, not to entities and trust and understanding is the basis for making this role a success so great communication skills are mandatory.

If you have a personal like this in your team and if you can afford to use him in that role, you are set for success. I recommend a senior developer with good interpersonal skills and he needs to be really organized and smart too. Tough call, good luck!

Have a great new year
Michael

Jut a quick one:

If you are a PMP, you have to earn PDUs in order to sustain this status. While this is a great thing as we all need constant education to stay on top of our game, the downside is that it can be a bit of a hassle.

Cornelius Fichtner offers a solution. The website pducast.com offers a subscription model. It costs around $300/year and you receive one webinar per month (1 to 2 hours). The topics are PM related and the quality is outstanding. Cornelius gets really interesting views from the top people in the business.

I think, this is great value for money and a superb way to cover all of the PDUs from one source. There is no need to do anything else if you don’t want to.

Here the URL: http://www.pducast.com/

Cheers
Michael

Hi there,

I would like to share an observation I have made over the years. It is about the way, the high level project brief that suddenly becomes the project plan and how that will go wrong. This is all just common sense but it might help you to avoid this fatal mistake.

We all know this scenario: At the start of a project everyone is on the same page. Well, more or less. If you are one of the lucky ones, your sponsor is a believer in good project management and you will have the chance to do proper planning. So far so good. So you do the obvious things. You meet with the major stakeholders, read the project mandate or initial descriptions, you get an idea of the risks and benefits and create a bit of a product breakdown structure. All pretty high level and that is all still going quite well.

You get the buy-in from the stakeholders and it is all a pretty neat package, so you get the go-ahead. Great! Another job and another chance to shine.

In theorie you got everything in place to create a successful project. BUT! And this is a big but and happens quite often: The project starts too early. What you have at this point is really just a high-level plan but you get the order to start the project right now. What was intended as project brief to give the stakeholders an idea what they can expect has suddenly become the project plan. You try to explain, try to pull the breaks but the budget is released and the team is ready to go, so you really have no choice but start developing the product.

Things might even get to a good start. The PM work keeps you as busy as it always does at the beginning of a project but you still manage to work out some things you need in a bit more detail. You assemble the communication strategy and maybe even the risk register but this is all still far away from a decent project plan. The schedule is more or less evolving while you allocate work packages to the people that are available – without really having the time to train anyone or figure out the best roles – let alone building a real team.

After some of the initial work is done and some progress is made and you even start to think “well, this isn’t too bad! Maybe I get away with using the high level plan after all” but there comes the day the first problems appear. Later work stages suddenly depend on things that have not been properly planned for. Interfaces wont work, first tweaking starts. Then the tweaking of the tweaked modules begins as later work dependencies that have been left uncovered begin to emerge and almost overnight the project is completely out of control. There are re-planning sessions, brainstorms and product analysis workshops… AY, HANG ON A MINUTE! This looks exactly like the kind of work that you should have done pre-project. Suddenly the stakeholders begin asking you uncomfortable questions about the reasons this has not been properly planned and why is it all suddenly going so wrong.

The result: Cost and time are out of control, quality suffers, rework, scope-creep and a demotivated team following a project manager who might not work for this company much longer or wont get a new contract here anyway.

The problem is obvious, almost too obvious to even write this article. But it still happens ALL THE TIME! So let us step back for a moment, take a breather and refocus on what we do in the start-up phase! What we did is to build a high level project plan. What we forgot is to also include a real planning phase into the plan. I suggest to put emphases on working on the business case, showing the stakeholders the benefits and risks of the proposed venture, giving them an idea about cost and time BUT THEN tell them that the next step will have to be to plan the project properly. Let them know that this is for their own good. That they have to invest some money but that they will exactly know what they will get for it and that the end of the planning phase will also be an excellent point to review the project once more before giving the final go-ahead (or cancellation).

It can be a tough sell since a lot of the time you will hear: “We know it will work, get started, we just need to get it done”. But in that case you can always come back with lessons learned from other projects where this has happened. You will easily find examples for that. Appeal to their business sense. “You wouldn’t build a house just using the drawings… you will get an architect to create a real plan, right?” “What we got is an appraisal. What we need now is a plan”… this sort of stuff. Be creative, influence your stakeholders. It is for their own best – and for yours.

Remember, we are NOT yes-men. We are leaders. We have the responsibility for creating a successful project. That is what we get hired for. If we have the guts to come through with it, we will manage our projects with real control and earn the respect and buy-in for future jobs. Put yourself into the position to be the man they can rely on.

While high level planning is necessary to confirm the business case, it should never be the end of it. Don’t give in, do proper planning and reek the rewards. Sponsors and stakeholders are like little kids. They see it, they want it. We as project managers have to be the voice of reason.

Cheers for now
Michael Zwiener

Could based computing is the future, we all agree on that. What is a simple way of using this kind of technology today without being a computer geek? The answer is “Evernote”. Evernote is a desktop program (Windows, Mac, Android, IOS…) which let’s you create notebooks and notes. You can store and organise all your information in there and access them from anywhere. Even via web-browser!

You can upload files into notes, take audio-notes that are automatically stored in a notebook of your choice, take screenshots and add websites fast and easy to your notebook.

I absolutely love this tool and I moved almost all of my important data into Evernote. The cloud also means that I have a save copy in case my laptop dies on me.

Check it out: http://www.evernote.com/

Hi again,

as everyone who works with me knows, I am a big advocate of the “Project Management Institute” (PMI) and their book “Project Management Body Of Knowledge” (PMBOK).

I like PMI because it offers so much for so little. For a membership you get free access to IMO the most valuable collection of knowledge in the project management profession. I am not only talking about the PMBOK but also about the gazillion of documents, articles, templates and discussions about all topics related to PM.

The question for you is “can I afford to miss out?”… Let me explain: While there still is no standardized study of project management at the vast majorities of universities there is a need of education. Estimates say that over 50% of projects undertaken are failures as a direct result of bad project management. This are projects that shouldn’t have been done in the first place (failure to establish a good business case) or went considerably over time and budget, quite often with fatal consequences for involved businesses.

The question is why so many project managers are still reluctant to education. The old-school “I am doing this for 20 years, I have seen it all” – mentality still prevails but the numbers clearly show that project managers who underwent a training (e.g. PMP certification) are considerably more successful, sought after and better paid than the untrained ones, even with less experience.

The industry realizes that project management, while complex, can be learned. Sure, 80% are soft skills, but in Poker, 80% is luck. The one who masters the other 20% is the winning player.

I suggest to every PM, no matter how experienced, to read the PMBOK. You don’t have to join PMI (though it makes a lot of sense) but get a copy of the PMBOK and read it. Don’t overdo it, though. Don’t just rush through it cover to cover. Deal with one small aspect every day. Really work it through and try to understand where the authors are coming from. A lot of things will not apply to your current project but knowing it all is a great bonus for your career as you will be able to talk the talk and also understand what good project management is all about.

If you like what you see, I suggest looking into the PMP certification process. It will take a few month of study but it will increase your value on the job market and also gives you a deep understanding of the PM Body Of Knowledge. There are PMI chapters pretty much all over the world. Why don’t you just go to a chapter meeting and have a chat with fellow project managers about their experience? I bet you will become an advocate of PMI just like me.

I write this not only to help others but also to help myself. Having trained project managers on the other side of projects makes it easier to succeed for everyone. We project managers don’t work in a vacuum. The chain is always as strong as it’s weakest link, education is the way of making sure this link is not you…

Cheers for now
Michael