Category Archives: Time Management

The Plan for the Plan

We all know what a plan looks like.  Objectives & scope locked down, funding secured, work breakdown structure defined, schedule in place, governance established, reporting kicked off, project team engaged – easy….. Right?

How did you get to that point, where you’ve successfully managed to get to that point?

How did you manage the expectations of stakeholders, customers & team members, whilst you were figuring out what you need to get done to achieve the desired business outcome?

How did you take the napkin page of desires and develop it into a detailed scope, which reflects the stakeholder’s objectives AND also made it achievable?

All the while, managing the expectations of your stakeholders, where they believe you should be off and running, completing deliverables, and getting closer to final delivery.   In many situations, the weeks, and sometimes couple of months of planning required, is seen as a luxury that “we can’t afford”.  How many times have you heard, “just get on with it and delivery me the benefits”?

One way of managing this often hectic time and the desire to demonstrate progress, I call “The Plan for The Plan or P4P” (at this point I must recognise the Managing Director of TBH who use this a point for any project TBH Was engaged on. Since that time I have claimed it as mine).  As with many of my concepts, it is a simple, and if executed well, it can be very effective.

Sit down and think about your program, talk to your stakeholders and key people.  What do you need to get done in the coming 3-4 weeks, and what can you realistically achieve in that timeframe? Create a list of actions/deliverables that will help you get your program organised; frame them all around things that you can report to your stakeholders and project team.  Things like:

  • Objectives defined and agreed with stakeholders
  • Milestones identified and targets timings for each
  • Governance committee identified, and meeting established
  • Work breakdown structure
  • Detailed Delivery Project Schedule
  • Roles and responsibilities drafted
  • Detailed schedule developed
  • Risks identified and classified
  • Architecture drafted, etc….

Develop the logic and resourcing for each item which will give you a target date.  Think about how long it will take to arrange, do you need to hold some workshops, meetings?  When will people be available?  For your schedule, you will need a few sessions with your team, reviewing and re-working the dependencies.  Can you get that done in 2 weeks, or 3 weeks?  It will depend on how busy the team are, and what time they can dedicate?

 

Refine your schedule into a list of 6-8 clear items that give the stakeholders clear understanding on what you are working on and when they will get the completed project schedule.  This can be presented to your project team as the focus for the first few weeks of the project.  This can presented to your stakeholders as a progress or status report.  Failure to achieve some of these key items will indicate your project has some risks that need to be addressed early and help the overall delivery of the project.

This schedule is “The plan for the plan”.  Once you complete this mini-plan, you will have an understanding of your project objectives, deliverables, schedule and risks.  You will have a detailed plan you can execute and track progress against.

“The plan for the plan” gives you something you can present to the wider organisation that shows your targets for the coming weeks, you can demonstrate progress and control while you are getting the program organised.

Just make sure that during this process you ensure that the team is focusing on the bigger picture and planning the whole project. You don’t want to get to the end of the P4P and not have a clear delivery methodology (Including Risks, Assumption etc.) and project plan to baseline your project to manage the rest of the project performance by.

 

Think about it!

 

 

 

Good luck with your projects….

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings – How To Survive?

Most advice on meetings focuses on the “how.” But the effort to improve meetings must start with the “what.” No matter how efficiently you meet about the wrong things, they are still the wrong things to meet about.

I have sat in numbers of bad meetings: no goals, no agenda, no preparation, no documents, no schedule, no minutes, no action items, no follow-up, and so on. We all hate these meetings. We all want to improve them.

But they do not address what I consider the major problem: Most meeting time is wasted because people aim at the wrong target.

In this post, I will suggest a way to cut your meeting time. Not by meeting about the same things faster, but by meeting about fewer things. This recommendation has reduced meeting time by 90% in one of my clients.

This does not mean that you can do the work in 10% of the time. You have to devote significant out-of-meeting effort to resolve the issues, but working more efficiently, enjoying a happier mood, and achieving better results.

What’s The Secret?

The only goal for a meeting is “to decide and commit.” No other objective is worth meeting for.

No meetings to “discuss.”
No meetings to “update.”
No meetings to “review.”
No meetings to “inform.”
No meetings to “report.”
No meetings to “present.”
No meetings to “check.”
No meetings to “dialogue.”
No meetings to “evaluate.”
No meetings to “connect.”
No meetings to “think.”
No meetings to “consider.”
No meetings to anything but “decide and commit.”

Of course, in order to decide and commit it is necessary to share information, monitor progress, provide updates, review materials, discuss ideas, analyze options, and evaluate costs and benefits. These are very reasonable ways to spend the time of a meeting.

But those are intermediate goals; the final goal is to perform. And to perform effectively a team needs to decide intelligently, commit resolutely, and execute impeccably. A good meeting focuses on the first two, in order to accomplish the third.

Swing Through The Ball

If you learned tennis or golf you must have heard your instructor say, “swing through the ball.” If you swing at the ball you will cut your swing short and will hit with significantly less power. Of course you will hit the ball as you swing through it, but the right aim is to finish the swing, not to hit the ball.

In the same spirit, “Meet to decide and commit.” If you meet to discuss, you will cut your effort short and will work with significantly less power. Of course, you will discuss in order to decide and commit, but the right aim is to do, not to talk.

Yet many teams practice “voodoo management.” They believe that talking about an issue is enough to (magically) solve it. They take pride of “working” on something while they only express opinions about what “ought to be done.” But there is no action without commitment. Not surprisingly, everybody feels frustrated because the issue remains unsolved “after all the time we spent talking about it.”

The Value of Information

Imagine you are locked up in a cell, incommunicado, for the next 24 hours. I offer to tell you the winning number of the lottery that will be picked this very evening. The will-be-winning ticket, worth $100,000,000, is still available. How much should you pay for the information?

Nothing.

This information is worthless to you because you cannot act on it.

Information is valuable insofar as it may allow you to produce better results that you would have gotten without it. Unless the information may lead you to act differently than you would have acted had you not known it, its value is zero.

Since you can neither buy, nor ask someone else to buy the lottery ticket, the winning number is worthless to you.

The same thing happens with a meeting. Unless the meeting may lead people to act in a different way they would have acted had they not had the meeting, its value is zero—no matter how efficiently it is run.

An Expensive Proposition

Meeting requires that all participants be in the same (virtual) place at the same time. This is an expensive proposition. There is only one practical reason to justify it: the interactive design and evaluation of alternative strategies, and the collective decision and commitment to pursue the strategy that the team believes is most conducive to its mission.

(There are social and emotional reasons to get together, but regular meetings pursue tasks, rather than relationship goals.)

There are many ways for a team to stay up to date on the status of initiatives, receive progress reports, share information, request clarifications, ask questions, express concerns, raise objections, make suggestions, and propose options without having to meet. Email and shared documents seem almost prehistoric in comparison to the many e-tools available today, but even they work quite well.

The single thing that can only be done interactively is to assess the global impact of alternative courses of action on the team’s mission. This exercise requires pooling each member’s information about her area of responsibility and her knowledge about the opportunities and threats that it will trigger in her local environment.

For example, a global leadership team from one of the top three IT companies in the world, whom I have been helping for several years, have stopped meeting (by video-conference) four hours a week to “monitor progress” of their different projects. They now use shared documents where each project owner writes a review with three points: (a) what have we done last week, (b) what are we planning to do next week, (c) any issues I need help to resolve. Only when (c) requires the whole team’s interaction there is a team meeting. Otherwise, there are sub-team meetings on the side to deal with the specifics.

Only people relevant to the matter are invited to this side conversations. Nobody sits idle during the discussion, and everybody present has a valuable role to play in deciding and committing to solve the problem.

The team now meets every four months in person, to explore new strategies and connect at a human level. Everybody loves these meetings, which take about 10% of the time the weekly updates used to take.

The Acid Test

Pick a red marker and search your agenda for terms such as “discuss,” “update,” “review,” and other non-decisive verbs. Cross them out and see what is left.

Then put any remaining item through the following three-question test:

  1. “What will we do differently if we succeed in this meeting?”
  2. “Why do we need to meet to accomplish this?”
  3. “How will this help us further the goal of the team?”

I bet that 90% of your meeting time goes away.