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Project Coaching Center (PCC) is a place for people who are looking for coaching on the stickiest most intractable project problems they’ve ever faced. Problems that seem to require skills and experience beyond their current training or certifications. PCC is also for people who simply want a tip, hint, or insight to add to their toolkit for project success. Maybe your project is going well and you want to share your experience with others or ask a question to get some feedback. You can find some answers, share your experience, ask a question, and get personalized coaching at PCC.

  • One-on-One Coaching

    One-on-one coaching is available with any of our consultants for some personalized and specific help with your project concerns. More

  • Team Coaching

    We offer group project coaching sessions to teams and will facilitate discussions and offer specific help with your project or team needs. More

  • Consulting

    For those rare times when your project really needs it. Check out our on-site Project Consulting Services More

Projects Take a Community….to Succeed and to Fail

By Eileen Strider

In the world of projects, organizations reward project managers for success and punish them for failure, as if the project manager was solely responsible for either. As a project manager, you know this perspective is both a trap and a myth. Projects don’t succeed or fail based only on the actions of the project manager.

A project manager’s skills are certainly important. Having project management expertise, training, communication skills, a good head on your shoulders and a healthy dose of courage are valuable assets. And if you have these, then you know the entire project community can either support or sink a project.

The people who directly work on the project are viewed as “The Project Team” with the project manager as their leader. The rest of the organization often thinks the project team does all the work while they kibitz. But the project manager has to manage a much larger community that the project team members who are doing day-to-day project work.

The community includes a much broader group of people than the “project team”: CEOs, vice presidents, directors, managers, supervisors, staff members, vendors, suppliers, implementation partners, consultants, contractors, boards of trustees, etc. Each contributes to the success or failure of a project.

Okay, so what am I talking about? Here are some real live examples from my personal experience.

Board of Trustees Contribution Example

The project schedule had slipped multiple times for numerous reasons. Each schedule extension led to increased implementation costs. Each time the schedule slipped, the project manager took a request for more funding to the Board of Trustees. Each time the Board approved more funding. By the time we were called in to review the project, the cost had increased 400%, the Board was upset with the project manager and was ready to sue the vendor and the implementation partner. When we asked them why they had approved each additional funding request, they realized they hadn’t asked the right questions and accepted their contribution to the project’s problems.

Executive Collusion Example

While reviewing a failing IT system project, we kept hearing about problems with employee data. Depending on how you accessed employee data in the new system, you could get up to three different addresses for the same employee. Digging a little deeper, we discovered that the VP of HR refused to have his staff use the new system’s employee identification numbers, because his HR staff complained about having to enter more characters than they were used to entering. So, the VP of Finance agreed with the VP of HR to customize the system. The customization basically broke the integration between the HR and Payroll systems and resulted in employee data being stored in three different locations with no integrity checks.

I could go on and on with examples. But you get the idea.

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Being Understood

by Wayne Strider

“Pay attention to what I mean, not what I say.” my father would sometimes say to me when I was a kid.  I did not know what to make of that. To me it appeared that sometimes he said what he meant, and sometimes he did not. My problem was I could not tell which was which.  On a good day I could get it right about half the time.  On a bad day I could not get it right at all.  As a youngster I was confused and frustrated by my apparent inability to understand what my father wanted.  I was equally frustrated that I could not seem to make myself understood. Though we never talked about it, my father probably did not feel understood by me. I certainly did not feel understood by him. As a result we were not very good together.  By that I mean he and I could not effectively do the work of creating the family we wanted to be, and though we enjoyed many happy moments together, we missed out on a lot of potentially satisfying experiences with one another.

What does my story have to do with project management?

The work of your project team is to create something of value together. The created value lies not just in the current product or service being built and delivered. There is also value in growing your team’s capability to effectively work together to build and deliver the next product, and the next, and so on. There are lots of aspects to “effectively work together.”  Some typical ones are roles, responsibilities, decision making, problem solving, conflict resolution, clear lines of authority, assigning and tracking work, and communication.  All of these are facilitated by understanding one another.  When you and your team members feel understood by each other, the team is better able to do its work of creating such value. Read more

Readiness: The #1 Predictor of Project Success

By Eileen Strider, Marie Benesh and Wayne Strider

The Vice President was worried. The project to replace their administrative systems was gaining support and speed, but was the organization really ready to start? Could they succeed or would they be added to the litany of organizations with failed software projects? They hadn’t undertaken a major project in years.  They had bad memories from recent past projects involving software packages.  This project was going to change the way the whole organization worked, certainly staff’s job duties and maybe even the organization structure. They were going to have to work together cross-functionally to gain any benefits. There were some seriously broken relationships that were going to be critical to the success of the project. He wasn’t sure how to get straight answers to address his concerns.  What he needed was a PCC Project Readiness Assessment.

In this blog, we are going to shamelessly promote our PCC Project Readiness Assessment.

A Project Readiness Assessment asks the question, “How ready are you and your organization to take on and complete this project?”  In order to answer that, you have to determine what “ready” means.

We look at five key areas that organizations need to address in order to effectively start and complete a project. They are generally areas of risk that can cause havoc as a project progresses.

The areas included in the assessment are:

Executive Sponsorship and Decision Making

We look at how your organization plans to manage project scope, user and stakeholder expectations, and whether you have clearly defined and communicated the project’s goals and objectives. Leadership support and sponsorship are the next areas that we evaluate – how clearly are the leadership roles defined, do the sponsors have a clear set of expectations for their own role and how that impacts the success of the project. In addition, we look for design principles for decision-making, or how decisions will be made. Is this decision-making  policy clearly written and communicated to all stakeholders?

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