Archive for Communication

Cultivating a Project Manager

By Jodi Cicci
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

PS Villiage:  June 3, 2009
By Jodi Cicci

I’m not sure anyone ever said ‘when I grow-up, I want to be a project manager’.  It’s the type of job that is critical in many companies but not one that necessarily is anyone’s dream job out of school.  Part of this may be due to the fact that becoming a project manager is not a book-learned skill but an investment of time and gaining of experience that defines and hones the basic skill set required to do project management.

In general a project manager must have the 3 ‘tions’ to be successful:  Communication, coordination, and organization.  I find that in many cases these are personality traits just as much as learned items.  Your project managers will stand out as technical leads or project leads simply due to their ability to keep on top of things and keep their respective team members in sync.

The 3 ‘tions’ are the starting point to the project management cultivation cycle.  The project manager cultivation cycle is made up of three stages:  Learned Techniques, Role playing , and Experience. Each stage is a progression in the level of your project management skills.

Learned techniques covers those items that you can pick up from reading books, taking project management courses, and attending seminars.  In this stage your project managers are introduced to tools of the trade including project plans, budget management, issue tracking, status reporting, and so forth.  The execution of these learned techniques, however, is what makes an effective project manager.  A project manager needs to know when to reach out, when to escalate, when to let others take the lead, and how to keep the entire team in sync.  By combining the 3 “tions’ and learned techniques, the beginnings of a great project manager are seen.  Unfortunately some project managers will stop here which limits their ability to take on challenging projects or expand into a mentoring role for other project managers.

The Role Playing stage is one that typically is covered as Project Managers rise through the ranks.  The best project managers are ones that have performed many of the roles of the project team and so have a basic knowledge of what the role entails.  What this means is that your project managers usually have a technical or industry background in the types of projects that are being managed.  I started my career as a software programmer and eventually started managing software development projects.  I would always have the ability to apply my ‘role-based’ knowledge to team discussions to resolve issues, revise timelines, and insert contingencies and dependencies based on my experience in those roles.  If you step into a project manager role in an unfamiliar industry or technology, you tend to revert back to the learned techniques stage until you gain role based knowledge.

The last stage is experience.

There really is no substitute for this phase.  Project managers gain knowledge and skills by simply dealing with what comes their way each day on a project.  This knowledge cannot be taught by courses.  Many people would call this Intuition.  It’s a skill like anything else but it’s a skill that comes with time.  Once a project manager reaches this stage they never leave since learning is a continuous activity.  Instead they evolve into a mentoring role to those up and coming project managers that are just starting the cultivation cycle.

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The Importance of Community and Communication

By Jodi Cicci
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

PS Village:  February 18, 2009
By Jodi Cicci

What is the most effective way to communicate with your team and your organization?  Probably one of the most classic questions asked with no best answer other than “it depends”.  Why does it depend?  We’ve got access to all kinds of communication devices now – email, Instant Messenger, text messaging, e-newsletters, websites, etc.  The key is getting to know your community to figure out the best interaction.

Take the PSVillage Newsletter as an example.  I subscribe to get the newsletter electronically.  It comes with all kinds of great information, discussion groups, and links to helpful areas that I may need.  However, I know it’s a newsletter and it gets prioritized in the email queue until I get all those critical customer emails taken care of.  Is the delivery means effective?  Yes.  Does it demand response from me?  No.  Do I review it in a timely manner?  Honestly, it may take a few days but eventually I get to it.  This format suits the PSVillage community.  We are a group that wants to share information and communicate with each other informally.

In thinking about your own organization, take the time to determine if you need to inform people, if you need responses from people, or if you are looking to encourage feedback/discussions among your group.  Not all of your communication needs to be handled with a single approach.  Email is effective in getting the information out there but there are LOTS of emails out there.  Using options like read receipts can help ensure people are accessing the email but unless responses are required, you cannot determine if the email has actually been read.  Newsletters are a great reference provided they are relevant to the audience and regularly delivered; if they become sporadic, then the audience doesn’t rely on them for information as much.  Websites become a good site for posting reference information and may also serve to encourage discussions using tools such a blogs or discussion groups.  Instant Messenger (or similar tools) gives you more of an “in the office” feel with user interaction expected – something that can easily lead to distractions if etiquette is not laid out.  The communication method you need may span one, some, all or more of these options.

Now think about the type of community you are dealing with.  Are they on the road a lot?  Are you dealing with multiple time zones?  Are they at customer sites?  This will drive how information would best be received and accessed.  If you’re posting everything to an internal website which requires internet and VPN access, your mobile team may run into difficulties accessing it.  If your team is primarily at customer sites, having random Instant Messenger windows pop up with questions may not go over well.  Email and Newsletters ignore time zones and can be read on your own time so time critical responses may not be received when expected or desired.

It would be helpful for your organization to layout a communication plan.  What types of information or feedback do you send and receive?  What is the frequency?  Who are the recipients?  What is the communication method you prefer?  You may have your Project Managers creating communication plans as part of their methodology but you can apply the same technique to your organization.  Make it available to everyone so there’s an understanding of what is critical, what is informative, and what is meant to become a community building tool that will benefit everyone.  Take the time to also setup an etiquette guide for things that are a bit more dynamic like email, Instant Messenger, and discussion groups.  The expectations you set for your community on clear communication will save time and energy in the end.

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Professional Services and Sales

By Jodi Cicci
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

PS Village: May 7, 2008

The Importance of Teamwork Within the Company and in the Marketplace

Throughout my career I’ve been on the technical side as a programmer and the managerial side as a project manager, team manager, and now company owner.  What has been interesting is seeing the different professional services business models across the various commercial companies I’ve crossed paths with – namely pure consulting organizations and product companies with services.  Contract mixes, clientele, types of services and offerings, etc. are all very different at the detail level but one thing is a constant in these business models – you have to close a deal to gain the opportunity to demonstrate your value add in the area of professional services.

In a pure consulting organization, the sales team has a keen focus on closing the deal – this is the bread and butter of the company.  In a product company with services, it isn’t this clear.  You may be surprised by this statement but consider this – what is the driver of the company? To be known for the products they sell and support those products with high quality customer service.

Services in a product company rely heavily on the type of product being sold.  Self-contained products that perform a defined function or functions such as project management, financial management, customer management, etc. tend to have Professional Services organizations that focus on product deployments.  Once the deployment is complete, the Customer Support organization takes over the customer relationship.  The Professional Services organization exists to deploy the system, provide feedback to R&D on features worthwhile to incorporate, and ensure the Customer Support organization is aware of customer specifics.  Customer sales can actually be closed without selling Professional Services should the customer already have experience in the product or plan to learn on the job.

Services in a product company that sells infrastructure tools which can be used to build solutions, such as databases or integration tools, are more critical in the development of a customer deal.  It is fairly difficult to sell only a product license to customers with no Professional Services to build a solution.  In this situation, Professional Services and Sales must form a partnership to succeed.  The trap that infrastructure product companies fall into is a division of Professional Services and Sales where Professional Services is more aligned with R&D and Sales is more aligned with Product Marketing.

What begins to happen is Professional Services learn features of the product from R&D but does not learn or invest time in understanding or developing solutions.  Marketing begins to define the concept solutions for Sales to promote.  Customer deals are closed and Professional Services are brought in to deliver a solution that has been built on a concept.  Professional Services must then make reality happen which, at times, is difficult and runs into problems.  Customers become unhappy or margin is lost by the company due to more investment in effort to complete the delivery.

How can this be avoided?

Sales and Professional Services for infrastructure product companies must have a partnership.  Jointly, the organizations should develop solutions with input from Marketing before customers are approached.  Periodic reviews of customer accounts by Sales with Professional Services allows the teams to identify potential opportunities by expansion of existing customer applications or even expansion of previous deliverables.  It is apparent that Sales is the first contact with a client, but Professional Services ends up being the ongoing contact providing Sales with information about ongoing opportunities.  Sales and services are natural partners.  Product companies will benefit from realizing this by ensuring Sales compensation includes Professional Services, Services personnel are consulted by Marketing and Sales when new product releases are available, and so forth.

A product company’s strength is its Sales team and the Professional Services it provides in delivering the quality product the company is known for.  A partnership is the key to ongoing success and growth.

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