Guest Post: Project Management Battle of the Sexes

Just contributed to LiquidPlanner's "Home on the Range" blog, with a post titled "Project Management Battle of the Sexes".


This past July, the New York Times ran the article, “No Doubts: Women are Better Managers.” It was an interview with Carol Smith, SVP and Chief Brand Officer for the Elle Group, the media company. She explained what she does to be a great manager and why women will always be better managers.

More on the LiquidPlanner blog >

It's painful being a Project Manager....

Have you ever felt alone, completely helpless, struggling with everything around you knowing that you can't do a thing to make it any better?

No, this is not a commercial for a Prozac, it's a story about how I got caught at an incredibly inefficient process at an IKEA one day and almost lost it. I was working on a bunk bed project, had bought a used IKEA bunk bed for my 4 year old and discovered happily at 1am while building it that it was missing alot of critical hardware. So, rather than chase down the seller who had probably already gotten packed up and moved out of the city, I decided to go to the nearest IKEA to get the parts replaced.

I showed up at the returns/spare parts line with the instruction manual for the bed I was trying to build, the pieces of hardware I had left and a list in my head of what I needed. I saw one of those typical scenes in a store, a huge line of people looking really frustrated and just one or two customer service people helping. Then, lots of other IKEA staff were wandering around, attending to other areas that were not as crowded. It's the kindof thing that makes you want to scream...watching people wandering around looking like they have nothing else to do when there clearly are long lines that need to be helped. I thought about Brooks Law for a moment, and decided that in this type of project adding resources might cause a slight delay intially just to get people setup and going, but ultimately will definitely make things go faster.

And wait, there's more!
We all had to pick a number and wait for it to be called, the line moved at a pretty steady (slow) pace but than at a certain point things sped up. The line almost breezed through the last 8 numbers before me and then behold, the two people right before me had a seriously huge cart of stuff to return. Not only was there a lot to return, but there were major complications with their items. It made me think about the idea that software project tasks are either 0% done or 100% done. It's impossible to predict the exact amount of work that will be required to get something done, anyone who's managed programmers before knows that they love to say they are 95% done for the last 90% of the project. You can only get a truly accurate estimate when the task has completed. In the meantime, stick to ranges.

As I sat there waiting and watching the clock tick, I figured I should use the time wisely and made sure I had an exact list of the parts I needed. So, it took 5 minutes and I got my list down. I wish some of the other people around me would have thought of the same thing. I couldn't stand watching the people at the head of the line rifling through their papers, I thought if they had only taken a few minutes to plan before it was time for them to get to the top of the line they would have saved everyone else a lot of time.

So, I'm not saying I'm an expert and that all my projects launch perfectly with the time/budget/scope triangle balanced to a tee. I enjoy learning about how to improve what I do and how to incorporate the right processes that will make my projects more successful. When I spend a lot of my time learning how to make things run more smoothly, it just pains me to see disorganization and chaos in a place where I have no control over things. Yes, I guess I could be one of those people to shout at the customer service reps to move the line along or lecture the others in line to be more organized, but I just don't swing that way.
I suffer in silence, and wait for the moment to pass (well, sometimes at least...)

Some Simple Lessons in Project Management, from Edward of Sir Topham Hatt's Railway

We watched a lot of Thomas & Friends over the holiday weekend (yes, with my kids...wow, that joke never gets old). Since I don't watch the show regularly (not kidding here) I was surprised to learn about how many different trains there were. I always heard about 'Thomas the Train" and didn't hear much about his other friends. Anyway, one of the episodes featured Edward, who had to take over Percy's mail route because Percy was getting repaired. Edward didn't want to ask about how Percy delivered the mail, he assumed someone would tell him or he would figure it out.

As he started on the route, he had three deliveries to make. He guessed his way through and got all three deliveries wrong. When he got to the end of the route, he was told that the deliveries were wrong and he had to go back and bring all of the packages to the correct places. At this point he's running out of time, so he rushes through the pickup and drop-off, and ends up losing & breaking packages. By the end of the day he's very frustrated and the other engines are disappointed in him.

So the lessons learned here are pretty simple...

1. Never assume that you completely understand the task at hand. It might seem simple at first, but once you're in the thick of it, questions might come up that you won't be prepared to answer unless you have a full understanding of the task.
2. Don't be afraid (or too proud) to ask for help. This doesn't just happen to trains, people will sometimes have pride issues, too. Better to ask what might seem like a stupid question now than look even more foolish later.
3. Rushing doesn't pay! What you gain in time you lose in quality.
   

Do you have any Edward trains on your project teams? Better make sure they watch this episode!

A Lesson in Risk Identification, from the Very Worried Walrus

Just got a shipment of old school children's books from my in-laws a few weeks ago (yes, we have kids, I don't just read kid's books for fun or blog material). One of the books is "The Very Worried Walrus", by Richard Hefter. This was one of my husband's favorites, but I had never read it before. So, when I read it to my daughters for the first time, it got me thinking about Risk Identification.

Let me tell the story....

Worried Walrus really wants to ride a bike, but is afraid he'll fall off. He has a conversation with "Positive Pig" about why he's worried...

"If I fall off, I'll get hurt. Then I'll have to go to the doctor. And I'll need medicine orbandages....or...stitches! Ohhhh!"

To which Positive Pig replies, "That's silly, bicycle riding is fun and there is no reason to worry."

The Worried Walrus goes on, "An awful lot can go wrong. You have to steer and pedal and balance. You have to look out in front of you and on both sides and make sure nowone is behind you...and not go too fast...and use your brakes."

Reading further, we understand why the Worried Walrus has his title, "...If I get hurt, they'll have to take me to the hospital in an ambulance. I can see it now, there's a traffic jam on Main Street. The ambulance get's stuck..."

And he ends up in the middle of nowhere walking through the rain in a dark night, wet and hungry and looking for anyone who can help him.

I won't give away the rest of the story, you should pick up the book and find out for yourself!

But, I think this is a great example of Risk Identification. This is the process of discovering, defining and documenting risks before they become a problem in a project. The way I see it, the more creative you can be about it, the better. The project team should sit down and brainstorm on all of the possible risks to the project and get them documented. The document should detail the risk, the severity, impact and contingency plan (here's a sample Risk Management Worksheet from the Gantthead site). At regular intervals throughout the project the team should revisit these risks, add new ones and archive anything that is no longer a risk. I recommend reading "Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects" to find out more about risk management.

The goal of this is not to be worried like the Worried Walrus. Actually the opposite, the more creative thinking you can do in the beginning of the project to identify and then manage the potential risks, the less stress you will have and more sleep you will get at night.

So, I tried to have this same discussion with my 2 and 4 year old after reading the book to them and well...maybe I'll try again in a few more years.

Will the real Project Managers please stand up?

Ok, so I already have that Eminem song in my head and it will be in there for the rest of the day I'm sure. If the least I can do is get that song in your head, than I've accomplished something. But, what this is really about is having an open discussion about all things project management, without the nuisance of spam or other unwanted discussion. I started doing 'Social Media Evangelism' for LiquidPlanner about a month ago and admit I feel like I am constantly struggling with the balance between being an active and valued (atleast I hope, you are all the judge of that) member of the Project Managers on Twitter community and using any available opportunities to express how powerful and amazing the LiquidPlanner project management system is. I am sure this is the same struggle that many people have who are promoting themselves or their products in social media (it's not always about Twitter, there's blogs, LinkedIn, ning sites, Facebook, etc).

Of course, looks like some have already failed. When I was checking out Webworker daily for posts about project management tools, I saw some great posts and then plenty of junk comments. I'm not saying that people shouldn't promote their products, but tell me who you are, and give me some reasons why I might want to use your product. Don't pretend to be a project manager making a recommendation, identify yourself and be open about promoting your product. One of the reasons why I made the post about my relationship with LiquidPlanner was to always have it handy to link back to when I was promoting LiquidPlanner and wanted to identify myself.

I think someone who strikes this balance really well is Charles Seybold from LiquidPlanner (and am I using this opportunity to promote them again? It probably looks like it, but I happened to like what he was doing before I had this whole arrangement with them anyway). His avatar is great, it's got the LiquidPlanner logo in the background and his face in the foreground. He does the same thing in his contributions on Twitter, a mix of product promotion and other interesting stuff. I think more organizat

I've seen many blog posts and articles about how to successfully represent your brand or organization on Twitter and other social media. It's a tricky balance and I don't claim to have found the perfect solution. But at the very least, when you want to talk about your product on project management blogs or via contributions to #PMOT, let us know who you are and why your stuff is so good.

A Tale of Two....Web Based Project Management Tools

I think I've found my new purpose in life. Forget doing good in the world, raising healthy and happy children, making a positive impact in my community....I've become obsessed with project management tools. Granted I don't exactly have days, weeks and months of extra time to spend sampling all of them, and there are a LOT of them. But, I like that I've been able to work with a few and research many more.

It all started with Microsoft Project, as it probably does for most people. When I began to learn the ropes of project management I learned how to use MS Project to build my gantt chart, dependencies, durations, assign tasks, etc. It was ok for what I was trying to do with it, but I never really loved it. As time went on and I needed more from a project management tool, MS Project was lacking what I needed. I got frustrated when items would randomly gray out and become uneditable, tasks were held to single point durations, updating one task would shift everything else out of control, and worse yet, nobody else on my team could easily view or work with my project file because they didn't have project installed and weren't comfortable working with it anyway. I needed something simpler, something that cut out all the extra unnecessary stuff that I didn't need when I was managing web projects, and something that was highly collaborative.

In walked LiquidPlanner. I won't go into the details of how I started working with LiquidPlanner since I did that in a previous post, but needless to say it quickly met all of my project management needs and with each new feature release, it only gets better! In the process of getting my workplace to adopt LiquidPlanner, I did research on other project management tools (Daptiv, Fogbugz, WebResource, @task, Wrike, 5pmweb) and consistently found that LiquidPlanner was the most practical and feature rich, giving the most bang for the company's buck.

To the point of the post - my research comparing Basecamp to LiquidPlanner. I've been using LiquidPlanner for over a year now and Basecamp for about 6 months. So when I was asked to work on a detailed comparison of the two systems for LiquidPlanner, I had months of personal experience from my own use to go on. The company I've been working at for the last 6 months is pretty married to Basecamp because of the value it adds as a communication and collaboration tool, but I quickly found that it was lacking as a real project management system. Basecamp has no Gantt chart, and from what I hear they have no interest in adding one...ever. Their goal is to keep the tool 'simple', so anyone can use it. I respect that, but then when I need something that will really help me manage projects, Basecamp isn't my solution.

Basecamp will allow you to create a milestone, give it a date and assign it to a resource. But, there is no way to give the milestone a work duration, dependency or specific start date. The Basecamp milestones also will always exist in one big pile in the project, there is no easy way to group milestones together by phase. This might work for very simple projects, but for anything more complicated with many tasks and milestones, Basecamp will get very messy. Also, because there is no work duration attached to Basecamp milestones, there is absolutely no way to see how your project team us over or under-loaded. It is possible to see all of the milestones assigned to each resource, but no way to really tell how many hours of work each resource has and what deadlines are at risk because of overloaded resources.

LiquidPlanner, on the other hand, took all of the smart and useful features from MS Project (and more) and includes them in its task and scheduling system. You create a task, give it a low and high work estimate, give it a 'promise by' date, a 'don't start until' date, attach dependencies, notes and files with a rich text editing system, put it in a project folder/sub folder and task list, and (of course) assign it to someone. Once you hit "Go", LP will then do all the math for you, figuring out if your resource will be able complete this task given all other work already assigned to him/her and flagging the task if it is at risk of not being completed. Tasks can be easily prioritized for your resources with a slick drag and drop interface (hey Basecamp, ever heard of drag & drop?). LP has an excellent Gantt system, using your tasks that have been estimated in ranges (and it's ok to make single point estimates too, buy why would you want to?!) and plotting out probable finish dates for all tasks, project phases, and of course the entire project.

If you had a chance to read my previous post about why I fell in love with LiquidPlanner in the first place, you'll understand why I feel so strongly about making task estimates in ranges. I wasted hours with MS project trying to find a way to do this, with no luck. And of course Basecamp doesn't have this feature. So far I have not found any other project management tool with this important feature, except for LiquidPlanner.

But what about collaboration? Basecamp has a decent collaboration system, all email communication for a project can be passed through and stored on Basecamp. This can be handy I admit, and this is not something that LiquidPlanner offers at the moment. But, the problem with this is that if the email threads are not managed carefully it's very easy for important details to get lost in the clutter of communication. Basecamp does have a search feature but it's pretty basic and lacks filtering and sorting. LiquidPlanner has many different types of collaboration available. Files and links can be posted, detailed notes created (with a beautiful rich text editor), and Twitter-like commenting. All this is available for each task, on any project sub folder, or on the entire project. This will allow the team to more easily attach the important information to the project, rather than loose things in a flood of Basecamp email.

And there's even more great stuff happening. LiquidPlanner just released it's client portal system, making it even more valuable as a collaborating and showcase tool. I might need to do a part 2 of this comparison, but I think it's pretty clear from this post what tool is my favorite.

The story of my (never ending) love affair with LiquidPlanner

Don't worry, this post is appropriate for children...

It all began about a year and a half ago, when I got slammed by the boss for a web project that was about to enter the development phase and was being projected by the programmers to take about double the amount of time that it was originally estimated. I kept my head up and went back to look more closely at the original estimate and what we knew about scope at that time. Well, we knew very little, practically nothing. And, I remembered that the estimate was made months earlier and my client said to me "just give me a rough ballpark, we'll figure the rest out later". So, that's what I did. Well, I won't get into the details of how that drama continued, but what I will say is that the experience led me to start doing my own research on estimates and how to make them more accurate. I was stunned by the experience, by the idea that I was being held to a number that was calculated before any of us had any idea of what the project was really going to be. It was an estimate, a guess... a really rough guess.

My reading and research just backed up my position even more, that estimates made at the very beginning are subject to a high degree of error (anywhere from .25x lower to 4x higher). I got this and much more great information from a book by Steve McConnell, titled "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (2006)". I wrote about this idea, and the importance of presenting estimates in ranges on my company's blog. You can find the same post copied here, where I compare the uncertainty of software project tasks with the challenges of herding toddlers around in the morning.

From that point on I was on a crusade to make sure that all estimates my team produced were in ranges. It took a little while to get the programmers into that mode, after the Director of Technology read the same estimation book, he also helped me get the programmers to think of their estimates in terms of best case and worst case. Nobody wants to think that way at first, you always want to think that everything will go smoothly and nothing will be confusing or unclear, but the reality is that things are not always what they seem and we need to allow the extra room to figure things out sometimes.

So, by this point you're probably getting impatient and wondering where the juicy details about the love story with LiquidPlanner starts. It's coming very soon...I promise.

I don't remember the exact order of things, but I know I was pretty frustrated with Microsoft Project. I was a true believer in ranged estimates and I couldn't figure out any good way to get those worked into my MS project schedules. I experimented with new fields and was really unhappy with the lack of flexibility. I wanted to have a tool that showed my schedule in terms of best and worst case so that project stakeholders would have a range to work with and not expect a commitment to an exact date and exact number of hours of work (especially so early on).

Then, that one magical day, I was contacted by Liz Pearce from LiquidPlanner. She had read my blog post about including uncertainty in project estimates and wanted to tell me more about their web based project management tool. It was love at first sight, I was sold pretty quickly just based upon the fact that I could make my task estimates in ranges. Then, as I did more research I saw how LiquidPlanner was going to solve more of my problems. Our office was not using MS Project server so there was no central workspace for project plans, we all worked isolated on our own files and one project manager never knew when the other one needed her resource (yes, all project managers were women at that company at that time...go us!). By having the entire production team on Liquid Planner (for a much lower price than Project Server of course), we could easily see when a resource was overbooked. I also was thrilled to see a project management system that had such great collaboration tools, I was not going to have to rely on saving important emails to folders or logging the information in a shared file, we could all go to LiquidPlanner to see all important discussions and files related to our project. As I researched more about the company, I saw that Steve McConnell was on the advisory board. He is the author of the book I referenced above and many other great software project books that I have read since. One more reason I know LP was for me.

I've been using LiquidPlanner for about a year now, and have never thought of turning back. I recently moved to a new company and have brought LiquidPlanner with me. I've found that the scheduling system has proven an invaluable tool for my resource management challenges in my new workplace. And all this time, I've kept up the relationship with the good people at LiquidPlanner. I like them and believe in their mission so much, that I found myself bragging about their product on project management blogs and twitter posts, LinkedIn and other social media outlets.

After a few months of this, LiquidPlanner and I decided to make it official. I am now a part-time "Social Media Evangelist" (that's the best title I've heard so far, hope I live up to it!) for LiquidPlanner. So....if you see me out there listing off all the advantages to using LiquidPlanner to manage your projects, now you know why. I hope our relationship continues to thrive, and if you haven't checked them out....well, what are you waiting for?!