Start the campaign as soon as work is announced and establish the duration of the campaign.  Clearly identify each objective of the campaign and be sure to announce each accomplishment as it occurs. In other words, if you can’t produce real-time updates, don’t bother, your campaign won’t work.

Campaigns work for the following reasons:

The power of the message.  Establish a message that resonates with all staff.  Make it a simple message that is easy to remember and too powerful to forget.  Use visuals or logos to promote the message.  Place campaign posters in common areas, where staff will see them on a regular basis.

The strength and ability of the people.  Your staff is great!  Acknowledge the power of people’s past accomplishments to rely on their ability to rally around the campaign’s goal.  Announce victories as soon as they are won; visually track the accomplishments.

The strength of logistics, support and planning.  Think of the EPMO as the “campaign management office”.  Use proven tools to plan, organize, and communicate the campaign.

The key to ultimate campaign success:  Find a message that will not only resonate with staff, but will mobilize them to take action.

For mature EPMO’s, there is the constant challenge of representing ongoing value to the organization.  In other words, once you successfully introduce project management to the enterprise and things are humming along, what next?  How about partnering with other departments to identify new opportunities as you successfully support tactical execution of the business plan – After all, this is the primary mission of all successful EPMOs.   The EPMO can drive a large part of the communication associated with the development, launch, and monitoring of business plan activities, mostly because they sit in the air-traffic controllers seat — they see and hear it all – if positioned in the right place within an organization, that is.  One way to promote communication is to introduce manager tool kits, designed to provide key messages managers can use when communicating business plan information to staff. 

A manager tool kit provides functional managers with talking points; it may include a scripted PowerPoint presentation, and tips for customizing content and delivery to staff.  A Q& A tool that assists managers with typical anticipated questions is a helpful tool in any kit.  The purpose of a manager tool kit is to provide management with important information that can be delivered across the organization is a consistent fashion, irrespective of who delivers it.  It ensures key business units will hear the same information, regardless of where they sit in the organization.  It should be written in a way that strengthens key messages, reinforcing what is important for the organization’s future success and why certain work efforts are considered priorities, i.e. the project portfolio.

Be creative when working with your internal business partners.  Work with your communications department to include business plan updates (including project milestones) in company newsletters.  Don’t have a newsletter?  Start one.  Try periodic updates through poster campaigns – what easier way to keep staff informed of important business plan/portfolio activities?  Does your Human Resources Department orient new staff when they join the company?  How about a few minutes of airtime during new employee orientation programs to introduce the role of the EPMO and to inform folks of the priority projects?

Today, it is easier than ever to offer information through multiple channels.  Recognize that everyone processes information differently.  When you understand audience differences, you can create a series of message that contain different levels of information and deliver it through a variety of channels.  The options are endless—understand what your organization needs, how staff best respond to receiving information, and then create a communications plan that supports business plan activities throughout the year.  Who says the EPMO doesn’t add value?

It is equally important for everyone to know how the company is delivering on the priorities.  Project managers tend to only see their own projects, and they are unsure how the project they are managing supports the organization’s overall success.  Many project sponsors don’t take the time to understand the status of project activities and are often unable to recognize the early warning signs of a project in trouble.  Senior executives seldom conduct a check-in on the business plan as a whole to ask questions like these:  Is it still the right plan?  Do we need to shuffle priorities?  Are we properly resourced to deliver the priorities?  And most staffers on the front lines do not really understand how their day-to-day efforts support the mission.

The PMO plays a key role in connecting the dots and communicating key headlines throughout the organization so there is a global understanding of, and commitment to, the successful delivery of the business plan. The traditional PMO typically focuses on communicating individual project activities, only after projects have launched.  It is right for the PMO to focus on project communications, as this is the hub of their existence.  However, the PMO also has the responsibility to communicate the portfolio as it is being developed and while it is being executed; sharing this information across the enterprise enables a heightened level of understanding which further promotes plan success.

PMO leaders need to partner with others across the organization to get to effectively communicate business plan activities.  Align with marketing and strategic development departments to design and deploy a well-orchestrated internal communications plan that tells employees about the business plan.  The purpose of the communications plan is to provide employees with a line of sight from the company’s brand, mission, values, goals and performance to their day-to-day work.  The communications plan should be designed to help staff understand the overarching business strategy, the priorities (and why), the tradeoffs the organization need to make short-term (and what is expected of them) each year.  The plan must be straightforward and comprehensible to effectively inform all staff.  The idea is to create simple messages, and be creative about making the messages memorable.  Then you must repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat. 

Create a plan in a conversational and interactive format, which allows employees to relate to the information better.  Get feedback from executives who have the greatest number of employees affected by the plan so you can understand the employee impacts and concerns/aspirations/fears of staff.  Some of the questions to consider when interviewing business leaders may include:

• What is top-of-mind for your employees today?
• What do your employees know about the corporate agenda (project portfolio)?
• What are the three most critical messages we need to communicate to employees around the current corporate agenda?
• Any thoughts on how to best communicate these messages?

You may consider the PMO an unlikely keeper of the communications plan.  But, who, may I ask, does it today?

We project managers need to possess a variety of skills and traits including, but not limited to, being culturally aware and sensitive, listening well and communicating effectively with other cultures. What does that really mean?

I have heard so many stories about how gestures, language and body posturing have all been misunderstood leading someone down a wrong path, to the wrong conclusion or worse an un-recoverable situation.  Even a well versed and culturally sensitive person can easily forget to step back and remember the cultural dynamics in the current situation.

I wish there was some special magic to this but what matters is constantly being aware of the environment and players, constantly applying your learnings and experiences.  There are good resources available to jump start you or help you understand your experiences, both in the present and from the past.  One really good book is “Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands by Morrison and Conaway”.  The more projects I manage globally the more I add notes and comments on the pages within my copy.

So back to Five Whys, how should Five Whys be applied to the people and team dynamics without the perceived attacking “why” because the why word can and often does cause people to go in to a defensive posture.  Here are my keys:

• Know your audience personally and culturally
• Be aware and listen carefully
• Search for understanding before responding 

The final wisdom I can share because this has really worked for me recently. If you are building a global team or lucky enough to inherit a global project, find people you know from those cultures or regional areas and learn as much as you can from them before that first meeting or conversation.

Once you are globally and culturally aware and ready, tackling Five Whys at a later juncture will be more successful. Good Luck !

- Debra Hein

It is best to understand clearly the problem statement in order to head in the right direction. Points of consideration should be the current condition or state, available data at hand and the gap in delivery to expectation or performance targets. Taking the time up front to understand the problem statement is a key to success of applying Five Whys; however, it is equally as important to be open to changing this problem statement as you and the team learn more during the application of this approach. What we thought was the base problem at the beginning could very well be what we perceived or projected on to the situation versus the true problem.

Additionally, quantifying and qualifying the problem statement is an important element. It is best to keep the problem statement as brief as possible - a sentence or two.
Examples might be: 

• Currently entering data in to four different unconnected systems cause task completion to be 30% later than scheduled for completion 
• The design tool fails to complete its operation twice daily           

The application of Five Whys should avoid turning the emphasis into a Five Whos as a search for blame. It is important to stay focused on the “issue” and not the person, even if you are dealing with human factors or behaviors. By focusing on the question “Why”, we are much more likely to avoid using the “Who” question.

Now that seems straight forward for a “technical” problem in the project, but what we project managers deal with a majority of the time are the human factors, challenges, obstacles, and human behavioral issues.

How should Five Whys be applied to these human factors without the perceived attacking “why” because the why word can and often does cause people to go in to a defensive posture. Often the application of Five Whys in these human factor situations tends to be one on one and not in groups. This is useful as it can prevent the feeling of being out numbered and hence defensive.  

Some factors that may lead to greater success would include:

• Perform as one on one discussion.
• Listen, Listen and Listen some more
• Hear with an open and objective ear (remove those hearing filters. Don’t approach the Five Whys having already formed a conclusion)
• Use alternatives to “Why”.

• Examples might be “help me understand”, “what caused that …”, “was there something different that could have been done”, etc. 

The application of Five Whys is a very powerful tool in the project managers took kit and applied in the right circumstances can lead to quick and effective solutions and resolution of human and team dynamics during a project.

- Debra Hein

Is memory a critical tool of the project manager?  

How can we strengthen this tool as to use it at just the right moment and need?

According to Thomas H Leahey and Richard J Harris our ability to have long term memory is based on moving the information we have proccessed from sensory memory to working memory through a means of rehearsal to effectively store it in our long term memory as facts, events and emotions.  Personally, my visual and recalled memory has been a strength as a project manager and after years of experience I continue to rehearse critical elements by writing them down in my project journal and on scraps of paper within reach. Yes I know this is old school, but this has always been the key to my memory. I am getting more modern these days as I have begun to use my iPhone notepad instead of all the scraps of paper!

Memory can be a very valuable asset as a project manager especially in those critical moments. Is this a tool in your tool chest?

- Debra Hein 

Fish do not simply float around in a tank. Although they once in a while bump into glass walls, they are able to find food, detect other fish and perform other cases of interacting with their environment. Fish in general can sense changes in the environment either by vision, by smell, sound and by the sensitivity of the skin (changes in water pressure, acidity and temperature). Yes, if fish want to communicate, they blow bubbles.

Photography by Weaselmcfee.

In a pond or ocean fish will continuously sense their environment, make something of that information and change their behavior if needed. This is an OODA loop.

To have a complex system in general that is resilient to changes, that has a mechanism to transform itself and to be able to adapt to the environment, it needs feedback from the environment. Feedback information needs processing and communicating to other agents. To do this an agent has to go through the OODA loop. John Boyd, a famous military strategist, created the so-called OODA loop to give us structure when discussing this subject. The loop consists of four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide and then Act.

Observing reality based upon absorbing information from other agents and the environment. The processed information is used for orientation in combination of the mental model a person has of the reality. Based upon the expectations resulting from both previous steps an agents decides what to do. Like a little PacMan we and fish are eating information packages on the OODA highway. The higher the amount of high quality information, the better our effectiveness in adaption.

We can discuss to what level a fish uses a mental model to make explicit decisions. But at some level, conscious or at a more hard-wired biological level, information is processed into action. For fish the speed of which they can make use of the latest information is essential. Be too slow and your a fish stick. A high ability to observe fast seems essential for survival.

In a sea of short term business volatility, it is often difficult to see the big picture of business. The sea is turbid and vision is obstructed. What fish do in such circumstances? They rely on other senses such as sound to collect information. Fish have the ability to switch senses. Do we need to do the same? In the sea of flooding information we are puzzled. As sound and light travel at different speeds in water than in air do we need to develop our information-collecting senses to cope with the new media of work?

So far, it seems that everyone is working individually. In the traditional OODA loop your mental models of the world are used. Your view of a situation, with your experience and history. But because humans are social, a large part of our mental constructs are connected with other people. Religion, economic relationships or even just being married create a shared construct. It is impossible to look at humans as individuals, we have to make connections with the larger groups.

If you look at how fish operate in a pond, you can see that

• fast observation of the environment is essential.
• the effectiveness of the observation is depending on the quality of the mental models hold.
• the ability to use more than one sense increases chances for survival.

Bas de Baar, blogging as “The Project Shrink“, is taking his message to the International Project Management community with a vengeance: “Projects Are About Humans. Now Deal With That!”

Thinking about a bucket of water can really help us out. It emphasizes the importance of preparation; the fish pond is all about preplanning.

Preplanning a pond is about the proper selection of the location, the pond size, the population in numbers and the types of fish. We have to think about what plants to use; whether they are oxygenating plants, shallow plants and submerged plants. We have to design the pond and make the necessary steps so that it is not leaking or becomes muddy.

Photography by bfick.

A friend of mine created a Koi Pond in his garden. He dug a huge hole. Plastered it with plastic, so it could contain lots of water. He connected the pump. Poured in hundreds of gallons of water.

He was ready. He threw in his 200 Euro Koi and heard… trrhrrfffjfhhfjjj.

He forgot to shield the pump so the fish could enter the pump.

Water out. Shield the pump. All those gallons of fresh water in and releasing a new, beautiful expensive Koi.

While watching the pond, a Heron flew over and ate his Koi.

Now he has shielded his pond with barb wire and glass ceilings. He’s prepared. His garden looks like a war zone though.

The idea about preplanning is to equip yourself in such a way that you can adapt to circumstances. That you create an start situation that is as good as you possibly can. If you go to the arctic, you take warm cloths, if you go to the tropics you pack T-shirts. If you don’t know, you pack several shirts you can wear over each other, depending on the temperature.

Preplanning is all about the construction of the pond. Once the construction is finished, you have to let the ecosystem take over. The next posting I will be discussing what is happening beneath the surface.

Bas de Baar, blogging as “The Project Shrink“, is taking his message to the International Project Management community with a vengeance: “Projects Are About Humans. Now Deal With That!”

Keep it Simple - How much do you really need to know about Microsoft Project?  To get through your career as a project manager, not as much as you think.  Perhaps a small fraction of the actual features.  But how can you distinguish useful features vs time wasters which don’t add value?  One effective answer is a combination of a hands-on course led by an instructor with real project management experience; and, a commitment of time to work with the tool using recommended best practices.

Don’t get overwhelmed in detail.  Complex project plans should be worked from the top down.  Project managers can keep things manageable by only going into as much detail as necessary.  Using your judgement on the areas of risk within a plan can streamline the information and help maintain sanity.

Understand the Tool - Microsoft Project is not a complete project management tool.  In fact, there are some key areas in the process where you might need to supplement the tool.  The front end planning and requirements gathering steps are key areas where project managers need to come up with accurate and meaningful information.  Project was not designed to effectively support these steps.  However, with a little creativity and some third party plug-ins, this process can be easily achieved.

Get more information on an upcoming Microsoft Project course at UCSC Extension in Silicon valley - Managing Projects with Microsoft Project.

Jim Park
Instructor, UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley

Photography by Erikogan.

Adaption to change is in your head.

The key is the mind.

Let go of predefined ideas of how the world should work, and you will be able to change your views. And change them fast.

Think about a situation in terms of communism. Think about it in terms of free market.

A different mindset provides different insights. You will not be able to predict the future, but you will get a more holistic perspective on matters. One that will bring you closer to the truth than using tunnel vision.

The mindsets, the metaphors in your head, are a very powerful tool. They really do affect reality in a sense that they effect the decisions and behavior of the people that hold them. People can talk about projects as if they are conducting a war. They are using words like “marching orders” and “the troops”. If a Project Manager has a mindset like this, war as a metaphor, his mind is thinking in friends and foes, allies and enemies. You are either with him or against him. This view of the world will make it very difficult to collaborate with this person if you disagree.

However, a really good metaphor makes you think anew about things that have been over-thought.

We hope that the Fish Pond as a metaphor for organizations operating under change, can assist you in training your brain to be more flexible. The Pond lets you see situations from different perspectives.

A Fish Pond is many things.

It is a hole with water in your garden in which during cold and hot days, the layering of water changes. Is there a suggestion that we may need both flat and hierarchal organizations?

It is a small ecosystem with fish and plants. Different inhabitants, all connected. Does “Global Village” ring a bell?

It is a school of fishes swimming together without a manager. Why don’t they need overhead?

It is water flowing through a pond providing fresh oxygen. The oxygen is like trust running through organizations. What’s the purifying filter?

A pond is many different stories.

You should not train your brain with only the Fish Pond Metaphor. More views is better. But you have to start somewhere. Why not with a pond?

Bas de Baar, blogging as “The Project Shrink“, is taking his message to the International Project Management community with a vengeance: “Projects Are About Humans. Now Deal With That!”