Ruminations on 5 New Management metrics December 14, 2011
Posted by Edwin Ritter in career, Project Management.Tags: career, management, metrics, performance
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I saw this article today on Forbes.com about new ways to manage. I agree with each and have used several of these metrics with success. To read the full article, use the link provided. My comments on each metric are included below. While it is a catchy title, I don’t think managers need to know these to be successful. You can adapt one or more for your own use easily and look for ways to subtly employ each of the strategies described. These metrics won’t drastically change management styles, but they do provide ways to improve your management ability and help drive your team to be successful.
Metric 1: Flow State Percentage
Basically indicates that people need more think/soak time. When you have time to concentrate (i.e. – no interruptions), you are more productive. Getting to, and staying in, the zone more often makes you a better performer.
Metric 2: The Anxiety-Boredom Continuum
Keep a balance here. Not too easy, not too hard. Stay engaged and tune the level needed as it suites your team.
Metric 3: Meeting Promoter Score
I have used this to great effect. If you rate the meetings, you get instant feedback on what works, what does not and what people are really interested in. I found that once you have a consistent score, you don’t need to track it and your team knows what to expect and is engaged. Bonus – if you end meetings early, expect your score to increase.
Metric 4: Compound Weekly Learning Rate
My Father-in-Law, who came from the old country, always said “Every day you learn.” You do if you are motivated to do so. Even if you just did this for yourself, measuring your progress would change your priorities and how you spend your time in the office.
Metric 5: Positive Feedback Ratio
Catch your team doing things right. Even the mundane tasks. The author mentions the payback is realized that when you have legitimate criticism, your reports will listen.
These strategies are easy to implement. You can try one or more with your team and tune them as needed. With the new year just around the corner, now is a great time to look at ways to improve your management skills. Who knows – you may influence your peers and your boss by doing this.
Good luck and let me know what your metrics look like over time.
6 Vital Signs on Project Health June 30, 2011
Posted by Edwin Ritter in career, Project Management.Tags: management, project management
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There are multiple tools and measures available to manage projects. Here are 6 metrics that provide vital signs to monitor project health. These metrics can assist you to identify trends and define your level of comfort during implementation. They are also useful in communicating status to your team and stakeholders. Additionally, they help identify when to stop a project and provide the data to support that decision. Based on an article I read a long time ago, I have recapped the salient points in this post and included additional comments.
Here are the 6 vital signs :
- Critical Path status - this is the big picture view of how the project is tracking. It accounts for factors such as budget, resources and time. Use ratios of 15/20/25% as a vital sign. If the status of the critical path is off by 15%, identify tasks with your team to get back on track. If the status hits 20%, use change control methods to adjust scope, increase budget or reduce quality with buy-in from the stakeholders. When the critical path status hits 25%, suggest the project be shut down.
- Deliverable hit rate – A measure of the team’s success at completing project subtasks or deliverables. This also indicates pace and how well your estimates are tracking to the project schedule.
- Milestone hit rate – Similar to deliverable hit rate but refers to major task completion of the project.
- Issues vs. deliverables ratio – Simply the measure of the number of issues (or, problems) raised during the execution of the project divided by the number of remaining deliverables. When you have more issues than deliverables, you don’t have a plan anymore, you have Swiss cheese. How fast you close these issues is key as well and is connected to the deliverable hit rate.
- Planned budget vs. actual – Using the same ratios as with critical path of 15/20/25%, if the project goes too far over budget, check the return on investment (ROI). The stakeholders will need to decide if the costs are still justified by the benefits.
- Planned resources vs. actual – Includes employees, hardware, software and time. Measure this the same as planned vs. actual budget.
How your organization uses project management will determine how many of these you can use. You may not use the critical path method (CPM) to track projects. There is a built-in assumption here that collecting the data signs will not detract from other project tasks. It also implies that your team will embrace this in addition to, or, replacement of whatever monitoring practice is currently in place. If you collect these measures and routinely monitor them, you have a good idea of your project health. Use these or tweak as fits your style and organization.
I appreciate that you can use this to communicate with the team and stakeholders. I like the vital signs 2, 3 and 4 – hit rate measures for deliverables, milestones and issues. Charting these and displaying them on a regular basis provide great performance indicators that your team and sponsors can easily understand. Trends are visible to all and your team may even provide solutions before you ask. Remember, shutting down a project is not a sign of failure – it is always a valid recommendation. Having the data and trend supports the decision.
There are many ways to run projects. As a project manager, you will use a lot of different styles, tools and measures. I have used success criteria based on QA results, stoplight traffic controls and even the statistics from the project schedule to communicate project progress and health.
What signs do you use to measure project health? What are your favorite, time tested ways to monitor progress?
Management Types to Avoid March 27, 2011
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.Tags: career, management
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Management styles evolve over time yet certain fundamentals remain constant. Planning, communicating and getting commitment from your team are a few of the essential fundamentals. Good managers also provide clear and actionable deliverables. You recognize those effective managers easily. They have successful teams; people who are motivated. Then, there are those managers who are not so good. You know the type. They don’t know what they want until the last minute, have unrealistic expectations and never acknowledge your efforts. The management types to avoid.
We all have worked for both good and bad managers. I hope you work for more good managers than bad. For those occasions when working for a less than good manager, I offer this adage that helps deal with fear, uncertainty and doubt (aka, fud).
“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long,with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing at all.”
A coping mechanism for sure and a way to gently express frustration. It also helps rationalize an irrational situation.
What ways do you use to work with good managers and avoid the bad ones?
Has Worker Productivity peaked? October 13, 2010
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.Tags: capacity, management, productivity, recession
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A recent report from the Labor Department indicates that worker productivity may have peaked and actually be in decline. That can be good news for the economic recovery as companies will need to hire more workers to maintain growth. Companies are beginning to realize they simply cannot get more work from current employees and they need to be aware of the burnout effect. To maintain growth then, companies will need additional workers.
This is good news for job seekers and will have a positive impact on consumer spending.
Are you as efficient as you can be? Has “doing more with less” been played out at your company? Do they plan on hiring?
Old and New Visuals for User Experience October 4, 2010
Posted by Edwin Ritter in User Experience.Tags: management, Planning, process, web design
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When it comes to web design, User Experience (UX) is one area where I learned a lot and, came to appreciate the value of, early on in projects. Having a good UX design is a key success factor in a good web site. As the web is a visual medium, using a simple graphic to describe the site design elements is a wonderful thing.
Having the UX defined is typically an early deliverable and is useful as the project goes along. It may be tempting to minimize the time spent on UX. If you skimp on the UX, as with other project fundamentals, you will revisit it later many times until you get it right. Pay early in the project and allot the proper time required to get this as complete as possible. In a visual medium, good design can be an intangible thing. You know a good design when you see it. Trying to articulate what makes a design work can be simplified by using these graphics.
Classic UX from Jesse James Garrett
The classic image from Jesse James Garrett shows the elements involved in UX. This timeless visual is now 10 years old also and still relevant. I keep a copy of this with me constantly on web projects. When the discussion turns to UX, I often refer to this image to understand and help drive a solution.
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Fast forward to our current gestalt with User Centered design and here is a great graphic that uses the familiar iceberg analogy.
Elements in user Centered Design
There is a lot of information conveyed in this visual and includes the elements from Garrett’s classic UX. I like the progression taking a strategy to concrete concepts, showing how planning drives design and results in launch taking while into account the personas, user testing (!) and observation. Last, I really dig the various ways the user goals are shown. It gets to the intent of the site and who will use it – instruct (tell me), inform (show me) and reveal (involve me).
This visual captures a lot of the current best practices for web design. Notice that the design is agnostic on platform delivery. This approach on basic design concepts works for the web, mobile and tablet platforms.
Both old and new visuals are useful for UX (and information architecture) discussions to convey the concepts for a site ‘look and feel’ . Each clearly shows what is required in UX and helps ground everyone on how the site will be used.
Have another useful visual? What is your favorite?
Project Roadmap and Holidays December 14, 2009
Posted by Edwin Ritter in career, Project Management.Tags: management, Planning, projects, roadmap, team work
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One of the benefits of being an experienced professional is being able to define an annual roadmap. The roadmap in this context is a list of project level commitments defined in a schedule. Crafting a roadmap visually is a great way to communicate with your team, clients and sponsors. Through experience and some lessons learned, I found that using holidays for project milestones has many benefits.
- Using the holiday schedule enables creativity and great team discussions.
- Holidays are easy to remember. They are highly visible to everyone.
- It keep the team focused on key dates.
I found that using Thanksgiving as the roadmap end date was useful also. That left time (a.k.a. slack) if any project slipped but more importantly, it left time for the 11th hour rush of requests from internal clients. Typically, the month of December is when my team would need to deliver on many unplanned updates. By having our roadmap finished, there was enough time to accomodate those requests. Client happy, staff happy, boss happy. A good place to be. 
Everyone is familiar with the holiday schedule. As project milestones, holidays are great motivators also. Everyone wants to complete a major effort before a 3-day weekend, right?
As a manager, you need to envision how to position your team for success. Keeping things simple is always a good mantra. Using common tools and techniques is a powerful thing for you and your staff. Communicating in a clear and consistent way is a key enabler also. By knowing the team roadmap, my staff planned their individual vacations accordingly.
It has taken some lessons learned over time for me to appreciate this as a routine planning process. Having that experience, I can have rational conversations at any level about the merits in this approach. I realize it may not work for everyone. Many times, project dates are assigned for you. Been there, done that.
Remember, the magic quadrant is a reasonable level of insanity. The least preferred quadrant is unreasonable level of insanity.
Hope your roadmap is in good shape and you are able to manage the time left to complete it in time for the New Year. Happy Holidays!
Peter Principle – Fact or Fiction? October 5, 2009
Posted by Edwin Ritter in Trends.Tags: capacity, career, management
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This basic management principle states that people rise in an organization to a level of incompetence. Every working professional can relate to this and may have experienced it already (or, will given time) by working with someone who has been promoted to a position that is beyond their capacity. At which time you ask ‘How did that person get his/her job?’
Whether fact or fiction*, the Peter principle is a fundamental reason why the Dilbert comic strip is so popular. We all can relate to those situations where incompetence reigns despite our hope that logic and reason will prevail. Many people feel the situations depicted in Dilbert are unique to their company. But, that is why it is universally popular – it happens in lots of companies.
Over the course of my career, I have worked with people who demonstrate the Peter principle quite nicely and even have had a boss or two like that. Thus far, I believe I have avoided being a data point to validate this concept. I’m not sure but there may be some detractors about that.
Competence is also related to my last post on capacity. Possessing the knowledge and skills to do the job required and meet deadlines is a learned skill. Being a consistently solid performer that can also exceed expectations requires focus and dedication. Career advancement is based on past performance and potential to manage more complexity and extend capacity.
Would you admit it if you are an example of the Peter principle? Know someone who is? What signals do you watch for to ensure you are working at a high level of competence?
*Actually, while highly plausible, the Peter Principle is but a work of fiction. See the wikipedia entry which describes the authors and the related book.
