The Project Coach

In my last blog, I talked about the Nominal Group Technique, a quick and painless way to guide your team through a brainstorming task.    Each team member gets a stack of Post It notes (or index cards or scraps of paper or whatever is available) and 5 or 10 minutes to silently and anonymously write down as many ideas as they can think of, with one idea per note card.  When the time is up, the meeting facilitator (i.e., the Project Manager – you) collects the artifacts, reads them all aloud, and, once all the ideas have been heard, asks the group to begin discussing them.

There are many benefits to this exercise:

• Participants have time to organize their thoughts and are not influenced by ideas from others
• Participants are less emotional when writing down their ideas
• Less assertive team members are heard equally with more dominant members
• Ideas are de-personalized because they are submitted anonymously

 Today I will give you some additional methods to use with the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), to maximize the many benefits of using this simple tool.  › Continue reading…

One of the most perplexing dilemmas of any project portfolio process, a catch 22 really, is how to estimate the size of the potential candidates being submitted before the selection board.  The catch 22 is that the selection committee wants an estimate of how much the project will cost before they can make a decision on whether to approve of it.  However, no work has been done on the project yet to define the scope or requirements to know what work would be necessary.  In fact the team that could even do the estimating has not yet been assembled.  No one wants to even invest the time to do any discovery until they understand the overall cost of the project.  So, if you are a program manager, you argue, it is impossible to determine a reasonable cost.  The decision makers counter-argue that they cannot make a decision without some kind of budgetary number to consider.  So you assemble a technical team and ask them to give you some kind of ballpark estimate based on the very sketchy facts you have at such an early point in the project.  They of course protest, suspicious that they will be held to the number when requirements balloon later in the project.  And round and round you go … › Continue reading…

If you are like most people charged with running a meeting, you find the same group dynamics are in play meeting after meeting after meeting.  You have someone who won’t talk and another who won’t stop talking and everyone else falls somewhere in the middle. 

Dr. Paul Paulus at the University of Texas at Arlington has studied and written about group task performance and creativity.  He has determined that groups are less productive than individuals, if left to their own devices.  › Continue reading…

Some people think of those 3 letters and hold up the sign of the cross as if to ward off vampires.  For some reason this seems to be one of those areas of project management work that meets with more resistance than most from beginning practitioners.  I’m often asked “Do we really need to go to all the trouble of creating one of those?” There seems to be confusion about what a WBS is and why anyone would need one, and generally speaking a lot of fear about the effort involved to prepare one.  › Continue reading…