5. Control the work in progress

The overall control system I use in practical terms is the production horizon: when will 'x' be finished, compared to when it needs to be finished.

A look ahead program will help discuss such questions and Earned Value Analysis will help tell you where you've been, but you need leading indicators of success as well.

Commitments is one such: have you committed dollars to agreed activities sufficient for their timely delivery (e.g. you've got the next sub-contractor signed with sufficient time for him to mobilise to start work in time.).

4. Build a one team one goal approach

If the goal is the overall project and its mission; then 'yes'. But local goals change from time to time. Usually they concerned with task completion, hand off and collaboration, but the goals intertwine. A project is not that neat that at the operational level there is one goal at any time.

Of course, scale might have something to do with this. On a $500m hospital project with the total project team running to dozens of firms and hundreds of people and a WBS of several thousand items, then many goals all the time!

2. Communicate visually

This alludes to a book by Woeppel about 'visual project management'. I haven't read the book so I cannot say if it is worthwhile, or just another PM gimmick.

Visual communication has had a boost in recent years with the preponderance of 'dashboards' as an attempt to communicate critical performance information to senior executives (or anyone, really). I use them myself, but one of the risks of dashboard reports is that they will be admired but not digested.

The idea of 'dashboards' was given its first outing, according to himself, by Charlie Kyd, who has an e-book on the topic. Edward Tufte's forum also deals with visual communication in regard to project management, wrestling with gantt charts, as though these are the be all and end all of PM information vehicles. Oddly, Tufte has some good ideas on this topic for medical charts. These could provide an approach for project management, conceptualising the project like a patient and bring a summation of past and current information to the chart.

The idea of visual communication: charts, influence diagrams, fishbone diagrams and the rest of the panoply of this genre is probably good, at a level. The idea of a project dashboard is good too, but one cannot escape the numbers. The two biggest numbers are: current expected (really truly expected) out-turn cost and current expected completion date. Nothing else matters.

1. Avoid multi-tasking

Yes and no.

Sure, don't try to work on a number of independent tasks at the one time, you'll end up with inefficiencies of time and effort for all, resulting in poorer performance that obtained by concentrating on a task until it comes to a stable stage (when you can leave it with minimal inefficiency upon return to it).

However, a PM, like any manager, hops from issue to crisis to ceremony ALLTHETIME. That's what management is.

The 'secret' is to organise this torrent of calls on your time with an end in view; not just the project as a whole, but on current delivery chains: actions that must be taken and completed to maintain the tempo of the project.

5 surprises

In his Projects in Less Time blog Mark Woeppel has a useful post on the "5 Surprising Habits of Successful Project Managers".

Let's discuss.

The surprising 5 are:

1. They avoid multi-tasking
2. They communicate visually
3. They collaborate intentionally
4. They build a one team one goal approach
5. They control the work in progress.

I'll discuss over the coming weeks.