Rest

Rio Celeste is one of the many wonderful hideaways available in Costa Rica. A zone with an important indigenous heritage, amazing natural resources and a river that due to volcanic influences literally goes by its name. I share this week a few lines about rest as I have the privilege to put them in practice as I spend this holiday season with my family here.

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Go on Vacation! – I've met colleagues that like to accumulate their vacation for long periods after which they also go for important periods of time, just because. I have slightly different perspective. I try to take all my available vacation every year in two or three different periods. Here the important thing is not so much how do you take your vacation. It is probably more important to ask: are you taking it? Do not get fooled by confusing hard work with no vacation at all. Even if from time to time you need to stay away from vacation to focus on a project. Do not make it a permanent habit. Otherwise you’ll remember that you are a human in need of rest the hard way. 

Make sure you deserve it – I mention this one because I try to make the same question to myself from time to time. It is really cool to go away from work knowing that you are performing well in what you are paid to do. If some time the answer is not necessarily positive, then make sure that your vacation pays you well by recharging your batteries for a better come back. 

Plan ahead – open spaces do not pop up in the agenda magically. There is space for the things that actually interest you and for which you open spaces. If you do not manage your agenda, other people will do it according to their interests. So make sure your family and your vacation have the spots they deserve in it. This means that you’ll need to make plans at least a couple of months in advance, so you match your family’s availability with the demands from the projects you are currently leading. 

Share the news – we live in a heavily connected world. Many team members and colleagues depend on the work you do, the plans you make, the code you develop. Communicate early the holiday seasons customary in your country which you plan to take, as well as the holidays. Make sure to let your stakeholders know your plans and how they can proceed in your absence. You will need to ask a few of them for their agreement with your plans. Others will do just fine with a kind notice. This will save you some bad moments once you come back. 

One more thing – if you are a project manager or a manager you will definitely want to ponder all vacation time and holiday from the team members you are leading. Especially if you are dealing with demanding restrictions of time or workload. It is easy to make dumb schedules by allocating every team member 52 weeks of work availability per year. That may be true for payment purposes not for effective time. 

I wish you a very happy Easter! 

- Sergio Calvo

Managing the Critical Path

A Project is by definition a temporary endeavor. This means that it has a definitive starting point and a definitive end point. No matter if it is a small home improvement effort lasting only a couple of days; or a real state mega deal spanning millions of dollars and years of development. As Project Manager you are in charge of determining, scheduling, and managing all the activities and resources required to complete that initiative in the given time frame.

In a small project like your home improvement, you may only a single set or path of activities. In other words only one start activity, followed by more activities to be done in sequence until the last activity completes the effort. Once you arrive at projects of certain size you will have more than one path of activities. Different sets of depending on one another but irrespective and in parallel of others. Like you may have on the Real Estate development.

Once all the paths are determined for the project, then the Critical Path can be identified. It is the set of dependent activities that will require the longest time to complete during the execution of your project. As such it will determine at the earliest possible completion date for your Project. It is called critical to reflect the fact that should any of those activities take longer than expected to complete, the overall delivery date of the Project will be impacted. Any activity on other paths can have some room to suffer delays before impacting the project itself, but not the critical path. Yes, you can have more than one Critical Path on the same project. Also you may have near critical activities which do not take as long as the Critical Path, but which can be pretty close to that duration. 

Given the impact that a delay on this set of activities represents for the project, it needs special attention in all phases of the Project Management process. First security measure regarding these activities, and the most basic one, is to actually identify which is that path for your Project. This may be a tedious task if you come from a culture which is not really used to worry about being late. However it is worth it since it will prevent the potential moral and financial impacts of a Project delivered late. 

Once it is being determined you may want to look at the team members assigned to those activities. You may want to make arrangements for those activities to be completed by skilled and experienced team members. If most activities on your Critical Path happen to be performed by junior team members, then you have an important risk factor for your overall schedule right there. 

You may want to look at tools like fast tracking or crashing these activities so the Critical Path may take less time to complete. If these efforts are successful, and the time required to complete the Critical Path is decreased; another path will become the Critical Path and so on. These techniques are also used when you evaluate the feasibility of decreasing the overall duration of the project. 

Keep in mind that the Critical Path, as the entire schedule of the Project for that matter, relies on the estimates provided by the team members for the corresponding activities. So it is pretty important that these estimates are as accurate as possible, elaborated by team members with some experience in the same kind of activity that needs to be completed. Otherwise there would be just guesstimates that may end up impacting the project. 

As with many other aspects of the Project Management process, monitoring and controlling is a vital step. You can’t manager what you don’t monitor and measure. You need to be on top of any changes in activities duration as the Project goes on so you can effectively detect any variances and act accordingly. This holds particularly true for something like the Critical Path. 

- Sergio Calvo.

Let's Follow the Sun!

My Saturday this past weekend started at 3:45 am local time to do some cool Project Management for the day. I had to take over at 4:00 am from a fellow Project Manager that started our weekend’s work the day before. It would have been very hard for her to stay overnight, however it was more manageable since she was working from a time zone a couple of hours behind me. For the next 8 hours I was the main point of coordination between our customers, located in a time zone a few hours ahead of me, and our technical teams split in three different continents. After my shift, another fellow Project Manager would continue with our work and then I would came to work for another 4 hours and finish our agreed deliverable for the weekend, by the end of the day.

This model of work is called follow the sun and it is the de facto work model in any global corporation nowadays. Such a name reflects the fact that at any given time is daytime somewhere around the world. So if you have people from all over the world working together, you can take advantage of it by having someone making progress at all times; without the need to burn any team member. Even if you work in a medium or small business, you are very likely to come across this type of situation if your customer is a company of certain size, or is based in a different time zone. This involves a series of challenges that are not to be taken lightly. 

As I rest from the very demanding journey I had yesterday; I share here a few tips to help you meet that kind of challenge. 

Wait a second! – You may be thinking something like: ok, why should I care about joining such a thing that you call a model of work? Well there are different factors. First, if you work for a corporation or in an industry where you interact a lot with customers from around the world, this is the usual model. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. If you really want to advance your career, you wont be able to avoid this kind of project forever. 

Then there is the nature of the project; there are cases like the project we are undertaking  now in which you deal with the information systems of big companies, systems that keep their operations running. There is no other time to work with them other than the weekend, following very specific protocols and executing to a very demanding and complex schedule. If we want to be successful in doing this kind of project, we need to align with its nature and inherent constraints.

Water in the Dessert – In this global setting you will work with lots of people doing several different things. Inside your company, with your customer and with the many third parties which are very likely to be involved. A fully developed and comprehensive contact list, including every team and every team member involved in the effort is like having water in the dessert. Without such a list the amount of time and energy that you will waste looking for the right folk that you require to perform a task is endless. 

Who is awake right now? – You must have some certainty about who is working or is ready to work at any given time. Given all the different time zones involved in a project you can’t take for granted that your colleague on the opposite corner of the world will be up and running at the very same time that you are. Plan ahead. If there are different shifts involved, you should require each team to confirm the team members that will be taking ownership of every shift. You should also get in touch beforehand with any colleagues from which you need participation, so they are aware and properly aligned when you require them to be. If you forgot about something, solved it inmediately.

Effective communication – You should manage communication effectively. Making sure that the message reached the other end, was understood as you intended to communicate it. More important you need to make sure that the message will trigger the pertinent action on time. Let's put it this way: sending an email or putting a request in a system has nothing to do with getting something done. An email sitting in an inbox, or a request aging in some system doesn’t do things. People do things. For the normal course of business you may have the luxury to wait some time to know if the email arrived or not, or to know if the request was attended or not. If time is constrained or if whatever you need to be done is important, at least use the chat. Ideally pickup the phone and talk to the person to make sure that both of you are on the same page. You need to use your judgment carefully to differentiate each situation. If you are not fully positive about something, communicate until you are positive. 

Emotional Intelligence – working long hours during the weekend, early in the morning or in the middle of the night is not something easy. No matter if you like to work hard or if you don’t need too much sleep. It is likely that you come into the need to wake someone up, or to call at a bad time, etc. Some people have flexible personalities and will be responsive to your requests; others are very structured and won’t react very positively to something like that. You need to have this reality present at all times and act with empathy in any interaction. 

Your work life balance – This kind on effort definitely has an impact in your work life balance, and in the life or your loved ones. Be mindful of their needs and align them with the efforts you are undertaking as part of the project. Remember that your team members and their the families will be also impacted. It is your responsibility to advocate in their favor in as much as possible. Plan ahead of time both your working time and your personal time. It is a very demanding pace that you will be required to accommodate, arrange with your employer and your management to get back some of the time you have invested. It would not be realistic to pretend to get back all of your time, but the goal is a healthy balance. Even if you don’t work in a global company, if you are involved in Project Management you will face this kind of situation at some point.

- Sergio Calvo

How to improve your performance with time tracking?

Let’s picture an olimpic sports star like  Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. They are disciplined. Disciplined enough to wake up before sunrise and make it to the practice every day. They work hard. Their trainers keep careful logs of the time devoted to practice. Let’s imagine a bit further that for some weird reason, those records show the same competition time at the end of each practice, 08:00:00 no matter what they really did. What do you think this would do to their performance? Would it provide therm insights to improve?

As professionals we do not share their outstanding sports level. Something we certainly share is that we come every day to work. We like to find ways to improve what we do and how we do it . Just like them.

As proper tracking of their competition times allows them to push further, our time tracking can also make a difference in our performance. It can prevent us from performing in the same way over and over again. Here are some hints to help you put this habit on your side.

Get a time tracker – Tracking the time you work every day is a good step; it will show how much you work and it will allow billing of your time. Something it can’t do is show how you are spending your time. This becomes an issue if your manager asks something like: -Which task is consuming most of your time?  Or – Give me a break-down of your time efforts – Just like it happened to me time a long time ago. I blushed as I had to start best guessing.

For many of us it would be annoying to write down the hour each time we start something and make sums at the end of the day. You don’t need to do it. You can use a time tracking tool. It is like having a digital trainer or assistant that logs your efforts while you practice.

There are a number of tools available. I’ve been using Grindstone 2 for a few years with cool results More info here. It lets you create tasks, link them to projects and have a recording toolbar. You can start or stop the clock with just a click. It will record the time you devoted to a task and it can also produce reports on how you spend your time among your tasks.

Be flexible – After a couple of weeks of tracking, you will likely be surprised about what the reports say. Do not panic!  If you never did something like this before, don’t expect to be a pro by next week. This would be frustrating and will not really help your performance. Get yourself some time to get used to it and to produce a healthy stress that challenges you to do more, not bad overwhelming stress.

Make it a habit – make a commitment to track for a defined period. Let’s say a month. Try to stick to it during this period. Then you can evaluate your results and take it from there. Remember, this will make a difference if you do it consistently in the long run. This is a challenge if you come from a culture like mine which is not really used to tracking things.

Plan for Action – After this time you will be more on top of your time and your tasks. You will likely waste less time. You won’t blush if your manager asks about your workload or effort breakdown. You can look at the reports and know if you are devoting your time to the right tasks. You can plan to make changes and adjustments. You have a clearer path on how to improve.

- Sergio Calvo.
Weekly Article #1