8 Expensive Lessons in Project Management, for Free!
When it comes to project management, it’s so much cheaper to learn from someone else’s mistakes. So here are a few of mine!
I’ve been running projects for my whole adult life. I started with computer games at IG. After ten years I switched to marketing and copywriting projects at Articulate Marketing, which I still run. On top of that, I’m now also CEO of Turbine, an online app for purchases, expenses, time off management and HR record-keeping.
Photo: Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig
Project management is the art, craft and science of getting stuff done by teams. And it’s also like walking through a minefield. These tips – based on my own experience over 20 years – will help you find your way through it.
1. Hire slow, fire fast.My first boss advised me not hire one person until I needed two of them. I ignored that advice at IG and probably hired too many people too quickly. Some were amazing but a few were amazingly awful. My experience was that the handful of underperforming staff took up more time and energy than the vast majority of good people. The big lesson is to spend more time developing the good people than correcting the bad ones. If necessary, this means firing poor performers who can’t or won’t improve.
In my case, after I sold the games company, I kept things small using contractors, freelancers, and outsourcing and only recently have I begun to hire full-time employees again. I’ve made more money, and I’ve been far happier with the new, slow-but-steady approach. My first boss was right.
2. Every new relationship needs a honeymoon.The human aspect of project management is vital, especially for long-distance relationships like the one I have with my Turbine development team. We had a bit of a rocky patch last year because I forgot that they were people and focused too hard on the product and my concerns about it. Today, things are much better because we have more regular contact and, more importantly, we try to talk more about ourselves and share a bit of water-cooler gossip.
Even for virtual teams, there are plenty of things you need to do to start the relationship in the right way: such as meeting regularly in person, setting clear expectations and using the right tools (we like Basecamp and, naturally, iDoneThis).
3. Understand incentives.
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Having paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in financial incentives over the years, my experience is that they are mostly worthless. Why? At best they motivate people to work more hours for a short period of time. At worst, they are taken for granted (which has no benefit at all) or unobtainable (which is actually demotivating).
Find other ways to motivate your staff: set worthwhile goals, give team members respect and autonomy, and create a feeling of belonging to a team with a mission. Maslov’s hierarchy of needs is an essential guide into human motivation. Also, give people a good, productive working environment. Read Peopleware. Don’t fall prey to productivity myths.
4. See eye to eye with the client.Most of the time, when a project goes badly wrong it’s because of a fundamental flaw in communications with the client. With projects, like software development, that are likely to have changing requirements, the key is to talk often, expect changes and plan for them. With creative projects it’s best to spend the time up front talking to and questioning the client until you arrive at a good, mutually understood brief.
My experience has also taught me two fundamental lessons about client communication: first, sometimes the best kind of conversation is a question, not a statement. Second, sometimes the best answer is no answer. When Kennedy got a belligerent message from Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, followed quickly by a more conciliatory one, he ignored the first and responded to the second. Do likewise!
5. Change is cheaper at the beginning.“Wrong decisions made early can be recovered from. Right decisions made late cannot correct them,” according to NASA Project Management Guidelines. Watch out for the 12 danger signs that your (writing) project is set up for failure (for example, too many meetings and not enough action), embrace confrontation, and make tough decisions early on. Early prototypes are very valuable for flushing out problems. Remember, it’s easier to change a sketch than recode a user interface.
Photo: thornypup 6. Bugs are inevitable.
Every project has bugs. When I got married, my friend Sophie said, “Three things will go wrong. Don’t worry about them.” This is great advice: bugs don’t cause stress; your reaction to them does.
So if you can accept the inevitable hiccups, even plan for them and agree how you’ll deal with difficulties up front, you’ll have a more successful project. This means going beyond a diagnosis of the individual problem, figuring out why the problem arose and adjusting your processes and systems to avoid that type of problem occurring again.
7. Know when to give up.I have shut down three big projects in my life. At the time, the decisions were difficult and painful. Looking back, in every case, it was the right decision because it freed me to do something better. One of the arts of managing projects (as opposed to project management) is knowing when to kill them. Google is good at this. They cull stuff all the time. But W.C. Fields said it best: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”
8. Make tea, not warAs the project’s manager you are the lynchpin, so be a friend to your emotions and stay sane. Over the past few years, I’ve realised that my time is more valuable than my money. You only have so many days in your life, spend them on projects that make you happy, better and richer. (Or reading my Devil’s Project Management Dictionary!)
And when I have a problem that’s stressing me out, which is inevitable from time to time, I find that a nice cup of tea is the universal solvent. Try it!
Scheduling Future Cosplays
Before you get started
By this point you’ll have:
- Picked out characters that speak to you (or at the very least their costume design does) that you would be okay with cosplaying
- Organized your cosplays by some criteria, recommend organizing by traits that can drastically change how you end up executing the cosplay. For me it’s easy, difficult, and competitive.
- The cosplays are prioritized based on characteristics that define what makes that cosplay important to you. For me it’s comfort and how the character fits in in terms of recognition and how likely that cosplay is to be worn by someone else at the same con.
Now you need to figure out WHEN you’re going to work on all these….
Step 1: Figure out what your cosplay needs are for the next year
Why a year?
Because it works for me. I’ve found that if I try to figure out what cosplays I will be wearing in 2 years, 3 years, or as little as 18 months, I always end up switching before I get to making them. Rather than worry about locking myself in to a cosplay that I might not want to do in a year or constantly flip-flopping, I just schedule as I need to.
Also, since any particular con only happens once a year, you can figure out how many and what type of cosplay you’ll need for the conventions.
This does not include costumes that might take multiple years to make. That’s an entirely different box of threads that I’ll write about another time.
So what are cosplay needs?
Figure out which cons you’re going to and what photoshoots or events that you’ll be attending (if they’re scheduled). Then list all of the cosplays you’ll need for those events. For example, let’s take a look at my 2012-2013 needs.
I generally scope my year from spring to spring because the main convention I attend is Anime Boston. These were my cosplay needs for spring 2012 through spring 2013:
- 1 Halloween costume
- 1 competitive outfit for Hall Cosplay
- 1 costume for my husband for the weekend of AB 13
- 1 costume for me for the weekend of AB 13
- 2 costumes for cosplay games at AB 13
You might need multiple costumes for multiple conventions, but the same principles listed below will apply.
Step 2: Refine your cosplay needs with any restrictions
For each costume, determine if there are any restrictions on what the outfit can be. If you’re going as part of a group to an event, make sure to take that into consideration. Also make a note of the time of year your conventions are. If you’re going to a summer con, it may not be the best idea to make that giant ballgown, so keep that in mind.
- Halloween costume - needs to be work appropriate and somewhat resilient to New England fall weather
- Competitive cosplay outfit - this year I’m going as a group, so my costume will need to be from the same series as the rest of the group members, plus it must be a competitive outfit
- Husband AB 13 outfit - this can be difficult or easy, but needs to be solid enough that he can rock it on is own
- My AB 13 outfit - can be easy because I’m already making a competitive outfit for AB 13
- 2 outfits for cosplay games -should try to fit the theme of AB 2013 (“Tales of Youkai”)
Step 3: Figure out what you already have and can reuse
To those of us with little time on our hands to make cosplays, taking an existing outfit and making some minor changes/repairs can save time, money, and sanity. As much as I would love to make a new costume for each outfit I needed, I don’t have that kind of time and money.
In this case, the outfits for the cosplay games can be found in my closet since I’ve already done pair cosplays with my husband of demon characters. I just need to make a note if anything needs to be repaired.
- Cosplay game outfits: Re-use Jin and Touya, but allow time for new wig(s) and minor prop/accessory fixes
Everything else can be new creations!
Step 4: Figure out what you CAN make
Real life can be annoying, but it always takes precedence over cosplay. As much as you might want to make 10 new cosplays, you need to be realistic. Do you have time to do that while working a full time job? Do you have money to make all those outfits if you’re still in school?
Do not put yourself into a position where you do not have money to live your regular life and where you let your enthusiasm for cosplay affect your work or school performance. Only you can determine what your bandwidth is, but be smart about it.
In this case, I generally find that 1 competitive, 1-2 difficult, and 1 easy costume are what I can handle. (Although I am getting faster and getting better work compensation, so those numbers might increase). Luckily, that matches up quite nicely with my cosplay needs (well, not entirely luckily, I do base my cosplay needs somewhat around what my bandwidth is).
If you find yourself without the time or money to make all of the outfits that you as ‘new creations’ in Step 3, you may want to revisit Step 3. See what you have in your closet that you can fix up or even re-purpose. You might be able to wash and re-use a wig. You might have props that can be repainted to look good as new. Leverage what you have to meet your cosplay needs without going broke/insane.
Step 5: Start matching up costumes from your prioritized lists
The first ones that I look at are always the competitive outfits, because those are the easiest to clear out the way (it’s for a single event, it has the most requirements to meet, and tends to be the most expensive because I want to get things right).
So for 2012-2013, I was going to be a part of a Magic Knight Rayearth group (where it had previously been decided that I would do Emeraude if the group ever came to pass). The other girls in the group were hoping to compete and so I agreed to lead the group and compete with them (which I didn’t have to).
This is why I organize my groups separately; when a group decides that it’s actually going to happen, you know what costume you’re doing for the group and so there’s not much to decide.
Next, I looked at potential pair cosplays for me and my husband to wear at AB 13. Generally I pick pair cosplays that feature characters that he loves because I have other opportunities (Halloween, competition) to make characters that I love. Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter happened to be on the top of the ‘easy’ prioritized list, so we decided to go with that. The pairing for that was Machi.
Finally, the last outfit to pick was for Halloween. I had a costume on the top of my list for Hakuouki, but hadn’t decided which Chizuru outfit to make yet. I decided to go with Chizuru, but I would figure out whether to do her Japanese, western, or geisha outfit a bit closer to Halloween.
Step 6: Breaking Ties
If you have two costumes that could work for a particular event, but you’re not sure which one to go with, there are three ways I use to break ties:
- Which one is higher priority on your board? You marked it as a higher priority for a reason, follow your prioritization or take another look at your list to see if you need to re-prioritize.
- Which one is cheaper? Why not save money?
- Imagine yourself walking around the con (or event) in both outfits. Do you get a better reaction for either? That will usually help you figure out where your heart truly lies.
Next Steps
Hopefully this helped you figure out how to wrestle with scheduling from a list of 20+ cosplays. Next time I’ll cover how to start planning a cosplay before you put needle to fabric.
If you’re still not sure, don’t worry about it! As long as you leave yourself enough time and money to make the outfits, you can delay making a decision until you’re a little closer to the event.
All the news.
Well, it’s probably safe to say now that I handed in my notice 3 weeks ago. I’ll be leaving my current employment next Friday. My new job is a jump up, I’ll be senior web project manager at a French company based in Dublin. And I’ll have staff again, 2 junior PMs. Nerve-wracking and exciting. But man am I glad to be leaving the agency business - never again.
Oh did I mention I’ll be spending a week relaxing in the sun on a Spanish island off the coast of Africa before I start my new job? Because there’s also that. Whoop.
Forecast. Increasing Productivity through Simplicity.
getforecastapp.comHello Handsome friends!
We’re excited to announce that Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 marked the official launch of our very first product— a simple yet versatile project & task management tool by the name of Forecast!
What started just over a year ago as a collection of improvements we wanted to see to existing project management apps, has become a fully functioning yet beautifully simple app of our own. It’s taken some elbow grease and late nights, as well as a ton of coffee and house music, but it’s finally here and the feedback so far has been tremendous!
Obviously, it will continue to grow and adapt based on the feedbacks we receive from our users (we love you!). But we’ve been using it to organize our own work for a couple of weeks now (including the final stages of it’s own development) and it’s been pretty great. We’ve never felt more organized, productive, and excited to work together. Gone are the days of long, unorganized to-do lists and trying to remember what thread so-and-so said that thing we were supposed to remember. Good riddance!
The ideas behind forecast are mostly familiar: projects, clients, people, comment threads, and file sharing— but we’ve taken an approach that haven’t been fully explored in the world of online collaborating & project management yet seemed long overdue.
First, and simplest of all, we’ve broken individual projects down into manageable chunks. Instead of endless lists of files and comments without context, we’ve given everything a nice cozy home. Conversations are kept to the matter at hand by only happening within the individual tasks themselves. Those tasks stay organized with our customizable tab system, so whether you’re a small team that follows a linear, phase based process, or are managing multiple departments, you can keep everything a click away without being overwhelmed. On top of this, we’ve supplied a simple, overarching ‘brief’ page for each project. Here you can provide the context, direction, and general goals as well as attach all of the most important files your team needs to start the project.
Our next big idea - the one we’re really excited about, dubbed the ‘Forecast view’, provides a birds-eye-view of everything your company currently has going on. A three week timeline displays the tasks due for each of your team members across all of your projects at once. At a glance, you can tell what days you can fit more in, who has too much on their plate and who has time to lend them a hand. You can toggle individual team members and projects on or off to focus on as little or as much as you need to get the whole picture. It seemed ambitious, but now that we’ve seen it through, we can’t believe we’ve never had anything like it before.
Finally, we think, the most important thing a project management tool should do for your team is get out of the way so everyone can focus on getting their work done. That’s where the ‘me’ tab comes in. In a single click, you have a personalized list of everything you need to accomplish across each project, organized by their due dates, because, what else do you need?
With Forecast, our goal has been to make it easier to spend more time on your work and less time thinking about it. We believe we’re off to a great start and are excited to be constantly improving the project management experience.
Sign up for a free 45 days trial and let us know what you think. We love nothing more than to hear from our customers!
Do good work.
The Forecast Team
getforecastapp.com
The Perks of Considering Your Plan "Dead"
Sometimes the sheer clarity of hindsight is like life’s annoying way of saying, “I told you so!” Looking in the rearview mirror to see what went wrong is integral to learning from our mistakes, but we often wish for hindsight’s clear vision when we’re forging our way forward. Research psychologist Gary Klein has a startling prescription for that feeling: imagine your plan’s death.
Photo: AlmazUK
According to Klein, one way to tap into the power of hindsight is a practice called the premortem. In the more familiar postmortem, you analyze an unsuccessful event after it has occurred to figure out what went wrong. In the premortem, the analysis faces the event head-on while presuming it has failed to generate plausible reasons for the failure. Performing premortems can help identify problems in advance and tune you into early warning signs because you know what to watch out for.
These are the basic steps for conducting a premortem:
1. Prepare: Everyone should be familiar with the plan before starting the premortem.
2. Picture: Imagine the plan has failed miserably and how that feels.
3. Generate: Each person makes a list of plausible reasons for the failure.
4. Share: Take turns sharing one reason at a time, collecting them into a master list.
5. Revamp: Revisit the plan armed with the reasons and revise.
6. Review: Return to the list every so often to check in with any relevant concerns.
Premortems employ prospective hindsight. The paradoxical term involves the mind trick of imagining that an event has already happened. Prospective hindsight “increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%,” says Klein, citing one of the better-titled studies, “Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events”, by Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington.
The researchers found that people generate reasons more efficiently, and often in more detail, when they conceive of an outcome or event as certain. So while many techniques such as risk analysis share the desired effect of making better plans and decisions, the premortem is not about imagining what might or could go wrong, looking for potential holes. Its effectiveness relies on imagining that things did go wrong before coming up with plausible reasons. The mind works differently when we ask “what now?” instead of “what if?”
Photo: Frederic Poirot
The power of the premortem lies in its great leveling effect. Starting a conversation from a point where the project has already failed is liberating. It extracts some of the politics and politeness that can muddle the planning stages. Klein recounts how one executive at a Fortune 50-size company reasoned that a billion-dollar project had failed because of waning interest in the wake of the CEO’s retirement. Sharing that type of thought in other circumstances may be a no-no.
The failed-starting point also helps neutralize cognitive biases resulting from the overinvestment and overconfidence of people who have strong feelings of ownership and authorship of a plan. Instead of flying over objections or identification of problems as a matter of course (the drive-by “Problems? Questions?”), the exercise increases participation and buy-in from objectors who get a real opportunity to share their opinion.
Mentally traveling back to the future is a great way to open up your field of vision to new possibilities and insights and pave the way to better decision-making. Prospective hindsight isn’t 20/20, and projects are sometimes just bound to fail. But at least we can tune up our planning processes and give voice to our team members who would’ve said, “I told you so!” in their head.
Big PMP'in...
did you find the PMP useful, I was thinking of going for it? By useful I mean did you gain any knowledge from it versus just looks nice on resume?
It’s been helpful to some extent. I won’t say it changed my life completely, but it’s had some positive impact on my work. I have an undergrad business degree, so most of the concepts weren’t exactly foreign to me.
Getting PMP certification is like learning a language in high school. You’re taught a very formalized version, but you have to learn the common colloquialisms on your own. The Project Management Institute’s guide book teaches you how to do EVERYTHING EXACTLY THEIR WAY, but expects you to only use a subset of what they teach on each project. They even say in the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) guide that the ‘good practices’ they outline “does not mean the knowlege described should always be applied uniformly to all projects; the organization and/or project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project.”
The biggest items I took from my PMP training were stakeholder management and identification, scope/time/cost analysis, risk management, and working in a matrixed organization.
If you’re considering getting your PMP certification, you need to be able to document previous experience at least contributing to a project (and really, almost anything can be considered a ‘project’), take some classes, and you have to sit for an exam. A suggestion: Your study and prep time for learning exactly what PMI will test you on should be 6-8 months to allow you to have some amount of a normal life.
I did it in 3 months. 5-6 hours a day. 7 days a week. In the week before the test, it was 12 hours a day. That was really fucking miserable and stupid. If you’re going to do it, take your time.
If you’re seriously looking into it, send me a message and I’ll tell you what books I read to prepare.
Also, you get to put PMP on your business card. It’s one ‘i’ away from being awesome.
-MMLTD, PMP
