Chapter 10 Review

Building a High-Performance Project Team


Framework for building high-performance teams

• Positive team environment creates personal ownership and strong interpersonal relationships built on trust and respect. Creating this environment has four elements:
• Ground rules that describe work patterns and values of the team
• Prime the pump with a starting list of ground rules that can be completed by the group to elicit greater ownership
• A team identity built on commitment to a shared goal
• Communicate the goals and scope of the project
• Repeat, repeat, repeat (we learn through repetition)
• Establish the project's organizational alignment
• Demonstrate management support for the project
• Build team relationships based on understanding strengths and diversity
• The ability to listen
• Employ active listening
• Mitigate natural obstacles to listening, including: physical distractions, preconceived ideas about what the speaker is saying, confusing speech styles, mental noise from other problems
• Suspend judgment
• Once you have clearly understood the speaker, you are free to disagree
• Teach your team to listen
• Look for effective listening behaviors within the team, point them out and emphasize how they contributed to a better decision
• Add active listening to ground rules
• Active Listening Tips (Erik Van Slyke, 1999)
• Focus yourself physically, eliminate environmental distrations
• Use nonverbal cues such as nodding, eye contact and leaning forward
• Provide feedback such as paraphrasing to ensure that you understand what the speaker intended
• As relevant follow-up questions
• Listen for the idea behind the facts and data
• Suspend judgment and remain neutral in your responses until you understand
• Don't try to solve the problem or give advice until it is requested
• Don't judge what you are hearing either positive or negative
• Don't shift the attention to yourself
• Be aware of resistance and defensiveness from the speaker
• The ability to effectively manage meetings
• Effective Meeting Guidelines
• Before the meeting
• Send a meeting invitation specifying: purpose, planned start and finish, location, who will attend
• Send an agenda listing purpose and major topics of discussion with timeframe by topic and topic leader; frame each topic with a specific goal for the discussion
• During the meeting
• Start on time and reward promptness
• Review the process you expect to follow. Set ground rules and define how decisions will be made.
• Have a recorder tack decisions and key points leading to decisions (these become the meeting minutes)
• Use the agenda to structure the meeting
• Drive topics to resolution
• Facilitate the group and control involvement to encourage fair participation
• After the meeting
• Send out meeting minutes
• Collaborative problem solving can be built by focusing on four team abilities:
• Problem solving skills tied to an accepted problem solving process
• Problem Analysis Steps
• Identify the problem
• Find the source of the problem
• Set solution requirements
• Generate possible alternative solutions to the problem
• Select an alternative
• Perform risk and cost-benefit analysis on the selected option
• Make a decision and action plan
• Understanding and applying multiple decision modes, these include:
• Consensus
• Guidelines for Building a Consensus Decison
• Follow a structure problem solving process
• Manage group participation
• Embrace conflict as a sing of creative thinking
• Build consensus by integrating multiple viewpoints
• Know how you'll make the final decision (if consensus fails)
• Voting
• Delegating
• Autocratic
• Conflict resolution skills
• View conflict as a source of positive creative energy and apply these guidelines:
• Prevent the conflict by attending to the components of a high-performance team
• Acknowledge the conflict and focus on the problem rather than the people
• Frame the conflict in reference to the project
• Focus on interests, not positions
• Trade places, attempt to describe the situation from the other person's perspective
• Separate identifying and selecting alternatives
• Agree on process, not outcome
• Continuous learning
• Project managers can speed up team learning by: (Amy Edmondson, October 2001)
• Being accessible
• Asking for input
• Recognizing the need to learn
• Serving as a model
• Enlisting full participation
• Eliminating fear
• Recognizing success
• Continuous learning habits include:
• Actively identify and question assumptions
• Strive for honesty over conformance
• Make learning a conscious goal on an ongoing basis
• Be disciplined in creativity
• Question the project's goal, scope, and plan
• Leadership includes the following responsibilities relative to creating a high-performance project team
• Attend to the health of the team and its members
• Maintain the strategic vision
• Attend to team members
• Exhibit and demand accountability
• Display personal energy that inspires the team through example
• Stages of team development  (Bruce Tuckman, 1965)
• Forming: members are polite and avoid conflict; leader should respond to group uncertainty by providing structure and clear direction
• Storming: power struggles emerge as team gains clarity about goals and roles; leader should respond to chaos with structure and clear direction, recognize early accomplishments, facilitate group discussion, demonstrate effective listening, ensure equitable participation
• Norming: team members begin to trust each other, rules have become internalized; leader should delegate increase authority to team, build momentum by reviewing and improving team processes
• Performing: personal relationships are strong enabling high trust, team handles challenges with ease and is highly productive; team practically manages itself, leader should focus on removing obstacles and improving team processes, share leadership more widely with team
• Adjourning: closure rituals enable team to say goodbye; leader should facilitate closure by setting up opportunities to review team's performance
• Team Process Assessments can be used to identify what's working and what can be improved
• Decide on a feedback tool
• Set a timetable
• Evaluate the tool
• Take concrete actions based on the feedback

Chapter 9 Review

Balancing the Trade-off among Cost, Schedule, and Quality


The best predictor of project success is realistic stakeholder expectations. The PM must use definition and planning techniques to balanced the project scope against the three most common project constraints: time, money and resources.

There are three levels of balancing a project:

• Project: requires making changes that keep the project on track for its original cost, schedule and quality objectives. The PM should have the authority to make these decisions.
• Business case: if the project cannot achieve it's cost/schedule/quality goals then the business case for the project should be reexamined. Changing any of the project goals puts this decision beyond the authority of the project manager and team because:
• Cost goals are related to profitability goals
• Schedules are closely linked to the business case
• Changing features and performance level affects the quality and value of the end product
• Balancing the project to the business care requires agreement from all stakeholders, most of all those who will be affected by the changes
• Enterprise: the firm has to choose which projects to pursue. This is well beyond the authority of the PM and project team.

Techniques to balance at the project level  include:

• Reestimating the project. By checking your original assumptions in the statement of work and work package estimates, it is hoped that increase knowledge of the project will allow you to reduce pessimistic estimates. Make sure your estimating assumptions about productivity, availability of skilled people and complexity of tasks are consistent and match all available information. The second round of estimation should create a firmer foundation of facts supporting cost, schedule and resources estimates.
• Change the task assignments to take advantage of schedule float. This could reduce the schedule with no change in labor cost, however this may compromise efficiency on non-critical tasks. To be effective, the tasks must be of the same resource type, the noncritical task needs enough float to allow it to be delayed without delaying the whole project, and you must be able to reduce the duration of the critical path tasks by applying more people.
• Add more people to the project. Diminishing marginal returns predicts that this will work in most cases, but only so much, and this method requires qualified resources. Task independence is important to productivity from additional people...the more independent the task the more benefit to adding labor.
• Increase productivity by using experts from within the firm. Create an optimal mix of average and star players by making experts within the team by putting the same people on related tasks; and using the WBS, network diagram and work package estimates, identify the tasks that benefit most from top talent.
• Increase productivity by using experts from outside the firm. Don't let these experts become islands working alone, they should be integrated into the project team.
• Outsourcing the entire project or a significant portion of it. This moves a large portion of the work to experts who should be able to deliver with greater productivity and shortened schedule. However, shifting responsibility creates more risk as the PM will have less control and there will be less expertise inside your company at the end of the project than if it was done in-house. Also, finding qualified subcontractors for large projects is a major subproject in itself.
• Crashing the schedule. Reduce the duration of the critical path by identifying which tasks are least expensive to compress. It may throw off estimates. Maintaining a crash table (or a cost/schedule trade off table) will help to identify the path where the payback will be the greatest.
• Working overtime. Increasing the daily hours of the project team avoids the addition coordination and communication cost of adding more people. However, overtime costs more and there are many intangible costs and an increase in "undertime" to compensate.

Rebalancing at the business case level can be done by:

• Reducing the product scope
• Fixed-phase scheduling
• Fast-tracking
• Phased product delivery
• Do it twice - quickly and correctly
• Change the profit requirement

Balancing at the enterprise level mainly confronts the constraints of insufficient equipment, personnel and budget. Alternatives at the enterprise level are variations of the ones applied at the project and business case levels.

• Outsourcing
• Phased product delivery
• Shifting work to the customer
• Reducing product scope
• Using productivity tools

Chapter 8 Review

The Art and Science of Accurate Estimating


Project are unique and the more unique they are, the harder to accurately estimate. A new team with members unknown to the PM, new technologies on which the project is dependent, and incorrect timing predictions can all  impact the accuracy of an estimate. However there are some "classic" mistake we should take care to avoid:

• Don't make "ballpark" estimates when you're put on the spot. Instead refocus on the complexity of the estimating process and the desire to provide accurate information. If pressed, write down exactly what is being requested and start listing the questions that need to be answered before an accurate estimate can be produced.
• Don't confuse a bid with an estimate. A bid estimates the schedule and budget of a subcontractor with a tidy profit margin built in.
• Don't pad the estimate. Adding time and money to the estimate solely for the purpose of bringing the project in early and under budget unnecessarily ties up company resources and (if discovered) undermines the PM's reputation.

Estimating also have several "Golden Rules" that apply to all projects. These include:

• Have the right people make the estimates. Have people with experience with the work that is being estimated create the estimate. The people who will actually perform the work should also be involved in estimating it because people who have had a voice in estimating their own work are more motivated to achieve. Make sure the estimator understand the goals and techniques of estimating. PMs working independently never create accurate, useful estimation processes.
• Base the estimate on experience. Past performance data is critical to accurate estimation. Compariing actual performance to estimates is essential to refining the estimating model.
• Negotiate the equilibrium (cost-schedule-quality), not the estimate itself. As the estimate should be derived from the product specifications it is a more defensible stance to negotiate the equilibrium.
• It takes time and money to develop accurate estimates.

Estimates have three levels of accuracy that are used at different decision points in a project.

1. Idea evaluation or "ballpark estimate": can be off by as much as 90%, but are useful for initial sizing; the accuracy relies on the estimator's knowledge; the purpose is to determine whether it would be useful to invest in a more accurate estimate.
2. Project selection or order of magnitude (or "ROM" for Rough Order of Magnitude): has a wide variance but is based on extrapolations from other projects; similar to a ballpark estimate but includes a few hours of effort comparing the proposed project to past projects; acceptance of an ROM estimate may initiate a project (the PM will then be assigned and tasked with defining and planning the project and in so doing creating a more detailed estimate).
3. Detailed estimates (bottom-up estimates): include all schedule and resource information and a forecast of a project budget and cash flow; this estimate will be used to measure the project's success and is based on product specifications.

Phased estimating requires cost and schedule commitments for only one phase of the project at a time. The method recognizes that it is impractical to demand a complete estimate at the beginning of the product life cycle, instead breaking down the project into phases which are considered separately as projects. Phase gate development includes decision points at the conclusion of each subproject to determine whether the project will continue to the next phase given the additional information derived from the concluding phase.

Apportioning (or top-down estimating) assigns a total project estimate then assigns a percentage of that total to each of the phases and tasks of the project. Although this is rarely as accurate as bottom-up estimating, it can be useful in determining what projects to pursue. Making useful estimates in this way relies on:

• Historical projects that are very similar to the current project since the apportioning formula is derived from historical data.
• Accurate overall estimates since the pieces are a percentage of a designated total.

Parametric estimates use a basic unit of work to act as a multiplier to size the entire project. It is always based on historical data and requires the estimator to have a solid parametric formula. Parametric models can be used at either the project or task level; greater accuracy is achieved by first estimating low-level tasks using parametric models then combining these work packages to build a project or phase estimate; the variables in the parametric formula almost always require detailed product specifications.

Bottom-up estimating requires the most effort, but is also the most accurate. Detailed tasks are estimated and then "rolled up" to create a project or phase estimate. The accuracy of the entire model is dependent on the accuracy of the work package estimates. Bottom-up estimating works only to build the detailed phase estimates.

The detailed cost estimate becomes the standard for keeping costs in line, and forecasting cash flow enables the project's funding to be planned and available when needed. It is important to consider the following categories of costs when developing a detailed estimate:

1. Internal labor cost (people employed by the company)
2. Burdened labor rate (average cost of an employee including wages, benefits and overhead)
3. Internal equipment cost (special equipment that is not routinely available)
4. Expendable equipment (with consideration that it could be used on multiple project and may only be partially used up on this project)
5. External labor and equipment costs
6. Materials costs (these are estimated primarily from product specifications)

Chapter 7 Review

Realistic Scheduling


A realistic schedule includes a detailed knowledge of the work to be done, has task sequences in the correct order, accounts for external constraints, can be accomplished on time, and takes into consideration the objectives of the project.

A predecessor table and a network diagram are two ways of recording sequence constraints. Two rules when graphing task relationships with a network diagram: define task relationships only between work packages, and task relationships should reflect only sequence constraints between work packages, not resource constraints.

Milestones have zero duration, but are useful to mark significant events in the life of a project such as major progress points.

• Project start and finish milestones are useful anchors for the network.
• Milestones can be used to mark input from one party to another (aka external dependencies).
• Milestones can represent significant events that are not already represented by a work package or summary task.

The finish-to-start relationship indicates that one task must be completed before its successor can begin. This is the most common type of relationship. Start-to-start relationships allow the successor task to begin when its predecessor begins. Finish-to-finish tasks can start independently of each other.

Bottom-up estimating builds a cost and schedule estimate from the summation of cost and schedule estimates for each work package. Cost estimates come from three sources: labor estimates, equipment estimates, and materials estimates (materials costs should be estimated from product specifications, not bottom up estimates). These three cost sources can be replaced by fixed-cost bids.

Labor and duration are not always related in an intuitive way,  you need to consider productivity. Adding people to simple tasks always reduces the duration. However, for tasks involving knowledge workers, adding more workers does not always result in greater productivity or a shorter duration of the task. Also people who spend all their time on a project tend to be more productive than people who are spread across multiple projects.

Calculating an initial schedule is key to establishing realistic schedules and meeting them. It provides detailed schedule data for every work package including early start (earliest begin date for a task), early finish (earliest finish date), late start (latest date a task can start without delaying the project), late finish (the latest date a task can finish without delaying the project).  Calculating these dates is a three step process:

1. Forward Pass: works through the network diagram from start to finish to determine the early start and early finish for each task.
2. Backward Pass: works through the network diagram from finish to start to determine the late start and late finish dates for every task.
3. Calculate the float: determine which tasks have schedule flexibility and which define the critical path (the task progression that has zero or negative float and must be completed on schedule to keep the project on schedule). 

Gantt charts are the most common way to display a project schedule. The time scaled network can also be used when it is important to condense the network onto less paper. The completed initial schedule has not yet taken into account  people and equipment limitations which must be assigned and leveled. It is most productive to have consistent, continuous use of the fewest resources possible.

Resource leveling begins with the initial schedule and work package resource requirements then follows a four step process:

1. Forecast the resource requirements throughout the project for the initial schedule
2. Identify resource peaks
3. At each peak, delay noncritical tasks within their float
4. Eliminate the remaining peaks by reevaluating the work package estimates

If the resource leveled plan is unrealistic, the PM should restimate work packages and look at delaying tasks within their float to remove the worst resource peaks and valleys. Failing that the next option is to accept a later project completion date.