Holding better meetings

Even if you attend just 2 hours of meetings each working day over the course of your career, then that’s easily 2 solid years worth of meetings over the course of your life. Meetings are a crucial part of any project, but insufficient time is often invested in them, here are a few ideas for improvement to make your ‘2 years of meetings’ better:

Each meeting should have a clear goal

Meetings have multiple functions these including: deciding, informing, asking for something or brainstorming. Be clear on what your meeting is for and make this clear in the meeting title, and whilst you’re at it, consider if you really do need a meeting to meet that that objective – would an email or memo suffice? If so, use an email or a memo. You’re saving not just your time but that of participants so the benefit is magnified. 

Finishes meetings early if you can

If you take a moment to think about it, it’s bizarre that most meetings take exactly the time they’re alloted. If you scheduled an hour to write a report on your own, it may ultimately take anywhere between 15 minutes and 4 hours. However, meetings tend to take the time they’re given, this implies that, to the point above, goals are not clear. Once the goal is met, end the meeting. People will always invent topics to fill a blank agenda – don’t allow it.

Scope the invitee list

Meetings are not a spectator sport. If you have a clear goal, it should be clear who should attend the meeting. Often people attend meeting because they want to know what’s going on, you can avoid this problem by writing crisp meeting summaries and sending them once the meeting ends.

Don’t be scared to cancel meetings

Just as finishing early is good, so is cancelling a recurring meeting that isn’t needed. Recurring meetings can easily invent their own purpose, rather than meeting clear goals. If you don’t have a clear objective cancel the meeting.

Do you really need an hour?

A hour seems to have developed as the default time for meetings, however, that might be too long or too short depending on the topic at hand. Consider huddles or micro-meetings of 15 minutes to coordinate activities without getting dragged down into the details. Equally, real brainstorming can take over an hour to produce really good ideas, because it takes time to build on conventional ideas and innovative thinking.

Three Tips For Better Post-Mortems

As I’ve mentioned before, post-mortems are a critically important mechanism for driving continual improvement. Below are three tips for improving post-mortems themselves:

Assign ownership – when areas for improvement come out of improvement, assign ownership of them. Of course, you may not know the exact next steps required, but clear ownership empowers the owner to take the required actions.

Don’t truncate the list – it can be tempting to focus on the major items coming out of a post-mortem, but this can mean overlooking some ‘low-hanging fruit’ and demoralizing those who submitted ideas that didn’t make the cut. Go as far down the list as you can.

Be transparent - post-mortems are a tricky topic, sometimes they find errors, and certainly things that could have gone better. However, this is best addressed by openness and transparency.

Hard conversations

Project management success depends on communication. Often project management failure is driven by poor scope and requirements management, but the root cause of that is poor communication.

The important thing to focus on is that the harder a conversation is the more useful it is likely to be to your project. The easy conversations, the ones without tension, with people you know well, people you like – those are important and need a regular cadence to keep things on track. However, it’s the hard conversations, where relationships are strained, where there’s underlying tension and disagreement. We can tend to subconsiously avoid them, think of reasons not to have them and spend time on the easy discussions so we feel productive. But the project suffers in the end.

Are you having your hard conversations often and early enough?

Innovation Whack Pack

Simply asking people to brainstorm doesn’t always achieve the best results. This pack of cards from Roger von Oech is $10 well spent, each card contains a strategy to help you create and implement better ideas. For example, one card suggests changing the name of the object you’re trying to create. If you ask an architect to design a door, you’ll get a door, but if you ask for a link between two rooms, you open up your thinking to many more ideas. This pack of cards is a cost effective way to revitalize your next creative meeting.

Project Management Salaries – Are You Paid Enough?

I recently performed a statistical analysis of project management salaries in the US. This analysis applies to publically listed full-time project management roles in January 2010.

The average salary for a project manager was $89,442, but more interesting was what drove the differences. Having a PMP certification was not statistically significant, nor were industry or sector differences. The two things that mattered were level of experience and the managerial rank of the position (whether it was for an individual contributor, a manager or a manager of managers). The implication is that general management skill is more relevant than project management skill in determining salary. The other point to note is that not all “experience” is created equal from a job application perspective, most positions listing experience wanted specific industry expertise, whether with specific software, power generation systems or government contracting methods. Again, these skills were not specific to the discipline of project management per se, but instead specific to the industry in which the project manager operates.

Hollrr and Innovative Products

A new website Hollrr makes it much easier to track consumer products that are getting traction. Hollrr works by people identifying products they love and others then adding their own views, it serves as a social forum to evaluating often new and innovative products. Since project management is often focused on driving innovation, Hollrr can provide ideas of tools to use and concepts to consider:

The Science of Motivation and ROWE

Very interesting on the science of motivation from the TED series. It goes against conventional wisdom as is well presented. The comments at the end regarding Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE) are a unique way to think about the workplace.

The video is here.

Outsourcing trends and project management

The internet is changing the trade-off between outsourcing and doing work in-house. It is important for project managers to be aware of this trend. Previously, there were many reasons to do work in-house and only outsource in a very limited set of situations, but now a number of the problems of outsourcing have been either reduced or eliminated by the internet. Project managers should reevaluate when they want to outsource, as there are now many more opportunities than even 5 years ago, primarily driven by technological changes.

The Nature of the Firm

In 1937, Ronald Course, first published his seminal article on the Nature of the Firm and the debate has being ongoing within the field of economics ever since. Basically, there is debate over why firms exist and what efficiencies (if any) they provide over having everyone just work individually on a freelance basis. Some of the reasons for firms to exist include:

• Reputation – firms have brands and reputation that would be costly for individuals to create and maintain.
• Search costs – its pretty expensive to launch a Request For Proposal process every time you need make a legal decision, and having an in-house legal team might be more efficient.
• Friction causes by external contracting – every time you contract with someone outside the firm there are legal costs and a risk that the contract may not be executed as expected. Whereas, within the firm the process is likely to be much smoother.

The impact of technology on outsourcing

The internet is changing this. All of the problems above that justify the existence of firms are starting to be solved by the internet. Reputation used to be relatively hard and costly to measure, but now sites like Amazon can provide informative product reviews, whilst sites like Yelp  in the US, do the same for businesses. Search costs are reducing as sites like Google and Bing make it much easier to find anything. Friction costs haven’t gone away, contracts still exist, but intermediaries now offer services that make this process easier – Mechanical Turk, Elance and Seed are all example of this. Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s tool for having individuals do low level work, such as checking if a photo is correctly titled and getting paid $0.02 per photo. Elance offers outsourcing of larger tasks like preparing a PowerPoint presentation. Seed is AOL’s effort to outsource content creation, Seed submits the description of what sort of news article or photograph is required, for example an article on ‘When Following Warren Buffett is a Mistake’ and anyone can then submit that article and receive a share of the advertising revenue it generates. In all of these cases, the technology is prompting greater outsourcing:

Solution	Benefit	Previous Solution
Mechanical Turk	Outsource low-level analytics	Hire the capability in-house
Elance	Outsource discrete pieces of work	Hire the capability in-house
Seed	Outsource writing of online articles	Hire the capability in-house

There are still barriers to outsourcing, notably that the quality of what is delivered remains hard to measure objectively in many cases, but there are significantly less blockers than previously and project managers should (re)consider the new opportunities in this area. 

Business Models and Technology

In 1998 it cost $270 to stream a 2 hour movie over the internet, today it costs $0.05 (see here for the analysis).

It’s interesting to think about how that plays out in the context of YouTube, YouTube is often called out as being a money pit for Google, with an estimated $470 million loss last year from Credit Suisse. However, much of that loss was bandwith costs which are falling exponentially (see above) and revenue is growing c. 20%.

Therefore, as with much of the internet today the business model is dynamic. Online video may not be economic today, but with falling costs and growing revenues, entering today and establishing market leadership may be a smart move to establish a credible position for when the economics of the industry turn.

Batch vs. Job Processes – Becoming More Efficient

Projects, and project managers, can sometimes learn from the operations and process literature. One key distinction is between a batch and a job process. A job process is one-off, whereas a batch process groups a number of items together and processes them at once. For example, a lot of people read email as soon as it comes into their inbox (job processing) whereas waiting a few hours and reading a group of emails together (batch processing) can be more efficient. The same can be true of administrative functions such as budget approvals and timesheeting.

It’s worth thinking about the activities you do and understanding whether they make more sense done on ad hoc basis, or rather grouping similar items together and using batch processing. Of course, there’s no right answer, since it depends on the nature of the task (time sensitivity, whether economies of scale exist etc.) however, I would suggest that without taking a step back sometimes job processing is used when batch processing might be more efficient.