global experience

Scatterwork Guest: How do you see your project?

Deasún Ó Conchúir Blog , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
https://youtu.be/1XqG-T8lRao

My name is Jonathan Norman from Gower Publishing,  a guest of Scatterwork GmbH, and I’d like to introduce you to a new platform we have developed for project and program managers, GpmFirst. In order to do so, I’ve taken a particular theme, which is the question of how do you see your project, and how do others see your project. I’ve chosen this subject for a couple of reasons. It introduces the premise that human psychology is a powerful influence in projects, and their success or failure, and it also underlines one of the key features of the new project community of practice that I mentioned.

Let’s just tackle these elements in order. In each case, I’ve used screen dumps from the community practice to illustrate my points. First of all, how does our psychology influence projects and their success or failure? Have a look at this image that was created by the wonderful writer Gareth Morgan, and is used in our book, “Images or Projects”. Imagine that this is a picture of your project, what do you see? A pig, but it isn’t as simple as that.

Have a look at each of the people around the edge of the image, let’s call them the stakeholders of your project. Put yourself in their shoes, and now look again at the pig, what does each of them see?

To the farmer, the pig represents his livelihood, a source of income. To the butcher, the pig represents a series of joints and cuts, bacon, ham, and so on. To the vet, the pig represents a potential patient. To the little girl, the pig represents the start of a nursery story, you get the point.

The point I’m trying to make is that you need to put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholders and ask yourself, how do they see my project, do they see it differently from the way I see it? What implications does this have on how I should communicate with them, or manage my project?

Once you understand the importance of perception, you’ll understand the idea of a playlist, which is a feature in the platform, www.gpmfirst.com. Rather than simply presenting content in the site in the way that we, our moderator, or our expert authors think it should be presented, we’ve included a feature that allows you to add any elements of the site, chapter, books, user generated articles, videos, community discussion threads, and indeed external links into your end playlist, which you can commentate.

Think of it as your own personal scrapbook of how you see a given theme, or a problem, in project management. Once you’ve created your playlist, and here’s one I created earlier using chapters from our books around the theme of perception in projects, you can share it with others by social media or email, and it will become a part of the searchable content on the platform, so that other users can benefit from how you see projects, or an aspect of project management.

Thank you for listening. If how I see projects peaked your interest, than I hope you’ll take a moment to visit this site to explore the new platform, and to get a sense of how you might use it. I’ve included my contact details on this final slide, so if you’d like to know more, than just go to the website, or contact me directly by email. Thank you very much.

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Varied Participation increases impact

Deasún Ó Conchúir Blog , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
https://youtu.be/a3bDMMxu9bQ

This is a short video from Scatterwork about varying participation in workshops and thereby getting an increase in the impact. A typical workshop has some business issue that needs to be resolved as well as possible and as quickly as possible so we bring together the right people who have the know-how, the context, the experience and so forth and they work on it. We hope that they will evolve a solution.

The people that we bring, if the issue is either local or the people locally have the skills we need, then we sit together. If the issue involves people that are further away, then there is an unavoidable delay in bringing people to a meeting and those people lose business time by traveling. But, we have to decide if that’s worth it. If we have a really big issue, we might say we need people from a much wider background. Again, that’s a conference and it takes longer to organize and it also costs more.

Other reasons that we bring people to this meeting might be team building. For example, those who are going to be involved in the implementation of the solution and we might bring stakeholders in as well so that they see what is emerging and again, they will support us as things go ahead.

In Scatterwork, we specialize in virtual workshops so that means providing the structure, the direction, the experience to make sure that we can hold a workshop but do it though the internet. By doing that, we can have a much wider variety of people involved and without much of the lead time delay that we would have if we were holding a physical meeting and certainly much more cost effective.

Why is it worth doing this? Let’s just say that a typical person has a 100 live contacts and that each of those 100 live contacts has 100 live contacts. Then we find ourselves in a situation that the linkage brings in 10,000 contacts so we have a much, much greater access to insight when we bring in more people. That’s the suggestion is that we use virtual workshops for an appropriate, and this always allows us to do it faster than if we’re involving travel and it allows us to bring in a much greater variety of people. By doing that, we leverage from the situation.

Thanks very much.

In the modern world, the optimal solution may not be traditional face-to-face training that everybody likes and finds very effective, but virtual training. Please help us to rank our list of virtual training features: Can Virtual Training replace traditional events? (5 minute survey)

Also, if you have any queries, then please select a time to call or send a message.

Invite your colleagues to sign up for the Scatterwork Newsletter and they will also get a 10% reduction on their first workshop.

Quality Management

Deasún Ó Conchúir Blog , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
https://youtu.be/HEEd5HsYg9o

Hello, this is Deasún Ó Conchúir again from Scatterwork for another anecdote from the book Overview of the PMBOK Guide. The topic here is quality management. This time I have two stories. The first one is about the quality of management itself and then the second one is the quality of the project.

The first one. The project manager had a small team. He told them there would be a weekly meeting every Monday afternoon. The first week, everyone was present. The second week, the project manager knew he was going to arrive late and telephoned ahead to ask the meeting to start without him. The third week, he said he couldn’t attend and delegated the meeting chair to one of his team members. Unfortunately, he did not brief this person about everything and in any case the manager didn’t want to delegate. The fourth week, the manager did not come to the meeting and just told the team that he was unavoidably engaged. The point of this particular anecdote, which of course really happened, is that quality applies in projects, not just to the deliverable, but also to the style of management.

Now, I have a second little anecdote here to do with quality in projects. I once worked in a computer factory which made standard models. As the orders came in from different countries which needed different keyboard layouts, the manufactured items were taken apart and reassembled with the right keyboard so the work that had been done was being wasted and then replaced by more work. It’s hard to find the value of add on in this process and I hope that such practices have long since gone.

In the modern world, the optimal solution may not be traditional face-to-face training that everybody likes and finds very effective, but virtual training. Please help us to rank our list of virtual training features: Can Virtual Training replace traditional events? (5 minute survey)

Also, if you have any queries, then please select a time to call or send a message.

Invite your colleagues to sign up for the Scatterwork Newsletter and they will also get a 10% discount on their first workshop.

Why use Project Management?

Deasún Ó Conchúir Blog, PM Methods , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
https://youtu.be/-db_SdX98dg

Hello this is Deasún Ó Conchúir from Scatterwork, and I’m here to bring you an anecdote from my book, Overview of the PMBOK guide.

Once upon a time, as all good children’s stories begin, there was a very important project. It was so important that the advisers convinced this local company with headquarters in Europe to start implementing it immediately. After about 12 million Euro had been spent, the team thought it would be a good idea to develop a specification. To do this, a project team was put together, and there was a large international kick-off meeting, which lasted a few days. Everybody had a very good time.

After some development work the users in North America were contacted to help with the testing. An enterprising manager there suggested that the project should be executed near to the users to improve communication with them. He said he was available to take over the management of the development work, and would be happy with the development manager’s salary. It’s possible this is why he suggested transferring the project to his location.

Instead of transferring the project team from Europe to North America it was disbanded. Except for the European-based project manager the work was passed completely to a new implementation team in North America. The new team grew to over 50 people and worked hard for about two years. They found it difficult to make good progress, because of the poorly defined decision making processes.

There was a senior North American manager, but he was not invited onto the project steering committee, because his line staff were not directly involved. His organization did however, provide office space for the project team. After every project review meeting he asked what was happening.

Sometimes he didn’t agree with the decisions, so he contacted his longtime senior colleague in Europe to get support for changes. This colleague then sent out new instructions, which often reached the team weeks after the original decision. This meant that some work done in the meantime was wasted. Because the development manager had such a big team he earned a really good salary.

During this time the company headquarters in Europe bought a competitor, and their managers became new project stakeholders. This was because they were expected to use the output of the project. Even so they were not convinced, and they said they wouldn’t use it. This made the company rethink the project and send in the auditors. They found out that the value of the deliverable minus the cost of development was nearly zero. The project was then terminated, and the project manager was fired, although he was paid his salary for some months without having to come to work. The total cost of the project was about $100 million Euro.

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Please help us to rank our list of virtual training features: Can Virtual Training replace traditional events? (5 minute survey).

Decades of Global Experience

Deasún Ó Conchúir Blog , , , , , , , , ,
http://youtu.be/S4ZjO-Q09Nk

Hello, this is Deasún Ó Conchúir from Scatterwork to present another short video about the benefits of virtual training. We’re talking here about replicating the traditional training environment through the internet using web meetings and other training activities. This is much more interactive than traditional webinars, for example, which tend to be relatively passive and individual for the participant.

In previous videos we mentioned that by using virtual training, there’s a much wider and global choice of trainer, and by going in this direction you get a better chance for a match for your needs. Our particular strengths in Scatterwork include my own experience in project management in well over 30 countries and in a wide variety of industries over more than four decades.

So, of course, this experience benefits the participants. Very often there is an experience that I’ve had in one place or another that serves as an example and it makes the learning easier.

There you have it: one of the benefits of virtual training is the better selection of trainer and in particular, a trainer with significant global experience. Thanks very much.

In the modern world, the optimal solution may not be traditional face-to-face training that everybody likes and finds very effective, but virtual training. Please help us to rank our list of virtual training features: Can Virtual Training replace traditional events? (5 minute survey)

Also, if you have any queries, then please select a time to call or send a message.