Suppose your car needs an oil change. You visit two garages on Monday looking for estimates. Garage One quotes $50; Garage Two quotes $50. Both say it takes two hours.

You leave your car at Garage One, go to a movie, and return two hours later to pay and drive away. Three months later you try Garage Two. You return from the movie. There’s an oil pan under your car. The mechanic is working the register.

“I need my car,” you say.

“It took an hour to prep and drain the oil,” the mechanic says as he rings up someone. “Now I’m on the register for the rest of the week. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the remaining hour.”

No one would accept this scheduling for a car. Why accept it in a project?

Relying on resource hours over task duration is one of my project management pet peeves. Methodologies that rely solely on resource hours don’t adequately predict when things will actually get done.

Managers and teams that go through our training get practical experience in the kind of scheduling that tells them when they can take the next step and when the job will be done – ahead of schedule, too. In project management, as in life, knowing how long a task takes – even a simple oil change – is insufficient. You need to know when you can drive your car.   It’s the only way to get anywhere, on the road or in your career.

“Paralysis by Analysis,” “Information Overload,” “TMI.”

If the key to a successful project is controlling time, one timewaster to eliminate is over-reporting. Some managers spend too much time tracking too many activities at too low a level of detail.

Luckily, reporting doesn’t have to be like doing your taxes, if you have some guidelines on how much detail is enough:

Each activity should produce a deliverable or change in product status with just enough information to indicate a change in status.

• Subdivide long-term activities into tasks of about a month, so you can track and monitor progress reliably.
• As a rule of thumb, a good level of detail is between three and fifteen working days.

Of course, some large, complex projects – just like large, complex tax returns – need some outside help. Our hands-on course in Control Methods & Practices with Microsoft Project streamlines controlling the performance of projects characterized by complexity and dynamic change.

A concise reporting strategy lets everyone spend their time on the project and not on reporting. Whoever said “the Devil is in the details” was likely a project manager.

There are ‘teachable moments” but April presents a teachable month. Tax time makes project managers of everyone who files a return.

Most people procrastinate, then scramble for records and spend days with an accountant or tax software. As April 15 approaches, they cross their fingers, file, and hope. They prove PSI’s philosophy: of the three measures of project success – time, budget and quality – the key element to manage properly is time.

 Busy managers have two common solutions, both wrong:

-Count backwards from the deadline

-Let the software handle it

 Both solutions are cages, not structures. Scheduling backwards is inflexible, unrealistic, and suppresses team commitment…and despite “time management software” and its 320 million Google hits, software alone is not the answer – people are.

We developed an add-in for Microsoft Project that puts people in control of their schedules. Our Project Success Toolkit lets users revise an activity’s duration without impacting resource assignments, and vice versa. This creates a more stable schedule because task duration, resource assignments and status do not change without user input.

We can’t help with IRS schedules, but we can train staff on the Project Success Method in just two day’s time – three with the Project Success Toolkit program. That’s a schedule any project manager could appreciate.

Three letters that alarm many businesses are not IRS but IoT, (AKA the Internet of Things), the Machine to Machine technology that collects and transforms data into information.

IoT could revolutionize business. A new Verizon report details increased efficiencies that could give, by 2025, a ten percent revenue advantage to businesses using IoT applications. Yet the same study estimates just ten percent of enterprises extensively adopted IoT.

These dabblers in IoT for shipping, maintenance (imagine factory equipment issuing service alerts), or security think it’s too intimidating to go ‘all in.” Some 92 percent of banks implementing IoT call “Complexity” the biggest challenge – but instead, “complexity” can bring project, career, and marketplace success…if everyone is on the same page with the right methodology and tools.

Our Project Success Enterprise Solution can get companies from a blank page to a completely organized, customized project management function, built from the ground up, equipped with the right tools and software, with fully trained staff.

Then, enterprises from manufacturing to finance to pharma might find another three letter word handy.

Win.

Connect with me:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/clintpadgett
• Twitter: @clintpadgett

Clint Padgett is the president and CEO of PSI. Since joining the firm in 1994, he has provided consulting, training, and account management to clients in a wide range of industries. His project experience covers many traditional and special applications, including: product development, equipment installation/startup, facility construction/moves, marketing, software/hardware system implementation, and international sporting events. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He also holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is associated with the Project Management Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Product Development & Management Association, among others. Additionally, Clint is a published author and frequently speaks at conferences on the subject of project management, including the Executive Education program in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is an adjunct professor.

While tech pundits and market seers debate the idea of an Apple car, what fascinates me is the five-year timeframe.  Some call that deadline aggressive; I call it exhilarating.

The notion of a light manufacturing company “turning raw steel into a car” in five years seems audacious, like streamlining geologic history into one calendar year.

But is it impossible? Not necessarily.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) like this are perfect candidates for our Compression technique.  Thoughtful tradeoffs in how project tasks are performed are the most strategic elements in project planning. It saves our clients the most money and time – especially critical in new product development.

It’s how we helped manage a complex, multigenerational product development program with more than 100 design, development, manufacturing and support teams providing input for Caterpillar for a bold new product.

As technological innovations multiply, many more businesses will need comprehensive solutions to the puzzle of staying competitive with new products but creating them in less time.  We’d better all fasten our seat belts, it’s going to be an exciting ride.

Leaders like Bill Gates worry that Artificial Intelligence will create havoc. Even now, ethicists grapple with the unintended consequences of automated programs – like illegal activity.

The fascination with AI is part popular culture and part business savvy. It’s tempting (in cost and time savings) to automate – to remove or limit the human element and personal interaction.

It’s a false economy.

Several studies prove that nothing beats face to face meetings for transparency, trust, cohesion, and persuasiveness. Leaders of in-person meetings obtain better information. They pick up on cues by individuals and ‘read the room” as a whole to get subtext that no software or AI program can detect.

More important, periodic, in-person meetings of team members makes sure the Worry CurveÒ is shifted. Teams reinforce mutual accountability and support each member.   As they continue to meet and solve problems, their commitment to the project, to each other and to their own role grows in a way no software can duplicate. It’s a lot more satisfying than monitoring via Skype or filling in boxes in a software program.

And of course, with face to face meetings with real people, you can rest assured some AI software isn’t blowing the project budget playing internet poker or doing insider trading.

At the start of most ventures, problems seem far away; future challenges seem manageable. It’s “the Honeymoon Period” – the most enjoyable and durable part of a personal relationship; in business, less so…

…and it’s the biggest obstacle to project management success.

My book, the Project Success Method, reveals that during a project’s “Honeymoon Period,” everyone thinks there’s plenty of time, and the project scope and complexity itself is underestimated. PSI calls this “Uninformed Optimism.”

About halfway through the project, the team begins to sense that things are not going very well. Poor planning, lack of focus, and ineffective controls lead to a sense of foreboding. Worries increase. Teams fragment, quality suffers, and budgets explode before the deadline is reached.

Our approach not only accepts that there’s an expiration date for the Honeymoon Period – we move it up.

With our Shifting the Worry Curve^® method, we offer some common sense steps at the outset:

-the team meets face to face to develop a project plan

-individual team members commit to specific activities

-team members meet regularly (every two weeks) to report their status and solve problems

Clients have told me how their teams appreciate not facing a Mount Everest of problems towards the end of a project. By avoiding the Honeymoon Period, team members remain engaged and committed to their projects because they have successfully managed the most critical dimension of project performance: Time.

It’s not happier ever after, but it’s close.

During the first few hours of any Project Success Method(SM) class, I can practically see the thought balloons over the heads of the attendees:

“Why should I spend all this time here when I already know Project Management?”

“I have a ton of work waiting for me! My company is wasting my time.”

“I’ve been a project manager for years and I’m sitting here with people who don’t know the first thing about it.”

Their attitudes remind me of the movie Groundhog Day:  Been there, done that.

However, as we proceed, it’s gratifying to see the thought balloons turn into light bulbs, as people understand the difference the Project Success Method(SM) offers. Attendees from different locations and departments become an effective team working off the same playbook – regardless of how well they know project management.

Nowhere is this more important than large, complex projects involving widely dispersed teams, where the lack of a shared context and little to no ‘face time” can create logjams and bottlenecks.  One PSI client, with a background in construction, insisted that everyone involved in one project, even attorneys and vendors, take the training so that everyone understood how they integrated into the process and how their roles could be a critical path item.

“For highly complex, high-value projects, it is worth it. If a $20 million project goes over by 10 percent, that’s an extra two million dollars in costs.  While there are no guarantees, you have a much better opportunity to avoid that cost by using the Project Success Method,” he said.

For project managers, that means the only kind of deja vu they’ll have is the satisfaction of completing complex projects on time and on budget. Now that’s what I call a happy ending.

Connect with me:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/clintpadgett
• Twitter: @clintpadgett

Clint Padgett is the president and CEO of PSI. Since joining the firm in 1994, he has provided consulting, training, and account management to clients in a wide range of industries. His project experience covers many traditional and special applications, including: product development, equipment installation/startup, facility construction/moves, marketing, software/hardware system implementation, and international sporting events. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He also holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is associated with the Project Management Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Product Development & Management Association, among others. Additionally, Clint is a published author and frequently speaks at conferences on the subject of project management, including the Executive Education program in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is an adjunct professor.

As professionals in our respective industries, we share common interests, such as meeting goals, searching for a competitive edge, or leveraging our existing resources. Undoubtedly, these interests require completing progressive steps grouped into what might be called “projects.” The success of executing these projects usually correlates to the success of achieving your desired goal. You would think that with so much depending on the project, it would consistently have a flawless execution; yet, many projects fail.

Why? What can you do to ensure that every project successfully meets its deadline?

Shift the Worry

Within the project timeline there is always a moment when team members begin to feel the pressure of the project. Panic, stress, fear, burden, and chaos are all words typically associated with meeting a project’s deadline. Approach the project tactically in its initial stage to offset the effects of stress and chaos experienced near the deadline. In particular, it is important to:

• Know your timeline requirements.
• Clarify project expectations.
• Define team roles.
• Create easy deliverable cycles.

Sure, this is common sense. Create a plan and everything will be OK. Right?

Achievement

Knowing what to do and actually doing it is the key difference in project success and failure. Meeting deadlines is not about being smart—it is about being practical and disciplined, while knowing how to execute a plan that includes both characteristics. My expertise in meeting project deadlines is in knowing how to execute.

I would like to educate you on how to apply my proven Project Success Method to any framework, regardless of type or scale. Whether it involves a merger and acquisitions, global outsourcing, green initiatives, product development, or technology implementation, you will learn to effectively complete these projects within the timeline and budget.

Join me at the ASTD 2014 International Conference & Exposition in Washington, D.C., where I will discuss my book, The Project Success Method: A Proven Approach for Achieving Superior Project Performance in as Little as 5 Days.

Connect with me:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/clintpadgett
• Twitter: @clintpadgett

Clint Padgett is the president and CEO of PSI. Since joining the firm in 1994, he has provided consulting, training, and account management to clients in a wide range of industries. His project experience covers many traditional and special applications, including: product development, equipment installation/startup, facility construction/moves, marketing, software/hardware system implementation, and international sporting events. He is a graduate of The Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He also holds a master’s degree in business administration from Duke University. He is associated with the Project Management Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Product Development & Management Association, among others. Additionally, Clint is a published author and frequently speaks at conferences on the subject of project management.