Importance of Feedback

Coaching; Feedback; Important Stuff!



I've been thinking about this because of my latest passion: taking spinning classes!

Our minds tell us we have reached our breaking point and we possibly can't do anymore. But listening to the coach, he tells you to turn it up and if you listen and do it, you achieve way more than you possibly think you could have. All through the class, he kept telling us to turn the knob to the right, and I kept doing it; and then when the song ended and he told us to sit it down and ease up, I realized how far to the right I had twisted the knob and how difficult it was to keep spinning AND I KNEW that I myself would never have pushed myself to spin that hard!


There's a famous quote by Einstein:
"You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew."


Listening to your mind, your own closed system of what's possible and what's not will NOT bring out your best. You need to be able to take direction from the outside. Coaching can really bring out your best. All top performers in any discipline require coaches; Coaches can see your true potential before even you can. Skilled coaches can bring out your true potential.
I would never have gotten to that difficult level of spinning on my own or even thought I was capable if the coach didn't push me to get there. It was simply out of my reality!

So whatever you're interested in: go seek a coach, mentor, buddy, whoever; Life Coaches, Executive Coaches, Personal Trainers, etc; go for it!

Status Reports...for Yourself!

This is about Updating your weekly status reports even if it's for YOURSELF!

First of all, if you're a PM and you're not having regular reporting meetings (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever it is) with your boss, take the driver's seat and schedule them. S/he will be grateful for it. 


If you have the attitude of seeing what you can get away with and not reporting status on your projects (like I did in the past), because you think there's not much to report, or you think you can coast for a while, then time to shift into overdrive! Making this into a routine practice is important for many reasons including:

• Your boss doesn't have to chase you and wonder how the project is faring
• You get the help you need: Even if you have it under control, your boss may have an alternate viewpoint or helpful tips or stakeholders you need to consult to make sure you have all the bases covered, etc.
• Your boss can help your with risk assessment and mitigation

The biggest benefit of a regular reporting practice is not for your boss but actually for yourself!

Preparing the report ahead of time clarifies your thinking and makes you think of what exactly you want to report. You have to put yourself in your boss's shoes. You don't want to put too much detail in the report but you don't want to make it too high-level either. Only by understanding your boss's needs and how s/he thinks will you arrive at the appropriate level of detail.

Furthermore, preparing the report will allow you to see if you made any real progress since the last period. It will give you perspective on what you're actually accomplishing rather than what you tell yourself you think you accomplished. Nothing makes it more real than writing it down. Your thoughts are usually very different from reality! So think of these reports as reality checks.

My own manager was out of the office for the week (I have a weekly status meeting) and so I didn't have to prep for the meeting that week. However, I went through with the exercise anyway and it was very revealing. Acting as though I had a real status meeting, I was able to see what was accomplished, and what was not. There were milestones that were achieved but on a smaller scale so I had to break those down into more fine-grained milestones. I then folded these back into my project plan, estimated durations and came up with new dates. I was also able to assess risks, and contact stakeholders for more information. That to me was amazing. It represented real pro-active project management. And I had no one breathing down my back to do this. PMs need to be real driving forces in getting projects done. This is something I'll talk about in a future post.

Opening the Package

There's a brief parable I read once that described a beggar sitting on a wooden crate asking everyone who passed by for money. One day someone stopped and asked about the wooden crate he was sitting on. The beggar shrugged and said it was just his seat. The stranger said "So you never looked inside?" And so the beggar opened the crate and found a pile of gold.

That's it. Pretty simple. The lesson is obvious right? But how many times do we operate in our own lives like that beggar?

At work, we had a collection of development tickets that were being passed around from group to group looking for a home. No one wanted to own them and work on them. They looked like a hassle to deal with. Finally, I got them. What did I do? I clicked on each one and read the description. Then I made a few phone calls. 3 out of 5 of the tickets were obsolete and the other 2 were going to be resolved in a re-design of another project that was already in progress! Voila. Problem solved; it took only a 1/2 hour. The tickets were marked as deprecated and closed however these tickets had been passed around for several months!

Lesson: open the package. No one wanted to look inside! But once we did, the weight was lifted and it was painless...

This also happened in my personal life. I had bought a poster in California that was rolled up. I had to get it framed. I thought I knew the dimensions of the poster and that I needed to get it custom framed. I gave the dimensions to a framer and they gave me an insane price. I didn't act. The poster languished for 2 months before I took further action. This time, I actually unwrapped and unrolled the poster. And you know what?? The poster's dimensions were nowhere near the dimensions that I thought they were! They were much smaller and consequently cost much less to frame. Lesson: Open the package!

Project Managers as Contractors is the WRONG way to go!

Everyone knows that project management in today's organizations is essential to business success. Without projects, you don't accomplish new business objectives. The discipline of project management is your best bet in reaching those objectives.

However, there seems to be an upward trend to hire project managers on a temporary basis to run these projects. I've seen it in my own organization and I've seen it with ex-colleagues who have gone on to take contractor positions in firms for the life of a project.
Indeed, the August issue of PMI's magazine PM Network has an item about this in The Buzz. Click here to read it.

One sentence says "...the temporary nature of projects makes them particularly good candidates for contract work".
This is quite true. It does seem like that...so what's the problem?

The problem is that effective project managers should be in place longer, much longer than just the life of the project. They are the ones that should be there permanently! PMs have more clout, more influence, and talk to more people than anyone else on the project. Their reach extends far and wide. Would you really want to lose all that after a project is finished?? If you find an effective PM, you keep 'em!

The ramp-up time for a new PM to be effective can be very long. For the PM to learn what makes their stakeholders tick, how to influence each and every one of them, to build relationships with them, along with the BAs, with the people doing the work, etc takes a very long time. The hub at the center of the wheel is difficult to replace.

So I've made my point about keeping PMs for the long-term. But what do you give up in this kind of environment where contracting is the new norm?

The solution is: The line positions that executes should be turned into contracting positions. Developers, architects, QA, support staff, for e.g.

If you have a strong PM & BA who are intimately familiar with what needs to be done, they can train new people to do exactly what they need them to do to accomplish the project goals. Especially with newcomers to the organization, it is important to get them off to the right foot and train them in the way you want things done. Then they will be able to deliver. We have a new QA person in Singapore who I will be training in our application. I will spend some late hours with him to get him up to speed but I will show him exactly what he needs to know. I don't mind doing this, because the payoff will be immense.

There is more of an impact on an organization's capability to deliver if you lose a PM vs. any other position. In my own case, I have been delivering in my space for nearly the last 2 years, and I have the confidence of the people around me that I am true to my word. This makes it easier for them to trust me and approve things. A new PM would have to build these relationships from scratch.

Furthermore, in today's agile world, no position is safe. If you're not advancing and continuing to build your skillset and your relationships, you're in danger of losing your job. Indeed, in the very same article, there is a quote, "When I hear people talk about temp versus permanent jobs, I laugh. The idea that any job is permanent has been well-proven not to be true."

So why should a developer who knows how to code a certain financial module (for instance) be so secure? Some people may think they have job security because only they know the module. However, if they're not performing, they should face the consequences, not be given free reign.

Plus, I'm willing to bet that a good developer or architect who comes fresh into a job and is given a mission (I need you to do x, y, and z and figure out how to do this) will see this as a challenge and figure out how to get the job done. Indeed, in my role as a BA on some projects, one of the pleasures I take is in coming fresh to a project and piecing together the puzzle of what needs to be done... This way, I start to own it.