These are a few random things I took away from today’s course I’d like to pick out for you:

• in just about all cases, the most important question to ask a client the first time you meet is: “Why are you doing this project?”
• the best ideas in your company will come from people working on the floor
• the profitablility of a project is defined in the bid phase
• a PM should spend the most of his time communicating
• less than 1 FTE PM per 6 project team members is planning to fail
• deliverables should be tangible and verifiable, the decision to accept them should be a formal review with a written document backing it up
• “GBV” means “Gezond Boeren Verstand” (Dutch) and you’ll need a lot of it

The courses are based on PMI which I’m very glad about, it’s a methodology that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s great to have Francis Moeris, a PMP with loads of experience who’s on board of directors of the Belgian PMI chapter teaching the methodology classes. It certainly looks like he’s a very professional and cool guy.

Wim Lockefeer

As usual this post is a summary of what I learned from the interview and my own interpretation. Here’s my last question to start with, answered with a fairly epic quote in my opinion:

What does a good project manager do?

A good project manager makes sure the promises that other people make come true.

How can a project manager have the biggest impact on a company’s baseline?

You can look at this from several perspectives, a project manager has a role facing clients and a role in the middle management layer of a company.

Anyhow a PM is responsible for the profitability of a company and is morally bound to wear both hats.

Facing the client a project manager helps to realise quality pitches and has a kind of sales evangelist role.

As a middle manager a project manager is in a position where he has to maintain contact with more people in the company than any other function. That position gives a project manager the best information to work on company efficiency, there’s a lot of impact there as well.

Project managers aren’t line managers, they should think in more than one dimension.

How do you keep a clear overview of things?

For yourself, probably the best thing that works is keeping a daily list of things to do and writing them down in such a way that they are feasible.

In the wider project context, good overview comes with:

• creating a fairly detailed WBS
• keeping clear expectancies from clients and the people working on the project
• making sure people report accurately
• pointing people to their duties
• creating situations that are self-motivating for people
• being honest

Having someone responsible for a skill group – a team leader – puts him in a good position for keeping quality and good time reporting in check. A project manager isn’t supposed to come across as a controller, he should dispense the correct responsibilities. Overview is a result, it comes with the deal.

What is quality management?

It’s what a good producer is for a movie. A managers creates premises just like the producer does. He makes sure the conditions are met for people to put their skills to work.

Hence the classic expression 1+1=3.

You have to be hard on yourself as a manager to make this synergy happen, no matter how much experience you have.

What do you do to get a higher quality management?

Having more emphasis on overview and a bit less on insight. Find the perspective that allows you to work proactively.

Take a step back and let people come to you so they can explain what they need to get their jobs done. Experienced people like working like this, they know what they need to get their job done and come to you for those things.

It’s a bit like Lego, if you look at the Lego boxes from the old days they where full of pieces and you just had to make stuff. Today boxes are smaller and have a detailed manual.

Some people need manuals, some won’t, but work that’s boxed correctly results in better quality and gets good results faster.

How do you know that what you are doing works?

It’s a continuous process.

Having a good running company comes down to making sure people are doing what they are supposed to do during their working hours. The hours in a day are limited and can only be spent once, time spent is irreplaceable.

Conclusion

Something that keeps coming back in Wim’s answers is proper commitment from people and conveying a correct sense of duties. It reminds me of the One Minute Manager book. For you as a manager it all comes down to creating the environments for others to apply their skills in the most efficient way. Again, just like we noticed in the interview with Jan De Schepper you need good soft-skills to make it happen.

Follow Wim on Twitter and check out his neat blog on the fine art of comics The Ephemerist. He’s also a respected writer for the Flemish comic magazine Stripgids.

Jan De Schepper

This wasn’t a classic kind of interview. No tape-recorder, just pen, paper and a talk. And these are the lessons I learned.

Have you ever had the project manager job title?

No, but I’ve always worked in project mode. Starting Telindus for instance was a project.

You are and have been responsible for so many people and so many things, how do you monitor and control so much stuff?

Good memory, and the the capacity to anticipate. What I do can be summed up in 5 points of control:

1. feedback control, asking the right questions and doing it a lot
2. building memory and anticipating
3. looking at the results
4. looking at how the results came to be
5. working with people, having a good working culture

How do you know what works?

By looking rationally and instinctively at things. Rationally by looking at the numbers, instinctively by building on previous experiences.

There’s a difference between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, touching and feeling, … that’s instinct.

Experience is what you get after you needed it.

My experiences for instance tell me about todays crisis, you have to show what works to companies and how a service will provide that ROI they need today. You have to reassure this, be credible, agile and provide quality at a good price.

Facing a client, which role is the most efficient for a project manager?

A good manager is what I like to call a 3D manager. The formost important thing you need to do is communicate. That is listening to what is going on as well as the interpretation of the things you hear. A PM has to do this facing all directions.

1. A project manager should translate what is told before making an action plan.
2. Think in parallel, be multidisciplinary.
3. You have to be an excellent time manager, for yourself and for others.
4. And you have to be able to use the tools, like PMI, Prince2, etc. whatever methodology you need.
5. A 3D manager is a good leader.
6. There has to be integrity in all you do.

How can you be a good leader?

Well, quality of the people we work with is very important. When there is good talent, a good leader can stimulate talent and keep it. 40% of the talent that is in most people is latent, a coach can help people discover and make use of it. People have to be able to learn form a leader.

Thanks for the advice Jan!

Conclusion

What we notice from the interview with Jan is that there’s a constant emphasis on soft skills (listening, talking, interpreting, building knowledge, leadership, etc.). For us PMs the methodology is a basis, you’ll only start to make a real difference by working on soft skills and emotional intelligence.

This is a conclusion my Program Manager Taki Tsaklanos came up with when he proofread this post, and I couldn’t agree more. I guess I’ll interview him sometime soon Next up is someone else though, so keep a look out, a new interview will be online soon.

These are some actions I noticed that can make the difference under such conditions.

• Keeping a good risk log, thinking up correct mitigations.
• Having a stakeholder list and a communication plan.
• Practicing disciplined asset management.
• Putting exceptional effort in illustrating the technical and time-based constraints, so everyone has the correct expectations.
• Practicing active quality assurance, involving creative direction from start to finish.
• Having people challenge each other with great mutual thrust.
• Creating opportunities for people with all kinds of skills to communicate naturally. (the brand team philosophy)

The advertising industry is creativity driven. The message of a campaign needs to get across in all it’s aspects.

I look at it as very harsh quality assurance. Sometimes that means making an unplanned iteration, or starting over in the middle of a project.

And that unpredictability factor is where I think the greatest challenge lies, to be able to still deliver within budget and on time. This is hard and requires good strategy and business insight.

Last month I started to work as a project manager for Duval Guillaume, a big advertising agency based in Belgium. The core business of Duval Guillaume is creating strong brands using an idea-centric approach.

Just so you know, my professional headquarters remains at Nascom.

The best website about retrospectives on the entire internet ever is retrospectives.com, it just says it all.

I send a link to retrospectives.com together with the invitation to the meeting to set the purpose and the expectations.

What is a retrospective? From the site:

A retrospective is a ritual gathering of a community at the end of a project to review the events and learn from the experience.
No one knows the whole story of the project. Each person has a piece of the story. The retrospective ritual is the collective telling of the story and mining the experience for wisdom.

What you get after the meeting is a nice list of meeting notes and happy people, and if that isn’t enough these are the 3 main reasons why I do it:

1. regardless of how the project went, the lessons learned are always valuable for the people on the team, like the definitions says, it’s mining experience for wisdom and will help people grow
2. you are creating a valuable project management asset for future risk assessment
3. it’s an official point in time that says the project is actually done and that’s cool because everybody likes the feeling of accomplishment (or relief )

When you want to do this, all you need are the 4 questions from retrospectives.com to set the correct mood. Although it’s kind of tempting, I’m not going to copy the entire retrospecitives site, so head over there.

I got this via the unofficial bridge king of the West and delivery manager at Nascom, Tom Tabruyn.

Just leave out all the processes that you don’t need. Whenever you can, do less and keep the processes lightweight.

Doing this will help you and your team to focus.