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.

• Cheap
• Fast
• Good

The golden rule is you can only have 2.

• A fast & cheap project is rarely gonna be good.
• A fast & good project isn’t cheap.
• And a cheap good project won’t be fast.

So please choose whether you want it cheap, or fast.
Don’t compromise on the good part.

a Hoss Gifford quote – via Claudio Capodifoglia

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.

Have a look at my sketch drawing in the picture …

1. important things that are urgent
2. important things that are less urgent, but not less important
3. not so very important things that are urgent
4. unimportant things that aren’t urgent

You can put everything you have to do in one of those 4 groups. Groups 1 and 4 are the obvious ones, do stuff in 1 now, never do anything that gets into 4, easy. But the things in groups 2 and 3 could trick you in wasting your time if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t rocket science, you already know this but I think it’s a good way to visualize the choices you have to make.

It takes discipline and courage at times to focus on the tasks you put in group 2, but often they are the ones that help you grow out of hard situations. Stuff that goes into group 2 for a PM for instance could be making a detailed planning or a strong risk log, or something strategical like writing out a new process and presenting it to your own project office or to your executives.

Have a good look at what your project teams are doing, it’s the job of a PM to indicate the urgency and the importance of different things for them but also to help them make the correct assessment and maybe the drawing can help you with that when things get fuzzy (like they do).

I got a lot of things like this explained to me in far greater detail by Inge De Bruyn from De Groeipraktijk and use the advice quite a lot, they do training workshops and seminars on all kind of soft skills. This post isn’t endorse by them but I’d recommend them to you if you’d ask me.

• Make a mind map. You can use a tool like Freemind for this. A mind map has a tree structure just like that of a WBS. Most mind mapping tools are made for brainstorming so they allow you to work fast.
• Work with Post-Its. Sit together at a fairly big clean table or whiteboard and group the elements of work in columns of Post-Its. Use at least 2 colors, a color to write group names on and a color for work elements. Take a picture of the whole thing after you’re done.
• Use SCRUM user stories to find and define the tasks. SCRUM is a methodology for agile software development, but most of it can be applied to just about any industry. SCRUM calls a collection of tasks a project backlog, which are derived from user stories. This video I found at Agile Software Development explains everything you need to know in about 8min.

Most of the projects I manage are a bit too complex to make a WBS on a presales budget but if it’s possible for you to do this exercise up front it’s an excellent basis for estimates. You need the full team for this unless you’re a complete domain expert yourself.

One day at a time.

This little piece of wisdom is one of my favorite project management proverbs. It’s number 40 in a long list of PM jokes and proverbs I found the other day. Interesting stuff, but be warned, you’ll notice about 95% of it is horribly corny.

• Check to see if a deadline is on a Friday, this happens all the time and it’s probably a bad idea because people make plans for the weekend and if something should go wrong you’re in for a challenge. I like deadlines on Mondays. As David points out, midweek is probably a lot better, that lowers the risk of having to work in weekends even more.
• Are you responsible for another project that has important events at the same time? Act proactively and early if this happens, reschedule or ask a colleague to help out.
• Take a look at the vacation planner, just maybe that key stakeholder or that rockstar server administrator the project depends on will be off rock climbing in the Alps that week. Ask HR.
• Is the deadline on an official holiday? For other countries (when working with offshore companies) you can probably find an official calendar at iCalShare (compatible with a lot more than just iCal)
• Does the delivery process take a long time? Think about this, some deployments or integrations take a long time to prepare or execute.
• Make sure you have the correct acceptance criteria in your hands. Call you client some time up front and tell him what the status of the project will be at the moment of the deadline, even if it’s already in the project charter. If something is still ambiguous at a late moment it should be defined better, right away.

A classic example of last minute ambiguity is the “time of day” discussion, aka “we meant ready by morning on the day of the deadline, not 6pm because our VP needs to sign off the campaign for the final go live”.

Remember, you can ask all vital planning information you need from any stakeholder once you own the project.

Here’s a list of good PM behaviors that I think are important:

1. communicate with all the people who are influenced by the project
2. monitor and control the scope, budget and planning constrains
3. understand the content of the project in enough detail to communicate, monitor and control efficiently
4. create situations that allow the team to focus on the project goals
5. help people to get the feedback they need to grow (not the same as coaching)

To give you some context on my list, in my company we create teams around a project most of the time, it’s what the Project Management Body of Knowledge would call a projectized organization.

The point is, you start out with it and maintain it during the course of the project. I never get project charters handed to me in my current work situation, I always write them myself. And I like them short.

According to what I understand from the PMBOK there are 3 things that are absolutely essential for a good project charter, and those are:

• a business case
• the projects constraints
• the assumptions (or dependencies)

Looking at only those 3 things that’s not much is it? Some of the things I always add are:

• high level in scope
• high level out of scope
• communication plan, list of major project stakeholders with their coordinates and roles
• general terms and conditions in the mother language of the sponsor, for legal purposes

I made a mindmap exercise in Freemind a long time ago by looking at some example project charters I got my hands on, the combination I came up with looked a bit like this:

But that’s too long to maintain if you have a high number of relatively short projects to manage.

Today my actual essentials look more like this:

Here’s the big mindmap:

project charter comparison PDF download

Freemind source file (.mm)

I want to share the whole exercise with you, so here you go, source and everything in a variety of formats.