Consider How You Spend Your Time
Not many people have spare time at work. Shocking, I know. But I was recently asked by someone who wants to move into management how to best spend their working hours. I was lucky to have some great mentors in the past, and based on their feedback, I have found a few tricks for monitoring how I spend my time.
Key to measuring/monitoring anything is to have facts for tracking. If you are serious about this, you will have to log how you are spending your time. I use my Outlook calendar for everything – as do many people – so it’s fairly easy for me to reflect.
For a manager, I recommend that you consider People, Processes, and Projects when splitting your time. All three of these areas of focus are critical to your team’s overall success so I split my time with 33% in each area. This can vary week by week if something comes up, but overall, an even third to each area tends to keep things balanced.
People – 13+ hours per week
As a manager of people, your job to help them maximize their contributions to the company both in the short-term and long-term. If you are not having weekly 1:1s, reconsider. This is some of the most valuable time you will spend all week! By helping them work through options for how to tackle assignments, coaching them on overcoming a difficult situation, or talking about training that will help their long-term development goals, it is time well spent.
Under the area of people, I would also include relationships that you should be fostering with others such as internal clients, vendors, or peers. Spending time talking to your clients about their needs on a regular basis will pay off in fewer surprises and their support when issues arise. Vendors may not require weekly attention but I try to rotate the time I spend with each vendor based on the role they play in our organization. Peers are critical. There are not many things our teams deliver without the help of others. Scheduling time with your peer managers to discuss overlapping functions (Business Analysts & Project Managers, App Dev & DBAs, etc).
Processes – 13+ hours per week
In this area, I include both the processes that my team uses to perform their work as well as the tools. This is not work that you need to do alone. You can schedule time to consider the short-term effectiveness based on feedback, or you can use the time to elicit feedback from your team. Either way, evaluating how your team is working is critical to maximizing their productivity but also can help improve relationships with others or improve team morale if they are frustrated with an existing process.
Projects – 13+ hours per week
This area may not come as a big shock. You should spend time addressing projects that your team is supporting but also considering the long-term pipeline of work. Developing a forecast and schedule can help keep things running smoothly on your team. It is also a great tool to use when your boss swings by and drops a bomb on you about that new thing they need your team to undertake.
By looking at your calendar for the past weeks, you should be able to evaluate how you are spending your time amongst these 3 activities. You may not realize where an imbalance exists – or this may confirm a hunch that you already had. Consider how you can adjust your activities to help spread your time across all areas that are important to you so when you leave at 5pm on Friday, you know that you’ve given all that you can to help your team deliver their next win!
Who Do You Think Owns Your Career Development
When I first started working, I worked at a major corporation with an extensive training and development program. I was exposed to the idea of building my annual career development goals, selecting from a catalog of training, and discussing it regularly with my manager. While this was a great experience, I look back on it now and am thankful that I was re-organized to a manager who could not have cared less about development. I could have been spoiled quickly and it could have caused lasting damage to my career.
Who Do You Think Owns Your Career Development?
It is not your boss or current employer. Some surveys show that a person could change jobs as much as 7 times in their career. If that is the case, do you really want to put your fate in the hands of at least 7 bosses? And that doesn’t even count the number of organizational changes you face with an employer. Your employer’s perspective is to develop the skills that they need to maximize their investment in you as an employee. Their job is not to keep you marketable in your career. That is your goal – and no one else’s.
To keep yourself marketable, you have to invest time. This is a small price to pay compared to the alternative of being stuck in the same job or finding yourself disconnected from technology or skills that you need to find your next position. Here are some ideas of things you might want to consider when keeping your skills sharp.
1. It will cost you money. Not all employers are going to pay for training to help you remain marketable. You may have to invest in yourself from time to time. Whether it’s a book, online class, or a formal training course, you may need to spend some money. Consider this an investment in yourself which should pay off if you gain a skill set or extend the life on one that you already have. Plus, what a great thing to share on a resume. Wouldn’t a potential employer be impressed if you were to show the initiative to keep your skills at their best?
2. You have to be honest. Be your own hardest critic. Yes, you should be getting feedback on your performance from your manager. You may also be able to gain feedback from peers. But be honest with yourself – you probably have a good sense of when you have screwed up. Or when you look back on a task and think “I could have done that better – or different”. Take the time to jot down a note and during a quiet moment, reflect on it. If you are comfortable, share your thoughts with your employer, and talk to them about what you are thinking about and how you would like to handle it differently next time. Perhaps your honest reflection will get you additional feedback from their perspective.
3. Look Outside of the Box. You may be a major player at your office but would you rank as “top dog” somewhere else? Use your professional network to gain insight on how your role is handled at other companies. This is a great way to also gain input on companies that you would like to work at one day. Knowing the capabilities expected of people in your role at other companies or through professional associations, can give you a way to measure yourself against a broader group. This will help you strengthen your areas of weakness so you can strongly compete for your next position. This can also help you talk with your manager about a potential promotion or career path.
No one is going to guarantee you a job for life (if you find someone, let me know). We all owe it to ourselves to consider our long-term professional goals and invest in ourselves to be the strongest we can be in our field. The time spent can help you in your current position and provide value to your employer (Win). This could lead to great work, sense of accomplishment, promotions, great performance ratings, raises, and more. It may also help you position yourself for a great opportunity down the road in your career. Either way, it’s worth taking the time to do because the alternative of neglecting your own development is the painful regret you may feel 5 years from now when you do not have the skills needed to move onto a new job.
The Most Under-Used PM Tool
The PMBOK defines Milestone as a significant event in a project usually associated with the completion of a deliverable. Okay, so that may be what a Milestone is but it is so bland!
Milestones are the most under-used tool in a Project Manager’s toolbox. Milestones are how you can manage the progression of your project, assess risks without emotion, and set expectations with your resources up front & throughout the project.
Define Your Milestones
As you start your project, defining your milestones is the first step to using them. As you outline your project activities, you should note any major deliverable or step that deserves focus. Without this deliverable or step, your project success is unlikely – those are the type that you denote as a milestone. Anything with a contractual obligation – is a milestone. Typical IT projects may include completion of requirements, design, start of testing, completion of testing, deployment – are key milestones. Don’t under-estimate the value of a little more granularity though. Instead of Design, perhaps you should denote Interface Design, if your project has signficant integration requirements. If you are standing up a lot of new hardware for your effort, the deployment of this hardware should be a milestone.
With each milestone you identify, determine 3 things:
- Impacts – which of your resource teams “co-own” the milestone with you. Let them know up front of the plan to treat the deliverable/step as a milestone, and that you are going to be publishing the milestone plan & progress regularly to key stakeholders.
- Communication Plan – who will you notify when the milestone is met (or delayed).
- Risk Plan – if your team falls behind on delivering to the milestone, what steps will be taken? What impacts could be felt? What if they reach the milestone early? A detailed project plan would include Early & Late Finish dates for milestones.
During Your Project
As you publish your weekly status to key stakeholders (please tell me you publish progress reports…..), you can keep the emails short & sweet by keeping focus on milestones. You can be as detailed as Percent Complete for in-flight milestone activities, or just note Planned, In-Flight, Completed. Do not neglect to include the Planned Finish Date for your milestone so stakeholders can have clear expectations in front of them every week.
Hitting a Milestone
When your team completes a milestone, communicate it to the appropriate stakeholders but also take the opportunity to celebrate. Too many times, we wait until the end of the project to celebrate. Oh wait, no we don’t because we get busy planning the next project. Take time to celebrate when a milestone is hit (assuming it was early or on-time). Doesn’t have to be a party – but make sure the team members who contributed know that their effort was appreciated, and let other team members know that this is a big effort with many parts coming together – with one less piece to worry about with that milestone completed! This is also a good point to have your sponsor send out a note of Thanks to the team members. Too often we only hear from sponsors at the beginning, end, and during risk escalation. Ask them to help you keep the teams focused on the effort by monitoring & celebrating the milestones.
A race ran without milestones is long. A road trip without the occasional stop for a roadside attraction (world’s largest ketchup bottle….) is boring. Using milestones can help a project manager set expectations, keep momentum moving during a long project, and assess risk of delivering quality on time.
What are some other ways milestones can be used on a project? Any suggestions? Any horrible experiences? Let’s make this a group discussion – post a comment so we can gain some diverse ideas!
Measuring What Matters
I worked in an organization once that had their managers spend an extreme amount of time on Excel and PowerPoint. Their job was to build operational reports about system performance, open tickets, project milestone trends, average hair loss of middle-aged people, you get the idea….
Measuring performance is important. You can’t get better if you don’t know where you are starting from. How much time should you really spend measuring? At what point should you spend less time measuring and more time making things better? Measure What Matters.
What’s Broken?
Determining what your want to resolve within your organization is critical. Make a list and throw it all on there. Involve your teams, your clients, anyone who has some stake in the game. Then play a game of word-association. Which topics are duplicates? Which ones are related? If you can group them into logical topics, then you can plan a little easier. Which ones are short-term wins? Which ones are game-changers that will make for lasting gains or allow you to tackle other areas? Try to narrow it down to a Top 5 based on priority and where you have the resources to work on the areas.
Can it Be Measured?
Once you have figured out your areas of improvement, you can assess how you will measure each of the areas for current performance. Not only do you have to review what tools you have to measure but what data is relevant to measuring the impact of the changes that you are making. For example, you want to improve MTTR (Mean Time To Respond) – so how are you going to capture the Response? What is considered a Response? An Email? Are you going to have your teams log the response in a tool? Is this really feasible? Be careful about what you decide to measure and how you measure it, as you may face resistance from your teams if you are asking them to work extra hours to log data to measure a change they are not totally on-board with in the first place. Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tackle it, just means that you have to address it in a different way.
Measure What Matters
Once you have a measurement plan in place for your Top 5 issues, then you are ready to decide on which ones to tackle. Not all of them at the same time – pace yourself! They are all going to make a difference (based on your initial assessment) so which ones do you have the resources to tackle now? Which ones do you have the resources readily available to work on the change? Pick your 1 or 2 efforts and then launch your effort.
Launching
Put down the email. This is a project. It has a defined start (today) and a schedule, and a scope. What is your overall objective for improvement? What is your timeline for making the change? What milestones do you want to achieve along the way? Build your team of people to help with your effort and get their buy-in during your launch meeting. Help them see how this change is going to make things better for your Customers or Employees. Why should they invest their extra time (ha!) on this effort. They need to be advocates for the change so they have to be bought in from the start. Take the time to host a Kick-off Meeting to launch your effort. Get your team excited about taking on this new effort and the difference that they can make to the organization. Explain the measurement plan and how it compliments the project milestones and the team’s ability to track their progress. And post the progress – let others see the great work that your team is doing!
As you continue down the road for your change effort, eventually, you will hit your goal. You have to consider how you will continue to measure the ongoing effectiveness of your change without the extra efforts. Can you re-use your existing reports to measure on a monthly basis instead of daily or weekly? Without a lot of overhead? Automating your reporting may be critical to validating that you implemented sustainable change.
Change is required of any efficient organization but making sure that you are changing the right things and not spending more time measuring than changing – is important to the overall success of your organization.
What methods have you used to launch a change effort in your organization? How did you balance the need to measure the rate of change against the additional workload to gather the data?
Why Not Ask Before You Start?
I have a new professor who teaches International courses with a focus on strategic management and HR. Last night, as I was preparing with my team to step in front of class to make our first presentation, the professor noted that he was wondering why we had not asked about the specific method in which we would be graded on our presentation. At that point, he pulled out forms for everyone in the class to fill out, and a very detailed form that included criteria he would be monitoring for us to complete. Yes… it was one of those “oh @#$! moments”. He noted that it must be the HR professor in him but he said that any time you start a new assignment, you should ask how you will be measured as being successful. The frustrating thing – I was just talking about this with a co-worker and offered her the same advice. I guess I should have taken some of my own advice….
So as I do when I make a mistake, I thought about how to avoid it again. Here is the points that I came up with as a “checklist” for the next time I start a new project.
1. Ask what the objective of the assignment is
It is easy for us to assume that we know the objective (often it is spelled out for us) but why not ask? There could be a complimentary objective that could also be satisfied. There may be a political objective that you should be aware of.
2. Ask about the timeline
Not only should you inquire about the ultimate timeline for completion but also if there is an expectation to hit a particular date for a defined milestone.
3. Ask about approach
This is one that I think many people neglect and will likely regret. It is a good idea to ask your boss if they have a vision for how they would approach the effort, or the format/style of the final deliverable. How many times have you turned something in to your boss (or professor in my case) only to hear “that’s nice but not quite what I had in mind”. Oops! I cannot speak for all bosses but I would not be offended if someone asked me if I had a vision for what that “XYZ report” should look like when they were done. This is especially true if the boss has done my job. They likely have been in your position to develop a “XYZ report” themselves and know what they felt was a good result. Better to ask up front then to find out later!
Three questions that will hopefully save me (and possibly you) that uncomfortable moment of finding out that you should have asked before finishing your project. What else should be asked before we start a new project? And yes… the presentation turned out great!
