Archive for the ‘Time Management’ Category

Are you an organised Project Manager? Do you care?

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 by steph

I read this discussion with trepidation http://www.ronrosenhead.co.uk/?p=362

Am I a bad project manager because there is:
an empty plate on my desk
a few cups
a stray bangle (not sure where that’s from)
and a few random post-its that long ago lost their meaning?

Project Management is not a dot to dot science as some would have us believe. One doesn’t get points in project management for having a tidy desk and for being “organised”. Points are gained for delivery and delivery only.

Some project managers will get there in style (these people are what you call smart arses), some won’t make it at all and should probably choose a different career, some will have a lovely clean desk and a nice big project plan, (they don’t know this yet but they’ll be blaming everyone else when it all goes wrong). Meanwhile, some may get there with a few hairs out of place and their hands dirty from mucking in. The team might even invite those dirty hands to lift aloft the Webby award which arrives as a product of bloody hard work.

I know what kind of project manager I am and no Ron, I’m not sorry for the state of my desk. Not one bit.

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The power of goals

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 by steph

post-its galore

I used to have a very good way of managing my own time.

I had a list in my head and every now and again I’d remember stuff that I needed to do and I’d do it. Don’t get me wrong, I always did my PM documentation but just didn’t manage my own tasks in the same way.

This made me a pretty good intuitive project manager and thankfully my memory was good enough to pull it off.

Then I got older…a little more forgetful..and I managed bigger projects… and more people. I progressed to writing my lists down.

My lists got too big, and my working life got too mobile so I progressed to using outlook. DOH - that didn’t work. I ended up just staring at a screen of red tasks. My husband swears by Outlook (so each to their own) but for me it just didn’t have enough manual dexterity to it.

Meanwhile, my personal life was getting pretty complicated. Moving cities, buying a house etc so I started keeping lists on my phone and tasks in my diary.

Then I started managing my own business…

I thought I had things fairly under control until one day I realised I had a list on my phone, a list on basecamp, a list on tactile AND a list on each of my many desks and…it went on!

I didn’t want to go so far as to say that lists didn’t work for me anymore but clearly something had to give.

It helped when I got my own desk. Just one solitary desk to manage, on which I could keep just one solitary piece of paper with one master list of tasks.

Then I realised one day that I had 45 tasks on my list and they were all due that day. So the nice concise list I had started with, was now spilling from a page of A4 onto post-its that stuck to my coffee cup and threatened to escape down the table-leg out into the corridor.

“This isn’t very Agile” I thought to myself.

Whilst pondering on Agile, I started to wonder why I had spent a great many years trying to manage my own time in a completely different way to the way in which I managed my team’s.

And then it hit me; I had been managing my own time in a soul destroying way. There was a chunk of time allocated (9 - 6pm) and I had to fill it with “stuff”. I was making endless lists that could have gone on forever (and what’s more), even if I came to the end of the list, if it wasn’t 6pm yet - I WOULD JUST KEEP GOING!

Like an Agile team with lots of Sprint Tasks but no Sprint Goal, I was just aimlessly churning out “stuff” until the customer (i.e. me) said that they were satisfied. As I’m quite hard to please, this would sometimes end up being 4am in the morning. So in fact, I wasn’t very good at time-boxing either!

Finally, I realised the power of goals. Every day, just one - and if that goal got done, my day was done too.

So now I have a goal in my head and every now and again I remember stuff that I need to do to complete my goal and I just do it. I cross it off my considerably smaller written list which was created not as a memory aid, but purely for the purpose of being able to triumphantly scribble it out.

I used to have a very good way of managing my own time. Now I don’t manage time at all… just my own expectations.

Read Timothy Ferris author of the 4 hour work week, on “why bigger goals are best and more achievable” here

I don’t proport to be the author of this idea of concentrating on goals rather than tasks and have almost certainly nicked it from Harvard. Three rather than one is certainly more ambitious and I find 2/3 often occurs. But if you (like me) don’t like failure, imagine the other two as back up “should have” goals :-) Read more here

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Posted in Agile, Philosophy, Six Sigma, Time Management | 1 Comment »

What makes a good project office?

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 by admin

The main point to remember is that a project office has one goal and one goal only: make everyone else’s lives easier so that they can deliver stuff. The goal isn’t “create loads of documentation so that when the project goes wrong no-one can blame you or your project manager”. If your project goes wrong baby, you know which way the sewer flows and you’d better have more than just a hefty PID to back up your argument when it does.

The fact remains that if you spend your time chasing people for reports which they have no time to write, maybe you should ask whether you can get the information another way. However, don’t set up an hour long meeting when you probably only need a 20 minute telephone conversation. A project manager’s time is precious and reporting (although important) is not as important as delivering.

Secondly, once you’ve elicited the information then give it back to the person who gave it to you. If you are asking for that information then somebody else is probably asking them for it too. At the very least they might need it themselves and they will no doubt thank you for putting order around chaos.

Finally, (but by no means least), if a project manager gives you some information about their project, then store it somewhere safe. Make sure its accessible next time you need to update your records because one thing’s for sure; if they told you it once, they don’t expect to have to tell you again any time soon!

For information about Project Office opportunities with Magic Milestones email chris@magicmilestones.biz

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Posted in Project Management, Project Office, Time Management, Tips, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

4-Hour Work Week: Myth or Magic?

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by admin

I am reading the 4-hour work week by Timothy Ferriss with interest.

The first pertinent point is the fact that I am reading it at all. Until recently, I hardly had time to breathe, let alone read a book on time management! This is itself a sign that slowing down would be beneficial to me…

Ferriss’ general point is this: “its not the hours you put in but what you put into the hours”. It sounds like old news -it is to a point. However, I have found myself agreeing and learning from this book nonetheless.

A standard response to the assertion that one “has no time” usually falls into 3 categories:

1. Write it down and plan your time better

2. Prioritise

3. Delegate

I have done all of these things and guess what? I still have no time!

The truth is that if I don’t have something else to do with the time, work is an easy thing to fill life up with.

Hang on though!! I’m hardly stuck for stuff to do. If I wasn’t working, I’d be playing the fiddle, writing songs, watching girly films and spending time with my loved ones. Wouldn’t I?

The problem is that I have re-prioritised my whole life. It’s no-longer about doing the stuff I used to do, it’s about sacrificing those things for a “greater good”. That greater good just happens to be my work. However, when one looks at work and its purpose in life, the normal answer is a better life and more time. How odd that work itself is so diametrically opposed to these goals!

However, when we sacrifice these things for work we are signing up to a life akin to the one Seymour finds in the Little Shop of Horrors. “Feed me Seymour!” says the plant … and feed her Seymour does. The plant wants blood and so does a business - it will sap the life out of you if you let it. Don’t think this just applies to us business owners by the way… if you are still at work at 7pm at night then you fall into this category too Seymour.

The point is that I haven’t decided that I WANT to do that other stuff. If I planned “that stuff” into my day then I would do it. Instead work eeks out to fill the gap ad infinitum.

Once the focus of my business is to do that “other stuff”, Ferris argues that not only will I benefit but bizarrely, my business will too.

Watch this space. Maybe you will see it happening right before your eyes…

Posted in Entrepreneur, Philosophy, Time Management, Work /Life Balance | 1 Comment »