Storms in the workforce market

In this troubled times there is no better topic than the storm that is now in process on all recruitment markets.
I am struggling with hiring high quality individuals, both from a job skills point of view, as well as from a personal and soft skills point of view. And yes, the soft skills are really important in my activity, as we work remotely with most of the team members, and need to have good communication skills, really strong proactivity and forthcoming, rather than waiting for things to happen...
And it's actually pretty easy to wait for things to happen to you, but they will not do by themselves - and if you expect that the reality tells different from this, then you are working in a really closed environment. I've seen people that did not progress in their work, because nobody was available to tell them what to do next. Well, if you don't know what's next, go and ask, don't sit and wait.
But I was talking about the workforce market - it's really weired what's happenning here... A statistic says that all companies in the city I leave (a 2-million inhabitant) want to hire around 40% new personnel, while the unemployment rate is 1% (or below). Any idea how we can still do the plan?
Well - steal employees from other companies, expand the research in different locations, build new offices outside the city, in regions where people are unemployed, and happen to have the right skills. But then you run into different issues: the people in those regions might be right from a technical point of view, but their soft skills are not trained, so we need to grow them, and invest... and once you have invested and the person has reached the required level and can be productive... the worst case scenario happens: they are employed by other companies!!!
Is it the same in your location? Are you fighting the people turnover? How do you make your business grow in this environment?

Evaluate your human resources performance

It's beginning of the year, and for a lot of companies it is the time for looking back to what happened last year and evaluate the performance of the resources.
You all know how to do performance evaluation, so I won't lecture on this, instead, I'm asking you: what are your criteria for evaluating a resource? Do you look only at their performance, do you take into account the context, too, the environmental conditions and all the factors that may impact a person's performance? Or you just look at the evaluations that you did over the year, sum it up, and that's it?
And if you answered yes to the above questions: by taking into account the reviews you collected over the year about a person, without keeping in mind the big picture of the context and needs and demands we had on that person, do we build an accurate image of that person's performance?
These are questions that I need to answer pretty fast, as I need to give feedback to all my team members, and it's not an easy task...

Cultural differences in communication styles in distributed projects

How often did it not happen to you to ask somebody to do something, wait for the result, and then notice that what you asked for and what you obtained is different? More often than we want to admit, there is a big gap between what you think you have communicated and what the other party has actually understood. And this happens when you talk with your peers face-to-face. Can you imagine what happens when the same request is done across geographic and cultural distances?
There are a lot of things that one has to take into account when working remotely, and these go from process and procedures to interactions and time differences. For solving all these points, there are quite a few tools and tips that one can use. But all these tools and all the processes in the world cannot solve by miracle one of the most critical points: different communication styles.
The communication style is different from one person to another, based on their education, maturity, personality style, and so on. And there is a huge influence that one has also to factor in, and this is cultural differences.
Communication occurs at multiple levels, in all directions:

• top-down, from the project manager to the remote team members
• between peers, inside the team
• bottom-up, from the team members to their remote project manager

.
At all these levels you may have communication issues, and the bigger the cultural gap the bigger the issues.

What you should do to solve this type of issues?

First, start by identifying the actual communication differences that you might have, based on your own observations in the past projects, or on the feedback from other people that worked with the same team before; you can also read specific literature about these differences.
Acknowledge these differences.
Cultivate the desired communication style inside the team, between the team members.
Plan your communications regarding the overall project objectives and current status, client interactions, how the client sees you - these are all important, especially if the team has no direct interaction with the client.
Foster an open communication environment inside the team, where all questions are allowed and it is not bad to let others know that one is stuck and needs help.
Clarify what type of communication you need from the team members in terms of status reporting (such as: progress, foreseen issues, next tasks).

I hope all these tips will help you in getting better when communicating with your peers, with your remote team members...

There are quite a few good articles that discuss communication, here is one that I recently found and liked: Culture Matters: Communication and Culture Tips for Global Managers.

Traveller's notes

I am really amazed by the people that spend most of their time travelling from one location to another, working with numerous people from different cities and locations. I am not talking about a traveller that is doing a pleasure trip, but of working guys that enjoy meeting lots of people and going to tens of locations just for work... I did only a few business trips, in not so many locations, but still I found it really cool. I'm not sure I could turn it into a work model, but I enjoyed. And took some nice pictures from my trips, too. I will show only one picture now, from Geneva. I want to start a traveller's notes website, with lots of pictures from my trips. Not the professional pictures type, but the amateur... Maybe I will see your pictures there, too.

Build Operate Transfer - Managing your BOT

Recently I've run into a lot of discussions about how to run a BOT business. Managing a BOT can pose a lot of issues if you don't respect some basic rules that you establish well ahead. Like with any other offshoring model, you need to have some expectations set from it. I am thinking of multiple points to be well defined ahead. I would start by setting an objective about team size to be reached in a period of time, and how you would get there (recruitment process, selection, ramping up). Next, I would think about the types of projects that could be safely handed over to the BOT team, without putting at risk the high visibility projects. I would also consider having one key person managing the entire BOT, one person that I trust and that could be hired by my company, rather than the service provider. And to make a long story short, here is a very good link that talks about a particular case, really-really interesting: http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/c060320a.asp

How to contribute to the open source community

I just got into the open source trend. You know, where people write software just for fun, and if they like it they make it available for the rest of the world... Some of it is not so good, actually, and you might get lost in their code, and you might start wondering what are you doing with that code after all... Come on, you would say, I could have written a much better code than that. And even contribute it to the community...

But there a lot of very good pieces out there, that you should be using instead of writing from scratch. They have good quality of the code, well architected and flexible, and also good documentation that teaches you how to best use it, and they allow you to post bugs, and even to fix the bugs if you know how...

All this good stuff is usually made not by only one person, but a whole team that has been working in their spare time just to make everything better.

And the best thing is that any of us could be contributing to make it better. It doesn't matter if you can't write code, in the same language or in any other language for that matter. It only matters if you have good ideas, and you are willing to share them for free.

So most of us could be contributing to the open source community. The best synthesis on how to contribute I found it here: http://www.nongeekperspective.com/2006/09/5-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source.html

In summary, the author identifies 5 ways to do it (actually they are 6):

1. Contribute quality: help to make a better project, better looking and with new features
2. Contribute documentation: Some Open Source projects have a poor or insufficient documentation
3. Contribute support: everybody need it at least once. Let programmer do their work while you help other people
4. Contribute money: many Open Source projects have a donate button or a shop where to buy related products, but there are other ways to contribute money
5. Contribute publicity: If the project gets popular there will be more people wanting to contribute
6. Contribute appreciation: it's an extra way to contribute but may be the most important.

Well, enjoy your reading, and send me your comments!

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings - useful or not?

Today I would like to discuss about meetings in the work environment. I'm pretty sure that you all have an agenda on your desk or in your computer, filled with lots of meetings every week and month. Are these meetings necessary? All of them? Do you reach your goals with these meetings?

Here is one excerpt from a very interesting article:

How many meetings did you attend or hold in 2006? Tens? Hundreds? Now, take a minute to consider how many of those meetings were actually turned into positive, productive action that made your business better.
These are important questions to ask in a world of ‘fast-food communication’, where ondemand, real-time, dynamic collaboration technologies have quickly turned global business into a single, connected cube farm. Everyone has meetings; it’s up to you to determine whether the information and responsibilities shared in those meetings drives your success, or simply leads to deeper inefficiency.

Here is the full article, to which I challenge to discuss in the following days:

http://www.pmforum.org/library/tips/2007/PDFs/Brett-2-07.pdf

The Art of the Start

I have just watched this great video of Guy Kawasaki: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559!!!

It is amazing how many things one can learn in just a 40 minutes presentation of the TEN key points he outlines and evangelizes...

I strongly recommend anyone who wants to start a company to view this video and think again before actually moving on. It's full of truths and things that I have already seen happenning before, and I can tell you (without being a big entrepreneur) that he is right.

I will search for more items like this one, an come back to you, it's really useful and meaningful!

Communication failures

Each company has put in place more or less complex procedures for a smooth project management for all their projects. They have procedures for planning, procedures for monitoring and control, procedures for risk management and, of course, for project communication.

What most of the companies fail to manage is the actual human side of the communication, the way of communicating the problems and the way managers react to problems.

In a study conducted by VitalSmarts and The Concours Group, named Silence Fails: The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution, more than 1,000 executives and
project management professionals across 40 companies in a wide variety of industries were surveyed.

The study pointed out five undiscussable issues that are the most prevalent and most costly barriers to project success, including:
1) fact-free planning – a project is set up to fail with deadlines or resource limits that are set with no consideration for reality, a flaw almost no one discusses effectively;
2) absent without leave (AWOL) sponsors – the sponsor doesn’t provide leadership, political clout, time or energy to see a project through to completion, and those depending on him or her don’t effectively address the sponsor’s failures;
3) skirting – people work around the priority-setting process and are not held accountable for doing so;
4) project chicken – team leaders and members don’t admit when there are problems with a project but wait for someone else to speak up first; and
5) team failures – team members perpetuate dysfunction when they are unwilling or unable to support the project, and team leaders are reluctant to discuss their failures with them candidly.

How many times did you see these signs in your projects and your project team, too?... Can we fix it?

OK, let's stop this project

I have recently read an article about stopping a project. Although it may be common sense, you should always consider that your project might not be successful (especially at its early beginning, when the risks are higher and uncertainaties are plenty of).

And here you are, in the middle of your project, and you start thinking that you should close it. Where did you got this idea? Maybe...
- your resources have been moved to more "glamorous" projects
- maybe your sponsor has changed opinion, or was fired, or just lost his decision power
- maybe the product of the project is no longer required by the customer (be it an internal customer, or a market sector)
- maybe you can no longer control the technology, as it was too new when you started, and it now proves to be cumbersome
- maybe because you are losing money from this project, instead of making
- the focus of the company has changed, and this project does no longer fit into the strategy
- project performance is too low
- other external conditions may have changed to lead to project termination.

All these are potential reasons, and if you notice some of these simptoms in your project, then you should really consider cancelling it before losing too much on it.

In one of the next postings, I will try to talk also on how to do this so that nobody hurts!!

And in the mean time, please visit our bookstore: http://projectmanagement.sufx.net

What a day...

How many times did it happen to you to get home, and think about your day, and suddenly remembering that you did not all the things on your (mental) list?... It just happened to me, and I am angry with me... Is it something common? What do you do when this happens to you? How do you organize your time?