The project leader's guide to adapt to change and manage uncertainty

The project leader’s guide to successfully adapt to change & manage uncertainty.

Were papyrus and reed brush the first project management tools? The inevitable evolution of project management methodology THEN Over 4,000 years ago ancient wonders like the Egyptian Pyramids were planned by hand. Everything from the supply chain, site infrastructure, and resource management needed to be thought through. These classic project management methodologies took us a long way, but times have changed... II. III. In the 1960s, project management was largely based around Waterfall techniques. This was good enough to land men on the moon and bring them safely home. In the 1950s, project management methodology began to take form with the advent of critical path method (CPM), Lockheed’s revolutionary Polaris missile project, and the U.S. Navy’s development of the program evaluation and review technique (PERT). Fast-forward to the 20th century and Henry Gantt was facing the same challenges in the steel industry: people and supplies needed to be in the right place at the right time. With a stopwatch in hand, he timed the assembly of bicycles and produced the first visual schedule of planned work vs completed work. IV. I. Gone are the days of organizing work in your mind or on sticky notes; you need tools to help your business get more done with the same resources. Yet most project management tools are still relying on classic project management methodologies designed decades — if not hundreds — of years ago. Think about it: how often do you still build Gannt charts? Henry Gantt’s timeline was an effective illustration of his assembly line, but everyone forgets that he said his methodology only worked if you knew 100% of the tasks ahead of time with 100% confidence in how long each task will take. Doesn’t total certainty in our projects seem like a luxury? For most, it is impossible in today’s climate to know down to the minute, hour, day, or sometimes even week how long work will take. It took about 20 years to build a pyramid; what were you doing 20 years ago? How big was the computer on your desk, if you even had one? The Egyptians adapted and improved as they went along, like any modern team. History shows us that ways of working change, and now, software is catching up to make it even easier. While we’re all grateful that we no longer have to work out the critical path or create PERT charts by hand, it’s time for modern ways of managing projects to be reflected in the tools we use. 60% of project managers say software improves timeline estimation and 55% say it means people are used more effectively. The project teams from the past would barely recognize today’s workplace. Companies must be more flexible than ever, ready to adapt in a fast-paced environment and seize new opportunities. Most are simultaneously juggling entire portfolios of projects where priorities are continually shifting and the only constant is change. Working at speed is the norm, demanding teams to be adaptive and agile. And our tools need to help us live and work at that pace, not slow us down. We recognize that project management tools have come a long way since the first SaaS products made it possible to collaborate via the internet. Today, 60% of project teams use cloud solutions for managing projects. The right software is a critical asset when it comes to ensuring your strategic projects get delivered in the most efficient way: It’s time for modern ways of managing projects to be reflected in the tools we use. 3 NOW Classic project management can’t align WHO, WHAT, WHY and WHEN Productivity is achieved by taking the objectives of the organization, turning them into operating results, and adapting to change along the way. We do this by building a portfolio of projects and executing them over months, quarters, and years. It’s where organizations spend most of their time, money, and energy. It drives the business but is a constant challenge. Over the years we’ve talked to many people who managed these projects to better understand their needs and what could have helped them succeed. Most have counted on traditional project management software to align their projects and teams, but we hear the same four issues come up time and time again: 70% of organizations have suffered at least one project failure in the prior 12 months Classic project management solutions and methodologies fail to solve the who, what, why and when problems in a single solution. We see time and time again, it is the “when” questions that vex teams the most; they just don’t trust their schedules. When priorities and work are constantly changing, so should your project plans. How? This guide will walk you through important tips to help you manage change and uncertainty in today’s workplace. MOST COMMON ISSUES QUESTIONS NEEDING ANSWERS Who is at capacity or is going to be out of the office for a while? Who on the team is not being fully utilized? What is causing our bottlenecks? What projects are in flight and how does this impact my schedule? Who is allocated to what projects? What are the potential risks and threats to my project? Why are we prioritizing one project over another? Why aren’t our people working on the right things? Why are projects competing for resources? When will the project realistically be done? When can we commit to the customer? When do we need to hire more people? When can we take on more work? Scheduling Issues Prioritization Issues Visibility Issues Resource Issues WHO WHAT WHY WHEN 4 Every project leader and team manager strives to eliminate overload and improve utilization so that every initiative gets the staffing it needs to complete on time, every time. We also need to balance factors like vacations, holidays, part-time schedules, and hours needed for non-project related tasks. One of the challenges of managing a multi-project portfolio with a common pool of team members and resources is that it’s too easy to accidentally book someone to work on too many simultaneous tasks. It is also far too common for individuals and teams to put in extra hours to finish work that had an unrealistic deadline from the start. When there’s more work to do, continuous resource balancing protects your team’s mental and physical health by making sure no one must work overtime to finish their work by the deadline. So why is it so hard to achieve this? With shared resources across projects and so many moving parts, it is simply not possible to resource level by hand. There is a modern solution. LiquidPlanner’s planning intelligence has automatic resource leveling so you can actively manage your team’s workload to eliminate capacity issues. Spotting bottlenecks early and seeing which critical path team members might not finish by the target deadline drives informed and timely decision making before it is too late. It works the other way too: tasks able to start are automatically brought forward to address underload and make sure no team member is idle. Powerful workload views help you to get the complete picture, and when you have an underutilized member on the team, they provide the needed information to reassign work and balance project tasks. Do more with fewer people by making the most of the skilled individuals you already have on the team. This will also decrease stress, reduce turnover, and help increase team fulfillment by leveraging their time and skills efficiently. Try out a solution with automatic resource leveling to improve team utilization and understand where the real bottlenecks are so you can take action to minimize delays to keep projects moving forward. Never wonder “who” is working on what and if the right work is getting done again. “Unlike other tools, LiquidPlanner schedules your tasks based on your availability per hours in the week. It does not allow you to overschedule yourself or your team. This is HUGE for planning. Also, it allows you to create priorities across multiple projects. Nothing comes even close.” - LiquidPlanner Customer Today, 58% of employees report burnout, up from 45% in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic Keep your workload balanced TIP #1 WHO: SOLVING YOUR RESOURCE ISSUES 5 Time management is as important to productivity as GPS is to navigation. It is essential to know what projects are in flight across the organization and who is working on them. If you don’t collaborate with your team on progress, you won’t know if you are drifting off course. If ‘prioritization’ is the route, then ‘tracking progress’ is the way you stick to the road. To make the most of your time and resources, it’s essential to track work. For your project to be successful, you need to effectively deploy the full measure of your teams’ time and talent, but they are knee-deep in ‘busy work.’ By simply removing the arduous tasks of manually reporting time and sitting in unnecessary status meetings, most teams witness an immediate improvement in productivity and job satisfaction. Classic project management assumes work is always going to plan and true ups are optional. In LiquidPlanner, it’s the opposite. It’s scheduling engine assumes no work has been done unless someone confirms it. Ignore the plan and work gets carried forward for a future date — just like in the real world — and real-time updates draw attention to potential areas of risk. Tracking time makes it easy to collaborate with your team, view progress and make the most of your team’s skills. Individuals get a simple view of their current priorities while project managers and team leaders have visibility into “what” their colleagues are working on and how much progress has been made. Integrated time tracking automatically updates estimates and schedules recalculate in realtime. In turn, that provides integrated controls and analytics so you can spot project performance issues early and take steps to bring the work back on track. Say hello to visibility and goodbye to countless status meetings! “LiquidPlanner helps us with assigning resources to a task. I like that I am able to understand how free or how busy an employee is in order to make sure everyone is being used equally. With this information it’s easy to plan future projects.” - LiquidPlanner Customer LiquidPlanner has re-envisioned the tracking process to make it easy and connected to the schedule. Did you know that enterprise workers are devoting just 45% of their time to their primary job duties? Track progress to know where time goes TIP #2 WHAT: SOLVING YOUR VISIBILITY ISSUES 6 We all work in organizations where priorities are regularly changing. But reallocating people on a whim without analyzing the impacts of incoming demands, understanding the priorities, or considering the organization’s goals can be dangerous. Aligning teams to purpose and executing the right work all begins with prioritization. If you can build a priority-based culture, you’ll be able to protect resources and have smart conversations about where time should be spent. It will help you move your tasks from one status to the next while keeping priorities aligned across all projects and all teams, ensuring that the right people are working on the right things at the right time. It has a powerful effect on productivity, quality, and visibility, yet few people do it well and most fail to maintain prioritization over time. It’s understandable because this is hard work when done manually and when change keeps knocking at your door. LiquidPlanner combines a predictive scheduling engine with priority-based planning for game-changing results. Projects in LiquidPlanner are ordered by priority, tasks are ordered by priority inside projects, and assignments are ordered by priority on tasks. When priorities change, simply drag and drop projects to reflect what’s now most important so everyone is aligned behind the work that drives the business value for your organization. Then, let the scheduling engine do the heavy lifting for you. A busy project portfolio includes in-flight work and pipeline projects that haven’t yet started. When there are no priorities set, it’s too easy to get pulled into working on the most interesting project, or the one with the most vocal executive sponsor, even if those aren’t the initiatives that matter most to the business. We’ve watched many teams double their productivity simply by adopting a global priority system and eliminating confusion, haggling, and forgetting. Companies that know their priorities - and ensure every member of every project team is on the same page - have a new competitive advantage. Teams must understand the “why” behind their project tasks. When they do, they are directly aligned to the purpose and more commonly achieve fulfillment at work. Additionally, they deliver more with less stress and have greater team alignment as people work on the right things at the right time. Try priority-based planning to ensure your top projects get the focus they deserve and then see the impact on the portfolio when priorities shift. ”We no longer overpromise on projects and underestimate the time it takes to complete tasks and milestones. The prioritization features have enabled us to focus on what is truly important instead of just using high / low / medium which don’t have that much meaning in reality.” - LiquidPlanner Customer According to McKinsey, only 52% of executives say their employees’ time allocation matches company priorities Use a priority-driven methodology TIP #3 WHY: SOLVING YOUR PRIORITIZATION ISSUES 7 Use predictive scheduling to wrangle uncertainty Every day you are expected to have answers to hard questions with more projects in play and dependencies than you can possibly manage. When will the project realistically be done? When can we commit to the customer? When do we need to hire more people? When can we take on more work? These questions are not ones you can answer without bringing visibility to projects in motion (the what), incorporating your priorities (the why), modeling availability of your resources (the who), and capturing uncertainty and change (the when) together in a single system. With so much to factor in, project managers struggle to trust their schedule — not to mention the initial project plan before change occurs. LiquidPlanner uses a scheduling engine that runs sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations across the entire portfolio while respecting constraints like prioritization, dependencies, target dates, and team member availability. ”We run over 20 projects at a time, with some resources working on 5 or more projects simultaneously. LiquidPlanner helps us understand when projects are in trouble, a long time ahead. It helps our project managers be more organized. We can react to customer requirements and be better informed and in control.” - LiquidPlanner Customer Should we stop creating project schedules at all? Of course not! All we need is a schedule that is trustworthy. Project teams need a modern way to accurately predict outcomes and adapt to change. Over 50% of project managers don’t bother to baseline their schedules. Baselining isn’t much help when you know the schedule won’t survive the week. These inputs calculate reality-based start and finish dates teams can trust and automatically update when priorities, people, or estimated scope change. Through ranged estimates, it creates realistic schedules, even if you can’t estimate a task accurately down to the hour. Thinking in ranges of effort (as opposed to fixed durations) helps teams capture uncertainty so they can see it and manage it. A ranged estimate is a best case — worst case pair of numbers, for instance 3 days – 7 days. They replace the tendency to force dates with an iron fist with productive conversations about assumptions. Schedule bars display uncertainty with Expected Finish (50% confidence) and Latest Finish dates (90% confidence). Managers use Target Start and Target Finish dates to guide the engine - so you can always see what is possible in relation to target deadlines. With this level of granularity, all the inputs needed for Gantt schedules to be accurate become a thing of the past and modeling for uncertainty is the clear path forward. Predictive scheduling will help you create a plan you can trust simply by estimating in ranges, assigning the team, and prioritizing the work. It means you’ll always know the answer to “when?” — and could even be the key to achieving your company’s objectives in 2022. LiquidPlanner is the only solution that calculates when work will be done with 90% confidence. TIP #4 WHEN: SOLVING YOUR SCHEDULING ISSUES 8 Make sure you have all the modern-day planning tools you need We’re living in what’s been called the Project Economy and there’s a certain cadence that comes with that: a cadence that will sweep you off your feet if you can’t keep up. Your business needs the tools to navigate through uncertainty and changing priorities, with real-time data to help the whole organization make the right decisions at the right time. Project managers do their very best to stay on top of dates, but in complex environments where people work on many projects at the same time, it is simply not possible for the human brain to calculate realistic start and finishes with the same degree of accuracy as intelligent software. Even the brightest people on your team would struggle to do automatic resource leveling, ensuring the right priorities for the business are the projects getting most of the available resource time. Thankfully there is a new breed of project management software — powered by planning intelligence — that ensures you have a reliable schedule and can’t overcommit your resources. It democratizes the process allowing you to spend less time on housekeeping and more time on strategy, coaching and quality work. It creates a collaborative system where people, projects and business goals sit seamlessly side-by-side, giving you full visibility of everything, however often the priorities change. It helps you achieve the momentum your business needs to succeed through seamless project execution, aligning the who, what, why and when in one interconnected, centralized location. Most importantly, teams that rely on planning intelligence put results at the heart of their business and have a competitive advantage. Are you ready for a smarter way for your projects to adapt to change and manage uncertainty? Try all the helpful tips in this guide and let us show you the true power of planning intelligence. REQUEST A DEMO START FREE TRIAL 9 Planning intelligence for smarter projects LiquidPlanner is a transformative project management solution for teams that want to plan, predict, and perform beyond expectations. It’s a new way to align your people, projects, and priorities to ensure the right people are working on the right things at the right time. Predictive scheduling dynamically adapts to change and manages uncertainty, so you always know in real-time when work will be done. With the power of planning intelligence, LiquidPlanner enables teams to deliver and optimize projects with confidence. Rated the best software for complex projects by PC Magazine, smarter planning is a click away. Get your free account today at LiquidPlanner | The Market's Only Predictive Scheduling Solution .