How to claim for 60 PDUs fast!

Are you a PMP ? Ok this is the most important post Im going to write in this blog for you .If you are also a PMP in my category who waited till the last moment to claim PDUs ( Please I don’t recommend that period! PMI can always reject what you claim so you need time for that) and in the mission of saving your title for another 3 years.. This post will sound music to you. First thank you Shawan Futter(http://www.theicpm.com/) ,Dr. Madhu and Cornelius (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/) for all the help. Ok Here we go. 15 points – Category 2 SDL If you are a regular listener of PMPodcast , (If not you can start now ) claim 15 points per one cycle.. (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=33) has more details 15 Points – Category 2h If you are really doing PM related work, you can claim 5 for each year so you got another 15. Now itself you got 30., ok the next 30 is the challenge.. I will do it and update the post.. :) wait ….
Here you go for the next 30..
10 Points – Category 2g
Have you done any research on new Project Management method or framework ? why not creating a presentation on that as training material and train your own colleagues ? Or if you are in to PM consultancy, you can use that for various teams training. There you can get 10 PDUs.

5 Points – Category 2 Activity
Create a Project Management forum in your own company with people who are interested to share knowledge and talk about Project Management related stuff. You are the moderator of this forum, have weekly meetings.. there you can collect 5 PDUs.

15 Points – category 5
This is really a good one . Under volunteer activity you know that you can claim PDUs for your PM subject specific blog? You can claim 5 points per year so you can get maximum of 15 points there. But be honest they do an audit J

There are many more available. If you are doing some formal higher studies on Project Management, if you do a research degree and publish journals, you can collect many PDUs easily. But above is the most easiest path I have found.

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Special note for Sri Lankan PMPs who will be losing their credentials soon…. I know there are lots of PMPs in SL right now.. and I know many of them are going to lose their credentials this year :) I was one of them before. Just like you guys, I also like to attend to worldwide seminars, conferences and earn PDUS but there is a big price to pay for these as we are located in SL. Traveling is very costly and these seminars are costly when you convert to Rupees. I know there are ways that you can purchase PM stuff, learn and then claim for PDUs. …Again you need money.. I know most of us are not invited to address our PM chapter dinners etc ;-) so we don’t get PDUs from that way. In the same time most of us have not written any books or published journals. Then how do we do this??? Don’t worry … Still you can claim for PDUs for what you have done .. Remember how hard it was for us to do this PMP exam.. Sooo many questions..PMBOK guides, online test exams, remembering inputs and outputs of each phase of the cycle ( Shoot me !! ) , Rita’s book.. oh its a nightmare.. So don’t lose what you have gained in hard way.. Actually I also believed that earning PDUs is unbelievably difficult task till few PMPs guided me on how to do this without spending any money. All what you have to do is all the days do your reading, participate online forums etc. , help other Project managers and practice as a Project Management professional. I specially thought to post this blog post for you guys to help to claim PDUs. I will improve this post to make it much more usable as much as information I find day by day…

Project Communication in Outsourced Project Management

We all know that, in average a project manager spend more or less 90% of his or her project management time for communication. Proper and effective communication is one of the most challenging areas in project management.. How about communication in outsourced project management..? that is any PM’s nightmare unless they manage it properly from day one.
This issue is not about language, either you do nearsoursing or outsourcing, nowadays most the professionals will speak good English. But poorly managed remote communication may increase the risk of project failures drastically. All aspects of remote communication should be carefully quality managed by a project manager who is in to outsourced project management. Unfortunately this needs quite lot of experience.
Over the years I’ve seen most the PM methodologies have matured, and processes has been introduced for project management.. New tools have come to the market., but still the challenge of remote communication remains the same.. How do we overcome it ?
Recently I had a chat with one of my project managers. He told me a story about a project he has managed while working in his previous company. It’s a very small sized project developed for one of the European countries. So him being the project manager sitting in the development company in Sri Lanka has communicated with customer via 600 emails. It gave me a fright.. Are we really doing something right here?
Have you heard about “Mad email Syndrome” which is very common in outsourcing operation. These are the symptoms;.
Project Manger from Venders company writes a mail to the customer about his questions regarding some requirement.. A nice email. Customer reads the mail., thinking why these people can’t even guess some simple thing like that …then he writes a reply in Blue color as comments for each question. ( yes we need to clearly separate the answer from the question)
Now that the Vendor's project manager who waited impatiently till he get all the answers to his questions receives the mail and he goes through the blue color comments made by the customer.. after reading that he find its disapointing and the customer has not answered half the things as he expected., most the points are not elaborated., so it creates much more questions for him now. Then what he does.. ? he uses another color., mostly seen is green , write comments in green color again under each blue color comments.. send this to the customer and CC to his whole hierarchy to save his back :-) and show them that he has still not got the answers right.
Customer receives the long email which is flashing in many color comments now.. He get really worked up.. certain symbols can give him a totally a different tone to the email. He write the comments in red color now.. and send it to the vendors PM again..

This doesn’t stop here… Is this situation new to you ? Im sure if you are in to outsourcing business you may have gone through this situation many times. This chain of email communication is a very strong risk trigger of project and relationship failure between outsourcer and outsourcee.. Why such a useful tool such as email can create this much of damage?
1. When communicating through emails , the other party doesn’t see your body language. They read exactly the meaning of word to word which may sound totally different to what you meant.
2. The other party don’t hear your tone of the voice. or your giggling . Recently I saw a customer commenting something like “Remove this field! “ with “!” what is that additional “!” is for ? these may create some unnecessary issues
3. Its very common that both parties think the other party is the idiot. They put less effort to understand each other. This may totally be different if you had a face to face discussion.

So how do you quality manage this remote communication? My advice for project managers are as follows;

1. Do not have email communication over 2 loops., if it goes over always try to use Voice via skype or telephone line. Or even use some tools such as Webex. Which is really good.(video con would be the best but unfortunately most of us do not have that facility )… Hmm How about Cisco TelePresence.???. I love to experience that !! :-)
2. Always read and re read your emails before sending.. do they mean something wrong to the reader.. make sure you communicate very clearly
3. Do not send too many emails. Try to summarize possible information in one email. Have your subject lines very clear.
4. If you need only 1 question mark have one .. But not three.. When you ask “can I have these replies by before end of business today? “ has a major difference between “can I have these replied before end of business today???????????”
5. Be very clear and elaborate on required points.. try to use tables as much as possible
6. Be warned when communication is not going right.. always ask help from your supervisors before it becomes too late.
7. Have the right attitude to respect the other party . if you read the mail in negative mind., you will end up with negative results.
8. Send customer status reports frequently., leave very little room for questions. Reports should be completed.
9. Always have project budgets to meet the customer face to face at least once in your project life. That will make your project communication much easier.
10. Understand that the time customer can spend for you is limited. That’s one reason why he or she outsource the project to you. Respect the fact and always think twice before you raising the question .Because you need to get the question right at the first time .

Ok.. its kinda sad thing.. This time Im very unlucky with Amazon.. I ordered the book., Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series)
by Mike Cohn. A book which I really wanted to have with me after going through many of his blog posts and the book reviews..
But it was never delivered to me. So I made the complain to Amazon.. they sent it again.. Didn’t receive yet.. its over one month now :( ....disappointing … Not a problem with Amazon.. but Im sure its something to do with our internal postal process.. As I checked with one of my colleagues and he said that they dont deliver the books to our doorsteps now . we have to go to a central post office and collect it .. ...:-( whyyyyy ????????????..............But I didnt get a letter like that either... So I dont know......

Do I raise the issue again.. hmmmm..

Dealing with difficult people...

Today I got a very good opportunity to go through one of Margarat Meloni's online lectures about dealing with difficult people.

Im not so bad when it comes to dealing with difficult people..:-) been there done that !

But this lecture of Margarat is absolutely useful not only for project managers .. but for every corporate worker. She explains how someone shoul deal with "difficult Mammals" very professionally.

As project managers we work with different types of people every day.. People with different attitudes, different levels of knowledge, different level of maturity, different nationalities etc.. So working with all the people is not same every day. We find some jerks some times.. But she explains how we shouldn't be another jerk in such situations.

Some times we think people are difficult.. but may be we are difficult too.. But if you want to know how you get away with all these corporate difficult situations as professionals without loosing the focus on our goals and work.. I recommend you to go through the lecture.

Specially in Sri Lanka we dont find such PM soft skills improvement lectures easily.. So this may be an alternative to improve your PM skills... Just check that out...

The Program Management Office: Establishing, Managing And Growing the Value of a PMO

I always love the excitement of ordering books from amazon and waiting impatiently till they arrive at my door steps.. So I experienced it again . This time I bought the book "The Program Management Office: Establishing, Managing And Growing the Value of a PMO " Just glanced through the book and seems its interesting. Now the biggest challenge is to find the time to read it.. ! I will keep posting some of the important factors I learn from it..

Gold Plating.. Dos or Don'ts

I can remember in some of the articles I have read said that Gold plating is something which you should avoid in projects. (This is one of the PMP Exam question too I suppose). .. Whats gold plating ??? No its not painting your accessories in gold color… Its about adding something to the deliveries which is out of the agreed project scope. May be some nice to have or fancy feature you are excited about. .. ..

Why is it so bad?? Coz that addition can create so much of burden and it creates most the project problems at the time of project acceptance.. Believe me I have experienced that. Once when we got to develop a developer guideline., we thought… ah ..Adding a starter kit is really fine to this Then the developers (The customer in this project ) can start the project much more easily..(We PMs love to impress customers : ). Though I knew its called gold plating.. I agreed to have that feature as a value addition.. as it didn’t show much impact to my timelines and budgets. (Smart Idea by my techlead J )..

But proving the theory at last, delivering that addition added more burden to us as it kept on giving some problems with the development environment. But the customer didn’t want to loose it either after seen the thing and highly taken up with the thing..So we had to put some more effort to solve the issues and provide a working starter kit with project deliveries.

But I noticed the following article at http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/148954-2/14_common_project_management_mistakes.html

“Fumi Kondo, managing director of NYC-based consultancy Intellilink Solutions, once observed an exchange between a software developer and a project manager where the developer told the project manager that he could add extra features to an application with no additional effort. The project manager told the developer not to add the extra features because users hadn't asked for them. "My response would have been,'Go to the users and see if those features are useful,'" says Kondo. "I see nothing wrong with over-delivering if it doesn't impact the budget or the schedule."

Don’t you think PM is right in this case.. He or she must have seen some risk of adding this additional work out of the scope.. One of my other PM friend explained an incident how a simple “Export to Excel” feature added to his reporting module ( which customer has not asked in the scope ., but they have given the feature as they thought its useful) made so much of trouble to him at the time of project acceptance..

In general Customers are pleased when you do your delivery right.. Adding those extra thingies here and there can really kill the success of your project records.. but you may never know those will have a long time pay back.. However I see the truth of avoiding such gold plating…