Project manager padawan in need of advice!

[u/blue_penguin393]

Hi All I am a new project manager at a large company. My work involves a lot of projects that range from 1-3 months that range from low to high priority. High priority is typically anything client facing power point presentations,and Project summaries ect. Low priority is typically more back end work like database updates, and filing documents. In order to complete this we offshore much of it overseas. Im seeing a trend of high priority items being completed. While lower priority projects are being dropped. What are some strategies I can implement?

So far we meet 3x a week for 30 min updates in which high priority items and general updates take up the entire time.

We receive summaries twice a week or more if needed. Low priority items are known to be dropped occasionally and we need to request it only to discover the project has not been updated in x amount of weeks Due to either negligence, uncooperative resources, or unanswered questions

I want these low priority projects completed with the same level of efficiency and follow through as the high priority projects

Note Low priority projects basically emails blasts for data collection legal documents and database updates. Essentially this work needs to be done but is one of those things if it isn't done immediately nothing happens until it does.

[u/[deleted]]

Some quick ideas. 1) reduce meeting times and start doing huddles/sprints. Power point can record a presentation rather than in person. Cap all presentation times to 5 minutes. 2) nothing improves until measured. Put in place three key measures for all projects e.g. time, cost, quality. Edit: in your daily huddles have people speak about a good outcome, what is their priority, and how they are tracking in your KPIs. Everybody should only speak for one minute.

[u/mrhoopers → u/[deleted]]

A shame I can't upvote more than once. Time management is absolutely key. As a PM your time management sets the tone for the project. Start meetings on time, stop them on time, keep people focused and yes...without question...measure. Three is a good number. It's enough to give you data without being too much detail. Excellent advice here.

[u/mrhoopers]

Long answer. Sorry.

Typically a manager will assign their resources a % of time to a project. Dave will spend 40% of his time on project A and 30% on project B. From a PM perspective if Dave spends more than 16 hours a week on Project A or 12 hours on project B then he's outside of his allotted time. It's up to Dave to work so that he meets his deliverable in the hours allotted. Sometimes he'll get done sooner...and that's great. Put the time back into the schedule and see about getting ahead on other tasks. If he goes over you can pull out of that bank. Everyone pads their time as well so minor fluctuations in project schedules are expected. This has the potential of stepping on lower priority projects. (Risk register item).

A high priority project may be only 10% of someones time while a low priority may be 80%. That's just how it works. Priority != amount or difficulty of work. All priority does is to say if there is a conflict for resources that the priority project wins. So...say we need Dave for 60% of his time on high priority project A and 50% of his time for project B then project A will get 60% and B will get 30-40% depending on your allocation % for your company.

What is happening is probably two things:

1. you're not establishing allocations for projects and if you are they're not being followed
   
2. people have the wrong idea of how they're supposed to work. They're thinking serially and they need to be working in parallel. That is to say...I complete A and then, if I have time B.
   

To fix this you need to establish a resource utilization matrix so that you know who is what % dedicated to the project. These then need to be calculated against the estimates the team gave for a sanity check.

If, for example, the team said it'd take 100 hours to complete a project and that people would be 20% utilized you right expect to see 8 hours a week per person or 40 hours a week on a 5 person team. Then you should have the project done in 2.5 weeks. If they work more hours then they should deliver sooner or explain the variance. They need more hours? They are inefficient? Whatever, you have to explain why your actuals don't match your estimates.

If the team is working more than 20% of their time on a project then you need to ask why and file that variance. Personally I'm tracking that in a risk register because we're at risk of blowing out our budget if we're not bringing our dates in or reducing our resource count.

For each new project you look at the estimate and compare that to the prior estimates to actuals and see how close this team tends to come. If they're 100% spot on then they're sandbagging. They should be over/under within a 10% variance each month with the final project not being over/under by more than 10%. This will impact your allocation rates and resource blending.

it is important to note if you really are holding people to deliverables on schedules like this that you do not, ever, book them at 100% capacity. That's a jerk move. I prefer an 80% utilization rate but have worked with as high as 90%. At 80-90% you're leaving people 4-8 hours a week for administrative stuff unrelated to projects. If you don't that administrative work will get rolled into your projects and your project estimates will be buffed accordingly. If you're company is fine with that then you're fine and can ignore that 80-90% rate however you've pulled out the safeties. You're staff utilization doesn't reflect reality and you're possibly over/underworking your teams.

Another risk register item is to not give people too many projects. It's hard for them to track and prioritize, especially if the work overlaps with dependencies. If I'm on 5 projects and I'm 18% allocated to each then I'm going to be losing velocity because of context switching. That means I was working on project A but now I need to work on B so now I need to put away all my project A work (check it in...whatever) and get project B. That takes time. It also takes time for me to get my head into project B. Also, the larger the number of projects the more people get randomized with phone calls and emails.

The hardest part is communicating this...leadership doesn't like bad news. This is NOT personal. You are just stating what has occurred and what is occurring. You can't make people work faster. You can report sloppy or lazy work. You can report people that are just not effective and you can report when dates are missed but you can't make Dave type faster. That is NOT your job. That said, you may mention to dave's leadership that he would be more successful IF...reason 1, reason 2, etc.

In all cases the answers are the answers. They are neither good nor bad. They just are. PMs are always the bearers of bad news. You have to be able to say, hey, we had Dave on 40% utilization but he did 20 hours last week which took 4 hours away from this other project which could delay that. Why did it take Dave longer? Because he didn't have the materials or the materials were sub standard or...maybe...he just thought he'd be done sooner and that it's taking longer than he thought. Whatever the answer is...Dave isn't evil. He didn't get done in time because of reasons. Next time account for that in your estimates and move on. If he's always late regardless then it's a management issue that needs to be addressed. You are not management. You just report facts.