LEARN Moments: Loosing a team member…

Here at thelearnpm.com we can tell you based on experience it is quite unsettling when you lose a team member. In fact, as a project manager, you have a pretty good shot at losing a team member from time to time. In fact, you are going to come to the end of a project and your whole team is going to disband and all the working together you have done, gone. But just like anything else because you want to be a good project manager you can prepare for this. Can you prepare 100%, no, but you can prepare and it can make things easier. Let’s take a look at a few common scenarios where you lose a team member and work through them together….

First…you lose a team member to another project.

We have to admit here at thelearnpm.com losing a team member to another project is, well, we think an act of defection/betrayal/the ultimate Benedict Arnold move. Maybe that is overstating it a bit, but that is what it feels like sometimes. You invest time and energy into your team members and then one of them leaves. Sometimes you don’t really have a choice because someone has made the decision to move them on. No matter the circumstance there are a couple things to focus on; transition and leaving a good impression. Let us take the latter first, leaving a good impression. Assuming (which we get might be a bad idea) that you have a good strong productive team member that has been moved on, you want to make sure that you do everything you can to make sure they remember your project fondly. One day you may have the opportunity to work with this person again and the first thing they will think about is the last thing they thought about when they left your project. Make sure that last thing they think about first is a good thing. How you make that happen may come in many different ways, but make it happen! Keep it within reason of course, but even something as simple as gathering the whole team together and thanking that person in front of everyone can go a long way. The key is that it needs to be sincere.

Ok now that painful, non-glamorous, no one wants to do this part… transition. First and foremost you have to do it, period. Second, you need to give it very focused time and attention and do the best job that you can. A transition is something that you will never do 100% until we find a way to completely download someone’s brain into someone or something. You will always have those “oh man what about” or “darn it he/she didn’t write that down”. It is really amazing to see but when you ask someone to create a transition document it is like all the energy and life gets immediately sucked out of someone into a vortex. If you find that motivating someone to create a transition document is hard, then you are not alone. Many times when someone is moving to a new project they are excited and their brain is ready to make a change of focus. So again it is not easy but just stay at it. Be diligent about getting as much information as you can….but remember to make sure they have a fond memory of leaving that project. As a side note, one way to make this easier to is to document along the way. Encourage documentation along the way before someone even potentially gets moved on to another project.

If I may a quote from the great linguist Winne the Pooh – “I used to believe in forever; But forever’s too good to be true.”

Second….you lose a team member to another job/company.

Ok, so now Benedict Arnold (again overstating, but it makes a good search tag) is moving to another company. Once again you don’t really have any control over this. The first thing you need to remember is that as professionals we all need to take control of our own career and sometimes in order to do that we feel like we need to make a move. Second, don’t take it personally, there may be all sorts of things outside of your control that you can’t change and if you are doing your best as a project manager, well that is all anyone can ask for. Third, you have a really unique opportunity at this point and you should do your best to take advantage of it.

So we talked earlier about the “first thing they will think about is the last thing they thought about” well that applies in a different way in this situation. In this situation they are not just leaving your project they are leaving the company, and you want to make sure you stand out as a bright spot for them at that company. Chances are they are leaving on good terms and have nothing but good things to say about your company, but you have a great opportunity to expand you professional network through this person. Do your best to make sure they remember you as a great person to work with. One of the great things about being a project manager is that you always have opportunities to grow your professional network. There is an upcoming LEARN Moments post about this but for now just remember that even though someone on your team is leaving you to have an opportunity to build your professional network, make sure you take it.

One other thing….yep transition. We talked about it earlier and it all applies. Tough sledding ahead here, even more so because the excitement and “grass is greener” voice is calling and calling loudly. Plus once this person is gone they are gone. Don’t hold out hope that you can call a person for a quick question in the future, it rarely happens. The person probably would like to help, but it is just not practical so don’t hold out hope for that.

Another quote from the great linguist Winne the Pooh – “If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together…there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart…I’ll always be with you.”

Third….you loose your entire team because the project is over.

What? You mean a project is actually going to finish/be over? Congratulation on that first and foremost, seems like projects can go on forever! When a project comes to a close it is a natural thing that the team would have to break up. You do have those moments where you and your team move on to the next phase of a project…hence the never ending project….but many times when a project is truly over it is time to say goodbye. (Cue Boyz II Men – “It’s so Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” or “End of the Road” pick your sad song). We mentioned this before, but make sure you have good transition documentation in place. There is little to zero chance that you won’t need it. A question will always come up and it is very difficult to get the team back together to get an answer to a question. Maybe just maybe in this particular instance, it might be easier to get transition documentation in place. Don’t be surprised if it isn’t. However, since everyone on the team has seen the project through from beginning to end hopefully your entire team can help out and it doesn’t just fall on one person or a subset of people.

Wrapping up a project with the same team members from the beginning of the project to the end is a pretty cool deal, and that should be celebrated. This particular type of situation offers you as the project manager a great opportunity to make a positive deposit in the memory banks of your team. Remember earlier we talked about ” the first thing they will think about is the last thing they thought about”, that still holds true here. Make sure that you take the time to acknowledge your team and their contributions especially since they have been together/with you the entire time. No matter if this project was one week or one year, each person on your team invested their time and themselves in your project and in may ways you, and that should be acknowledged and they should be celebrated. The other piece of advice I would give you, make it genuine. Doing something as simple as writing a note to each member of your team (you actually writing it) that talks about a specific contribution he/she made can go a really long way. If you have some budget left or can get approval for it, take everyone to lunch and use that time to talk about the project and particularly the success that each team member had. Make sure you take the time to laugh with them, and let them laugh at you as well…be willing to take some good natured ribbing.

Finally in this instance remember that you as a professional have a really great experience her by which to grow your professional network. In fact, everyone on your team should see this as an opportunity to grow their professional network. If you have a LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. profile make it a point to connect with your team. You may work together again for another 20 years, but if for some reason you don’t you want to make sure to stay connected with those people that you have this good experience with. Let me say one thing too about the “experience” you had with this team of people. The project doesn’t have to be a resounding success for the experience to be a good one. Here at the thelearnpm.com we have been on projects that were not so fun or even so successful, yet the team experience was still good.

For now, I will leave you with a final quote from the great linguist…Winne the Pooh – “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Thanks for taking the time to read, see you soon!

Citation Credit: All Winnie the Pooh quotes from http://www.winniethepoohquotes.org/

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LEARN Moments!

We here at thelearnpm.com have an exciting new thing to announce, LEARN Moments! (Yes, yes we will do a hashtag too #LEARNMoments) Just like us as a project manager you will have some moments or experiences that you will always remember along the way. So not only are we continuing unpacking the LEARN process so that you can LEARN project management one letter at a time, we are sharing some of our specific moments or experiences along the way. Our plan is to weave them in and out so that you can chew on them a bit, or as some of our friends say, noodle them.

One time, one of us here at thelearnpm.com was speaking with a seasoned professional in the business world. This professional asked a very profound question; “What do you think the difference is between me and you?” Wanting to give the right answer the reply came, “you are a highly educated and successful professional that has accomplished all sorts of great things.” The gentleman replied, “no wrong answer, the only difference between you and me, I have a larger mental filing cabinet than you”. He continued, “you see I am no smarter than you I have just faced the same problem 7-8 different ways, where you may have only faced the same problem 1-2 different ways, or not even at all”. His advice was “just focus on building your mental filing cabinet and you will be just fine”.

We hope LEARN Moments are things you can use to build your mental filing cabinet too.

Thanks for taking the time to read, see you soon!

The LEARN PM Process: “L” is for Listen!

Welcome back, we are glad you are hear!

Now the fun stuff begins, now we get into the LEARN PM process here at thelearnpm.com. Don’t worry this process is straight forward and we don’t require you to take notes because you can come back and visit again anytime.

So lets get started…the letter “L” stands for Listen.

Listen…if you are the type of person that likes to get up and do the hardest thing in your day right out then this letter is for you. If your not that kind of person and you like to ease into your day, just hear us out, we think you will be ok. Listening is hard to do! Have you ever had one of those times when you were trying to explain something and the other person just didn’t seem to get it. We have and we know how frustrating that can be. Better yet think back to the last project you managed, as the project manager how many times did you have to repeat that same deadline or requirement to one of your team members or to one of your stakeholders? Yep that is frustrating too…and that is exactly why this first letter in the LEARN PM process is so important.

As a project manger there are many things that you need to be good at; project schedules, project budgets, Visio diagrams, acronyms, swiping your credit card for late night pizza when you are in a time crunch with your team…but the one thing you have to be really really really good at is listening. Think about it, as a project manager it really is about the one thing that you should constantly be doing from the moment you walk in the office door, listen. In fact lets reflect for a moment on the importance of listening, for example;

…The Doobie Brothers implored us to “Listen to the Music”

…Stephen Covey made it very clear to us in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, specifically in Habit #5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood that we spend a lot of time reading, writing, talking, wishing that people would understand us. However we don’t really focus that much on listening.

…In the classic movie “Goodfellas” Jimmy Conway provides a very clear example of what it is like to listen saying, “Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut”.

All of these examples (creative examples) reinforce the need to listen.

But lets talk more about the need to listen in the context of a project manager. As a project manager on any given project you are the central hub for the project. You must from the get go be the man/woman in the middle who is always in the know. You stay in the know by listening a lot and then listening even more. Great you say, that is incredibly simple…what is next…not so fast there Speed Racer listening is not something you just do with your ears, hang with us for a bit longer and we will tell you what we mean.

Listen with your feet

As a project manager you have to put yourself in proximity of something that is worth hearing. Trust us you can hear all sorts of stuff all day, but putting yourself in proximity of something worth hearing is the ticket. We are not advocating going into James Bond mode (Sean Connery was the best if you are wondering) and spying on people or trying to get in on conversations that are not for you. Nope you have plenty of stuff to hear within the context of your project team and your project stakeholders. Get up from your cubical kingdom and take a walk over to the desk of your software developer or go find your mechanical engineer and just listen to what they have going on at that moment or given day. It is not about going in for an interrogation, it is about being involved and understanding what is going on with your team. Is your project sponsor down the hall from you, or maybe you have a whole team of project stakeholders down the hall to the right, through the double doors and across the courtyard. Get up and go see them and listen to what they have to say.

Hear at thelearnpm.com we heard about a guy one time that started a new job and he got up and walked around so much that he lost nine pounds in the first couple months at his new job! Not a bad deal. So now you are up and walking around and listening for things. You are listening for bits of information that will help you run your project more smoothly, you are listening for opportunities to help your team be more successful, and you are even listening for opportunities for new opportunities that you or your company can be involved in. Most importantly you are listening and taking in data and processing it against more data and refining your decision making process and making your project, your team, and yourself the best you can be. By they way since you are up and listening take the time to drop a few words of encouragement to your team along the way, go out of your way to find something to compliment them on, genuinely, and let them know that you appreciate their efforts on the team. It will go a long way.

Listen with your eyes

We most likely had a parental figure tell us this at some point in our lives but hear at the LEARN PM we believe that not only is listening important, but you have to listen with your eyes. Right off the bat that sounds funky and weird and like we don’t understand the basic use of some of our senses, but let us explain. We would submit to you that one of the best and equally the worst things that ever happened to project management is the smart phone! The smart phone gets so much eye time that it makes others jealous that their eye time has been taken by the smart phone. Project managers have this great tool to respond to emails quickly, pull up a copy of their project plan from “the cloud” (sounds so hip) and even be extra responsive to their customer or project stakeholder when they call. Admit it even you reading this enjoy getting a phone call in a meeting saying “excuse me I need to step out for an important call”….big time right there.

But here is the problem, the smart phone has made it so easy to be so available and so responsive that we start trying to split eye time with other things. When you are in a meeting pounding out emails on your phone, you are not listening because you are looking at your phone. Most of the time wherever you look that is what you listen to. We think we are so talented and that we can look at our phone and still listen, but nope doesn’t every really work out that way. The person speaking to you or your project team while you are looking at your phone usually sounds like the classroom teacher from Charlie Brown. You as the project manager are reduced to things such as; “right”, “ok sounds good”, “yep I will check on that”….and then because you know you really haven’t been listening but want to sound on top of things you say “so can you please document your questions and send me an email”….(que facepalm). You might as well have just told everyone you weren’t listening, they already knew you weren’t anyway. If someone is speaking look at them, if someone is making a presentation look at it, otherwise you will just have to ask them to repeat what they said. Now we gave you an example of a smart phone, but this applies to just about anything that might cause you to try to split your focus, therefore not really listening. It could be the phone, another person, newspaper, Internet, Twitter, Facebook, etc…you name it there are so many things competing for the attention of a project manager that if you don’t listen with your eyes your effectiveness can suffer.

Listen with your hands

Ok another crazy statement, we get it, but this one is pretty good so hang with us. Lets assume for a moment that you have walked around and listened with your feet. Then you sat in a meeting and you put your smart phone down and you listened with your eyes. Again we are not crazy and we know what we are talking about (we hope), so why not listen with your hands. Take some notes! Write something down! There is only one Albert Einstein and unfortunately there is a really good chance that you are not either him or the second coming of him. So what better way to listen then to write down what you hear. There are those of us here at thelearnpm.com that are not the best at listening with our hands. In fact we are really feeling quite convicted at this point about what we are saying because we know that it is a point of improvement for us. Here is the problem when you don’t listen with your hands; you might miss something or even if you do catch everything the next time you try to listen you won’t be as effective because you are still trying to hold onto what you heard last time and keep it top of mind. However there is another aspect of listening with your hands, go and do what you just heard. If you were really listening when you were in a meeting with your team and they express something they need you to do, then go do it. Here is the problem with listening, you can’t see it. You can see the results of listening or not listening, but you can’t see the act of listening. So if a team member tells you “I really need your help to go and clarify some questions that I have with our project stakeholder and you do it, then you team member things “he/she really listened to me” but if you don’t do it most likely they think “he/she didn’t listen to me”.

We know, we are making it way to simple because you as a project manager you have so much to do and we just don’t understand all the pressures on your time….um yeah we do, we have been there and we can tell you from experience that line of thinking doesn’t help your mission to Listen. Remember when you listen with your hands you are showing your project team that you are listening to them, you are showing your project sponsor that you are listening to them….most importantly you are laying the foundation for success on your project. Success begins with listening. Many talented project managers can do many things very well, but if they can’t listen it will be very difficult…and plain near impossible…to be the best that they can be.

So there you go, L is for Listen…we agree it is easier said than done, but listening is well worth the effort. See you next time! Thanks for stopping by.

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The LEARN Process…an introduction.

Listen Up!

Whether you are a seasoned professional or a newbie, thank you for coming by and visiting The LEARN PM @ thelearnpm.com. Our goal here is different than the rest of the sites telling you how to learn project management. We are not out to tell you that our way is the only way. We won’t claim all the knowledge there ever was and ever will be regarding project management either. What we want is for you to really learn project management. We want you to learn it the right way, and we want you to be the best project manager you can be. It takes years to learn project management, and we don’t think you ever master it. Here is why, because project management involves human beings. As you may know by now, no human being is the same therefore you can’t apply the same project management process to every human being. Pretty simple. That fact right there….humans are not the same….is what we believe here at The LEARN PM is the biggest hurdle that most people have to get over when they are either trying to learn project management or become a better project manager. Hence this is why we came up with our process, the LEARN process, which allows you to learn project management one letter at a time.

However first lets get a couple things out of the way…

First, don’t expect an academic discussion of project management on this site, that is not our goal. If you are looking for the academics then here are a couple sites that should be your go to spots;

Project Management Institute | www.pmi.org | – At PMI you will find one of the most widely accepted set of academic project management practices in the world. PMI offers and administers a certification program, that we highly recommend.
International Project Management Association – | www.ipma.world | – IPMA claims to the be the worlds first project management association and is more of a globally focused organization. IPMA also offers and administers are certification program, we recommend you familiarize yourself with it as well.

There are going to be countless other websites to visit and read regarding project management. In fact many other certification programs will all have project management as a component….you see project management is in everything we do just about. For our purposes here, again, we are not going to be referencing academic certifying bodies or other certification programs. Our purpose is to take a higher level approach and give you a process that is flexible and can be made into what you need it to be each time you find yourself in need of some project management.

Second, in order to learn project management you must commit to the craft. Project management is not just a set of rules that you must follow, it truly is a craft and it takes art and skill at times. You see sometimes you find yourself in a hairy project management situation and that is when have to kick into a different gear. Project management takes finesse at times and if you are truly going to learn project management you have to be willing to learn some finesse too.

That is why we say you must commit to the craft. Committing to the craft means that you want to learn the ins and outs of project management, not just the ins and outs of a template, project schedule, issue log, risk assessment, RACI matix, or communication plan, but as we said earlier the ins and outs of the people you are working with. That is what committing to the craft if all out.

We here at The LEARN PM have seen some excellent project schedules, in fact we have seen a few that have made us want to cry tears of joy, but that doesn’t mean you will be successful as a project manager. We have seen project risk analysis that has uncovered the depths of risk in a project that no one even knew ever existed, but that also doesn’t mean you will be successful as a project manager.

You see when you commit to the craft you learn to build a bridge between the information you have and the people you have around you. Once you understand how to build that bridge (this is the finesse part), then you are on your way to becoming a successful project manager.

Finally, the LEARN process, well it is a bit unconventional because it can be done in order or out of order. You might use the whole process one time, and pieces of the process another time. That is probably going to bother some folks, but we think again it reiterates what it takes to be a great project manager and to learn project management, flexibility.

In the 1950’s a guy named, Art Clokey, created a character named Gumby. Art used clay to animate his creation and an American franchise was born. Gumby as you can imagine was always flexible and was able flex his way through all sorts of situations and came out whole on the other side every time. So think of Gumby when you think about the LEARN process, it should be flexible for what you need it for, but you also should come out whole on the other side of your project too when you follow all or pieces of the LEARN process.

Ok…so our next blog post will go into the overview of the LEARN process. See you soon!

Just a few citation notes….

PMI. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2016, from http://www.pmi.org/
Project Management Certification,Standards,Competence Development,IPMA. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2016, from http://www.ipma.world/
Gumby – Premavision and Clokey Productions. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2016, from http://www.premavision.com/

Hello PM World!

Welcome to The LEARN PM, where you can learn project management one letter at a time. Project Management can be seen as a very complicated topic, but we don’t think it has to be. Take some time to read about our process and we think you will agree that learning to become a great project manager is not hard at all.