The polarity of time and progress reporting

A common question I get asked when clients are implementing a PM methodology or framework is “What level should our staff use to report time and progress against tasks?”.

The simplest answer (as any good consultant would say) is “it depends”.

For time reporting, consider the following two conditions:

1. How often are staff entering time?  If they are doing it on a daily basis (What planet are they from?) then they may actually remember what they did at day’s end to be able to report time against one task vs. another.

2. How much multitasking are staff doing?  The more activities a person has to do in a day, the more likely they will forget what they’ve done as well as how much time they spent doing it.  For staff that are focused on a very few activities in any given day, task-level time reporting is feasible.

If either or both of these conditions are not met, then you are better off from both a compliance and data quality perspective to have time tracked at a higher level of detail – possibly by phase, work package or even at the overall project level.  Now the purists amongst you will argue that this will prevent the use of these actuals for refining estimation practices and you are quite correct, but my rebuttal (and no, I DON’T have pointy ears!) is that estimate refinement based on perceived accuracy is illogical.

Let’s now consider progress reporting.  The “right” way to do progress reporting on a task is to get an understanding of how much effort remains – this helps to eliminate the games that are played with reporting percent complete.  Even if you are using the percent complete reporting method, the same question arises – at what level should staff report these percentages?

My recommendation is to always report progress at the lowest level of detail possible.  A couple of reasons:

1. You will get better accuracy by having someone report remaining effort or percentage complete on an “atomic” task as opposed to a large module or work package.

2. While you might get occasional inaccuracies in progress reporting for some tasks, when more tasks are taken into account for overall progress calculations on projects, individual task progress inaccuracies cause less of a quality impact than when a progress calculation is done using the progress data for a small set of high-level tasks.

This recommendation assumes that you have a work breakdown structure that is detailed to that “atomic” level…

Therefore have staff track time at the highest level management reporting will permit (unless my earlier conditions are met) and have them track progress at the lowest level possible.

Organization change – no pain, no gain!

Many of the articles I’ve written and presentations I’ve given have focused on reducing the impacts of organization, process or technology changes on staff.  Having said that, an issue I perceive with many of the clients I’ve worked with is the assumption that such changes come at no cost or pain to affected staff.

I would be hard pressed to think about any strategic change initiative that I’ve been involved with or have witnessed that did not leave some carnage in its wake – leadership’s focus should be on minimizing or proactively controlling damage, but not on attempting to create a state of no churn.  Otherwise, you are not implementing change, you are trying to maintain the status quo or to satisfy the totality of a democracy.

This illusion that change comes at no cost is dangerous -  Information Week had a good article on the leadership team at Rockwell Automation that is realistic – the line that stuck with me from this article is from their CIO: “Our business processes and practices will change significantly, and we will accept some disruption to achieve the ultimate benefits.”

This assertion acknowledges two key principles:

1. Change hurts – someone, somewhere in the organization is not going to be happy or will struggle with the change, no matter how logical, beneficial or commonsensical it may be.

2. The net benefits realized from a change are rarely achieved right away, and will likely take longer depending on the magnitude of the change.

Now this might seem completely obvious to all of you, but think of how many projects you’ve worked on where a basic expectation was that there would be no disruption to operations stemming from the deployment of the project’s deliverables.

Wowing jaded customers… what IT can learn from hotels

I just spent a very pleasant four evenings at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge, MA.  As someone that travels for business at least a couple of times each month, I’ve had the occasion to stay with most major hotel chains and a myriad of independents.  After three years of being a road warrior, it is a challenge to find something unique in a 3 or 4 star hotel that will “wow” me – I’m pretty much as jaded as they come!

As such, I was very pleasantly surprised by some of the amenities at the Hotel Marlowe – sure, Boston has a number of great hotels so they have to step up their game to remain competitive, but kudos to the Kimpton chain for thinking outside the box.

Here are a few examples:

1. The hotel is very pet friendly – this started off at the front door where there were a variety of doggy treats and continued through all the common areas.

2. The chain has a “raid the mini-bar” concept for participants in their InTouch loyalty program – you get two items from the mini-bar over your stay for free (up to a maximum value of $10).

3. They’ve spent the money on some good quality fitness equipment – most of their cardio machines have personal TVs.

4. Without fail, every hotel employee smiled, greeted me and was pleasant to deal with.

5. The decor of the common areas and rooms is very unique – my entire room was done in a leopard-print motif (it sounds tackier than it was).  The room colors were very warm and inviting – certainly not the typical cookie-cutter approach used by some of the larger chains.

Taken individually, none of these are memorable, but as a package they are – especially from a mid-sized hotel chain.

It got me thinking – why do IT departments not take a page from this hotel.  Just think what a difference it would make if every single IT resource treated their internal customers with the same pleasant manner that I received or tried to add a bit of originality or flair to the service they delivered?  Think about the last time one of your clients received assistance from one of your staff – do you feel that they would give as glowing a review of the service they got?