Tailoring project management for a home move (part 2)

In my last article, I had written about our current personal project of moving from our current home to a new house in a different city. After it was published, I received some feedback (thanks Luis!) that it would be helpful to provide more context about the project itself.

This initiative was the follow up to an initial project which covered the purchase of the new property and the sale of our existing home. As such, a number of constraints were set before this project got underway, including the moving day milestone, the ceiling budget on home renovations, and available floor space to accommodate our furniture and any renovations we were planning.

The scope of the current project includes the following high-level workstreams:

• De-cluttering, packing & unpacking – this included donating, discarding & giving away stuff that we didn’t need in our new home, procuring packing materials, packing & labelling activities and the corresponding unpacking and arranging of home contents as well as the disposal of the used packing materials
• “The move” – this included selecting the moving company, negotiating the contract with them, the move itself, and closing the contract
• Account transition – this included cancelling, updating or setting up accounts for utilities, subscriptions and other services
• Financial and Legal – this included selecting the law firm to represent us, providing them with all required documents, securing our bridge loan from the bank and completing the closing process for both properties
• Renos and upgrades – this work stream includes identifying all desired renovations and upgrades, soliciting bids for the work, negotiating and signing contracts, procuring materials, monitoring the execution against those contracts and closing the contracts

A house move is a good example of a project which could never end as renos and upgrades are an ongoing interest. For simplicity we decided to set an arbitrary project completion deadline of a month and a half after the moving date with all subsequent renos and upgrades being handled as operations or follow-on mini projects. This deadline provides sufficient sense of urgency to get the high priority renos and upgrades completed in a timely manner.

The execution phase of the project has been split into four sequential stages:

• Pre-move planning and preparations
• Moving day
• The first two weeks after moving day including high priority renos and upgrades
• The subsequent month covering the lower priority renos and upgrades

As you’d expect, resource management varies based on the resources and work packages involved. For the work being done by my family, planning and tracking have been informal with the primary objective being to ensure that the “right” person is responsible and accountable for each work item. As our family is a long standing team, the Develop Team process is less relevant than the Manage Team one and significant effort has been spent to ensure that team members are engaged, motivated and focused! For the work being done by contractors or for materials and equipment, estimating resource requirements and acquiring resources has been done more formally.

Quality management has focused more on quality control than on quality assurance. The duration of the work being performed by each contractor is short enough that by providing clear requirements upfront, ensuring that there is a common understanding of those requirements including acceptance criteria, and then using those acceptance criteria as the basis for the Validate Scope process is sufficient. For the work done by our family, checklists and peer reviews are the standard tools we’ve been using to control quality.

While a project communications plan was not produced, with major stakeholders such as the bank, our lawyer, the moving company and key service providers, written, formal communications have been used. There have been frequent instances of the basic communication model failing which has necessitated follow up with recipients to request acknowledgement or feedback. Needless to say, an issue log has been a valuable artifact at managing such concerns! Within our family and with secondary stakeholders, a combination of verbal and written informal communications have been effective.

In the final article in this trilogy I will cover the remaining three PMBOK knowledge areas. By then, we will have moved to our new home, so I will also be able to assess the effectiveness of our planning!

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)

What’s the link between emotional intelligence and psychological safety?

Following a presentation I gave this week on how project managers can cultivate psychological safety within their teams, an attendee asked me to what the relationship is between psychological safety and emotional intelligence (EI). After answering her I felt it was worth writing about it.

EI is normally considered to be a personal trait although it is possible to claim that one group of people has a higher degree of EI than another. Psychological safety is usually defined in the context of a team as it wouldn’t make sense to assess the level of psychological safety of an individual unless they are suffering from multiple split personalities! It would be difficult to assess psychological safety for an overall organization as companies are normally composed of multiple overlapping teams. However, it is possible to assess if the executive team is committed to building a team culture of high psychological safety within the divisions which they lead.

One model for EI uses the following four attributes: self-management, self-awareness, social awareness & relationship management.

How do these traits help a team to become psychologically safe?

Team members who are effective at self-managing and are self-aware will be better equipped to handle actions, comments or behaviors from their team members which they take exception to. They know what their own strengths are but they also understand their weaknesses which means that they are more likely to say when they don’t know something, are making an assumption or need assistance from someone else on the team. They have self-confidence which means they are comfortable with experimenting and not feeling that a failed experiment reflects poorly on their abilities.

Social awareness and relationship management relate to how much empathy we demonstrate towards others and to our ability to work well in a team as both a contributor and a leader. Having higher levels of these characteristics means that individuals will be better at picking up on the discomfort of their peers and can help those who are silent to find a voice. It also means that they will be more effective at resolving conflicts which could mean interceding on behalf of a team member if they are being persecuted.

So it seems like a reasonable assumption that on those teams where the members exhibit higher levels of emotional intelligence they are likely to become psychologically safe quicker than others.

But is there an inverse relationship as well?

It is difficult to effectively improve one’s emotional intelligence without receiving coaching and support from those whose feedback we trust. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel safer providing feedback with radical candor to their peers. As such, I’d assert that psychological safety can act as an accelerator for increasing the overall emotional intelligence of the members of a team.

A rising tide lifts all boats!

 

 

 

 

What is your project management familiar?

Familiar – Noun, a supernatural spirit or demon, often in the form of an animal, supposed to serve and aid a witch or other individual.

Project managers frequently wish that they had a trusted right-hand person who could help them out of challenging situations but why not broaden our imagination to think about the benefits of our multi-legged friends? Dear reader, before you start worrying that I have lost my marbles, fear not, this is merely a Gedanken experiment to help you gain a deeper understanding of yourself.

Let’s consider a few of the ones which came to my mind.

A dog

A canine will sacrifice itself if you are about to be thrown under the bus by an untrustworthy stakeholder and will cheer you up after you’ve experienced a rough work day. But you must also remember that dogs don’t lead long lives so this might not be the best familiar if you are working on a long project.

An elephant

“An elephant never forgets” goes the cliche, so just imagine the benefits you’ll gain by not having to document much of the information generated by your projects. Elephants are also able to carry a lot of weight which means that they could help you better bear the burden of a complex project. Unfortunately, they also generate a lot of waste so you might find yourself spending too much time cleaning up after your familiar.

A cobra

The swaying motion and spectacle markings on the hood of an alert cobra can be hypnotic which might be just what is needed to help you sway the attitude of your stakeholders. Cobras can’t be tamed so you might have to constantly protect yourself from being bitten.

A fly

A fly has compound eyes which enable it to see the world in a completely different manner than we can. This could be extremely helpful when trying to understand a decision or issue from multiple perspectives. Just imagine the benefits of having your very own “fly on the wall” – think of all those hidden conversations which you will now be able to eavesdrop on! Unfortunately, one fly looks very much like another to an untrained eye so you could end up accidentally swatting your familiar.

A pig

Pigs are among the animal kingdom’s smartest animals and have a phenomenal sense of smell. A pig could help you sniff out untruths faster than a lie detector could and when the going gets tough, your familiar might save your bacon.

A bear

There’s no doubt that a bear could be a formidable ally to have your back in challenging meetings but do you really want a familiar which will sleep for almost a half year at a stretch?

So if you were granted the wish of having an animal familiar what would it be?

“Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to” – Mark Twain