The Importance of Mentoring

August 28, 2009 — Bruce McGraw

Do you Mentor anyone?  Let me say upfront that I believe in mentoring. I think it benefits individuals, organizations, and the mentors themselves. Effective mentoring takes time and planning, but it makes a measureable difference. So, I want to share my thoughts and experiences to persuade you that the effort mentoring requires is worth it.

What is mentoring?
Mentoring is a knowledge sharing relationship between an experienced professional and some one more junior in the organization. A mentoring relationship may be formal—defined as mentor/mentee— with official meetings and planned activities or informal. In the past, informal mentoring relationships were the norm.

In the olden days, senior managers or technologists identified individuals with potential to move up (we called this succession planning). These individuals were taken under the wing of a more senior person who spent extra time with them, offered insights and advice, and shepherded the mentee into work experiences that helped extend and polish their skills.

Today, there are classes and books on “How to be a Mentor”. Amazon has almost 50,000 returns for the search term “mentoring”. Even the government has information on the subject like the State of New York’s PM Mentor program.  Although these resources are likely have to many valuable bits of advice, I do not think a Ph.D. in mentoring is an essential starting point. Rather, if you have been mentored, ask yourself what was useful, what did you learn, what else do you wish had been part of the process. If you did not have the benefit of a mentor, what tips, tricks, and processes do you wish someone had shared with you before you picked them up in the school of hard knocks?

Benefits of mentoring
To the organization–succession planning is just one benefit. The mentor shares with the mentee how to do a job well within the confines and constructs of the organization. Those observed, practiced, and honed skills developed under the tutelage of the mentor make a mentee immediately more useful to that organization.

Mentees must commit time and effort beyond the average employee to benefit from the mentoring relationship. The experience gained and the personal relationship with the mentor creates a deeper bond with the organization that promotes employee retention and satisfaction.

Another benefit is that the mentee can become an effective mentor later in their careers.

To the mentee–Brian Price at Project Management Mentoring offers this observation, “When I was cutting my teeth as a new project manager, I was constantly making things up and trying to do what I thought I needed to do…I would have loved to have a project management mentor to help me do the right things at the right time.”

  • Mentors can systematically enhance classroom knowledge and academic guidelines.
  • Mentors offer their mentees a wise ear that can help unravel problems and find solutions.
  • Mentors help mentees become aware of self defeating behaviors that keep them from reaching their full potential.
  • Mentors contribute feedback that is outside the management and performance review process.
  • Mentors extend career guidance and exposure to assignments that develop management and professional skills more quickly.
  • Mentors provide access to people, meetings, and other learning opportunities.

To the mentor–Interacting with and shaping the development of intelligent, motivated young people is rewarding. You will feel good seeing the impact you are having. You will also learn about the organization from a perspective that perhaps you have forgotten.

You may be training your replacement—allowing you to move up in the organization while remaining confident that your legacy is in good hands.

Mentoring tips and techniques

  • Schedule time to meet with your mentee. You can have a formal time slot with a general idea of what needs to be discussed or just a piece of time you carve out of your schedule to touch base. Do this at least monthly.
  • Meetings with your mentee should be one-on-one with some privacy.
  • Ask questions.
  • Listen.
  • Do not turn your meetings into status reports. Your goal is building skills. The meetings should focus on observations, experiences, and ideas.
  • Be willing to talk about yourself and your philosophy. For example, talk about how you make decisions or what you’re thinking about the issues on your plate right now.
  • Invite your mentee to sit in as an observer in high-level meetings. Talk with them afterward about what they saw and thought happened. Add your own insights.
  • Give feedback on your observations of the mentee’s skills and behaviors—build their confidence to tackle ever more challenging situations.
  • Encourage them to learn.
  • Encourage them to try new things—to stretch their skills into more responsible positions or different areas of the organization.

I have personally benefitted from mentoring by working with talented, seasoned professionals who have freely shared their knowledge with me during my career. I have also had the fortune to mentor many younger software developers, managers and project managers. I delight in seeing them become more comfortable, more productive and enjoying their work more. How about you? What has been your experience with mentoring? What advice can you share?

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Project Stress: The Importance of Stress Reduction

August 21, 2009 — Bruce McGraw

Project management is stressful. Perhaps managing a project to a successful outcome is not stressful every minute of every day, but there are definitely times—like pulling an all-nighter to solve a problem before shipping on time—that definitely qualify as high stress.

Now it may seem like stress is your friend. It helps you focus attention and block out the extraneous. And from a physiological perspective, that is what stress is for—it is self protection; fight or flight. Discovered by Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and discussed by Dr. Neil Neimark MD in the Body Soul Connection:

“When our fight or flight response is activated, sequences of nerve cell firing occur and chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released into our bloodstream. These patterns of nerve cell firing and chemical release cause our body to undergo a series of very dramatic changes. Our respiratory rate increases. Blood is shunted away from our digestive tract and directed into our muscles and limbs, which require extra energy and fuel for running and fighting. Our pupils dilate. Our awareness intensifies. Our sight sharpens. Our impulses quicken. Our perception of pain diminishes. Our immune system mobilizes with increased activation.”

But, stress takes its toll on our bodies and eventually on our ability to be effective project managers. Here are just a few of the long term consequences of stress on your health:

  • Headaches
  • Sleep disturbances
  • Digestive problems
  • Depression
  • Muscle spasms
  • Difficulty focusing attention

“Psychological stress can also worsen the symptoms of many medical conditions, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurological conditions, chronic pain, and addictive disorders” according to Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD.

Stress Reduction
A personal friend of mine is Austin-based leadership trainer Chris Douglas, who has some excellent and easy to implement suggestions on dealing with stress and reducing its impact on your body and your performance. Improving Performance Under Stress is a seminar offered by Chris through Quest Seminars. You can receive a free copy of Chris’s Managing Stress in Challenging Times by registering your email on his site.

Chris recommends the following activities to help project managers handle stress and keep it from disrupting their effectiveness:

  • Breathe! Deep breathes from the diaphragm.
  • Timed Breathing —Inhale to the count of 4, hold for 7, exhale to the count of 8
  • Find some humor in the situation. Laughter is a great stress reliever
  • Try a mini-meditation—just one to two minutes of relaxed breathing or guided visualization can help you relax

A few other simple stress relief techniques you can practice in the office:

  • Get up and move around five minutes out of every hour.
  • Stretch your shoulders and lower back.
  • Do some neck rolls—drop your chin slowly forward then roll your head to your right shoulder, back, left shoulder and front.
  • Relax your hands and wrists. Interlock your fingers and rotate your wrists clockwise and then counter-clockwise. Finish with a stretch of your hands and fingers.
  • If you do not have an ergonomic office, try to get one. It really helps.

Don’t forget to exercise routinely and take a real vacation every year!

Now be honest – is stress getting to you on your projects?  Do you have some stress relief techniques that help keep you healthy and focused? Please share!

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Tips for engaging and keeping the interest of project sponsors

August 14, 2009 — Bruce McGraw

The project manager’s job of selling a concept or product does not end with the kick-off party. Throughout the life of a project, it is essential to keep the flames of interest and commitment burning in the minds project sponsors. And, that’s a challenge.

Software, in its development stage, is ethereal and vague.  Hours of work are performed to create designs, write code, and build use cases. However, much of that effort is not tangible. The sponsor cannot see or touch the software and must take it on faith that something worthwhile is being done with his money. Building that trust is the job of the project manager.

In the current technology and software industry there are several new “methodologies” that have been introduced to help with the “buy-in” from sponsors and clients.  You should have heard of agile, extreme and Scrum techniques and if you have been around for a while (like certain unnamed people), you have utilized spiral engineering, rapid prototyping, and rapid application development (RAD).  All of these methods and techniques have a common goal of either reducing the scope and/or the timeframe for the individual project or cycle.  While these approaches have proven to make it easier to get the sponsor/ client to participate, they will not do the job all by themselves.  There are still basic techniques and tactics that should be employed by the PM to assure sponsor, stakeholder, or client commitment and buy-in.

So to ensure project sponsors remain interested and committed the project manager needs to do more than provide weekly or monthly progress reports. They need to keep the end result—the vision—alive. Here are a few of the techniques I have found to be helpful in maintaining sponsor’s interest:

  • Context: in status meetings and progress reports show how accomplishments tie back to a function or capability required of the end product. For example don’t just say, “We completed the algorithm for buffer allocation”.  Explain that buffering impacts how quickly processing moves through the system, what trade-offs needed to be made to optimize buffering, and the advantages to the client of the approach taken.
  • Involvement: offer opportunities and encourage participation in team meetings. Give the client or his representative the experience of watching the team wrestle with options and make decisions.  If the sponsor’s representative is technically knowledgeable, ask for their feedback and encourage their participation.
  • Acknowledge expertise: the client or his/her representative has expertise about the effect of the end product on their business. Solicit that feedback and then show how the input from the customer is reflected in the resulting design and product. “You requested the ability to edit the output before it is incorporated into the report, here is how we are providing that capability.”
  • No surprises: there are many good reasons that as the detailed design emerges from top level design, there are changes. You may add a feature, delay a capability, or implement the movement of data in a different way. A task may take longer to complete than initially estimated or the world itself changes. The golden rule for keeping sponsors from losing interest or “going ballistic” is No Surprises! Tell the client as changes are being considered and why. Do not force the customer to find it out for themselves.
  • Communicate often: you do not have to wait for the weekly or monthly report to communicate with the customer. Use informal conversations or email to share (briefly) relevant information about the project or the team.
  • Show – don’t just tell: there are enormous advantages to showing the customer or sponsor the project as it matures. Design your schedule and your modules so that there are many opportunities to demonstrate— such as showing the user interface in pictures, prototypes or use cases; providing example or test cases using input and output of various modules, or showing the integration of the output of one function into the processing of another.

Gaining and maintaining sponsor interest and buy-in is essential to a successful project – no matter which software development method or life cycle is used. I have seen projects that corporate management was ready to slash until the sponsor came in to support the effort. I have also worked with follow-on projects that resulted because the sponsor / customer felt like part of the team and was personally invested in the outcome. And, I have seen projects die a slow and painful death because the sponsor lost interest and everyone involved was going through the motions of fulfilling the minimal contract requirements with no joy or anticipation of the resulting software.

So what is your experience?  Are you now being asked to use agile or Scrum in order to get better sponsor / client engagement?  Is that all it takes? Or do you think the PM needs to do some of thebasic techniques I have described in addition to one of these new methods?

Please leave your comments….

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Surviving a new boss: 10 Guidelines for briefing your new boss

August 7, 2009 — Bruce McGraw

Congratulations! You have a new boss.  Or – I guess congratulations are in order.

Whether this change is the result of an internal promotion, reorganization, or an acquisition, the project manager is responsible for educating the “newcomer” about the projects for which he or she is responsible. What you say and how you say it is to some extent dependent on your situation. For example, in a small company where the new boss already knows a bit about you and the project, then your task may be a no more than a status update. Other scenarios offer more challenges to a project manager – the person is new to the company or the person is new to project management (Yikes!).

In a large organization, the arrival of a new boss may lead to several days (or weeks) of briefings to get him or her up to speed. You and your project(s) will be among many presenting and the format and flow of the briefing may be dictated beforehand. Other organizations will choose to let the new boss set up briefings when they are ready. KEY ACTION: Don’t wait too long. If the boss does not take the initiative, you should. You want the new boss to know what projects you are managing, what you are doing, and why it is important.  The sooner you start a rapport and relationship with your new boss – the better.

So that first meeting / briefing is critical to your projects and you.  Here are some guidelines for handling your first briefing:

  • Provide context: where does your project fit within the organization. You may use an organization chart or a statement of objectives and tasks as they relate to the company’s mission. Answer the question: Who are the stakeholders (customers or consumers) of your project?
  • Present outcomes first: what will your project provide when it is complete. This is more detailed than just a rehash of your objectives. You will want to focus on the revenue or cost savings that will result from the successful completion of your project.  Think outcomes!!
  • Project status: This is typical status report information that includes schedule, accomplishments, costs against budget, and plans. Be sensitive to your new boss’s knowledge (or lack thereof) of technical terminology and keep this part of the briefing at a fairly high level. Hold off on risks and issues until later in the briefing (if at all). You are still in selling mode at this point.
  • Introduce your team: tell the new boss a small amount about the team members and the project team organization. Identify each person by name and role. Again, an organizational chart may be helpful if you have a large team.
  • Demonstrate: If time allows and you have a quick demonstration of your project doing its magic—show it off. This is the final part of selling your project.  Demos (when short) are always good.
  • Issues and risks: You want your new boss to understand what challenges you face and what conditions present a risk to the successful outcome of the project. It is a very good idea to have solutions ready for each risk and problem you present. A chart that includes probabilities, costs, and mitigation strategies is effective in presenting issues and risks.  If you run short on time – this is one area that can be moved to your second meeting.
  • What does the boss want to know? If you can, find out beforehand what questions the new boss is trying to answer about the projects and be sure to address those questions using the words he or she has chosen.  Or maybe I should say:  Find out everything you can about your new boss before briefing your first meeting.  Get their resume, talk to anyone who worked for them, if they have written articles get copies.  Don’t go in cold.
  • Graphics speak: Many people grasp information more quickly and retain it better when it is presented in graphic form rather than text. Make liberal use of relationship diagrams, tables with key concepts in the headers, charts, and pictures. Remember, pictures are worth a thousand words.
  • Make and distribute a hard or digital copy: If the boss is getting many project briefings as part of their orientation, it is likely that everything will run together in his or her mind after awhile. A copy of your briefing will serve as a reminder of your project.
  • Don’t try to do everything in one meeting: You are bound to have many more opportunities to present to your new boss. Think of this briefing as the beginning of a dialogue where you create a common vocabulary and understanding.  Make this meeting a positive one.

 

I want to thank Michael Watkins for his Blog on “How to succeed with your new boss” – it is a very good post on what to do with a new boss.

 

Useful links:

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