Project Team Blog

I suppose it’s no surprise, but I for one, perform better when under the influence of inspiration.  My projects just flow when I am driven with excitement to complete them.  I don’t even have to ignore the boring aspects of the project; I just fly right over them as if they didn’t exist.  But without that inspiration, it’s sometimes a drag.

Okay, that’s me.  Now, how do you get the entire team motivated like that?  All at once?

Clearly the answer lies in goals that every one shares.  Fame, fortune, accomplishment?  It’s different with every project, and every person.  The key is to find common ground that everyone can get behind.

I remember the old MacPaint program on the early Macintosh’s.  All the author’s names were in the About box.  Those guys met in Andy Herxtfeld’s home, and pounded out the next great thing: Fatbits!  But there’s no simple formula for every project team and every project.  In other words, you cannot simply offer comp time or best-employee certificates for every job.

Years later, names in the About Box isn’t enough.  Been there, done that.

Eventually, people grow weary of simple incentives.  They need big “life incentives” that mean something to their lives.  They need to know their efforts are making a difference in the world.  That people recognize their work.  Yes, it takes that much.  Nobody wants a shallow life.

How do you inspire your team, all at once, to change the world?

–newshirt

In this post we’ll discuss how to split tasks in Microsoft Project.  In other words, how to break tasks into segments representing the exact times work will be performed.

Microsoft Project tasks do not necessarily need to start on one day, and continue until the task is complete.  They can be broken up into segments.  In other words, work can be performed in a discontinguous fashion.  For instance, 16 hours in one week, 16 hours in the next week, and a final 4 hours the following week.  This technique is illustrated below.  Steps to perform it as also included.

 

Split bar, showing each segment of work

Split hours, in Task Usage view

 

I must warn you…  I feel this is a micro-management technique.  It can be good to define exactly when the work will be performed, right down to the hour, but do you really want to spend your time doing that?  That’s better left to the discretion of engineers who will actually be doing the work.

Follow these steps to split Microsoft Project tasks:

1. Create a new task in the Gantt view (See the View menu)
2. Right-click in the header area, and choose Insert Column
3. Insert the Work column (it represents the planned work for a task)
4. Enter 10 hours for the Work
5. Choose View, Task Usage
6. Notice the number of hours for each day (this is the time you will work on the task)
7. Skip a few days, and enter some additional hours into the Task Usage view
8. Choose View, Gantt Chart to return to the preview view
9. Notice that the Gantt bar has been split to show the new hours

 

–ray

This is a little reminder that we all need from time to time.  I’m not going to get too depressing here, but I attended a close family members funeral last week.  As I talked with family and friends at the service I was reminded of what’s truly important in life.

We all know this, but rarely stop and do anything about it.  We get caught up in the daily grind and focus on the latest hurdle at work.  Well I’m here to say that last year I said forget it, and took my family on a 10 day vacation!  We spent time at the beach and doing a whole lot of nothing.  During this vacation I got to spend time with my aunt whose funeral I attended last week.  I remember chasing and catching fireflies with my children in her backyard, priceless.  Jeez, I’m a city boy raised in So-Cal.  And during that time I got to ride on my grandpa’s tractor around the old family farm.  I am so glad we took that vacation!  These are just a few memories that no one can pull from my mind.  It was relaxing and it was more fun than I ever thought it could be. 

Life will always bring excuses as to why we can’t slow down to enjoy time with family and friends.  We Americans work harder than any people on earth.  Yet we ought to recharge and relax once in a while.  What are one or two weeks out of the year?  For me its a lifetime of memories and more fun than I ever dreamed.

I just got off a conference call where the customer lamented that project tracking (in his organization) is an albatross.  E.g. too much work!

His company had been using an Excel spreadsheet, and wanted to switch to Standard Time® for project tracking.  Their spreadsheets had grown so large that grooming them consumed too much time.  His statements really got me thinking.

Every project has two components: doing the work, and managing the work.  That’s no big secret.  This person was lamenting about the management part, and wanted to know how Standard Time® would improve that.

Unfortunately, the answer is not in the tool, but in his organization.  Questions arose regarding the size of his teams, their self-sufficiency, and how granular his tasks needed to be.  We agreed that his tasks were too granular – too small.  He had been trying to micro-manage everything, and that was driving him crazy.

Let’s face it, project tasks change frequently.  It’s nice to document every task you’ll work on, but in practicallity, some well-defined buckets could catch all the task work.  Each time log could describe the work performed, and you’d still have some basic tasks to report on.  Simplicity is best.

eWeek published a little piece in the Application Development department regarding Web 2.0 collaboration.  (See a link to the article by Darryl H. Taft below.)  The upshot is that developers have been using Web 2.0 collaboration for years.  It’s the rest of the world that’s just catching up.  How about you?  What Web 2.0 technologies do you use?

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Developer-20-GungHo-or-Ho-Hum/

I use the following resources pretty regularly.

1. codeproject.com
2. codeguru.com
3. msdn.microsoft.com
4. projectteamblog.com
5. projectteamwisdom.com

Honestly, I’m not a big web surfer.  I don’t spend a lot of time subscribing to RRS feeds and plugging into the forums – with the exception of projecteamblog.  I don’t even have special ringtones.  Web 2.0 is not that exciting to me.  I’m not much of a social networker.

Tell me why I’m wrong!  What am I missing that could help in the areas of project management, application development, and team management.  technorati.com says there’s 11 million blogs out there, plus or minus 500 million that come and go every month.  I must be missing something!  I’d like to hear your comments…

–newshirt

What percentage of your organizational time is spent on business-driven projects?  In other words, how much time is spent working for customers?

Even a one-man operation must worry about this number – this percentage of customer-driven time.  Every organization has projects they do for customers, and projects for in-house development.  The balance between them is what I’m talking about.  Do you know your percentage?  Do you track your project time?

I’d like to think that 90-95% should be customer-related.  Any lower, and you’re probably spending too much time fiddling with non-marketable work.

I once worked for a company that wrote all their own software development tools.  At the time, Microsoft was selling full-featured compilers for $300.  Yet this company wrote all their own.  In their case, I would guess their customer-drive project time was less than 80%.  That’s too much time fooling around with internal tools.

A company with that much time on their hands won’t do well.  What say you?

–ray

I know a person (who will remain unnamed) who uses a little trick to work on projects.  When starting a new job, she does just a little bit the day before.  When she comes in the next day to begin the project, she’s happy to see that there’s some done already!  And then, she can continue where she left off.

Nobody likes to start a new project with a blank page.  Yuck, where do I begin?  That small hurdle is sometimes enough to make you procrastinate a whole other day.  Yes, I do it too!  I have hundreds of small projects I’m responsible for, and sometimes I can’t bring myself to start another one.  To avoid a new one, I’ll putter around on secondary tasks, avoiding the real work.  But, if my project is already started, I have no trouble picking up where I left off.  It’s the starting that bugs me.

I think I’ll try this little trick next time!

— newshirt