ISSUE #15

Welcome to the + 2 newsletter from The PPM Academy

Each month, I’ll send you two quick and simple approaches to improve your Productivity and Project Management that you can try, test, and adapt to work and everyday life.

How can you have fewer problems on your projects? In this month's Project Management Tip, I’ll share an approach for how you prevent many of your project problems before they happen, improve team relationships, and put you in a leadership position as Project Manager. 2 minutes, 48 seconds reading time.

Too often, we work on low-level tasks that don't push us or move us closer to where we want to be. In this month's Productivity Tip, I'll tell you about a simple tool called The Power List to help you work on what matters most and win the day. 1 minute, 38 seconds reading time.

Before you read the tips, I have some exciting news 🚀

Soon, I’ll be launching my new training called the High-Performance Programme. It’s a mixture of live and on-demand video training across 5-weeks teaching How to Become a High-Performing Project Manager by maximising your project management skills, productivity and mindset.

Sound interesting?

​​Register your interest here.​

Productivity Tip: The Power List 🚀

How often do you coast through a day working on tasks that keep you busy, but when you look back, it’s a day wasted as you haven’t provided much value or feel like you’ve progressed personally?

This is a widespread problem and even more difficult as a Project Manager if you’re busy managing multiple low-level tasks, like your inbox, sharing a file with a team member even though they should know where it is, or just being in meetings all day.

The flip side is we actively look for these more manageable tasks as they’re low risk, low profile, and keep you busy, whether you are conscious of doing this or not.

The impact?

You’re stuck in the same role, year after year, and your confidence level dips, so you’re less likely to go for that promotion or job change.

To make a change, you need to change your approach to have more impact at work, home, and health.

A tool to help is called The Power List.

The Power List isn’t a checklist, a to-do list or any habits you’re already doing daily.

It’s simply 3-5 critical tasks you must complete daily to move forward faster and progress toward your goals.

If you complete these tasks, you win the day. And when you win the day, you progress faster, your confidence builds, and more opportunities come your way.

If you don’t complete your tasks, you lose the day, but learn from it.

I first heard about this approach from Andy Frisella, who puts it like this.

If you win enough days, you win the week.

If you win enough weeks, you win the month.

If you win enough months, you win the year.

If you win enough years, you WIN YOUR LIFE.

This is how you can make significant changes in your life; it’s that simple.

Critical tasks are not simple or easy; they move towards your goals in life and are in addition to your more straightforward day-to-day tasks, not replacements of them.

So, what’s stopping you from creating your Power List today?

Project Management Tip: The Pre-Mortem 💀

How many projects have you been involved in where a problem has surfaced, and you said or thought, if we had done ........, this wouldn't have happened.

It's very rare, or at least in most cases, that a problem will occur, and you say there was absolutely nothing we could have done about that. No matter how much preparation, questions asked, or planning sessions were held, this wouldn't have been avoided.

But if you ask enough questions on how it could have been caught, there will nearly always be an opportunity to have caught it if you're honest with yourself.

Most problems on projects are due to a lack of education/shared understanding of:

• The process
• Roles and responsibilities
• Project tool
• Deliverables
• Outcomes needed.

The reason for these problems is the need for more time spent on educating all those involved so you have that shared understanding, and once you're all aligned, everything gets easier.

The challenge is that often there isn't enough time to educate everyone involved and then validate they understand what this means for them.

To help, you can run a pre-mortem workshop.

This will only fix some of the potential problems on a project, but you'll catch many of them far earlier than we would if you don't run one.

A pre-mortem workshop essentially asks one question:

What could go wrong?

This question is rarely asked or not asked in the right way; the wrong way is here's a risk log, our assumptions, and the client's responsibilities written in an SOW.

Most of which is shared without a conversation.

In a pre-mortem workshop, you mix education through conversation and showing. So you look at what the process is, the tools you use, and the deliverables you create, to name a few, whilst asking questions like:

• What could go wrong?
• Have you done this before?
• Who else might get involved or want to know about this?
• What happens if you are not around (e.g, the approver)
• What do we do if this presentation of a deliverable doesn't go well with your stakeholders?

You want to go through lots of worst-case scenarios as well as go deeper on how you'll work together.

It's not easy talking about worst-case scenarios, but the point is, that these have yet to happen, and they're less likely to happen if you talk about them now and put plans in place to prevent them.

If you cover your eyes and ears and hope for the best because you want to sound all positive pre-project, then they're more likely to happen.

So be brave and ask the tough questions.

What are the benefits of doing this?

Well, you'll catch potential problems early and have a shared plan in place if they do.

If a problem does occur, then as you've already discussed it, you're far more likely to work collaboratively to fix it rather than blame each other.

Having tough conversations early really helps with relationship building with new teams, as you're already working as a team.

It builds confidence in you as a project manager as you're taking a leadership role.

The great thing about pre-mortems is that you can test them in different ways. The most powerful and effective way is a full team workshop, but you can also run them in these scenarios.

• A 121 between a Project Manager and an Account Manager.
• 121 between you and your client
• With your team only, so no stakeholders or clients
• A stakeholder session only

All of these can provide value for your project and catch those problems early.

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