Have you ever been part of what seemed to be a never-ending project?  Come on…admit it.  No matter how hard you try, some things are just outside of your control.  Or at least partially outside of your control.  No project manager likes to admit that they aren’t in complete control, but it’s a fact.  The team has a mind of it’s own.  The customer certainly is working on different timetables and with different constraints and assumptions.  And the project itself seems to be a guided missile being manipulated by some outside entity at times….a juggernaut that seems to not respond to your guidance during the most critical of times.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we examined the first two of five ways to ensure project profitability: having a spine and knowing your cost of doing business.  In this second part, we’ll look at three more ways.

Understand Your Peter Principle

Someone came to me with a frustrating situation.  They weren’t an IT consultant, but they were an ‘independent contractor’ type of worker and they were receiving $500 for their service offering in a small town in Nebraska.  They knew – and I knew – that in other parts of the country and especially in larger and more affluent markets – they could receive much more for the package they were offering.  But they were in small-town Nebraska and that’s where they were going to stay and that’s where their clients were.  And $500 is what they could get.  They could alter their offerings, include more or different services in their package, but their research showed that they risked losing business – and that would also come with the risk of decreased profitability.  In effect, they had essentially found their ‘Peter Principle’ in terms of what they could get for the type of service they were offering in the location they were offering it in.

The last thing any IT project management consultant wants to do is get caught up in a consulting or PM engagement that costs them lots of time and effort and in the end makes them very little money.  It’s frustrating, it’s counter-productive, and it almost certainly ensures you won’t have return business with that particular customer. 

The key is to safeguard your efforts – safeguard the profitability of the engagement.  To do that, there are five key things to keep in mind when you’re discussing the project with the customer, scoping and pricing the project, and then executing on the project through to completion.  In this Part 1, we'll examine the first two of the five ways to ensure project profitability….

Have a spine

This may be the most important concept of the five and it probably overlaps, to some degree,...

In project management situations with teams, customers, client management, etc. we get feedback.  Probably somewhat less than if we were direct hires, but we do get feedback.  And with negative feedback it's easy to get defensive.  With positive feedback we can take it all to ourselves or we can share it with our team - if applicable.  How we handle feedback - both negative and positive - can say a lot about our professionalism and who we are as a person. 

Let’s consider ways to constructively respond to the positive and negative feedback we sometimes receive on our project management engagement.  I’ll start with reactions to negative feedback first.

The easy answer to the customer participation question is, “If I can run the project without the customer getting in the way all the time then I’m happy with no customer involvement.” Now stop and think about that.  Is that really what we want? 

There are projects or programs where the customer basically hands everything off to you and your project team and lets you take off with the project.  Meanwhile, the customer basically just “phones it in” for the rest of the project.  I’ve had those types of projects – we probably all have to some degree.  They’re not all bad and as the project manager you’re pretty much left with free reign as long as you keep producing status reports and show that you’re on target.  Of course, if you start to deviate from the project schedule too much or get to the point where you have to give them bad news concerning the budget or start throwing change orders their way … LOOK OUT!