Project Execution

The Importance of Tracking

• Once the project execution phase gets going, how do you actually know that
the work is getting done? Primarily, you can keep tabs on project progress
by tracking and measurement.
• Tracking, by definition, is a method of following the progress of a project's
activities.
• Measuring project performance regularly to identify deviations from the
project plan can help ensure that the project stays on track.
• A deviation is anything that alters your original course of action.
• Deviations from the project plan can be positive or negative.

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The Importance of Tracking
• Benefits of tracking:
• Tracking makes key project information transparent, and transparency is essential for
accurate decision-making.
• Tracking centralizes project information so that everyone can understand the status of
each part of the project, which can then help you identify gaps in your knowledge.
• Tracking helps ensure that you don't risk forgetting something.
• Tracking helps keep all team members and stakeholders in touch with deadlines and
goals.
• Tracking is also crucial for recognizing risks and issues that can derail your progress.
• Tracking helps build confidence that the project is set to be delivered on time, in-
scope, and within budget.

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Commonly Tracked Items
• The most commonly tracked items:
• The project schedule
• The status of action items, key tasks, and activities to ensure that that work is actually
getting done.
• Costs
• Key decisions, changes, dependencies, and risks to the project, including any agreed
upon scope changes.

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Tracking Methods
• Gantt chart:
• Measures tasks against time and includes useful information, like who will own each
task and what the order of the tasks should be.
• Useful chart for staying on schedule and for projects with many dependencies or
tasks or activities or milestones that are reliant on one another.
• It's also a helpful chart for teams with a lot of people, because ownership and
responsibilities are explicitly laid out visually.

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Tracking Methods
• Roadmap
• Useful for high-level tracking of large milestones. Roadmaps outline the project as a
whole and provide an overall snapshot of key points—just like an actual roadmap
contains points of interest and mile markers.
• Illustrating to your team or key stakeholders how a project should evolve over time.

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Tracking Methods
• Burndown chart:
• Measures time against the amount of work done and the amount of work remaining.
• Their main uses are to keep the project team on top of targeted completion dates and
to keep the team aware of scope creep as it occurs.
• Burndown charts are best suited for projects that require a detailed, broken-down
review of each task associated with a project, and they're great for projects where
finishing on time is the top priority.
• The y-axis or the vertical axis symbolizes the number of tasks left to complete, and
the x-axis or the horizontal axis signifies time.
• Progress gets tracked from the upper left-hand corner of the chart.
• As the project goes along, you'll track down, working your way towards zero
remaining tasks, and to the right, working your way toward your end date.

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Tracking Methods
• If you need to communicate milestones to a large team, you might choose a
roadmap.
• If you have a project with multiple dependencies, you might choose a Gantt
chart.
• If tracking tasks against your deadline is especially important, then the
burndown chart might be your best option.
• Because the tracking method will be determined by the type of project you're
working on, your resources, and the project scope

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Project Status Reports
• A project status report gives an overview of all of the project’s common
elements and summarizes them in a snapshot.
• It is an efficient communication tool to convey the latest status in one place
for the team and stakeholders.

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Project Status Reports
• Most status reports contain the following components:
• Project name
• Date: You will create project status reports many times during the course of a project’s
implementation phase. Reports can be created weekly or monthly—it all depends on the
stakeholders’ needs and pace of the project. Adding the date to each status report acts as a
reference point for your audience and also creates a history log of the project’s status over time.
• Summary: The summary condenses the project’s goals, schedule, highlights, and lowlights in
one central place for easy stakeholder visibility. Usually, the summary section will be followed
by, or grouped with, the timeline summary and the overall project status.
• Status: The status of the project illustrates your actual progress versus your planned progress.
• Milestones and tasks: A summary of the project’s major milestones thus far and current tasks
helps the team and stakeholders easily visualize the progress of those elements.
• Issues: The issues include your project's current roadblocks and potential risks.

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Project Status Reports
• A common way to depict this is through RAG (red, amber, green), or Red-
Yellow-Green, status reporting.
• RAG follows a traffic light pattern to indicate progress and status. Red
indicates that there are issues that need resolution and that the project may
be delayed or go significantly over budget.
• Amber/Yellow means that there are potential issues with schedule or budget,
but that the issues can likely be resolved with corrective actions. And green
means the schedule and budget are doing fine and that the project is on track.

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Project Status Report Types
• If you need to share a status report with
your team for a project that contains
multiple layers of complexity, it may be
best to format the report in a spreadsheet
in order to keep track of all the moving
parts.
• If you simply need to communicate
updates to senior stakeholders, your
status report may be best formatted as a
slideshow, like the one below, containing
only an overview of the most key points.

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Risks and Changes
• Change request forms:
• You and your stakeholders will use these forms in order to stay on top of, and
adequately manage, any changes.
• Since a lot of people with different roles on the project can fill out these forms, it's
important for the forms to be self-explanatory and very thorough.
• You need to include in the form:
• The project name, the discussion owner, who's taking the lead on this discussion from the team,
discussion type.
• You'll want to let your audience know if you'll be discussing a risk, opportunity, or anything else.
• The teams involved and the expected outcome of the discussion, which might be a change in
priorities, schedule change, or an official call on how to proceed with an issue.
• The target date for discussion, and identify which milestones or goals might be impacted.
• A short description of the current situation, the change, and any difference you expect to make to the
plan of record, like a snapshot of the before and after.
• Then go into in-depth proposal for the necessary changes and address any trade-offs.
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Identifying and Tracking Dependencies
• Internal dependency, describes the relationship between two tasks within the
same project.
• External dependencies, refer to tasks that are reliant on outside factors, like
regulatory agencies or other projects.
• Mandatory dependencies:
• Tasks that are legally or contractually required. For instance, when that construction
company finishes the demolition and starts the rebuild, they'll first have to pour a
concrete foundation and then have it inspected by the city to ensure it meets their
standards before the construction company can continue to build.

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Identifying and Tracking Dependencies
• Discretionary dependencies:
• These are dependencies that could occur on their own, but the team saw a need to
make those dependencies reliant on one another.
• For instance, the construction company may be using concrete from a new supplier
and want to run a test, pouring a portion of the foundation to get a better estimate of
the total amount of product they'll need to complete the foundation, rather than
buying too much or too little product up front. The task of pouring a portion of the
foundation comes first, because the team needed more information before making a
decision.

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Identifying and Tracking Dependencies
• There are four important steps that a project manager can take:
• proper identification
• recording dependencies
• continuous monitoring and control
• efficient communication.

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Techniques to Help Manage Risks
• Brainstorming with your team is one of the most effective techniques for
identifying risks in a project.
• Risk exposure is a way to measure the potential future loss resulting from a
specific activity or event.
• It's almost impossible to account for every single risk over the course of a
project.
• That's where the ROAM technique can help. The ROAM technique—which
stands for resolved, owned, accepted, and mitigated—is used to help manage
actions after risks arise

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Techniques to Help Manage Risks
• Once a risk has materialized, you need to decide what to do with it.
• If a risk has been eliminated and will not be a problem, it goes into your
"resolved" category.
• If you give a team member ownership over a certain risk and entrust them to
handle it, that risk goes into the "owned" category and is monitored through
to completion.
• If the risk has been "accepted," it has been agreed that nothing will be done
about it.
• Finally, if some action has been taken such that the risk has been mitigated,
either reducing the likelihood of it occurring or reducing the impact to the
project, it goes into the "mitigated" category.
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Escalating Issues
• Before starting work on a project, the project manager, the team, and the
project sponsor should establish escalation standards and practices.
• This means they'll specify who the issues will be raised to, how issues are
raised, and the forum for discussion.
• A project manager should escalate an issue at the first sign of critical
problems in the project.
• Critical problems are issues that may cause a delay to a major project
milestone, issues that cause budget overruns, issues that can result in the loss
of a customer, and issues that push back the estimated project completion
date.

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Escalating Issues
• Escalation is great for preventing two common issues within a project:
trench wars and bad compromises.
• Trench wars occur when two peers or groups can't seem to come to an
agreement, and neither party is willing to give in.
• This leads to a standstill of the project and will likely delay certain aspects of the
project's progress.
• Typically, we think of compromises as a positive way to resolve issues, but
there is such a thing as a bad compromise.
• A bad compromise occurs when two parties settle on a so-called solution,
but the end product still suffers.

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Communicating Changes
• As a project manager, when communicating a small change that will affect
an individual, it's a good idea to send an email.
• Be sure to avoid emotional topics or anything that needs to be discussed in
depth. Just give them a heads up and set a meeting time.
• Weekly meetings may not be necessary, particularly if your agenda is short.
• If you set a meeting and then decide against it, you can either pivot to an
email or move the topic to a different forum.

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Communicating Changes
• When there's a big change within your project that impacts more than one
person and is likely to change the budget, deadline, or scope of the project,
you'll probably want to have a team meeting.
• One useful tactic to keep in mind when navigating these changes in your
project is called a timeout.
• A timeout means taking a moment away from the project in order to take a
breath, regroup, and adjust the game plan.

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Communicating Changes
• Timeout is a chance for the project team to evaluate the changes so they can
adjust the plan as needed.
• Throughout the process, you will want to hold meetings in order to discuss
successes, setbacks, and possible feature improvements to the project. These
meetings are called retrospectives.

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Key Quality Management Concepts
• Quality is when you fulfill the outlined requirements for the deliverable and
meet or exceed the needs or expectations of your customers.
• The four main concepts of quality management: quality standards, quality
planning, quality assurance, and quality control.

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Quality Standards
• The quality process begins with setting quality standards.
• Quality standards provide requirements, specifications, or guidelines that
can be used to ensure that products, processes, or services are fit for
achieving the desired outcome.
• Set quality standards with your team and your customer at the beginning of
your project.
• After you set those well-defined quality standards, you'll want to check-in
periodically and make sure everything looks okay and the requirements are
met.
• Remember that well-defined standards and requirements lead to less rework
and schedule delays.
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Quality Planning
• Involves the actions of you or your team to establish and conduct a process
for identifying and determining exactly which standards of quality are
relevant to the project as a whole and how to satisfy them.
• During this process, you'll plan the procedures to achieve the quality
standards for your project.

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Quality Assurance
• A review process that evaluates whether the project is moving toward
delivering a high-quality service or product.
• It includes regular audits to confirm that everything is going to plan and that
the necessary procedures are being followed.
• Quality assurance helps you make sure that you and your customers are
getting the exact product you contracted for.

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Quality Control
• Involves monitoring project results and delivery to determine if they are
meeting desired results.
• It includes the techniques that are used to ensure quality standards are
maintained when a problem is identified.
• Quality control is a subset of quality assurance activities.
• While QA seeks to prevent defects before they occur, QC aims to identify
defects after they have happened and also entails taking corrective action to
resolve these issues.

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Quality Standards
• If you stuck to your quality plan, checking on quality throughout the life
cycle of your project (QA), and of course correcting as needed (QC), the
likelihood of meeting your quality standards is high, resulting in a high-
quality deliverable at the end of your project that satisfies your
organizational goals and exceeds the customer's expectations.

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• Feedback surveys are a survey in which users provide feedback on features
of your product that they like or dislike.
• These surveys can take place as you design, before you launch, in order to
find out if people like and understand the product, or after you've launched,
if you want to make sure the user experience is even more satisfying.

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• A user acceptance test, or a UAT, is a test that helps a business make sure
that a product or solution works for its users.
• A UAT must meet the agreed upon requirements and deliver the expected
results.
• UAT is typically used to assess the end-to-end experience for the user of a
new process or product.
• A user acceptance test is incredibly important because it takes place near the
end of a product's development, and therefore, is an overall user experience
test of the entire product, software, or service.
• UATs are sometimes referred to as "beta tests."

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• UAT agenda steps:
• Welcome your users and thank them for participating
• Present the product to them
• includes discussing testing guidelines and demonstrating how the product works.
• Start your UAT test cases, taking your audience through critical user journeys
• A critical user journey is a sequence of steps a user follows to accomplish tasks in your product
• When presenting something you've built, you must give users a visual representation or mock up of
your product or have them go through a demo.
• UAT demo should focus on a call to action:
• For instance, the call to action for your project may be the need to test hardware in the client's future home.
• Maybe the homeowners have requested a dishwasher that can be opened and closed with very little force and
doesn't make too much noise.
• In that case, you'll want to give the client real-life scenarios to work within.
• Ask them to load the dishes and start the wash cycle. Then ask questions like, "On a scale of one to 10, how
much force was required to open and close the dishwasher?" to determine if the washer meets their
expectations.
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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• UAT agenda steps (cont.):
• Identify edge cases
• Edge cases are rare—outliers that the original requirements didn't account for. They deal with the
extreme maximums and minimums of parameters.
• During your presentation and walkthrough of the UAT, you should be collecting feedback from
the users on their overall experience.
• During this part of testing, your users will be able to help you collect edge cases.
• Recap your findings, identify bugs or issues, and prioritize which issues need to be
addressed first.
• When you've addressed the issue and determined next steps, you'll be able close and
conclude your user acceptance testing.

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• The goals of UAT:
• Demonstrate that the product, service, or process is behaving in expected ways in
real-world scenarios.
• Show that the product, service, or process is working as intended.
• Identify issues that need to be addressed before considering the project as done.

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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• Best practices for effective UAT:
• Define and write down your acceptance criteria.
• Acceptance criteria are pre-established standards or requirements that a product, service, or
process must meet.
• Create the test cases for each item that you are testing.
• A test case is a sequence of steps and its expected results. It usually consists of a series of actions
that the user can perform to find out if the product, service, or process behaved the way it was
supposed to.
• Select your users carefully.
• It is important to choose users who will actually be the end users of the product, service, or
process.
• Write the UAT scripts based on user stories.
• These scripts will be delivered to the users during the testing process.
• A user story is an informal, general explanation of a feature written from the perspective of the
end user.
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Measuring Customer Satisfaction
• Best practices for effective UAT (cont.):
• Communicate with users and let them know what to expect.
• If you can prepare users ahead of time, there will be fewer questions, issues, or delays during the
testing process.
• Prepare the testing environment for UAT.
• Ensure that the users have proper credentials and access, and try out these credentials ahead of
time to ensure they work.
• Provide a step-by-step plan to help guide users through the testing process.
• It will be helpful for users to have some clear, easy-to-follow instructions that will help focus their
attention on the right places.
• Compile notes in a single document and record any issues that are discovered.
• You can create a digital spreadsheet or document that corresponds to your plan. It can have
designated areas to track issues for each item that is tested, including the users’ opinions on the
severity of each issue. This will help you prioritize fixes.
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Continuous Improvement and Process Improvement
• Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products or
services.
• It helps ensure that a product steadily makes its way toward the best possible
outcome.
• Continuous improvement:
• begins with recognizing when processes and tasks need to be created, eliminated, or
improved.
• Then a project manager must plan for and implement changes to keep the project on
track. That's where process improvement comes from.
• Process improvement is the practice of identifying, analyzing, and improving existing processes to
enhance the performance of your team and to develop best practices or to optimize consumer
experiences.

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Continuous Improvement and Process Improvement
• A control is an experiment or observation designed to minimize the effects
of variables.
• Control groups are representative samples that help you to determine that the
differences between your experimental groups and the norm are due to your
changes, rather than something else.
• For example, you observe a problem with your process and put forward a
hypothesis, which is an educated guess about what's causing the problem
and how you'd fix it. Then you change one variable in the system, keeping
the control group the same, and observe your results again.

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Data Driven Improvement Framework
• Data-driven improvement frameworks are techniques used to make decisions
based on actual data.
• Examples of data driven improvement framework:
• DMAIC
• PDCA
• DMAIC, stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control.
• DMAIC maps out five steps that you can take when working toward
continuous improvements.
• PDCA is a four-step process that focuses on identifying a problem, fixing
that issue, assessing whether the fix was successful, and fine-tuning the final
fix.
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DMAIC
• When considering how you can improve customer experiences:
• First, you'll need to define the business problem, goals, resources, project scope, and
project timeline.
• Next, measure. Here, you'll conduct performance metrics and data collection to
establish baselines and measure success.
• Then, analyze. Work to find the root causes of problems and understand their impact.
• Next, improve. This means implementing a reasonable solution to the problem.
• Lastly, control. This is where you'll implement the changes and stay on top of
monitoring the updated processes

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PDCA
• PDCA steps are as follows:
• First, plan. Here, you'll identify the issue and root cause and brainstorm solutions to
the problem.
• Second, do, or fix the problem.
• The next part of this framework is check. Compare your results to the goal to find out
if the problem is fixed.
• Finally, act, or fine-tune the fix to ensure continuous improvement.

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The Purpose of a Retrospective
• One way to ensure continuous improvements is to conduct a retrospective.
• A retrospective is a workshop or meeting that gives project teams time to
reflect on a project.
• Retrospectives, sometimes known as retros, should happen throughout the
life cycle of a project, but mostly are implemented after major milestones, or
most commonly, after a project is completed.
• Retrospectives give you a chance to discuss successes and setbacks that took
place within the project or phases.

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The Purpose of a Retrospective
• Retrospectives serve three main purposes:
• First, they encourage team building, because they allow team members to understand
different perspectives within their team.
• Second, they facilitate improved collaboration on future projects.
• Third, they promote positive changes in future procedures and processes.

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The Value of Data
• Data is a collection of facts or information, and through data analysis, you'll
learn how to use data to draw conclusions and make predictions and
decisions.
• If you have the data from your project tracker of the number of tasks
completed, the number of escalations, or the number of issues that come up
surrounding an internal process, you'll be able to deduce where the majority
of issues are stemming from.

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Common Types of Project Data
• A metric is a quantifiable measurement that is used to track and assess a
business objective.
• Metrics are based on selected goals. They vary per project and serve as a key
type of project data.
• You can group project metrics into productivity metrics and quality metrics.

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Productivity Metrics
• Productivity typically measures progress and output over time.
• Productivity metrics allow you to track the effectiveness and efficiency of
your project and include metrics like milestones, tasks, projections, and
duration.
• A projection is how you predict an outcome based on the information you
have now.
• The duration of a project is the total time it takes to complete a project from
start to finish.

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Quality Metrics
• Quality metrics relates to achieving acceptable outcomes and can include
metrics such as the number of changes, issues, and cost variance, which all
affect quality.
• The number of changes during the project or project scope helps to monitor
risks.
• Changes show any inconsistencies from the initial requirements of the
project.

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Quality Metrics
• A series of compounding small changes may indicate a bigger issue and
provide early warning signs of these issues.
• Using a change log to keep a record of these changes is a useful tool for
communicating with stakeholders about why something is taking a long time
or costs more than expected.
• A change log is a record of all of the notable changes on a project. An issue
is a known and real problem that may affect the ability to complete a task.
• Cost variance illustrates the difference between the actual cost and the
budget cost.
• Simply put, cost variance compares what you plan to spend versus what you actually
spent.

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Adoption and Engagement
• Adoption and engagement are a set of metrics related to quality.
• Adoption refers to whether or not a product, service or process is accepted
and used.
• Engagement refers to the degree to which it is used—the frequency of use,
amount of time spent using it, and the range of use.

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Adoption and Engagement
• Each project will need to define its own set of successful adoption metrics,
such as:
• Conversion rates
• Time to value (TTV)
• Onboarding completion rates
• Frequency of purchases
• Providing feedback (rating the product or service)
• Completing a profile

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Discerning Important Data
• To determine what data is important, there are a couple of ways you can
begin to do this:
• One way is to observe your team's productivity and output.
• Identify which tasks contribute most to the overall goal. This will help you determine the
importance of which data points—in this case, tasks and activities—you should focus on.
• Secondly, prioritize the data or metrics that are most valuable to stakeholders.
• Using signals, focusing on the tasks that have the biggest impact on the
project goal, and aligning to your stakeholders' priorities are a good way to
help you prioritize the right tasks.

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Data Ethics
• The data you collect will usually hold PII (personally identifiable
information)—information that could be used to directly identify, contact, or
locate an individual.
• Data ethics is the study and evaluation of moral challenges related to data
collection and analysis. This includes generating, recording, curating,
processing, sharing, and using data in order to come up with ethical
solutions.

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Data Ethics
• Businesses apply data ethics practices so they can:
• Comply with regulations
• Show that they are trustworthy
• Ensure fair and reasonable data usage
• Minimize biases
• Develop a positive public perception

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Data Privacy
• Data privacy deals with the proper handling of data.
• This includes the purpose of data collection and processing, privacy
preferences, the way organizations manage personal data, and the rights of
individuals.
• It focuses on making sure the ways we collect, process, share, archive, and
delete data are all in accordance with the law

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Data Privacy
• As a project manager, it is your responsibility to protect the data you collect.
You can help ensure the privacy of data collected from users, stakeholders,
and others for your projects by:
• Increasing data privacy awareness. Make sure every member of your project team—
plus the vendors, contractors, and other stakeholders from outside of your company—
are made aware of your organization's data security and privacy protocols.
• Using security tools. Free security tools, like encrypted storage solutions and
password managers, can decrease your project’s vulnerability to a data breach.
• Anonymizing data. Data anonymization refers to one or more techniques such as
blanking, hashing, or masking personal and identifying information to protect the
identities of people included in the data.

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Data Bias
• Data bias is a type of error that tends to skew results in a certain direction.
• Types of biases
• Sampling bias is when a sample is not representative of the population as a whole.
• Observer bias is the tendency for different people to observe things differently. For
example, stakeholders from different parts of the world might view the same data
differently and draw different conclusions from it.
• Interpretation bias is the tendency to always interpret situations that don’t have
obvious answers in a strictly positive or negative way, when, in fact there is more
than one way to understand the data.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that
confirms pre-existing beliefs.

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Data Bias
• Data bias is a type of error that tends to skew results in a certain direction.
• Types of biases
• Sampling bias is when a sample is not representative of the population as a whole.
• Observer bias is the tendency for different people to observe things differently. For
example, stakeholders from different parts of the world might view the same data
differently and draw different conclusions from it.
• Interpretation bias is the tendency to always interpret situations that don’t have
obvious answers in a strictly positive or negative way, when, in fact there is more
than one way to understand the data.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that
confirms pre-existing beliefs.

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Data Analysis
• Data analysis is the process of collecting and organizing information to help
draw conclusions. It's used to solve problems, make informed decisions, and
support goals.
• Quantitative data includes statistical and numerical facts.
• Qualitative data describes the subjective qualities or things that can't be
measured with numerical data, like user feedback.
• In project management, you will use both qualitative data and quantitative
data points to inform decisions, make improvements, and share insights.

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Data Analysis
• There are six main steps involved in data analysis: Ask, prepare, process,
analyze, share and act:
• During the Ask phase, ask key questions to help frame your analysis, starting with:
What is the problem?
• After you have a clear direction, it is time to move to the Prepare stage. This is where
you collect and store the data you will use for the upcoming analysis process.
• Process your data. In this step, you will “clean” your data, which means you will
enter your data into a spreadsheet, or another tool of your choice, and eliminate any
inconsistencies and inaccuracies that can get in the way of results.
• Analyze: take a close look at your data to draw conclusions, make predictions, and
decide on next steps. Here, you will transform and organize the data in a way that
highlights the full scope of the results so you can figure out what it all means.

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Data Analysis
• There are six main steps involved in data analysis: Ask, prepare, process,
analyze, share and act (cont.):
• Share your findings. In this stage, you use data visualization to organize your data in
a format that is clear and digestible for your audience.
• Act: In the final stage of your data analysis, the business takes all of the insights you
have provided and puts them into action to solve the original business problem.

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Presenting Data
• Storytelling is the process of turning facts into narrative to communicate
something to your audience.
• Storytelling is how you bring data to life and is a useful way to tell
stakeholders within your organization about your project.
• In general, there are six main steps to storytelling.
• Define your audience
• Collect the data
• Filter and analyze the data
• Choose a visual representation
• Shape the story
• Gather your feedback.

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Visualizing Data
• A dashboard is a type of user interface, typically a graph or summary chart,
that provides a snapshot view of your project's progress or performance.
• It acts as a centralized location for project stakeholders to draw quick
insights.
• It can display a tight summary of metrics, stats, and key performance
indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is a measurable value or metric that demonstrates
how effective an organization is at achieving key objectives.
• They serve as a great aid in helping your team and stakeholders understand
if you're on the right track.

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Visualizing Data
• Dashboards are great visualizations for efficient status updates because they
enable you to group, summarize, and highlight top project data points.
• Another visualization that does this is a burndown chart.
• Infographics are visual representations of information, such as data or facts,
and are typically in the form of a "one-pager" or a "one-sheeter."
• The difference is that they're typically concise summaries of that data.

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Effective Presentation Techniques
• Three ways to help you give an effective presentation. Those are being
precise, flexible, and memorable.
• To be precise about your key points. Identify the problem you're solving for
your audience and remove any content that dilutes your narrative.
• "designing for five seconds." The idea is that your audience should be able
to understand a slide within five seconds.
• Use stories or include repetition to help your audience remember the
information moving forward.

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Teams and Workgroups
• Teams differ from workgroups.
• A team is a group of people who plan, solve problems, make decisions, and
review progress in service of a specific project, or objective.
• Team members rely on each other to get things done.
• Though people within a workgroup might be working toward a common
goal, their work is more likely to be coordinated, controlled or assigned by
single person or entity.

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Factors Impacting Team Effectivness
• In order of importance, those five factors are: psychological safety,
dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
• Psychological safety:
• refers to an individual's perception, of the consequences of taking an Interpersonal
risks.
• Meaning it's safe to take risks within their team and they don't risk being labeled as
ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive.
• On teams with high psychological safety, teammates feel comfortable taking risks
around fellow team members, seeking differing opinions and resolving interpersonal
conflict when it comes up.

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Factors Impacting Team Effectivness
• Dependability:
• On dependable teams, members are reliable and complete their work on time.
• Structure and clarity:
• refers to an individual's understanding of job expectations, knowledge of how to meet
those expectations and the consequences of their performance.
• Each team member has a clear sense of their individual role, plans and goals. And
they have a sense of how their work affects the group
• Meaning:
• Finding a sense of purpose either in the work itself or in the results of that work.
• Impact:
• The belief that the results of one's work matters and creates change.

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Leading High-Functioning Teams
• Key ways that project managers help build high- functioning teams who
work together to meet project goals:
• They create systems that turn chaos into order
• They communicate and listen
• They promote trust and psychological safety
• They demonstrate empathy and create motivation
• They delegate responsibility and prioritize
• They celebrate team's success.

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Air Cover
• Air cover refers to support for and protection of a team in the face of out-of-
scope requests or criticism from leadership.
• Though the needs and requests of your stakeholders are crucial to the
project’s success, there may come a time when you will need to prioritize the
needs of your team over the wants of your stakeholders.
• This is called providing “air cover” for your team, and it is an important part
of managing a project.
• The ability to effectively provide air cover requires a trusting relationship
between a project manager and their stakeholders.

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Air Cover
• One way to provide air cover to your team is to say “no” to your sponsor’s
request without explicitly saying “no.”
• There are a few ways to do this:
• You can gently push back with a polite explanation that their request won’t be
possible to complete under the current constraints—the scope, time, and/or cost—of
the project.
• You can politely offer to get back to the stakeholder with your response. This gives
you time to better understand the request and to consult with trusted team members to
lay out the benefits and costs of this request. And, if you are lucky, this might even
give the stakeholder the opportunity to reconsider their request or forget about it
entirely.

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Team Development
• The five stages of team development: Forming, storming, norming,
performing and adjourning.
• Forming stage: Individuals on the team are just getting to know on another, and
they're eager to make a good impression. During this stage, you as a project manager
should clarify project goals, roles, and context about the project. People are seeking
guidance and it's your job to provide that guidance.
• Storming stage: As people settle into their roles and the work on their project begins,
the people on your team are interacting more and maybe disagreeing a bit. As the
project manager, it's your job to focus on conflict resolution. Listen as the team
addresses problems to solve and share insights on how the team might better function
as a unit.

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Team Development
• The five stages of team development: Forming, storming, norming,
performing and adjourning.
• Norming stage: the team has resolved some of its internal conflict by establishing
new norms. Like processes and workflows that make it easier for everyone to get
things done. The team feels better equipped to work together efficiently and
effectively. You, as the project manager should codify the team norms, ensuring that
the team is aware of those norms and reinforce them when needed.
• Performing stage: the team works together relatively seamlessly to complete tasks,
reach milestones and make progress toward the project goal. In the performing stage,
you as the project manager should focus on delegating, motivating and providing
feedback to keep up the team's momentum.

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Team Development
• The five stages of team development: Forming, storming, norming,
performing and adjourning.
• Adjourning stage: In this stage the project is wrapping up and it's time for the team to
disband. It can be a bittersweet time for the team and you might want to mark the end
of the project with a celebration.

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Ethical and Inclusive Leadership
• Ethics can be defined as the principles of conduct governing an individual or
a group.
• Ethical leadership is a form of leadership that promotes and values honesty,
justice, respect, community and integrity.
• You promote ethical leadership by defining and aligning values within your
team and demonstrating how adhering to those values benefits the mission of
the organization.
• Inclusive leadership aims to put what we've heard into action to create an
environment that encourages and empowers each and every member of our
community.

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Ethical and Inclusive Leadership
• Three ways that managers can lead inclusively. These include fostering a
culture of respect, creating equal opportunity to succeed and inviting and
integrating diverse perspectives.

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Ethical and Inclusive Leadership
• A common framework for ethical decision-making

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Steps to Effective Influencing
• Influencing is the ability to alter another person's thinking or behaviors.
• There are four tried and true steps of effective influencing: established
credibility, frame for common ground, provide evidence and connect
emotionally.
• Credibility:
• Make the case for why your audience should listen to you.
• Credibility comes from two sources, expertise, and relationships.
• You need to demonstrate to your audience that you're an expert on a given topic,
whether that's through professional experience, extensive research, or something else,
and you need to demonstrate relationship credibility by establishing that you're
honest, trustworthy, and someone who they want to work with.

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Steps to Effective Influencing
• Frame for common ground:
• you'll make the case for how your idea can benefit your audience. To determine this,
• you'll need a strong understanding of your audience and their values.
• Provide evidence:
• you'll make your case through hard data and persuasive storytelling.
• Numbers aren't strong enough on their own. They need stories to live in them up.
• Connect emotionally
• demonstrate to your audience that you're emotionally committed to your idea and
you'll do your best to match their emotional state.

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Steps to Effective Influencing
• Four common mistakes that people make when attempting to influence
others:
• They'll often approach their audience too aggressively, and that tends to put people
off ideas entirely.
• They might also resist compromise, which is crucial for any kind of mutual
agreement.
• They'll focus too much on developing their argument for the idea and not enough
time establishing credibility, framing for common ground, providing evidence and
connecting emotionally.
• They'll assume that they can work out an agreement through just one conversation.

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Using Sources of Power to Influence
• Most power sources fall into two buckets, organizational and personal.
• Organizational sources of power include your role, information, network,
and reputation.
• Your role:
• refers to your position within an organization, or team.
• In a project management role, you have a certain level of power over the project, and
therefore more influence.
• Information:
• refers to your level of access, and control over information.
• As a project manager, you possess a huge amount of information about your work,
and your stakeholders, which can work to your benefit.

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Using Sources of Power to Influence
• Network.
• refers to people you're connected with professionally and personally. Strong
connections within your organization and beyond it can boost your ability to
influence others, and help your project continue on.
• Reputation:
• refers to how others perceive you overall. As you might expect, people with positive
reputations tend to be more influential than those with negative reputations

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Using Sources of Power to Influence
• Personal sources of power are power sources that come from you.
• Personal sources of power include knowledge, expressiveness, history and
character.
• Knowledge refers to the power that you draw from your expertise in certain
subjects, your unique abilities, and skill sets, and even your ability to learn
new things.
• Expressiveness refers to your ability to communicate with others.
• History refers to the level of personal history there is between yourself and
another person.
• Character refers to other people's view of the qualities that make you: you.

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Principles of Effective Email Writing
• Principles of effective email writing:
• State what you want clearly.
• Keep the content short and concise.
• Structure your writing.
• Check grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

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Principles of Effective Email Writing
• State what you want clearly
• Include your request in the subject line of your email.
• State your request within the first two paragraphs of your email message.
• Indicate the specific call-to-action associated with your request (for example, reply,
review, RSVP).
• Write clear, concise sentences when providing details.
• Define terms. Avoid using acronyms and terminology that users may not know.
Provide additional information as necessary to avoid misunderstanding.

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Principles of Effective Email Writing
• Keep the content concise
• Summarize the content you want to convey, and remove anything in your email that
doesn’t contribute to your goal.
• Aim to write “question-less” and “self-standing” emails. This means that the message
contains enough information to stand on its own. The reader shouldn’t have any
questions about what you want and when you want it.
• Know your audience. Some people—such as executives and other busy leadership—
may not want to read emails of more than a few sentences or click on external links
for further information. Try to tailor your emails accordingly.

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Principles of Effective Email Writing
• Structure your writing
• Use bullets. Bullets break up the visual flow. If you have more than one of something,
consider using bullets. Write strong action verbs at the start of each bullet.
• Use labels. Labels help guide the reader to what information is most important.
• Add hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow readers to directly access additional information,
rather than adding lengthy details to your email.
• Write a strong topic sentence. Place the main idea of the paragraph in the topic
sentence.

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Principles of Effective Email Writing
• Check grammar, punctuation, and spelling
• Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are critical. Turning grammar and spelling
suggestions on in your email application can help you quickly identify errors. Be sure
to correct any errors before sending off.

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Organizing Effective Meeting
• Effective meetings always have the following elements in common: They're
structured, intentional, collaborative, and inclusive.
• Structured:
• This means they start and end on time.
• The attendees have been carefully selected.
• The meeting topics are prioritized and And the designated note taker has been assigned.
• Managing the meeting time and audience lets participants know that they're valued and
appreciated.
• Structured meetings also have an agenda with prioritized topics.
• It's good to think about and set expectations for how long you expect the group to spend
on a given topic.
• This is defined as timeboxing, which just means you're setting a time limit for discussion.

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Organizing Effective Meeting
• Intentional:
• This means they have a clearly stated purpose and expectations, which should be in
the meeting agenda as well as the meeting invite.
• The agenda needs to set clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during
the meeting.
• The purpose of your meeting might be to make a decision, assign tasks, propose/
invent an idea, or something else.
• A well designed agenda increases the group's ability to address problems and
prevents wasting time.
• If input is needed by attendees, be sure to send any pre-reading materials in advance
of the meeting so that everyone shows up prepared to participate.
• Depending on the purpose meetings can be formal or informal, have as few as two or
three group members or have hundreds of attendees.
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Organizing Effective Meeting
• Collaborative:
• Collaboration is when people work together to produce or create something.
• One easy way to make your meetings collaborative is to be sure the agenda isn’t just
full of presentations where participants are talked at.
• have a digital shared meeting document and encourage participants to write any
comments or thoughts directly in the document. But more importantly, remind them
that the notes will be shared.

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Organizing Effective Meeting
• Productive meetings have three elements in common:
• Active participation from attendees
• A clear and concise agenda that is followed throughout
• The correct attendees (meaning the participants can contribute to achieving the
meeting’s goal)

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Common Types of Project Meetings
• There are four general types of project management meetings, project kick-
off, status updates, stakeholder reviews, and project reviews.
• Kick-off meeting.
• This is often considered the official beginning of a project and serves as a way to
align the team's understanding of the project goals with actual plans and procedures.
• Members of your team are the major attendees of your kickoff meeting. But the
participation of senior management and key stakeholders is also required for securing
buy-in and ensuring alignment with project goals.

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Common Types of Project Meetings
• Status update meetings
• This category includes regular team meetings where the primary goal is to align the
team on updates, progress, challenges, and next steps.
• During the meeting, the project manager may distribute or present project
performance reports and formal status updates on key elements of the project.
• This allows the team and stakeholders to gain visibility into current performance
levels and task progress.

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Common Types of Project Meetings
• Stakeholder meeting:
• The goal of a stakeholder meeting is to get buy-in and support.
• You'll need to start by understanding a stakeholder's challenges or problems. Then
respond accordingly and make necessary adjustments to resolve those challenges.
• In some cases, you might want to have stakeholder meetings on a one-on-one basis.
This allows you to dive deeper on relevant details with each stakeholder.
• You should always be able to present a project update. Start the meeting with a short
overall project's status update of 2-5 minutes.
• Another key reason to meet with stakeholders is to seek out and listen to feedback. Or
you might meet with stakeholders to make a decision or resolve a major issue
surrounding your project.
• Stakeholder meetings are generally more formal.

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Common Types of Project Meetings
• Retrospective meeting:
• A typical retrospective meeting agenda includes reviewing lessons learned about
what's going well, what you should keep doing, and what can be improved.
• Equally important to reviewing lessons learned is taking the opportunity to celebrate
the project's success.

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The Importance of Project Closure
• Project closing consists of the process performed to formally complete the
project, the current phase, and contractual obligations.
• Completing a project is not the same thing as closing a project. Just because
a project is done doesn't mean it's closed.
• There are three criteria that make up a project closing:
• You'll want to assure all work is done.
• Ensure that the agreed upon project management processes are executed
• Get formal recognition from stakeholders that the project is done.

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The Importance of Project Closure
• The never-ending project exists when, for whatever reason, the project
deliverables and tasks cannot be completed.
• This may occur when tasks are delegated to team members who don't have
the skills necessary to complete the tasks or when deadlines aren't properly
communicated, maybe when user acceptance testing yields too many non-
launch blocking bugs, or when your client is unsatisfied, despite meeting
their requirements.

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The Importance of Project Closure
• Decide if your project warrants a small closing process at the end of each
milestone or a formal and more comprehensive closing phase near the very
end.
• You'll determine this by asking yourself if a particular milestone is final,
meaning the milestone will not need to be readdressed at a later time in the
project. If so, having a short, formal closeout will ensure that everyone is
clear on the outcomes of that particular milestone.

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The Importance of Project Closure
• Steps to conducting a closing process after each milestone or phase:
• Refer to prior documentation: such as your statement of work, request for proposal,
risk register, and RACI chart. Ask yourself, was all of the required work in the
elapsed phase done?
• Put together closing documentation: review that documentation with team members
to make sure that every aspect of the project has been discussed. You'll also review
notes from any retrospectives you and your team participated in.
• Conduct administrative closure of the procurement process. Close any contracts
necessary, deliver the payments to vendors, and retrieve all final deliverables from
contracted workers.
• Formally recognize the completion of the phase, if necessary.
• Execute necessary follow up work: like gathering final feedback and conducting
closing surveys.
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The Importance of Project Closure
• Steps to conducting a closing process at the end of the project:
• Provide the necessary training tools, documentation, and capabilities to use your
product.
• Ensure that the project has satisfied its goals and desired outcomes:
• Review the project to make sure that all tasks and deliverables were completed and nothing is
missing.
• Did you accomplish what you set out to do? Is the full scope of work completed?
• You'll also want to document acceptance from all stakeholders like clients and sponsors. Ensuring
that you have written proof that stakeholders are happy with the deliverables and outcomes is very
important.

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The Importance of Project Closure
• Steps to conducting a closing process at the end of the project (cont):
• Review all contracts and documentation with your project team. This includes things
like your SOW, RFP, RACI chart, risk register, and the procurement documents.
• Conduct a formal retrospective. Include your team, any other teams involved, your
stakeholders, and outside vendors in this meeting
• Disband and thank the project team.
• Impact reporting: a presentation that's given at the end of a project for key
stakeholders, which typically includes the stakeholders you had in the initial kick-off
meeting. The purpose of impact reporting is to demonstrate how the project went and
discuss the impact of your product or service.

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Impact Reporting
• Highlight these key performance areas to demonstrate to your stakeholders
how you achieved successful results and outcomes:
• First, describe the goals and objectives you set for the project and what you hoped to
have achieved by the end.
• Then, describe how you met those objectives against your KPIs. A KPI is a
measurable value that demonstrates how effective a company is at achieving their
objectives. In your impact report, review how you defined the success of your project
at the beginning, and highlight the outcomes you achieved that demonstrate this
success.
• Finally, showcase your schedule and budget performance by outlining your cost
savings and efficiencies. Demonstrate that you met the deadlines set in your project
scope and that your project was completed within budget.

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Impact Reporting
• Use facts and statistics to highlight the results you achieved related to the
performance areas described in the section above. Examples of common metrics
you might include to demonstrate a positive impact could include:
• Improvement in schedule performance
• Revenue growth
• Positive return on investment (ROI)
• Increased external user counts
• Increased percentage of internal users
• Cost vs. margins
• High percentage of customer satisfaction
• Reduction in overhead
• Reduction in technical issues
• Time saved
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Impact Reporting
• Highlight these key performance areas to demonstrate to your stakeholders
how you achieved successful results and outcomes:
• First, describe the goals and objectives you set for the project and what you hoped to
have achieved by the end.
• Then, describe how you met those objectives against your KPIs. A KPI is a
measurable value that demonstrates how effective a company is at achieving their
objectives. In your impact report, review how you defined the success of your project
at the beginning, and highlight the outcomes you achieved that demonstrate this
success.
• Finally, showcase your schedule and budget performance by outlining your cost
savings and efficiencies. Demonstrate that you met the deadlines set in your project
scope and that your project was completed within budget.

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The Closing Process for the Team
• The three main retrospective benefits for your team:
• Retrospectives encourage team-building because they allow team members to
understand differing perspectives.
• Retrospectives facilitate improved collaboration on future projects
• Retrospectives promote positive changes in future procedures and processes.

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The Closing Process for the Project Manager
• For a project manager, it's important to close the project properly for a
number of reasons:
• Closing provides an opportunity to reflect on how you and your team performed,
• Ensure every task is completed
• Prevent confusion around the project in the future.
• A project closeout report is a document created by project managers for
project managers.
• A project closeout report serves three major purposes:
• It's a blueprint to document what the team did, how they did it, and what they
delivered.
• It provides an evaluation of the quality of work.
• It evaluates the project's performance with respect to budget and schedule.
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The Closing Process for the Project Manager
• In a project closeout report, include the following things:
• An executive summary: this means a description of the process and what the purpose
of the project was. This should be short and concise.
• A list of key accomplishments: think of this as a way to highlight the team's
accomplishments, as well as the overall impact of the project. Include any lessons
learned, like: what went well, and why? What went wrong, and why? What were the
major effects of key problem areas, such as scope creep and schedule slip?
• Any open items: this could be things you didn't quite get to or ideas for changes you'd
make if you'd had the time.
• Your next steps: things like, are there expected follow up projects, and is there any
ongoing maintenance required?

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The Closing Process for the Project Manager
• In a project closeout report, include the following things:
• Important information about the schedule and important deadlines, like: what were
your milestones, and how did you choose them? How long did the project take? Did
the project stay on track?
• List resources and team members. Explain who is involved and what their roles were.
This is also a key way to acknowledge people who contributed to the project's
completion.
• Include a resources and project archive section.

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