Working Out Loud

3 min.

Summary

Working Out Loud is particularly suitable for working in projects. It is not a classical method, but claims to be an attitude to life – with associated practical techniques. The elements are: Making work visible and improving it, making contributions, building social networks and working together purposefully.

Introduction to WOL

Working Out Loud is an approach from the USA, which is particularly suitable for employees in projects. The initial father of the idea was Bryce Williams. John Stepper skillfully generated a movement out of it. It is currently sloshing across the ocean and gaining new users in Germany. This attitude to life also leads to lived values which are not everyday in this combination. Austin Kleon also presents similar approaches in Show Your Work.

The five core elements of Working Out Loud are (as originally listed on workingoutloud.de):

  • Make work visible – publish intermediate results,
  • improve work – cross-connections and feedback help to continuously
  • improve your results, make generous contributions – offer help instead of self-portrayal,
  • build social networks – this is how broad interdisciplinary relationships emerge that advance,
  • work together purposefully – to exploit the full potential of the community.

The application in a company like T-Systems with parallel application of classical project management is presented.

Content are practical examples of the application, the success criteria of the approach and its hurdles in a project organization before.

Working Out Loud in a project management organization

How does an application work in a group like T-Systems using classic project management approaches? Isn’t that contradictory? Employees at ThyssenKrupp, Robert Bosch and T-Systems practice these attitudes and techniques.

„Working Out Loud“ means „publishing“ one’s own work, reporting progress, problems and mistakes and exchanging information with other colleagues so that everyone can benefit from what has been learned. So nothing new you think spontaneously?! A combined application of the core elements of the Working Out Loud approach requires discipline, openness and consistency.

How does this happen in practice in the project?

The exchange in „one’s own juice“, i.e. in one’s own project, is not enough. A first basic requirement is to approach central departments such as those responsible for tools or processes, or in the best case also other projects. Even with positions that are often not very popular, such as central quality management units, project management handbook managers or tool owners, is necessary. An intensive exchange about objectives, application and solution of the upcoming challenge is a must. I have lived this consistently for my current project in which we had to develop a degree of progress and forecast process and tool that did not correspond to the company standard due to special circumstances. Even the sharing of micro results with project colleagues who are not (directly) affected raises undreamt-of potentials. The integration of stakeholders such as clients, users and policymakers is common practice, but only partially increases the potential. Networking also outside the Group for the exchange of ideas is essential. Otherwise, the efficiency and effectiveness of every project will suffer. The process, the specification, the tool, the training and the rollout took an unprecedented three weeks. Just two months after the introduction, what had been created was then presented to the annual group-wide worldwide project manager community and defined as good practice in the sense of „making contributions to the community“. A degree never achieved before in this time span. Strictly speaking, it is not only the speed that is unusual, but also the „overall“ (apart from standard processes and tools). Working Out Loud opens new horizons and brings a fresh vitality and interactivity into and around the projects.

Even in large corporations, this „combined approach“ Working Out Loud is applicable from already known approaches and bears fruit beyond the individual project.

The author presents further practical examples of the application, the success criteria of the Working Out Loud approach and also its hurdles in a project management organization.

Active participation in „WOL with Group Security and NDA“ working group

If you would like to actively participate in a working group on „Working Out Loud with Corporate Security and NDAs“, please contact me.

Presentation

In the spirit of the WOL I have released the presentation of the PM-Forum Version 3.0 again for commenting. Thank you very much for all previous hints about Version 1.0 and 2.0!

Advantage through early warning in the project – team spirit as an indicator

4 min.

– Methodical usage of emotions in the project –

Summary

As a project portfolio manager you want to avoid full blown up project audits in all of your projects to identify potential deviations. Therefore you may use a very simple survey to avoid any surprises.

As project director or project portfolio manager, you also have another early warning system at your disposal.

As a project or program manager you want to compare your current endeavor with previous engagements in a very simple way.

There are multiple ways to gather the team morale in project teams. I am using following approach for a few years now with reliable and sound results.

There is a systematic way in doing so by gathering “SmileyPoints” via an online survey tool. Examples for free tools are kwiksurveys.com, the free version of surveymonkey.com or Google Forms.

Questions to gather in the survey

  1. “How happy are you being on the program/project?” Then the below picture should be attached to this question.
  2. “What can Program / Project Management do to improve?”
  3. “What can you do yourself do to improve?”
  4. “Rumor Box: If there are rumors around and you have any questions related to these please let us know here to clarify.”

In larger programs you may add a question to identify the participant’s team assignment to be able to give indication on the discrepancies between the different teams within the program.

The survey should be run every second week in case of a longer lasting projects or programs. It can be a good trend indication during the project life cycle. The minimum participation of project members should exceed at least 10% of all project team members. Less will not be representative. For smaller teams a higher minimum participation ratio must be achieved.

Result interpretations

The average and the standard deviation of all results of responses to question number one gives you a clear indication on the team morale within the program or project team.

The higher the standard deviation of all values to question one the more obvious are
– a lack of communication within the team
(especially from top to down and bottom to up)
– roles and responsibilities not well defined or not transparent to the team and
– the scope not well defined or not transparent – at least to the extended team

The lower the average value of the results to question one is the less attractive is the project for the team members. Therefore the enthusiasm being part of the project is lower too. In very critical project situations (e. g. work life balance not achievable due to work load) the average tends to be low.

Now the question comes up of there is a *correlation between standard deviation and average”? Not really in all instances. The standard deviation should be low in a well-organized program. In the same over-worked organization if such things as structures, roles and responsibilities, communication channels, scope are well defined and transparent to the team the standard deviation should be still low.

The next questions is what is low and what is high”? A good one! Experience shows that values between +2 and +4 as an *averageare very common for projects in good shape. Of course there is a tendency for new joiners in a project to rate their personal happiness in areas of +6 to +10. These artifacts need a critical mass of responses to balance out.

This does not support the hypothesis that a new project with new team does automatically mean a good SmileyPoint average value. The team as a whole is well observing all team quality criteria before providing their SmileyPoints and in average the rating will be again to the “real” value.

On the other end of the SmileyPoint scale low average values as -6 to -2 indicate projects which are in a turnaround mode or at least in a need to turnaround. Immediate actions need to take place.

For standard deviation following pattern can be identified. Values of 6 show massive deficit of structures implemented, missing role definitions or at least transparency on it. Criteria e) to i) from below listing do impact the standard deviation up to my experience. Programs in a good shape show a standard deviation of less than 3. 

Of course a survey like this will not replace individual talks and interviews but it gives you a very precise supporting evidence of your findings in conversation or at least an initial feeling in case you did not have any contact to the program at all.

In a next posting I will list a couple of elements and ideas on what to implement to improve the SmileyPoints in your team.

Your comments and participation to improve SmileyPoints

Use SmileyPoints actively in your projects!

Your comments and active participation are welcome. Both can be entered in the following survey and you will be informed about new findings on request.

This values shall be gathered
– average and
– standard deviations
– number of participants out of total number of team members

from some of your projects and programs. Especially helpful would be if you can add a typical auditors or your personal rating on the same scale from below on following topic clusters:
a. team morale within the extended team
b. program financials in good shape and transparent to the project management
c. infrastructure well established (e. g. printers, office space)
d. right skills on board
e. architecture and solution well defined
f. methodologies applied properly
(e. g. project planning, issue and risk management)
g. roles and responsibilities and structure well defined
h. scope and acceptance and completion criteria well defined and transparent
i. governance well defined and in place

Please use this form to submit your feedback to improve SmileyPoints.

This article was originally published on 23.07.2011 on GooglePlus.