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Podcast episode 021: bonus episode - how to create new year project resolutions that work

This is a special year-end bonus episode of the pm411.org Project Management Podcast to show my appreciation to our faithful listeners. In this special episode I provide you with some tips on how you can make sure your project team starts off on the right foot for the upcoming year. Usually around this time of year, I have found the holidays to be a good time to think about how my projects have done over the course of the past year and what adjustments I’d like to make during the upcoming year. I think of this as a time to review project “lessons learned” without being tied to completing a particular project milestone, but rather as an opportunity to reflect and to go back and see what things have worked well and what has not worked well on my projects. Then I set goals on how I hope to improve my project for the new year. However, the new year goals I set are different than just setting typical new year resolutions. New year resolutions often seem to be made following a night of heavy partying and are usually a temporary way of showing penitence for the previous night’s debauchery. How many of us have said early on one New Year day or another that we would “never do that again” only to do it again the next year? But seriously, resolutions are usually not based on what is commonly known as SMART objectives- where SMART is an mnemonic that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Let me give you an example. There have been more than a few new year resolutions that some of us (names withheld) have broken in years past. Maybe we decided that in the upcoming year we were going to lose some extra pounds and get into shape. Our good intentions often failed because we didn’t follow SMART objectives and we were not specific in our goal. Perhaps we set out to lose weight, but we may not have had a specific number of pounds we wanted to lose to indicate success. Maybe we didn’t set up a consistent means of measuring and tracking our weight loss. Maybe our goal wasn’t even achievable - it probably would have been a good idea to consult a physician on what your ideal weight should be rather than expecting to look like that supermodel within a month. The goal also needs to be relevant - you must have the authority or the ability to make or influence the change and it needs to be relevant or important to do so. Being told by your physician that you need to lose weight in order to prevent a heart-attack is different than already looking like Nicole Richie and wanting to take weight off. This is not to make light of eating disorders, but some of these folks need to lose another pound like I need to grow another chin! And finally, perhaps our failure was because our goal wasn’t time-bound. Chances are that after the first couple of weeks of really trying to lose weight, you will start trying to trick yourself into thinking that you still have the rest of the year to lose the weight, so why rush? So now that we have looked at the wrong way of setting your new year resolutions, let’s go through the 7 step process of reviewing your past year’s performance and setting SMART objectives for your project in the upcoming year.

Step 1: Decide what needs to change

First, decide on a particular project that you want to change and write down the things that you and your team did well during the past year and those things that need improvement. You may want to consider the following 9 knowledge areas in the PMBOK as a starting place for your project review:

• Project scope management
• Project time management
• Project cost management
• Project human resource management
• Project procurement management
• Project risk management
• Project quality management
• Project integration management
• Project communications management

As an illustration, maybe there are some inconsistent areas within communications management that you would like to improve upon and change since your team members have indicated that they are unclear on what they should be focusing on each week and upper management wants to have more details on how the project is tracking against its metrics.

Step 2: Create a specific objective

Now, you don’t want to go into the new year with just a statement to “communicate better”. So, in Step 2, you will create and establish a specific objective for the coming year that is described in terms of a specific behavior / outcome and is linked to a quantifiable metric such as rate, number, percentage, or frequency. In our example, perhaps you have decided that you have been inconsistent in the past in publishing status reports for your project. So in Step 2 you establish that you will publish a 2 page weekly status report by 4pm every Friday afternoon that gives specific details on changes to the project schedule, budget, risk registry, completed tasks, and upcoming tasks. This specifically describes the change this year on your project.

Step 3: Determine how you will monitor and control your progress

In Step 3, you will need to decide how you will measure the behavior or action that you are changing. In the case of measuring our ability to submit status reports on a weekly basis, you could create a simple spreadsheet to track when your status reports were actually published and distributed in comparison to your objective of having them published and distributed by 4pm every Friday. This way you can make any corrections to your behavior as needed to help insure you meet your goal.

Step 4: Insure that your objective will be achieved

Is your objective achievable? If you have concerns that it will not be successful as it is currently stated, now is the time to revisit and revise your goal to insure it is attainable. For example, to insure the success of your weekly status reporting, you may need to get the commitment of your team members to provide you with the data required by Thursday to accurately publish it on a weekly basis on Friday.

Step 5: Determine if your objective is relevant to your team and organization’s goals

The question you want to ask in Step 5 is does your goal address the issue that you identified in Step 1? Going back to our example, does the weekly status report address help to address what team members should focus on each week and how the project is tracking against its goals?

Step 6: Be clear on the time frame of the goal

Your project’s goal needs to have a definitive start date and review points. For instance, what date will you start publishing your weekly status report? How often will you review the progress of your goal and to verify whether it is still Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely? Will you continue weekly status reports throughout the life of the project? In our example, you and your team decide to start the weekly status report format on the very first Friday of the year and review how well it is working once a quarter.

Step 7: Put your goal into action!

This is probably the most important of the seven steps. Without action you will not have change. Follow-through on your team’s goal and insure that you are following the other 6 steps throughout the life of the objective. By following these 7 steps you can feel confident that you have a much better chance of success than you would by just making the typical new year resolution. So, heere’s to you and your team’s success in the coming year! Happy New Year!

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