ETP: News

How To Put A Man On The Moon If You're A Kid

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 10:41:00

Throughout their school career, every schoolchild in the world is given projects to do. Once they leave school, many go into jobs where they have to run other, much more significant projects. Yet – bizarrely - no child is ever taught how to plan and run projects. It should be no surprise to us, therefore, that so many large projects routinely run late or over budget or fail to deliver what was required. We have not even taught the basic skills to the people involved! Imagine if we didn’t teach anyone arithmetic but we still expected people to become accountants and scientists and engineers.

This book teaches project management to kids. It shows how, whether it’s a tiny project about 'My favourite pop star' or a huge project to say, put a man on the Moon, the same method, the same techniques apply. In 90 pages the book describes this method in simple language that an 8 – 16 year old child could understand.

Contents

Introduction

How To Use This Book

Part I Planning Your Project

Chapter 1. Know what you’re trying to do
Chapter 2. Figure out what jobs have to be done to get the
project done
Chapter 3. Figure out how big all the jobs are
Chapter 4. Figure out when those jobs have to be done
Chapter 5. Figure out who’s going to do the jobs
Chapter 6. Figure out how much the project will cost
Chapter 7. Gotta have a leader
Chapter 8. Figure out what to do if things go wrong

Part 2 Carrying Out Your Plan

Chapter 9. Do what the plan says
Chapter 10. Get people to do things for you
Chapter 11. Let everyone know what’s happening
Chapter 12. Learn from your project

Introduction - Zero Waste in Business

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:58:00

Introduction

Look down the following list and see whether any of these things apply to your organisation:

o Priorities appear to be constantly changing
o Everybody working long hours (10 – 16 hours a day) over sustained periods of time is standard practise
o So-called ‘fire fighting’ is standard practise
o There is no real culture of proper planning
o Pressure and stress are so severe that they effect peoples’ health
o There is no sense of having a work / life balance. (Peoples’ feelings about work may range from ‘don’t particularly enjoy working here’ through to ‘dread going in in the morning’)
o Projects are only completed with huge effort and overtime
o Some projects are not completed at all or go badly astray
o Nasty surprises are commonplace
o There is a sense that there is a lot of wasted time, effort, resources or money. (This includes the same problem ending up being solved several times – or work having to be redone.)
o There is a feeling that while the way we do things at the moment may not be perfect, it’s the best way there is. (And certainly anyone who questions the way things are done is probably met with some of the phrases below.)
o These things just described are believed to be ‘part of the culture of the organisation’
o There is a sort of permanent backlog which never seems to get cleared
o Management use any of the following (or similar) phrases:
    o ‘This is a very aggressive schedule / deadline’
    o ‘That’s just the culture here’
    o ‘I don’t want to hear anybody using the word “can’t”’
    o ‘We like a can-do attitude here’
    o ‘Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions’
    o ‘You’re going to have to learn to do more with less’
    o ‘You’re being inflexible’
    o ‘You’re not being a team player’
    o ‘Work smarter, not harder’
    o ‘Is this plan based on a five day week?’
    o ‘You’re lucky to have a job’
    o ‘We don’t have time to plan it, just go do it’
    o JFDI [where the ’J’ stands for ‘just’, the ‘D’ for ‘do’ and the ‘I’ for ‘it’]
    o ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll find somebody who will’
    o ‘We have no choice – we have to do it’
    o ‘That’s not the kind of attitude we want around here’
    o ‘We want can-do people here’
    o ‘I don’t think you’re suited to the culture of this organisation’.

If you said yes to any one of these then you’d better read this book.

For reasons that I’ll explain in the next few chapters, organisations that have these characteristics end up being run with very large amounts of waste. This waste can come from up to seven different sources as described in chapter 2. I refer to organisations that are run like this as Big Waste organisations.

While the characteristics that I have described are commonplace, they are not inevitable or necessary. It is possible to run successful organisations where none of these things happen, where little or none of this waste occurs. For obvious reasons then, I call these organisations Zero Waste organisations.

This book covers everything you need to know to turn your organisation into a Zero Waste one. Whether you are in the public or private sector, profit-making or not-for-profit, a company, a division, a department, a section, a team – whatever - you can take the ideas in this book and become an organisation where:

o Projects completing predictably on time and within budget is the norm. Projects going off the rails and nasty surprises are somewhat unusual.
o Your operation is the part of the organisation that works best
o Priorities and changes of priority are clear to everybody and occur a lot less frequently than currently
o In general people work standard 8 hour (or whatever is standard for you) days and late and weekend working is something of a rarity
o There is a culture of proper planning. The maxim, ‘a little planning is better than a lot of firefighting’ is embedded in the organisation
o You can know in five minutes if a project is in good shape or not
o You can know right at the beginning of the year whether your targets are achievable or not
o You can recognise the difference between ‘stretch goals’ / ‘aggressive schedules’ and losing the plot
o You get more done and spend less time doing it
o You vastly reduce fire fighting and waste of time, effort, money and resources
o You get projects done in the shortest possible time
o You know how to respond correctly when you get handed an impossible mission
o Pressure and stress are severely reduced
o You still have a life.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 has five chapters. Chapter 1 describes how to know if you’ve got the condition that I’ve called Big Waste. Chapter 2 shows you where the waste is occurring. Chapter 3 offers a theory as to why Big Waste occurs. Chapter 4 summarises the steps that need to be taken to solve the problem of Big Waste and turn a Big Waste organisation into a Zero Waste one. Chapter 5 describes some basic skills and knowledge needed to begin that journey.

Part 2 of the book, which has five chapters, explains how to install a Zero Waste system i.e. the steps you have to take to begin the journey of transforming your organisation. You can think of this as the ‘Getting Started’.

Part 3 of the book has four chapters and describes how to move your organisation to Zero Waste. If Part 2 of the book was the ‘Getting Started’, Part 3 is the ‘Keeping It Going’.
In order to make the concepts as real as possible, I have used a made-up worked example. The example is of a medium-sized company (of about fifty people) in the technology products sector. Each chapter of the book shows how the ideas and concepts described would be applied in such an organisation. In addition, it will be made clear – if it isn’t self-evident - how these ideas and concepts would be scaled up or down for bigger or smaller organisations.

Don’t expect to find any complicated ideas in this book. The ideas are simple. But somewhere along the way it seems to me we have lost both the ability to look for simple solutions and the high regard in which such solutions should be held.

Anyway, the promise of this book is simple. Run a successful organisation and get home on time. If this appeals to you then turn the page and let’s get started.

Chapter 1 Big Waste - How to Know if You've Got it.

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:57:00

Almost all organisations, no matter what sector or business they are in, operate in broadly the same way.

In a typical organisation this is what happens. At the beginning of the year, the owners or shareholders or board decide that they want to do ‘more’ business as usual. They say they want to capture X percent more customers or market share, increase revenue by Y or profit by Z, sell such and such a percent more widgets and so on. They also want to do some brand new things – new products, services, initiatives, take new directions.

The management team takes this mission and launches a bunch of projects designed to make sure that both of these major thrusts (business as usual and new initiatives) are realised. They often say the kind of things mentioned in the Introduction. While some of these phrases may sound quite different from each other, they in fact all have common undertones. These undertones are:

    o What we’re being asked to do is really tough
    o But it’s certainly doable
    o And we know you’re the man / woman for the job
    o And if you say you can’t do it, you’re being disloyal in some way
    o And planning is for wimps – the way to get this done is just to go in and do it.

Everybody in the organisation now has (a) maybe a day job and (b) almost certainly, a project-related workload. Most management teams expect everybody to undertake this work load. For this reason planning becomes somewhat secondary. Indeed planning can come to be viewed as something of a problem. After all, we don’t want plans showing us that the things we are trying to do are impossible, now do we?

Symptoms:
o There is no real culture of proper planning
o Use of the phrases identical or similar to those in the Introduction

Because plans are non-existent or inadequate, there is no real measure of whether there are enough people to do all the work. (You may have heard the old saw, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’). The suspicion (or it could be much stronger than that) is that that there aren’t. But it doesn’t matter – because somehow, the view is, we’ll find a way. In reality, that ‘somehow’ is generally pretty obvious and well known to everybody. If there aren’t enough people to do all the work, then the existing people can just work harder. And this is exactly what happens- the troops begin to work harder and harder, longer and longer hours.

Symptom:
o Everybody working long hours (10 – 16 hours a day) over sustained periods of time is standard practise

Despite this, something – either a project or some business as usual thing - starts to drift. (This is inevitable if there aren’t enough people to do all the work.) Eventually – it’s usually as late as possible because nobody wants to be seen to be the bearer of bad news – somebody realises that there’s a problem.

Symptom:
o Nasty surprises are commonplace

When this happens there’s a bit of a stink. Some senior manager or customer begins to jump up and down about ‘their’ thing. If they shout loud enough people are switched onto that thing and the thing that lost the people is told to work even harder.

Symptom:
o Priorities appear to be constantly changing

They do work harder – but it doesn’t make any difference. That or some other thing now starts to drift, despite the long hours being worked. And the thing to which people were moved doesn’t necessarily speed up. There are learning curves and people need to come up to speed and they make mistakes that people who were already familiar with the thing had stopped making ages ago.

Life carries on like this until management realises that something else is drifting. The same events occur – a stink, jumping up and down, people being moved from one thing to another, the progress on more and more things not being what was expected. And so the year unfolds.

Symptom:
o So-called ‘fire fighting’ is standard practise

Eventually the end of the year comes round. Some things have been done, many haven’t. Many have come in late and / or over-budget. Right up to the last minute it’s perhaps not been a hundred percent clear which things – out of all the things we set out to do at the beginning of the year – are going to end up being done and which are going to be left undone.

Symptoms:
    o Projects are only completed with huge effort and overtime
    o Some projects are not completed at all or go badly astray
    o There is a sort of permanent backlog which never seems to get cleared
    o There is a sense that there is a lot of wasted time, effort, resources or money.

Some people are burnt out and leave. Everybody thinks it’s been a tough year and that they worked really hard.

Symptoms:
o Pressure and stress are so severe that they effect peoples’ health
o There is no sense of having a work / life balance. (Peoples’ feelings about work may range from ‘don’t particularly enjoy working here’ through to ‘dread going in in the morning’)

There is a sense of having triumphed in the face of adversity. We sure earned our salaries and bonuses this year, we think. Yep - we did one hell of a job.

Symptoms:
o There is a feeling that while the way we do things at the moment may not be perfect, it’s the best way there is
o These things just described are believed to be ‘part of the culture of the organisation’.

If any of this sounded familiar, if you saw any of these symptoms in your organisation, then there’s a fair chance that you’ve got Big Waste to a greater or a lesser extent.

But no, you’re saying, you’ve got it all wrong. While we may have these symptoms, we don’t have the problem. These are just the way we are, just normal characteristics of our organisation and the way we do business.

Really? Read on.

Chapter 2 Big Waste - Hey, That's Not Us!

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:12:00

‘Whoa! Wait a minute,’ you say. ‘We may do and say some of the things you talk about, but we don’t have a problem with waste’:

    o ‘We’re a start-up. We’re lean and mean and hungry. There’s not much flab in our organisation’; or
    o ‘We’ve had to downsize. We’re having to do more with less. You won’t find much waste in this organisation; or
    o ‘We’re in a very fast-changing sector. Priorities do change all the time’; or
    o ‘This isn’t a holiday camp. So what if we sweat our resources a bit’; or
    o ‘Firefighting - it’s the nature of our business’; or
    o ‘’All our competitors work this way. If we don’t well that’s the end of us’; or
    o ‘We’ve got a great team here. They know what they’re doing’; or
    o ‘Not everyone is suited to working here’.

All of this may or may not be true. But let me tell you the seven ways there may be waste in your organisation. If none of these apply to you, close the book and pass it along to somebody who needs it.

1 There is waste every time you switch people between projects

Every time a so-called priority changes and you take people off one project / assignment and put them on to another one, waste occurs. It occurs on the project they come from because now that project has to reconfigure itself and see how they’re going to get the thing done now. If they decide to just work longer hours to make the deadline then see #4 below. If they announce some kind of slip or delay then that’s going to cause further downstream waste because what the project was meant to deliver (savings, revenues, profits) will now be delayed. On the project they move on to, there will be waste as you bring them on board, bring them up to speed, they have a learning curve, they take time away from people already working on the project, you have to train them, they require hand-holding and nurturing. You have to find places for them to work, tools to work with and integrate them into the team. Don’t forget too about Brooks’ Law [2] – ‘adding people to a late project makes it later’. So that adding people to a project doesn’t always speed it up. In fact, adding people to a project may have:

    o Little effect
    o No effect
    o Could actually slow it down.

2 There is waste every time you don’t plan a project properly

If you think about it, projects get done through a sequence of events. There are three ways this sequence of events can be built. Two of them are less efficient than the third. (I should also add that, in my experience, the third is the least widely used.)

The first way that you can build the sequence of events is not do anything at all – you just let fate or luck do it! Here’s what working on such a project would be like. Charlie arrives in in the morning and says, ‘Hmmm, what’ll I do today?’ He does something. Then he realises he needs something from somebody else, so he wanders down the corridor and says, ‘Hey Fred, do you have that other thing?’ But maybe Fred says he won’t have that until Friday and so Charlie shrugs and does something else and so the project unfolds with things just ... well, sort of happening. Will there be waste on such a project? Is there bear poo in the woods?

Now clearly nobody would consciously do this and deliberately decide that they’re going to let fate / luck run their project. But in your organisation today there are almost certainly projects that are being run exactly like this. Typically, they’re not being run like this because people are stupid or incompetent. They’re being run like this because people don’t have enough time available to run the project. If people are too busy, are trying to keep too many balls in the air, are multi-tasking so much that they don’t have time available to run the project, then fate / luck just takes over. But you need to remember that fate / luck is the worst project manager there is.

The second way you can build the sequence of events is to do it in real time. Here’s what this is like. You arrive in in the morning and look at your to-do list. You start doing the first thing on the list but then somebody asks you to come to the nine thirty meeting. During the meeting, somebody knocks on the door and says, ‘Can I speak to you for a minute?’ While you’re speaking to them, your mobile phone rings so you answer that. Then your computer goes ‘bing!’ because an email has arrived. And then your land line rings … You get the idea. You sort of ricochet through the day. Gotta go here, gotta go there, do that thing, talk to that guy … You may be familiar with the ‘f’ word – ‘fire fighting’.

Fire fighting is a term used to describe how you deal with crises or unexpected events. A fire fight occurs when something you didn’t anticipate occurs and you have to deal with it.
Now, absolutely fire fighting happens on projects. No matter how carefully they’re planned, on your projects and my projects, fire fights are going to happen. But not everything that happens on a project is a fire fight. Many things that happen on projects could have been predicted – if only you’d thought about them. Fire fighting – the recipe for a short, unhappy life – is certainly not the way to run a project efficiently and without waste.

That leaves one other possibility when it comes to building the sequence of events. This is to do it right at the beginning – before you have made any commitments to any stakeholders, before you start hiring people or allocating jobs or burning up the budget – you build as much of the sequence of events as you can. Fire fights will still happen – but then you can save your energy for the things that are genuine fire fights; as opposed to the things which would never have become fire fights in the first place, if only you had thought about them.

Building this sequence at the beginning has another name. It’s called planning.

3 There is waste every time you have to deal with a fire fight

Whether you planned the project well or not, there is waste every time you have to deal with a fire fight. The more fire fights, the more waste. Over time you can reduce the amount of fire fighting you do by understanding why the fire fight occurred and factoring that into your planning next time out. But notice that that just leads you back to proper planning.

4 There is waste because people are working long hours

You may think that because people are working long hours over sustained periods you’re sweating your resources and maximising your productivity. Think again, comrade.

Let’s be clear. This is not about a short ‘push’ to hit a deadline or make a milestone or solve a customer problem. This is about overtime (10 – 16 hour days) over long, sustained periods of time.

Burnout hours are bad because people quickly become less efficient than if they had just worked a normal forty hour week. While this may sound counterintuitive, if you think about it you can see why this would be the case.

Imagine, first of all, that you were going to have the hottest date of your life at 8 PM this evening. How would you organize your day? Well, to begin with, you’d probably plan to leave at say 5 PM. For you this would be a hard deadline every bit as vital as having to catch a plane, a train or pick up kids from the crèche. Just to be on the safe side, you might actually plan to have all your work done by 4 PM. Then, if some genius did come in to you late in the day looking for something urgent, you would have an hour’s contingency to deal with it.

You would plan your day carefully, figuring out exactly what had to get done so that you could leave by 4 PM. You would be brisk with time wasters, not allowing them to take much of your time and in the process jeopardising your date. The result would be that the important things would get done and you would be ready by 4 PM to go home, scrub up, put your glad rags on to get to your rendezvous.

Now contrast this with if you’re coming in to face into a day which will last from say 8 AM to 8 PM or later. And this is not an isolated day. You have been doing this for a long time and, as far as you can tell, will continue to do it for the foreseeable future. Not only that, but you haven’t been having weekends or evenings to recover from these days. And maybe you haven’t been eating or sleeping very well. Or getting much or any exercise. And you haven’t been seeing too much of your loved ones. In short, your life has narrowed to being at work, thinking about work, bringing work home with you, or cancelling other things so you can work.

Now how will you spend your day? Well, you will be lazy with your time. Somebody wants to stop for a chat, you’ll be happy to chat with them for ages. You may take long breaks or spend time messing around with your inbox or doing any number of other time-wasting things. This is because you know you have a vast amount of hours to spend each day and that if something doesn’t get done today then there’s always an equally vast number of hours tomorrow. In short – productivity goes out the window.

So working burnout hours is bad in that it’s just not productive. There is lots of attendance but not much achievement – at least not as much as there would be if you were just going home on time. If you want a supporting opinion on this, read [1] especially chapter 15.

5 There is waste every time a project goes astray or is cancelled

In the former, there is waste because of the delayed benefits (savings, revenues, profit). In the latter there is the waste of all the time, energy, resources, effort and money that went into it.

6 There is waste because morale goes down

It's difficult to measure but this is the waste due to people’ physical and mental health suffering. I both know of and have heard numerous stories of people who have suffered breakdowns through overwork on projects. Physical health suffers resulting in lost days through illness – never mind the effect on the people themselves.
And relationships suffer. With wives, husbands, partners, girlfriends, boyfriends, children, parents, siblings. I know of marriages that have broken up because of this issue. Or (especially) men wondering where their children’s childhoods went. If their work is causing people to experience things like this, think that’s going to be good for productivity?

7 There is waste due to multitasking

When people are multitasking, there is now additional work introduced. This is the put-down-pick-up overhead that occurs every time they have to lay one thing aside and pick up something else to work on it. As they put down, they (hopefully) try to organise the thing such that it’ll be easy to pick up again. Then, as they pick up, there is the work involved in getting their head around the new thing.

And here is a terrifying calculation.

Let’s say that there’s a job that has to be done on your project and you estimate it to be 10 man-days. Charlie’s going to do it and Charlie’s available full time i.e. 5 days a week. Then the duration of this job is 2 weeks – 5 days the first week, 5 days the second week, job done.

Now supposing it was to happen that Charlie was only available one day a week and you know how easily this can occur. Charlie is involved in another project which was meant to have finished but it hasn’t quite finished yet, so he has to spend time there. And Charlie is the only guy who knows about the X project or system or thing and there are some issues with that. And there’s been a customer-related issue that Charlie’s having to deal with … You know how it goes.

With 1 day a week, Charlie’s job will take 10 weeks. And this doesn’t take into account that the job will now probably be bigger than 10 MD now, because there is going to be the additional effect of Charlie putting it down and picking it up a week later. But never mind about that for now. This thing of we-estimated-5-days-a-week-we-got-1, doesn’t sound that serious. On a big project you mightn’t even pick up that it had happened. On a small project, with Charlie sitting behind you, you mightn’t pick up that it had happened. Yet, this one little thing, that doesn’t appear that serious, can potentially cause a two month delay on this project (10 weeks minus 2 weeks).

And let’s not forget the put-down-pick-up effect which now adds extra time to this job, so that the demand increases making a bad situation worse. And remember that this is one job belong to one Charlie. Is this the only job of Charlie’s that this is happening to? I don’t think so. And is Charlie the only person to whom this is happening? Unlikely.

Another way to think about multitasking is with the idea of availability. The more multitasking a person does, the less availability they have to work on projects. Not knowing people’s correct availability will just eat away at your project. You’ll start and almost immediately, you’ll start to fall behind schedule. The team will work a bit harder, longer hours. But it won’t do any good. You’ll continue to slip. You’ll be sending out status reports saying things like, ‘We’ve lost a bit of ground but we hope to make it up later in the project’ – one of life’s greatest illusions. One day you wake up and you’re miles adrift of where you expected to be.

As I said earlier, if none of these seven apply to you, you can stop reading now.

Preface - Zero Waste in Business

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:13:00

Imagine if you will, the following. You get a job managing a small car repair / servicing shop. The owner of the shop has been running it up until now but he wants to hire somebody in who has had proper business and management training. That’s you. There will be generous profit-sharing.

The shop employs two mechanics and there is a rule of thumb that each mechanic can service two cars a day. Obviously this is a rough rule – cars can take longer or shorter and sometimes big jobs have to be done which can last several days. But, in general, the two cars a day rule of thumb works pretty well. It even allows some time for those inevitable walk-in clients or emergencies. The owner tells you that the car repair shop is a relatively happy place to work and a fairly simple place to manage.

Now, as we’ve said, you’ve come from a much more sophisticated organisation where people used to talk about ‘stretch goals’ and ‘ambitious targets’ and ‘aggressive schedules’ and ‘tough challenges’. And you decide that the car repair shop needs to be exposed to these ideas. So you tell the two mechanics that you’re going to ‘grow the business by twenty percent this year.’ You’re also going to offer a new service where you will collect and return the client’s car. The mechanics will do the collecting and returning. You tell them that this will enable them to ‘get closer to the customer’.

So you do some marketing and sure enough, business starts to increase. The mechanics get more overtime, the business makes more money and the customers get a better service. Everybody’s happy.

Business continues to increase. But you don’t want to hire any more mechanics to deal with the increased workload because that will increase costs and eat into your profits. So instead, you tell the existing mechanics things like they’ll ‘have to work smarter, not harder’ and that if they don’t do it, you’ll find somebody who will and that they should be bringing you problems not solutions and that they’re not committed enough and other useful advice like this.

The mechanics used to take a twenty minute tea break morning and afternoon (which often became half an hour) but with the increased pressure, they have to stop doing this. You’re pleased about this because you never liked the idea much anyway. (Never mind that, as well as talking about football and girls and the weekend, the mechanics used to plan their work during these breaks and discuss technical problems.)

Now things start to go to hell a bit. Customers’ cars aren’t ready when promised. And since some customers tend to get more irate than others, these ones are given priority. But that means that you inevitably lose some customers who aren’t happy with the service they are getting. And the mechanics complain because priorities are constantly changing. Back in the old days, when a car came in, a mechanic worked on it pretty much until it was done. Now, because of all the juggling of different jobs, the two mechanics are constantly switching from one priority to another. This adds further to the overload as, when they return to a particular car, they have to get their head back around the problem again which takes additional time.

Because of the pressure to get cars picked up, worked on and delivered, mistakes are made. And so work is done which has to be re-done. And there are more unhappy customers, refusing to pay for repairs or looking for discounts / refunds or saying that jobs are going to have to be re-done or taking their business elsewhere. And of course, all of this loses you money.

And what used to be a happy place to work had become a place of great stress, long hours and unhappiness. Finally, one of the mechanics leaves and the word on the street is that this shop is not a place where people would want to work. Revenue may be up but profits are definitely down due to the waste caused by:
    o No planning and resulting wasted effort
    o Work being thrown away
    o Re-work
    o Switching between jobs.

And that’s not even to mention loss of staff motivation and unhappy customers.
But, of course, you’re a good manager. You would never preside over such a stupid scenario.

Instead, your organisation is probably like most organisations. At the beginning of the year, the owners or shareholders or board decide that they want to grow business as usual by say, 15%. They also want to do some brand new things – new products, services, initiatives, take new directions. The management team takes this mission and launches a bunch of projects. Everybody in the organisation now has (a) maybe a day job and (b) almost certainly, a project-related workload. Most management teams expect everybody to undertake this work load. They say things like ‘that’s just the culture here’ or ‘I don’t want to hear anybody using the word “can’t” or ‘we like a can-do attitude here’ or ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions’ or ‘we’re going to have to learn to do more with less’ or - if somebody objects to all of this – ‘you’re being inflexible’ or ‘not a team player’ or (these days) ‘you’re lucky to have a job’. They also say things like ‘we don’t have time to plan it, just go do it’ and that is exactly what happens – projects and initiatives are either not planned properly or planned at all.

If the management team is a bit more enlightened it will tell people to schedule themselves say, 70% for their day job and the remaining 30% for project work. While this is a great idea in theory, it almost never happens on the ground. And anyway how can somebody schedule themselves 70% for their day job if it’s a full-time job? Not do some bit of it? Which bit?

The troops begin to work harder and harder, longer and longer hours. Despite this, something – either a project or some business as usual thing - starts to drift. Eventually there’s a bit of a stink about this thing. Some senior manager or customer begins to jump up and down about ‘their’ thing. If they shout loud enough people are switched onto that thing and the thing that lost the people is told to work harder. They do – but it doesn’t make any difference. That thing now starts to drift, despite the long hours being worked. And the thing to which people were moved doesn’t necessarily speed up. There are learning curves and people need to come up to speed and they make mistakes that people who were already familiar with the thing had stopped making ages ago.

Life carries on like this until something else is seen to be drifting. The same events occur – a stink, jumping up and down, people being moved from one thing to another, the progress on more and more things not being what was expected.

Eventually the end of the year comes round. Some things have been done, many haven’t. Many have come in late and / or over-budget. Some people are burnt out and leave. Everybody thinks it was a tough year, but they worked really hard. There is a sense of having triumphed in the face of adversity. We sure earned our salaries and bonuses this year, we think. Yep - we did one hell of a job.

And there’s certainly no comparison between what we’ve done and the earlier car repair shop scenario. No comparison at all. Nossir, none. Well, apart that is, from:
    o Not having enough people to do all the work.
Oh, and:
    o Not planning enough or properly.
And … well …there’s:
    o Constantly changing priorities and switching between jobs.
Not to forget:
    o The wasted time, effort and money
And, of course:
    o Not knowing which jobs are going to be done and which jobs aren’t.
No, apart from these there are no comparisons at all.

Distance Learning from ETP

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:16:00

You want to train your people:

o But it’s almost impossible to get them all together in the one place at the one time
o And anyway, you can’t spare the 2-3 days per person the training will take
o And conventional training is far too expensive.

So why not try a different approach? Click on http://www.etpint.com/training/subscriptions/

Earn More, Stress Less Coaching

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:49:00

The idea behind Earn More, Stress Less is simple – get all the money you want and stop worrying about money. You can do it with the book just by doing what it says. But you know how it goes when you try to do something like this by yourself – life often has a habit of getting in the way. Day to day concerns take over, your attention wanders and soon it becomes just another great idea that never came to anything.

With Earn More, Stress Less Coaching from Fergus this won’t happen. You’ll stay focussed. You’ll start to see results very quickly. And your original investment will be repaid many times over as the money you’ve asked for starts to flow to you.

You can begin the process of signing up for coaching now just by sending an email to Fergus Fergus.oconnell@etpint.com explaining what you’re trying to achieve.

Pricing for Earn More, Stress Less Coaching for the next three months of 2010 is as follows.
                                    Sign up in                  Price in Euros
                                        April                               895
                                        May                                995
                                        June                              1,095

Earn More, Stress Less - Read an extract from the book

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:45:00

Introduction

One thing’s for sure. Over the next few years an awful lot of people are going to spend an awful lot of time, effort, energy and sleepless nights worrying about money. People who never, or rarely, had to do it before are going to have to do it now. The Credit Crunch / Collapse of the Banking System / Second Great Depression – whatever you care to call it – is going to result in, is already resulting in, unhappiness, depression, ill-health, broken relationships - and worse - on a scale that is hard to imagine.

Yet there is a way out and numerous teachers / philosophers / writers, both past and present, have pointed to it. Philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Emerson and more recently people like Deepak Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne have all shown how anybody can have as much money as they need.

So why this book?

The answer is that this is practical – like all of my previous books. Rather than giving vague or complicated or airy-fairy or new-age sounding advice, it is a how-to book. It provides examples, exercises, templates and how-to’s to enable the reader to get all the money they want. Deepak Chopra will tell you, for example, to ‘release this list of my desires and surrender it to the womb of creation, trusting that when things don’t seem to go my way, there is a reason, and that the cosmic plan has designs for me much grander than even those that I have conceived’ (Chopra, 1996). I will tell you how (and why you need) to do these things.

You’d be entirely justified in asking what my credentials are in writing it. Am I as rich as Croesus? Why haven’t you seen me on Dragon’s Den? Or in the press trumpeting my own achievements?

Well, my credentials are these. First I have enough money for all my needs. I pay taxes in Ireland and – without in any way meaning to boast – last year, I was in the top 1% of earners in that country. Does this mean I’ve never had money problems? Hell no. I’ve experienced not being able to pay the mortgage, not having money for food, banks regarding me as a lower form of life than pond weed. I’ve had the sheriff call. On January 1 2001 I had a business-related debt of € 750,000. I have more first-hand experience than many of the terrors that come with lack of money.

However, between 2001 and 2006 I cleared that debt using the ideas in this book. My income in 2008 was double what it was in 2007 as a result of using the ideas in this book. My next objective, which I expect to see realised this year, is to make a million euros – € 800,000 in earnings and € 200,000 in debt reduction (i.e. becoming mortgage-free).

In summary - if I’m not any richer than that, it’s because I don’t want to be or need to be. I’m living the life I want on the money I earn and I don’t worry about money.
And so can you. It doesn’t matter what’s happened to you in the past or what your current situation is. It doesn’t matter what bad luck or lousy breaks or terrible things that have happened to you – and I know that lots of lousy things have happened to lots of people. The central proposition of this book is that if you do the things it shows you, you can live the life you want to live, have all the money you want / need and you won’t have to worry about money. If this idea appeals to you then read on.

If you look around at other books on making money, they generally fall into three categories.

Biographies of successful businessmen
‘Stop buying lattes very day and pretty soon you’ll have a big stash in the bank’ kind of books
‘Principles’ of making money or becoming rich.

This book is none of these. Instead it harnesses what is usually referred to – though other people have other names for it - as the universal Law of Attraction. If that’s already sounding too new-age for you, don’t worry. You won’t find much that’s new age in this book. This book is firmly anchored in the practical.

In this book I will ask you to do certain things. They will all seem eminently sensible and practical. Yet in doing them you will be using the Law of Attraction. From time to time, I will refer to this Law and some books on the subject, to provide a context for Earn More, Stress Less. You, on the other hand, can go through this entire book, make all the money you want and never have to think about the Law of Attraction – if that’s what you want.

For the three months that I was writing this book, some people acted as case studies. They were introduced to the ideas in the book and began to try them out. Their experiences, feelings and reactions are dotted throughout the book. All talk about the benefits they have gained. All have said that they intend to continue.

The book is divided into three parts called

Decide how much you want
Have a plan
Believe.

These three things – figure out how much you want, build a plan and believe - are the things you must do if you want to earn more and stress less. Most of the chapters have one or more sections called ‘Go Do It’. These are where I ask you to do the things necessary to begin getting all the money you want. You can see that these are the most important parts of the book. When you come to do these exercises it would be good to keep them together – maybe in a special notebook or in a particular folder on your computer.

Part 1, How Much Do You Want will help you get a sense of what life will be like as your money starts to flow in. As one of my case study people said, ‘I have to say I enjoyed doing it, and the “feel good” aura is still with me.’ As you work your way through Part 2, you will start to feel really positive. You will be taking action. You will be taking your situation by the scruff of the neck and doing something about it instead of passively taking what life is doing to you. I completely accept that no matter how up-beat you are, there are times when it can all become too much. That is what Part 3 is there for – to stop yourself from worrying, stressing or becoming depressed – and, in the process, undoing all the good work you’ve done in Parts 1 and 2.

As part of my research for this book, I came across a number of examples of well-known people who have used the Law of Attraction. These were people like Oprah Winfrey, Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert cartoons), Jack Canfield (one of the people featured in the book, The Secret) and TV presenter Noel Edmonds. Are these people famous and wealthy because the Law of Attraction applies to them, and only to them? Come on - sounds a bit unlikely really, doesn’t it? Are they famous and wealthy because they have some amazing, unique talent? Well, they have talents – for sure – but we all do, don’t we? We all have talents that make us unique? Are they famous and wealthy because they live in a certain city or state or country or area? Nope – doesn’t seem to be that. Or is it because they are involved in a certain line of work? Uh, don’t think so. Maybe they save a lot and that’s why they’re rich? Well I’m sure they have savings but I think we can probably assume that that’s not the answer either.

It’s something else, isn’t it?

In conclusion, let me ask this. What’s your alternative to all of this? Well, it seems to me it’s to sit at home, watch day-time television and bemoan your lot. Don’t! Where’s that going to get you? Get out and do something? Do what this book tells you. Then watch the results flow. It may be a bad time for you – it is for many people. But think of your journey through this book as an adventure – a game, if you like. You may not have a lot to lose. You have much to gain.

So, let’s begin – and good luck.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:55:00

Lots of people say it. Very few people know what it means.

Now, with ETP, you can do a course on it.

Of course training budgets have been slashed. But this is the one course that you and your people need to do this year.

To find out why and for more information email info@etpint.com with a title line ‘Work Smarter Not Harder’.

Don’t do anything else on your project until you’ve done this!

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:11:00

If you’ve ever watched TV hospital dramas like ER, then you’ll know the scene when the crash cart comes through the door and the A&E doctor checks for the patient’s ‘vital signs’. The vital signs are the handful of things which tell the doctor the key things they need to know about the patient.

Just as people have vital signs, projects have vital signs. There are a handful of things which, the presence or absence of them, will tell you how your project is doing.

ETP’s PSI (Probability of Success Indicator) checks for these vital signs. If you haven’t yet run a PSI over your project, you should.

ETP’s Project Management Guide #8, How To Assess A Project In Five Minutes, describes how to check for a project’s vital signs and calculate its PSI.

The PSI comes in three forms – Simple, Intermediate and Advanced:

o Simple – checks for a project’s vital signs
o Intermediate – gives you additional diagnostic information about the project
o Advanced – for a full-scale audit or review of a project (particularly useful if a project has gone off the rails)

All three forms of the PSI are described in ETP’s Project Management Guide #18, The Probability of Success Indicator.

ETP cuts prices

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00

Because of the times in which we find ourselves, we've tried to come up with a better deal for our customers and potential customers.

So - we're offering a deal whereby for an annual subscription of € 2,540, an organisation can send any number of people on our three most popular public training courses - How To Run Successful Projects, Work Less, Achieve More, A Little Planning is Better Than a Lot of Firefighting. The Year 1 subscription price is fixed but as more organisations take up subscriptions, our intention is to reduce the year 2 subscription price even further.

This actually means that in 2009 you can train all your staff in project management and time management for € 2,540.

Full details can be found at Training / Subscriptions

Fergus has been promoting his latest book

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00

Fergus has been promoting his latest book, Work Less, Achieve More (see Books / WLAM). He appeared on TV3's Ireland AM programme last week, as well as on RTE1 Radio's Mooney. He also did an extensive round of press interviews.

If you've been made redundant

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00

Maybe now is the time to upskill and we can help you. If you've been made redundant and you want to either (a) retrain as a project manager or (b) sharpen up your skills generally, we'd be happy to have you on any one of our three public courses for just € 95. (Yes, ninety five - it's not a typo!) These courses are:

How To Run Successful Projects [2.5 days - list price € 1,200; includes Work Less, Achieve More content]
A Little Planning Is Better Than A Lot Of Firefighting [2 days - list price €1,000; includes Work Less, Achieve More content]
Work Less, Achieve More [1 day - list price €595]

Contacting Cowen

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00

In July of last year ETP contacted the Taoiseach's office and offered its expertise to help the government solve the problem of runaway projects. We received an acknowledgement and despite two follow-ups have had nothing since. Last month we offered our reduced-price subscription (see 'ETP cuts prices' above) to all the government departments. Again nothing. Presumably they don't need it!

A Little Planning Is Better Than A Lot Of Firefighting

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00

This is a new course and, as a recent attendee said, is 'an ideal course for anyone who has competing demands on their time and a mix of responsibilities on projects and business-as-usual commitments' [Mike R O'Sullivan, FEXCO, Killorglin, Ireland]. For further details check out Training / A Little Planning Is Better Than A Lot Of Firefighting