Project planning and funding are usually high on our priority lists, whether for kicking off a new business endeavor, supporting a worthy community effort, planting a spring garden, or reorganizing our places of work.

The month of May also heralds a remarkable annual effort by our local university’s project management students, an undertaking known as the “PolyHouse Project” that is coordinated by Dr. Roya Javadpour.

This “mission impossible,” learn-by-doing program involves completely rebuilding the home and lives of a physically and financially disadvantaged family.

In the span of just 10 short weeks — with only two long working weekends allocated — the students perform a brand of project magic unrivaled even by “total makeover” television. Each year’s students begin with no capital whatsoever. They must do all necessary fundraising and learn nearly every building technique from scratch. They then meticulously plan every permit, action, nail, and screwdriver and execute their design plan with astonishing results.

In the area of fundraising, I’ve also included a potent article by Barry Vanderkelen about seeking donations for charitable causes in a down economy: “Want People to Give Money? First, Ask Them for Time.”

For these reasons, I really hope you enjoy today’s features, including “The Eighth Annual PolyHouse: Another Miracle in the Making.” And be sure to join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

This week I gave another talk on estimating at a meeting jointly sponsored by my local chapters of STC and PMI — two proactive professional societies with which I have long been associated.

During that event, I thoroughly enjoyed engaging the participants in the same fun estimating simulation I described in Part 3 of the discussion on estimating, the series that just wrapped up in my last newsletter.

Once again, the answers from the audience on how long it should take to complete each of three simple tasks ranged from barely a few minutes to several hours. As always, audience members were amazed at their range of views on how long they thought they’d spend on seemingly “no-brainer” tasks.

So, why (again) is the estimating process so important, and yet so difficult? One set of reasons I haven’t fully articulated is that estimating our time entails:

• Formulaic aspects, which include the basic numerical computations we use to arrive at a total. If that were all there were to it, we could just treat estimating like a simple arithmetic exercise and be done with it!

• Psychological phenomena, including the fascinating propensity we have to imagine work getting done in record time, under perfect conditions. I believe we tend to vastly underestimate more often than not — by a factor of 2 or 3.

• Social norms, which involve how we tend to look to others to get a sense of whether our “answers” are correct. We defer to their values and judgments rather than to verifiable evidence of how long something actually takes to do.

• Organizational politics, which can intimidate us into overestimating our abilities and may persuade us to back into into highly precarious scenarios, based on “must-have,” “must-do,” or “must-win” business pressures.

But we can fight back using the twelve powerful estimating techniques recapped below, in “A Summary of the 12 Powerful Estimating Strategies.” What experiences do you have to share? Join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

From time to time, I enjoy giving a presentation on estimating to professional groups or clients. Whether it’s to very savvy and seasoned project professionals or to people with very little project experience, we recognize that we all have a big challenge in common: estimating accurately.

During these events, I enjoy facilitating an experiment to find out how long each person believes it would take to perform a short series of tasks that have to do with measuring the sides of a building. Here’s what happens…

Regardless of who the audience is, people’s answers range from minutes to hours to days to weeks to complete the same simple job!

This astonishing result shows how much variability exists in our perceptions of what’s required to perform an activity. If you can imagine what happens when these differences scale to the level of an entire project, I think it can help explain why we often have so much difficulty agreeing on, much less carrying out, a precise plan of action!

For these reasons, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “Twelve Ways to Improve Your Estimating Accuracy (Part 3).” What experiences do you have to share? Join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

Spring offers the perfect time to “imagineer” everything we aim to do in the year ahead.

It’s also a chance for us to ask ourselves, “Have I learned anything from my project experiences during the last year? Were there any discoveries I should review to better predict my results for this year?”

When we make an effort to address these areas, even if it uses time and energy that we’d rather spend on something else, we’ll position ourselves to launch future projects with much greater clarity and minimal distractions or doubts.

With that in mind, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “Twelve Ways to Improve Your Estimating Accuracy (Part 2).” And please join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

It’s exciting to imagine how many great new beginnings the remaining months of 2011 will bring! At this very moment, if you’re anything like me, you are probably incubating several novel ideas that you would love to hatch this year.

Estimating how much time and effort it will take to bring our “brainchildren” to fruition, however, is the next challenge we face in the manifestation process.

In fact, the practice of estimating involves so many variables and stumbling blocks that some of my clients have asked for a set of estimating guidelines that can help them arrive at more accurate predictions.

In a series of articles beginning with today’s issue, I will be offering twelve of my own “best practices” for estimating. These techniques are the very best ways I’ve found of tackling this often intricate but important function.

With that said, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “Twelve Ways to Improve Your Estimating Accuracy (Part 1).” And please join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

Whenever I talk about productivity, many folks think I’m referring to what efficiency experts do. Efficiency experts get things done with less time and effort.

They use time-saving tools, techniques, devices, and software to trim, condense, eliminate, combine, or otherwise shortcut laborious, tedious, and time-consuming tasks.

They also know how to organize files, desks, computers, and electronic gizmos. They divide up their schedules into highly productive chunks.

Although I greatly value this domain of professional expertise, I prefer to aim my efforts in slightly different directions.

Like efficiency experts, I hunt for things that impede productivity. However, the impediments I pursue are not typically those that resolve easily by speeding up work, reducing keystrokes, or organizing space and time more efficiently. They tend to be more complex and multidimensional.

One of these areas is system constraints. They limit our productive capacity and tend to elude our ability to control them. That’s why today’s newsletter delves more deeply into this type of obstacle. You’ll see books, tips, and resources for managing constraints at the system level, as well as working with those under your personal control.

For these reasons, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “What’s Holding You Back? Tips on Managing Your Biggest Constraints.” Please join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

As the New Year gets into swing, many organizations are looking for every possible advantage to counteract the current economic uncertainty. If your group is one of them, then I have terrific news for you — there is much more valuable information yet to glean from the wealth of recent employee engagement research, the subject of my last newsletter issue.

Whether you’re a member of a small, medium, or large organization, thinking through how to take the pulse of your workforce is essential to applying the powerful findings that link engagement levels directly to your levels of productivity and profitability.

Today’s newsletter introduces another critical aspect of this topic: customer engagement.

Employees represent only one critical dimension of the engagement playing field; customers represent another. Because “it takes two to tango,” when both of these dimensions interact in a balanced and highly energized way, a business can realize unstoppable earning potential. It’s far greater than when only one group is engaged, according to The Gallup Organization’s years of research.

For these reasons, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “How ‘Engaged’ Employees Can Turbocharge the Bottom Line (Part 2).” And please don’t forget to join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

Today’s newsletter focuses on the important topic of employee engagement — a great subject to kick off the new year. Companies are looking for every possible competitive advantage during our protracted economic recovery, and this is one of them!

But what exactly is employee engagement, and why does it matter?

Well, it turns out that a powerful correlation exists between the level of employee engagement and the degree of financial viability of an organization.

One way of looking at it is that employee engagement is a form of supercharged job fulfillment that determines all sorts of things about how well an organization performs. The degree of employee engagement affects just about every financial and operational dimension, such as absenteeism, turnover, accident rates, defects, profitability, customer satisfaction, and more!

For this reason, numerous research firms are studying intently how to measure and manage all the factors that contribute to employee engagement. They have learned that engagement extends far beyond “regular” job satisfaction. The emotions and commitment that accompany engagement are so powerful, they have the capacity to influence every success factor the organization monitors.

Therefore, I hope you enjoy today’s features, including “How ‘Engaged’ Employees Can Turbocharge the Bottom Line (Part 1).” And please join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

In today’s issue, we continue exploring the timing, tools, and techniques for developing the strengths and talents of your personnel. Should you train or use a different approach to close an achievement gap? And when you do train, how can you make sure that the training “sticks”?

My last newsletter introduced the topic of training transfer, which refers to the many conditions that managers must satisfy to help learners successfully apply training to their jobs. Since training produces a short-lived result unless accompanied by transfer support, it pays to plan carefully and follow through systematically.

Also consider that if significant turnover or downsizing occurs, it would mean that many of the company’s intellectual assets — people with precious, or even priceless skills and knowledge — would simply walk out the door, perhaps not ever to return. Can you afford the time and expense of seeking replacements? Training may be one of several ways you can expand organizational expertise and improve retention.

For these reasons, please enjoy today’s features, including “Tips on Making Training Stick (Part 2).” And do join the conversation by leaving your comments below!

In my last newsletter issue, I discussed two types of organizational improvement techniques: training and “tune-ups.” Each has important applications that should be weighed carefully before use.

Today’s issue is devoted to exploring the roles that management can and should play in ensuring that training — as well as other types of improvement interventions — produces the best possible results. Rather than leaving success to chance, “the boss” can systematically engineer a positive outcome.

The better management can set the conditions for success by planning all aspects of the training experience, the more readily employees can apply what they have learned in a way that benefits the organization. This means that management must anticipate and orchestrate what occurs before, during, and after the instruction to make training “stick.”

You may have experienced this phenomenon yourself — embarking on an expensive and time-consuming program, only to lose steam somewhere along the way. The last thing you’d want to see happen is the whole effort being wasted because the follow-up fell through, or because some key aspect didn’t receive enough attention.

For these reasons, I hope you enjoy today’s issue, including “Tips on Making Training Stick (Part 1)” And please join the conversation by leaving your comments below!