New Year’s resolutions for a Project Manager

As we recharge our “batteries” over the (hopefully) quiet time at year end, it is an ideal time to come up with resolutions for next year.

To help seed your definition process, here are a few thoughts:

1. Grow a spine – the role of a project manager is to facilitate “right” business decision making.  Sometimes this means delivering  unfavorable recommendations or not acquiescing to irrational demands.  I am not advocating career-limiting feedback, but no one will thank you in the long run for just being a “Yes man/woman”.

2. Use the tools of your trade – in low PM maturity environments, or where the organization culture is anti-PM, it can be tempting to jettison all the practices of the profession and go along with the “just do it” mentality.  PMI’s Code of Ethics has an appropriate counter-position:  “We believe that the credibility and reputation of the project management profession is shaped by the collective conduct of individual practitioners.”.  Even in the most chaotic organization, you can still define and apply  techniques and principles that will demonstrate the benefits of PM.

3. Define (and execute) a professional self-development plan – the temptation is there to commit oneself wholly to your projects – your success as a PM is judged by the success of the projects you’ve managed.  However, this does both yourself and your organization a disservice.  Just as organizations should budget a percentage of their time and resources to “internal investments”, a good PM is a learning PM.  Projects provide opportunities for gaining domain knowledge and honing soft-skills, but the PM profession is evolving, and staying abreast of these changes is a competitive career advantage.  My challenge for those of you that are PMI members, how many of you take the time to read PM Network cover-to-cover each month?

4. Pay it forward – If you are a successful PM, it is likely partially due to the knowledge, coaching and support that you’ve received from other practitioners.  The New Year is a great time to think about how you can give back to the profession – through writing or doing presentations, volunteering with your local PM association’s chapter, mentoring a junior colleague or by contributing your PM skills to a social or not-for-profit organization or project.  Apart from the obvious benefits in helping others, such activities will help you as well – when working in chaotic or low maturity situations at work, volunteer or mentoring activities can provide the opportunity and gratification to practice our profession “by the book”.

One of the oldest PM cliches says that those who fail to plan will plan to fail – just as it applies to projects, it also applies to you!

Let’s all plan for a productive and progressive 2011!

Resolving cultural hostility towards project management through peacekeeping

A root cause of PMO failures is an organization culture that is not in favor of project management.  Unlike other common contributing factors (e.g. a lack of executive sponsorship, perception of insufficient value delivered), this issue is much tougher to address as it cannot be resolved by having the “right” leadership team, or by enforcing policies.

A parallel could be drawn to the role of peacekeepers in a post-war country – merely enforcing policies and rules does not resolve insurgencies, nor do they endear the peacekeepers with the citizens.

How can the practices used by peacekeepers help you establish project management capabilities under hostile conditions?

1. Be a missionary, not a dictator – Avoid “hard selling” PM, and focus instead on creating a need for change within your target audience.  Avoid the temptation to “preach” or to pass judgment on the motivations behind behaviors and focus on establishing and communicating a vision of how things “could be”.

2. Lead by example – Before attempting to change practices across the department or organization, manage a single project using the practices you are trying to establish.  If you can demonstrate the value of applying these practices to the sponsor, stakeholders and team members on that project, they can then begin to spread the “good word” on your behalf.

3. Pick your battles – You cannot afford to engage in a do-or-die costly “war” over any one specific practice or policy.  Be like water – follow the path of least resistance, but with persistence you can wear down the toughest boulder!

4. Be consistent – Although there is a general need for flexibility (as per point #3), if you don’t adhere to a basic set of principles (however minimal those are), you will never gain respect from those you are trying to “convert”.

5. Make the lives of the “locals” better – While it is important to sell the value of PM to senior management, culture change is more successful when it is both top down and bottom up.  Providing support and coaching to project teams in subtle ways can help to foster a grass roots movement.  Focusing efforts on key influencers (super-connectors) can help you get to the tipping point faster.

While resolving PM culture clashes can make you feel like you are waging a protracted battle, adapting a peacekeeping approach to winning “hearts and minds”  may be the best path to lasting change.

 

What would a caveman do with a computer?

A recent article on ProjectTimes covering the pitfalls of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) or Enterprise Project Management (EPM) tools drew some “heat”.

It’s true that many PPM tool purchases fail to deliver expected benefits relative to their (often significant) hard & soft costs.  However, one can draw the parallel to any other type of enterprise business application – ERP systems are the stereotypical example of this, and yet, there are case studies of organizations that have successfully implemented ERP solutions and the same will be true for PPM or EPM tools.

As my father is fond of telling me, “A bad workman always blames his tools”, so the following questions should be answered before you get started.

1. What is the primary objective of implementing a tool -  is to to provide a toolkit for PMs to reduce their administrative efforts, is it to automate defined PPM or EPM work flows, or is it to provide dashboards and reports to improve decision making?  The answer to this question should help to narrow the field of products and will help you understand what process and governance prerequisites need to be in place.

2. Is your organization culture ready for it?  If your culture is still unfriendly towards PM or you don’t expect to have effective sponsorship in place to support the solution, think twice!  A common precursor to introducing such tools is to provide some PM 101 training for all impacted staff.

3. Can you create a valid business case to justify it?  Selling the project on the basis of increased efficiency or similar intangibles may come back to haunt you if the expected improvements don’t materialize.

4. Are your sponsors and stakeholders willing to accept “good enough” from work flows and reporting capabilities?  Similar to early adopters of ERP technologies, PPM or EPM customers often expect that a product will fit their needs perfectly “out-of-the-box”.  This is unrealistic given the variance in reporting, data capture and work flow needs.  The lesson to be learned is that it is often best to find a product that “fits” your culture as well as “reasonably” matching your needs and implement it with minimal customizations during the initial roll out.

5. How do you plan to deal with compliance challenges? The weak link in most EPM or PPM implementations is the completeness or quality of the data being captured.  Beyond the initial growing pains period, how will you identify such issues and do you have the support structures in place to address them so that it is not a “garbage in, garbage out” outcome?

6. Do you have basic processes defined?  While you may need to adopt “out-of-the-box” work flows, a lack of some definition around PM and PPM processes will just result in automated chaos.

While PPM or EPM solutions may not be the right tool for everyone, they can act as a positive catalyst for capability improvement so long as we answer the fundamental question “are we ready?”.