You want me to sign off on WHAT?

I was reminded this week of one of the more common project issues – delays in getting formal approval or sign offs on project outputs.

We are taught that a good project management practice is to explicitly define the criteria for project acceptance as part of normal planning activities and to capture them in a formal document such as a project plan.  Sometimes we go further and provide standard procedures for deliverable acceptance.  Usually, there is limited resistance against either of these approaches and sponsors and stakeholders are willing to sign off on these “rules of engagement”.

So why then are there protracted delays during implementation or close-out on a per deliverable basis?  I’ve identified three common causes:

1. It’s not a priority: The sign off process may be viewed as unnecessary overhead by the signatories – after all the deliverable has been produced!  Sometimes, this is a result of the individual not needing to be one of the signatories OR a case where a particular deliverable really does not require the formality of a sign off.  And sometimes, its just laziness or a lack of understanding of the schedule or other business implications of such delays – if so, the PM should be sitting down with the signatory to explain the consequences of their delays and if nothing changes, escalate appropriately.
2. Insufficient involvement of the signatory: Sometimes, the reason they are not signing off is that their (hidden or otherwise) needs were not met by the deliverable.  You’d expect that such feedback would be provided earlier during requirements gathering, development or verification activities, but some stakeholders act as though their needs should be obvious, and then are “miffed” when they learn that the project team does not possess ESP.  If this is the case, the project’s governance bodies need to consider whether the missing needs are important enough that they merit rework on the deliverable.  This may also point to incomplete stakeholder analysis or engagement.
3. Confusion about the meaning of the sign off: We are taught at an early age that signing a document means we are accepting a legal responsibility and some individuals treat the act of signing off on a deliverable as equivalent to giving away their first born.  All formal sign offs should have a focused, clear explanation of what the signatory is accepting to avoid such confusion.  As deliverable acceptance forms are often based on boilerplate templates, review the wording for each signature block before circulating it to ensure that project-specific context does not merit changes to the wording.

As with most sources of frustration on projects, a good approach is to focus on understanding and addressing the cause of the issue through careful preparation of deliverable acceptance documentation combined with appropriate engagement and education of stakeholders and other signatories.

D’oh – Homer Simpson provides some Project Management lessons learned!

While there’s probably a little Homer Simpson in all of us (especially when faced with a “forbidden doughnut”), he has spouted off some witticisms that provide some lessons learned for project managers!

1. “Well, it’s 1 a.m. Better go home and spend some quality time with the kids.” While project managers are notorious for burning the candle at both ends, work-life balance is important as sooner or later, you will have no more (work) projects to manage.
2. “I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here. ” All great examples of what Neal Whitten would call project managers being too soft.
3. “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” Failures are not what makes us, it’s how we handle failures that makes us.  Project managers who get jaded or disillusioned after experiencing project failure are doing themselves and their organizations a disservice.
4. “I’m normally not a praying man, but if you’re up there, please save me Superman.” Faith is good, but project managers need to leverage some earthly sources as well!  Having developed good relationships with your sponsors and stakeholders and (hopefully) having a mentor or two can provide you with multiple layers to your support “onion”!
5. “Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do? ” Flexibility with regards to procedures and practices is important.  Applying a project management methodology rigidly regardless of the scale or complexity of a project will likely result in frustration and resistance from your team and your stakeholders.
6. “What do we need a psychiatrist for? We know our kid is nuts. ” Even if you have specific expertise into a decision or issue, project management is about using the right skills from your team to the right problem at the right time.  Too many project managers take on too much decision making by themselves and undermine the skills and roles of their team members.
7. “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.” Yes, statistics can be wrong some of the time, but failing to use quantitative project performance metrics means you will likely be wrong 100% of the time when monitoring your projects.
8. “How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?” Project managers (especially seasoned ones) can sometimes become complacent about their own professional development.  While there’s a lot to be learned from the “school of hard knocks”, the profession is evolving with research across multiple knowledge areas and a project manager who refuses to spend some time on knowledge enrichment is setting themselves up for obsolescence.
9. “If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can’t speak English.” Scapegoats exist in all companies, and it’s often convenient (and easy) to blame project failure on one.  Professionalism comes from taking responsibility for project outcomes.
10. “If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing” Applying many of the hard and soft project management competencies is not easy – this doesn’t mean that you jettison them as soon as things get tough.  To quote Kennedy “…not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…“

However, after 22 years, there is one Homer Simpson quote that is applicable to all project managers “All my life I’ve had one dream, to achieve my many goals.”

Siri has proven that the future of Project Management is soft (skills)

It was only a few years back that the concept of a natural language, expert system-based computer interface seemed far out of reach to the average person.  While the iPhone 4S’s Siri is not the first release of such technology, Apple’s real game changer is that it will help to make such capabilities a commodity in a few years.

The potential that Siri tantalizes us with combined with the success that IBM’s Watson achieved on Jeopardy earlier this year convinces me that within the next decade (or two if I hedge my bets!), many of the “hard” skills that project managers learn and take for granted are likely to be delegated to non-human assistants.

An example of this might be in the identification and analysis of risks – a Watson-like expert system having access to vast data stores of historical projects combined with a Siri-like natural language interface could address the knowledge gaps and “gut feel” blind spots that occur when a small group of human beings is asked to do the same thing.  Parametric estimation and costing tools have been around for decades, but their complexity and costs have usually restricted their use to specific industries and project valuations – commoditizing these would start to provide objective data to defend budget and schedule requests.  In both examples, human beings are not eliminated, but their role changes from executing the process to providing the inputs and validating the outputs.

This is a very natural evolution of a profession – twenty years back in Computer Science, universities tended to focus on advanced topics such as assembler programming and operating system design – these days the focus tends to be more on mainstream content for undergraduate degrees.  In a similar fashion, the PM hard skills that we learned and practiced in the past will morph from a practical to a more academic value.

While this might alarm some budding project managers, what won’t change in the forseeable future is the criticality and greater importance of soft skills.  An uber-Watson could come up with the perfect project plan (covering schedule, cost, quality, risk, communication, etc.), but selling the merits of that plan to decision makers, negotiating through scope changes, building a high performing team, and managing customer expectations are not likely to be outsourced that easily.

What this implies is that PM education programs need to shift the emphasis from tools and techniques to business and people skills – this is still a rarity in most “foundational” project management curricula, but it is an opportunity for differentiation.

Who knows, perhaps in the (more distant) future, instead of the PM having to let their customer know that a requested change is unrealistic, it might be Siri’s descendant saying “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that!”