Improving organization project management competency takes more than just hiring some project managers!

A misconception about improving project management competency is that it can be achieved by simply staffing one or more project manager roles.

Hiring experienced project managers can help to improve the probability of success of the projects to which they are assigned, but unfortunately, few companies have the luxury of hiring enough project managers to manage all the change initiatives that are likely to be active at any given time.  Beyond the fiscal and organization structural challenges of hiring so many project managers, such a staffing model would also result in an atrophy of critical change planning and implementation skills within other roles or areas of the organization.

Given this, there is the need to develop project management knowledge and skills across multiple roles in most companies, whether or not those roles are ever responsible for directly leading a project.

Functional managers have multiple responsibilities for project success hence they need to be sufficiently project management savvy.  The traditional role of a functional manager on projects is to allocate and support team members from their departments.  This requires them to be able to review and challenge their staff’s work estimates, assist junior staff in work decomposition or activity sequencing, and act as the primary point of escalation for issues involving their staff.

Functional managers are also often called upon to serve as project sponsors and if they do, they should have sufficient judgment to be able to know when to prioritize their sponsor role higher than their functional management one.  It is all too common to see functional managers who will protect their staff to the detriment of a critical project which they were supposed to be championing as the assigned sponsor.

Finally, for both local and cross-functional change initiatives, functional managers should have the confidence to execute their organization’s project management practices if they are assigned to lead a departmental or cross-functional change initiative.  This last responsibility can often be the most challenging as they will have to overcome their natural bias in favor of their division or department by adopting a true cross-functional view.

Team members also need to possess sufficient project management acumen to be able to effectively support the project manager.  They should have enough planning skills to be able to decompose their assigned work packages, sequence the activities, and estimate the effort required to complete these activities.  They should also be able to objectively evaluate progress towards completing their assigned activities and to proactively identify and effectively communicate issues and risks.  Too often we are assigned team members who are unwilling or incapable of defining and sufficiently decomposing their work or tracking its progress.

Providing foundation-style project management training is a good place to start, but experiential learning is equally important.  After an individual has been on a project management course, it is important to provide them with an opportunity to exercise the tools and techniques they’ve been exposed to, otherwise real learning won’t happen.  As I had written in an earlier article, for functional managers, this could be accomplished by having them manage one or more projects each year.  It is also cruical to frequently reinforce the benefits of project management to team members and functional managers since without that, their support is likely to fade over time.

Multiple articles have been written about the need to have executives who have first hand knowledge of project management, and if we want to truly see this profession institutionalized as a critical enabler, the same will need to happen with other roles.

Why are companies “good” but very rarely “great” at project management?

There is a remarkable similarity between organizations trying to improve their project management capabilities and someone who is attempting to lose weight.

As personal trainers will attest, significant weight loss improvements are usually made early on but having reached a plateau with the potential of being able to achieve further reduction with continued effort, many clients will stall and some may even rebound and gain back some of the weight they had lost.  Although there is significant empirical evidence of the health benefits of weight loss, the ongoing effort required to lose more than a nominal amount of weight increases in a non-linear fashion, hence many people are unable to reach their original goals.

The same is witnessed with project management – while there has been much research supporting the premise that improvements in project management increases competitive advantage and operating efficiency, few companies capitalize on this and some even end up sliding back to their pre-project management levels of mediocre performance.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m the last person to advocate that all companies should strive to achieve world-class levels of maturity.  Those heady altitudes are best reserved for a very small set of organizations as the significant costs required to achieve world-class maturity must be justified financially.  However, I believe almost any company can aspire to PMI’s envisioned goal of embracing, valuing, and utilizing project management and attributing their success to it.

So what prevents this?

Improvement requires real commitment and effort, both in terms of behavioral change and ongoing investment.  The behavior changes required for successful project management capability improvement are not painless and many executives and mid-level managers are simply unwilling to relinquish their real (or imagined) power to make these changes.  Ongoing investment in capability improvements is also challenging, especially for public sector companies struggling with restricted or reduced operating budgets or public companies striving to meet or exceed shareholder expectations – this is the one advantage that private sector, non-public companies enjoy.  As Richard Branson said about Virgin “Fortunately we’re not  a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I  want.”

Project management maturity does not exhibit causal determinism.  As there is a lag between improving practices and realizing the benefits of these improvements, you can’t force someone to value project management – they’ll either take that leap of faith and believe in it or they won’t.  If the executive who championed the initiative leaves the company or gets distracted with the latest Big Shiny Thing and if there is insufficient critical mass developed to sustain and further the improvements, project management maturity is likely to die on the vine.

One way to reduce the likelihood of this happening is to take an agile approach to your project management improvement initiative.

• Engage your executives in prioritizing which practices or capabilities to improve by helping them understand the benefits and costs of each
• Demonstrate tangible value at frequent intervals to re-kindle enthusiasm in the improvement initiative
• Develop and implement improvements using a cross-functional/cross-role team working closely with one another

To paraphrase Jim Collins: Few companies attain great project management capability, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good project management capability.

May the 4th be with you – project management wisdom from Master Yoda!

Learn much from Master Yoda, Padawan Project Managers can!

In honor of Star Wars Day, here are some of the Jedi Master’s quotations and the project management lessons they can teach us.

“Difficult to see.  Always in motion is the future” – Project managers sometimes get obsessed with developing and maintaining ”perfect” project schedules, resource forecasts or other planning artifacts.  Always remember that a plan is just a model developed from assumptions and incomplete knowledge, and as things change, plans must evolve to remain relevant and useful, hence there is absolutely such a thing as doing too much planning.

Luke: “I don’t believe it.” Yoda: “That is why you fail.” – On long, challenging projects, it can become difficult for project managers to maintain belief in their project’s odds of success.  If the project manager starts to resemble the Ancient Mariner, more often that not, this doubt will infect the rest of the team and the project manager’s forecast of failure will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we were to consult Guinan (crossing from Star Wars into the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe), she’d say “When a man is convinced he’s going to die tomorrow, he’ll probably find a way to make it happen”.  Care should be taken with this advice as blind optimism is equally dangerous – if a project is truly doomed, it is the professional responsibility of the project manager to make their customer, sponsor & key stakeholders aware of this such that appropriate triage and recovery can occur.

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?” – A critical error in judgment a project manager can make is to underestimate the complexity of what appears to be a very straightforward, small project.  This assumption could cause the project manager to abandon good project planning practices such as stakeholder analysis and risk identification which might have revealed more subtle challenges.

“If no mistake you have made, losing you are” – A common question I ask candidates who are interviewing for project manager roles is: “What is your greatest failure as a project manager, and what did you learn from it?”.  I believe that good project managers, like swords, are forged in hot flames and beaten on anvils, and hence any project manager who claims to have never suffered a failure is not self-aware or is just trying to fool themselves.

“You must unlearn what you have learned” – Any project manager striving to achieve their PMP certification would do well to heed this advice.  When it comes to project management nomenclature and processes, there are as many variants in practice as there are alien races in the Star Wars universe.  Hence, it can be challenging for seasoned project managers to study for the exam as they will need to induce a Jedi mind-trick on themselves so that they can recall PMBOK’s use of common PM terms and practices.

In closing, I’ll leave you with Yoda’s most famous quotation, which should be used by project managers to confirm the commitment of senior stakeholders to whom they have escalated issues or risks: “Do. Or Do Not.  There is No Try.“