Are you an unbeliever?

I was asked a very unique question by one of the learners in a project management course I taught this week: “How do I motivate my team members when even I don’t believe in the project?“.

While I’d been posed this question for the first time, it is not an uncommon challenge. It is hard enough for project managers who are in full support of their projects to inspire disengaged team members so having to do so when the project managers themselves don’t feel the projects are worth doing is much worse.

Start by confirming the issue does not rest with you. Are you experiencing some general malaise with the company, your role, or some other personal cause which has nothing to do with the project? If so, deal with that first, or recuse yourself if you have the option to do so until you can deal with your personal issues.

Assuming the challenge is with the project and not you, how do you go about addressing this?

You can’t just grin and bear it. If you don’t really believe in the benefits from the project, it will be hard for you to create a genuine sense of purpose for your team members. Worse, if you try to fake it, your team members will pick up on this and you will lose credibility with them which will hurt you much more if you have to work with them on future projects.

Make sure you understand the underlying business rationale for the project. Whether there is a financial motive or not to the project’s existence, is there something you are missing with regards to its expected benefits? If you have a good relationship with sponsoring stakeholders, meet with them to ensure you have the full picture. Ask your peers if they can see something which you don’t.

If it is a non-discretionary project, ask yourself why you don’t believe it needs to be done? We always want to lead disruptive, innovative, sexy projects but just because you are working on a mandatory project doesn’t mean that your team members can’t express their creativity, especially in coming up with lean solutions to the minimal requirements. With such projects it is often a question of re-framing how you perceive them. By keeping your organization safe, you are improving its brand, reducing risk and opportunity costs.

What if it is a discretionary project? Even if it is not improving profitability or solving world hunger, is there any benefit which justifies the investment? Even if the answer is “no”, could there be an intangible reason for it such as a promise made to a critical stakeholder which, if broken, would cost a lot more to address in the future? If so, why wouldn’t you want to support it?

But sometimes the project you are leading truly has no merit. If so, this is the time to use your powers of influence and persuasion to convince the sponsor, governance committees and other decision makers to do the right thing. And if they don’t, you have a tough personal decision to make.

If you are asked to lead a project and don’t want to, always start with why.

 

 

COVID-19 and agile are strange bed fellows

COVID-19 is like that car accident just up ahead which you know you shouldn’t be focusing on while driving, but which draws the attention of all around it. After doing a number of articles related to the pandemic, I’d planned to write about something completely different, but as my weekly blogging time drew near I realized that there was (at least) one more topic I needed to write about.

I’ve often said that one of the bigger challenges with agile transformations is the costs of doing nothing (different) today is cheaper than those of changing things so that they will be much better a year or two down the line. This is especially true when you look at companies which operate in markets which are near monopolies or oligopolies as they might still succeed in spite of themselves. Implementing transformations such companies can be orders of magnitude more difficult than in those companies who need to always be more efficient and effective than their competitors in order to survive.

But all that has changed.

Operating budgets have been slashed, companies have frozen hiring, supply chains are under such heavy demand that materials may be unavailable when needed and staff availability is even more unpredictable. Regulations are being introduced at lightning speed, fast-tracking public policy changes in hours or days which normally would take months to push through.

And worse, don’t expect a quick resolution.

Under such conditions, it is not enough to just deliver business value from your projects as early and regularly as possible, avoiding non-value add efforts and inspecting and adapting based on changes within and without.

Portfolio investment decisions will also need to be made in a similar manner. Funding plans might need to focus on shorter time horizons and provide Plan B (and C and D) options of what could be delivered with progressively greater constraints on investment.

Defining right-sized MVPs, MBIs and MMRs will be critical.

Product and solution viability risks will have to be explored much earlier than they might have been previously.

Understanding our cross-functional value streams and finding ways to reduce the cost of delay across them will be that much more critical.

And teams will have to take an enterprise-level view, making sure they are engaging delivery and control stakeholders appropriately so that business and control objectives are both being met.

And above all, we need to double-down on putting people first. 

 

 

 

 

Does your company recognize “Here, there be (project) dragons”?

Over time companies tend to take on projects with increasing levels of complexity. This happens either as a side benefit of a boost in organizational project management maturity, reactively when responding to regulatory or competitive pressures or organically as an outcome of strategic planning.

Unlike many of my previous posts, the WHY behind this increase is not my focus but rather the HOW.

Do governance bodies within most companies recognize when a proposed project or program is beyond its current capabilities and if so, how do they do this?

Project uncertainty and complexity are continuums and the sweet spot along those continuums will vary by company. There are three company-specific zones within this continuum – low uncertainty/complexity, high uncertainty/complexity and the chaos zone.

The boundary between the first and the second zones tends to become clearer over time, and as a company matures, they will use that boundary to dictate staff assignments as well as the required level of governance. For example, lower complexity projects might require minimal oversight and can be managed by a junior or intermediate project manager whereas those in the higher complexity zone will benefit from steering committees, highly seasoned project directors and regular delivery assurance checks.

But what about the chaos zone – what defines its boundaries?

In the past, when travelling the world’s oceans, ships’ captains used maps with notations indicating where the edges of the known world were as well as that wonderful warning “Here, there be dragons”. Unfortunately, such cartographic aids are not available to portfolio governance teams! Without having the boundaries for the chaos zone defined, it would be easy for a company to invest in a project whose failure could result in catastrophic organizational consequences.

One approach might be to use the same set of criteria which are used to distinguish low and high complexity projects. A radar chart such as the one below provides one way of presenting this. Complexity inputs such as the number of distinct stakeholders involved/impacted, total number of unique delivery partners or the extent of external influence could be assessed using a simple questionnaire.

Assessing and presenting this information is a good start, but it might still not be enough to prevent a sponsor or line of business from undertaking a “bet the firm” project. This is where the checks and balances of effective governance are crucial.

A common misbelief is that Sir Edmund stated the reason “Because it’s there” when asked about climbing Mount Everest. In fact, George Mallory is believed to have said it almost thirty years earlier. Unfortunately, George perished on the way to the summit.

Start a chaos zone project and your company could face a similar fate.