Milliken Project Management

The Most Obvious Secret

2012-02-12T14:49:00.001-05:00

If you’ve gota job, someone is paying you. A purse-strings decision-maker thinks you providevalue that is worth money.

Duh. So whatother thunderclap of wisdom is new?

Well, there’snothing new with thinking about the economics of personal employment. But it’stime to introduce some better thinking about it, in this tough and uncertainera. In fact, some of the oldest truths about the meaning of employment areamong the least examined, and definitely the least accounted for.

Here’s arecent illustration of what this is about:

Supply ChainManagement Review published a new study last month on which skills andcompetencies hiring managers are currently emphasizing in their job openings.The study focused on university preparation and was limited to the inventorymanagement industry, but its results are thought-provoking in a much moregeneral way.

The surveyasked hiring managers to evaluate applicants’ preparation in a number ofappropriate skills. Are the candidates sufficiently prepared, or do they needto be better prepared?

Glaringlyhigh on the negative side are management skills and customer relationships. Formanagement, the ratio was 44 percent in need of better preparation, 16 percentadequately prepared. For customer relationships, the numbers are 40 percent and15 percent.

So, by 3 to1, the young people looking for employment in that sector are deficient inleadership and people skills.

A lifetime ofdirect involvement in those areas tells me that picture is accurate across theentire working world.

This is notto devalue subject-matter knowledge and technical skill. Those attributes mustbe present and productively engaged in any workforce. But this is not aneither-or game. It’s a “both of ‘em” proposition.

We all haveexperienced the frustration of working with, under or over people who hadsuperb hard skills, but couldn’t listen, organize, decide, explain, etc. The job skills are present, but not productively engaged.

Shortfalls are just as damaging inthe soft skills areas, but evaluating them is quite a bit more difficult. So isovercoming them. That’s why, in very many organizations, their absence isbasically taken for granted.

You’ll notice, though, that peoplewho make it their business to acquire and display excellence in management andpeople skills head the pack in getting hired and promoted. Organizations maynot be good at equipping people with the full set of competencies, but mostwill pay for them when they’re available.

So it’s encouraging that the hiringmanagers in the Supply Chain Management report were even asked about managementand relationships.

It’s discouraging to see how theresults turned out, but there’s a real bright side. This is a major heads-upfor career builders who are looking for that key advantage over the employmentcompetition, either in the hiring line or on the job.

Just becauseit’s obvious doesn’t mean everybody will jump on it. They sure haven’t so far.

Authority, Responsibility, Management

2012-01-24T14:55:00.000-05:00

“I can’t doanything about that agency,” the government official said. “I don’t haveauthority over it.”

The statementreflects a primitive, fundamentally flawed management philosophy, for a numberof reasons.

For onething, it implies that one-way exercise of power is the only way government canfunction.

For another,it denies the speaker’s responsibility for outcomes he/she can’t control.

You can findthe same kind of thinking in nongovernmental organizations.

In the real world, though, it isdelusional for anyone in a position of authority to believe you make thingshappen as a continuing practice by ordering them done.

Organizations headed by such peopletend to be circuses of hypocrisy and just-pretend. They become progressivelyless functional as they lose good people and gain a culture of fictionalbehaviors.

No one has all the answers, andsmart leaders know how to spread authority around in the right places, and howto empower people to use it with pride to multiply quality results.

Conversely, people willing to betreated as lackeys pretend respect and compliance while they play hidden gamesthat hollow out the operation.

You don’t dare question adictatorial boss, but you don’t waste time and energy actually trying to carryout all of his/her stupid directives, either. Such bosses often see what theywant to see, while they punish and humiliate those who don’t stay in line.

Bad bosses have bad bosses. When apower-obsessed incompetent is allowed to continue in place, it’s becausesomeone agrees with the behavior, isn’t paying attention or is practicingavoidance or denial. The boss’s boss isn’t doing the job.

That is astrue in the private sector as it is in public service. If you are elected orappointed to a position of power, it is because you are expected to get certainthings done. That’s the responsibility part.

If you takeyour responsibility seriously, you equip yourself with the skills and practicesyou need to get the desired results or as close to those results as possible.So you build relationships, and you learn and respond to the motivations ofother people in the environment.

You respect and understand howothers see their authority and responsibility. You work creatively andpersistently in the realm of the possible. You negotiate, giving and taking inat atmosphere of mutual dependency and respect.

That sounds a lot like projectmanagement. While “government as business” is in many ways a failed concept,there is significant value in seeing project management as politics.

The typicalfunctional manager in business, industry or the nonprofit world generally hasmore formal authority than the typical political leader – and far more than thetypical project manager.

What iscommon to all management roles, though, is the responsibility to achieve resultsthrough obtaining the constructive involvement and contributions of otherpeople. What you can’t order into place, you must nurture into being.

Power needsresponsibility.

Responsibility demandscollaboration.

Collaboration must be earned.

Authority is dependent uponcompetence.

Project Elect Me

2012-01-08T16:46:00.005-05:00

Government should be run like a business. Right or wrong?

Pick your side and jump right in. The debate is just as hot as ever, so be prepared for a lively time.

The current primary election campaign is a fine venue for excessive mutual battering among political true believers. And it wouldn’t be the same, would it, without the good old government/business bull in the arena?

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney presents his business experience as exactly what the country needs to haul it out of the current economic swamp. As an immensely successful practitioner of business, he promises to turn Washington around in a hurry.

The competing candidates running on more standard public service resumes tout their experiential distance from the seat of national power as a central qualification for the presidency. Doesn’t make them all businessmen, exactly, but at least it implies less entanglement in standard political thinking.

In a related case, the sitting governor of Maine was among several around the country elected last year as fervent proponents of installing businesslike government. In office, Gov. LePage, a former retail executive and part-time mayor, often refers to business thinking as the driving principle for his actions and proposals.

We should pay attention to these propositions, as well as those of the opposite or differing persuasions. Even during a primary campaign, they are not necessarily hot air.

By the time the dust, smoke and mirrors of this campaign clear in a year or so, some of these people are going to be making and enforcing your laws. Presidents have lots of authority of various kinds, and close contenders frequently wind up in – or return to – other powerful positions.

We expect them, once in office, to pursue whatever it is that convinced a sufficient number of people to vote for them. Those of us who did so believed that doing it meant something.

Project managers can provide special value to their fellow citizens in times like these. That’s because the campaigns themselves are projects, and the changes proposed by the candidates will require project management if they are to be achieved.

Since that is so, here are a very few of the points one could apply in evaluating the project of running for office with the intent of mounting the project of changing government.

First, the political campaign as project.

What is the nature of this project? It is a marketing project, right? The fundamentals of marketing are identifying a need, analyzing the prospective customer, defining an effective solution and convincing the prospect to buy it.

That’s what candidates and their staffs do.

The most convincing factor a marketer can employ is an absolute fact that is of obvious, immediate value to the targeted consumer. When the value isn’t all that obvious, it’s up to the salesperson to persuasively explain its worth according to the prospect’s way of thinking.

The further the pitch gets from absolute, obvious fact, the more carefully we consumers should examine it before buying.

So what is the assessment of a political campaign whose main thrust is seeking to convince the customer that the other guy is a jerk or a crook? Does our discerning project manager see that as a satisfactory proposition?

You want to know how well the candidate understands what we citizens need and want, how credible the candidate’s proposed solutions are, and how competent that candidate is likely to be in delivering once in office.

Candidates who play on our fears and perceived prejudices as their central message are high-risk/low-trust project managers. We don’t vote for them.

How about that fascinating “government-as-business” concept?

This is where the project manager wants to see the candidate’s definition of “business,” as well as his/her definition of “government.”

Is the candidate’s intent to promise crisp, sharp, swift decisions on important matters of public concern? In the real world, that matches poorly with both business and American-style government.

The accurate definition of “business” is as varied as the countless differences among the countless businesses in our world.

Most well-run businesses, though, do have relatively stable lines of authority and reasonably well-defined target markets. Democracy, by its nature, has neither. This doesn't even touch on the fundamental issue of profit vs. service.

Your government-as-business candidate is proposing a hell of a fight from the get-go, with high likelihood of getting nowhere in a hurry, and/or a lengthy, destructive struggle.

Not good project management.

Move Me if You Can

2011-12-26T16:07:00.002-05:00

How do you motivate people? For project managers this is a big deal – getting people to do stuff is among the top challenges.

And then how do you get them to stick with it, over time? Through thick and thin? Take responsibility? Act autonomously, but know the limits?

Much of the typical project management experience is chasing people, hounding them to meet deadlines and quality standards. Or even getting them to show up, sometimes.

How much more quickly projects could be accomplished, at higher quality, with so much less hassle, if only more people would devote themselves to getting the work done. And if they would communicate more effectively and collaborate more enthusiastically.

So, how do you get people to do that? Well, you don’t, actually. Motivation is a do-it-yourself phenomenon. People motivate themselves. If they don’t, it doesn’t happen.

That does NOT mean project managers need be helpless victims in these relationships, although too many act that way.

It DOES mean that the project manager must be assertive in his/her relationships with project team members and other project stakeholders. He/she must address the issue of motivation at the source.

Why do people do what they do? Because they want to. The project manager’s first goal, in terms of chronology, is to ensure that the project has key participants who are convinced that they will derive personal value from contributing to project success.

That includes the project sponsor and the organizational decision-makers who make final decisions and who will control the flow of resources into the project. It extends to the senior project team members who will make up the nucleus of the effort.

Those key participants must really want the project to succeed, must intend that the project will succeed, must be ready to invest whatever it will take to make the project succeed.

Many project managers snort in derision at such an idea. When do you ever get to handpick the people, much less have anything to say about their attitudes?

The answer for the project manager starts with a broadening of the job description – just what the project manager sees as her/his role. There’s a lot more to the project management process than leading the plan process, communicating among the stakeholders, coordinating project activities and correcting variances – not that any of that is inconsequential; not at all.

As a matter of general practice, the snorting project managers simply take what they’re given and trudge off into the project, prepared to fulfill the general expectation. Off on one more grinding effort to produce a not-very-satisfactory outcome.

Well, they have failed to do a very important part of the job. Project managers should take a more assertive grip on personnel, right at the beginning. There are two main ways to do this: You either get people who already are motivated, or you find ways to help them become so.

We ought to talk about that sometime soon. The why and the how.

See Why Should I?

http://www.jimmillikenproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-should-i.html

Well, It Hit the Fan. Now What?

2011-11-22T16:11:00.005-05:00

Something unsavory hits the fan. Who ya gonna call?

After you clean it up, who ya gonna blame?

Then, what are you going to do?

Why do things go wrong?

Things go wrong because the process didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Maybe it was the wrong process. Maybe it used to be the right process, but now it doesn’t work any more. Maybe it never really worked, and a final, fatal straw fluttered down onto the overload.

Or did someone miss a step, or botch the execution, or not know the right process?

Whatever happened, it has someone’s fingerprints on it. The one constant in every human activity is that it’s human – it has people in it. Some person designed the process. Someone oversees the process. Other humans employ the process and/or are affected by it.

If the process fixes itself, then it’s a self-correcting process, and humans designed it to be so. Most processes can’t do that, and human intervention is necessary.

When the process goes awry, someone did something that disrupted it. And it’s people who then must repair the damage, fix the problem and do something about why it happened.

So the operative factor always is the human being. How effectively do we prepare people to invent, conduct, fix and modify their processes?

This is a precautionary thought about the current emphasis on STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

There is absolutely no question that high competency in the skills of those categories is essential to the furtherance of our wellbeing, as individuals and as a society. No argument there.

Yet, every manager knows how reliance on those competencies alone will not consistently achieve success. When the credentials and the quantifiable assets of education and experience are all in place, there still are shortfalls and breakdowns, plenty of them.

Too many inadequate processes never change. Too many problems continue, or recur. There’s too much disharmony. Too much disengagement. Too much waste of potential. Too little constructive enthusiasm.

There are reasons for that problem with the fan. Just because the causes aren’t discussed doesn’t mean they aren’t obvious. What would it be like to do something about them?

Put Me in, Coach: Role vs. Soul

2011-11-08T18:20:00.009-05:00

The typical project manager has the soul of a high-performance player, and that’s a problem. The job calls for someone entirely different.

The solo champion is disciplined, self-demanding and unshakably focused on the task at hand. The champ is fiercely competitive and supremely self-reliant. Those characteristics are widely admired, and rightly so. They just aren’t good for the project manager.

The role of the project manager is defined in countless variations, but the best descriptions call for finely-tuned skills in persuasion, collaboration and delegation.

We all have known managers, in projects and in other circumstances, who were disciplined, demanding, etc., and they often were good managers. They were respected, perhaps feared, and you didn’t want to cross them.

But few of them could successfully delegate, and their style was not what you’d call collaborative. They really didn’t have the ability to lead groups of mutually supportive professionals operating autonomously.

Taskmasters don’t inspire initiative, or creative problem-solving. They tend to be more critical than helpful. They are better at nailing mistakes than helping with solutions or improving the skills of their team members.

There’s another, perhaps more frequent, issue with the people who are asked to manage projects. This is when the appointee is chosen because he/she is really good at the specialty involved, or is a good worker, period.

What’s the problem with that?

Well, the problem is that no one checked to see whether the person can manage. The distinction between doing and supervising was not drawn. Doing something well is radically different from overseeing other people who are doing that thing.

Subject matter expertise is vital to the individual contributor. For the manager, it is a nice thing to have, but it’s far less important than the person’s grasp of the unique skills of management. The frequent assumption that one equals the other is the bane of the workplace.

But project management most often has another burden, one that burns out project managers and crashes projects.

A Punch in the Nose & Other Good Communication

2011-10-24T16:35:00.007-04:00

Talking about “communication” is not good communication. What is good communication? A punch in the nose, that’s what. A punch in the nose is good communication.

If you are repulsed by such a concept, then that also is good communication. Repulsion is an unambiguous response. I made my point.

Let’s do a little defining here. Defining is good communication. It is, in fact, at the heart of good communication, along with a few other practices we are about to explore.

Communication is defined as establishing some kind of understanding, and good communication is defined as establishing mutual understanding with the greatest possible clarity in the shortest possible time. Can’t beat a punch in the nose for that. It establishes clear proof of bad intent in seconds.

If you accept the definition, you cannot quarrel with the example. If, on the other hand, you live by a broader and more decorated concept of good communication, you’ll object.

And that’s the first half of the major problem in most relationships, most organizations and most projects. We start from different assumptions about what is being said, demonstrated or otherwise indicated.

Our individually distinct upbringings, educations, experiences and attitudes inevitably give us varied understandings about even the most common words, phrases and other communication tools.

That’s the innocent half of the problem.

The other half, the working half, is the one that directly causes widespread grief in our relationships. It is the sad fact that we don’t clear up these different understandings before we start acting on the decisions we make based on them.

We rarely bother to find out what someone else really means. We think we already know. Well, we don’t know.

Why should we know what the other person means? We don’t know what WE OURSELVES mean. We just assume we’re right about whatever it is, and fault other parties for believing and acting differently.

This general misapprehension often turns into mistrust. In more active cases, it culminates in a punch in the nose, that climactic and crystal-clear act of communication. Generally, it hardens and deepens the misunderstandings that led to it in the first place.

While miscommunication is everywhere and its causes and nature are complicated, its cure is not all that frequent. But it's relatively attainable.

The Ghost in Our Days

2011-08-31T12:15:00.003-04:00

Too busy.
Too much to do.
Too little time.
Workload overload.
“Hey, how ya doin’?”
“Busy . . . You?”
“Yeah, busy. Too busy.”

What’s this “busy” that everybody is? Is it work, real work? Is it important work? Worthwhile work? Is it the right work?

Ask yourself what was the most important thing you accomplished last month. Or last week. Or yesterday. What made it the most important?

Equally serious questions: What was the second-most-important thing you did yesterday? How long did it take? And the third? How long did it take, and why did it take that long?

In fact, what exactly did you do all day? And what about the stuff you didn’t do, maybe didn’t get to, that you had planned to work on?

Who has time to think about all that, much less figure out answers? Anyway, we may have no idea where to start.

And therein lies the problem: We don’t have time to manage our time.

Well, why is that?

As with any chicken-egg situation, this one just plain discourages examination. It frustrates decision.

That doesn’t mean we just become unaware of the issue. It hangs around. It is a ghostly presence in our days – this feeling of dissatisfaction with our own behavior because we can’t seem to get ourselves to accomplish what we want.

We all know we’re supposed to be doing something about it, but we don’t. Why?

Two main reasons:

First, we don’t really know how, even if we think we do.

Second, we don’t really want to do it, even if we think we do.

So that’s where you start: Finding motivation and getting practical.

A Case of Implementation

2011-06-25T10:09:00.003-04:00

An exercise in introducing
Project Management into an organization

YOU
You are Phil Campbell. You were hired three months ago into a newly-created position, Project Manager, by this industrial materials supply company. You’ve worked for several other organizations over your 10 years of employment, and this is the job you consider your first real career-builder.
You’ve held various jobs in recent years as a lead worker and supervisor in retailing and construction. You originally got interested in Project Management because of a presentation at your Young Leaders Society meeting. Since then, you’ve taken a couple of Project Management courses and have become a regular attendee at programs of the Project Management Institute chapter.

The HIRE
You weren’t really in the job market, but they announced at a PMI meeting that Accurate Materials Company was looking to hire a project manager, and it sounded interesting.
Until then, you hadn’t really thought of yourself as a project manager, but the information you’ve been learning at PMI has made it clear to you that project management is what you’ve been doing for years. It hasn’t been all that high-level and sophisticated, but you’ve found that adapting project management practices on the job really does make things work better.
You also hadn’t realized how interested you had become in project management. When you heard about this opening, you were quite intrigued by the idea of actually going into a job with the title and status of “Project Manager.” It crystallized in your mind as something much more meaningful than just another job.
So you sent in your resume – and got the call. The interview was unlike any you’d had before. It became apparent that Dan and Simon, the two executives who met with you, did not know a lot about project management. They liked what they heard, though. They exchanged glances and nodded in satisfaction several times as they listened to your comments and answers.
Accurate Materials had some ideas about expanding its lines of business into product innovation and development, rather than remaining a distributor of basic goods from bulk suppliers and original equipment manufacturers.
Dan and Simon knew some of the specifics about what they wanted to develop, but acknowledged that they had no idea how to organize and execute innovative processes. They had heard enough about project management to identify it as the way to do the organizing and executing.
They were impressed with how well you fit their job description. The offer, with a nice bump from your previous salary, came quite soon.
It's been an interesting 90 days.

Up & Down the Pyramid

2011-05-29T11:08:00.004-04:00

You haven’t had your coffee yet today, and you just spilled a full cup in your lap. How do you feel?

Or something important has just gone all to hell on the job, and it’s your fault. How do you feel about that? Say it wasn’t your fault, but you’re being blamed anyway. How’s your mood now?

Now, look the other way. You stubbornly stuck to your guns in a long, difficult effort. Everyone else said it would never work. In the end, you pulled it off – and now they all think you’re awesome. If you don’t feel on top of the world, there’s something wrong with you.

Either way, bummer or winner, we’re supposed to suppress our emotions: Never let them see you sweat . . . and it’s very bad form to celebrate yourself.

There are two important things, one good and one bad, going on in such situations.

One is how we build and improve our image and our relationships. Our behavior is one of our most important tools in successful workplace collaboration. No question that dignified response to all kinds of situations is important in earning respect.

The other vital element is what goes on inside our heads. We err seriously when we too rigorously enforce this restraint within the privacy of our own internal “conversations.”

Don’t kid yourself – the stream of self-talk is constant and powerful. It’s voluminous, estimated to flow in our minds at four times the speed of a typical conversation. Most of us don’t do it aloud – at least most of the time – but it is real and extremely important in determining our behavior.

When that self-talk includes too many admonitions to ourselves to bottle up our reactions, it is a mistake.

In short, we’re plenty emotional, but we don’t like to admit it. We don’t even acknowledge it, and that damages our ability to manage.

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid has been a cliché for decades, but don’t forget that clichés thrive for a reason: They provide instantly-understood definition and meaning. Maslow deserves better, and taking a serious look at the idea in our daily performance can be pretty instructive.

Project management, especially: Risk, uncertainty, complexity, dependency. That’s the environment for the project manager, and it’s guaranteed to keep the emotions at a boil.

Picture the project manager, eternally sliding or slipping down the pyramid. Maybe lurching or pitching down, depending upon how abrupt and impactful the event is.

Trudging or scrambling up the pyramid.

Maslow has a lot to say to you, project manager.

Fear, Avoidance & the Nonsecret of Success

2011-04-25T16:02:00.004-04:00

Most project managers work hard. Some of the best of us work too hard – especially considering the disappointment that all too frequently dogs our results.

Give yourself a little private test, whether you carry the title “Project Manager,” or do projects without the portfolio, or just too often have to do stuff without enough time, information, competent personnel, etc.

Actually, we’re ALL project managers. Everybody is, at least part of the time.

This test requires that you do a quick – honest – review of your emotional state at work over the last few weeks. Zero in on the moments when the situation was not going particularly well. There may have been moments when you felt stress, panic, anger, frustration and/or the blues.

What was causing those reactions? Identify the moment, the feeling and the circumstances. This may not be easy, if poor performance and negative emotion have become so common in your life that they are virtually the standard state.

If necessary, just pick any old project or situation.

What exactly was going on? Were results coming in as expected/predicted/promised? Were people doing what they were supposed to do, what they had promised they would do? Was stuff showing up on schedule? Were problems being addressed, meaningfully, in time to do so properly? How about ongoing support and response on the part of management?

If everything was going swimmingly, congratulations. If that was not the case, how did you feel about it?

Stress, panic, anger, frustration, depression? OK, maybe just a modest level of pressure, fright and the general sense of just never getting things done? Do you feel this way often? Have you become resigned to poor performance? Have you, perhaps, even come to believe that that’s the way it is, and always will be?

Well, that’s not the way it should be. If that has become your way of life, you’re not in a good place. You don’t “fail” this test, but it does tell you something about your potential for effective management of projects.

The worst state is that of the project manager who accepts the false reality that their projects will never really work well, that organizations and individuals, however highly placed, simply cannot or will not consistently come through.

When that happens, the only sensible personal strategy is survival – keeping a watchful eye out for threats, staying away from hotspots, going with the flow – and managing to mediocrity. Not a noble occupation.

The solution is not particularly simple, nor is it easy. But it works.

Why & How to Go against Nature

2011-03-15T10:23:00.003-04:00

When you really think about it, project management doesn’t make sense.

It attempts to introduce a strange mix of discomfort and disorder into a system whose purpose is to pursue adherence to repetitive predictability.

Start with the nature and make-up of organizations. You gather people and resources together to pursue an outcome – say, profit, or public notice or a worthy cause – that requires the focused dedication of this effort, talent and wealth. You devise and implement processes, and constantly tune them, to make your valued outcome happen.

If the processes you invent/import are to get you where you want to go, they must be good processes. Effective processes that do not waste resources and human input, that make good use of your investments. If the processes don’t work, the organization does not reach its goal. The resources and the human effort turn out to have been wasted.

As the leader of such an enterprise, your obligation is to assemble the kind of people who will respect the process, learn and improve the process, stick with the process to make it ever more effective. They become increasingly invested in the established process.

A process is a set of sequentially dependent steps that, properly carried out, lead efficiently to a predetermined outcome. The more trustworthy the steps are, and the more rigidly they are followed, the less variance there is in the process and the more assured is the desired outcome.

The people drawn to and chosen for this kind of work collaborate well in an orderly environment. They constitute the much-maligned “bureaucracy,” which is as necessary to civilization as roadways and waterworks. Good bureaucracy makes communal survival possible, and is generally taken for granted. Bad bureaucracy, usually a minority, gets all the mentions because of its encrusted maladjustments.

In sum, the smooth functioning of an organization requires that there be a minimum of disruption, while the very purpose of project management is to take away resources and familiar routines from the organization to do or install something that’s never been there before.

So, when we mount a project, no matter how valuable we expect the payoff to be, we’re going against the nature of the sponsoring organization. Should we take carefully planned special measures if we want this alien thing to make it? Well, yeah.

Do we? Well, most often, no.

Reality Fiction

2011-02-27T20:59:00.004-05:00

There are six of them sitting in a conference room, tasked with preparing for a project. This thing is going to be complicated. And important parts of it are unfamiliar to them. They are meeting for the first time, and they’ve never worked together before.

Theoretically, they will collaborate to organize and execute this difficult innovation. They will recruit additional team members, arrange resource investments, guide the work process and resolve problems as they arise. They will take responsibility for their own parts, while supporting each other as necessary.

Unfortunately, it often doesn’t work quite that way. Many people in such situations would consider such a theoretical construction to be a fiction. They face an entirely different reality.

Five of the project planners in the example count themselves lucky. The sixth has been designated as project manager. This provides something of an escape hatch for the others. They had plenty to do before the dreaded tap on the shoulder that put them in this room. Now begins the delicate ritual that will determine for each of them what this new assignment will do to an already impossible workload – if indeed it has an effect at all.

You know, maybe it will die off, yet another victim of benign neglect.

The project manager is the only person out there in the open, clearly tagged with responsibility for making it work. In many organizations much of the time, this is a pretty difficult spot to be in, because history indicates there will be a lot of work, a lot of hours and a lot of frustration.

Objective studies show a high rate of shortfall or failure in projects of all kinds. There are reasons for that. Some are organizational, some are personal and all frequently are deeply ingrained in the culture.

One contradiction at the root of the problem originates with the fiction, subscribed to by some senior managers, that plans would work if only those charged with managing a plan would stick with it. The contradiction is completed at the working level by the counter recognition that fiction is not reality, however sincerely it is believed.

Sometimes all involved know that this “planning” business is a charade in which the impossible is demanded, with the expectation that anything less won’t motivate anyone. The effect is, of course, the opposite.

If job security dictates that the project manager pretend the plan will actually work, so be it. March dutifully along for a while, maybe, but sooner rather than later you’ll have to do whatever it takes to salvage something from the doomed initiative.

Or maybe not. If a shortfall isn’t acceptable, or if even a poor substitute can’t be wrung out of the effort, it might just be declared dead, or allowed to quietly wither away.

And life goes on. One more proof that planning simply doesn’t work.

Well, this “reality” is the real fiction. Overcoming it can be done, often is done, but it’s not easy.

Blow Up Teamwork

2011-01-31T19:02:00.003-05:00

Teamwork? Hah!

Process? What process?

Collaboration? Show me.

This is not cynical. I do not dismiss the sincere cooperative efforts of countless people who work together in pursuit of common interests. Nor do I demean the behavior and motives of those who labor to lead, to coordinate their fellows and their staffers to make good things happen.

I’m just viewing the results, and commenting as a favorably disposed but objectively depressed observer of the scene. Things just don’t go well, mostly, in the collaborative activity of most of our organizations.

Experts in organizational behavior suggest sitting in the cafeteria or break room and just listening to the talk, if you want to know how well an organization is doing – or how it is likely to do. Or just stroll through the workplace with your eyes and ears open.

The chatter and the body language will tell you what’s going on. Are they complaining about unfair bosses, lazy co-workers, rude customers? Or does the conversation reflect pride, progress, engagement? Or do they never mention the work at all? Are people busy, vigorous, engaged? Or is there lethargy, resentment?

We often misunderstand the true nature of teamwork, organizational process and group collaboration. We refer to them as if they actually exist, in the sense of having independent existence. They don’t.

Think of this: Take a typical organization, of any size or process or project. Remove the people who now occupy and operate it. Immediately replace them with other people of equal background, training and talent. There will be an abrupt and radical change in what happens and what is produced. It's not the structure or the process. It's the people.

So we ought to blow up our easy acceptance of “teamwork” as it is commonly understood. Discard it. Trash it.

Why? Because it is a misleading and dangerous fiction. Teamwork, process and collaboration are effects of human activity, which itself arises from individual intent. People don’t merge their distinct individualities into some collective new superior creature when they become part of a group. They simply add a mutual dependency with other people in the interest of some common intent.

The common intent is not by itself the determinant of whether the new group succeeds or not. The actual individual efforts, driven and accumulated by the common intent, produce the outcome. If the intent inspires committed effort, success is possible. If a leader can ignite that inspiration, things happen.

So that’s why the participants’ unguarded conversation is a quick indicator of group strength. The talk tells you what people are thinking. Thinking is the engine of action.

Then the ultimate, unmistakable producer of group success is, of course, what the participants do. And THAT is where the manager’s attention must be focused.

Screwing Up to Succeed

2011-01-23T21:22:00.005-05:00

There is the story of a bright young man who got himself an opportunity to manage a $10 million project for a large company. To his horror, the effort failed, totally.

The guy was summoned to the office of the top man, and entered the presence burning with awareness of a disaster he could blame on no one but himself.

“Well, young man, what do you have to say for yourself?” said the executive.

“I want to apologize, sir, from the bottom of my heart,” he answered. “I know I’m going to be fired, and I know I deserve it.”

“Fire you? Why should we fire you?” the old man demanded. “We just invested $10 million in your education!”

Screwing up is not hard to do. We’ve all done it. And you know what? We’re all going to do it again. Serially, Continually. We can’t avoid it. Individually and in our various collective relationships, we can expect it to happen, and happen a lot.

The wrong words pop out at the worst possible time. I forget a commitment that turns out to have been very important. I thoughtlessly take on something I can’t handle. As sure as tomorrow, I’ll pull off something embarrassing – soon.

When I do, I can go through any one or more of several responses. There’s the Saturday Night Live one: “I hate when that happens,” as if it were an uncontrollable event, certainly not occasioned by me. There’s Problem Solving 101: Can I blame someone? Good. Problem solved. There’s denial: “Problem? What problem?” And there’s always avoidance: Just exit the neighborhood, virtually if not physically, and wait for it all to go away.

So what was going on in that little story we opened with – a veteran executive dismissing an expensive failure as a simple educational investment? What was he thinking of? What was the justification? What can we take from the example?

We don’t know the context in which the young man’s project was conducted. We do know that the organization’s leader was not taken aback by what happened, and had reason to see it in a positive light. And he was looking to the future, a future he fully expected to be successful.

That implies a culture of effective problem solving and talent development. As one important part of it, we suspect the organization’s decision-makers knew precisely what had gone on, and what it meant.

We need to adapt that understanding to our own career management. We can start with a personal policy toward our own screw-ups. I am not going to engage in any of the ineffective failure-response attitudes noted above. Instead, I can confront the situation directly, openly, motivated only by an intent to determine exactly what happened and why. Then, I immediately turn to what I’m going to do the next time. Specifically.

This is a matter of courage and discipline, especially when I caused or contributed to the disappointing event – or when people intent on pinning it on me are busily at work.

One essential truth to keep forever in mind: There never is a worthwhile success that is not preceded by multiple failures. Success is earned, not awarded.

Easy Doesn't

2011-01-11T15:03:00.003-05:00

If it’s easy, don’t do it. It’s not good.

That statement may be the rare oversimplification that is true more often than not. It certainly is true of Project Management. Whatever you do the easy way won’t get the job done.

The emperor of this land of failure is “It’s easier to do it myself.” Of course it’s easier to do it yourself. Any fool knows that. Just do it. You don’t need to take the time to describe and explain it to someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and may show clear signs of not really caring to find out.

It’s easier to do it yourself than to think through ways to keep track of someone else doing it, and easier than taking the time to figure out what they’re doing wrong, and get them to see that, then get them to see how to avoid doing it wrong again as soon as you turn your back.

It’s easier to do it yourself than it is to wait and wonder when it will get done, or whether it’s even under way yet, and whether there will be unexpected and unnecessary barriers in the way of whoever else is trying to do it.

There’s little or no pride in seeing a final result that is only 70 percent as good as it could have been, or one that doesn’t have the proud polish of true professionalism.

There’s a little extra embarrassment when some other expert makes amused remarks to you about the work done under your supervision that isn’t up to the standard you used to set back when you were more on your game.

On a really personal level, results that are solely and fully your own are deeply satisfying. You might not have much time to relax and admire such a result, but it beats the dickens out of settling for knowing that some group product was brought to an acceptable (unexciting) conclusion under your direction.

There often isn’t much praise at such moments, and what there is doesn’t qualify as the gee-whiz variety. And it’s spread around – by you, if you’re smart enough to know how to earn the loyalty of your worker bees. In fact, some contributor may be singled out for a bit of glory that you know really belongs to you – but you’re the manager, so you have to witness some lesser achiever getting the plaudits that used to be yours, and by rights ought to be right now

Truly, any fool knows it’s easier to do it yourself. It's easier than managing.

The real fool, of course, is the one who actually DOES it himself/herself as a matter of practice. And don’t kid yourself. Most of us do, too often. Hard to believe? Not really.

How to Save Your Organization

2010-12-30T23:10:00.004-05:00

It’s the unlovely little secret of most organizations. It’s the universal challenge facing those responsible for the work of others. It’s the sand in the gears of group productivity.

What is it? Delegating, that’s what. Poor or nonexistent delegating.

Delegating is the reason we have managers. The managers’ job is to clarify and specify what is to be done, then subdivide the workload and assign suitable portions of it to the various people who are under the managers’ direction. Sometimes it works. When it does, it produces results whose quantity and quality rise well above the possible accumulation of individual outcomes from the same workforce.

When delegating doesn’t work, which is often, it is because the managers haven’t successfully set the goals, identified the work and transferred the responsibility. Alternatively, it doesn’t work because the delegatees haven’t done their part. They haven’t gotten it done correctly, or on time. And sometimes it doesn’t get done because it never really was assigned at all.

The general result is that most organizations operate at low levels of productivity, most employees do not achieve and work at their potential – and many managers spend too much time doing work they should be delegating.

The managers often are too busy to take the time to train their staff members to handle activities that properly should be part of their jobs. More basically, they may not get to know their employees well enough to be able to gauge their capacity to grow and perform higher-level work.

Certain characteristics of many managers add to the problem. They earned promotion to their more-responsible positions through their superior skills as individual contributors, and they retain high standards for how that work is to be done. This can be intimidating or off-putting to those who now work for them. Such managers may, actually, demand higher-quality results than are really necessary, and their workers know it.

The syndrome often includes a tendency on the managers’ part to back away from the difficult new pressures of management. They revert to what they know and enjoy, which is doing their old job. It’s easier to do it themselves than try to explain it to those unfamiliar with it, and the managers do a better job, anyway. Naturally, this doesn’t leave them much time to address and perfect the uncomfortable practices of management – including delegating.

It is not unusual that senior managers in organizations suffering from poor delegating see what’s going wrong at the direct-management level. The problem is that they often don’t understand how to do it, either, and their criticisms and directives simply add to the stress.

The way out is simple, but not particularly easy.

Without Which Nothing

2010-11-30T15:05:00.006-05:00

The PMBOK Guide describes 42 processes necessary to manage a project, and organizes them into five process groups and nine knowledge areas.

It takes nothing away from the Project Management Institute formulation to state the basic truth that not a single process, not a shred of knowledge is worth anything without one factor that is the ultimate essential. It is, in the fine old Latin phrase, “sine qua non – without which nothing.”

This prime-moving element is no mystery, no mystery at all, but its universal absence from Project Management talk suggests that it’s too delicate a concept for its name to be uttered in polite company.

Commitment.

I rewind and rerun in my imagination the project meetings of my life, especially the famous opening act: the initial organizational session.

I see once more the veiled eyes, the crossed arms, the sagging body language, the disguised yawns and smirks. Hear the doubts and obstacles and competing priorities. Workloads. I feel the palpable rejection and get that old familiar lost, gone feeling, sliding down that slippery slope once again. All alone.

Then I fast forward to today’s older-wiser mental video of the project manager behavior that reflects a deep understanding of why those long-ago days were the way they were, and a complete grasp of what it is that was missing then.

Commitment.

Not only does this modern project manager understand the situation and grasp its implications, he/she also knows what to do about it. This project manager will not become immersed in planning details that result in nothing. Or get entangled in excuses, squabbles and slippages. This project manager will pay attention to business, and will do so in an order of priorities that recognizes the sine qua non of commitment.

The project manager constructively engages the very deep-down human infrastructure that guarantees successful project performance and full satisfaction of the project intent. This project manager has, in fact, done what needs to be done about it before this first project meeting, and will now proceed to do it again.

The Boss & I

2010-11-24T22:08:00.008-05:00

The Emperor Nero ordered his Roman subjects to worship his horse as a god, basically as an idle demonstration of his power. He did it because he could, and there was no way to stop him. You could wind up dead if you didn’t comply.

That is authority without responsibility.

The modern project manager, on the other hand, often is the one who must meet quality standards within cost and time limits set by someone else – and do it through the work of people he/she doesn’t control. Amid plentiful risk and multiple complexities.

That is responsibility without authority.

The project manager swings in the breeze between those two poles. He/she is at the mercy of people who own all the marbles and can yank them back at any time. Simultaneously that project manager must somehow get tough stuff done predictably and consistently by “team members” who have no obligation to comply while they have lots of other things to do.

Too many project managers respond to this by working like dogs, scrambling in pursuit of busy people and filling in the gaps through their own efforts.

In the world of management, among the worst things you can do is to substitute personal labor for management direction. When you, the manager, pick up your shovel and go to the mine, you often are the best digger down there. While you’re demonstrating that, the actual designated diggers are leaning on their tools to watch admiringly, if they’re not off on some other dig.

As this sort of thing is going on, management is not happening. When you, the leader, become overbusy, a lot of really important stuff goes by the boards. Leadership very significantly depends upon observation and analysis, paying attention, understanding. It demands persuasion, the ability to convince people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do.

You can’t determine what’s happening or convince anybody if you don’t have time to conduct adequate observation and effective communication. You anticipate/solve problems and build productive mutual relationships through attention to events and people, watching and listening, responding to variances, needs and ideas, showing people they can look to you for solutions, assistance, ideas and inspiration.

A workload overload robs the project manager of the time and mental/emotional balance required to do that sort of thing. And, truth be told, many project managers secretly long to have these folks get out the way so they can have at the work themselves.

In sum, the project situation is set up to leave the project manager all alone out there with the responsibility, facing at best a major set of challenges. At worst, the view is a solid wall of people’s backs. What to do?

Don't Just Do It! Do It Right

2010-11-08T17:17:00.010-05:00

Just do it!

What a great slogan! It clears away a lot of the fuzz and distraction. Just do it. Act. Get things done. Results. We love it. The phrase emits a shiny, glowing simplicity that feels really good.

It would be great if only it worked. It doesn’t. For the athletes (and wannabes) the Nike slogan is aimed at, there is an implication of a simple need to unleash intense action based on high-level preparation. As a slogan, it may even have value for the couch potato who needs a boot into motion, any motion.

For general purposes of life for the rest of us, the “just do it” concept is dangerous nonsense. Think about it in the context of managing projects. Reasonable expectations about human behavior say “no way just do it.” You can’t lead project teams that way.

“Just do it!” says “impulse.” Don’t take time to think it over – your determination might drain away. Jump before you think about it too much.

What do you think it does to the team you’re trying to lead if people never know when you’re going to lurch into unexpected, unexplained action in response to some unpredictable impulse? That’s not leadership; it’s solo hyperactivity.

This is not to dismiss the project manager’s need for motivation. Leaders are by no means exempt from the fundamental and very human reality that we need a recharge on occasion. In fact, a project manager’s emotional battery must have extra capacity. It has to supply the energy for the leader’s own demanding role as well as frequent jump-starts for numerous dependent stakeholders. If the project manager is not driving forward with vigor and confidence, everyone else loses headway. The drag increases exponentially and can become irreversible very quickly.

So the project manager must have and display fire and determination, as well as focus and mental engagement. The project manager’s behavior must reassure and inspire others. He/she must be tuned to the needs and momentum of all those others who operate at lesser speeds on lower levels.

That central role demands steady direction and guidance. Impulse is out. But the need for self-motivation is not. And, in fact, for the project manager the need is greater – often much greater – than that of other project stakeholders.

But we’re not superhuman. Just do it! won’t do, so we must look elsewhere for self-motivation.

They're Not Listening to You

2010-09-26T16:46:00.002-04:00

The project manager has been at this a long time, and he’s been frustrated for much of that time.

“I get to the end of my rope about once a week,” he said, “I go in there and tell my manager how screwed up things are and what needs to be done to make it all work. And you know what happens? Absolutely nothing!”

Meanwhile, at the other end of this relationship, things are fine. It all depends upon your perspective.

“Joe is a really good project manager,” his manager tells me. “But he’s kind of a worrier. He comes in here every once in a while with a list of problems. I let him unload for a while – then he goes back and finds ways to get the job done.”

So one sees a system that doesn’t work, while the other sees a cyclical ritual that is just a factor in a passable way of life.

This kind of relationship is not sustainable. When there are systemic problems, continued indifference at the management level results in progressive unhappiness at the working leadership level. It wears people down. If there is not a sudden explosion at some point, there is an erosion of productivity and/or eventual burnout.

The syndrome has countless scenarios in the workplace. It is pervasive. You wonder if any organization actually has clear understandings between the people who do the job and the people who manage the process and own the resources.

This is, of course, the famous “communication problem.” It comes up in conversation and complaint really, really often. There is reason for the impression that not only is it everywhere most of the time, but there’s really nothing to be done about it.

Well, the main reason nothing gets done is that no one does anything. We don't resolve basic communication disconnects because the real issue gets too little thought on all sides. More specific to project management: They’re not listening to you because you’re not talking to them. You’re talking to yourself. They just happen to be on the scene, providing an occasion but not a partner for the verbalization.

If something effective is ever to be done about this failing, let’s start with the project manager.

Leadership: Do You Want to Work That Hard?

2010-09-15T22:01:00.004-04:00

We talk of leadership in glowing scenes of roaring crowds. Huge ones. Rippling banners and uplifting trumpets. Adulation. No rejection. No resistance. No nasty sniping.

That’s why we see so little of it.

If you’re actually going to do leadership, be ready. Leadership, real leadership, is mostly grubby, grinding, endlessly demanding of time, patience and effort. Then, in the midst of long stretches of unnoticed, unrewarded labor, unexpectedly there arises the moment at which great success is achieved . . . or great disgrace is earned.

Basically, your extraordinary personal investment is taken for granted.

You can’t be sufficiently disciplined, adequately tolerant, to invest all that time in supporting, guiding, educating, persuading . . . it takes to build a strong constituency of appreciative followers. You can’t – at the same time -- be sufficiently gifted and smart enough, properly alert and sensitive enough, politically attuned at the necessary level, to know when your moment has come.

Unless you’re a leader.

If you love authority, you’re out. They'll hate you. If you enjoy the limelight, you’re a performer, a lightweight. They may love to watch you, but they won’t follow you. If you declare yourself a leader, you’re a joke. It’s not up to you. If you expect appreciation, you’re really missing the point. When and if appreciation comes you didn’t anticipate it, because it never was part of your motivation.

You lead because you outwork expectations, beginning in the most mundane ways. Wherever your project, your organization, your people are, that’s where you are. You attend an awful lot of meetings. You tell people, early on and all along, what they need to know. You have, and you demonstrate, respect. You ask real questions, and you really listen when people talk. You reward significant input, and you ignore distraction and misdirection.

Man, does all this take time. Most of that time is low-octane investment of your presence and attention. It is draining. You don’t need to have all the answers, but you need to be a steadying, reinforcing backbone of the process. Alert, believing and always on message.

You need to do your homework, answer the questions and dissolve the objections. You must offer ideas and solutions – while empowering people to think and act in ways that get them to consciously engage their own initiative.

Oh, and this job requires what Peter Drucker called “the ‘C’ word – courage.” No really meaningful decision, he said, is easy. When it truly matters, there is going to be pain and a price is to be paid, no matter which way you go. People are going to be hurt. They're going to be angry. At you.

Probably no one will blame you if you dodge the firestorm.

But, if you do, they will never ever think of you as a leader.

OK, so you buy all that, and you’re ready to be a leader. How do you do it?

Derelict Projects

2010-09-08T12:41:00.008-04:00

The mythology of the sea is ripe with mysterious and scary stuff. Why was the Mary Celeste discovered cruising along, relatively undamaged but totally without captain and crew? Is the Flying Dutchman really still fulfilling his vow to battle Antarctic gales in a ghost ship until doomsday?

The Mary Celeste case was examined by a court of inquiry at Gibraltar, but the provable facts were too skimpy to settle it, and the rich flow of supposition and speculation has kept the story rolling vigorously since the 1870s. No, there was not a half-eaten meal on the table, nor was there a cat asleep on a berth when the ship was boarded.

The Flying Dutchman tale is even more fun, since no one is quite sure what, if any, actual event in the 1600s seeded the endless versions of the cursed shipmaster’s challenge to God (or maybe the Devil) that condemned him to suffer the worst of every subsequent storm off the tip of Africa. To this day, or at least to the last reported sighting of the ghost ship in 1959.

For sure, there really were, and are, derelicts – abandoned ships and boats – in the modern world, plenty of them. Mysterious disappearances from vessels, too. In April 2007, a good-sized vessel was discovered off Australia with its engines running, an open laptop computer on board and – yes – food on the table. There was no sign of the three men who were supposed to be there.

For the big-tragedy-oriented, the Bermuda Triangle provides updated mythology that includes the unexplained vanishing of jet planes as well as ships. Scary.

There is a bottomless human appetite for mystery, and we have no problem finding it in the most unromantic places. Project Management, for instance.

Derelict projects loom in the workplace, drifting aimlessly, sometimes for years, their hopeless crew members staring out at the passing world from haunted eyes. Actual disappearance of projects occurs, too, but ghostly reappearances are thankfully rare.

The word “abandonment” shows up often in definitions of “derelict,” and there’s a lot of that in the world of projects.

The reasons generally are neither romantic nor mysterious.

Project Communication: When It Ain't Broke, It Can Fix Whatever Is

2010-08-31T22:36:00.003-04:00

We talk about communication all the time, but we rarely communicate about it.

Communication. It’s one of those everyday pervasive things we notice only when it trips us up – and even then we pause only long enough to cuss a bit. Then we move on, busily sowing new communication pratfalls pretty much like the last one.

Wait a minute! Back there, I said we talk but don’t communicate. What does that mean? We’re seeming to claim that talking is not the same as communicating.

Good question. Now we can get into the subject in a meaningful way, and examine how it lurks in just about every problem among people. And therefore in every solution. Especially in project management.

Communication does indeed occur when we talk, but the talking itself isn’t the whole thing, and often isn’t even the main thing. Other factors can be better carriers of useful information between the conversational parties than the words are. It’s a lot harder to understand and be understood when, for example, you can’t see the person(s) you’re talking to. It’s even harder when you can’t hear or be heard, such as when the exchange is through writing rather than speech.

Whatever the situation or vehicle, it’s difficult to communicate meaningfully when the subject matter is complex, dynamic and unfamiliar – say, when you’re managing a serious project. Doing it remotely, and/or across cultures, multiplies the barriers. And it’s infinitely worse when there is ignorance, misunderstanding, hostility or conflict. Open, latent or disguised.

Just sticking with regular project management, among culturally homogeneous, co-located people, you have to conclude that most projects don’t meet reasonable expectations for schedule, cost and outcome. Ideal project outcomes are just not that frequent, because ideal project situations are just not that frequent.

Why is it so tough to manage projects to happy endings? Not surprisingly, my endless string of project manager surveys about the worst project failings nearly always places communication right up in the top three, often first. The other top flaws are essentially caused by or are dependent upon communication.

When communication fails, everything fails. When something else goes wrong, communication always is essential to the repair. How?

Project Management and the Pursuit of Assurance

2010-08-24T14:45:00.004-04:00

“Will this make me less risk-averse?”

The question, in a roomful of managers, startled me. I was a newly minted trainer, and we were gathered for a project management workshop. I hadn’t quite thought of the matter in terms of overcoming the jitters – but my views have radically changed since that long-ago day.

My previous experience with projects had been informal – in fact, I had never heard of something identifiable as “Project Management” until I got into consulting.

When, as a manager in the news business, I was responsible for getting something done, I rolled up my sleeves and went into combat mode. People knew that the poor devil stuck with the effort – special edition, process change, behind-the-news series, whatever – was in for a tough time.

They also knew that that person was going to disrupt their busy lives with demands for additional effort, generally unpaid and unrewarded. The thing rarely went well. Besides the reluctance of project “team” members and others whose help the leader needed, there were all the uncertainties of the work itself. The likelihood was that this was going to take a lot more time, blood, sweat, etc., than predicted. In all likelihood, more than it was worth.

So, with perfect logic, everyone stayed as far away as possible as long as possible. “Leadership” basically involved tracking people down and strongarming them for the desired output. All of this caused serious damage to relationships and left institutional scars that ensured a lousy start for any future initiative. It produced consistently poor results.

The essential problem with that familiar approach is its failure to properly engage and manage the one factor that makes all the difference: People. In the best of projects and the worst of projects, people are the most volatile variable. When this part is right, amazing things become possible. When it's not right, nothing will work.

And, in a typical organization, experience has inoculated potential participants against enthusiasm for participation.

When the manager mentioned above raised the unexpected question, it wasn’t just risk she was thinking of. She really was referring to the array of negatives, certainly including risk, that often surround the management of projects. Every one of them is based on – or heavily influenced by – people, their intentions, behavior and relationships.

This poor functioning of the human factor makes sound project management nigh impossible in many organizations, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For one thing, project managers have to stop supporting the negatives that bedevil them. WHAT?

When Is It a Project?

2010-08-14T13:01:00.003-04:00

If you’re human, you’ve done it. You’ve slipped sideways into a project without realizing it, and your routine practices didn’t work. This can be messy and difficult.

Some people you know have been doing it all their lives. Some never catch on – even when they are acutely aware that things just aren’t working right. They assume that’s the way the world is and nothing can be done about it.

Well, when IS it a project? And what CAN be done about it?

The answer to the first question is not as simple as it might seem, and the implications are extremely important. Project management calls for relatively time-consuming and uncomfortable actions up front. You have to get key stakeholders to sit still for the necessary research, decision-making, planning, communication and commitment. That’s a challenge.

When you’re looking for ways to identify when you’re into a project, you’re not going to get a lot of help from the scripture of the industry. Here are some examples:

The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (the PMBOK Guide of the Project Management Institute) – “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.”

Harold Kerzner’s Project Management -- “A project can be considered to be any series of activities and tasks that:
Have a specific objective to be completed within certain specifications
Have defined start and end dates
Have funding limits (if applicable)
Consume human and nonhuman resources (i.e., money, people,
equipment)
Are multifunctional (i.e., cut across several functional lines).”

Garold Oberlender’s Project Management for Engineering and Construction –
“A project is an endeavor that is undertaken to produce the results that are expected from the requesting party. . . . A project consists of three components: scope, budget and schedule.”

All three are correct, as are many of the various other definitions of “project” out there in the field. But many people who wake up in project situations could use some finer tuning. How do I know whether what I’m doing, or what I’m facing, is a project? What do I do about it?

Making It in Project Management

2010-07-25T11:44:00.005-04:00

How do you find a job as a project manager?
Here’s a simple how-to system:
1. Get a job.
2. Act like a project manager.

See? Nothing to it.

Well, actually the process does require more than just showing up and appointing yourself. But prospective project managers must understand that this is an environment unlike education, accounting, bartending or any other relatively defined field of endeavor.

My experience is that true project managers do not always come clearly labeled, and some people who do carry the title aren’t really doing the full project manager job. In fact, the job title has always been inadequate in specifying just exactly what the holder was doing.

The information technology and construction industries have, for decades, listed “project manager” as a distinct position. The jobs often are defined so narrowly, though, that their occupants really don’t manage projects. In fact, they sometimes don’t manage anything of consequence at all – they simply tend technical slices of predetermined processes. Necessary work, sometimes quite important work, but not project management.

Other people identified as project managers do indeed handle key responsibilities in originating and conducting significant project work. You just never know until you look into it.

In the current world, organizational decision-makers are becoming more aware of project management as a way to handle complexity, rapid change, growing risk and all the consequences of globalization. Conventional management is neither agile enough nor comprehensive enough for the job.

When that perception results in action, the organization consults some source in the project management profession to obtain a job description that more than likely demands extensive, specific experience in the work. Then they may add their own wish list and create a fictional silver bullet of a position.

Where does this leave the person who is looking to have a project management career, and is wondering where to start?

Same Old Wheel

2010-07-02T16:32:00.002-04:00

History is the how-to manual for the future – but only if it lasts that long.

People are studying project success rates all the time, and they find that well over half of all projects fail to some significant degree, even when the standards of measurement are relatively forgiving.

Why are things this way? Well, there are the people, generally very good people. Then there’s the process, often not a very good process.

First, the people. Project managers, when they’re successful, are action people. They typically are not contemplative types. They thrive on engaging the multiple simultaneous challenges of complex innovation. Their days are consumed by the trials, errors and revisions that keep projects moving through the fog of uncertainty. If something works, great. If it doesn’t, let’s move right on and try something else.

This is the way to go, as far as it goes. When it doesn’t go far enough, the project manager’s workstyle, combined with other typical factors, does not encourage a cult of preparation and documentation. If they’re not careful, project managers are tempted to shortcut planning and tracking.

That can limit the formal planning/operating process to combining adoption of some old paperwork with finger-crossing for what’s new this time. There is no history. Individual memories tend to be selective and incomplete, and of course the memories leave when their owners do. The institution doesn’t develop and retain knowledge for use the next time.

When that happens, it results from a false choice: Either we get going and tackle this challenge, or we sit around and waste time attempting to plan the unplannable.

Don’t be tempted. Professional project management methodology, thoughtfully employed, works. It engages the unfamiliarity, the complexity and the risks – while actually taking less time and hassle.

Why Should I?

2010-06-26T11:40:00.002-04:00

It’s easy to get people to do what they want to do. The problem for project managers is that most people don’t want to do this. They aren’t particularly motivated to throw themselves enthusiastically into project work.

They have their reasons. Projects very often are extra work. The team members’ regular bosses have their own concerns. Functional managers can be quite unwilling to adjust team members’ regular workloads in favor of time to work on outside projects. The managers can flat-out demand that close-to-home priorities come first.

The reluctance also can originate with the designated team member him/herself. If you’re a committed worker, you don’t want to take time away from what you’re already devoted to. If you’re not a committed worker, you don’t want to take on more unwanted duties of any kind.

There are other factors. The project usually has unfamiliar activities and personnel. It’s uncertain, risky, time-consuming. You don’t like to be subject to the decisions of someone you don’t know – and who isn’t really your boss, anyway.

The very dedication of the project manager, when it exists, can be off-putting. Dedicated people can be really annoying to associates who aren’t. Doesn’t this guy/woman realize I don’t share the conviction that nothing in the world is as important as this thing?

If the project manager is not dedicated, or is a bumbler, disorganized, a poor communicator, impatient, uncaring . . . Well, you get the picture.

All of the above is no revelation to veteran project managers. Project leadership is openly built on the ghastly principle of responsibility without authority. The stage is set.

The situation is so daunting, in fact, that stakeholders and spectators often operate on the assumption that every project will wind up ‘way over budget, off schedule and under quality standards. That’s just the way it is.

When the project manager agrees with them, a disappointingly frequent occurrence, you’ve got a guaranteed dog of a project and a dispirited troupe of reluctant participants. You’ve got an organization resigned to mediocrity or worse in its attempts to innovate.

And, most seriously, you have a burned-out project manager who tried the “champion” role – pulling the project through by superhuman effort – or a cynical project manager – telling the world that you can’t expect anything different from a loser organization like this.

Refocusing this picture is not impossible, but it’s not simple. It means the project manager must refuse to share in a cardinal failure of our workplace culture.

The Greatest Flaw

2010-06-19T15:27:00.004-04:00

The seemingly endless catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is an excellent example of really terrible project management. From every angle, this is a colossal botch by some of the smartest and most powerful people in the world. That starts with British Petroleum (BP), which reportedly used at every turn the most primitive form of risk management – squeeze your eyes tight shut and cross your fingers.

As it drove its drill through four miles of seabed, starting under a mile of water, the huge, worldwide oil company used up-to-the-minute techniques and technology. Yet, for the prevention and mitigation of possible problems, it stuck with decades-old practices developed for shallow water, consistently choosing the least-costly protective measures. In essence, BP appears to have acted on the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong, and the federal regulators seemed to agree.

From reports about what went on before and during the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, it begins to appear that a disaster was inevitable.

In the ensuing weeks, we’ve been treated to a series of incredibly ineffective efforts to stop the underwater gusher. Shortly thereafter, we began to witness the resultant chaos in trying to contain and clean up the millions of gallons of crude oil. The fishing and tourism industries, vital to the populations that rim the Gulf, are for now as dead as the beslimed sea creatures plucked from the gunk.

Regarding the cleanup, The New York Times reported last week: “From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials and BP.”

That description is a near-complete listing of the classic ailments of failed projects, including the most damaging flaw of all.

David Brooks, estimable columnist for The Times, concludes a commentary on the situation with this prescription: “We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart, but who are really distant. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.”

Wrong.

Jangling the Triangle

2010-06-14T11:08:00.007-04:00

Nothing jangles the Triangle of Truth like the black magic wand of risk. For a terrifying example, consider the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
Drilling for oil in unprecedented circumstances is, of course, a project. The level of innovation and uncertainty in any project determines how much risk is involved, and therefore how the Triangle is to be constructed.
Drilling for oil a mile down in an extremely complex and fragile environment is a hugely risky project. It calls for strategic designs and tactical decisions soundly based in comprehensive assessment, analysis and planning with forethought.
Consider the Triangle of Truth (in more august quarters, referred to as “The Treble Constraint”).
The corners of the Triangle represent the three slippery assets at the foundation of the project manager’s job: Time, cost and quality. Projects are projects because they are uncertain, and the three corners are floating constructs required to make any action planning possible.
Amid uncertainty, we want to take time for baby steps, cautiously edging into the unknown. Can’t do much of that, though, because now you’re bulging out the cost corner. After while, certain desired outcomes can begin to look impossible because you’re running out of time and money – and maybe because they turn out to be just plain impossible.
So the triangle is dynamic, constantly tending to lurch out of control. At its center is the project manager, the busy string-puller who must keep the three corners in balance. The project manager works to manufacture certitude out of material that is largely speculative.
The multiple investors, participants and beneficiaries of the project must be empowered to act decisively and efficiently. You, as project manager, persuade them to do so, without let-up, through the life of the project. You start with forecasts and commitments that coalesce into a plan, then you execute, correct and accomplish. And negotiate.
Success at this enterprise demands proof that those making commitments can do so in confidence that the risks have been identified and accounted for.

To-may-to? To-mah-to?

2010-05-30T18:51:00.003-04:00

You say to-may-to. I say to-mah-to. So what?

Well, different pronunciations are symptoms of different routes through life, each with its own history, values, practices . . . and language and interpretations. In the course of human events, few factors are more important than communication, and few are less well-understood.

For this very reason, thousands of failures are launched every day in the conference rooms of this country. Well-intentioned people try to function without common definitions. They are project managers, team members and other stakeholders trapped in a culture that dooms a majority of projects to failure, not infrequently total failure.

Overblown, you say? No, this is not simply a point of irritation for lingo freaks. It matters, a lot, to us all. Take, for example, the word “done.” Left to my own devices, I’ll make sure my part of the project is complete, finished according to my understanding of what should be included.

Yet, it may be lacking elements – perhaps important ones – required for subsequent project activities. The shortfalls may show up immediately, or it may be several steps down the road before they erupt. They can, and often do, cause severe schedule and cost problems as somebody else gets hit with an unexpected variance. Their assumptions didn’t match mine, and neither of us knew.

This problem is so pervasive that it is a fundamental piece of the general expectation that projects will never truly meet expectations regarding cost, schedule and quality. This assumption says something about attitudes toward communication, and therein lies a crucial issue for the project manager.

Stress, My Friend & Foe

2010-05-17T14:48:00.003-04:00

If you’re a project manager, and you’re not tense, you’re not paying attention. Tension, stress, whatever you call it, is a defining worklife trait of effective project managers. You have to be a bit tight to do this job properly. But not too tight.

The shorthand of the workplace too often gets this wrong, equating tension/stress with unhappiness and poor health, period. That oversimplifies and trivializes this most valuable of conditions.

The pursuit of happiness is a stressful business, especially if you take it seriously. You’re chasing something you want but don’t have. The more valuable it is and the more you want it, the more stressful the process becomes. Pretty much by definition, the good project manager really, really wants the desired outcome.

It’s the level of determination, twinned up with the risk, uncertainty and dependencies, that make for the stress.

It’s no wonder, then, that project management draws the kind of people who enjoy challenge, problem solving and dealing with the unexpected under time pressure. And it’s no surprise that they live lives in which the tension can become suffocating.

Here’s why. Whether they admit it or not, project managers take pride in the role of go-to person, courageous decision maker, hard worker, totally dependable leader, manager and teammate.

People frequently find themselves in this work by natural selection rather than conscious choice, at least at the beginning. Early on, they seem to be more willing to take on the tough jobs. They take responsibility for learning how to do what no one else steps forward to tackle.

Over time, they build the reputation – in their own minds as well as among their superiors and peers – as people you can turn to. The workstyle traits that distinguish them become more pronounced as their distinctiveness becomes more sharply defined.

This good thing can become too much, and the invigorating stress, remaining too high for too long, becomes destructive. Wisdom must discipline commitment at some point, or such people can work themselves into burnout or worse.

The Project Manager's Art

2010-05-03T15:04:00.001-04:00

How do you get people to do what you want them to do?

This eternal question of human relations has special resonance in the world of Project Management. Sometimes nobody wants to do what needs to be done -- perhaps even the Project Manager who is supposed to be its leader.

Considering the nature of Projects, this disability is understandable. But it's not acceptable. Dealing with it should be up front and on top of the Project Manager's priorities. It often isn't.

Consider the nature of Projects. They are temporary intrusions into the regular order of business. Sometimes they are massive. Always they require individuals to engage in unfamiliar tasks and/or to work with unfamiliar people. This uncomfortable new workload can be in addition to their accustomed activities, perhaps with no reduction in pre-existing expectations. You're supposed to kind of work this new thing in.

Surrounding it all is an aura of uncertainty, since Projects are -- by nature -- risky. No one, including the leadership, is quite sure how to handle this. That's why it's a project -- a complex, multidisciplinary effort to produce an innovation. The quality of the outcome is expected to be high. Oh, and you must use a minimum of resources, including funds and people, and meet a tough deadline.

There are many characterizations of what typically happens in such situations, some of them quite flip. Generally, the point being made is that there's no way this thing will get done anywhere near the deadline. Nor will it have a prayer of meeting budget. And quality? You're lucky if your result has 50 percent of the features or functions you set out to produce.

Well, what happens when things work, despite the odds? While successful Projects are in the minority, there are some. What makes the difference?

Project Management has been described as an art and a science. That's not just an airy remark. It is central to understanding how the Project Manager is to be effective.

All Productivity Is Personal

2010-04-27T10:53:00.005-04:00

Effective Project Management can make perfect sense on paper. Logic, clarity and predictability are like that. Even risk can be identified and managed with reasonable certitude when you theoretically control the circumstances. Then you insert the human factor, and . . . .

Ah, the human factor. Sounds so manageable when you say it that way – sort of a verbal cardboard cutout with depersonalization of “human” and the emphasis on “factor.” As a matter of brutal fact, too many managers follow the Paul Simon dictum, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Truth is, people even at their best are the least predictable of the resources available to the manager. Someone who is a star performer today can be a flat tire in the operation tomorrow, depending upon utterly unpredictable personal, family, health, financial, mood influences.

When that happens, there can be radical effects on results. The resources of cost (salary), time (work schedule), materials, equipment, facilities and everything else remain completely unchanged. The bad effect occurs solely because the human being has performed differently. That catalytic resource – the person – gives dynamic meaning to all those other resources, and is the dominant determinant of the outcome.

As in everything else, what is true in ordinary organized human activity is more so in Project Management, because a Project is organized human activity in a pressure cooker. You don’t have the luxury of seemingly plentiful time. Your resources are sparingly, perhaps grudgingly, often inadequately doled out from stores originally anticipated elsewhere.

Most importantly, your people are loaned from permanent organizational functions whose managers are not above tugging them back to serve contrary priorities.

In short, management of this human being thing makes or breaks the Project Manager. And the most serious challenge in doing so is bounded by the end of his/her nose.

The Ancient History of the Boss

2010-04-23T17:19:00.003-04:00

Hundreds of tough-looking men stand around in a clearing in the North Woods, obviously waiting for something. Then a smallish guy walks into the clearing, goes up to the biggest, meanest-looking of the men and knocks him flat with a single punch.
The onlookers nod approvingly to one another, and a murmur goes through the crowd: “Must be the new boss.”

Would that establishing authority and leadership were so simple today! Well, it’s not. Many members of any Project Team can have sophisticated skills utterly different from those of the Project Manager. In fact, the very defining work of the Project can be common to Team members, but not the Project Manager. Such professionals can be difficult to lead – but Project success is impossible without accomplishing that.

It can be done. A veteran worker in a skilled trade, now in training to add Project Manager expertise, recalled his puzzlement a few years earlier when a Project Manager was added to an organization in which this senior contributor typically had a leading role.

He ignored the Project Manager for the next two or three Projects, then somehow was convinced to make use of the man’s knowledge and experience. His eyes were quickly opened, and that is why he decided to get Project Management training himself.

It is unfortunate that, in many organizations, such moments of revelation never occur. The Project Manager operates as digger-in-chief in a pick-and-shovel environment characterized more by devotion to good old-fashioned hard work than better up-to-date smart work.

While nothing is simple in love and war, life and Project Management, there is a relatively straightforward solution for the Project Manager.

Down from the Mighty White Horse

2010-04-18T10:43:00.003-04:00

The starving settlers on the frontier deployed scouts in a desperate search for food. Back came the report: “The bad news is that all there is to eat out there is buffalo chips. The good news is, we have a five-year supply.”

Meanwhile, back in today’s world: No matter who blew it – or failed to do it – it’s all your fault. You’re the project manager. And you have to fix it. That's the bad news. Now let’s get on to the good news.

It’s true that the world is not yet at the point where little boys and girls aspire to be Project Managers. Cops, firemen, astronauts, sports stars, adventure heroes and all-purpose celebrities continue to dominate the career dream scene – for now.

But we’re getting there. More and more, employers are demonstrating at least a general understanding that Project Management training is worth demanding in new hires. Many specify in job postings that applicants hold the certification as Project Management Professional (PMP).

In response, more working adults are seeking Project Management training and certification, and more students are taking courses in the subject. Project Management no longer is as mythological as the tales of the Lone Ranger.

All this good news shouldn’t mask the fact that Project Management is difficult work.

For one thing, it is frequently mischaracterized as an information technology specialty, so business-process challenges are assigned to IT specialists who have no idea how to manage any of it outside its technical component. More broadly, functional managers sometimes see the new Project Manager as the convenient repository for any problem they don’t want to deal with.

And, sadly, the whole thing is the Project Manager’s fault.

One Sick Project

2010-04-12T09:59:00.003-04:00

A junior manager of a healthcare organization came across a no-brainer solution to a serious problem, and therein lies a depressing story. This is an illustration of the failure of goal coordination that fosters extensive effort -- extensive, fruitless effort.

In the healthcare facility, there traditionally has been a high rate of back and neck injury among staff members who have to lift and turn bedridden patients. Most of the patients are incapable of helping in the effort, and some are quite hefty. The patient also can suffer injury because of the clumsiness inevitable when two or more people are moving an inert body.

The junior manager attended a conference at which she learned about equipment that will do the heavy lifting while the attendants carry out simple, easy tasks and guide the process.

She put together a project proposal for installing the equipment in various patient care units of the facility, emphasizing the benefits to the workers’ health and the organization’s management of its costs. There also, not incidentally, would be the contribution to the comfort and welfare of the patients.

The decision to propose a change instantly transformed the junior manager into a project manager, which she didn’t realize. While she was somewhat familiar with project management, this was the first time a sizeable project had arisen in her worklife. Unfortunately, the project warning bell didn’t sound in the back of her mind.

In due course, senior management approved the plan, which was to begin with a pilot implementation in one department that had volunteered to go first. The equipment was installed, information was provided to senior professionals in the department, explanatory signs were made and posted.

It’s all been downhill since.

Fatal Assumption

2010-04-03T20:59:00.005-04:00

You can trigger a lively discussion any time you’d like by inviting a group of Project Managers to list the most pervasive, frequent and damaging problems at fault when Projects aren’t going well.

Everybody you ask has been most often or most recently burned by one or more of the worst difficulties that engulf a busy, complex, multidependent innovation, especially one that inconveniences or irritates a lot of people.

People have little trouble identifying the problems they’re wrestling with. Ask, though, about the most dangerous assumption a project manager can make, and there tends to be a thoughtful (puzzled?) pause. Action-oriented, go-to, problem-solving overachievers don’t spend a lot of reflective time on such matters. Nor analytical time, either. But those assumptions underlie most, if not all, of the decisions that respond to the perceived problems.

That’s why so many Project Managers spend endless hours in exhausting, low-return, repetitious effort that diverts them from more important concerns.

Assumptions are NOT inconsequential. Assumptions are those “truths,” often unexamined, that control our actions and the priority judgments that drive our actions. The Project Manager entering into a new Project carries with him/her a variety of expectations about the work, the situation, the process, the problems and the people.

Those are assumptions. And one of them is the most dangerous of all. And too often it seems to be the most common.

Off Course on Autopilot

2010-03-27T10:12:00.002-04:00

Which shoelace did you tie first this morning? How did you decide? Do you even remember doing it? Well, if they’re tied, someone did it.

That tiny task, and up to 90 percent of your other daily actions, generally are automated. They are filed in the orderly progression of your habit pattern, so familiar that you don’t even think about them. That’s how we get through our days. Imagine what your life would be like if each morning you had to decide how to get out of bed, which tooth to brush first, how to use the stairs, etc.

The vast, overwhelming mass of what you know, what you have experienced, how you do things, is tucked neatly into your subconscious. That frees your conscious mind to focus on what is new and challenging. When you were very young, learning to tie your shoes was among those challenges. I don’t know about you, but it was immensely frustrating for me until I worked away at it long enough to get the hang of it. It’s rarely a problem now.

An interesting phenomenon pops up sometimes in this habituated behavior matter. If the accustomed sequence is interrupted in some way, odd outcomes can result. You’re bringing in the groceries, and you pause along the way to turn on the washing machine. That’s how the car keys can wind up in the laundry basket instead of on the hook by the door.

The next day, ready to rush off to work, you’re startled and much annoyed that the keys aren’t where they’re supposed to be. You have to become a detective and trace your own activities of the previous day, which can be hard to do because you weren’t paying attention at the time – didn’t have to.

This familiar human reality, living on autopilot, has important implications for managing the mindset of the project manager.

The Failing Cult of the Champion

2010-03-21T11:46:00.003-04:00

Among the most thrilling events in the annual NCAA basketball tournament is the inevitable emergence of unexpectedly heroic effort that overturns high-seeded teams. Someone bursts into inspired play beyond all personal precedent, and energized teammates join in to perform equally over their heads and overwhelm the less-dynamic favorites.

Presumptive national champion Kansas University was shocked by Northern Iowa (Northern WHO?) Friday. The hero was Ali Farokhmanesh, who played like a demonic genius in the game, polishing off the 69-67 upset with a three-pointer and a couple of free throws in the final seconds.

That’s why they play the game, and that’s why we watch.

What makes for great entertainment, though, tends to improperly influence our assumptions about the general conduct of human affairs, including those difficult and stressful activities called “projects.”

In fact, you can look at most group processes and observe that nothing really happens until someone, officially designated or not, steps up and creates movement. Pending that, things tend to slosh around disjointedly, perhaps moving grudgingly along in response to official prodding. No recipe for high achievement in difficult circumstances.

In project management, there is a designated occupant of the catbird seat: The project manager. When project managers buy in to this concept, they volunteer for eventual exhaustion and frustration, and that’s a shame because we really need them.

So, without dismissing the importance of the project manager’s key role, it is vital to unplug the spotlight and shine some attention on the corners of the project operation.

Rising from the Black Hole of Being Promoted

2010-03-13T22:11:00.003-05:00

For most people, it takes three months to three years to recover from the disastrous effects of receiving a promotion to management. Some never fully come back from it. And their organizations share the ill effects for the same period, however long that lasts – including forever.

I would say the syndrome is broadly general about promotion, but it certainly fits most appointments to the project manager role, especially for people who have not managed before.

Consider: You get good at what you do, so good that people look up to you, admire you, compliment you, want you on their teams. Then the moment comes when you are asked to share your excellence by becoming the leader/supervisor/manager of other people doing the same work, and possibly some doing other stuff.

Celebration all around! You and your family and friends rejoice at this recognition of your hard work and signal achievement. Your co-workers are happy for you. Your bosses delight at the prospect of having someone of your quality join their ranks. What a moment!

This is when the virtual black hole appears on the near horizon, looming as evil as those real ones we envision in the (hopefully distant) universe, swallowing all nearby matter with implacable and irresistible force.

One of the theories now current among astronomers and astrophysicists is that most of the universe actually is made up of “antimatter” or “dark matter,” which constitutes an alternate world that exists invisibly in some fashion along with the one we’re (more or less) familiar with.

The apparent reality of black holes has been established, while the dark matter business seems to be still in discussion.

The two concepts together, though, create a powerful metaphor in the working world for the movement of the superb individual contributor into the world of management. In job and career terms, this moment of promotion (or appointment to lead a project) is the place where you pass through a black hole into a universe where everything is upside down.

To go further with this idea, click here.

Surly Silence as Communication?

2010-03-07T15:48:00.002-05:00

Everybody talks about communication, and everybody does something about it – but frequently not very well.

This is a crucial matter for project managers, because the essence of the job is to get diverse people you don’t know well to commit personally to doing stuff they’re not certain of, and to trust other people in unfamiliar situations. There are too many complexities and relationships for the project manager to directly supervise each moment of each one.

The manager, who by definition doesn’t do all the work himself/herself, must convince those delegated to do it to agree, understand, commit, follow through and work cooperatively. That is done by persuasion, negotiation, delegation, explanation and all the other “tion” words. That is, it is accomplished by continuous use of appropriate means of communication.

This is universally true in organizations, but especially true in projects. A project is temporary and time-pressured, is staffed by a team drawn from various parts of an organization (and often some from outside the organization), and involves some significant measure of innovation, risk and uncertainty.

For all those reasons, the project manager must understand communication and take the time to learn it well and practice it consistently. That’s not easy, considering the time it requires of a superbusy person heavily focused on specific tasks and issues.

So, let’s understand communication. It may seem to be a Mickey Mouse question to ask: What is it, and how does it work? As you'll see, that's not Mickey Mouse at all. Take a moment to scribble a quick, one-sentence definition, then read the rest of these messages and see what you think. Blogs are for debate, so feel free to comment if you differ.

Let’s start with this: One of your team members generally responds to questions and suggestions with surly silence. Is this person communicating, and if so how well?
Click here to read on.

Out from Underwater

2010-03-02T15:05:00.003-05:00

Sergei is deep in it. Over deadline. Over budget. Overworked. This is a troubled project.

Sergei is the project manager. His project, implementing a new order entry system for a printing company, is not going well. He was asked to take over the project because it’s a key part of the company’s strategy, but had fallen seriously behind.

There was no time to lose, so Sergei hit the ground running. As far as he was concerned, the time for rational planning was long past.

The team includes members from sales, accounting, inventory management, IT and the general manager’s office, all of them overloaded with work. There are eight people, including Sergei, who is an assistant foreman in the warehouse.

Unfortunately, no one seems to share Sergei’s sense of urgency – or maybe they’ve just given up. There rarely are more than four people at the regular weekly project meetings, and often even those people haven’t completed – or even started – their assignments on the order entry project. The vendor supplying the software doesn’t seem able to meet some of the terms of the contract, and the company reps don’t always show up when they’re supposed to.

Sergei’s boss in the warehouse knows nothing about the project, and has made it clear he doesn’t want to get involved. The vice president for facilities contracted with the software company and set a deadline for implementing the new system. He has arranged for removal of the existing system at the same time.

Sergei has sent messages to the vice president’s office asking for postponement of the deadline, but the word he gets back is that the company is committed to the schedule, and there’s no turning back. Sergei and the vice president have never actually discussed the project.

I have two questions:

How does Sergei rescue this project?

What does this experience tell Sergei about his next project?

Jot down your answers, then click here.

Can't You See I'm Busy Drowning Here?

2010-02-25T18:08:00.012-05:00

An eternal truth of human behavior is that if people can do something, they will do that something – even if it frustrates a larger purpose. Generally, the something is perceived as having a quick value or providing an immediate satisfaction.

A current much-discussed example is that of “distracted driving,” in which one pursues a cellphone conversation or text-messages while driving a car.

This syndrome of can do/therefore will do can become a way of life in this gizmo-driven age. It doesn’t just involve cutting-edge technology, either. Do you know the average American home has the television turned on seven hours a day? Or it did before everybody split up with their phones or iPods to text, watch stuff, listen via earphone or play video games.

And you know, a day fully occupied by such choices concludes with a net gain of not much, and a net debit of one more day subtracted from the limited store you started life with. And then you’re old, and then you’re dead. No wonder we have trouble getting things done.

Nothing is going to improve unless and until you are fed up enough that you’re ready to actually do something. Crystallizing that motivation is Job One. Have a good talk with yourself about it.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Our way of doing things is precious to us. We treasure it, love it. It’s familiar and comforting. The outsider, observing the overbusy person determinedly flailing in circles in a whirlpool, feels compelled to toss a life ring.

“Get that thing away from me,” the doomed paddler sputters. “Can’t you see I’m busy drowning here?”

Still not convinced? Click here to check out the full argument.

So what to do? Tune in Tuesday and I'll share a few secrets with you.

This Is Decisive, Too

2010-02-22T14:22:00.005-05:00

We walk backwards into the future. It is nigh impossible to shake the supposition that today will be pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow will be more of the same.

This comforting cocoon stifles growth and muffles our perception of opportunity as well as our awareness of danger. It disguises the long-term erosion of our prospects because there rarely is any particular pain or undue discomfort.

To carry further the Personal Productivity idea introduced yesterday, try this three-step process:

1. Spend a little time working up a single-statement Strategic Decision for where you’ve determined your life is going to go, avoiding dependency upon factors you can’t control.

2. Make clear decisions about three specific actions you’re going to take in the next week to further that strategy.

3. Track your progress as the week unrolls, and at its end, then repeat the procedss for the succeeding week.

It would be great if people who try this – or have worked with a similar system -- drop a note to the rest of us by commenting on this post. Victory and defeat, as Roosevelt says, both can be glorious when you did it all yourself.

For a fuller version of this post, click here.

This Is Decisive

2010-02-21T17:31:00.008-05:00

The Personal Productivity Improvement process that is going to work must have the beauty of laying out a low-demand approach that can produce major change over time.

I had an invigorating discussion on the Project Management applications of this concept Thursday night with the participants in a program of the Maine chapter of the Project Management Institute. I asked the 30 or so people present to choose (with Lego blocks as ballots) the most important factors among 10 that pertain to management of a typical project.

The election outcome, largely tracking with my experience in this exercise over the years, put Communication, Planning/Task Definition, Teamwork and Goal Coordination among Stakeholders at the top of the list.

And those are pretty much what people have no time for in real-world Projects. They feel they just have to get going, and have no time for Communication, Planning, etc. Their sense of urgency creates a pressure for action without forethought. And this bad habit persists, however many times Projects stumble and fall because of poor decisions about priorities.

Same with life in general. We roll along in unthinking acceptance of the idea that there’s no other way to live. On the contrary, a couple of relatively simple decisions, faithfully executed, can have a marvelous effect in helping you find out what you’ve REALLY decided to do with yourself.

Tune in tomorrow. There’s a practical payoff in it for you.

For a fuller version of this post, click here.

Project Managers' Day

2010-02-14T07:19:00.002-05:00

I have long felt that project management someday will save the universe. This weekend, I have realized that it was crucial to the foundation and preservation of the United States of America. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were among the greatest project managers in human history.

Think about it: A project manager must lead disparate stakeholders through complexity, uncertainty, difficulty and risk to achieve a high-value outcome that looked impossible at the outset. Project managers need to be competent at managing the unmanageable and inspiring the unleadable.

Not only did both Washington and Lincoln do that supremely well, they’re still doing it. The words and example of both presidents continue to be touchstones of civic and political excellence that we refer to frequently.

Here’s the record:

Washington led his volunteer farmers and tradesmen to victory over the world’s greatest military power. Not only that, he singlehanded kept his fractious fellow citizens together at the Constitutional Convention long enough to place securely under the wobbly new nation a document and a set of principles that have sustained this brilliant new idea for 232 years (so far -- keep your fingers crossed).

We don’t think about it much today, but Washington underwent a firestorm of hostility, including accusations that his secret intent was to make himself king of the new country (his real longing was to get home to Mount Vernon). No one had ever seen a government such as the one proposed, nor a leader so truly noble.

Among the many great moments of Washington’s service came near the end of the Revolutionary War, when his officers came to believe that Congress was going to renege on payment to them. Washington confronted them in April 1783 with a speech of great patriotism, followed by personal remarks that brought many of them to tears. And ended the prospective mutiny.

Lincoln, an unknown country lawyer from Illinois, traveled the rough roads of the country with his inspiring oratory, leading to his incredible victory over opposing presidential candidates who had far greater public stature. Then, as secession came crashing down on the country, he recruited those very men into his cabinet so the nation could benefit from their expertise and their connections.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s marvelous “Team of Rivals” tells in fascinating detail the entire story of this man’s triumph over agony and opposition through his commitment, vision and leadership.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was just 275 words that took about two minutes to express. It is always worth repeating. Happy Presidents’ Day!

---

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln - November 19, 1863

The Heft Project Strategy

2010-02-11T17:18:00.001-05:00

Have you read the much-discussed proposed health care reform plan, all 2,700 pages of it?

Neither have I. I’m not sure when it will work its way up the priority list, particularly since it may change, maybe change a lot, and maybe get killed off entirely.

But it doesn’t seem necessary to have read it at all to have a very strong opinion, pro or con, and voluminous reasons for or against. House Minority Leader John Boehner, for one, seems so awed by the simple heft of the document that he shows up on TV several times a day to gesture at an impressive stack of paper purporting to be the very reform plan, obviously unabridged. Never touches it or refers to its contents. I guess anything that long must be bad.

Project Team Skills & Costs

That does raise a question, though: What do we send these people to Washington for if they can’t – or won’t – read? If John doesn’t have time to get through it all himself, how about those smart and expensive staffs of his (he has several)? Couldn’t each of those . . . dozens? hundreds? . . . of people knock off a few hundred pages and give John a book report on it?

To be bipartisan about this, where do the Democrats get off investing what must have been a lot of time and money in something that obviously is going nowhere? The paper it’s printed on, alone, must have added substantially to the national debt.

There has been much argument about provisions that are said to be in the bill, but, so far, no one has confessed to actually looking at it. Maybe Olympia Snowe has.

Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast, suggested on NPR the other day that we deal with the heft challenge by sending all those newly unemployed newspaper editors to Washington to edit the damn thing down.

My purpose in raising this matter is neither to pick sides nor to tag along with the professional Congress bashers. I’ve never done the Congress put-down, because I respect the institution and empathize as much as I can with the difficult work done there, not just on this important and frustrating subject. I do admit I’m a little shaken by the events of the past year, though.

As for the newspaper editors, they’re a hardy lot and I believe they can take care of themselves without lining up at the public trough.

The MAD Point of View

For me, this is a Project Management matter. I press unstintingly for minimum adequate documentation (MAD) in Projects.

The term codifies the truth that sound Projects must have permanent written records of all important issues, decisions and intentions. That’s the adequate documentation part. But effective Project Teams can’t spend all their time developing, distributing and preserving paperwork (or cyberwork, if that’s what you call it when it’s in the guts of computers). So the documentation must be minimal in its consumption of time and space.

From the MAD point of view, the 2,700 pages may be a monumental example of bureaucratic obfuscation. Or possibly the creation of a clever bipartisan plot, a weighty but meaningless straw man for the protagonists to whack around without anyone getting hurt, because no one will ever know what – if anything – is in it.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a real Project would have been conducted under cover of something entirely different. Ever wonder what the REAL Project Plan was for the Big Dig?

Sit in the Garbage and Sing

2010-02-08T16:56:00.003-05:00

We conduct a lifelong duel with reality. We prefer living by illusion, but unadorned facts keep disrupting the serenity of our self-deception.

Psychologists long have reported the multiple "personas" of people. There's the person we think we are presenting to the world, an often-splendid creation whose construction and maintenance can occupy an inordinate amount of our time and attention.

Then there's the second person, the one people actually see. Not the same as the first, perhaps hugely not so. The third persona lives inside our lives with us, the one we think we are. Last is the person we really are, which we hide as much as we can, even -- especially? -- from ourselves. Some theories have a lot more personas, often more entertaining than this group, but four is enough for us for now.

If you are offended by this concept, run a check of your self-talk as you go through a few display cases of your life in the next day or two. Be honest. It doesn't make you a bad person, but it does say something about our choices in how we manage our thought patterns.

The "multiple personalities" issue pokes through the mists of time as I gather information and thoughts for a program called "Right On/Way Off: Good Decisions, Bad Decisions in Managing Projects" for the Feb. 18 program of Maine's Project Management Institute chapter (see pmimaine.com).

It would seem to be a good working philosophy that our lives will be better if we are able to base our everyday decisions on the true situation, not only about ourselves but about the people, events, problems and possibilities we meet along the way. In fact, engaging reality is the only real way to make progress.

Handled correctly, it is a powerful tool for healthy growth and leadership. At the very least, as Mark Twain said about something else, it will annoy your enemies and amaze everyone else.

A late great friend once told me a story from his hardscrabble youth that made this point about reality in very blunt fashion. The family had just moved to a new town, and my friend had an appointment for an interview for admission to the local high school. The only food in the house was a little dry cereal and a sliver of butter.

His older sister, caring for her siblings in the absence of both parents, told him he should be the one to eat the food, because he had to have something to sustain him for the long walk to the school and the pressure of the interview.

As he looked into the bowl, he recoiled with disgust. The cereal was infested with silverfish, an insect performing, in this case, the function of the cockroach. He knew he really had to have something in his stomach, so . . .

Many years later, now a successful executive, he looked at me with an intensity I'll never forget, and said, "You have to eat the silverfish." I'm convinced it was a life commandment he had repeated to himself countless times -- and followed in his behavior toward the uncomfortable realities he had faced.

My own example is not quite as graphic, but it's still repulsive enough for me; it has given me an attitude-control device that has had significant influence on my own efforts to remind myself to face the real.

I was a very reluctant recruit in the U.S. Army, at Fort Dix in the era of soldiers handling chores that may be outsourced today. I had KP duty one Saturday morning, and was assigned to ride in the back of a deuce-and-a-half truck to receive and empty garbage cans as we toured the barracks streets of the base.

I tried to keep my balance, standing amid the garbage as the truck lurched away from its first stop on what was going to be a long trip. I realized within the first 10 feet that I wasn't going to be able to stay vertical. So I looked at the garbage, briefly evaluated the issues, then plopped down and made myself comfortable. "You're a garbage man today," I told myself. "After a shower and a laundry run, you can be an unhappy rookie rifleman again."

And I cheerfully ran through my repertory of off-key pop songs while enjoying the sunshine and the occasional whiffs of fresh air.

That attitude-changer remains with me, and it still works. If it's garbage you must do, then sit in the garbage and sing.

The Hardest Thing You'll Ever Do

2010-02-03T10:01:00.004-05:00

The hardest thing you'll ever do is try to change your own behavior.

We are trapped in our own preferences, whether we originally got them voluntarily or because a parent, teacher, boss or role model installed them. We may think we hate our smoking habit, or our weight, or our shyness, or our tendency to alienate people by our thoughtless conversation. But we don't hate those behaviors. We hate the fact that we love them.

How's that for a love-hate relationship? We do them because they provide the comfort of familiarity, and because it's easier to punish ourselves on occasion than it is to undertake the perceived burden of changing what we do. And we don't know how to do it.

So reluctance rules. Well, here is a way to make headway, with relative ease, against even the most ingrained of personal habits. It's called "constructive substitution."

Constructive substitution is based on a conviction that each of us has a limited amount of will power, and we must learn to be judicious in where we invest it.

If we decide to make a frontal assault seeking reversal of a major personal habit, we may use up all the will power available to us at that time. We will have none left to move us on other, lesser, matters, and we in fact will lose ground with behaviors that previously were not a problem. For example, if all your will power goes into improving your golf score, you may take your family life for granted and slip into losing touch. And we're all familiar with the agonies of people trying to quit smoking or lose weight. Everybody around them gets to share the pain.

Very often, the effort results in the New Year's Resolution Syndrome, when a gargantuan effort exhausts the finite store of will power. The person falls back, disappointed, disillusioned and disempowered, into the pit.

So, in constructive substitution, you use a minor amount of will power to focus on something you already do a little of, or could easily start doing. I once used regular exercise to elbow aside an inordinate love of beer and cigarettes. Picture the start of this process: Working out in the bedroom with a can of Bud on the bedside table. However, in a relatively short period of time, the good feeling from modest exertion and the afterglow pushed back the undesirable behaviors.

The will power is directed first to getting yourself to take seriously a commitment to change, then in planning low-impact substitute activities and continually finding new motivations to get yourself to do them. Action follows from emotion, although it may originate in intellect. You have to first encourage your desire to achieve the outcome and your willingness to take the actions. Then you keep finding new proof that this is wonderful for you.

Constructive substitution. Don't look it up, because you won't find it anywhere but here. Do try it out, though, and let us all know how it worked out.

Project U.S.A.

2010-01-26T07:13:00.008-05:00

It's been a year since the presidential campaign, an exhaustingly difficult and risky project, was successfully concluded by Barack Obama. He was elected on a wave of optimism and expectation.

Now, just past the first anniversary of that big win, the mighty wave has ebbed. In fact, the follow-on project that is actual service in office is getting bashed around in some very nasty rapids.

What happened? Shouldn't the historic level of Obama/Democratic victory have guaranteed a lengthy period of broad support for the policies that would implement the campaign promises? Why are Democrats now desperately scrambling to the right, or to the door? Why does it feel as if the public has turned against the administration it boosted so improbably to power so recently? Was the triumph empty?

Let's look at the available evidence through a Project Management lens. Caution: President Obama, Rahm Emanuel and company have not shared their thoughts with us, so this is strictly winging on what can be known from the safe distance of total noninvolvement.

The very first point to be made is that sliding sideways from one project to another is invariably fatal. If ever there was proof that a bright line must be drawn between separate but related projects, this is it. Once a clear goal has been reached (getting elected), the table must be cleared and a brand-new project plan begun (getting things done). Any assumptions imported from the previous round must be rigorously vetted. Did the new team do that?

Sticking just with the past year, what were the foundational elements of the project that was launched on January 20, 2009? The election results, both presidential and congressional, were of course a major factor. The horror of the economy was, too, as were the costly, bloody, unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The stakeholders included the president and his coterie of close advisers, the hierarchies of the two houses of Congress, the wildly differing members of those bodies, the two major political parties, the public and the hydra-headed cacophony of multitudes loosely referred to as "the media." And, of course, bankers, homeowners, voters of all persuasions, etc.

A central function of successful Project Management is to analyze each stakeholder for potential impact on the project and for positive and negative characteristics, most especially seeking to understand how best to maximize this group/person's productive integraton into the project. Or, as necessary, neutralize its power to cause harm.

This process should, to the greatest extent possible and necessary, go to the individual level rather than simply examine classes, organizations and groups. Within each collection of people, no matter how large, there is a very small nucleus -- sometimes an individual -- who holds tremendous sway over the thinking of the reaction-prone majority. Who are the influencers in any organization, and how are they to be influenced?

The development of the rational base for a project goes on to similarly dissect the nonhuman factors in the pre-existing situation, and applies hardheaded risk management processes to every meangingful segment, with generous allowance for unknowns. This is particularly true in a political project, even as it is particularly difficult.

Such practices head off the disaster that surely results from thoughtlessly skating from big success into an abyss of unexamined reality loaded with risk. The analysis counters a tendency to assume certain attitudes and likely actions from possible allies and opponents. While you know an agent of change is going to run into resistance, doing your homework can be of enormous value in reducing unnecessary damage from the unexpected.

Did the Obama administration blunder into traps because of superficial analysis and poor decision-making based on sloppy assumptions?

Or are we, not privy to the inner thinking at the White House, missing the fact that this is a four-year project? A skyscraper one-quarter built doesn't look too user-friendly, either. What if this chess game of a project has many moves ahead that will astound us?

Stay tuned. Great case study.

You Don't Get What You Deserve . . .

2010-01-18T15:22:00.004-05:00

You don't get what you deserve -- you get what you negotiate.

That's an axiom of professional negotiators, and it's true in spades for project managers. The art/science of project management is overstuffed with formulas for just about everything, but none of it works without the wise management of the relationships among the stakeholders.

Any relationship is a constant two-way stream of requests, promises and value exchanges, large and small. With projects, it is vital that, from the very beginning, all the stakeholders are clear on what this is all about, including what their contributions are to be.

When projects fail, there always is some measure of short-circuit in the examination of assumptions, the communication of expectations and the settlement of differences. Those are the components of negotiating strategy. More noticeable are shortfalls in status reporting, problem-solving, schedule management, etc. -- the tactics of negotiating -- which can be either symptoms of strategic issues or sources of independently occurring problems.

As a project manager, you are the catalytic agent among the stakeholders, beginning with the owner/funder, through both close and remote contributors and on to the end user/customer. You are the keeper of the communication, the lead negotiator.

Troubled projects of my experience generally have a sizeable set of unexamined or unshared assumptions, leading immediately and inevitably to diverse expectations among different stakeholders and the resulting conflict that just keeps coming no matter what the project leadership attempts to do to resolve it.

The competent project manager understands that the very basis of a healthy project is thorough, shared understanding. Everyone involved must work out agreements as to the reasons for the project, the pertinent realities of the situation that gave rise to it, the priorities for action, and risks and assumptions that will affect the planning process.

Where there are differences among stakeholders, they must be exposed and cleared up so the process is founded upon solid consensus. Without that fundamental negotiation, the project will be beset with problems.

It isn't particularly easy to get the stakeholders to focus on this initial process and accept ownership. The project manager must get it done, but it's only the beginning. During the execution of the project, it's a continuous requirement. The work often entails finding ways to solve problems that shouldn't be occurring and re-energizing motivation where it shouldn't be slipping. Bummer.

Just getting a complex project done is demanding enough in itself. The project manager shouldn't also have to be constantly negotiating to keep things on track. Project managers deserve better. They're just not going to get it without negotiating.

Out of the Alley, Under the Streetlight

2010-01-15T13:01:00.002-05:00

There's that insightful old story about the tipsy gentleman crawling around the roadway under a streetlight on a dark night. A friend comes along and, quite naturally, inquires as to what's going on.

"I'm looking for my wallet," says the guy on all fours.

"Oh, you lost it here in the street?" the friend asks.

"No," says the searcher. "I lost it back there in the alley, but it's too dark to look for it there, so I'm looking out here."

Feel free to chuckle, if you think that's a funny little story. Then do yourself a favor and think about the reality all around you, in which multitudes persist in doing what's easy rather than what will work.

A prime field is that of decision-making. Most of us have familiar thinking tracks and favorite solutions. When a situation arises that needs to be examined and resolved, we tend -- if we're not careful -- to follow familiar routes of diagnosis and treatment. We may do this even when the problem is only faintly related to what we have experienced before.

We cling to the "tried and true," which often is really neither tried nor true, never actually having been tested and confirmed. Doesn't matter. We need comfort when something causes us to be uneasy. We may repeatedly apply the unsuccessful process, growing more desperate with each failure, despite its predictability.

In short, the pursuit of comfort can trump the achievement of success if the decision-making process is not constructed thoughtfully and followed with discipline. Identifying what you don't know about this matter, and searching diligently for the necessary information, makes all the difference in the world of competent problem-solving.

A little practice, built intelligently from ongoing experience, remarkably raises the learning curve in competent decision-making. Life is neither a dark alley nor a well-lit street. It's having a good flashlight and knowing how to use it.

What Organizations Do. Oh, No!

2010-01-06T15:59:00.003-05:00

Organizations inevitably do what organizations do. When that's good, it can be very, very good. The lights stay on, paychecks arrive on time, good works get done.

When organizational behavior is not good, you can wind up with an unobstructed terrorist boarding a flight to Detroit, no matter how many protective measures are supposedly in place.

This is not to jump in on either side of the current discussion of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed bombing attempt, but to take the occasion to comment on organizational reality.

Bureaucratic organizations are the bone and sinew of civilization. A bureaucracy is established as a structure for delivery of products and/or services. The government of the United States is such a structure. So, for that matter, is El Quaida, although it apparently is kept extremely loose.

The worth of a bureaucracy is determined by how efficiently and reliably it produces the desired results. "Efficiently" means using the least possible amount of resources (including time) consistent with the pre-established nature and quality of the outcome. "Reliably" means high predictability in response to following the defined steps of the organization's process.

Because of its nature, a bureaucracy attracts, rewards and perfects the skills of efficiency and reliability. It hates and avoids uncertainty and risk, because those are the antitheses of what it values. If its leadership is not careful, the bureaucratic organization can go too far in the direction of eliminating disruptions of its routine.

One bad habit can be the bureaucracy's avoidance or denial of uncomfortable realities as the people in the organization tend their beloved process while their focus on the ultimate purpose gets cloudy.

This problem boils over when something bad happens. The bureaucracy acts to make sure the undesirable thing doesn't happen again, sometimes by layering over with perceived added protection rather than disrupting things by digging out the cause of the aberration. The bandage, not the surgery, is more in the nature of the organization.

In my opinion, that's what happened after the unspeakable catastrophe of September 11, 2001. Some observers believe the attackers could have been caught before acting if the existing agencies of government had done what they are supposed to do, including act effectively across bureaucracies to share information and coordinate their work to protect the nation.

Instead, disparate bureaucracies operated on their islands of turf, allowing pieces of related intelligence to remain separated from each other and from proper analysis.

Sound familiar? Aren't we having the same conversation now about the attempt to destroy the airliner on Christmas?

Part of the reason we're still dealing with the same issues is that no one shook the barnacles off the encrusted bureaucracies back then. After all, they had failed to keep alert to their risk-management purpose, and had lapsed into comfortable internally defined bubbles, indulging in the luxury of cutting off communication with partners they chose to see as competitors.

It is the nature of organizations to do so. Mao Zedong understood that truth in Communist China, and so he blew up the entire national bureaucracy every five years or so, to horrifying effect. Mao's philosophy was flawed and his governance was abhorrent, but at least he recognized the problem.

Admittedly, it's very difficult to create a standing organization -- a bureaucracy -- to serve a purpose such as constant total alertness to great threats buried daily in countless bits of information. It's a purpose very close to impossible for a continuing organization, but we're stuck on the point of that spear, and we should act as if we understand that.

What might have happened in the U.S. after 9/11 if the top three layers of management at the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, etc., had all been fired in September 2001 and people brought in to lead the organizations according to a clear commitment to their vital purpose? If the political leadership of the government were complicit in the failure, the appropriate people should have been axed there, too.

Instead, everyone stayed in place at the agencies, and a gigantic additional bureaucracy (the new Department of Homeland Security) was spread over the lot. A classic bureaucratic solution to a nonbureaucratic problem, with a thoroughly predictable result.

It would be very reassuring if the matter were settled properly this time. This is no longer a bureaucratic matter.

The Frame of the Game

2010-01-01T10:59:00.005-05:00

Project Management is politics. Whether done well or poorly, the art and science of the possible is the key practice of the person (Project Manager) who leads a complex, multiparty innovation.

Seeing the job this way provides the appropriate lens for the great majority of people I work with every year, but the general philosophy of our culture equips us all poorly to focus the lens correctly.

For one thing, in this polarized age you're a weenie if you don't batter any opposing party with supercharged overreactions to meaningless differences. For another, we prefer tidy quantifications to accurate qualifications -- meaning we are conditioned to reduce complexity to two-dimensional formulas without regard to how accurate or useful it is to do so.

As a result of those and other underlying cultural norms, we tend to have trouble with managing to results in complicated, nuanced situations. A key complication is that participants invariably begin with differing -- sometimes opposing -- intentions.

Dealing constructively with ambiguity. That's effective management. Since Project Management is management boiled down to a thick (sometimes harsh) brew, both the constructiveness and the ambiguity tend to be harder to handle.

I'm fresh from a visit to the "Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge," the PMBOK Guide of the Project Management Institute. The Guide does not claim to be a Bible for the profession; it presents itself as a compendium of specific points of knowledge that a competent Project Manager should possess. The actual use of the knowledge is up to the individual, and that competency is earned through practice, study and training.

The PMBOK Guide is therefore rich in quick references to the essential working skills of the people manager, but light in the how-tos of those skills. The words "negotiate" and even "politics" show up often enough, but you get to Page 409 in the Fourth Edition before you find three pages of summary of eight skill components of what I call the politics of Project Management.

(PMI does provide extensive listings of books and other materials that thoroughly cover the landscape, including the people-leadership skills I prize so highly. One of my favorites is V.K. Verma's "Human Resource Skills for the Project Manager," published by PMI itself.)

This is not a criticism of the Guide. It is just a word of caution to aspiring Project Managers: Knowledge is not power. Skill is. And the skill of managing diverse insterests to mutually satisfying outcomes (i.e., politics) is the ultimate, most satisfying, skill of all.

How's the Seat of Your Pants?

2009-12-30T16:04:00.002-05:00

Paying more attention than usual (even) to how Project Managers think: I'm preparing a presentation called "Right On/Way Off: Good Decisions and Bad Decisions in Managing Projects."

I've been on this subject for years, and I'm still short of definitive results in tracking the thought patterns of these fevered souls we call Project Managers. I can tell you this, though: You can't find a hall large enough to accommodate enough of them to get consensus on much of anything. Oh, other than a strong sense of the perfidy of the various stakeholders collectively known as "they."

One of the most revealing moments in my Advanced Project Management course is when each participant gets four little black Lego blocks to use as ballots in picking among 10 factors that are the major culprits when Projects go bad. I've also used this electoral process with a couple of Project Management Institute chapters and once with a few dozen bankers.

The voters can put all any number of their four Lego ballots in one cup, say, "Process Management," or one each in different cups. Process Management rarely gets many votes, as a matter of fact.

The general revelation of the exercise is . . . to be reported at the February 18 meeting of the Maine Chapter of the Project Management Institute. I am doing a lot of online and in-person exploration of the topic, so I'm not sure what the full truth will be by then. Just to reduce risk with this little project, though, I'm not going to say much about it here. You'll have to be there.

Suffice it to say that the report on the extensive research could produce a rare consensus among the Project Managers: That Jim has spent too much time out in the full moonlight wearing blinders. Maybe rose-colored ones.

In Search of the Obvious

2009-11-07T17:48:00.002-05:00

It was a blinding flash of the obvious.
A project manager was talking the other day about a big problem in her organization. The business side had run out of data storage space, and adding more capacity was not in the cards. The potential workload demands posed by this problem, and the potential cost of solving it, kept it well down the IT priority list.
For the business people, though, it was very serious and pressing. They were boxed in.
But this project manager had recently come across the concept of looking for opportunity in potential project situations, as a way of broadening support among stakeholders not attracted by the idea of just solving the problem.
So, she thought, what opportunities might be lying unnoticed amid the daunting negatives she faced?
She and her associates expanded their focus beyond the problems and did some brainstorming on the opportunity side. What factors, current or possible, existing within the problem situation were untapped benefits?

Then it came: A realization that, for years, the system’s users had stored all sorts of stuff that very few people, if any, would ever need. And, even if they did need it, that wouldn’t be very often, and what they needed would be only a small part of any of the files.
Solution: The system could simply store the links to any potentially needed material, leaving it in storage at the original source. A quick and easy way to ensure ample storage capacity.
So simple. Why didn’t we think of that to start with?
There’s a reason why, and it’s also simple: We can become so accustomed to usual approaches that we’re baffled when they no longer work. When there are “unknown unknowns,” they don’t reveal themselves until you break out of controlling assumptions.
How do you do that? Well, the group needs to ask itself: “What kind of a problem are we trying to solve? What is the nature of our project? What is the essential purpose for what we’re trying to do?” That line of thinking clears away the underbrush, and allows for fresh insights arising from unexamined potential in the original situation.
In the storage case, the point was to get space – but initial thinking was too narrow. It misidentified the situation by limiting itself to a single possible solution: getting added space. The team got into this box without realizing it – so was in no position to even know what unknowns it was missing.
Once the team started looking for opportunities instead of simply wrestling with an intractable problem, they correctly understood their challenge was to find space, period. That opened the door to look for more efficient ways to use current space.

The two practices – working out a clear understanding of the nature of the situation, and brainstorming fresh ideas/concepts – should be fundamental to every project and every other problem-solving effort.

The Mediocre Media Muddle . . . and the Critics Who Should Know Better

2009-10-28T14:11:00.001-04:00

“The media” are a mushy, messy mélange.
It is distressing that, while our news media, infotainment industry and the mindless megaphones of cableworld devote their considerable energy to messing with our world view, they get so much help from people who think they’re being critical.
A late-breaking example, the one that triggered this rant, came in Sunday’s New York Times. Frank Rich, normally a well-informed and thoughtful commentator, found reason to spread the blame beyond the Balloon Boy Dad, Richard Heene. Heene is the guy who conducted the Colorado hoax involving the false report that 6-year-old (note the name) Falcon Heene was aboard a runaway aerial balloon.
Rich’s point was that “the media” panted after the story without pausing for a nanosecond to ask the no-fun questions that are traditionally considered the province of newspeople. A few adult queries and a modicum of background research might well have revealed the truth about the family, and certainly would have moderated the enthusiasm that drove the coverage.
While Rich lumped all kinds of media together, I don’t.

Media, yes. News? No

There is a fundamental point here, and it’s one that Frank Rich as well as other viewers of the scene don’t touch: Our true “news” media are a tiny and shrinking droplet in the information ocean that floods this country in a deep slosh of audiovisual sensation all day every day.
Some smaller, local newspapers are artifacts of a “real news” tradition, but are they equipped to make it very far into the future?
Television, radio and associated media are NOT news media. They provide sight and sound that can be momentarily gripping, pleasing, shocking or entertaining – but rarely are more than minimally informative. Rich referred, in his Times piece, to “the news media,” then went on to criticize cable television. He was comparing apples and, say, football fans. Cable TV most assuredly is not a news medium. It is an entertainment medium, sometimes capable of providing value in discussions and reports – but its nature is to provide sight and sound that attract and hold attention.
For decades, it has been said of television news, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Notice that a report from Washington requires a “wind-in-the-hair” shot of the reporter standing in front of the White House, or the national Capitol, or maybe a large photo thereof. You have to have something to see, and the medium favors stories that have visual drama or pathos.
But what is important often isn’t much to look at. Therefore, trends and stories that lack the looks are downgraded, if they appear at all. Check your emotional thermometer sometime after a half-hour of television “news” to determine how full and balanced your sense of the world is. Walter Cronkite once said that the entire content of a half-hour TV news presentation would fill maybe half a newspaper page.
The transitory nature of the electronic media experience also promotes superficiality. It flashes before you, and is gone. You can’t go back a paragraph or two, nor can you pause to digest the meaning of a particular point.
With the spread of self-operated technology, it’s all going further. The unfunny caricature now is two young lovers playing a board game together while each is separately texting other people.

Wailing for a Lost Cause

So when I, as a young newspaper editor, saw that polls showed television moving ahead of newspapers as people’s major source of news, I predicted the demise of print journalism. The fact that I was decades ahead of my time is not as important as the truth that something very like extinction is happening today.
One reason for my early cynicism was that, even at that age, I had a rather low opinion of the newspaper industry’s vision and commitment. Sure enough, around the 1970s even the best of America’s papers launched a long and fatal experiment with “doing TV” in print. In the last two decades especially, there has been a virtual merger between the newsroom and Hollywood. Things have become shorter, quicker, more colorful.
And less meaningful. My obsession through those years was modernizing and improving reporting, writing and graphics so the newspapers could become ever better at what they do – information and understanding – while developing more interesting and reader-friendly styles of presentation. That might have taken a modest amount of money, but it would have required the persistent investment of courage, imagination and leadership. Needless to say, there was precious little of all four available.
So, in my sour dotage, I would at least like the satisfaction of seeing today’s major thinkers probing the meaning of our exploding media universe, and applying some real thought to the challenge of operating a democratic republic with a citizenry now informed mostly by Jon Stewart.
. . . While multitasking meaninglessly via slick gadgetry whose main effect is to distract.

Words that Can't

2009-09-30T11:20:00.001-04:00

Words cannot portray
what wisdom never created.

You can't write your way
out of a factual problem.

You can't talk your way
around a lapse in integrity.

You can't walk the talk
if it's just talk.

The Second-Hardest Thing You'll Ever Attempt

2009-09-29T10:45:00.002-04:00

The second-hardest thing you'll ever attempt to do is change the culture of an organization.

The hardest thing of all is to change your own behavior.

When you stop and think about it, (How often do we actually stop and think about anything at all?) this issue of deliberate change is at the root of every improvement effort. That covers Project Management, Change Management, process improvement, skills development, problem solving and all the rest.

If all of us would build in this perception as we "plan," we'd be more solidly based no matter what we might be seeking to accomplish. The implications are immense.

Example: I am assigned the task of changing the process in our office to speed up interdepartmental communication and reallocate workload to include a new service we've been directed to provide to meet increased competition.

Senior management believes we have significant unused capacity that can be tapped to handle the change with little or no disruption. They feel most of our long-term administrative staff members continue to do some things we don't really need to do any more, and numerous current processes can be streamlined to be more productive in less time.

This is my first such assignment, and I'm concerned about making sure I put together a good implementation plan and don't miss anything. I also know the staff is going to be unenthusiastic, to put it mildly. I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to get them to go along with my plan, once I come up with a plan.

My tendency is to figure out the new process, research and draft ways to introduce the new way of doing things and improve the old ones. I present my plan to my management, then revise it to meet their concerns. Then I screw up my courage and call everyone together to lay out what we're going to do. Maybe I get some senior managers to attend that session to put some power behind this new process.

Then the fun begins.

How, if I should take my own advice, would I do all this differently?

Well, first of all, I would reverse the order in which I would approach the assignment.

Here's how: Knowing I haven't the faintest idea of how to conduct this big change process, I would determine the real nature of it: Culture Change. The new processes themselves are, at this point, less important than the "organizational culture" -- what people do here, their history, their attitudes, their values, their relationships.

So my first question is: What are the best ways to get this particular group of people to buy into any change at all? My answer is to convince them to embrace the change. This means I don't just get them to go along. I don't get them to just accept the new ways -- I get them to like it, lead it, make it their own.

What? Are you kidding me? These people just don't DO change!

So we arrive at my second question: How do I equip myself to successfully answer the first question? What do I need to know and do to convince them to become cheerleaders and implementers of the new way, whatever it turns out to be?

The best way is to engage them from the beginning, into the examination of the reasons for change, and the devising of the best ways to carry it out. My skills here are those of persuading and guiding. I don't have to come up with the ideas myself, at least not all of them. In fact, I shouldn't.

This may sound tough, but it can be done, and in fact is the only way to do it well. I learn to be the salesman and leader, rather than the staff planner. Learning and using the skills of this role is my real challenge, and it changes my fundamental approach to the assignment.

So the third and final question is answered within the context of full-group participation. I organize the future users of the proposed new process to reach the two big outcomes I've been directed to achieve? These goals are:
changing the process in our office to speed up interdepartmental communication;
reallocating workload to include a new service we've been directed to provide to meet increased competition.

Once I've convinced the group that change will -- must -- happen, and that they can be partners in designing and implementing it, very good things can happen. This is not to say it's quick and easy, because it is likely to be hard on me. But I will earn immense satisfaction, as well as a good measure of respect, by pulling it off.

Love, Hate & Must Have

2009-09-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

I've joined the Project Manager Networking Group, and discovered some interesting thoughts on the discussion board.

One Project Manager started this discussion, and it's interesting that along the way the comment exchange got a little heated . . . sort of like a few moments in your typical Project.

The title of the discussion was "5 Things about Being a Project Manager -- 5 Things I Love, 5 Things I Hate, 5 Things I Must Have."

Here are my contributions:

Five things I love about being a Project Manager:
1. This is a common-sense profession that makes tough stuff possible.
2. Serious people jump on Project Management once they understand it.
3. All workplace issues become clearer through this lens.
4. You can't beat the satisfaction when you pull off something everyone said was impossible.
5. The job needs and encourages real teamwork.

Five things I hate about being a Project Manager:
1. Too many functional managers won't give it a chance.
2. There is too much risk aversion in most of us.
3. Everybody's attention span is too short.
4. Few understand that minimal adequate documentation makes it work and makes it permanent.
5. The real issues in getting things done often are avoided or unexplored.

Five things I can't live without as a Project Manager:
1. The opportunity to practice the profession.
2. At least one other open mind at the start of a Project.
3. Patience.
4. Tolerance.
5. Sustained enthusiasm.

Hollow Project Management

2009-07-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

Every time I do any group training for Project Management, I give the participants the opportunity to brainstorm what actions or omissions can damage a Project, and what actions best ensure success. In hundreds of instances, it has almost never failed that PLANNING comes out a runaway winner -- poor planning in the failures, good planning in the winners.
Then we talk about people's actual experiences in Projects. It also very unusual if most of the group doesn't report that planning, when it occurs at all, is slipshod. Any plan that results is dismissed or ignored.
OK. There you have it. Failure of planning is the root of Project problems. Plan, and your problems evaporate.
Well, no. In Project Management, as in life. smelling out the neighborhood of the problem is only a nonfunctional first step toward actually doing something to counter it.
The second step is harder. That is the one where you examine a failed planning process to determine what was missing, either totally or in part. And here, almost invariably, you will lay bare the real reason Project planning is so often poor.
The reason? People. The Project Team Members and other Stakeholders are human, and that's what causes all the difficulties.
First of all, the "human resource" in Project Management is the catalytic resource, the one that puts all the other resources (money, materials, equipment, etc.) to work. If the people of the Project are not informed, competent, committed and productive, nothing will work.
Second, typical planning avoids the realities of people's behavior in Projects. Most planners have been burned, bombed and blown out by individual and group nonperformance in Projects, for a variety of reasons. Out of that experience, they have determined that people won't do what they say they're going to do, even if you can get them to agree to something.
That's how people are when you plunk them into a situation of extra work, in the company of unfamiliar co-workers, where there is pressure, uncertainty and risk. If you have concluded that nothing can be done about this fundamental matter, then Project predictability is a mirage.
So, you may do a plan, because you're expected to. Or you may NOT do a plan, because everyone knows they don't work. Either way, you have contributed to the tradition that Projects always go over budget and schedule, while falling short of expectations.
Hollow Project Management. All because the managers fail to recognize that the human animal in the Project situation needs a plan that accounts for the people realities at least as much as it counts the beans.
Projects that work are planned and executed by those who engage reality with courage, wisdom and skill. We call them "leaders."

Selfsinking

2009-07-18T10:34:00.000-04:00

I am so
overwhelmed
with my feelings of being
overwhelmed
that I have become . . .
overwhelmed.

All Good Management Is Project Management

2009-07-14T11:54:00.000-04:00

One of the vital things they never told me when I became a manager was how to think. So, among the many truths that took decades to crystallize for me was the concept of "the managerial attitude." Matter of fact, I'm still working on it.

In recent years, I've discovered that an obsession with Project Management is very helpful in clarifying this matter. The Project Manager enters a situation of uncertainty, ambiguity and risk -- and convinces skeptical (frequently negative) people to act with specific vigor to make tough things happen.

An important practical factor in successful Project Management is that deadlines, cost/resource allocations and concrete requirements/outcomes are established as if things weren't uncertain, ambiguous and risky. The risk, especially, is at the core of the process, and the risk rises dramatically when the Project seeks a "stretch" Goal, one that is quite valuable and quite distant from the starting point.

The way success is implemented is through a planning process that first, artificially "freezes" the dynamic reality, and slices it into ever-thinner/smaller pieces until risk is manageable and individual actions are simple and do-able. Secondly, the process reassembles all those little parts into a coherent, controlled whole in which management of the process and the relationships is seamlessly blended with investment of effort and resources.

If you look at day-to-day management in Project Management terms, you don't see routine, with one day following the previous one in a string of similar cycles. Instead, each day is one more application of a known, trackable process in each path through a broad complex of planned activity. For example, there should be measurable movement by each staff member along prearranged paths of skill development and results production. Each day is distinctly different, measurably ahead of the previous day, in the mind of the staff member as well as that of the staff member's manager.

The Process Control Cycle therefore is the manager's way of life: the Planning node accounts in detail for the Execution node, which is tracked closely by the Monitoring note, whose output is compared to that of the Planning node by the Analysis node, whose output is converted into the Correction node, which then becomes the Planning node as the cycle turns.

Planning -- Executing -- Monitoring -- Analyzing -- Correcting.

Everything in the manager's worklife is disciplined into that Process Control Cycle. It accounts for everything. How simple. How neat.

If only reality would allow itself to be organized effortlessly into that pattern . . . we wouldn't need managers. So, at the constantly irritated seam where circumstances, events, people and process meet, the successful manager is developing and tending the Process Control Cycle, the effective gizmo of Project Management.

Mis-sending Mixed Messages

2009-06-11T17:09:00.000-04:00

Today, everybody from governments to parents is "sending messages." You don't just say something or do something, you send a message.

The idea is that your real meaning -- a warning, say, or a bad example -- will come across loud and clear to some key person or group without regard to what you THINK you're saying or doing. Or maybe what you PRETEND to think you're saying or doing.

It's great fun to accuse someone of "sending the wrong message," because this matter can be entirely subjective. That being so, the original sender can argue in response that the accuser is misinterpreting the message, maybe on purpose. This counterclaim detects a message of veiled but evil intent.

There's no real way of determining who's right . . . unless, of course, someone actually asks the purported recipient (a kid, a voter, an adversary) of the suspect message. And what kind of a message would THAT send?

A Life Riding the Seam

2009-05-11T10:40:00.000-04:00

This is about what really goes on in effective management.

Very few managers actually have a process devoid of people. A process is a defined set of sequentially dependent steps that produce a predictable outcome. Process improvement is making the steps clearer and more efficient, thereby making the result more predictable with less input of time, effort and resources.

In short, a people-free process rewards knowledgeable tinkering, and sits there waiting for you -- unchanged -- between tinks (new word; add it to the dictionary). Managing such an unadorned process is what managers often yearn to do -- and in fact is what many go ahead and do, ignoring the fact that there are lots of people hanging around the process.

And there's the rub. I once had a manager who was responsible for the work of nine people. He said to me, wistfully, "If it weren't for the people, this job would be perfect." The problem was, of course, that the people WERE the job. The process being conducted did not exist without the nine people. The manager was superb as an individual user of the system, but not as a leader of the people.

People are improvable, but they also are unpredictable and often not very logical or efficient. A tight process annoys many of them, and triggers resistance (or worse).

So, for the vast majority of workplace organizations that consist of people wound around a process (or vice versa), what is the secret of good management?

The answer starts with accepting the fact that managers reside uncomfortably, often painfully, on the seam between process and people. Their job is to get the maximum output from people who can't operate effectively without process, but who may resist learning and following the process.

This relationship often is negatively affected by the manager's personal mastery of the process, meaning there is a constant temptation to "do it myself." That attractive mistake produces narrow success and systemic failure. Worker bees lean on their shovels to watch the process-perfect manager turn out fine work, and devise ways to evade criticism of their own less-exemplary efforts.

Nobody tells newly minted managers this. The job, properly defined, is quite short of fun, at least at first. The primary workstyle requirements of the true manager, especially early in such a career, are patience and tolerance, followed by flexibility and persistence. Subject-matter knowledge is a given, but often it need not be top-drawer personal expertise.

As a manager, you're measured by collective results. Your individual managerial contribution usually is invisible. Some of your bosses --senior managers -- know the properly functioning group can be that way only because a master manager is inside there, constantly balancing people and process. Many bosses don't understand that, though, and many who do know tend to take the excellence for granted after while.

Sad. Welcome to life on the seam.

Building Alliances

2009-05-02T09:29:00.000-04:00

Every "transaction" with another human being either improves or reduces the productivity of your relationship with that person.

You build by investing attention. You graciously comply with requests. You listen carefully, and respond respectfully. You cheerfully help find solutions rather than dwelling on mistakes.

So people LIKE working with you, being around you. And they feel obligated, in a pleasant sort of way, to go out of their way to help you. When you truly are too busy, they understand and feel not the slightest irritation with you. They waste less of your time.

This kind of relationship is a tremendous complement to your individually defined habits of personal productivity.

In fact, personal productivity is the combination of a person's efficiency at tasks plus that person's effectiveness in collaboration.

Warning: This success in building alliances takes time.

Most fundamentally, if you're overwhelmed with tasks and problems, the first thing that goes is your ability to communicate meaningfully. As a result, the second thing that goes is your collaboration. You don't have time to even acknowledge another person's existence, much less take time to listen, converse and work together. And those others are a lot less interested in helping you.

This alliance-building is one more time-management issue. It is time-consuming to organize yourself and focus on the communication skills that are the currency of relationships. Each one of these moments with another person takes a few minutes more than just brushing by.

The idea is to manage your time with a thoughtful eye on the importance of investing in your relationships. Make alliance-building among your highest priorities. The payoff is big.

RIP

2009-05-02T09:21:00.000-04:00

Maine PMI's Project of the Year competition died a quiet, unattended death on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at the age of 7. There were no survivors, no mourners and no entries. May it rest in peace.

Simply Amazing

2009-04-24T14:03:00.000-04:00

You act or you don't.

If you act, the action accomplishes something or it doesn't. The result either meets your expectations or it doesn't.

That is a simple, behaviorist description of personal productivity. Forget about all the syllables (eight of 'em: Per son al Pro duc tiv it y) -- this is about getting things done. The right things.

You don't have to be an efficiency expert to understand personal productivity. Anyone can grasp it, but it's amazing how little attention we pay. This is a fundamental factor in human life.

On the matter of paying attention: Even the most minimal amount of it a person pays to his/her own behavior can save that person hours a week, or even hours a day.

Think about it. You need to run errands, say. One of the errands involves an annoying person or thing. Because your focus is blurred by a minor negative emotion, you don't realize until you're well on your way that you forgot to bring along the items you need to properly carry out the two or three other matters you were going to handle while you were downtown.

So, you're going to waste some time, and you have to do some more thinking. Do you turn around and go back? Do you reprioritize your activities? Do you get madder?

Most importantly, do you take a moment to imprint the lesson learned, and to leverage some motivation from it to improve your management of the rest of your day?

Personal productivity comprises efficiency, anticipation, evaluation, prioritization, scheduling, negotiation and persuasion -- and probably a few other good habits.

But it starts with stopping to think. Do that a few minutes twice a day, and reap some amazing rewards.

Stakes & Chickens

2009-04-20T09:57:00.000-04:00

The objects of projects are clear
To all of the holders of stakes.
The chickens come roosting, my dear,
When the stakeholders learn what it takes.

Brand-New World . . . Same Old Challenges

2009-04-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

Few of us alive today have seen this. Huge old corporations crashing down over a single weekend. Seemingly endless reports of unprecedented layoffs and business failures. Our world is changing drastically. What can we, individuals and managers, do?

It's a time of threat and uncertainty, and the perfectly natural reaction is to hunker down. The world has changed and what you've been doing isn't working. What you know doesn't give you the new answers you need. So now what?

For starters, you can keep your eye on the ball -- which is success, not simple survival. Studies of recessionary times show that leaders who use the occasion for rethinking and innovation are the ones who make it through the hard times, and thrive more quickly and thoroughly when it is over. They focus on the successful operation they plan to have in five years, not the array of bad news currently on their desks.

In golf, the point of the effort is a good drive in a good game, not just hitting the ball. Obviously, if you don't hit the ball there will be no drive and no good game. But focusing just on hitting the ball can put you in the rough. You can't sequence it all from Step One, planning each next step as you conclude the current one. You can't plan placement of the shot after you've hit the ball. You need to be skilled at a process that competently gets the entire job done.

Why Caution Won't Work . . . and Panic Won't Either
That's why lying low in a difficult economy, however natural, doesn't ensure that you'll ride the upswing when it comes. Playing it safe is based on certain assumptions. One such assumption is that this will blow over before your resources are exhausted. Another assumption is that the underlying realities are the same as before, and when they resurface your hard-learned processes will once again be profitable.

If either of those assumptions is wrong, you'll find that out too late.

The opposite "strategy" can have worse outcomes. The wise manager doesn't lurch into frenzied struggle against the unaccustomed burdens. That's a sure way of hastening a bad end. Its basic assumption is that the old realities are gone forever, and it's a jungle out there.

While very bad things may be happening, panic is a sure way to do oneself in before the economy has a chance to do it to you.

So wisdom counsels neither unadorned patience nor unbridled struggle. It says you need to sort through the strengths and weaknesses in your standard process, and be prepared to make some major changes. At the same time, you look for opportunities and threats in what is going on in the outside world.

Fresh eyes and an open mind are absolutely essential now, presuming good judgment also is present.

One important factor is innovation. Often, pre-existing weaknesses and potentials have been growing for some time, but we have been too busy or too set in our ways to act on those perceptions. Now may be the time for some significant initiatives. If new ideas make sense based on an honest evaluation of one's organization and its people, courage teams with wisdom to produce innovation. You DO IT.

Reality is Internal
Times of severe stress really aren't radically different, and the challenges faced by individuals and organizations aren't either. It's just a matter of degree.

It's important to remember that our expectations are our own, and we should manage them consciously. If we are swayed unduly by the really bad news around us, we'll replicate it within our own spheres of action. If instead we take confident command of our thoughts, examine our assumptions and truly assess our strengths and opportunities, and ACT on our constructive judgements, our prospects improve dramatically.

When it's over, there will be a future. Those who will prosper in it are those who find ways to make hay when the sun isn't shining quite so brightly.