The accomplished engineer made no bones about it. “When I
ask someone to do something,” he told a roomful of us, “I always do it myself
as well, to make sure it gets done right.”
Got that? After delegating an assignment to someone, he
would secretly duplicate the entire task himself because he trusted no one else
to handle it properly. This was the triumph of personal perfectionism over
everything we’ve all been saying about teamwork, delegation, personal productivity,
staff development, supervisory responsibility. This was the ultimate failure of
trust.
It’s an exaggerated example, but don’t kid yourself: It
represents the major weakness of most projects. There is an implicit, general
limit on expectations arising from our experience with our colleagues and
managers. People often just don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do,
and we adjust our estimates accordingly.
So you throttle back from exciting possibility to the safe
zone dictated by experience. What you can do yourself, you do. When you don’t
know how to do it, or there’s just too much of it, you fudge. You live the lie,
knowing the best we can do will not be what we’re really capable of doing.
This is a huge
reality. It overshadows and undercuts many or most of our projects, but
rarely is mentioned and just about never properly accounted for. It’s sneaky. Projects
have fuzzy plans, or inadequate tracking, so their failure to meet expectations
can be chalked up to the myth that projects are fated to rarely hit targets.
Sometimes it seems that such lowballing becomes something of
a norm. While we don’t acknowledge it as baldly as the duplicating engineer
did, it is essentially a damper on legitimate risk-taking with many
organizations, and with a lot of decision-makers.
In short, a common cause of project shortfall is inadequate
engagement with this massive fundamental risk. We busy ourselves with stuff and
activities, when the real basic, defining challenge of project management is
the intertwining of delegation and risk.
Delegation is the magic management process that gets people
to take responsibility for faithfully carrying out assignments. Risk is the
possibility/likelihood that things will not go according to plan.
Risk is formally addressed in most project management
formulations, generally as a system for identifying and addressing resource and
event issues. Even when it is managed well within that context, it frequently doesn’t
address the really important project risk area: Human performance.
Delegation, management
of the “people resource,” is the catalyst for project management. All the other
resources just sit there waiting for someone to apply them, install them, invest
them. The action part is the contribution of the people resource, the most
valuable of them all.
People also are the most risk-laden resource. Certainly,
people make up the most vital, adaptable asset available to the project
manager. Yet, they are the most changeable; while they are the most important,
they also are the most risky.
This is where the project manager’s attention should be. If you
get this vital, intricate risk under management, all other possibilities
improve dramatically. Good people, properly led, can do really good things –
including risk management.
The how-to for the solution is a laser focus on team members
and other stakeholders. The successful project manager will get close to the top
decision-makers and influencers as early as possible, and devote all the time
it takes to properly select, prepare, inform, empower and lead the key
individuals throughout the project structure.
This is by no means to dismiss or demean the other
responsibilities of the complex project manager position. But, as a top
priority, the project manager must get this people thing right. All those nuts-and-bolts
arrangements are right up front, demanding attention. They can be delegated.
The huge people
issues hang quietly in the background, easy to postpone and ignore. They
cannot be delegated.
The super-careful engineer worked for an organization large
enough to absorb, at least for a while, the excess investment of expensive
talent required for total duplication of detailed assignments. Few of us enjoy
that luxury.
A better investment is devotion to selecting, preparing and
leading the people who can be fully trusted to do what they say they will do.
Our biggest risk is failure to properly set that priority.
Do the people stuff. It’s not easy, but it’s the answer.
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