The Hardest Part of Project Management

     What’s the single most difficult thing about the project manager’s job?

     I know, I know: There are so many problems, especially the unpredictable ones, that it seems a worthless exercise to try isolating the single worst. Those devilish items take turns being the worst, often with head-spinning rapidity.

     The specifics can include, but most definitely are not limited to:

     Insufficient time

     Scope creep

     Fuzzy expectations

          . . . often unexpressed and/or unknown to those who have them

     Abrupt changes in organizational priorities

     Lack of assured project resources

     Team members who won’t make commitments

         . . . or won’t keep the commitments they’ve made

     Managers who block or limit team members’ participation

     Lack of insights from project end users

Measuring & Managing

 

   In our never-ending quest for assurance, we jump on anything that sounds simple and can pass for realistic. Here’s one such thing, a commandment for managers:

     “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

     True or False?

     You could almost say the famous statement is both. It’s true and it’s false. (Sort of like the good ol’ boys of The Great White North who liked to “both eat in and take out.”)

     It’s true that managers must have ways to determine the effectiveness of their efforts. They’re investing to make things happen, and they need to know how it’s going. Managers build processes, then tend and adjust them to achieve maximum benefit.

     They have to keep track along the way.

     But it’s not always mathematical. With the really important things, assessment of progress usually is too subtle for quantification alone. There may be evidence of progress or slippage. There may appear to be both.

Failure Is Quick & Easy

      If it wasn’t the fastest-ever project failure, it had to rank right up there. The project manager appointed two people to get started on the design of a software program, then immediately left on vacation.

     Needless to say, there wasn’t much progress while the project manager was away.     The designers spent a lot of time fixing problems that were interesting and in the neighborhood, without really getting much done on the software design itself.

     The IT people were grateful for the extra help, but the project mostly wandered aimlessly away from the original short-term intent..

     After the project manager returned, the carelessness of the launch was reflected in a continuing lack of focus. The project wasn’t very large, but the eventual cost and finish date were way out of line.

Project Management consulting: Listen to the interview

I was interviewed by Priscilla Hansen-Mahoney of Blazing Trails Consulting about my views on project management consulting. Listen to the interview here.

Love That Failure

 
 Most information we see about project success and failure falls into one of two major topic areas.

     Numerous studies have revealed the bad decisions that led to famous historical disasters such as Robert Scott’s 1911 expedition, in which everybody died after reaching the South Pole (while Roald Amundsen had led a flawless round trip to the Pole a few weeks prior).

     And we’ve read about the project management mistakes that sank the mighty Titanic of the White Star Line in 1912. And why the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (“Galloping Gertie”) destroyed itself in 1940.

     Big-time and big-budget, all of them.

     And then there are statistics that tell us what percentage of present-day projects actually make their numbers on cost, schedule and requirements. Results vary, but not many are outstandingly good. 

     In either category, there isn’t much of use to us small-timers with nontechnical challenges in unsophisticated environments. So innumerable project managers wrestle alone with issues of limited resources, demanding sponsors, resistant stakeholders, shaky budgets, distracted team members -- often with utter lack of precedent.

So it's a big deal . . . Is it a project?

     This was going to be a big deal. I knew that.

     What I didn’t know was that it was a project.

     I didn’t even know, actually, the meaning of “project,” what a project is.

     If you ever had mentioned the word to me, all I could have summoned up would have been a memory of my mother telling me about the Saturday morning cellar cleanup: “Don’t make a federal project out of it.”

     Mom was expressing a culturally current joke reference that influenced my automatic reaction to the idea of a project. In that conception, a project was an unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming ritual intended to draw things out and waste time instead of just getting the job done.

     Just get it done!

     Do it. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Don’t sit around theorizing and “planning.” Act. Do. Produce.

     Today, many years and countless iterations later, it is a little bit of a surprise to stop and realize that things haven’t changed all that much. Many, maybe most, organizations of all kinds are committed to action. Period.

Can a Project Last 40 Years?

     Can a project last 40 years?
     My first response? Of course not.
     Why, then, did I post a commentary on the 40-year history of Borders Books & Music last November 8, and entitle it “Botched Project: Borders Book & Music”? I even noted in the same post that the business had been founded in 1971.
     Since the piece appeared, there have been more than 900 views of it, and countless comments about it on the various discussion boards. Just one writer, though, raised a point (for which I am grateful to him, Steve S), that is deserving of thought by all of us:

     “This is not a project, because it was not intended as a temporary endeavor. This is a case study of a business. It did not have consistent objectives over the years, or a fixed timeline (due date) for completion. I wouldn't call it scope creep either, but more of a business going through expansion and retraction as it changed its mission and strategies.

Nothing Soft about Project Skills

    We call them “hard” skills because they have recognizable shape and the appearance of substance.
     By the hard skills standard, thirty years on the job earns you a presumption of competence at whatever the specialty is. BA, MBA, PCE, PMP, licenses and certificates. They all open gates because we take them as proof the holder is good at stuff.
     Now we can place that person, and make assumptions about how much he or she matters.
     While the tangible proofs of professional ability often are the objects of intense personal pride, they also have the aura of objectivity as you present yourself to the world. They are the currency of value in the competency marketplace.
     But “soft” skills, conversely, are private and local, not easy to specify on the resume: “Excellent communicator – strong team worker – known as problem solver. . . .”
     You talking about yourself? Yuck. Doesn’t work, not at all.

Project Lessons Not Learned

     “Milliken left a lot of files. I threw them all out.”

     The speaker was my successor as president of a regional newspaper editor’s association. He was chatting with another person as they walked out of a meeting room, unaware that I was standing nearby.

     I had kept a number of neatly labeled folders, notes of the planning and conduct of projects and activities during my year in the position. The files included a number of possibilities that hadn’t come through in my term, but offered promise for follow-up.

     There were notes on our attempts to recruit major national figures as speakers for our events. Members show up, and participate more enthusiastically, when there is some star power on the programs. It’s worth pursuing big names if you want a dynamic group.

     A couple of prominent people had been favorably disposed, as a matter of fact, but couldn’t make it at that time. Now they would never hear from our organization again, and the spadework was wasted.

     There were other names in those files, phone numbers and notes about member recruitment, development activities and other matters involving potential growth of the organization.

     All of it wound up in the trash at the new president’s place of business.

Project Document Magic

     Bought a car once from one of the best salesmen I ever met.

     First, he asked questions about our wants, needs, preferences and financial range. He listened attentively, and asked meaningful follow-ups.

     We looked at cars and discussed them. We decided to talk at greater length about one model, and sat down to do so.

     Before long, the salesman was asking us questions about ourselves, and writing down some of the answers.

     At the time, I happened to be teaching “Personal Selling” to university students, and I found myself admiring this entire performance in the new-car showroom.

     Among the challenges in sales is winning the trust of your prospect. Another is disciplining yourself to delicately tend this new relationship, enhancing the trust while eliciting details about what could convince this person to buy . . . or not.

Botched Project: Borders Books & Music

     Look at Borders Books & Music. Actually, you can’t look at it. It’s gone, as of September 2011. Defunct, at the age of 40.

     Tom and Louis Borders probably didn’t consider themselves project managers, but their clear vision and consistent follow-through produced a hugely successful commercial project. For a while.

     The two University of Michigan students started in 1971 with a few used books in an upstairs room or two in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their concept was an engaging one, and shortly they opened a real store. Phase One of the project.

     Were you ever in a Borders store back in the ‘70s, ‘80s – even into the ‘90s? It was a booklover’s dream. Books, thousands of them. Endless shelves of books – fresh books, old books, every possible kind of book. Soft chairs to sit in and soft-selling staff people who knew books, loved books, could talk about books.

Politics Projects . . . & Vice Versa

     Hey, project manager!

     There is a lot of attention in these weeks of October to the battles for election to public office in the USA, in its national entities and its constituent states. Much political persuasion is presented to us in various channels of information and entertainment.

     And also misinformation, disinformation, distortion and just straight-out lies.

     Those are all work packages.

     The good, the valuable and important, the interesting, the useful . . . and the damaging and disgusting. They are organized into projects with much the same characteristics as those you’re leading.

Agile: The End of that Oldtime Project Management? Again? Nope. Again.

     Remember TQM?

     I do. Total Quality Management rose 20 years ago and fell a short time later. It was considered by some in the project management field, at the beginning, as the state-of-the-art successor to our ancient craft.

     TQM was the new wonder. Project Management, as we knew it, was out.

     I didn’t see it that way. I pegged TQM as embroidery on the working jeans of project management – a nice enhancement, but you still had to have the jeans.

     TQM was a perfectly respectable system, initially devised to improve management of quality in manufacturing processes. W. Edwards Deming developed the modern form in Japan after World War II, where he went as a representative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program helped Japan recover from the devastation of the war.

Project Planning? Fiction

     The guy at the neighborhood meeting was livid.

     “Just do what you said you were going to do!” he shouted at the developer. His two dozen or so neighbors all sounded their “Yeah!” They were fed up.

     They had bought their lots and contracted for homes to be built in this planned development sited on a big vacant field in the city. They were promised features including a pleasant pond surrounded by their nice little residences.

     Development had gone slowly. Most of the additional homes went up. The muddy track became a quarter-mile roadway, paved, center circle and all.

Projects that Sneak Up on You

Jim the Newsman

     Back when I was a newspaper editor, I got into a monumental special edition, our self-congratulatory recognition of the paper’s 150^th anniversary. It made a lot of money, but our management of it failed to match the grand expectations in other respects.

     The organization mostly treated the matter as a replication of what we all did every day, only bigger and with a more extended schedule. We news folks figured there had to be loose bits of time in our schedules, and story ideas and photo subjects lying around. No big deal, just somewhat burdensome.

     We did it one step at a time. There was no master plan, and there was zero meaningful consultation among the major stakeholders. We made no attempt to do anything other than leave it to each department: Gear up for a big effort. That’s the only way we knew how to do it.

Tesla, Musk & Projects without Precedent

      Elon Musk is something else – sort of a Paul Bunyan of project managers. You can read it all on Wikipedia.

     We’ve heard about dreamers, daredevils, winners and those incredibly focused people who get serious at a young age and achieve great things.

     Musk is all that. The work breakdown structure of his career includes work packages that have made him a multimillionaire while he tackles very big challenges. He continually diversifies and multiplies success.

     As a South African kid, he taught himself computer code and made $500 at the age of 12 selling a video game. He came to the U.S., did PayPal and made a bundle when Amazon bought it.

     He took Space X in seven years from nothing to the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon space freight vehicle. The Falcon9/Dragon combo was the first commercial space vehicle to dock with the International Space Station. He is visionary, a technical wizard and no slouch at sales and marketing, in-person and online.

 

Eric Shinseki, Project Manager

     Eric Shinseki, a truly noble soldier and leader, became Secretary of Veterans Affairs for the United States in 2009.

     He was handed a project of immense scope and intractability. It was bulging with problems and pulsating with explosive risk. The VA mess went back decades, and that was well known. The agency also had been honored for the quality of care that it often provided for at least most of the people who made it into the VA facilities.

     But hundreds of thousands of additional candidates for VA care were produced by the wars of our last two decades, and Vietnam veterans are into their care-intensive age. Studies and commissions have shown that the VA is buried under demands it simply cannot meet.

     Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, including in his promised programs the solution to the VA mess. Eric Shinseki was qualified as a superb executive. He had risen to the very top of the military hierarchy of the United States, serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had demonstrated great courage in opposing the Bush administration’s Iraq War, a stand that cost him his career.

Project Management Certainty

      It seems pretty unfair, when you think about it. Project Management demands certainty, but it doesn’t give you any.  You have to bring your own.

     My earliest experiences with project managers in a large corporation, decades ago, included listening to a raft of complaints about this. Those project managers often were the target of what really were attempted cons, by their own managers.

     Boss: “When will the project be finished?”

     Project Manager: “It’s ‘way too early to tell. We have to get a lot of quotes and estimates before we have any idea of how long it will take.”

     Boss: “Well, how about just a rough idea? I won’t hold you to it.”

     Baloney. If the project manager should mistakenly breathe anything, however circumscribed and conditional, that could be interpreted as a number or a date, it instantly became carved in granite.

     At least, that’s how the story went, and I have heard it countless times. Still do, now and then.

First Project, First Success

     This was an orphan project, wandering aimlessly back and forth among four stakeholding corporate partners. It didn’t meet the budgetary threshold for the sponsoring organization’s formal project management, and it didn’t fall into any other practical slot.

     Still, it was important for other reasons, not least the company’s reputation with the other partners.

     A restless sales manager in that organization was just completing project management training he had undertaken to support a possible career change. Well, his boss said, how about seeing how you can do on this project?

     Here’s how it went, in his words:

 

Looks Like Management, Works Like Leadership

Have you ever had a great leader?

Neither have I. I’ve had a few effective managers, though, and that may be all we need to have. Or to be.

I’m sure there are people who have had great leaders, and have been part of great achievements as a result. Maybe we’ll hear from some of them. For myself, I’ve never experienced that, and no one I know has ever mentioned having done so.

We’ve been reading – and writing – a lot about leadership lately. A favorite discussion starter is the division between leadership and management. I’ve used it a lot, but now I’m thinking a little more deeply about it.