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.

Whatever It Takes

   
  How to Get Commitment

     Whatever it takes.

     That’s the slogan for commitment. You agree to take on something really tough, and you’re asked, “How are you going to pull that off? What are you going to do?”

     When your answer is, “Whatever it takes,” and you mean it – you’re committing. If you are going to keep that commitment, you go out and work at it, relentlessly, persistently, imaginatively. You’re really committed.

     When you have a team of people who have bought into such an attitude, there’s no way you won’t succeed. You may not accomplish exactly what you set out to do. If the challenge is really all that tough, you almost certainly will not pull off the entire original intent.

     You will, though, produce a solid result that probably will get the job done, or enough of it.  Forget the image of perfection. You’ve succeeded.

     How do you do that? It’s plenty hard, in the first place, to get yourself to stick with it, to take the plunge and fail, then pick yourself up and tangle with it again. And fall and get up and re-engage. To keep studying the matter in the midst of the struggle, continuing to invent and employ new strategies with vigor and discipline.

     It’s a lot harder, and much more complicated, to get a whole group of people to do it. On the rare occasions when you see that done well, you know it. We honor that as “leadership."

The Inquiring Project Manager

     One skill unerringly points to the competent manager: The question habit.

     Good managers ask a lot of questions. Besides the need to know what’s going on and why, they must be able to negotiate well – something that calls for a really well developed sense of questioning.

     Whenever I can, I squeeze a negotiating piece into management training, especially project management training. They’re negotiating all the time.

     Good negotiators do a lot of careful preparation, but they are fully aware that they can never know enough to completely understand the values – and therefore the motivations – of their counterpart(s) on the other side of the table.

     So their presentation of incentives in bargaining is preceded by, and continually enriched by, a search for additional information. The Holy Grail is finding the route to a mutually beneficial outcome.

     Real negotiators are never looking to beat anybody. They want happy campers all around when it’s over. They recognize that there will be a future.

When Management Is Excellent

     All the marvelous skills of the topflight manager teeter delicately on one old-fashioned essential. That's the skill we’re tired of talking about because it depresses us. It never ceases to demand attention when we really would like to focus on much more worthy matters.

     When we neglect it, though, the punishment is swift and cruel. It will put our most treasured desires out of our reach, if it doesn’t damage or destroy them.

     This harsh taskmaster: Time management.

     We think of time management as a nutsy/boltsy thing, and it is. It’s also, though, the gatekeeper through which everything must pass. Even, or especially, our most important things.

Corey Booker: 'DO Something!'

     The young Corey Booker had a Yale law degree and a lot of spunk, but he eventually ran out of gas as his fellow city councilors squashed anything he tried to do.

     They had had enough of his in-your-face campaign against the poverty, corruption and general disaster of New Jersey’s Newark. He had confronted his fellow politicians too vigorously and too often.

     So, depressed and emotionally shot, visiting one of the city’s worst drug-dealing areas, he ran into a woman from the area who had been an active opponent in many public forums.

     She, seeing his dispirited state, gave him a reassuring hug. I can’t remember the story well enough to say whether he asked for her advice, or if she just volunteered it:

     “DO something!”

Project Manager . . . Really?

     Most of the project managers I have met aren’t sure they are project managers. They don’t need to wonder. They indeed are project managers.

     This matter comes up often as people consider the prospect of qualifying to take the certification examination for Project Management Professional: “I’ve never been a project manager. I can’t meet the experience requirement.”
     Baloney. These are people who have been initiating and carrying out project work, sometimes for years. Sure, no one ever gave them the title “Project Manager,” and the problems they solved and the new things they created were not labeled “Project.”
     Yet, the results they achieved – often high-quality results – distinguished them as very competent project managers.
     This is not just in the context of the PMP test. It is everywhere in the working world. There are people doing solid-to-superb project management who don’t know they should call it for what it is.

How to Avoid Avoidance

     “I never listen to the readers. All they ever do is (complain).”
     I heard that comment from an editor back when I was in the news business; it’s been a handy start to conversations about customer service ever since.
     In a broader context, it shines the light on a deadlier failure, that of management, in the corrosive practice of ignoring/avoiding problems.

     I got the “benefit” of a double whammy in this regard once. I was working for a man who insisted on keeping decision-making in his own hands, which made his say-so a requirement for any staff response to whatever might come up.
    One morning he didn’t even pause as I attempted to get an answer to a rather minor matter that, if neglected, was capable of disproportionately messing up our day. “I’m going to a meeting,” he said as he walked away.
     He brushed aside both my interruption and the original issue. Any old decision probably would have made it go away; instead, the staff was tangled up for a couple of hours.

     How much of that “management” does it take to destroy productivity and drive away quality employes? And the editor who ignored his readers? The damage from stonewalling your end users that way can be unknowable, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be considerable.

     You can understand how that sort of thing comes about. It’s no fun when things are painfully not the way they’re supposed to be. Avoiding the discomfort is a perfectly human reaction.
     But it’s not management.