Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Conscious unbossing as a professional’s career choice and conscious unbossing as a leadership philosophy not only have no intersection, but can be detrimental in implementation. When does it become reckless leadership?
As part of the development of the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility, PMI spoke with a range of executive leaders to gather insights on what enterprise agility looks like in practice. Here, Terence Mauri shares how to rethink operating models.
How much do you challenge the directive? If project managers are always going to go along with what they are asked or told to do, then there really isn’t a lot of point in them being there.
In Part 1 of this article, I looked at ways that real-time communications--meetings and one-on-one exchanges--could be improved by using some of the tools and services that are available in the modern connected world. In this second and final part, I want to look at non-real-time communications and consider how they can be improved using these tools and services.
A new attitude So what kind of stuff are we talking about? Let’s start by going back to the quote I used in Part 1: blogger Ian Davis said that Web 2.0 is “an attitude rather than a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services.” That’s key to this second part of the article. I am going to focus a lot on collaboration tools--things that help us work more closely together, but we aren’t focusing on the tool itself--rather our attitude to that tool and how we use it to achieve our goals.
With real-time communications we need to think about using different tools, or different features of existing tools. But here we often use tools that we are familiar with, in a way that is new. Consider SharePoint for example (or similar offerings from other vendors)--a long established tool that is used by many organizations as a way to share information among employees. To many it’s just a form of file share, but if we change our attitude it can be a powerful tool.
One of the biggest problems that I find with the use of these tools is that people create a “gate” to access. There is a perception that something has to be produced first and then made available to others in a collaboration tool like SharePoint. That’s communication 1.0 thinking: build it and they will come. Communication 2.0 thinking says (at least to me). “Get them to come and they will build it.” Put simply, you don’t create the project plan and publish it to the tool; you create a blank file in the tool and let the team build the plan.
I’m not joking.
Create a workspace for people to use for the WBS (for example) and ask people to add their components. Structure it in such a way that it’s easy for people to add comments and make changes without losing the different versions (functionality built into these tools out of the box) and let the team work together in this virtual data space to build the WBS for you. It’s the same process that you would go through if you tried to use meetings, working sessions, etc. to build the WBS, but people have more time to think and can do the work on their own schedule.
Of course this doesn’t just happen overnight. You need to create an environment where people are comfortable working in this way. For people who are used to working together in real time on tasks, the idea of “working together separately” can be a tough one to grasp. I have had the most success by focusing on the benefits--more time to consider their contributions, the ability to bounce ideas around with their colleagues, the ability to contribute on their own schedule and the time to consider how to respond to other people’s submissions.
In many instances you end up with people putting more thought into the work than if they were in a room (or on a conference call) for several hours trying to finalize the details. It is rare for the final version to take any longer, and it is invariably a better solution because it hasn’t been rushed to completion in the confines of a scheduled meeting.
Maximizing the benefit Remember though that this is an attitude shift. It’s not simply a better way to get people to work on a document; it’s a better way to work, period. Many projects now involve resources from different locations, and that often mean different time zones. This allows you to stretch the working day. Here in Canada, the time difference from west to east is four-and-a-half hours; in the United States it’s three. If you work for a multi-national, you may have a 24-hour working day.
Use this time to get more done. Have people in different locations work on the same task and you can get much more than eight hours of constructive time out of a calendar day--vital if time to market is a driver for your project. If you create an environment where the work can be stored and shared, create an attitude of summarizing updates, request colleagues look at specific aspects, etc., it quickly becomes reality. At the same time it fosters a much closer team spirit--team members feel like they are letting their colleagues down if they don’t make progress on requested items.
Project managers can help their team members to come to terms with the idea of this collaboration environment by turning it into a hub for the project. Modern versions of these tools don’t have to be file shares; they can be websites with a sense of identity for the team, and they can contain tools to help you manage the project. Microsoft in particular has done a great job of building an environment where its tools can work together--Project will readily integrate into SharePoint and allow you to publish person-specific tasks to your team members, capture updates and report progress. The more you use these tools as the hub for the project, the more people will use it as that rather than working from Outlook or other tools--collaboration becomes the norm because it’s easy.
Finally, consider the use of blogs and wikis. Some of these may be project specific, some may be more PMO related. Encourage a less formal--and potentially even less-work focused--area of the tool. These are great ways to have your team work together to share ideas, help one another and capture best practices. They also provide a way to interact that is perceived as being different from just working on deliverables. Think of it almost as a “virtual water cooler”--an area where people can exchange ideas and interact outside of the formal project deliverables.
Conclusions In this short series of two articles, I have only scratched the surface of how different “connected” tools and services can help improve the efficiencies of the modern project team. The suggestions I have made will hopefully resonate--at least providing food for thought when you consider how you can use technology to improve things.
I have no idea who Ian Davis is beyond the little I found during my research, but he is a smart man. If you think beyond the concept of just simply tools and systems and start thinking in terms of attitude and mindset, then it becomes a lot easier to understand what is necessary to leverage Communication 2.0. Like everything else, you have to believe in it yourself to have any hope of success, but it doesn’t need to be something inaccessible.
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting Inc., an Ontario, Canada-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Additionally, Andy is Vice President of a new Canadian professional project management body--the Project Management Association of Canada. Learn more about them at www.pmac-ampc.ca.
