'Steal' From Successful Consultants: Be Committed, but Not Attached

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Consulting  

Clare, a seasoned project manager with over 20 years of experience, has experimented with all kinds of approaches for her projects. That’s because she uses the idea of being committed to project success, but not attached to how she achieves that success.

That’s how consultants often work.

The most successful consultants support their clients as those clients discover and experiment with new ways of working. That means the consultant must be committed to the client’s success—but not attached to how the client achieves that success.

Sometimes, that feels quite challenging for the consultant or the project manager. First, project managers (and consultants) need to clarify what they are committed to.

Clarify Your Commitments
Many managers want people—either project managers or consultants—to commit to specific outcomes. For project managers, that tends to look like:

“We will deliver Project A by Date B.”

But that’s not a useful commitment. Everyone knows that Things Happen in projects. Even when the project accounts for known risks, no one can account for unknown risks.

Instead of committing to specific outcomes, Clare decided long ago that she would commit to the people. She uses these three principles to create successful products:

1. Support the team to work well together, so they can be successful.
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