Optimal Technical Approaches Almost Never Come In Cans, And Real Leaders Know It

 

I may be setting a record for the highest number of characters in a GTIM blog title, but I needed every single one of them to synopsize this week’s take on this month’s ProjectManagement.com topic, Leadership. An oft-overlooked aspect of managerial leadership is a subset of my three key aspects of it, to wit:

• Sufficiently advanced expertise to identify the optimal technical solution to the problem in front of the Project Team,
• A genuine concern for the members of the Project Team, and
• A willingness to pursue the optimal technical solution, alone if necessary.

The oft-overlooked aspect I alluded to is a subset of the first bullet, identifying the optimal solution to the problem being pursued by the Project Team. Even a moment’s consideration of the situation must yield the obvious fact that, if one of the canned strategies that’s been around seemingly forever was clearly the ideal approach to take, why on earth would it need a PM to execute it? Doesn’t work that needs no innovative or creative approaches or solutions become rote?

And this is where I become frustrated with symposium paper-presenters. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who are not so much presenting new or innovative ideas as much as acting as well-mannered and polite scolds to those they perceive aren’t implementing Earned Value or Critical Path Methodologies to their satisfaction. These are not thought leaders, nor leaders at all. They’re more precisely defined as passionate followers, throwing their energies behind notions that have been around for decades. We all know the need to set up a Work Breakdown Structure; we’ve been told ad infinitum of the need to clearly and completely define the scope, and to honor the “triple constraint,” and to acknowledge that one of the baselines can’t change without impacting the other two, and to guard against informally changing the scope, and, and, and…

Enough already! This isn’t news to anyone who’s ever even studied for the PMP®. To help illustrate my point, let’s turn, once again, to the Game Theorists’ favorite tool, the payoff grid.

Practically speaking, the Type of Leader/Assigned Role profiles for scenarios 1B and 2A will be significantly easier to identify than scenarios 1A and 2B. Interestingly, scenario 1A represents a threat to being able to optimize Asset Management, while scenario 2B is a danger to Project Management. If a genuine leader has not been recognized for their abilities in such a role, the worst that can happen is that the organization isn’t using its assets to their potential. However, if a PM happens to belong to scenario 2B, and the project can’t perform adequately with only conventional techniques, then such a project is virtually doomed to overrun, come in late, or both.

“But wait, Michael!” I can hear GTIM Nation say, “What about your oft-cited derivative of the Pareto Principle, that the 80^th percentile best PMs with access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20^th percentile worst managers who have 80% of the information so needed? Wouldn’t the existence of an adequate Earned Value Management System, combined with a decent Critical Path schedule and a functioning Change Control System, keep the scenario 2B manager from wrecking the project?”

Well, yes and no. The people I’ve observed who are entrenched in scenario 2B will tend to reject the idea that poor cost and schedule performance indicators could possibly be indictments of their technical approach to their projects’ scope, preferring instead to blame various members of the Project Team for not implementing the canned management schemes thoroughly enough to attain success. This kind of blame-shifting from the fake leaders in the PM role easily turns into a project performance tail spin, particularly if unrecognized true leaders happen to be in the ranks of the Project Team, and can see the actual source of the project’s difficulties, but are not in a position to properly address them.

“BUT WAIT MICHAEL!” I can hear the more readily agitatable members of GTIM Nation exclaim. “What if the performance measurement information actually influences the PM to re-evaluate their technical approach?” Well, if this is the case, then such a manager would have begun the transition from fake to genuine, leaving my analysis (mostly) intact.