What To Do If You Find Your Project On A Dating App

 

Now, before GTIM Nation emails Cameron McGaughy en masse demanding that I report to Occupational Medicine for drug screening and/or psych evaluation, let me explain this blog’s title. I’m a firm believer in Matrix Management, the organizational structure that acknowledges the inherent conflict of interest between Project Management and Organizational, or “Line” Management, and sets up the business model to avoid errors that would be expected to happen without such an acknowledgement. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, Project Managers don’t really care if the PMO’s printer is rented or purchased, or the increase in the rate of vacation accumulation between employees with less than ten years on the job and those with more. They do care very much about delivering their Projects’ scope on-time, on-budget, and orient their decisions towards that end. Again exaggerating, the Asset Managers don’t pay much attention to the success rate of the PMO’s portfolio – they’re more interested in the most efficient use of the office equipment budget, or the renumeration structure that both attracts and retains talent for the organization. Different goals, different Management Information Systems informing their decisions. It’s only natural, then, that different people be named managers in pursuing these often-competing goals, otherwise the inherent conflict of interest will skew many decisions and aspects of the business model towards error.

Here's where Matrix Management can get complex, and interesting. Many, if not most of the Project Team will be dedicated to your Project full-time. The rest of the Team may be working multiple projects, depending on their specialty. That being the case, the latter category of Team members will inevitably prefer some project work (and managers) to others, which is where making your Project the most attractive comes in to play. In this game, your Project has three images to maintain:

• Those in the Project Team will have a front-row view to how you handle them, as well as the technical challenges of the Project itself.
• Others within the organization who are not part of your Team will also form an opinion about how you are doing (based on your Cost/Schedule performance data presented in the Project Review Meetings), and also what it’s like to work on your Team (based on what they hear from your Team members).
• People outside the organization who are aware of your Project, including your customer, will also form an opinion of your management skills. Sometimes to find fault, other times to create an assessment of their competition, or even to poach your undervalued talent into their organization.

It’s this three-faced dynamic that led me to the analogy of the Dating App. The dating game isn’t that far removed from the PM-as-image-setter game: in both cases, we’re trying to put the best light on a given set of facts, knowing that, should we deviate from reality, downstream negative consequences inevitably await.

To really spice things up, let’s bring in the Maccoby Archetypes.[i] I find the most insufferable of these to be the Jungle Fighters, relying as they do on tactics that have nothing at all to do with actually contributing to the Project Team in order to get ahead within the organization. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, this type is also particularly adept at glomming on to Projects they perceive as winners (“swipe right”), and distancing themselves from the losers (“swipe left” or “ghost”), regardless of their actual level of contribution. These people are real – I once was given an extremely difficult task with a hard deadline from a new PMO team that had been grafted onto my organization. The person it should have gone to, an organizational superior (naturally), avoided me almost the entire period of performance … until it started to become apparent that not only would I pull it off, I would do so rather well. Once that happened, he started hovering over me, right up until I hit the “send” button on transmitting the deliverable. Afterwards he went back to leaving me alone.

My advice if you find your project on a dating app is attracting a lot of scope-adjacent people, looking to associate themselves with your soon-to-be-realized success? Don’t reject, or “out” them. It’s unlikely that would do any good, and might make you look bad. Simply let them bask in your Project Team’s reflected glory, and be confident that those truly in the know are fully aware of what’s happening.

Then ghost them.

[i] [i] In The Gamesman, The New Corporate Leaders (Simon and Schuster, 1976), the brilliant Michael Maccoby posits four corporate personnel archetypes: The Craftsman cares deeply about his output, but not so much about the organization around him; The Company Man tends to assume the persona of the organization around him; The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through calumny and other cloak-and-dagger tactics; and The Gamesman sees his renumeration not as food on the table or a roof over his head, but as tokens in some grand game being played.