Gantthead Badges - How To Get Them
| Situation: You could use a pat on the back. Badges are one of my favorite recent additions to gantthead. At a glance, they help you understand how your peers are contributing to the site. If you look at your profile as your "PM Body of Work", badges offer a fun set of highlights - adding a sort of punctuation to the link-lists of things you've done. They live on the your profile and and follow you around the site. Every time you make a comment or participate in a discussion, badges tell people a little bit about you. Since launching badges last week, we've received a lot of questions about how you earn them. So here's a quick list of the launch set of badges and a description of how you can get them. We'll be adding more over time, but these are a great place to start.
|
Lazy Project Management
| Situation: You think "there's got to be a better way."
Peter Taylor is the head of a PMO at Siemens Industry Software Limited, a supplier of global product lifecyclemanagement solutions. He does a lot of speaking and writing on the subject of ‘The Lazy Project Manager’ . His elearning modules are available online as are his free podcasts on iTunes . So most people would think that being lazy is not something you would want to be known for. Peter thinks differently. We recently caught up with to find out why...
Q. You talk about the Pareto 80/20 rule in the book, but finding that critical 20% is always a trick. How did you identify the critical parts of PM that are most important? Do they share common attributes? Generally speaking, are they the easiest things to do or the hardest? A: Answers to each question in series -
Q. You also discuss the way that the leadership potential of Prussian Army officers was judged according to their intelligence and their laziness. You go into some detail about how laziness and high intelligence in combination makes for good leadership. Does that mean you believe in born leaders? Are 3/4 of project managers doomed to be poor or mediocre leaders? A: Answers to each question in series -
Q. You use a tool called a power grid to assess a project sponsor. How does that work? A: Well it is all about how to control your greatest asset and potentially your biggest threat. Critical to any projects success is having a good project sponsor, but, like the saying goes ‘you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives’ and the same is true of project sponsors. So what makes a good project sponsor and how do you deal with the one you have just inherited for your project? The Project Sponsor is the key stakeholder representative for the project and provides the necessary support for the Project Manager with the primary responsibility of achievement of the project objectives and benefits. An inappropriate choice of Project Sponsor can seriously impact the possibility of success of the project and provide you, the project manager, with an unwanted additional overhead. Now you can’t practically ask a sponsor for their CVand put them through a formal interview process, nice as it would be sometimes to utter the phrase ‘I’m sorry but I just don’t think that this is the job for you right now’. But you should evaluate the sponsor you have and complete, in a subtle way of course, a ‘Strengths and Weaknesses ‘assessment so that you can adapt your project approach and communication methods to maximise their sponsorship support for the project that you now manage. Tip: At your first meeting with the sponsor don’t ask ‘hard’ project questions but ask ‘softer’ and more open questions: ‘What are your hopes for this project? What are your fears about this project?’ – You will learn a whole lot more. But let’s not be pessimistic, that isn’t going to happen to you, you won’t get an extreme case of project sponsor and they won’t fail the ‘interview’. So, what is your next move? Well perhaps you should consider the power base that your project sponsor has. Use the power grid to assess your project sponsor, assess their rating of interest in this project from high to low and their actual power in the organisation, also from high to low.
This will give you an indication of the way in which you should work with them. Actually this power grid is for all project stakeholders and if you end up with a project sponsor that is in the ‘low interest’ and ‘low power’ quadrant you really have a problem. It is unlikely that this sponsor is ever going to support your management endeavours.
Q. What's the single most important take away from the book? A: Well people tell me they love the stories at the end of each chapter as they show real situations where I pretty much got it completely wrong but lived to tell the tale and learn a very good lesson. But if I was to pick one thing that project managers should do it would be to work on your communication. At least 70% of a project managers time is spent in communicating so if you are going to be productively lazy anywhere do it here. That doesn’t mean communicate badly but communicate more effectively and that can often mean less effort overall. Oh and ‘be lazy’… |
Why is it SO Hard to Hire the Right People?
| Situation: You feel like there's something wrong with the way you hire. Two weeks ago, at the PMI research conference,
Dr. Joana Geraldi, Senior Research Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, International Centre for Programme Management gave a presentation entitled Finding the Right Person for the Job: Rethinking Work-Worker Fit in PPM. The presentation was based on a research paper she co-authored with Harvey Maylor, Sergio Pellegrinelli and Scot Colquhoun. We recently asked her a few questions about how we can put her findings into action. The answers to the questions below are her personal opinions, but closely tied to the research findings. Her perspectives, both here and in the research paper are pretty thought-provoking.
Q. During your presentation you discussed the problems with the way that "fit" is judged. (a worker's fit with a work profile, or work fit to a worker's profile) Could you briefly discuss how that fit is currently determined and the problems with that approach?
Q. Hiring managers and PM practitioners seem to be unaware of these issues. Why do you think that is?
A. It is difficult to say, but my guess is that the current approaches are more accessible, widely known among HR practitioners. There are plenty of people trained to assess people through these well known competence-based models. This makes life easier. We may also be tempted by the rationality and objectivity that these models promise.
Q. You talked a bit about a more holistic approach to hiring that doesn't create such a strong separation between the work and the worker. Could you describe this approach? Do you have any tips for someone who would like to put this into practice?
A. First the theory: Building on Sandberg (2001) and Partington et al (2005) we look at worker and work as inseparable. An individual's competence cannot be reduced to objective lists of activities, but is constituted by the subjective meaning that work takes on for workers in their lived experience of it. Our task is to understand what individual workers conceive of as work and, through the elicitation of examples, how they conceive of it. More specifically, Partington proposes four conceptual levels:
That is interesting, but how do you put it into practice? As a first step, Sergio Pellegrinelli and colleagues typically run assessments with project and programme managers and identify which of the four conceptual levels above they fit into. This helps the assessors identify high potential people in their firm and also make sure they are nurtured appropriately. The next question though is how to identify which projects or programs require candidates to be at the various conceptual. One way to map a project or program to a level is to judge it's complexity. One model to measure this complexity is MODeST (Maylor et al, 2008). This model looks at Mission, Organization, Stakeholders, and Team attributes to help judge complexity. There is still a need to explore the relationship between complexity and conceptual levels, these could be explored by studies, such as:
|
Project Management - Getting Better or Worse?
| Situation: You occasionally wonder whether we're moving forward as a profession.
PMI's mission, roughly speaking, is to have business leaders view project management as essential for businessresults. Obviously, the best way to do that is to show increasing success over time. That's why I found this particular PMI research report interesting. Are we getting any better? Comparing project management in the years 2000 and 2008 was a report produced by Erling S. Andersen and present two weeks ago at the PMI Research conference. Mr. Andersen was kind enough to answer a few questions for us recently about the research he conducted.
Q. Your research was conducted using the X Model, could you tell us a bit about how that works? (both at the micro and macro level)
Q. You concluded that some areas of project management have shown improvement, saying specifically that team members are more knowledgeable about project work, project objectives are more clearly expressed, project organization is more appropriate, most work processes are improved, team members experience project work as rewarding and are more motivated for future projects, and the results of the project are more balanced. Why do you think this is true? Do you credit PMI? Better Training? Stiffer performance requirements from employers?
Q. You also talk about areas for improvement, specifically, in achieving the project mission and goals or keeping to the project schedule and budget. Why do you think this is the case? Q. Do you know of other recent and important research in this area? Do you know of other studies being conducted now that might be of interest?
|
What's Interesting to You?
| Situation: You Like to Get Your Head Around the "Big Questions" in Project Management. Hey PM Thought Leaders >> Take a look at the list below and let me know if one of the topics could really help you tackle the challenges you face every day.
Earlier this week I attended PMI's Research & Education Conference 2010. The event has asubtitle - "Defining the Future of Project Management". While I'm not sure that anyone can "Define the future" of anything, I think there were some interesting presentations. I plan to interview some of the researchers, but I was hoping to get some feedback (either here as a comment or via email, whichever is easier) on what you might find interesting. During each interview I'll be attempting to identify who the research findings might be interesting to and what practical actions you can take based on their findings.
PMI presented awards for work in the following areas:
The 2010 Project Management Journal® Paper of the Year Award
Topics presented at the conference
Anything jump out as just what you were looking for? Let me know and I'll drill down deeper for you.
pplications of positive psychology to teaching project management and leadership.” J Davis Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, USA 2. “ Supporting interaction in the classroom – Using personal response units.” A W Gale School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, The University of Manchester, UK
3. “The use of Skype and other communications technologies to deliver international project management education.
pplications of positive psychology to teaching project management and leadership.” J Davis Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, USA 2. “ Supporting interaction in the classroom – Using personal response units.” A W Gale School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, The University of Manchester, UK
3. “The use of Skype and other communications technologies to deliver international project management education.
|
