Project Management 2.0

Situation: You want a way to verify what you already know is true.

Jim Finkelstein recently wrote a book entitled "Fuse: Making Sense of the New Cogenerational Workplace™" that offers some ideas on how to make your workplace healthier and more productive.  Here are five "boss types" that he sketches out and considers "good".  

Do any of these describe you?

Not all bosses are created equal, however, and there are certain trends that make for better bosses.  Forty years of combined experience – one of us with 35 as a professional management consultant and the other with 5 as a fresh and reflective worker – have uncovered prime examples of good bosses.  To enlighten the modern workplace and workforce, here are five examples of good bosses (and they are not mutually exclusive):

1)    The Listener – a boss who will listen to and appreciates different points of view.  This boss hears and honors their employees’ thoughts and considerations respectfully but with a caveat being they may or may not put these ideas into action.    The Listener listens to their employees because they were hired for a reason.  As such, they trust their employees and value their input.  Sometimes, they are even dependent upon it.  The Listener is a good boss because they have insight beyond their own experience and vision, insight that is influenced by many angles, and because if their employees are allowed to voice their own opinions and ideas, they are inspired and engaged.

2)    The Empowerer – a boss that lets employees run their own show and lets them learn by making some mistakes.  To a degree of trust and support, this boss cultivates leadership in their team.  Working together, they identify tasks and create a plan, but let the employees decide the nuts & bolts of how it actually gets done.  The Empowerer doesn’t delegate aimlessly, creating a sense of subordination in their team, but rather engages their employees from the ground up in a focused manner.  Employees are inspired to take on leadership roles and collaborate both with their boss and with others.  The Empowerer is a good boss because they can simultaneously ignite productivity, personal development, and satisfaction among their employees.  

3)    The Mentor – a boss that teaches, coaches and guides.  This boss doesn’t necessarily need to be older, but a tad wiser or simply just willing to share.  They seek to understand their employees’ experiences and identify which ones need or want mentoring.  The relationship with their employees is constructive, meaning both criticism and praise are offered with the intentions of growing the employees set of skills.  An offer to mentor is either explicitly offered or subtly developed over time.  The goal is both in current interest and looking towards the future, always geared to enhance the employees’ skills.  The Mentor is a good boss because they ensure a future for the employee and the company while inspiring immediate productivity and engagement.

4)    The Cool Dude (or Dudette) – a boss that has fun and lets their employees have fun.  This boss maintains a certain aura of authority while creating a likeable and lively atmosphere.  They let their employees enjoy their time at work and find time for small diversions, within the confines that the job still gets done…and done well.  At those instances, this boss rewards their employees with time off or special workplace events within the realm of a respectable workplace culture.  The Cool Dude or Dudette is a good boss because they understand that all employees are people, that all people need some kind of fun, and that happy employees are healthy, productive, and engaged.   

5)    The Creator – a boss who inspires invention and creativity.  This boss pushes the limits of their employees to ignite innovation.  They challenge intellect and question the status quo, so that new products and ideas are developed from within.  The Creator embodies the spirit of imagination and is never overly demanding.  Creativity and invention come from a unique mindset, so this boss correctly identifies those in their team that are keen to this way of thinking.  As such, The Creator is a good boss because they are motivational and collaborative.

These five bosses, or rather their respective characteristics, exemplify what makes for healthy leadership within organizations.  Many bosses may embody many or all of these characteristics.  The best bosses are able to reflect upon their own natural inclinations and experiences, leveraging their assets and developing areas of weakness.  Common trends amongst these five good bosses make for a great boss as well – collaborative, communicative, engaging, and inspirational.  Our new cogenerational world is crying out for leaders – of all ages and generations -- and hopefully many of us will realize that great leaders can exist in the smallest, biggest, nearest and furthest of places.  

Situation: You love obscure facts about Project Management.

Oddly enough, we get asked this a lot.  However there aren't a lot of good numbers to go by.  PMI estimates that there 16.5 million Project Managers in the world.  Both PMI and Gantthead have relationships with a bit more than 600K each, with roughly a 13% overlap.  66.8% of PMI members are based in North America.  53.9% of gantthead members are based in North America.  So that implies that there may be 8.7M-11M Project Managers in North America. 

Of course, these percentages shrink every year as the industry (and everything else in the world) becomes more global - but that's our "guesstimate".

Situation: You're curious about what your peers put at the top of the priority list.

Sometimes we post fill-in-the-blank questions to our facebook fan page.  People have fun with them and sometimes the answers can be telling.  A recent posting asked facebook fans to say what the most important part of their job is.  

I thought it was interesting that 12 of the 38 responses directly mentioned communication as most important.  Many of the other common management issues came through, but none quite so strongly.  I wonder if that's because we really feel that way (and there is a lot of support for this) or whether communications is such a hot topic at the moment in our field.

Here are the results...

Situation: You are asking yourself, "What do I really need from PPM software?"

I've been asked this question a lot lately.  So I thought it deserved to be addressed here, in a way that hopefully the asker can relate to. The answer of course, is "it depends".  It depends almost entirely on the maturity of your organization.

Even for something as important as "doing the right things" (PPM), most of us feel like we really only need a few key functions. With this in mind, software vendors have spent the last few years creating simple SaaS applications to serve our needs - each of them focusing on limited views of the portfolio that should be just enough to facilitate decision-making to accomplish mostly near to medium-term goals. Despite most of us having some similar basic needs, we still customize whatever we end up implementing. Since a lot of that customization ends up happening (i.e. - is funded) when the software is first bought, we end up optimizing the software for the needs we have NOW, versus longer term considerations.  Then we consider the PPM Project done.  Later, when PPM is less of a hot button at your organization, it becomes harder to have the system evolve as the company matures. 

So let's talk about the things companies generally want. I'll begin with a list of PPM functions from MS Project Server 2010. It a set of information management areas which are fairly comprehensive, yet their value probably varies a lot based on what your immediate needs are:

• Demand Management - Intuitively capture all requests within a central repository, and manage them using governance workflow

• Portfolio Selection and Analytics - Objectively prioritize, optimize, and select project portfolios that best align with the organization’s business strategy

• Resource Management - Proactively and reactively manage resources throughout the project life cycle

• Schedule Management - Easily create and communicate both simple and complex project schedules

• Financial Management - Control and measure project and portfolio financial performance

• Time and Task Management - Simplify the collection of time and task status updates from team members

• Team Collaboration - Better connect disparate teams to share information and drive collaboration

• Business Intelligence and Reporting - Effectively measure project performance and gain visibility and control across all portfolios

• Administration, Scalability and Extensibility - Streamline administration and effectively extend the solution to meet unique business requirements

How much do these matter to you?  If you are really having a problem "doing the right things", the prioritization might look like this:

1. Portfolio Selection and Analytics 

2. Business Intelligence and Reporting

3. Demand Management

4. Financial Management

5. Resource Management 

6. Schedule Management 

7. Time and Task Management 

8. Team Collaboration 

9. Administration, Scalability and Extensibility 

I often hear from organizations where project management itself is not part of the corporate culture, then time and task management are at the top of the list.  Almost universally, senior management would like everything fixed immediately by the new system - so most people are just trying to implement all of these functions.  Unfortunately, the functions are just the means of getting there.  Implementing functions individually doesnt really help.  It's how they comes together to form a complete system that creates the value you are looking for.

So you might be thinking, "it depends", isn't very helpful.  The key to getting the most value out of your PPM solution is understanding the PPM maturity of your organization and using that as a guide to rolling out new technology and processes.  It's more about looking at where your company is and what you can accomplish when, changing the focus of your efforts as the organization matures.

Gartner, some time ago, laid out a roadmap for doing just that.  It is available here on gantthead for your reading pleasure. You'll find that the maturity levels are not a direct match with the function, but rather imply that you focus your efforts in certain areas at different points in time.  There are dozens of other resources here on gantthead, a few of which I've listed below. Hopefully these will help guide you ithrough your PPM journey.

Also See:

• Effective Portfolio Management Implementation Tips by Andy Makar
• details on planning for and implementing Project Server, Portfolio Strategy wtih Project Server 2010  by Tim Cermack
• an exhaustive list of over 130 PPM functions, you can find a terrific selection matrix on Projects At Work

Situation: You want your PM software to be more playful.

Recently we spoke with Alex Leblanc, founding partner of Upstart Industries and creator of Vantage Software.  His ideas around making PM software as painless as facebook are very compelling.  If you think about it, everything in our world is moving in that direction.  The presentations we give have to be more interesting and entertaining than they were a decade ago.  Your personal brand is becoming more important by the day. People expect everything they do to be engaging.  If it’s not, the chances of it getting any attention at all go way down.  So it makes perfect sense that the next generation of business software would move in the same direction.

I personally love the idea of “software that works like you play”.  Here’s what Alex had to say about it…

DG.  You say that VANTAGE^TM software "works like you play".   What do you mean by that?

AL:If we have one guiding principle, it's to build intuitively.  Software is no longer the domain of productivity and businesses.  With the evolution of cloud and mobility, the proliferation of consumer apps, and the explosion of social media through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Color, and so on, expectations are raised.  There's an ever-increasing chasm between the software used on the job, and the apps we're willing spend our free time on.  And it's more than just the underlying purpose. 

Businesses don't think twice about implementing software that requires every employee to attend a week's of training before they can even begin to use it.  Think about that. Training.  How many hours of classroom time do people put in before posting on their friend's Facebook page?  Now, imagine implementing software in your business that your employees can simply use, because they already know how.  Because they use apps in their daily life that have familiar design patterns, familiar commands, familiar gestures.  And as a SaaS tool, they can access their new easy-to-use project app at home, at the office, waiting for their delayed flight at the airport, and so on. 

Vantage has its own internal social media stream called VantagePoint. A common project process is requiring review and consensus. An intuitive and extremely valuable feature of our product is the ability to gather consensus on these activities by posting a VantagePoint message for your team and having them simply clicking “Agree, Disagree or Tune Out”. That’s what we mean.  Work like you play.  Everything should be that intuitive, that easy.

DG.  Are there specific industries or types of projects that you think VANTAGE^TM is particularly well suited for?  

AL:Well, we don't build for industries, we build for usefulness.  So I guess you could say it's most appropriate to anyone that needs an intuitive app to help them manage and work on their projects.  On a personal level, our team has a great deal of project experience in a number of industry sectors and areas including financial, insurance, retail, aerospace, public sector, healthcare, emergency services, technology and we've built VANTAGE^TM leveraging and applying these experiences.

DG.   You view the ability to look across all resources in all projects in the organization as an advantage with your tool.  Are these just all resources involved in projects or does it non-project utilization as well?

AL:Both.  We originally viewed it as project utilization, across all projects.  But during some feedback sessions and demonstrations we held with various user groups in multiple industry verticals, our eyes were opened to how valuable it is to useVANTAGE^TM to combine those worlds - to give visibility to the operational and project day-to-day battle for resources and priorities. 

Our pre-beta users showed us how they can begin use VANTAGE^TM for both project AND operational initiatives and resource utilization in its current form, and that really sparked some ideas within the team.  So our engineers of course are off and running with some great new concepts of how we can develop this even more.

DG.  Many simple SAAS tools target small companies with less complex projects.  Do you feel that the tool is better suited to this sort of environment?

AL:No – not necessarily “better suited”.  I think small and medium sized companies naturally gravitate to us, as they tend to be higher adopters of SaaS in general, and VANTAGE^TM is a fantastic and much needed SaaS tool.  VANTAGE^TM is a full-fledged PPM app, with the ability to handle small simple projects to large multi-dimensional complex projects and programs. A good example is the flexibility that  comes with VANTAGE^TM to select the ‘type’ of project you’d like to use within the app;  either  a “task only schedule” or a fully robust “project plan with Gantt”.  Its intuitive design and ease-of-use tend to mask a lot of the complexity that resides under the covers. 

We invested a great deal in the underlying architecture of the tool, with a very clear vision of where we're going with it and what it needs to support and accomplish.  It's a workhorse.  It works for you, not the other way around, and it can handle whatever you throw at it.

DG.  To what degree can your clients customize or integrate VANTAGE^TM with existing software? (either through direct connections, importing or exporting data and files)

AL:We're providing an API in the coming months, for developers to go crazy with.  We're not as fond of imports/exports, only because we think there are better ways to achieve better results.  And we'll help you do it.  We'll be offering technical tips and support through our blogs and forums and such, so some great opportunities ahead.

DG.  What makes this tool a better choice than Basecamp?

AL:Project management is more than task management.  It's a constant juggling of priorities, resources, schedules, risks, issues and dependencies to name a few.  And when you add to that the need to manage multiple projects at the same time, and keep all of those balls in the air until you can gently guide them to where they're supposed to be, all perfectly timed, then you need VANTAGE^TM.

And also, project managers aren't miracle workers.  They rely on each project participant to contribute their part to the project's success.  So they have a real need to empower their resources.  Sure, resources need to know what's expected of them and when, and that's Task Management 101.  But beyond that, they need to see the whole picture.  What's the goal of the project?  What's the project schedule?  What are fellow project participants working on? How does their work impact others, and vice versa?

With VANTAGE^TM, all of that information and more is at your fingertips, and all in one place.  And the best part?  It's not passive.  It's not, "go look at your task list and get it done".  VANTAGE^TM is a virtual project workspace where participants can flag issues, identify risks, request approvals, discuss, question, comment, solve, and engage - with each other, with the project manager, with other project teams, and other project managers throughout their organization.  Imagine that.