Strategic Project Management

Earlier this month, CMO.com published an article I'd written about Breathing New Life Into Project Management. Although the article was written with marketing teams in mind, I think it applies to everyone working on projects. I hope you'll follow the link and see if work is "alive" within your project teams.

Although it's not rocket science, there are some things you need to do to make sure that your team is fully engaged in the work. Here are a few suggestions that will help you choose the best project management tools for your team, they should:

1. Work the way people want to work: enabling stakeholders to request work, suggest due dates, collaborate and negotiate. For some teams, this might mean incorporating a more social feel to how work is requested, or enabling a dialog and negotiation that usually transpires when work is assigned. Forcing people to work within a box or "process" that doesn't feel natural "because that's the way the software does it" is contrary to working the way people really work.
2. Be tailored to all types of workers: team members, project managers and executives. Everyone on the team should be able to obtain value from the solution. If the only value a team members sees in new software, for example, is a better way for management to "watch what's going on", odds are the implementation will fail. However, if individual team members can see some value too, management will be able to seamlessly collect all the project information they want—at the source.
3. Portray work in context: connect people to teams, tasks to initiatives and goals, and recognize that people wear different hats. Projects aren't the only work creative teams deal with every day. If you don't have visibility into all the work going on and how it all relates to each other, you have an incomplete picture of what teams are doing. What's more, the conversations about tasks, projects and goals should be captured and addressed in a way that gives context to the conversations. Though I don't advocate implementing Twitter or Facebook into the project management process, a Twitter-like approach that focuses and attaches those conversations to tasks and initiatives is incredibly valuable to project leaders and organizations trying to make sense out of the quantitative data collected with most project-based work.

Although there are lots of tools to help organize all types of work, navigating the morass of available solutions can become problematic. All work is not the same. Structured work, unstructured work, ad hoc tasks, and repeatable work all need to be considered when looking for the best way to manage projects and other initiatives. Unfortunately, a one-size-fits all approach doesn't fit. What's more, most of the methodologies we use today are 50 to 100 years old, reflecting approaches that hearken back to the assembly lines of the industrial revolution or the project management approaches that were part of construction and the space race.

Bringing work to life for team members is possible. It's all about creating the right environment. What are you doing to bring work to life for your project teams?

Failure is not uncommon. According to growthink.com, here are 10 Famous Failures that you might remember (if you visit the above link, you can actually see the commercials for these products):
 

Although the above examples are all products that failed, it got me thinking about the number of project failures that happen every year. Fortunately, when projects are in trouble, there are early warning signs (if you're watching). The earliest signs might be hard to measure, but easy to recognize if you're paying attention:

1. Lack of Interest: Whether it's a lack of interest within the project team or among the project stakeholders, it's often demonstrated by people not showing up for meetings, a lack of active participation and feedback, or a poorly organized user base. This is an early warning sign of a project in trouble.
2. Poor Communication: If nobody is communicating, including stakeholders, team members and end users, there could be a problem.
3. Lack of Velocity: Projects should always be moving forward. The best way to keep a good velocity is to divide your project into small deliverables at frequent intervals. If the project isn't moving forward, it's likely in trouble.
4. A "No-Bad-News" Environment: Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news, but sometimes organizations need to face the reality of negative news. This includes project team members who don't want to be the messenger and business leaders who tend to shoot the messenger. If there isn't an environment where the communication is honest about "reality", projects tend to fail.

You don't need to depend on some of the intangible signs that a project is in trouble, there are also a number of easily measurable signs as well:

1. Lots of Overtime: A project running on schedule should have little or no overtime. Overtime is often a quick fix, but leads to poor employee health resulting from too much caffeine, too many late nights and too much junk food. (It also leads to mistakes.)
2. Diversion of Resources: When people are pulled from one project to work on something else, it could be a sign of trouble. If you've budgeted your people properly, a few hours here and there on a troubled project can quickly add up and cascade down, endangering healthy projects.
3. Ratios Trouble: Cost ratios and schedule ratios are financial metrics that allow business leaders to measure budgeted time and money verses money and time actually spent. Without metrics, all you have to rely on is the accuracy of communication you receive from project teams.
4. Milestones Aren't Met: This is pretty obvious, but it is surprising how many times this warning sign is ignored. Small, discrete and often, are the guidelines for the milestones of a successful project.
5. Scope Changes: A common approach to shoring up a lagging project is to change the scope. Eliminating features or relaxing requirements is not uncommon, but if project teams are doing it because the project is struggling, it's a huge warning sign of danger ahead.

Of course, warning signs are not the work management harbinger of doom, they are just warning signs that a project might be in trouble. Depending on how your organization handles project-based work, the right project management tools can help identify potential problems early, when there's still time to do something about them.

Have you ever wondered if the process (or at least the way we execute that process) ever gets in the way and makes it more difficult for teams to do their work? I'm not suggesting that project management best practices are bad, or that we should eliminate successful processes from how we lead project teams, but I have to admit that sometimes it feels like process can get in the way.

When that happens, I don't think it's the process that gets in the way, but rather how we execute the process and the type of relationship we have with the members of the team.

By that I mean, the relationship between the project team, the project manager, the process and the project are sometimes challenging and need our attention. For example, in many organizations that don't have a PMO or formally established project methodology, it's not a project manager who leads the team, it's a department head or other line of business leader. I think this is significant. In those cases it's the team and not the process that is the focus of the project leader. His or her relationship with the team extends beyond the start or finish of any particular project.

I don't think this implies that a project manager can't build those types of enduring relationships, but in those instances where they don't, "project management" can get in the way.

In many organizations, "project management" has become associated with a lot of unnecessary governance, pushing edicts down the org chart and command-and-control. Of course, there are some projects where governance is a critical part of the project and how it's executed, but that doesn't mean a heavy hand is needed. With that in mind, here are three suggestions that will help project managers build a more natural and productive relationship with the team:

1. Work Together: There is a difference between working "for" someone and working "with" someone. Henry Ford said, "If everyone is moving forward together, then success will take care of itself."
2. Get Out of the Way: Those closest to the work understand it the best. Theodore Roosevelt said, "The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."
3. Share the Success: Worrying about who gets credit for project success will handicap any project from the start. Harry Truman said, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." Empower people to do great things and make sure everyone gets credit for what they do.

Building productive relationships with project teams doesn't just happen. It takes effort. Remember that it's the team and not the process that should be the focus of our efforts.

What are you doing to focus on productive relationships with your team?

This weekend the weather was nice, the river was calling and I wanted to escape the heat by wading in the river and flailing a little tiny fly back and forth with my fly rod. I mentioned this to my oldest son and my daughter, who volunteered to come along. My son has been fly-fishing since he was 11 or 12, so he climbed in his waders, entered the river and went after it. My daughter hasn't been fishing much, but was motivated to learn (the first step to acquiring any new skill).

The rivers here in Utah are still running a little high, but we thought they would be fish-able, so we jumped in. My daughter soon found out that without much practice, it's kind of hard to get the hang of casting with a fly rod, but by the end of the day she was doing better and better (even if she was a little frustrated).

Like any skill, casting a fly to a fish with a fly rod requires practice, patience and a willingness to persevere. And, the more challenging the skill, the more practice is required (this reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers and the 10,000 hours).

With that being said, as I found myself in the unlikely position of "teacher" (I'm no fly-fishing expert), I realized that it takes some practice, patience and a willingness to persevere to be a good teacher, too. Fortunately, because I love my daughter and wanted her to have a fun day with her older brother and I, it wasn't a chore to be patient, etc. However, how many times as a project leader do we forget the importance of the three P's? Particularly when it's something that we feel should be second nature. The truth of the matter is, much of what project managers do is not second nature to most people. In fact, they don't get it. They think it's weird.

I don't think it matters if you're trying to learn, trying to teach or just trying to get everyone on the same page, practice, patience and perseverance is required. What's more, most of the time, it's us that needs to remember the three P's.

We had a great time on Saturday. With the river still moving too fast we didn't have much luck, but time spent fishing can't really be deducted from your life anyway, right? Besides, this was a great primer for our family fishing trip to the Unitah Mountains coming up later this month. Hopefully the time we spent in the river over the weekend will help make our trip to the mountains fun—and we might even catch a mess of fish.

What are you doing to promote an atmosphere of practice, patience and perseverance on your project teams?
 

I've recently come to discover something about myself. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older, or if I've always been this way—but it has felt kind of revelatory to me.

I'm a tortoise rather than a hare.

This might not come as a surprise to any of my colleagues, but I think I'm more of a "slow and steady wins the race" sort of guy. I'm going to assume that you all know the story of the tortoise and the hare—if you don't, click HERE to read more about it.

I have always felt that I am the willing accomplice of change. Change doesn't frighten me, I like the change in scenery and attitudes that come with implementing change. However, I'm not a big fan of change for change sake (which I think makes me more like the tortoise than the hare). I think this is particularly true within the project environment.

Although I am a real advocate of taking a new look at the project management process with fresh eyes, I'm not advocating a new approach simply because it's new. I think we need to change the way we manage process and work with teams because the current system is broken. Over the last thirty years, I've seen the workforce dynamic change—particularly with the millennial generation—while the way management interacts with the workforce hasn't kept up.

In my opinion, slow and steady wins the race, and change for change sake doesn't make sense, but many organizations are coming to the realization that it's time for a new work management paradigm. The days of command-and-control are fast dissipating and being replaced by a more democratic work management approach.

I don't think there's any question that an engaged workforce is the linchpin to a successful project-based organization (or any organization for that matter). Creating that environment requires that project leaders empower team members to create and invent—which the traditional top-down project management approach stifles. Our role as project leaders needs to become one of facilitation, not command-and-control.

Are you a tortoise or a hare? What are you doing to create a more democratic project environment?