Strategic Project Management

As many of you know from my last couple of posts, I'm spending the week in Japan meeting customers and preparing for a presentation at the PMI Japan conference to be held on Saturday. I'm having a great time (despite the record-breaking heat).

Over the last several months, I've had a couple of conversations about the effectiveness of email as a project-related communication medium. Today I had an interesting conversation with a very sharp Japanese project manager about her efforts to eliminate email and manage all their project communications through their project management software. Before I weigh in with my opinion, I'm interested to know if any of you have attempted or been successful at the same thing.

Tell us about your experiences and in the next day or two, I'll share my opinion regarding email, collaboration and project communication. Is email an effective tool for sharing project information? Is there a better way? What are you doing to successfully promote communication and collaboration?
 

In Utah, if something is 100 to 150 years old we think it's old. However, in other parts of the world, the foundations are old enough that they existed long before the Utah Pioneers settled the valley. I was reminded of that last month when I visited London and walked around the grand buildings that predate the formation of our country, and this week as I've had a couple of days to visit a couple of Japanese historical sites.

I don't think it really matters what type of project we're working on, before we can empower the team to really make a difference, we need to make sure that we have a good foundation of work management best practice. Otherwise, the project structure we build will never stand the test of time. Here are a few practices I have come to rely on as the solid foundation to a successful project:

1. Make sure the project has a strong sponsor.  Every project needs a sponsor who will evangelize the value of the initiative throughout the life of the project.
2. Make sure the project is adequately funded.  The temptation is to take whatever funding is offered, but without adequate funding—it's usually the project manager who ends up in hot water when the project fails for lack of financial resources.
3. Pick the right team.  Make sure the team includes all the skills that will be needed for success.  Just because someone is available, doesn't always mean they are the best to work on your project.
4. Plan.  Planning is more than just preparing to deliver the final product.  It should involve a continual process of evaluation and adjustment.
5. Know the end before you begin.  Make sure you know what the outcome of a successful project is before you start.  What does "done" mean?  Financial experts call this an "exit plan."
6. Prepare for change.  The very nature of projects create change.  Whether it's a new product or an improvement in process or technology.  Makes sure to prepare for the change.

Regardless of the particular work management methodology you choose, or even the project management software you use, if you are able to encourage some foundational project management behaviors that have proven to produce successful projects, I can't promise that your project will last for hundreds of years, but you'll likely become skilled at leading successful project teams.

Are there any other foundational practices we should add to the list?

"Former U.S. labor secretary Robert B. Reich has devised a smart, simple, (and free) diagnostic tool for measuring the health of an organization," writes Daniel Pink in his book Drive. "When he talks to employees, he listens carefully for the pronouns they use. Do employees refer to their company as 'they' or 'we'? 'They' suggests at least some amount of disengagement, and perhaps alienation. 'We' suggests the opposite—that employees feel they're part of something significant and meaningful."

Let me suggest that you listen carefully in your next project team meeting. Do team members talk about the project and their leadership as "they" or "we"? "Theirs" or "ours"?
 

Earlier this week I was reading Jo Ann Sweeney's blog, How to Come Alongside Generation Y, which addresses some of the issue associated with engaging this empowered and tech-savvy generation within the workforce. Jo Ann's post is well worth reading.

She starts by bringing up a couple of concerns she is hearing expressed regarding Gen Y:

1. Their expectations are unrealistic within the current economic climate, but it's felt that if they aren't met they will leave for greener pastures
2. They are not engaged in the traditional communication activities that take place in most organiztaions ("How do we get them to pay attention?" seems to be the question).

"...I hear a subliminal message that says 'we want to keep Gen Y because they are our future managers and leaders; but on our terms not theirs.' If I can hear this then Gen Y probably does as well," writes Sweeney. "In the second issue I sense a mindset among communication professionals who have got stuck in a rut. The way they have been managing activities has been working well and they haven't realised it is time to change."

We are working with the most empowered and savvy group of young people to ever enter the workforce (at least during the thirty years of my career). Their expectations regarding compensation and advancement are set at a higher pace than previous generations. This doesn't mean that they are expecting to be compensated like the CEO, but they are looking for a career path and a plan for advancement. And, that plan should be communicated with them so they know what to expect.

We also need to realize that they have been working and collaborating within teams since they were children in elementary school, we don't need to teach them how to collaborate, we need to facilitate an environment where it can happen and get out of the way.

"Okay, so what does this mean for todays' leaders and managers?" asks Sweeney.

Sweeney hits the nail on the head (in my opinion) when she suggests that "Gen Y'ers want to work on their terms, they are curious and self directed and keen to deliver results—the mindset of autonomy, mastery and purpose."

Basically, they want the very thing that will help project teams and ultimately our organizations succeed—control over what they do, how they do it, when they do it and whom they do it with. There is no question in my mind that we need to step back from the traditional command-and-control management methods of the last 50 to 100 years and rethink how we manage the individuals that make up our project teams. They were hired because they were smart and capable people—isn't it time that we stepped back and allowed them to use their smarts to solve problems, create new ideas and invent the products that will ultimately change the world?

Sweeney suggests that we change the way we communicate with them—I agree. Doesn't it makes sense to incorporate the metaphors that are familiar platforms to them for collaboration into the project management process? Social media has proven to be the way this generation communicates with each other. Part of communicating with people is discovering how our audience will best receive our message, nowhere is this more important than within a project team tasked to solve problems and get things accomplished.

I'm sure there is now a lot of chaffing at incorporating Twitter or Facebook into the process. I am not advocating that. But I am suggesting that something Twitter-like or Facebook-like could prove invaluable to encourage communication and facilitate an environment which makes collaboration about work feel natural. Engaging the workforce in the process is critical to successful projects. I think it's time we took a fresh look at how we manage teams and realize that the way we've been doing it just isn't working anymore (I have my doubts as to whether or not it ever really did).

What's your experience working with the Millennial Generation?

Thanks Jo Ann for bringing this up. This is an important discussion that deserves much more than a single blog post. I hope we will continue to talk about these issues within our individual spheres of influence within and without our organizations.

Since our last conversation about giving the team autonomy and creating a ROWE workplace, I've been asked a couple of times something basically like this: "Giving this level of autonomy to the team is all fine and good, but it doesn't work for everyone. You have to have the right team."

I couldn't agree more.

I'll even go one step further, you can't go directly from a traditional command-and-control environment one day, and expect team members to successfully act autonomously the next. That is a recipe for disaster—there may be some team members that need to ease into it. But make no mistakes, the preponderance of evidence still suggests that it's a good idea.

What's more, as project leaders, we need to approach the team from a paradigm that assumes that they want to be accountable, want to contribute at a higher level and will do so if given the opportunity. Unfortunately, most organizations assume that employees will waste time and slack off if given the opportunity (where knowledge workers are concerned, this has proven to be a false assumption).

Over the last several months, we've talked about a couple of key areas over which project team members should have more control. In the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, he suggests (and I whole-heartedly agree) that there are four areas of autonomy we need to consider. "...[W]hat a few future-facing businesses are discovering is that one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with."

In an environment where our assumptions are that team members are naturally slackers, this will be a huge (if not insurmountable) leap of faith. However I'm convinced, from personal experience and observation as well as the experiences of such organizations as 3M and Google, that we can assume the best of our team members and will likely be very pleased with what a little autonomy can do.

Here's a case in point shared by Daniel Pink about fostering this level of autonomy. Google is probably the best known company to embrace this attitude in the workplace. They actually give their employees one day a week to work on personal projects. "Some Googlers use their '20 percent time' to fix an existing project," writes Pink, "but most use it to develop something entirely new. Of course Google doesn't sign away the intellectual property rights to what's created during that 20 percent—which is wise. In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy."

You might be surprised to know that Google products like Google News, Gmail, Orkut (Google's social networking software), Google Talk, Google Sky and Google Translate all came from this effort.

Of course, there still may be nay-sayers who suggest that what works for Google and 3M just won't work for everyone else. I have to admit, they may be right. Particularly if there's not the right management attitude behind it. However, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks represent another great example with how their company, Atlassian, set about creating this kind of environment as a start-up, and were incredibly successful. Without going into the details of their story (which might be good fodder for another blog post in the future), I was impressed with how they react to a finance guy who might question this approach. "I show him a long list of things we've delivered," says Cannon-Brookes. "I show him that we have zero turnover in engineering. And I show him that we have highly motivated engineers who are always trying to perfect and improve our product."

Whether or not your first impression is to create a more autonomous work environment for the members of your project team, I believe it's something that you should consider. Particularly if you work in an organization that expects your project teams to creatively solve problems and come up with new ideas.

If you're organization doesn't embrace this style of leadership, what could you do as a project leader to build this environment within your teams?