Strategic Project Management

Because I am not a pilot, I don't often get an opportunity to sit in the cockpit of a small plane. However, one time on a trip from Denver to Salt Lake City the pilot came into the cabin and asked if anyone was interested in sitting in the right seat with him for the flight. I jumped at the chance.

Sitting in the cockpit with the headphones on listening to all the chatter, and getting a bird's eye view of the Rocky Mountains and just how much air traffic there was between Denver and Salt Lake City was very interesting.

As is sometimes the case, flying into Salt Lake in December included landing in the middle of a very dense inversion. Basically, without the aid of instruments, visibility was zero. In fact, I found myself trying to put on the brakes with my right foot (brakes which weren't there, by the way). The pilot noticed what I was doing, chuckled and calmly said, "That's why they pay me the big bucks."

Although his instruments gave him visibility to help him land the plane, there was no visibility for the rest of us (which made me a little nervous). Had this been a project, he may have had visibility but there was no transparency for everyone else on the team.

Is there a difference between visibility and transparency?

I think so. In project management terms we talk a lot about giving executives and stakeholders visibility into project status and other information to inform decisions, but we rarely talk about a process that is transparent to everyone involved in a project (and yes, that includes individual contributors to a project team).

I believe this is relevant when we start talking about adoption, team member engagement and buy-in. If team members don't have visibility into what they're buying into (which requires transparency from bottom to top as well as from top to bottom), it's difficult to expect anyone to be totally engaged. When's the last time you were totally committed to something that you didn't really know much about?

Thanks to the recommendation of @NimblePM, I've been reading The Truth About Leadership. Authors, James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest that we need to move from a "need to know" style of communicating to a "commitment to share" mentality. Just as an executive needs visibility into what's happening in the trenches to validate that corporate goals and objectives are being executed by project teams to inform decisions, everyone needs visibility into what's motivating decisions and driving objectives if the goal is worker buy-in and team member engagement.

Nobody likes working in the dark.

I've mentioned this before, but I once worked for an organization that one year, through an oversight, didn't make their corporate goals public to anyone until November—which made it hard for anyone to do anything that could reasonably impact whether or not they achieved their objectives. What's more, since the rank and file of the organization didn't know what the goals were, it made it difficult to expect that anyone could actually buy-in to those invisible objectives.

An atmosphere of transparency is appropriate for almost any organization. When everyone can see into what's pushing some initiatives forward and the value of everything they may be individually contributing to, an engaged and empowered workforce can accomplish great things. Transparency makes it possible for team members to see the bigger picture, which allows them to do more than check boxes when tasks are completed.

Visibility can sometimes be created with the right project management tools. Transparency is created with a "commitment to share" work management philosophy.

Late last year Universal re-mastered the movie Back to the Future, staring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. I was in Seattle at the time on business and was able to watch the movie again on the big screen. 30 years after it's debut, it is still a great movie.

Although truly great leaders focus on the future, fortunately they don't need a Delorean and 1.21 gigiwatts of power flowing through the flux capacitor to do it.

I recently started reading a book by James Kousez and Barry Posner, The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know, and according to Kousez and Posner "The capacity to imagine and articulate exciting future possibilities is the defining competence of leaders. Leaders are custodians of the future."

I think this is particularly relevant to project leaders, who by necessity spend a lot of time dealing with the here and now. Granted, sometimes it's difficult to look into the future, but leaders understand that it's critical to think beyond what's directly in front of them and imagine what's over the horizon.

According to Kousez and Posner, "...your constituents want to know your hopes, your dreams, and your vision. They want to know where you plan to take them. They want to share in the glimpse of the future."

When they ask the question to thousands of people about what they want in their leaders (what they are looking for in someone they will willingly follow), the quality of being forward-looking is second only to being honest as their most admired leadership quality. In fact, 70 percent of respondents select it. What's more, in Asia, Europe and Australia, the preference for forward-looking is even higher than it is in the United States.

In my opinion, the difference between being present-oriented and future-oriented is pretty straight forward. The future-oriented leader, although working in the here-and-now, spends time every day thinking about:

1. Improving processes so that current results don't limit future results
2. Making sure that team members understand the larger purpose and vision of what they're doing so they don't get bogged down in the day-to-day details of their work
3. What they can do to make a difference

Unlike Marty and Doc, we can't go back in time and fix mistakes so that when we go "back to future" things are different. As project leaders, we need to spend time every day focused on the future. Kousez and Posner suggest that "...it's important to invest the time today in tomorrow's future."

I have to agree. What are you doing to be a future-oriented leader?

"The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship," writes Seth Godin in his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

"Shipping something out the door, doing it regularly, without hassle, emergency, or fear—this is a rare skill," writes Godin, "something that makes you indispensable."

Of course Godin is talking about projects in the broader context of what we do, but it still applies. It's easy for some organizations to get all wrapped up in the process of work or projects and forget that there needs to be some kind of deliverable at the end—something of value. And, sometimes it's not just an organizational problem either. I have known several very talented and capable people who work very hard but never seem get anything done (they always seem to be spinning their wheels).

What is it about actually finishing something that is so difficult for individuals and organizations? If you can answer that question in your own organization, you'll be indispensable. Godin identifies two challenges that make finishing (shipping) successfully so difficult:

1. Thrashing
2. Coordination

Thrashing, according to Godin, "...is the apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops. Thrashing might mean changing the user interface or rewriting an introductory paragraph. Sometimes thrashing is merely a tweak; other times it involves major surgery."

I think we can all agree that no mater how well a project is planned, there is a certain amount of "thrashing" that takes place—I have yet to meet a project that is planned perfectly from start to finish. The problem with "thrashing" isn't that it happens, but is all about when it happens. The earlier the brainstorming takes place, the better it is for the project. The later in the process, the greater the opportunity to introduce problems, bugs and glitches.

Coming from the software industry, Godin asserts that "Every software project that has missed its target date (every single one) is a victim of late thrashing." I think it's safe to say this could very well be true of any project that struggles, whether or not it is a software-related project.

I also think it's pretty safe to say that the more people involved in the decision-making process, the more difficult it becomes to actually make a decision. Not just a little bit more difficult, but exponentially more difficult. "The reason that start-ups almost always defeat large companies in the rush to market is simple: start-ups have fewer people to coordinate, less thrashing, and more linchpins per square foot. They can't afford anything else and they have less to lose."

Projects run by a committee are seldom successful. Coordinating everyone's opinions and agendas can be a real project killer. Someone needs to have the ultimate authority to make project decisions. "That means you need formal procedures for excluding people, even well-meaning people with authority," says Godin.

Sometimes the decision to exclude people boils down to whether or not the project ships on time or gets bogged down in a morass of lengthy approval requirements. In my opinion, this is the death knell for any project.

I wasn't expecting to find so much great information in Godin's book, but I did. I finished the book this morning and it will take a prominent place on my bookshelf. I can highly recommend it to anyone who is trying to get work done, lead a team or an organization or simply wants to advance their career.

Shipping makes you indispensable. What are you doing to spin your wheels less and deliver more?

 

In my last post, I talked about Seth Godin's Hierarchy of Value. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, in fact over the last few days I've beat that drum pretty consistently. I guess my desire to create value is at the heart of it. Einstein said, "Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."

I admit that Einstein and Godin may have been talking about different things...but I don't think so. Einstein was a creative problem solver who also said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition." That sounds like part of the creative process to me. "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant," he said. "We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

At the crux of everything we do as project leaders, is the need to provide value—or as Godin puts it, the need to create or invent. As I see it, that's what projects are all about. If projects fail to create some kind of value, they become fruitless exercises. Likewise, as project leaders or individual contributors to a project team, if we fail to climb the hierarchical ladder of value, we soon become irrelevant. What's more, I believe that most people have a desire to create. Which is why our responsibility as project leaders is to facilitate an environment where they can.

Einstein also said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Empowering individual team members to create makes sense to me. Empowered teams produce projects that provide value. It's been my privilege to occasionally work on such teams and my obligation now to create that environment myself—however in many organizations, this environment isn't as common as it should be.

What are you doing about it? What do you do to empower your team to create?
 

As you already know, I've been reading Seth Godin's book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. I'm almost done and am a real fan. I am enjoying the book so much, I bought copies for all my adult children to read. I can highly recommend it to you as well. I'm sure over the coming months, topics from this book will wind up here. I think much of what Godin has written fits well with my opinions about empowering the team, managing work and providing value.

In the past, we have talked about the need for projects to provide value to the organization. I think it's universally accepted that the point of pursuing a project in the first place is to provide some kind of value to the organization. Today, I'd like to briefly talk about what the value we, as project leaders and team members, can provide to the team.

Godin describes the "Hierarchy of Value" like this, starting at the bottom:

1. Lift
2. Hunt
3. Grow
4. Produce
5. Sell
6. Connect
7. Create/Invent

"There are always more people at the bottom of the stairs, doing hard work that's easy to learn," he writes. "As you travel up the hierarchy, the work gets easier, the pay gets better, and the number of people available to do the work gets smaller.

"Lots of people can lift. That's not paying off anymore. A few people can sell. Almost no one puts in the work to create or invent."

I suggest that what we should be empowering each other to do is create and invent. In project environments where all we ask of project teams is to lift or even produce, individuals are so far down on the hierarchy ladder that team members will find it difficult to provide real value individually (let alone collectively as a team), making it problematic to produce real project value. The more we can empower those closest to the work, the better able we are to execute on projects that produce value.

Whether we accept it or not, the way organizations look at how we manage projects specifically, and all work generally, is changing. It might make us uncomfortable, but the more successfully we adapt to the change and assume the mindset of creating and inventing, the more valuable we will become to our organizations and we will enjoy a rewarding and satisfying career.