Strategic Project Management

This week I'm exploring LIFE's 15 greatest leaders through history.  We started with the first five yesterday:

1. Mohandas Gandhi
2. Vince Lombardi
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Steve Jobs
5. Nelson Mandela

Today we're going to tackle the next five:

1. Gloria Steinem: "The best kind of leader: one who creates independence, not dependence."
2. Golda Meir: According to the New York Times 1978 obituary, "Mrs. Meir had a gift for making complex issues appear simple and expressing her views in plain but emotional terms: 'Our generation reclaimed the land, our children fought the war and our grandchildren should enjoy the peace.'  Even when she spoke to an audience of thousands, it could sound as though she was speaking in her living room."
3. Martin Luther King Jr.: "We all have the drum major instinct.  We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade ... And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct.  It is a good instinct if you don't distort it and pervert it.  Don't give it up.  Keep feeling the need for being important.  Keep feeling the need for being first.  But I want you to be the first in love.  I want you to be the first in moral excellence.  I want you to be the first in generosity."
4. Winston Churchill: From Time 100's most important people of the century, "He stood unchangeable, as the greatest of all Britain's war leaders.  It was not only his country, though, they owed him a debt.  So too did the world of free men and women to whom he made a constant and inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled Britain in 1940 and 1941.  Churchill did not merely hate tyranny, he despised it."
5. Douglas MacArthur: "Duty, Honor, Country.  Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.  They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."

Along with our additional five great leaders, here are two more of the five traits that I believe make good project leaders:

1. "Figure-it-out" resourcefulness: This implies creativity and occasional out-of-the-box thinking to solve problems along with a tenacious, never-give-up approach to overcoming obstacles and resource allocation issues.
2. Highly-developed communication skills: It's paramount that project managers are able to effectively communicate with stakeholders, project teams, and their peers.  If project managers are unable to customize their communication style to the appropriate audience, success will be elusive.

Tomorrow we'll finish up with LIFE's list of 15 of the greatest leaders through history, and cover the last trait I think makes a good project leader. 

Regardless of your chosen project management methodology or the project tools you utilize to manage work in your organization, effectively managing project-based work in the future will require us to master leadership skills that will enable us to inspire and lead project teams.

I don't know if these are the 15 greatest, but I was thinking about some of the traits that make good leaders and stumbled upon this list published by LIFE.  I've decided to share some of what they had to say here.  Here are the first five, I'll post the rest as the week goes on:

1. Mohandas Gandhi: In 1950 Albert Einstein said, "Taken on the whole, I would believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time.  We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting for our cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil."
2. Vince Lombardi: "The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group.  If he does, he is no longer what he must be.  He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert."
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt: "This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.  Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.  This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper ... In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory."
4. Steve Jobs: "...merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he's Fortune's CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue).  In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets—music, movies, and mobile telephones—and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown." November 2009, Fortune Magazine.
5. Nelson Mandela: "A leader is like a shepherd.  He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing all along they are being directed from behind."

This week, I'd like to share five traits that I believe make good project leaders, here are the first two:

1. A collaborative management style: Engaging the team and stakeholders in problem-solving and decision-making is critical for work management success.
2. Adaptability: Project teams and individual projects are always different.  Successful project managers are able to adapt and overcome the challenges new projects present.  A fluid project management approach is a very effective method for managing project-based work.

Over the next couple of days, we'll go through all 15 of LIFE's list of the greatest leaders.  Stay tuned.

Yesterday I finally got around to reading Derek Huether's post titled, Mitigated Speech and Project Negotiations.  This post is really worth reading.

Because I'm such a big believer in socializing the project management process, how teams communicate and collaborate is something that is very interesting to me.  Derek quotes Malcolm Gladwell from his book Outliers, where he defines mitigated speech as "any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said."  Because this happens all the time in project-related communications, I thought I would share some of what Derek had to say, and put my own spin on it too.

Gladwell describes the six degrees of mitigation we tend to use when suggesting a course of action during a negotiation:

1. Command: "Implement this"
2. Team Obligation Statement: "We need to try this"
3. Team Suggestion: "Why don't we try this?"
4. Query: "Do you think this would help us in this situation?"
5. Preference: "Perhaps we should take a look at this as an alternative
6. Hint: "I wonder if we will run into any issues by following our current process?"

Derek writes, "...I have the opportunity to witness mitigated speech every day.  Being direct (command) doesn't always work.  People need to learn to be flexible in their requests and negotiations if they have the hope those in power will implement new strategies.  Additionally, learn to read those around you to know what degree of mitigation you will use IF you intend to use it."

Although Derek's post is addressing how mitigating language is used in negotiations, I'm going to give it a little twist by suggesting that we need to look at how mitigating language is used in everyday project communications.  I hope Derek won't mind.

As project leaders, I think we should look at this from the perspective of how we interact with stakeholders and executives, as well as how we interact with our project teams.  Although Derek describes being "direct" and "command" as the same type of mitigation language when negotiating, I don't look at it that way when reporting status or other everyday project communication. 

I do agree that commanding stakeholders, executives, or even team members just doesn't work—but being direct is not necessarily the same thing.  For example, earlier this month I wrote about how sometimes the problems that lie under the surface are the most dangerous in Icebergs, the Gulf Oil Spill, and Project Management, and how there is a natural tendency to soft pedal, downplay, or sugarcoat (mitigate) project status. 

As project leaders we need to facilitate an environment where honest and straightforward conversations are expected and appreciated.  If there's a big problem lurking under the surface that I don't know about, I don't want it sugarcoated—I want to hear about it.  And, if I shoot the messenger every time there's a problem, I'm going to foster an environment where I never get the real story.

Same is true in my conversations with others.  If I'm quick to agree with uninformed stakeholders when they give me unrealistic time-lines and then sugarcoat the bad news to my project teams—what I say will never be trusted by either—and I will eventually become irrelevant.

That's not to say that you should be disagreeable.  However, smart business leaders don't want to make decisions based upon information that is inaccurate, or worse, misrepresented because someone is afraid to tell the truth.

I understand that what I'm suggesting is difficult in the real world of project management and office politics.  That being said, I believe we have an obligation to encourage that type of communication among our project teams and extol the virtues and benefits of the same to our superiors and other stakeholders.  Otherwise, our efforts to improve the work management process will be handicapped by inaccurate and misleading information.

What are you doing to ensure that project conversations are honest and straightforward?

A recent article published by TechRepublic and written by Rick Freedman, Adaptive Project Framework: A new level of agile development, caught my eye the other day.  As I was reading, I couldn't help but think of Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway in the movie Heartbreak Ridge. 

Without spoiling it for anyone interested in watching an old Clint Eastwood movie (1986), Highway is a hard-nose gunnery sergeant who gets stuck training a bunch of "indulged" Marines who wind up in Granada.  Although the movie is predictable (and the language is what you'd expect in a Marine barracks), Gunny Sergeant Highway says something that I think is applicable to Freedman's article.  When asked why his squad advanced on an enemy position despite being outnumbered and without support, he says, "We're Marines, sir.  We're paid to adapt, to improvise."

According to Freedman, when teaching Agile Project Management classes, the first thing he does is write two words on the board.  "The first word is adaptive," he says.  "I emphasize with my students that adapting the project approach to the specific effort at hand is a fundamental concept that underlies all agile methods."

I couldn't agree more.

"The second word is hybrid," he continues.  "I assure my students that, while some agile proponents are almost religious in their insistence that Project Management Institute (PMI)-style, traditional methodologies have no place in an agile environment, my philosophy is that almost every project, every client, and every organization will require us to incorporate some traditional methods into our agile approach.  It's my experience that very few organizations desire, or are prepared for, a complete migration from traditional tools, such as project plans and Gantt charts, to a total agile approach founded around the idea that, if you're running a traditional product development life-cycle and applying PMI standards, everything you know is wrong."

I have to agree with Freedman.  Sometimes I think we forget that the entire project management process is about getting work done—not the particular work management methodologies that are used.  I like his suggestion that we should consider "hybrid" approaches to the process.  There are some things that agile methodologies do very well, but to say that everything in the PMBOK is a bunch of hogwash would be like suggesting that there is no need for a hammer because we now have a nail-gun (or vice-verse).  I don't know a carpenter who would make either of those outlandish claims.

If getting work done, or rather getting the right work done, is the ultimate aim of the project management process, using whatever method makes the most sense for the type of work undertaken just makes sense to me.  After all, it's people that get work done anyway, the particular approach used is to make it possible for people to be successful, isn't it?

With that said, I think our job as project managers is to adapt and improvise depending upon the particular work challenges we're faced with.  Some projects might require sophisticated online project management software while another might require a simple task list—or PPM software that incorporates traditional waterfall or agile methodologies.

If you haven't read Freedman's article I suggest you give it a look.  He also introduces a new book written by Robert Wysocki that looks interesting, Adaptive Project Framework.  It's a book I've put on my summer reading list.

How do you incorporate different project management methodologies into your work management strategy?
 

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip once said, "Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results."

Although I don't entirely agree with Adams, many organizations just don't foster good decision-making practices, which handicap project managers, project teams, and organizations.  The answers to the following three questions will help your organization foster a workable decision-making process:

1. Who? Prior to the beginning of any project, determining who has decision-making power is step number one.  Of course, on most projects there will more than likely be several decision-makers.
2. What? Different members of the team will probably have different decision-making responsibilities based upon their role.  Identifying the scope of everyone's responsibility regarding the type of decisions they can and can't make avoids confusion and makes it possible to streamline the process.  Nobody wants to "Mother, may I" every move they make, nor should the project manager or stakeholder be expected to make every decision.
3. How? Identifying how decisions are made and how they are shared with project team members is almost as important as the decision itself.

Regardless of your work management methods or project management tools, making project decisions is part of a project managers job.  What's more, it's been said that indecision becomes decision with time. 

The Chinese philosopher Confucius suggested, "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is the noblest; Second; by imitation, which is the easiest; and Third by experience, which is the bitterest."

I don't think there's anyone who has had to make decisions on a regular basis that wouldn't agree with Mr. Confucius.  What are you doing to foster a good decision-making environment to make informed decisions?