The Money Files

OK, we’re back to our mini-series on resilience in project teams! Today, I want to give you more practical tips for building resilience. We’ve looked at some of the things to consider for team culture and behaviours, but now we’re looking at more specific things that you can do as a project manager to help your team bounce back and deal with challenges.

1. Encourage a growth mindset

Talk about challenges as opportunities for learning and growth. If someone can’t do something or didn’t do it as well as they wanted to, it’s an opportunity for skill building and practice. The more you practice, the better you get!

Put regular post-implementation or post-project reviews in the calendar. Use retrospectives. Don’t blame. And if you haven’t read Carole Dweck’s book or watched her TED talk to the growth mindset, I highly encourage you to do so.

2. Take time for team building

I know, team building can feel a bit meh at times. But team-building activities and exercises can strengthen relationships and build trust among team members, so it’s worth putting a few minutes aside during team meetings for social chat, or activities, or case studies, or anything that won’t feel blergh to your team.

We are doing a series of pecha kucha presentations to get to know each other better, so even simple things like that can help.

3. Model work-life balance and make it possible for everyone else

Be the leader that logs off at a normal time and doesn’t expect everyone to work late into the evening or respond to messages before they should really have logged on. Manage resource capacity across the project so people aren’t overburdened, as burnout can reduce resilience. You can’t bounce back if you have no energy to do the things you should be doing.

Make sure there is flexibility for people to take holiday time away from work even in busy periods on the project. If you’re in a position to offer it, think about flexible work arrangements. Don’t book meetings when people might be out doing the school run. Encourage regular breaks, and support your colleagues’ well-being to help maintain morale.

4. Let people solve problems

Put aside the idea of hero project manager. You don’t need to solve all the problems for the team. Empower them to contribute ideas and solutions. You can facilitate sessions to encourage creative problem-solving, but you don’t have to have all the answers.

This might require some training or support on your part for the team. They can’t solve problems without the right tools or resources, so make sure they are equipped with what they need to handle challenges effectively (before they face the challenge). That might include facilitation training, or conflict resolution training or even stress management tools – you probably already have access to some of these through your organisation.

5. Recognise and reward resilience (you don’t have to call it that)

Recognise and reward achievements, especially when times are tough. Shout out someone who solved a problem on your chat channel. Tell someone’s manager that they did a good job at solutioning. Celebrate milestones and achievements together, particularly those that demonstrate the team’s ability to overcome obstacles.

You don’t have to say, “we’re celebrating resilience today!” as that not only sounds weird but might not resonate with the team. Call it out as whatever you want!

What else do you do to help team members and the team overall get more resilient? Have you tried any of these ideas and what happened? Let us know in the comments!

We hear a lot about how projects and people should  be resilient, but what does it really mean? I think of it like being a tree – there’s that quote about bending with the wind and not breaking, but how does that translate to your work life? I think resilience is something that we talk about a lot but find difficult to turn into actionable insights, and I’m all about actionable insights! So I did some thinking about resilience and have a few things to say on the subject.

Let’s start my new mini-series on this topic with an overview of what it actually is and what resilience looks like in project teams.

What is team resilience?

Resilience refers to a team’s ability to adapt, recover, and grow stronger in response to adversity, stress, or change. And on projects, we see a lot of stress, adversity and change, right?

If you work in a project team, resilience involves the collective ability to maintain focus, adapt strategies, and work collaboratively when facing obstacles.

OK, so that’s a definition. But we’re not much closer to knowing how that shows up in the way teams behave.

Characteristics of resilient teams

Here’s what I think resilient teams demonstrate.

• Adaptability: The ability to shift strategies or tactics when unexpected challenges arise, managing change.
• Collaboration: People support one another and work together effectively, especially under pressure.
• Optimism: Team members have a positive outlook that they bring to problem-solving, even when there are big challenges ahead.
• Persistence: The team shows determination to stay on course and get things done even if there are setbacks.
• Emotional regulation: People in the team (especially the project manager) have the ability to manage stress and stay calm in high-pressure situations, like audits, project reviews or dealing with issues.

All those characteristics are things that I think project managers show, perhaps more than other roles in the business, because we are exposed to challenges, stress and changes all the time. All. The. Time. Even on projects that are ‘easy’!

Whether it’s tight deadlines, changing client demands, unforeseen risks, your budget being cut by 10% or a staff member going off sick… there are challenges every week with delivering projects. Working on improving the characteristics of resilience means your team is going to be more likely to overcome these challenges while maintaining morale and productivity.

If that wasn’t benefit enough, resilient teams are also more likely to be innovative (because they have to be creative to get out of sticky situations). Resilience helps improve long-term project outcomes, because we can learn from failures and refine processes over time – that’s the ‘bouncing back’ bit.

They’re more capable of dealing with ambiguity and complexity because they’ve got the mental agility to manage when things aren’t linear.

As an aside, when I started out in project management, I assumed things would be linear, and mostly my projects were. But as I’ve grown into my career, I’ve worked on more and more projects where we don’t have the ability to see into the future, the end is not clear… we’re flying the plane while we build it. And that ability to sit with ambiguity and just get on with what you can is something that’s been useful for me.

So, we can conclude that resilience is an important skill and we know what it looks like in project teams. Next time, I’ll talk about some practical things you can do for your team to help them have every chance of being resilient when the work gets tough.

I’m continuing my deep dive into continuous improvement this month as it’s such an important topic for project managers. There’s this expectation that we will use the retro and lessons learned processes to make improvements, and yet there is rarely the time to fully implement lessons. That’s one of the major challenges, and I want to talk more about challenges in making changes to ways of working today.

Resistance to change

The first challenge is resistance to change. Resistance can come about for lots of reasons, not least because people are worried about the extra workload of having to deliver project management process changes on top of their project execution activity.

Also, humans seem programmed to not like change. Having to learn a new way of working is a pain.

We can address this in the same way as you address change resistance to any of your projects: understanding the concern, clear communication, training and support and demonstrating the benefits. Plus a bit of management ‘this is the new way of working and you will follow the process’ can be useful!

Sustaining momentum

Improvement programmes might start out well, but it’s challenging to keep them going. After all, there are only so many improvements that are simple to make and easy to implement, so you might feel your goal of improving continuously is struggling because people have already suggested the easy wins.

Team members might not engage with it any longer. Keep celebrating success, keep recognising good contributors (without making those who cannot suggest improvements for whatever reason feel bad).

Pace out your changes so there is a small strand of work happening throughout the year instead of a big push and then nothing.

Resource constraints

I’ve mentioned this a lot throughout the series because I really do think it is the hardest thing to overcome. We have to balance improvement activities with project deliverables.  In resource-constrained environments (isn’t that everyone’s project environment?), you may find it challenging to allocate time and resources for improvement initiatives. Management might not see the value.

People doing the work might prefer to focus on their project work, which probably already has to be balanced against their business as usual activity. Now you’re asking them to do even more, and even if they are willing, they have to make prioritisation calls, and frankly, changing processes is probably way down the list.

They might be incentivised on other things. Their personal performance metrics or team objectives and KPIs probably don’t include the new improvement that has only just been thought up. So unless you’re going to work with line managers to write in a percentage of their availability to work on improvements, expect to see some up and down commitment throughout the year. People will do what they can, but creating the space for them to do that is important.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for helping teams find the time to overcome resource constraints for project improvements? Do you build it into their personal objectives or make it part of the expected ways of working for the squad? Let me know in the comments below!

That concludes my deep dive into continuous improvement. It’s an important aspect of project management practice, and it helps us create an environment where we can contribute to the business in more ways than simply project delivery. We can be the driver for change as project managers, and help our teams, and our organisations, deliver more in difficult times.

It’s very easy to talk about continuous improvement, but if you’re anything like me, it’s a lot harder to build the actions into the workflows and processes you use to ensure that the improvement actually happens.

OK, perhaps that is an exaggeration. There are some simple activities that, once you realise, are easy to change and within your sphere of influence. Those are the improvements we can make simply and with minimal effort, and that everyone appreciates.

But the world of work is increasingly more complex, more VUCA, more intertwined, and changing one thing has an impact on other things. We’re not talking about updating a document template to add a new section, but rewriting workflows within project management tools, or changing how benefits are owned, tracked and reported on across the company. Those types of continuous improvements warrant projects of their own. Projects that often we don’t have the time put aside to deliver on.

Continuous improvement in project teams

What do we actually mean by continuous improvement? In my experience, when people talk about it in a project management environment, they mean the ongoing effort to enhance processes, increase efficiency, and drive better results. Whatever that takes. Like I said, it could be small tweaks or organisation-wide transformation of how projects are run in the business. And frankly, that makes it kind of hard for the average project team to effect any major change.

Still, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. So, if you want to create an environment where people have the opportunity to raise their voices when they see things that can be improved, here are some suggestions.

Set the right example

If we want to foster the right culture, people have to believe they are already in a culture where their suggestions will be listened to. So we want to demonstrate:

Leadership commitment: That’s leading by example, speaking up and suggesting improvements, pointing out where things could be better and encouraging others to do the same whenever we hear them mention a good idea.

Communication: Unsurprisingly, communication needs to be taken seriously and you need to create the time for it. If everything is rushed, they won’t feel that they can share feedback and lessons learned (outside of structured conversations or retros). Create feedback loops or ask about improvement ideas in regular check ins.

Recognise the wins: Celebrate improvements and suggestions, even if they don’t turn out to be implementable – you’re recognising the fact that an idea was brought to the group. Hopefully this will encourage others to do the same and to feel that their ideas are valued.

Make it easy to suggest improvements

People need to feel empowered to suggest improvements and to act on them. Granted, most organisations don’t have dedicated ‘innovation’ time or slack in the calendar where people can work on their own projects. But you can remove the barriers to making suggestions.

Let people work their own way: Encourage ownership on the project and let people run their area of the project the way they feel best. If they find ways to improve or change the process, let them.

Suggestion schemes: In the olden days we used to have a box at work for suggestions. These days there are forms online where we can submit ideas. If you think people would be more open to suggesting ideas anonymously, make sure these systems are in place.

Incentivise innovation: In my very first corporate job we had a scheme where we sent in suggestions and got cards back. If you matched the cards to make a picture, you got a prize. Or something like that. It was a long time ago, but there was an incentive scheme for pointing things out. What could you do that’s similar?

Build in creativity training

Building problem-solving and creativity skills is a… skill. And we can train people on skills. Find some time for training on problem solving techniques, process improvement methods, creative thinking and so on. The Six Sigma training I did in my early career was so influential in how I approach problems today. But let’s just say I’m not naturally someone who would whip out a control chart.

Something else that’s easy to do and within your control is cross-skilling team members. Cross-functional learning and an appreciation of what other people do in their job helps people see the project from different perspectives and find improvement opportunities that way.

This is an interesting topic for me and I think there’s more we can cover, so next time I’ll look at tools and techniques for continuous improvement. Watch this space!

Have you ever made a bad decision? I’m sure I have but I don’t think I’ll be owning up to them here! The point I’m making is that people who make decisions aren’t always making the best decisions. And part of that reason is bias. No one is immune to it; the best we can do is call it out and be aware that it is happening.

I was asked to talk about bias in decision making at a university recently so I thought I’d summarise some of my key thoughts on the topic here to share with you.

Biases are cognitive shortcuts, often subconscious, that impact decision-making. And research has shown that there are lots of them. I read a few papers in Project Management Journal that pointed to many biases being identified. The key ones that I wanted to call out are these.

Confirmation Bias

This is where you seeking information that supports pre-existing beliefs. For example, only looking at data that supports your conclusions, or data from successful projects and ignoring data sets from unsuccessful projects. In daily life, this might be looking out for a particular type of car and then seeing it everywhere.

Anchoring Bias

This is where your future thoughts and opinions are anchored around a particular number. For example, if you’re talking about pricing a product and someone says it should retail for £50, you might get suggestions of setting the price at £40 or £60 but it’s unlikely that anyone is going to suggest £300 as the group has been anchored around the first number they heard.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Bent Flyvbjerg calls this escalation of commitment, which is where you justify increased cost in a project even though it isn’t performing to plan. In other words, people talk themselves into continuing a failing project because of the investment that will be ‘wasted’ if they stop now.

Optimism Bias

Haven’t we all been guilty of this? It’s where you underestimate risks and overestimate project success. We all think our estimates are realistic even when past experience shows that we need to add buffer time.

Groupthink

When a group agrees with something, dissenting voices aren’t heard with the same volume. There is pressure to conform to collective opinions, even if you don’t truly agree. Diverse groups tend to make better decisions because they bring diverse experience and opinions.

Status Quo Bias

This is where people prefer familiar approaches over innovative solutions. I think there is also an opposite to this that I have – I’d rather use new tech and explore options and learn a different tool than use the old boring tool I’ve used before. Although this is not a good thing and means I have to spend a lot more time preparing for presentations because I’m trying out new gadgets or software that I haven’t used previously!

Bias contributing to project outcomes

You don’t have to look far to see examples of the sunk cost fallacy or optimism bias in public sector projects.

But there are examples of where bias has contributed to positive outcomes – or rather, structured decision making processes let people regularly challenge assumptions to avoid getting stuck with inappropriate solutions. I asked ChatGPT for examples of bias leading to project success and it could only come up with Toyota’s lean production system actively combating bias through data drive decision making. Maybe you have other examples from your experience – if so, leave them in the chat below please!

Overcoming bias

So what can we do about it?

• Encourage diverse perspectives: keep a focus on structured debate and let the dissenting voices be heard!
• Use data: seek out evidence that will provide impartial inputs
• Externally validate data and solutions: can you use external data reference sets or focus groups to confirm (or reject) your position?
• Consider failure: what does failure look like and what might lead you there? Pre-mortems are worth a go to discuss all that before you get started.
• Reassess the business case: keep the business case under review so you avoid throwing good money after bad.

Bias is inherent in how humans navigate decision making, but it’s manageable if you are open to talking about it and thinking about ways to reduce it. What’s one bias you’ll watch out for in your own decision-making?