PMO Bytes

I know project managers are not salespeople and we do not need to do the dog and pony show in front of our customers (oops!) stakeholders. However, we still need to be spectacular in our presentations if we want to convey our message and garner others’ buy-ins. At the end of the day, it still depends on how well we sell our story. And yes, a good presentation needs a story to back it up. Many people have this false belief that quantity means quality. However, a good presentation does not necessary need to be lengthy. Keep it short as long as it conveys your message. Refrain from using too many words which tends to bore the audience. Let the pictures do the talking.

There is a key difference between presentation slides and articles which many people are confused. People tend to use the same style for writing articles to prepare the slides. This usually results in too much text being squeezed into the miserable 10 by 7.5 inches landscape space. This is absolutely wrong. Do you expect to read through the slides during the presentation or, worse still, your audience to read them for you? Presentation slides are meant to engage the audience and not to put them to sleep with massive chunks of text. If you genuinely need to go into details, it would be better to keep a separate set of supplementary slides that you may share with the audience after the presentation. Stick to the main purpose of your presentation slides – to engage the audience. Stop puttinging them on a drip of alphabets.

I don’t claim to be an expert in presentation, but I have seen enough of poorly prepared slides to be able to tell what a good one should look like. Typically, I will go with these four simple steps,

1. Introduce Problem: Your audience needs to know why they are there for the presentation. They won’t be there is there isn’t a problem. Show them the problem and make sure they accept it.
2. Instill Fear: Once your audience has accepted the problem, the next step is to let them know the consequences if they do not deal with the problem soon enough. Paint a picture of the most horrible nightmare to them.
3. Propose Solution: After the nightmare, it is time for the entrance of the star of the night – the solution. You need to slide this in appropriately so that it does not look like a hard sell. It has to look like a natural progression.
4. Visualize Outcome: Nothing is better than to wrap up your presentation by showing your audience what awaits them at the end of the tunnel. Make sure they drool over the end result that you are showing.

It doesn’t make sense if I just talk about how to prepare a good deck of presentation slides without showing some examples. Now, let me walk the talk with a few slides below to sum up what we have just discussed.

 Introduce Problem

Instill Fear

Propose Solution

Visualize Outcome

"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." said Chuang Tzu more than two millennia ago.

Well, it seems like Chuang Tzu was struggling with an identity crisis back then. As a project manager, we often find ourselves asking this very trifling question – “Am I a project manager attempting to assume the role of a subject matter expert or am I a subject matter expert trying very hard to be a project manager?” I hope you are not doing this every morning when you look at yourself in the mirror.

There is a long debate on this chronic struggle in the industry. Most arguments brought forward are either industry-specific or too sentimental. If we look at this from another perspective, keeping the focus on the project itself, the fundamental question that we should be asking will then become – “Between project management skills and domain knowledge, which of these two is more important to the success of a project?” Again, this is not an easy question to be dealt with. Most purists would argue that project managers should stick with what they do best, that is to manage project, and leave the domain knowledge problems to the subject matter experts. Yet, there are others who would challenge whether a project manager could do a good job if he or she does not have the required domain knowledge.

For the same reason, most employers find themselves stuck with this dilemma – “Should I hire a subject matter expert or should I get a project manager?” This is very similar to the experience of buying a smartphone. Would you go for a Samsung or an Apple? For the Apple lovers and die-hard fans, this is straight forward. They will only go for an iPhone regardless of how much the competitor’s technologies had surpassed those of the empire that Steve Jobs had left behind. No matter how much they love the bigger screen or drool over the sexy user interface of Samsung phones, they will still stick to iPhones like the rats following the pied piper. Call that brand loyalty if you wish. It is either iPhone or no phone.

Majority of the employers are like the Apple die-hard fans. On one hand, they have been trying very hard to convince themselves that they need a strong project manager to take good care of their projects; on the other hand, they are more than ready to trade in good project management skills for domain knowledge and experience. In other words, priority will always be given to the subject matter experts. Sounds ironical huh? However, this seems to be the current recruitment trend especially in those niche industries like banking and information and communications technology. That is why we often see interesting names like ‘Banking Project Manager’ and ‘Technical Project Manager’ appearing in job postings where the emphasis is on domain knowledge more than project management skills. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against such whimsical ways of transmuting job titles. It is the vagueness of the job scope and the inconsistent expectations of the employers that I am more concerned with. While this may sound trivial to many people, setting right expectations is a crucial step to avoid unnecessary confusion and disappointment down the road.

Now, what should you call yourself in your next job?

What about ‘Business blah blah blah, Operation whatever whatever whatever, Techno- so on and so forth Project Manager’?

I have learned through hard ways the Do’s and Don’ts of being a leader in the past few years leading a team of project managers. I think it is a good idea to share them here so that you can benefit from my mistakes.

• Do talk when you need to give direction or communicate to keep everyone in the loop. Don’t talk just because you need an audience to stroke your ego for your rhetorical hyperboles.
• Do make sure you are there when your team needs your support and help. Don’t be around when they need some privacy; else you will look like an uninvited micromanaging maniac.
• Do coach when you feel that your team needs some guidance or when they have asked for your advice. Don’t interfere too much if your team knows what they are doing; else you will hamper their creativity.
• Do give your team a chance to speak up when they need to be heard by an empathetic ear. Don’t listen to words that are full of flatteries and lack of validity as they will cloud your judgment.
• Do let your actions do the talking and show your team that you are not just doing lip service. Don’t get overzealous and start to do everything for your team that they are supposed to do.
• Do ensure there is fairness in your team and everyone will be treated equally. Don’t let favoritism and nepotism set foot and fester within the team.
• Do give credit to your team for their hard work and acknowledge those who have contributed. Don’t steal their credit or praise them just to glorify your achievement.
• Do be nice and treat your team well as they deserve it. Don’t be so nice that they start to take advantage of your kindness. It is always easier to give, but harder to take back.
• Do give your team a good lecture if you need to do so in order to set the right expectation. Don’t scream, insult, bang the table or throw cups at them. No abuse in workplace please.
• Do be positive and provide continuous encouragement and motivation to your team. Don’t get over passionate and start to give empty promises and sell elusive dreams to them.

If you have been paying attention, you will realize that the key is to know when to do what you should do and know when to stop when you should. The truth is – leadership is more of an art than science. You won’t get any better by cutting corners. Even if you know the Do’s and Don’ts, you still need to find the guiding line where you should stop and not cross over. And this, takes years of repeated practicing to hone your skills.

Every morning when we wake up, we stand in front of the mirror, fill the toothbrush with toothpaste, look into the mirror again and start to brush our teeth from the same spot. We move on to the next spot when we are done with the current one. Depending on the habit, it could be the one on top or the one on the right. We continue doing this until all the teeth are cleaned. The same teeth-brushing process is repeated every morning starting from the same spot and going through the same flow. We never know why we have to start exactly from the same spot or why we follow the same flow. It seems like our subconscious minds have registered the pattern and taken over the control. It is habitual. If someone now insists that we have to start brushing our teeth from a new spot and in a different direction, I am sure most of us will find it uneasy to adapt to the new method and will probably sink back to the old habit in no time. We loath at change and we curse at those that tell us to change.

So far, we are just looking at the habits of individuals. If habit is manifested on a grander scale, say organization, then what we are dealing with will be a cultural issue.

“If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

“Left well enough alone.”

“Let sleeping dogs lie.”

We have heard phrases like these echoed through the office corridors many times. Mark Twain once said – “Nobody likes change except a wet baby.” As much as we dislike those green-horned change agents, we abhor the bearers of bad news even more. We love sweet words and flattery, and turn a deaf ear to those who try to warn us.

In my previous article “Antemortem Confession of an Ant”, I wrote about a valiant ant who tried to warn the fellow ants that they might have been trapped in the ‘Spiral of Death’, but was eventually being dismissed as having a hallucinated fantasy. We have a special name for such people who are disbelieved when they try to warn others about something bad that is going happen. We call them ‘Cassandra’ – the name of the daughter of Priam, the King of Troy, who was both blessed with the gift of prophecy and cursed in such a way that no one would believe her warnings. You probably have come across a few Cassandras in your organization. Sad to say, there is a high chance that they are being thrown into isolation in one of the Gulag camps by now.

So, why do we shy away from bad news and warnings? Why we avoid Cassandras like the plague? Could it be ego, hubris or simply just being too timid to face the warnings? Perhaps, we may find an answer in a report issued by Richard Stevenson, Trevor Case, and Betty Repacholi called “My baby doesn't smell as bad as yours: The plasticity of disgust”. This report that appeared in the September 2006 issue of the journal “Evolution & Human Behavior” provides evidence suggesting that mothers regard their own baby’s fecal smell as less disgusting than that from someone else’s baby. This implies that we have a preference, or higher tolerance, for our own body odors and those from close kin over those from other people regardless of the intensity of disgust of the odors. Perhaps we have a similar inclination when it comes to warnings. We have higher tolerance for warnings that concern us and may tend to perceive them as less critical, thereby paying less attention to or even ignoring them completely.

Unfortunately, this does not imply that the warnings are less valid. The diaper will still get wet and we need someone to inform us when the diaper needs to be changed. In other words, Cassandras are invaluable to an organization. It is always a good thing to have a couple of them around. No matter how unpleasant they are to the ear, we may still need to rely on Cassandras’ warnings in order to help the organization to evade the potential pitfalls ahead. The price to pay for shunning them is too high. Instead, we may take the warnings in a positive light, perhaps as inputs to our continuous risk assessment process in projects. Have you identified any Cassandra in your team? Do you have an environment that will encourage them to voice up their opinions and warn the team of any looming danger?

Project managers work hard all day in their projects and usually do not have much time for fun. But, this does not mean that they are lack of humor. Below is a list of project management humor that I have curated from various sources and a couple of my own creations. Take a break. Have a good laugh!

1. Any task, no matter how complex, can be estimated accurately, once it's completed.
2. What is the favorite line that the project manager likes to say to the sponsor? - "You jump, I jump".
3. You can bully a project manager into committing to an impossible project completion date, but you cannot bully him into meeting it.
4. Why do project managers wear Nike but sponsors prefer Adidas? - The answer is in the slogans, Nike: "Just Do It", Adidas: "Impossible is nothing".
5. Too few people on a project can't solve the problems - too many create more problems than they solve.
6. A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would anyway melt when heat is applied.
7. A user is somebody who tells you what they really want the day you give them what they first asked for.
8. Project manager is, in a way, like Pinocchio except that the project manager’s project gets longer for each lie he or she tells.
9. There's never enough time to do it right first time, but there's always enough time to go back and do it again.
10. Prioritization is the best abused trick to say ‘No’.
11. I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
12. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
13. If you fail to plan the project, you are planning to fail the project.
14. What goes up but never comes down (besides our age)? – The number of issues in a project.
15. The sooner you fall behind the project schedule, the more time you have to make it up.
16. PMO means different thing to different people. To the users it means 'Piss Me Off'; and to the project managers it means 'Pimp Me Off'.
17. What is another name for Steering Committee? - "Staring Committee". Well, some really just stare at the projects and hardly doing anything.
18. What is the most common item that pops up in lessons learned meeting? - "We need to remember to conduct lessons learned meeting".
19. Putting an efficient system into a wrong process is just accelerating its failure.
20. Everyone asks for a strong project manager – when they get them they don’t want them.
21. The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
22. When everything runs well, you call it ‘Agile’. But when things start to break apart, you change the word to ‘Fragile’.
23. The biggest risk in a project is, ironically, the project manager paying no attention to the risk management part of the project.
24. Remember the lesson from the 'Three Little Pigs’ – cheap and fast never last.
25. A project gets a year late one day at a time.
26. I heard they said the lesson learned meeting is a good place to start the ‘Blamestorming’.
27. Screw up once, it's a mistake. Twice, it's a process. Three times, it's policy.
28. Sponsors are like diapers - they need to be changed often, and for the same reason.
29. Project Management is like a STD - a short moment of fun followed by pain and a long time of regret.

Feel free to share yours and I will add on the list…