We shout these out if someone violates a rule. For instance, our mathematician might say: “Whatever… I can do what you want, if you really want to do it that way.” Everyone will shout out “RULE 6 VIOLATION!” as loud as possible. I must admit, I’ve been called out for “rule 8 violation” several times…
In any project, epically difficult ones – humor helps. I’d like to refine this a bit to say “harmless humor.” One fellow on our team was late for a meeting and arrived sweaty. He promptly took off his tie and threw it on the floor. “What’s wrong with you?” It turned out he was shredding papers and got his tie caught in the shredder – while he reached everywhere to find an off switch. From that day on, we awarded the tie to people for “lack of attention to detail.” Later, the goat tie tack was added for an extra honor. Everyone loves it. Except perhaps the prize winner.
Here’s a corner of one of my own war rooms from a $46-million-dollar project. What you are seeing is actually the network diagram of the project – along with a LOT of notes, photographs of the progress to date, completed “nodes” of our network. 
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Tip #5 For Managing a Cross-Functional Team
| TIP #5 FOR MANAGING A CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM (How to herd a group of cats, cows, sheep, goats, dogs and llamas….)
Meetings Don’t Waste Money, If They’re Done Right Often in a meeting someone will count the number of people there, multiply by some number and come up with a cost then declare the amount of money ‘being wasted.’ It’s certainly possible to waste money (salaries) having people in a non-product meeting. It’s easy! Meetings are sometimes called “the practical alternative to work.” AVOID THIS. Don’t do this. Have well-run meetings. How? With Team Rules Create a set of team rules! The rules don’t have to be detailed, they shouldn’t come close to resembling a “Roberts Rules of Order.” Our teams typically had about 8 or 10 rules. We would post them on the wall of the meeting room. Again, if you are meeting virtually, the same thing can be done. Everyone can print out the meeting rules tape it someplace, or put it on their desk. Whatever. But actually seeing the rules written down in front of everyone is important. Here’s a photograph of a set of rules from a very stressful turn-around project. If you can see it, the last rule was a fine. We’d fine people $1.00 if they were late for meetings – these funds were later converted to liquid and consumed by all.
A slightly edited version of our rules are
Shout Them Out
Rule number 4 sounds odd. “The truth is permitted.” This means that team members can say things you wouldn’t normally hear in meetings. “I’m late getting that done.” Or, “This is never going to work.” “Our solution is awful!” The only correct answer from the team for someone speaking to Rule 4 is “THANK YOU.” Then, the team starts working on solving whatever issue just came up. There’s harmless humor in every situation
Mindreading doesn’t work This one is pretty simple. If you think the rest of the team should hear it – SAY IT. It’s surprising how often teammates (who speak a different technical language) assume the rest of the team knows what they’re thinking. Continual Questions Part of the project leader’s job is to dig in to find problems. The problems are then scheduled for “demolition.” To find problems, we always, always ask the following questions
Whatever it that makes the Project team cry must be dealt with. The worse it the problem is – the better we like it, so “bad news is good.”
Another favorite question, after all is settled and we’re ready to move onto doing “work” as opposed to “meeting” is “are we fooling ourselves?” “Are we drinking our own bathwater?” This is a conscious effort to avoid the DEADLY enemy of group think. Nearly nothing is worse for a team than “group think.” There are many examples, many documents, many books on the topic. But, from personal experience I can tell you – it can KILL.
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What you don't like about someone is what you like about them.
| Tips for managing a cross-functional team
This sounds very self-conflicted. But it’s not. I’ve found that with a project team of highly skilled people, there’s at least a few people that will *really* bug you. They’ll get under your skin and annoy you in team meetings. The project manager’s first instinct is to “deal around” them. In other words, don’t get them involved important aspects of the project. Leave them out, don’t ask them questions, don’t get their opinions. You’re hoping that maybe they’ll get the message and leave the rest of you alone. This is absolutely the wrong thing to do. You need the pests, you want the pests, the pests are your BEST friends! LOVE THE PESTS! Don’t get annoyed, simply smile and say “thank you!) When these people annoy you and the project team, they’re showing a unique quality that will, most likely, be very useful to everyone. The best way I can think to explain what I mean is by picking a few personalities that stick in my mind. These are my recollections of real people, and there’s a chance they’ll recognize my description of them. That’s OK. They know we’re all friends that worked long and hard together. Here are some of the best and most frustrating team mates I’ve ever worked with ANNOYING TEAM MEMBERS Always Wanting More Detail I must say this is typically considered an engineering oddity. I have it myself. Some of the best engineers are NEVER EVER satisfied with the information they have. This behavior isn’t just restricted to engineers though. But, when I’m typing this, I’m thinking of our reliability / maintainability person. He never had enough detail to calculate reliability numbers or to insure we met our maintainability goals.
Whiner / Complainer These folks will complain about every step in the project, every deviation, every change, everything that’s not what they think it should be. These folks are the first choice to work-around, do without or leave out of any project decision. That would be a big mistake. Here’s a few test cases:
Negotiator These folks want to negotiate every detail in the project. “Can’t we do it differently – everyone does it this way?” “Let’s get the two teams together and work out a solution.” This is *after* it’s all be decided.
THE LIST GOES ON AND ON… We all have a list like this of different personality types we’ve worked with on teams. The key is when the annoy you and everyone on the team -- remember this when you DON’T like them. But sooner or later, this person will help the project a great deal. Embrace the jerks on your projects – they may be your best friends! Please comment with a list of your favorite project jerks! And remember that's what you like them for. MEET ME IN SAN DIEGO NEAR THE PROJECTMANAGEMENT.COM BOOTH. MAKE AN ONLINE / EARLY RESERVATION TO TALK TO ONE OF OUR EXPERTS HERE! |
Focus on Project Measures That Matter
| Tips for Managing a Cross-Functional Team
LOOK FORWARD, NOT BACKWARD My goal is to communicate the challenges, fun and “things that have worked” in managing projects team that has widely different backgrounds, experiences, education, and understandings. Informational diversity is based on different functional, educational and industry backgrounds that constitute information and knowledge resources upon which the team draws. THE TIME V. INFORMATION DILEMMA The project team members should be cognizant of other parts of the project – this is especially true for cross functional teams, or teams with high informational diversity. Not only that, but the project manager should know exactly how the project is doing. The Project Manager must understand the course the project is going in and attempt corrections if things are drifting too far off. The problem with this simple concept is that there is simply too much information to absorb for multiple disciplines and multiple projects. It’s in different technical languages, it changes daily, it requires an in-depth understanding of each discipline. The team doesn’t have time to learn how or what the other disciplines are doing and complete their own efforts. Even if that were all possible, not enough time exists to absorb the information and manage the projects So, the question becomes, when managing a cross-functional team, what information, or indicators should be used to judge the health and direction of the project. It must be a subset of all the information the project team possesses. The key is to focus on “measures that matter.” And, to do that, it’s important to understand the differences between leading and lagging project information. LEADING AND LAGGING INFORMATION Lagging information is something that gives us a window into the past. It’s something that HAS happened. It’s nearly impossible to drive a car down a road while looking only in the rear view mirror, but that’s exactly what most projects do. They concentrate on LAGGING information.
Some of the most popular Project Information to be collected and digested fall into the LAGGING category. In other words, “How we did in the past, will tell us how we’re going to do in the future.” Ask yourself, is that true? Here are a list of popular project LAGGING indicators. Lagging Indicators
Wouldn’t it be better to find, discover and measure LEADING indicators? Things that tell is where, to the best of our knowledge, the project is heading? Certainly! But like most good ideas in project management, it’s very difficult to identify and track leading indicators. But we must make an attempt.
It’s quite possible that a project’s best leading indicators are not a clear-cut single measurement. It’s more likely that the course and direction of the project is best determined by a function arrived at by examining several indicators at one time. Performance measurement “To-Complete-Performance-Index does this. But that method may not be a good fit for your project. You’ll need to explore and discover your own. Leading Indicators
WHY BOTHER? If you have predictive or forward looking indicators for the health of your project, you’ll be able to look in the same direction you’re driving your car in. That’s useful! It’s also very difficult to arrive at meaningful leading indicators. It will require a team effort, failures and patience. Pay attention to the rail road crossing sign (leading information). Don’t wait until disaster strikes to understand your status.
TRY TO FIND AND USE LEADING INDICATORS FOR YOUR PROJECT ---- MEET ME IN SAN DIEGO NEAR THE PROJECTMANAGEMENT.COM BOOTH. MAKE AN ONLINE / EARLY RESERVATION TO TALK TO ONE OF OUR EXPERTS HERE! The first five blogs:
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Things That Have Worked Leading Project Teams @ NASA
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This is the fifth blog in a series dealing with the challenges and excitement managing “informationally diverse teams” of experts. My goal is to communicate the challenges, fun and “things that have worked” in managing projects team that has widely different backgrounds, experiences, education, and understandings. Informational diversity is based on different functional, educational and industry backgrounds that constitute information and knowledge resources upon which the team draws
THE FIRST FOUR CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM BLOGS: 1. Herding a group of cats, cows, sheep, goats, dogs and llamas…. http://bit.ly/2cr0ddH 2. How hard is it to herd a group of cats, cows, sheep, goats, dogs and llamas? http://bit.ly/2c6n3Gv 3. Cats, cows, sheep, goats, dogs and llamas *CAN* be herded. - http://bit.ly/2cLpS2w 4. Things that have worked leading Informationally Diverse Teams - http://bit.ly/2cfkKka
NASA PROJECTS “Projects are the means by which NASA explores space, expands scientific knowledge, and performs research on behalf of the nation” - from the NASA Project and Program Management handbook. NASA/SP-2014-3405 which can be downloaded (free) http://go.nasa.gov/2chNXuO While the NASA project management handbook is very closely aligned with the PMBOK guide, there are some important exceptions. One being the absolute requirement for monthly status reviews (more on this in a later blog) PROBLEMS WITH CROSS FUNCTIONAL TEAMS Managing a cross-functional team can be very difficult. People are certain they are right, they KNOW they are right and everyone else just can’t see the truth. There are many well-documented studies showing some of these frustrations. When I give a talk on this topic, I ask people to raise their hands if they’ve experienced any of these issues. A lot of hands get raised!
THINGS I’VE TRIED THAT HAVE WORKED Again, I didn’t start off knowing these things – I had a lot of mentoring (formalized), plus I failed a lot. So these tips come from years of “falling forward.” Number 1: Establish a sense of Mission (blog 4) Number 2: Establish a Communications Framework That Works Neville Chamberlain famously established a set of war rooms in 1939. Churchill visited the Cabinet Room in May 1940 and declared: 'This is the room from which I will direct the war'. In total 115 Cabinet meetings were held at the Cabinet War Rooms. What were the advantages of a war room? COMMUNICATION. Everyone saw the same maps, the same schedules, the same plans and could talk about them. It was “total emersion” into the project problem. Today there are many electronic, internet-based versions of war rooms, and they can work well. But the physical war rooms still exist. Google has used its war rooms for over 80 startups! Not matter what technology you use - do it – CREATE A WAR ROOM. A central repository of information where everyone can see the same material at the same time.
MEET ME IN SAN DIEGO NEAR THE PROJECTMANAGEMENT.COM BOOTH. MAKE AN ONLINE / EARLY RESERVATION TO TALK TO ONE OF OUR EXPERTS HERE! |
Things That Have Worked Leading Informationally Diverse Teams
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This is the fourth in a series of blogs on the challenges and fun related to managing a diverse team with widely different backgrounds, experiences, education, and understandings. (Or herding Cats, Cows, Sheep, Goats, Dogs and Llamas) This type of team has a high degree of “informational diversity.” The first three blogs:
Those set up the problem that makes it sound impossible to manage. But it’s clearly not impossible. THINGS I’VE TRIED THAT HAVE WORKED First off, I didn’t get this anywhere *near* correct for the first ‘zillion’ times. That’s right, I failed as a Project Manager (in varying degrees) for years. The project may not have failed, and the product of the project never failed, but I clearly didn’t do as good a job managing a cross-functional team as I should have. I did improve my skills and after continually trying and learning, I developed a cookbook of techniques that worked for me with a team of experts and a difficult technical project. I’ll write about all 7 of my recipes for leading a cross-functional team or project. The first one is the most important. Number 1: Establish a sense of mission There’s a popular story that exemplifies what I mean by “Project Mission.” During a visit to the NASA space center in 1961, President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor mopping the floor. The President stopped, shook his hand, and asked what he did at NASA. The janitor replied: “Sir, I’m helping to put a man on the moon!” This is awe-inspiring to me. The sense of mission is the undeniable knowledge that everyone is working towards the end goal and that the goal will be useful. There’s a PURPOSE to what the project team is doing. My advice is to identify the mission of your project, in as few words as possible. Believe it, say it, and do it. Project Mission questions – everyone on the team must be able to answer these, and the answer to the last two is “YES.”
Remember the President Kennedy story? The janitor had a strong sense of the project’s mission. EVERYONE should have the same mission concept. In 1973, Peter Drucker said: “That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.” So, say the project mission, believe in the project mission, live the project mission – all the time. MEET ME IN SAN DIEGO NEAR THE PROJECTMANAGEMENT.COM BOOTH. |