Voices on Project Management

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

I recently touched upon fighting imposter syndrome, which we can all suffer from as project managers. But as a leader, and even as a colleague, we can also unintentionally foster impostor syndrome on our teams. Let’s review three ways I’ve observed (and unfortunately practiced) this over my career—and what we can do about it.

1. Credentials and work experience don’t define human beings

Many years ago, I worked with a project manager who managed a strategic account. I was skeptical of our ability to lead; she was not an engineer, and she didn’t have a technical academic background.

As always, I had many ideas and began to regularly push them—and to ask many questions. I always have suggestions on how to do things differently—in other words, my way. I also talked with contempt to show her that (I thought) she was not a legitimate candidate for the position. My behavior stressed her out.

I've often heard this concern: "I'm not considered as a project manager even though I'm a PMP certified and I've been doing the work for a while". That’s the kind of comment that can shutter self-confidence.

When I took on a new role, a woman on the team told me: “You were chosen because you can speak Arabic.” I cannot speak Arabic (neither do I understand it), and I was hurt because she negated—unintentionally—my skills as a project manager.

How can we improve? Work doesn’t define you completely as a human being. It’s important that when team members introduce themselves, you don’t focus just on their academic credentials and work experience; listen when they share what they like outside of work, and what they struggle with. Understand how they aim to contribute to the team and what added value they bring beyond academic degrees.

2. Start with the positive

Are you always objective? Do you always provide criticism or feedback on something from a factual perspective, or might it differ depending on who developed the work?

When a colleague enthusiastically shows you something they have done and your first response is, “It's good, but...,” that can dampen their enthusiasm and spirit—especially if relates to an area where they lack confidence.

For instance, I’ve improved my skills in PowerPoint, but I still feel insecure about them. So if a colleague modifies a lot of my presentations, it reinforces my inner voice that I’m not good with the application.

How can we improve? Simply asking people to redo things doesn’t help them improve; be sure to use positive reinforcement and explain what needs to be improved, with some best practices or guidelines. This way you help your colleague grow.

3. Follow good role models

In workplaces where technical expertise is valued and technical resources are needed, we sometimes overlook inacceptable behaviors. For instance, a technical expert silencing a less technically savvy colleague in front of everyone, highlighting that what was said was wrong. Or talking with a very authoritative voice, as if giving an order. These types of behaviors should not be followed or encouraged.

How can we improve? Ask yourself: Does my comment add value to the problem that needs solving? Is this an intellectual debate? Or is it a personal attack or an ego booster?

In what ways have you fostered impostor syndrome in your teams? Share your comments below.

by Dave Wakeman

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the art of strategy. I did some research to rebuild my website during 2021 because I decided the pandemic was a good opportunity to create a new version of my business—and what I found was that around 40% of businesses have no clear, stated strategy. And, of the 60% that say they have a strategy, around 80% of those strategies don’t pass the test of actually being a strategy.

Ask yourself:

1. Do you know your ambition?
2. Are you focused in your targeting?
3. Do you know why someone picks you over someone else?
4. Have you identified the resources you need to be successful?
5. What will (and what should) your action list look like?

In a lot of ways, this looks like the role of a project manager as well. But where I really want to turn your attention to this time is to the third question about knowing why folks will pick you over someone else. Because I want to talk with you about having a competitive advantage in your role as a PM.

Let’s begin by defining a competitive advantage for our purposes as the skills, attitudes and competencies that you have that help you stand out and get your projects completed successfully even in very challenging environments.

Now, let’s look at some of the key competitive advantages that I see missing pretty regularly—ones that can change everything because you can work on improving them. Here are my top three:

1. Leadership skills: It can feel like we live in a world without leaders. Managers, yes. But real leaders feel few and far between.

In fact, I’ve seen a sharp reduction in the amount of “thought leaders” preaching leadership principles or highlighting the way that folks can be better leaders in their organizations. A leader is someone that uses persuasion, not just positional authority, to get their team to achieve the results they want.

It can also be improved by focusing on the right actions and attitudes. The first attitude is one of team over individuals. On projects, it can be easy to fall into the trap of looking at the task list and thinking of the individuals and the individual tasks independently. That’s often the road to trouble, since success doesn’t happen alone or in a vacuum. Helping your team see this is a strong start to success—and one you can work on as a PM.

Start here and master this attitude. This alone will help your leadership skills.

2. Vision: I understand how crazy this one can seem to a lot of you, but bear with me. Vision is often missing because we can all fail to see the big picture from time to time.

For PMs, it might not even always feel like an important skill—but it is, because having a feeling for the vision of what success will look like can be the difference between success and failure. This is due to the reality that in most instances, our projects are part of a larger ambition—one that might have many stakeholders and many smaller tasks or projects that lock into ours.

We need to know this, recognize what the entire scope of the environment will look like, and be able to share this with our teams. That’s vision.

You get better at vision by being willing to take a step back from the task at hand, connecting with key stakeholders and working to see the 50,000-foot view of the project. In my strategy work, the first thing we focus on is setting the “ambition” for the organization. This is simply figuring out what success will look like.

That’s vision, and if you put your organization’s overall thinking into the framework around ambition, you’ll have an easier time with it.

3. Communication skills: Since I started writing these pieces, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about communications skills because your ability to communicate effectively has arguably the most impact on the success or failure of your projects.

Why? Effective communications can help propel people to action, shortcut potential challenges, and draw people toward a successful conclusion of your project.

Where does communication fall short for most people?

1. Too much jargon or complicated language: You have to speak to the level of your audience and their understanding, not just yours.
2. A failure to listen: We are all guilty of waiting to talk at one time or another. But being an effective communicator requires a willingness to listen to the other person.
3. A lack of ensuring the message got across. I have an affinity for making sure I got my message across by making myself the point of ineffective communication. I do this through offering up that I may not have shared everything, or that I may have been too technical. By making yourself the butt of the joke, you can lower people’s resistance to saying they didn’t understand something.

These three skills are competitive advantages—and are unfortunately often missing. But like a good strategy, you can focus your energy to give yourself a chance to be more successful. Give these skils a try, and let me know what happens.

By Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

As the pandemic stretches on, work-from-home programs continue to keep teams working virtually. During this time, we have performed courageously to deliver our strategic and business outcomes. Here I will share a select review of advice from industry experts as they explore how to build a post-pandemic response strategy.

According to McKinsey (2022), organizations have pivoted to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth toward building a better world. And Harvard Business Review (2020) notes that all types of companies have navigated the pandemic by pivoting their business models in the short term to survive—becoming more resilient in the long term.

Yet not all pivots generated an improved business outcome. Three trends in particular can help ensure a successful pivot:

1. Align the pivot to a long-term trend driven by the pandemic
2. Extend the firm’s existing capabilities, further solidifying the strategic plan
3. Sustain profitability, which preserves and enhances the brand’s value to the customer

PWC’s Global Crisis Survey identified three key lessons that businesses can adopt for long-term resilience:

1. Plan and prepare for inevitable disruption by establishing a crisis team
2. Integrate teams and cross-company competencies to enable effective responses
3. Build resilience governance into the organization’s culture

An opportunity, therefore, exists to consider how to prepare your team’s competence in driving synergy and resilience in order to lead post-pandemic growth strategies—and simultaneously pivot from those same strategies.

Here is a shortlist of what leaders can do to prepare for a post-pandemic recovery and support an organization:

1. Develop mental agility to pivot among key strategies and deliver business outcomes as key shifts and business challenges arise
2. Allow the process of learning to take effect across key leadership levels
3. Integrate PMI and agile frameworks to ensure flexible planning activities
4. Employ data analytics to support key insights in customer and marketplace forecasts
5. Clarify the governance of key plans and what event would trigger a decisive strategic pivot
6. Develop talent to migrate into new areas of company strategies and projects
7. Gather teams in person in order to create synergy and move from “norm” to “perform”

In the end, the teams that are ready to execute and can pivot as necessary will be ready for the post-pandemic competitive environment.

Let me know if you have uncovered additional successful strategies—or any pitfalls to avoid—in building team synergy and resilience.

References

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business
2. https://hbr.org/2020/07/how-businesses-have-successfully-pivoted-during-the-pandemic
3. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/crisis-solutions/covid-19.html

By Lynda Bourne

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the concept of modern project management. How did we get here and where are we going?

People have been doing things that require planning and organization for millennia. But no one involved in leading these endeavors called themselves a project manager until the concept of being a project manager emerged from general business management in the United States starting in the 1930s and ’40s.

Following on from this start, the catalyst for modern project management was the development of PERT and the critical path method of scheduling in 1957. Practitioners of this new craft formed the early project management associations: INTERNET (now IPMA) in Europe in 1964, and PMI in the U.S. in 1969.

These new associations defined and created the concept of modern project management. In particular, PMI created the first project management body of knowledge in 1987 to support its original PMP examination. The structure of the PMBOK® Guide was reorganized in 1996 and remained fundamentally unchanged through to the Sixth Edition published in 2017. The project phases, knowledge areas and processes defined in the PMBOK® Guide had a major influence on the emerging understanding of project management worldwide.

The 20th century version of modern project management was based on reductionism (WBS, etc.), and focused on control (CPM, PERT, EVM). The prevailing view was the work of a project involved people with hard hats creating something you can kick.

Project success was achieved by implementing the processes in the standards effectively. Consequently, project failure could be overcome by the better application of better processes. Internationally, efforts were focused on identifying and defining the required processes, training people in the processes, and qualifying trained people as project managers (the PMP credential being the pre-eminent example).

Almost everyone involved in these developments through to the early 2000s believed projects were special and distinguishable, that project management was a transferrable skill, and that good project management could be defined. We thought that with a bit more work, we would be able to fully define projects, project management and the processes needed for project success.

Then there was entropy!
Entropy describes the level of disorder in a system and shows that all closed systems will tend to become less ordered over time. Work has to be applied from outside of the system to return it to an orderly state.

For 40 years, project management associations had worked to create order in the discipline of project management. But in the last 10 years, a range of external influences have caused a rapid increase in entropy. And because of these influences, it looks as though efforts to standardize project management into a single structure are no longer feasible.

The three primary drivers of entropy are:

1. Everything is a project. In the 21st century, almost anything can be a project. Traditional “hard hat” projects have been joined by:

• School projects
• IT projects
• Business change projects
• Research projects
• Environmental projects
• Volunteer projects, etc.

2. Methodology overload. Approaches to project delivery now include:

• Agile, including Scrum, Kanban, XP and a range of blends; with ranges of control spanning SAFe and Disciplined Agile, through to people advocating no planning
• Light and lean concepts
• Complex project management
• Traditional, waterfall, etc.

3. Project scope is expanding. Project management has expanded to include:

• Portfolio management
• Program management
• Benefits management/organizational change management
• Front-end loading

It appears there is no longer one right way to manage a project; the processes used to successfully run an agile project are fundamentally different to those needed to run a “hard hat” project. This dilemma led to the fundamental change in the structure of the Seventh Edition of the PMBOK® Guide. But this also means the concept of a project manager and the skills the person require are extremely variable.

This divergence is recognized in the way PMI is restructuring its range of credentials and qualifications. But both the revised PMBOK® Guide and the qualification framework seem to be adapting to the symptoms, rather than the fundamental changes occurring in the global understanding pf projects and project management.

The challenges for PMI, and all project management associations globally, are:

1. Refine the definition of project management. My suggestion is “The management of a temporary team, created to deliver a predefined outcome for an organization, in a disciplined way.”
2. Identify the universal factors that are consistently required to separate a project from other business and general activities. These appear to include:
   1. Temporary teams set up to deliver an objective
   2. Stakeholder engagement and communication
3. Rebuild a purpose around these core attributes, augmented with industry and methodological specifics.

This approach would produce a knowledge framework with a constant set of core skills and knowledge, supported by workplace skills such as being a scrum master of a construction scheduler.

What future do you want for PMI and the project management associations?

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

A few months ago, I missed an important requirement in a project. Much was at stake if it wasn’t fixed on time. Fortunately, the provider could implement it on time, but it was very tight.

How did this happen? I had a complete sense of control of the project because I delivered similar ones in the past. But I was excessively self-confident and missed some steps in the process. This project also uncovered some tacit knowledge I didn’t document.

Turns out we not only have to fight imposter syndrome, but also “overconfidence syndrome.” It is a problem that can affect any leader regardless of age, gender, experience or location. 

5 main symptoms

There were some warning signs a few weeks before that I didn’t take into account. Here are some symptoms of overconfidence that can alert you:

1. You are reluctant to introduce changes. Your excuse: “It has always worked like this. Why do I need to change?”
2. You don’t request feedback. Your excuse: “If people don’t say anything, it means they are satisfied.”’
3. You shelve ideas quickly, indicating no deadline. Your excuse: “We’ll talk about them later.”
4. You begin to be more task oriented than relationship oriented. “I’m overloaded. I don’t have time to talk, and we have to move forward.”
5. You don’t acknowledge efforts made, but instead focus on what is missing. Your excuse: “I’m a perfectionist.”  

Risks of inaction

Taking no action may have harmful effects on your projects. You can make new mistakes that will delay the projects. Some members of the team will feel demotivated by the behavior you display. Some will feel paralyzed by your overconfidence and make mistakes.

Overconfidence for me translated into a kind of scornful tone that I wasn’t aware of until some colleagues raised it to me. Since then, I’ve used some simple “medicines” that worked for me…

5 healing medicines

Before hitting a wall, there are some healing recipes to set up:

1. Help a team member: It will give you a different perspective of the issues and constraints faced by the team.
2. Mentor a young project manager: For me, it works because I remember how little guidance I got—and I’m back with my feet on the ground.
3. Volunteer for a non-profit: For instance, you can spend a weekend helping an association. It is a way to meet diverse people and hear different stories of success—and failure. It reminds you how vulnerable we can be and how fragile life is.
4. Write regularly in a journal: Block some time in your calendar and reflect on what happened during the week. What behaviors are you not proud of? What kind of role model were you for the team in that particular situation?
5. Build a squad of mentors: Ask them to alert you if they notice any symptoms of overconfidence.

All of these will help you feel like you’re back in the trenches with a learning mindset! It will develop humility, tolerance and empathy.

What other healing medicines do you have to help you keep your feet on the ground despite your success as a project manager? Share your thoughts below!