Voices on Project Management

By Cyndee Miller

It’s probably the bracelets and the boots. But I long harbored a desire to be Wonder Woman. I had big plans for using her Lasso of Truth on my sister.
 
But conference keynoter Nicholas Epley came in with a reality check for me: “Of all the superpowers, reading minds is the only one you already have.”

It’s that innate human ability to understand what others think, feel, believe, want and know. And it’s what makes humans the most dominant species, he said.

But it's complicated. At best, the ability can help project professionals connect with their team. At worst, our egocentrism, stereotyping and behaviorism can spark misunderstanding or even conflict.

“There’s only one mind that you’re engaged with all the time: your own,” said Mr. Epley. “We tend to oversimplify other peoples minds.”

Body language tends to be another culprit of missed connections, says Mr. Epley — and this after I’ve spent years covering it as it as a way to get ahead in business. “The problem with body language is that we misread it,” he says.

To really understand someone, you have to really get inside their head, Mr. Epley offered a few tips:

1. Be wary of gimmicks. Facial expressions and body language can mislead — and there’s no proof that training can improve a person’s ability to read it.
2. Cut the confidence in half. Approach people with humility.
3. Be painfully clear when you communicate. Ask direct questions, listen carefully, reiterate clearly and ask for confirmation.

Do you experience misunderstandings with your teams? Do you think Mr. Epley’s approach could help? 

by Cyndee Miller

This year’s PMI Project of the Year sounds like the plot of some Tom Cruise movie: Deadly nuclear waste starts to leak into the outer shell of a storage tank at an underground storage facility in Washington, USA. A team is tasked with moving the 800,000 gallons (3 million liters) of deadly toxins to a stable tank — in just three years.

Except in real life, there was no Mr. Cruise to jump in and save the day. It was the Hanford AY-102 Recovery Project team that got the job done.

So when Roland Greenwell, PMP, stepped up to accept the Project of the Year award, he gave credit to his team.

“It was the workers who really invested in the vision and made it possible,” said Mr. Greenwell, single-shell tank retrieval manager at Washington River Protection Services.

It initially didn’t look great: The project was given just a 15 percent chance of success. But because of the team’s dedication to delivery on the project strategy, the project closed early and US$8.3 million under budget.

The Hanford AY-102 team members weren’t the only difference makers. The other finalists had extreme circumstances of their own to contend with:

Gahcho Kué Project, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The Gahcho Kué diamond mine sits deep in the Canadian artic, in the middle of nowhere. Building the mine required shuttling materials over a treacherous ice road that only exists for two months of the year. Missing it would have meant massive delays to the project. But in the end, the team prevailed, closing the project two months early. The payoff? In 2016, the mine exceeded its carat production by 60 percent.

University Link Light Rail Extension, Seattle, Washington, USA

Traffic around Seattle is the fourth-worst in the United States. Commuters clearly needed another option. So the city decided to build a light-rail link between downtown and the University of Washington. Despite underground obstacles and stakeholder concerns that threatened to throw the project off track, the team delivered the line extension US$200 million under budget. And because the project closed early, service began six months earlier than scheduled.

For more on the 2017 Project of the Year winner and finalists, look for in-depth feature stories in upcoming issues of PM Network and check out video case studies on PMI’s YouTube channel.

by Cyndee Miller

Sweet home Chicago — the birthplace of deep-dish pizza, Ferris wheels (and Ferris Bueller), brownies, Chance the Rapper and yours truly.

This is a city driven by innovation.

Not to brag, but we’ve pretty much cornered the market on mind-blowingly awesome construction projects, with the skyscraper as our specialty. We may no longer be able to claim the world’s tallest, but we’ll always be home to the world’s first. Construction isn’t the only game in town, of course. In September, mega consultancy KPMG named Chicago one of the top 10 tech innovation hubs in the world. Take that, Silicon Valley.

And now, PMI^® Global Conference is here for a visit, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the opening keynoter, no less.

As the father of the world wide web, Sir Berners-Lee has serious cred talking about innovation. Over the years, I’ve heard my fair share of hooey about fostering creativity. I appreciated his stance, which basically comes down to letting people do their thing: “When you see a twinkle in somebody’s eyes, that’s when it’s time to give them some space.”

When he first started talking about his nebulous project called the world wide web, for example, his boss called it “vague, but exciting.” Then he had the good sense to get out of the way.

Still, Sir Berners-Lee said he was constantly working to keep the spark alive. He needed to nurture that flame to get to the next phase: the critical collaboration necessary for the nascent project to take off.

“How do you take the creative energy between these different companies trying to produce the best browser and get them to produce the best HTML so there is just one web, just one HTTP,” he said.

For project managers, it’s about getting people to put aside their way of doing things, collaborate on the common goal and build consensus. “By the time you’ve mixed your ideas with other people’s ideas, you’ll end up with a better product,” said Sir Berners-Lee.

With any major innovation, the people driving the effort usually go in with a really strong idea about the world they want to make, the problem they want to solve. But there are inevitably unexpected consequences once an idea makes its way into the real world, said Sir Berners-Lee.

Take Twitter. Given that Sir Berners-Lee built the internet, he also built Twitter — and the angry tweet. “We used to think just good things would happen,” he said. “Give the world a liberal dose of communication and give them a medium that knows no nation and surely there will be world peace.”

Alas, we all know that’s not quite how it worked out.

“Project managers must think about: If everyone ended up using [a given project], what would be the affect on humanity?” he said.

As innovation continues to ramp up — and project managers begin to step up as agents of change — it’s a powerful and necessary question.

by Lynda Bourne

A person’s attitude is derived from their perceptions of a person or situation. In the project context, it is often the stakeholder’s perception of your project and how its outcomes will affect the stakeholder’s interests.

Fortunately, perceptions — and therefore attitudes — are negotiable and can be changed by effective communication.

In my research, I’ve found two key dimensions to attitudes: 

1. How supportive or opposed the stakeholder is toward the project. 
2. How receptive the stakeholder is to communication from the project team. While receptiveness may seem less important, you can’t change a stakeholder’s level of support if they refuse to communicate with you.

Levels of Support

Support can range from active opposition to active support. The project team needs to understand the stakeholder’s current level of support and then determine what is a realistic optimum level to facilitate the project’s success.

However, what represents a realistic optimum level varies. For example, environmental activists can never be realistically expected to support a new road through a wilderness area. In this circumstance the realistic optimum may be passive opposition as opposed to active opposition. On the other hand, your project sponsor should be an active supporter.

Creating Open Communication

The key to achieving either of these objectives — and support in general — is open communication. If the stakeholder is unwilling to communicate (either because they don’t like you or they are just too busy), you need to devise ways to open channels.

This may involve using other stakeholders in the network, using someone else on your team as the messenger, changing the way you communicate or just plain persistence.

If you can’t gain credibility — one of the key factors within your control that will influence the effectiveness of your communication — with a particular person because of their perceptions of you or your project, make sure you find a credible messenger to carry your communication.

Communication is a two-way process. Only after communication channels are open can you start to listen to the other person and understand their needs, concerns or ambitions. Once these are known, you are then in a position to either explain how the current project meets those needs or consider risk mitigation strategies to modify the project to reduce issues and enhance opportunities.

Communicating for Effect

The whole point of stakeholder management is to optimize the overall attitude of the stakeholder community to allow the project to succeed.

This requires:

• A focus on the important people at the current point in time.
• Understanding and managing their issues.
• Communicating to achieve the desired changes in attitude — communicating for effect!

Communicating for effect means focusing your communication efforts where the need is greatest:

• If people are at or above the optimum target attitudes, the purpose of your communication is to maintain the status quo.
• If less important stakeholders are below your desired optimum, you devote as much effort as can be spared from your limited resources.
• Important stakeholders who are below optimum need heroic communication efforts to change the situation and maximize the project’s chance of succeeding.

Remember, a very significant proportion of the risks around most projects are people-based. The only way to identify, manage and/or mitigate these risks is by effective two-way communication designed to effect changes in attitude.

How do you focus your communication effort for maximum effect?

by Ramiro Rodrigues

Project managers: Are you sometimes looking to make plans faster but without being superficial and therefore riskier to the project?

Developed in the 1980s, design thinking is a structured mental model that seeks the identification of innovative solutions to complex problems. Although the concept has existed for decades, it’s only made its presence known in the corporate environment over the last 10 years.

Swiss business theorist and author Alexander Osterwalder similarly sought to accelerate collaborative reasoning when he introduced the Business Model Canvas. Canvas helps organizations map, discuss, rework and innovate their business model in one image.

But a series of proposals for the use of the Business Model Canvas for various purposes outside of business models has also appeared — including innovation, corporate education, product development, marketing and more.

For project professionals looking at alternatives to developing quicker and more collaborative planning, Canvas may sound like a great option. Of all the proposals that come up for the use of Canvas in a project environment, integrating stakeholders may be the best. Canvas brings stakeholders into the process and will help to minimize resistance and increase collaboration, resulting in a better proposal for planning problems and making the project more aligned to the interests of organizations.

But while the arguments put forward for Canvas all seem positive, there is still a dilemma: Can Canvas fully replace the overall project plan and the planning process? Is it possible to do without a schedule of activities, a detailed cash flow, a matrix of analyzed risks — just to limit ourselves to a few examples?

That is probably too extreme.

The general sense is that the integration of Canvas with specific planning — such as the cost plan and the risk plan — is the most productive and generates the best results.

It may be worth asking your project management office for their thoughts.

Have you ever used a Canvas for your project planning efforts? If so, what tips can you share?