Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

As we head into the homestretch of 2021, we are still being heavily impacted by the pandemic—and it seems like a society that is restructuring (or realigning) itself due to challenges and issues that the pandemic uncovered.

Reading this morning’s paper highlighted this to me. It got me thinking about the types of skills that a PM is going to need to highlight (or build) to ensure that they are on top of the ever-changing world we are living in.

Here are my top three:

1. Communication: I feel like any good list on what makes a good PM should always contain improving your communication skills, but in this regard the communication skills we need to improve are a bit more broad than normal.

In a general sense, we always want to remember that your communications need to be clear, concise and easy to understand. But as we expand here, we need to make certain that we have the ability to communicate with folks clearly in different cultures. This might mean recognizing how different phrases translate or different customs come across.

The key to being a successful communicator in a changing world is that you need to focus on the receiver of the communication—with an emphasis placed on things that might make your communications fall flat. Because even when you share a common language, the gulf in understanding can be significant.

2. Negotiation: We hear a lot about different issues that are being exposed around the world right now, like supply chain backups, staff shortages and demand issues. The list goes on and can contain hundreds of variations on each issue, but the key idea here is that even if you are dealing with a challenge, a good PM has to find ways to resolve issues. This comes down to negotiation. And what is negotiation but solution seeking at its finest?!

To be an effective negotiator in a changing world, you need to focus on your communications to begin with (like I mentioned above, communications seem to be the gateway for effective project leadership). But you also need to recognize how to frame ideas, challenges and solutions to give people win/win opportunities. You also need to be able to see different routes to success.

Probably the most important skill is to not look at negotiation as a winner-takes-all situation. Because in most instances, it’s going to be about accommodation and not capitulation.

3. Recruitment: I’ve written here over the years about how great a PM I think Alabama football coach Nick Saban is. One of his best skills is his ability to recruit talent to Tuscaloosa. Talent wins.

To be a successful PM in our new environments of change and uncertainty, you are going to need to focus on recruiting folks to your team to be successful as well.

Recruiting in this context doesn’t mean getting people to sign up as your “ride or die,” though it may require that at certain times. Instead, recruitment is likely a lot more flexible as you need people to dedicate a few hours to a challenge you are dealing with, sign off on a new piece of your project, or commit the resources necessary to help you keep your project moving forward.

As I write this out, I start thinking about how we recently discussed project management being a sales job. Then, I look at my list and realize that the key way that PMs are going to work forward now is through selling: their ideas, their partnership and their resources.

Maybe instead of a big change, the more things change the more they stay the same? Let me know what you think in the comments

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

Project management skills are transferable skills you can use in any domain or environment.

All of us have heard this, but I didn’t believe it until I realized the power of PM skills in two situations. The first one was in a software project I managed many years ago. More recently, I leveraged my project management practice in a new technical environment.

Based on my lessons learned, here are five main ingredients I’d like to share with you in terms of establishing your credibility in a new environment

1. Accept your limits
I don't have a developer background. When I was appointed, the team was skeptical. From the outset, I set the expectations: I said right away that I didn’t know much about software development. Talking openly about our limits is the cornerstone to forge trust among stakeholders.

2. Stay in your lane
The developers were experts. One of the sponsors tried to compete with them, asking tricky questions, challenging what they were saying. The developers interpreted it as a lack of trust—which it was, partly. He plummeted their engagement.

It's not about foregoing a general understanding of what experts are doing. It's about knowing where to put the bar. The time you will spend learning will translate to less time wasted down the line.

3. Connect and reflect
Take time to get to know the people you’ll work with—and remember what they told you. Taking a genuine interest in your team members will translate into stronger teamwork and better outcomes.

More importantly, think about creating spaces in your clogged calendar to self-reflect. What objectives would you like to achieve in the three coming months? It will help you to not go astray.

When you arrive in a new environment, you are also overwhelmed by names, faces, documents and information. I write down the information I get (including personal ones) to jog my memory when I need to.

4. Observe, ask and take notes
When I revamped the delivery process in the new technical environment, I interviewed experts to understand the current state. I listened, I misunderstood, I asked again —that's critical for understanding where the most important things lie.

In my former position, I trained newcomers. I was a reference on the team. In this new environment, I felt like a fresh graduate student with more ego. Thoughts of failure crawled in. It was not easy to accept. In hindsight, it was an incredible lesson in humility to push me to shift my mindset from “knowing it all” to learning.

5. Communicate
Before being project manager, I contributed to different projects. In one of them, I hardly saw the project manager—and I didn't understand how she managed it.

Drawing on this lesson learned, when I took over the project role on the software team, I explained how I worked, the way I communicated, what I knew (and didn’t know) and the frontiers of my role.

In both cases, I set up different communication threads:

• A general email, like a newsletter every two weeks (a long email list with all stakeholders, including some top managers)
• Dedicated project emails
• Ad hoc conference calls (if needed)
• Instant messaging groups

These also provided places where I could reward some team players for their contributions.

In the beginning, people didn't see the value of these communications; I was accused of sending too many emails. But in the long run, it has held. It fostered team spirit.

What are the ingredients of your recipe to thrive in a new environment? Share your comments below.

by Dave Wakeman

I recently realized something that I never really thought about before (at least, I don’t remember thinking about before): Project managers share a lot of the same needs and requirements with salespeople.

Crazy, right?

Many of you are probably scratching your head, thinking, “Dave has really lost his mind now.” You might be right, but let me try and explain. Here are some things we have in common with salespeople…

1. Driving awareness: One of the key jobs of a PM is to make sure that the stakeholders and key assets of a project know what is going on and are committed to helping the project reach its goal.

That’s really just another way of saying “drive awareness.” Which is really one of the key things that salespeople do: They find targets in the market and they create attention and need through elevating awareness.

For project managers, a similar process happens when you look at the people that have an impact or influence on your project’s success or failure. You have to figure out who these people are and let them know that your project is moving forward—and what impact it is likely to have on folks over time (if you are successful).

That’s a lot like a salesperson. 

2. Expressing value: I’m a trained marketer. That means that I don’t believe in commodities. Which is good for project managers, because every project a PM undertakes should have some sort of unique value that is going to also add value to the team, stakeholders and environment that the project exists in.

As a PM, you also likely find yourself struggling to get people to buy in on the value your project creates at all times.

Why? People have different priorities. People may have different beliefs about the value of a project. Or, people just don’t want to invest in certain things.

We could go on here, but the key is that as a PM, you have to mitigate the risk to your project of people not knowing the value of what you are doing. How? By expressing the value of what you are working on.

There are two types of value to express: tangible value and intangible value. Tangible things are easily measured (like time saved, money saved or money earned); intangibles are much more difficult to measure, but they can have a big impact (like less stress, less time wasted or time saved). You make these values clear by expressing them in a manner that shows how your project directly leads to the benefits.

Again, y’all are selling!

3. Gaining commitment to action: This is the ultimate sales job. Without action, nothing happens.

In any leadership role, you end up only being successful through the efforts of others. In sales, the same idea holds. This is why the focus on commitment to action is so important.  You have to get people to commit to taking action or no change will take place.

What does action look like? A process started. A job completed. A purchase made.

As a PM, these jobs look exactly like the job of a salesperson, because you both are relying on the efforts of others to help you achieve success.

Now I may be wrong, but when laid out like this, PMs and salespeople look much more alike than we usually think they do in a lot of cases.

Or I’ve lost my mind.  (You tell me in the comments below!)

By Lynda Bourne

How much detail is too much? Traditional views tend to favour a management approach built on the assumption more detail is better, and to a point this is undoubtedly correct, insufficient detail in a plan of any type is a sure way to fail – ‘just-do-it’ at the overall project level does not help.

But looking at the ‘Coastline Paradox’ and using the length of a coastline as a synonym for the duration of a project suggests there is a point where too much detail is counterproductive.

The coastline paradox states that as you increase the detail by using smaller units of measure, the measured length of the coastline increases. If you use a small enough unit of measure, the length becomes infinite. For a more detailed explanation see: The Coastline Paradox Explained  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

So, what does this mean for project controls and project management?  No one navigating a ship into a UK port would be happy using a map where the smallest measurement was 50 km, significantly more detail is needed, but they do not need absolutely everything about their intended destination. What’s needed is useful information at an appropriate level of detail, the same goes for you, when navigating your car in a strange city[1]:

Finessing project plans to present useful information at the right level of detail is not easy, decisions have to be made! 

Take a typical risk register, if you tried listing every conceivable risk, the document would emulate the ‘coastline paradox’, and be of almost infinite length, which means the register is never finished and the project does not start.  Conversely, miss one or two significant risks and the project team may have a very unpleasant experience, possibly causing the project to fail. Pragmatic guidelines about the risks to be considered are needed and these have to be tailored to the project.  Similar guidelines are needed for the schedule, cost plan and all of the other sub-plans needed for a project.

How much detail do you feel is appropriate for your projects?

[1]  Image source: Understanding Design, The challenge of informed consent. Dr. Lynda Bourne, 27th November 2014; maps of North Sydney

When my son was a little boy, he was a great enthusiast of world-class soccer players and enjoyed questioning me: "Is a great soccer player born with talent, or did they practice harder than the others?"

Being the native consultant that I am, I replied to him with another question: "What do you think?" From then on, I was amazed by his train of thought being developed through this old yet complex question.

Through my many years of experience in consulting (and my licentiate degree), I got close to many people who were interested in growing their careers as project management professionals. I acknowledge a sense of pride in having collaborated in different ways with many of these stories. But, as an outside observer, every now and then I find myself asking the same well-grounded question brought up during that talk with my son: "Can a project manager achieve excellence through training and experience, or are there innate characteristics to this professional?"

Perhaps I should begin this reflection by attempting to identify what makes a project manager a successful professional. As it has already been written about before by many others, and aware that the list takes many characteristics into account, I will stick to those traits that I most like to see in a professional:

1. As I like to put it, "projectized thinking," which is basically a mental model where one considers the actual risks and ramifications of these paths. This is someone always seeking to look at what is expected to happen next—they envision a sequential view of activities that consider the troubles inherent to the path and serve as balance points.
2. I also like to emphasize the mental organization capacity of the professional. This ability keeps topics from being forgotten, or having their importance miscalculated.
3. Interpersonal skills are also vital—such as common sense, negotiation capacity and politeness—in addition to other techniques such as communication and technical expertise in project proposals.
4. All of that—as if it were not enough—must be supported by a strong skill to "read" other human beings, which enables us to minimally understand what is going on with stakeholders and what their real interests are.

We probably think that we have some (or all) of these skills. By admitting shortages, it is also natural to imagine that these skills may be developed through some specific training. I agree with that. However, I believe that we may recognize how rare (and challenging) it is to identify all of these characteristics at a high-level within the same professional.

The truth is that there are no effective tools to identify how great we really are in these skills. That's probably why it’s so difficult picking the ideal professional for the job. This is neither good nor bad. Bottom line: We were not born with a binary code that always allows us to go beyond expectations and break the simplistic view that we were destined to become something that we will be until the end of time.