Voices on Project Management

If you listen to business prognosticators, the concept of “mature economies” or “mature markets” comes up pretty regularly. Which means that it has become more and more difficult to squeeze growth out of larger, more mature organizations.

The funny thing is, this is actually a great opportunity for project managers and project leaders around the world to really step in and put their skills to use in a more strategic manner.

Why?         Because a great project leader is a strategic project leader. Strategic project leaders understand the business at a deeper level and can anticipate decisions. More importantly, they have access to the goals and vision for an organization’s growth, which enables them to contribute to that goal.

So what do strategic project leaders look for when they are attempting to manage growth in mature companies?

Here are three ideas:

1. Align thinking with the organization’s growth goals: You have to gain an understanding of where the organization is going, as a baseline for success. This isn’t as hard as it might seem. Many organizations, at the beginning of the fiscal year, quarter or calendar year, share goals for the coming year (or, if you are lucky, the next several years).

This information will provide you the groundwork for better discussions as certain projects move from concept to planning and beyond. 

2. Anticipate ways projects can or can’t create additional value: Here’s the challenge. It is easy to mail this stuff in. I’m just a project manager, right?

If you want to be a leader in your organization and manage for growth—growth for your company and your career—you can’t allow this thinking to infiltrate your mindset.

To manage for growth, especially in tough markets, you have to be able to anticipate where your business is going and where opportunity lies. Then you need to be able to take action to apply these ideas to your projects and advocate for them in a strong, reasoned manner.

 3. Frame your ideas in a context that fits executive and stakeholder goals: As project leaders, your goal is often to be the point from which information flows in and out of the project. To put it another way, you are the sounding board for people that have an interest in your project’s success.

This means that you have the unique position of knowing as much or more about the project than anyone in the organization.

This gives you tremendous power and provides an opportunity to push the project in ways that will help squeeze out the maximum benefit for you and your organization.

This requires you to advocate for an idea, present your ideas in a way that are relevant to the context of the goals of your business, and have a business case behind them so that they appear logical.

Are these conversations easy? No, but are they worthwhile? Absolutely!

If you are serious about managing for growth, you can start now from where you are, but the actions you take are going to have to be more business focused. Fortunately, many of you already have the tools to take action—no mandate necessary.

I look forward to your thoughts on managing growth.

by Dave Wakeman

Has your leadership style evolved to reflect the modern business environment?

Old leadership styles put a premium on command and control, which made sense when there weren’t so many specializations.

Now, our culture, and the way many of our projects are organized, requires that we are more collaborative and more focused on enabling our teams. Let’s call this “leadership by empowerment.”

Having fully engaged and empowered teams is now a key to project success.

If you are struggling with adopting this new leadership style, here are a few tips to help you build empowerment in your teams:

1. Focus on communication: With all of the tools at our disposal, you would think communication and information sharing would be easier than ever.

But it isn’t.

In most cases, it feels like our communications are hampered more than ever by all of the noise and demands from technology. But knowledge is empowerment and if you want to empower your team to maximize its impact, you need to renew your focus on communications and getting people the right information at the right time. You can do this by clearly spelling out the way that you will communicate with your team and how they should communicate back with you. You can create areas, tools and methods for accessing the most important information. A tool like Slack may be a way that you can better organize your information.

2. Allow your subject matter experts to be experts: In projects it is easy to lose focus on the fact that as the leader, you can’t know everything. This can cause project managers to want to dictate every action and every possible scenario to your team members, but that is a clear path to friction, delay and failure.

As the project manager, your job is to put your team of experts in a position to succeed. One way I do this is by setting outcome-based goals for my teams with clear check-in points so that I can understand the status of tasks and activities , but give my team members the power to do the work in a manner that they feel is best.

3. Provide continuous opportunities to learn and grow: We talk a lot about constant learning and development, but how much of that is just lip service? To help empower your teams, spend some time developing the skills that are truly going to help deliver better results for your organization (not just the ones that are going to help your team members learn something new).

You can do this by creating a training calendar or schedule that focuses on mission critical tasks, sharing best practices or interesting new ideas, or inviting in guest speakers.

Remember, your job is to use the tools you have at your disposal to make sure your leadership empowers your team to do the best work they can for you.

How do you empower your team members? 

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by Dave Wakeman

As project managers we are charged with balancing the needs of the C-suite with the needs of the day-to-day project implementers.

The problem is that this central role often lacks any clear or formal power. So we must rely on strong and meaningful executive sponsor support.

But how can you cultivate that support? Here are three tips.

1) Talk to your executive about the project’s ROI.

Tell them why the project is important now, where it fits into the organization’s long-term goals and what it will mean to the executive and the organization if you succeed.

Then listen to your executive sponsor’s perception of the project and why they see it as important. This will ensure you are on the same page and will give you the ammunition you need to have productive conversations moving forward — especially handy if you end up needing additional resources during the project.

2) Set a schedule for project updates.

Don’t let the momentum built during your first conversation die. Keep the executive engaged in the project through regular communications. And let your team know you will be discussing the project with your executive sponsor on a regular basis — this will help you have more productive conversations on both sides. Regular conversations with your team and executives helps you avoid the messy and time-consuming challenge of bringing people up to speed when they have been out of the loop for long periods.

3) Come forward with solutions.

When your project hits a rough patch, you can ask for help, you can wait to be told what to do or you can come forth with solutions.

The choice is easy: Always lead with solutions based on your expertise as the project lead. You are likely to get more buy-in from your executive sponsor with this approach because you have made the decision easier for them and you are acting like a partner, and not just a subordinate.

And that’s it from me. What advice do you have for engaging executive sponsors throughout the project lifecycle?

(And, if you’re interested, PMI’s Executive Sponsor Engagement report has some additional info on this topic.) 

If you enjoyed this piece, you will really enjoy the weekly newsletter. It is my most personal and strategic content delivered each Sunday morning to your inbox. Make sure you never miss it! Sign up here or send me an email at [email protected]! 

By Dave Wakeman

A topic I’ve come back to again and again on this blog is the need to ensure that communications skills and practices give you the best opportunity to act as a project leader—not just a facilitator.

The key tool that we project managers have to manipulate the outcome of our projects is communication. As we spend more and more time figuring out how to become strategic partners of our sponsors, it’s imperative that we think of communication skills as a weapon we deploy to achieve business goals.

Here are three areas that I think project managers can focus on to transform communications skills into strategic assets.

Always talk in terms of outcomes and achievements. I have a client that says, “I’m a big picture guy.” To try to talk with him about tactical things would be doing us a disservice.

To use your communications skills as a strategic tool, you need to take this same approach to your own conversations. Focus on what you are trying to achieve and what the outcomes that deliver value will look like. When you talk like this, you become a stronger partner to your stakeholders and you are likely to inspire a stronger following from your team because you are focused on the outcomes—and not on micromanaging every task.

Have a framework for your communications. As a project manager, I’m sure you love having a framework for most of the activities that you undertake. Why should your communications be any different?

Such a framework doesn’t need to be complex. Try a simple one like this:

1) Motivate: Begin by pumping your team and your partners up so they are excited and energized by what you are working on. You can do this pretty simply by focusing on achievements thus far, outcomes, and progress.

2) Teach: Share what you need everyone to learn. Teach your audience to see the project in the way that you do.

3) Reinforce: Make sure you confirm that everyone is on the same page. This is vital.

Invest the necessary time and energy. To become more focused and strategic with your communication practices, you’re going to have to invest some time in your relationships. For several reasons, but most importantly, you are going to need to know the goals and objectives of your key stakeholders. And you are going to need to understand how they like to be communicated with.

Without these key concepts in your toolbox, your communications are likely to fall flat. There is no real shortcut here. You just have to really be willing to listen and talk honestly with your stakeholders and team members to develop a relationship that can withstand the challenges that every project faces.

 If you enjoyed this piece, you will really enjoy the weekly newsletter. It is my most personal and strategic content delivered each Sunday morning to your inbox. Make sure you never miss it! Sign up here or send me an email at [email protected]! 

By Dave Wakeman

For me, planning is the secret sauce of almost every successful business—and definitely of every successful project. But while most project managers probably agree on that, not everyone else does. So how do we sell planning to an audience whose first reaction isn’t to lead with planning?

Here are a few ideas.

Lead with a discussion about outcomes. When I get stalled by people who don’t want to discuss planning as a strategic tool, I ask them about outcomes and what success is going to look like in this situation.

How does this help you get back to planning?

Well, it makes people think about the future. By doing that, they logically have to draw a plan together that’s going to help them get there. And this is a tool that is easy for you to use.

Ask about failures on similar projects. Just like with the discussion based on outcomes, you can overcome a lack of planning in projects by asking your stakeholders or sponsors about similar projects. Specifically, ask what some of the problem areas in previous projects were and how they were handled.

No one wants to make the same mistake twice. So by forcing your project stakeholders and sponsors to confront the reality of some of their past failures, you can automatically refocus them back onto planning. You can now direct the conversation to how to avoid having these issues arise again.

For you, that means being brave enough to ask about lessons learned during your initial conversations so that you can control the conversation if you are getting pushback on a thorough job of planning.

Find out about key stakeholders and other important people in the project’s success. This is a back door into finding out what these other people hope will be successful about your project.

Sometimes if you are under a lot of pressure on a project, you will discover that the sponsor hasn’t done a good job of accounting for all of the key stakeholders and may be missing something that is essential for one stakeholder. By asking about other stakeholders, you get a chance to refocus on where you are trying to get to and you have more control on pushing for planning.

You can easily do this in your projects by making sure to ask a simple question like, “Has everyone who is essential to the success of this project been asked for input?” This should get the conversation onto favorable footing for you.

What do you think? Am I onto something here? Or have you used other tactics to refocus your projects back onto planning when necessary? 

By the way, I write a weekly newsletter that focuses on strategy, value, and performance. If you enjoyed this piece, you will really enjoy the weekly newsletter. Make sure you never miss it! Sign up here or send me an email at [email protected]!