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 Cyndee Miller

It was almost like watching rival cliques at school, die-hard agilistas matching wits with waterfall purists. The drama was always quite civil, mostly limited to snobbish comments dismissing the merits of the rival approach.

But lately — and frankly, I never thought I’d say this — they’re learning to play nice.

Some of this comes down to organizations not willing to take sides. They’re simply letting the best approach win.

“Most companies are becoming more results-oriented and less methodologically dogmatic,” said Bryan Berthot, PMI-ACP, PMP, project manager, AT&T Entertainment Group in a recent article on PMI.org. “They empower their project teams to choose their preferred project management framework — as long as they deliver results.”

Forget the preconceived notions. Teams are using whatever they need for the project at hand.

Check out the numbers in PMI’s 2017 Pulse of the Profession: While plenty of project professionals said they relied on agile or waterfall for recent projects, 20 percent used hybrid. And 23 percent relied on something other than agile, hybrid or plan-driven approaches, which could be a further blend or customization of approaches.

Social networking king and Silicon Valley mainstay LinkedIn seems like a natural for all agile, all the time. But when the company launched an overhaul of its website, the project leaders decided to go hybrid.

Mind you, this is a company steeped in sprints and fast-track developments, and now it’s adopting an agile/waterfall hybrid approach. The rationale? Allow project managers to incorporate user and stakeholder feedback — while retaining a sense of urgency.

“This hybrid approach enabled us to define requirements at the beginning of the project and provided the needed flexibility and transparency to adapt to the fast-changing requirements,” Ranjit Dhaman, PMP, senior staff technical program manager at the company, told PM Network. “We were building a foundation for future product innovation, and a quick turnaround time was needed to keep up the pace with daily product releases.”

It’s not just agile teams adopting waterfall ways, of course.

French tire-maker Michelin says it’s developing an agile approach to project, program and portfolio management.

“We believe that agility could also be used in multiple ways — in everything we do,” Philippe Husser, senior partner, progress direction, said in PMI’s latest Pulse of the Profession. “The world is changing very quickly around us, so much so that we cannot afford anymore to have projects taking two to five years to deliver because, during this time, the initial requirements have changed.”

The company now has project managers, along with a steering committee and project sponsor, select the best approach for each project together.

It’s just like those fine ladies of En Vogue would say: Free your mind and the rest will follow.

What’s happening on your projects? Do you and your teams gravitate toward one approach? Or are you doing whatever you need to do?

by Cyndee Miller

Agile is the punk rock of project management. After years of living on the fringe, it’s officially gone mainstream—much to the joy of some and the utter dismay of others.

Like punk, it was built around a call to disrupt the status quo.

When a group of software programmers wrote the agile manifesto 16 years ago, the big goal was to embrace change: “to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the competition, the market and the technology,” Andy Hunt, a co-author of the agile manifesto, told PM Network last year.

While that purpose still holds true, the agile club is no longer limited to software developers, startup leaders and waterfall haters. An HPE survey showed agile’s ascendancy from anti-establishment to mainstream really took off in the past five years, with a significant adoption inflection point occurring around 2010. And check out the current numbers: Ninety-four percent of the survey respondents in the latest VersionOne State of Agile survey said their organizations practiced agile. PMI recently partnered with Agile Alliance on an Agile Practice Guide.

Some of this comes down to the business world’s obsession with digital transformation, which 42 percent of execs say they’ve begun, according to a 2017 Gartner survey. As Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx, wrote: Companies are increasingly going agile “to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them.”

Take South Africa’s Standard Bank. Facing competition from a rapidly expanding fintech sector, this 155-year-old bastion of financial service embarked on a multiyear digital transformation—with a shift to agile software dev at the center, according to McKinsey.

Not everyone, however, was onboard. I know, shocker, right? To change hearts and minds, the company’s CTO and his team held town hall meetings to explain their logic and set targets for the transition, gave teams autonomy to make decisions on how to go about their day-to-day functions, and co-located team members for better collaboration.

So far, so good. In early agile engagements, Standard Bank reported productivity increases of up to 50 percent and unit-cost reductions of up to 70 percent per function point.

But for some, agile’s entrance into the mainstream has given rise to a new challenge: the dilution of the very term. Mr. Hunt told PM Network the word has become “sloganized” and is “meaningless at best, jingoist at worst.”

In that same article, Jordi Teixido, PMP, COO at Strands, Barcelona, Spain, said: “Agile is wonderful when you’re really iterating and collaborating, but it’s also a refuge for mediocre practitioners who are unable to document or express their requirements or forecast what they want to build. If you don’t follow the rules of the game in waterfall, everyone knows it. But in agile, that’s harder to tell from the outside—and because of that, some people use agile on projects that would be far better under waterfall.”

What do you think? Is your organization using more agile? And do companies have a grasp on what the term really means?