Voices on Project Management

By Jorge Valdés Garciatorres, PMP

“Remember that we choose to follow leaders based on the way the leaders make us feel. Remote associates are no different. You just have to concentrate on ensuring that your remote people feel included, supported and part of a team.”

—Steve Coats

As companies take necessary precautions to keep their staff healthy and safe, remote work has become the new normal.

Some organizations have already worked this way, and the pandemic has only intensified the pace. Others may be thinking about it, and others may have never considered this option and perhaps are struggling to keep things going in the midst of the crisis.

In any case, there isn’t one right way to do remote work. However, whichever method suits your project teams best, leadership and communication play an important role in the process.

The benefits of remote work

In a totally empirical, non-formal study that I am conducting on my own (my grandma used to call this “curiosity”), I have been talking to and gathering information from my students, colleagues, friends and relatives, and sharing my observations with them. Throughout México and other locations in Latin America, it seems like most people are more happy than not about working from home. Among the aspects they are enjoying the most are:

• They can save money on commuting and other expenses.
• They can spend more time with their families.
• They have more time for themselves, in some cases up to four hours daily.
• Some can eat better while at home.
• Some are finding more time for exercise. One of my interviewees even told me that during one weekend, he and his wife ran for the equivalent of a marathon on the treadmill.
• Most are participating in webinars or online classes.

The drawbacks of remote work

When I ask about the downsides of this modality of work, there are also several answers:

• They perceive a more intense rhythm of work. 
• They note a dramatic increase in their number of meetings. 
• Some of them are struggling to find a place at home where they can concentrate. 
• Some of them report weight gain since they are eating more often, and moving less.
• Most have told me that they find it more difficult to balance personal life and work.

At this point, most of them complain about the way their leaders are following up with their assigned duties. They feel like they are being micromanaged. Their project leaders are asking for updates several times during the day. Again, in some cases this is almost not present, but in the majority of my chat partners it is recurring.

Based on my experience doing remote work for nearly 15 years, I’d like to outline some lessons learned for leading remote teams. I am focusing on the day-to-day phase of remote work, assuming that at this point all of you have passed the implementation phase:

1. Set the ground rules and expectations with your team, and establish new ones or modify some of them, as needed.
2. Trust in your team. Perhaps not all of them need close supervision. And for those who are less mature, tell them that you are there to help. Establish a system of responsibility and accountability that doesn’t rely on you hunting them down at every turn for updates.
3. Show empathy and compassion. In the program I am leading now, for instance, nearly 45 percent of team members live alone, and being alone for eight weeks (because of the lockdown) is difficult. Nearly 30 percent are suffering an overnight transformation in their daily habits. As a leader, you must help your team navigate their personal circumstances to move a project forward.
4. Establish a daily or a biweekly virtual standup. Ask each of your team members how they are doing. Let them know that you are here for help if they need something.
5. Read your team and schedule one-on-one conversations when needed. Show genuine interest in the individual and then get straight to the point.

What are some practices you’ve implemented to ensure your remote project team is working at full capacity?  

By Cyndee Miller

For the past several years, business pundits have waxed poetic about “unprecedented change” brought on by what seemed like massive socioeconomic shifts. Well, buckle up, because it’s become abundantly clear that was just the pregame. The past few months alone have shown we’re in for some painfully uncertain times.

The one thing we do know the future is sure to hold? Change—delivered through projects.

More than half of organizations are refocusing their identities around projects and programs, according to PMI’s research. And even before the pandemic and accompanying economic meltdown hit, project leaders said the biggest project delivery obstacle was managing changing priorities.

It’s going to take a new kind of multidisciplinary team—the kind that can turn strategy into reality, even as shifts in scope or requirements inevitably pop up.

These change-ready teams are grounded in innovation, collaboration and empathy. Complexity doesn’t faze them. They’re ready for anything. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession^® In-Depth Report, Tomorrow’s Teams Today, lays out three core tenets behind the new take on teaming:

1. Agility, always: As roles and responsibilities are redefined, teams that adopt an all-for-one mentality will be best prepared to adjust on the fly.
2. Collaborate and listen: Hierarchies are dying—or at least the idea of an all-knowing, top-down leadership is fading fast. The onus is on project leaders to build team trust and forge a collaborative pact.
3. The customer comes first: Pretty obvious, but making consumer feedback the backbone of planning and execution will help teams stay on track to deliver meaningful value.

In the renewable energy sector, supercharged growth is rapid-fire technological change. And that means a lot can happen between project tendering and execution, says Jeanette Ortlieb, PMP, project manager, Distributed Power Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa. “As project manager, you need to be ready for change to happen,” she says in the latest issue of PM Network^®.

The most effective project leaders don’t just manage change—they rally their teams around new ways of thinking. Case in point: Rocio de la Cuadra Vigil, PMP, of Yanbal International in Lima, Peru: “I love changing all the time in search of better ways to work.”

Even amidst all the change, though, the idea of projects delivered by teams isn’t going anywhere, says Peter Moutsatsos, chief project officer at Australian telecom giant Telstra.

“I do believe that the construct of a project team will persist into the future,” he says on a recent episode of Projectified^®. “It might mean that projects become perpetual in that you may have a persistent team of people working constantly through a series of iterative projects.”

That will bring its own challenges and opportunities, Moutsatsos says, as far as team composition—and keeping everyone energized and engaged. And who knows what the post-COVID team will look like. People may be suffering from serious Zoom fatigue, but are they all going to rush back into the office or hop on a plane for an in-person project launch?

What are you seeing on your teams? How are you staying ready for anything? Let me know in the comments.

By Wanda Curlee

Spikes in cases. The new normal. Limited opening. Social distancing.

These are all new taglines that we’re hearing as we slowly move back to the office. Granted, some of us were already remote workers and in that case, the change will be minimal. But those returning to the office will experience a radically different environment.

What does this have to do with project management? Well, project managers play an integral part in the transition, and it started sometime back.

When the pandemic first hit and lockdown started, project managers were needed. Companies could not just send their employees home with their laptops and hope that work would continue as usual. Project managers had to put in extra work to ensure employees and resources were prepared for the transition. And there was minimal time to prepare.

I am sure that many companies did not expect to be on lockdown for months. For many, it has been devastating. But now it is time for project managers to help transition employees back to the office.

Compared to going remote at the beginning of the pandemic, project managers now have more time to plan and execute the project to transition work back to the brick-and-mortar office. But a project to transition work back to the office is also quite different from transitioning to a totally remote environment. Transitioning back to the company’s physical location requires setting up the office to meet social distancing requirements and other regulations established by the state and the federal government, making sure IT is in place to handle the transitioned workforce, instituting updated processes for the new environment, ensuring contractors are hired to maintain new cleanliness procedures, helping the workforce learn the new cleanliness policy and what to do if an employee is sick, and so forth.

Or will it be a different type of project? Companies’ leadership may have considered how well the remote workforce did. Recently, I read that some companies located in Manhattan may not return to their office spaces at all. The leadership saw that working remotely was much cheaper and resulted in a happier workforce, with more or at least the same amount of work accomplished. Sure, we heard about parents who had to work while also looking after or homeschooling their children. But for many, this is a temporary phenomenon.

If the leadership decides to keep the workforce remote, the tasks will be different. The project manager may have to look at helping all employees move their offices back to their homes, make the IT system more robust, develop procedures to support the workforce with upgrades, create processes to help employees with broken laptops and keep them working while the computer is fixed, develop new processes for hiring and assisting new employees in understanding daily expectations, and assess whether new tools are needed, such as online signatures and secure conference systems, among other tasks.

Project managers will need to think outside of the traditional ideas of a virtual environment or a brick- and-mortar office. These project managers will be establishing the new normal for their companies.

How are you helping your team transition?

By Mario Trentim

These days, many of us have traded in-person meetings for videoconference calls and business casual for sweatpants. We’re spending much more time working in front of our computer screens and in an astonishing number of new meetings.

The time spent on video chat apps has increased by 277 percent since March, according to research by RescueTime. As a long-time user of time-tracking software, I review my screen time weekly. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve noticed a dramatic change in my activities. And it made me wonder about the remote work habits of my team members as a result of the new paradigm.

So, I decided to investigate further from two perspectives:

The Collateral Effect of Working From Home

Employee Engagement: Although some people enjoyed flexible work options prior to the pandemic, most project teams were not fully remote. My team, for example, had a chance to meet and greet at the office every day, building our unique culture through real-world interactions.

Shifting to remote work in the wake of the lockdown made people anxious. I believe that some of us felt a little disconnected. We lost our routines and rituals. Moreover, social and economic effects became a major concern for all of us.

During the first week of lockdown, we assured our team that no one would be laid off during the next three months. Multiple strategic changes and an enormous effort from all of us helped the company not only serve our customers better but improve efficiency, increase capacity and strengthen our relationships.

Despite the happy vibes described above, there was—and still remains—a lot of uncertainty. Another tipping point happened about 45 days into the lockdown. Confined to our homes, despite our new processes and best practices, we started to become disconnected again. We were struggling once again to find motivation and engagement.

Productivity: From the productivity perspective, it appears as if we are getting more done. There are several reasons for that. For one, cutting commute time down to zero gave people much more productive time.

Coordination and communication protocols were established around ground rules and organizational culture. Information technology helped a lot, improving productivity as manual and repetitive tasks were automated, processes were reviewed in search for operational excellence, dashboards and KPIs were made available to support decision-making and more.

In summary, the global pandemic forced all of us to ask time and time again what adds value and what is wasteful in every aspect of our projects.

5 Best Practices for Remote Work

As many of us adjust to the reality of our project teams working remotely well into the immediate future, there are some things we should all keep in mind to keep engagement and productivity up. Here are five ways to fight remote work fatigue and produce better results:

1. Focus on what adds value for your customers. I know this seems like common sense, but there’s no room for misalignment in organizations working fully remote.
    
2. Adopt a lean approach in the pursuit of operational excellence. Encourage employees to discuss processes and tools frequently. Get rid of what doesn’t work—or rethink it.
    
3. Provide training. A lot of organizations were caught by surprise. They turned to any collaboration tool available and sent employees home. Unfortunately, not everyone is tech-savvy. Without the right training for digital tools, many people falter during remote work.

4. Plan, execute and adapt. Digital transformation is a complex journey. Integrated platforms and architectural decisions must be carefully made. However, planning with no execution is of little use. Adapt as needed and manage changes.

5. Promote a balanced life. There are various definitions of a balanced life. Promote whatever best suits your organization and culture. And leave room for some fun in the process.

How do you avoid remote work burnout?

by Dave Wakeman

I’ve continued to watch as the world works its way through the coronavirus pandemic, keeping an eye on leadership styles around the world. The successes in places like Australia, New Zealand and Germany can teach us a great deal about what a great project manager can do and achieve with a good scope, strong leadership, trust in their team and consistent communication. 

But over the last week or so, I’ve also been toying with something else that I think is playing into the success or failure of countries’ responses to the pandemic: systems thinking. I keep coming back to the idea that maybe one of the big challenges that folks are dealing with is that their systems aren’t set up to help them be successful during this pandemic. Then, I got to thinking about what we can learn if that is the case. 

Here are three things that have stuck with me the last few weeks:

1. To have a successful theory, you need a unified theory of your system.

In the United States, we’ve seen each state approach the coronavirus in its own way, with different measures of success and failure and different ways of communication. 

That’s one extreme.

On the other side of the world, in New Zealand, we saw the prime minister lock down the entire country with a shelter-in-place order mandating people to stay exactly where they were. 

The idea behind New Zealand’s thinking seems to be that if everyone in the country were on lockdown at the same time and didn’t move, they would be able to stop community spread in its tracks. 

In the U.S., having 50 different governors offer up 50 different plans for their states has allowed people to interact with each other much more freely, increasing the likelihood of community spread. 

To put it another way, thinking about New Zealand as one big system enabled them to act with the entire country in mind and take actions as a unit, whether or not every area needed the exact same prescription at the moment. The system took precedent over any individual component. 

2. Looking at the world as a system can help point toward a quicker recovery.

Adaptation is at the heart of strong systems. And, as we have seen the pandemic move around the world, countries have had their impact from the virus start at different points and end at different points. 

Take, as an example, the German Bundesliga—the first professional football (soccer) league to return to action, providing a roadmap for how football clubs around the world could manage playing games without fans and ensure players remained healthy after returning to training. 

The same idea is taking place as we look to reopen many of our economies. In Japan, it was reported that the country’s response to the pandemic was not completely successful, but that having their population conditioned to use masks helped them avoid a tremendous disruption due to the virus. 

Both of these examples can point us toward solutions that will enable us to reopen more quickly and, hopefully, reduce the possibility of a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections. 

You can already see this taking shape in the way that La Liga, the Premier League and the NBA are working to restart their leagues. And it is prominent in much of the messaging about the importance of wearing a mask to prevent community spread of COVID-19. 

3. Successful systems still need good communication. 

Even in a huge system, we are seeing that communication is essential to adaptation and dealing with a challenge. 

This is true in any situation. 

The countries with greater success navigating the pandemic have had their leaders communicate in a way that is consistent, clear, built on facts and science, and gives folks points of reference. People are able to see the success or failures of the actions that they are taking, which provides motivation and compliance. 

I’ve said this many times before, but in general, around 90 percent of your time as a project manager is going to be spent communicating. In looking at the pandemic and the responses to it as a system and through the lens of a project manager, I can see that this number still holds pretty true, no matter the nature of your project.

It’s another way of saying that leadership matters, communication matters and having a grasp on the changing facts of the challenge you are working to overcome and the willingness to constantly communicate them in an effective manner makes this pandemic look less unusual—and more like a really complicated project. 

But, maybe I am biased. 

What do you think?