Voices on Project Management

Sue Gardner says winning companies of the future will put tech at the center of their organizations.

By Cyndee Miller

Nap pods, free laundry service, foosball tables, an endless supply of snacks. Ah, the perks of working at a Silicon Valley startup. Of course, there are also expectations of brilliance—and a willingness to log long hours.

And now the Silicon Valley way of working is infiltrating mainstream management.

More companies are realizing they need to create an atmosphere of ease, comfort and pleasure if they want their people—and projects—to reach their full potential, Sue Gardner told congress attendees at her keynote on Monday.

“The new workplace believes abundance drives innovation,” said Ms. Gardner, former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

That means becoming a lot less Office Space and a lot more Silicon Valley—focusing more on creativity and less on cost-efficiency.

“Organizations need to be more willing to take risks and break things,” Ms. Gardner said.

I know, I know. Breaking things sounds messy. But face it, maintaining the status quo is never going to give companies an edge. In today’s tech-drenched, rapid-fire environment, companies quickly move from challenger to incumbent to decline.

“For the past 15 years, this cycle has been aggressively speeding up, with more disruption being more quickly driven by technology changes,” she said. “Tasks that used to be done by people are now being done by technology.

As technology takes center stage, so must the technical team. Smart companies will prioritize people with tech skills—giving them the chance to be innovators rather than order takers.  

“Technology is now core to everything we do—and organizations that don’t retain tech talent will be vulnerable in the marketplace,” she said.

Project managers are in a prime spot to help drive the change, Ms. Gardner said. They can be the “connective tissue” between tech staff and management types, helping different groups understand each other. But it requires a degree of flexibility.

“Adapt to other people. Don’t expect them to adapt to you,” she said.

That doesn’t mean project managers should be pushovers. On the contrary, Ms. Gardner thinks they have the power to address an organization’s most intrinsic issues.

“You have access to information, so you will know where the bodies are buried,” she said. “When there’s an elephant in the room, project managers are the ones who need to acknowledge and resolve it.”

And if Ms. Gardner is right, you’ll have a nice nap pod to retreat to after all that hard work.

But is that enough? As much as I’d love my own personal concierge service a la Google, you have to wonder if the Silicon Valley startup style will really work for everyone.

F-15 pilot-turned-leadership-guru Joel “Thor” Neeb talks focus, feedback and failure.

By Cyndee Miller

As with most things in life, apparently being a fighter pilot isn’t much like what you see in the movies. There’s not a lot of witty Top Gun banter from the cockpit. No Kenny Loggins soundtrack. If you’re smart, you’re concentrating solely on the enemy trying to blow you out of the sky—not staring at the control panels.

“You’re spending 90 percent of the time focused on what’s going on outside the cockpit,” said Joel “Thor” Neeb. (It turns out Top Gun-style nicknames are a real thing. And I want one.)

“It’s the mission objective you’re looking at,” he said in the opening keynote at congress.

And so it goes with project managers, who must stay fixated on the assignment at hand—or risk crashing their projects into the ground.

“If you lost sight, you lose the fight,” said Mr. Neeb, a former F-15 pilot-turned-president at corporate training company Afterburner.

But it’s easy to get distracted when you and your team don’t have enough time, tools or resources to accomplish the mission. That can translate to task saturation, what Mr. Neeb called “the silent killer to performance.”

The most common response is channelizing—focusing on the one thing you deem most important—to the detriment of everything else going on around you.

Clearly, that’s not a great idea.

Instead, Mr. Neeb advocates zeroing in on your “critical instruments,” aka, the factors that will influence project success. “These change all the time,” he says. “It’s up to you to figure out what they are and to teach your team what they are.”

Mr. Neeb promotes flawless execution, but he acknowledges that no project will be perfect. He says project management top guns must push their teams toward perfection while still allowing them to “pivot, fail and iterate.”

“Tell teams they’re empowered to fail and fail quickly,” says Mr. Neeb. “Make that mistake but never make it again.”

The best way to identify and avoid these mistakes is through a debriefing with “no names and no ranks.”

“The key to a debrief is the tone. We’re not pointing fingers,” says Mr. Neeb. “It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right.”

Too often, companies skip this step, but they’re missing out. According to Mr. Neeb, structured debriefings can increase the chance of success on future projects by 38 percent.

With “Danger Zone” as my official earworm du jour, Cyndee “Scoop” Miller is signing off now, but stay tuned for more from congress….

Steve Dierker accepts the PMI Project of the Year award on 24 September.

By Cyndee Miller

When people talk innovation, they typically throw around a lot of fancy management terms: paradigm shift, game-changer, disruptive.

What’s often left out is the blood, sweat and tears part.

So it was positively refreshing to hear Steve Dierker credit the hard work and sacrifices of the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS‐II) team as he accepted this year’s PMI Project of the Year award. “It was a long journey with many challenges along the way.”

I’m not even going to pretend I truly grasp the science behind this project. Let’s just say, this was a tough one. The team at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, USA, was charged with creating a powerful photon microscope that would help scientists conduct research at the atomic level. The final design incorporated 900 custom-built giant magnets that created a concentrated beam of electrons thinner than a human hair—moving at 99 percent of the speed of light.

Completing that kind of paradigm-shifting, game-changing, mind-blowingly disruptive project took some serious project management.

“A disciplined approach to project management was part of the vision we shared with [project sponsor], the U.S. Department of Energy,” Mr. Dierker said at PMI’s Professional Awards Gala in San Diego, California, USA.

The payoff for all that hard work and discipline? The team closed the US$912 million project ahead of schedule and under budget—and delivered an additional US$68 million in scope enhancements not included in the baseline. (Get a look inside the project with this video and the cover story of PM Network^® in October.)

Still, winning this award was no cakewalk. The Brookhaven team had some worthy competitors—with their own disruptive projects:

Guaíba 2 Pulp Mill Project, Guaíba, Brazil: A US$2.4 billion project nearly quadrupled the production capacity of the Celulose Riograndense pulp mill—while leading the way on social and environmental responsibility.

To make the factory energy self-sufficient, the company designed a system that would generate all required electricity through its own production processes. Celulose Riograndense also spent US$50 million on local roads and infrastructure, created more than 9,429 jobs and offered more than 230,000 hours of training courses that allowed locals to develop specialized skills. Check out the video to learn more about the project.

Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital, Brisbane, Australia:

When public enquiries found the local pediatric healthcare system was putting children with complicated medical problems at risk, the government of Queensland, Australia took action. To reduce mortality rates—and make it easier for patients to meet with the state’s limited number of specialists—Queensland Health launched a project to consolidate and centralize pediatric services.

Putting the focus squarely on sick kids, the Aurecon project team created a collaborating project environment and followed a formal benefits management process. Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital now provides an integrated facility that puts families at the center of its operations, while also reducing redundancy across the healthcare system. Check out the project video to learn more.

For more on finalists, look for in-depth feature stories in upcoming issues of PM Network^®.

Keynoter Mark Stevenson closed PMI^® Global Congress—EMEA on Wednesday.

By Cyndee Miller

Everyone says they won’t get old and stuck in their ways. And then it happens. Habits and assumptions calcify until all change seems either utterly pointless or just stupid. To battle that instinct for the status quo so deeply embedded in my DNA, I must fight the good fight. Yup, I literally force myself to try new music even when I’m absolutely convinced I’ll hate it. And so it came to be that Beyoncé now lives happily next to Nick Cave and Junior Kimbrough in my iTunes.

Author and futurist Mark Stevenson has a fancy term for it: engineered serendipity. The idea is to smash your mind into new shapes and truly embrace divergent thinking, aka new ideas.

That means tossing out cynicism. “You think it’s wisdom — actually, it’s laziness,” he said in his closing congress keynote. “Because if the person with the new idea is right, you’re going to have to change the way you think.”

Given Mr. Stevenson’s whirlwind-but-vivid tour of the future — 3D printing! blockchains! solar-powered smartphones! — we’re all in for some serious change.

“If you thought the digital revolution was a big deal, well, strap yourself in.”

For those of us who have trouble with straps, Mr. Stevenson helpfully offered up some tips. There was the idea of valuing evidence over ideology, or as he so eloquently put it: “Think like an engineer, not a politician.”

He also suggested actually doing what you think about. Stop procrastinating, no more excuses: “You are what you do—not what you intend to do,” he said. So, um, I guess I’ll have to book that safari in Namibia, hit the gym more than twice a month and master Snapchat like all the cool kids.

Living at the border of strategy and results, project managers have loads to look forward to, Mr. Stevenson said. “You’re the people who take us from the world we’ve got, to the world we want.” He pushed attendees to “engage in projects bigger than you.” 

Not a bad thought to close out my congress coverage. Adios, Barcelona — and ciao Roma. Ci vediamo là for next year’s congress on 1-3 May.

Simon Moores hosts the salon Tuesday in Barcelona, Spain.

By Cyndee Miller

Had I been around in 17^th century France, I would’ve been a big fan of the salon. Hanging out in ultra-posh dresses, talking about politics and books — it sounds lovely. (And I’m thinking there was champagne and macaroons involved?)

On Tuesday at congress, PMI put a 21^st century spin on the notion with a salon dedicated to “game changers for the project, program and portfolio management professional.” With the audience firing off questions via Twitter, it was a free-ranging discussion on artificial intelligence (AI), big data, machine learning and all sorts of tech buzzwords that could define the future of business.

Some big questions come to mind — like will the machines take over? Or, on a more optimistic note, can technology actually improve our lives?

The project, program and portfolio community has plenty to gain, said salon panelist Luis Miguel Munoz of Thomson Reuters in Madrid, Spain. “In project management, I see AI helping us in activities with planning—predictions and forecasts.”

Fellow salon participant Joanna Newman of Vodafone in Swindon, England, has a dream that all project managers can get behind. She imagined a world where teams could plug in a deliverable and a few key criteria, and software would spit out cost and schedule details. Sighs were heard around the conference hall.

It’s not about replacing people with machines—it’s about allowing project managers to focus on higher-value work, she said.

“We need to move away from a focus on the how—work breakdown structures and project plans—and move to leading and delivering solutions, which is what each and every one of us does, every day,” said Ms. Newman.

Think of it as a symbiotic relationship. “It’s all about collaboration between what machines can do and humans can do,” said salonnier Anael Ndosa, with PwC in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. But fear not, my project management friends: “Projects are always going to be about people.” 

And people are always going to be, well, people. That, in part, means inevitable conflict. Everyone on stage seemed to agree that big data can support decision-making and AI could help automate mundane tasks. But when it comes to problems with stakeholders, sponsors or team members, there’s no substitute for humanity.

Take that, Siri.

Still, a machine-powered future is on the horizon, and “we have to be imaginative and forward-thinking in the way that we deal with technologies,” said tech futurist and salon host Simon Moores.

And with that, the salon broke up — and I went off to discuss AI over a nice glass of cava. But the conversation will continue on 8 June in a webinar with Mr. Moores.

Unless the machines take over …