Voices on Project Management

Innovation is a natural skill in human beings—that’s how we moved from the Stone Age to the Space Age. The corporate world, however, seems like it’s in a different universe, where everyone wants innovation but appears to be racing to kill it. Here are a few easy-to-use tricks for you to join the race.

1. Focus on the quarter

Make sure you’re not allowing your team to think beyond a quarter. Quarterly results are dear to CEOs. So only focus on the next quarterly result and make sure everyone on your team does too.  

2. Be Impatient

Patience is a weapon of lethargic people. You should never allow it to develop in your team. Any project or idea that takes time to materialize should not be your cup of tea. Let your team members continue to focus on your short-term goals.

3. Keep the team busy

You should be a very strict taskmaster. Check what time your team comes in and leaves for the day, and all the activities they do in between to ensure they are continuously busy in day-to-day activities. Keep their task list overflowing so that no room is left for any free time or “blue sky” thinking.

4. Maintain order

You should lay down strict processes and not allow any deviation at any cost. Teams must follow the process even if it is not required. You never know how a simple deviation could turn out to be an innovation. Explain to your team that doing things differently is the job of other teams!

5. Stay safe

Just in case the above suggestions do not impress you enough, and some little spark in the corner of your heart wants to allow a deviation, let me warn you—they all are full of risks. Risks mean uncertainty that can put your project in trouble or jeopardize your dearest short-term goals. They can even hit your reputation of consistently delivering linear results. You should play it safe by taking the routine paths already proven by others.

6. Don’t listen

Listening will be seriously injurious. If anyone comes to you suggesting a solution to a problem or a new way of doing something, don’t listen. Sometimes, you may be tempted, especially if someone’s sharing success stories. But ignore it all, lest innovation seeps in. If anyone suggests any idea, reject it immediately, giving a very routine reason, such as “it will not work in our project.” You should not give any new reason, otherwise it will appear that you are doing some innovation.

7. Reward only the million-dollar idea

Rewards are precious and should be given to the best of the best people. If a stubborn team member implements a good idea despite all your efforts, immediately point out a flaw in it, ignoring everything else. If this person meets some early-stage failure, that’s an opportunity for you to explain to the team why they should not try new things. Thoughts of rewarding someone should not even occur to you until the idea is recognized by some external agency.

I’m being facetious, of course. My point is that breakthrough innovations are not harder in practice than many seem to think—but our day-to-day responsibilities and deadlines make it hard to step back and change thinking.

What do you think are the most common practices that prevent innovative thinking? How can they be avoided? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.

In recent years, agile approaches have rapidly gained ground in many parts of the world—but not everywhere. Some areas of Asia, including where I live (Taiwan), have generally speaking not yet embraced agile ideas and practices, despite their value and potential in the region. For this reason, I’ve been working to promote the adoption of agile approaches.

What is agile? It means being flexible and able to quickly adapt to unpredictability. Agile approaches are useful where the environment is constantly changing, where requirements are not fixed or where stakeholders face constant uncertainty.

Agile is typically used in software development, but it’s becoming more suitable in any organization facing rapid changes. Developed over 20 years, agile practices focus on customer value and emphasizing collaboration.

My work has involved training Agile Certified Professionals (PMI-ACP)^®, organizing agile communities, promoting agile practices and reporting on the successful use of agile. I have a digital magazine, “PM-Mag ,” with over 100,000 readers across the Chinese-speaking world. Two of the editors have earned the PMI-ACP^® credential.

Through my company, I ‘ve also commissioned reports and articles about the use of agile to generate its acceptance and support. I’ve also taken advantage of other media (such as radio and YouTube videos) to raise awareness of agile in the project management world. And then there are other more novel approaches—like an ACP song played at events and before speeches. I introduced a “Hybrid PM” badge that I award to project managers I see taking up agile ideas.

In the last year alone, I trained 149 PMI-ACPs, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the PMI-ACPs currently working in Taiwan.

It was my honor to win the 2015 Agile Award for Person Who Has Done the Most to Promote Agile. The competition was strong, and I’m very humbled by this recognition.

Currently in their sixth year, The Agile Awards are organized by business management consultancy Yoh to recognize businesses, organizations and individuals who actively promote knowledge of agile, as well as its proper application and development. In the past, the awards have been dominated by Europeans and Americans.

I hope that my recognition will spur more international recognition of agile methods in project management, encouraging the further development of agile in Asia and allowing European professionals to understand agile application and development throughout Asia.

To improve the acceptance of agile even more, I encourage those who have already gained their PMP to learn from agile, especially the concepts of incremental delivery, adding business value and embracing change. These new ways of running businesses can improve the competitiveness of small to medium-sized businesses. The added value is too great to ignore.

by Dave Wakeman

In my posts from the last few months, I’ve been discussing strategy and how you can make yourself a more strategic project manager. A lot of project managers still struggle with this idea.

One source of this struggle seems to be uncertainty about what strategy means in relation to being a project manager and part of a larger organization.

First, let’s start with a simple definition of strategy: a plan of attack designed to achieve a major goal. So where does that apply to project managers? Pretty much everywhere.  Here are three ways you can look at it.

1. Think from the end backward, not from the start forward.

A few months back, I wrote about managing for the right outcomes. And that means starting with the end in mind. In being a strategic project manager, at its simplest, you are really just starting out by planning your project with the end in mind. Considering that we are all supposed to begin our projects with a planning phase, it makes sense to not just plan, but plan with the intention of fitting everything into a commonly focused outcome.

Think about it like this: The planning process is designed to make sure that you have the time and resources available for your project and that you know where you are going. In being strategic, you just need to make sure you always make your decisions with the end in mind.

2. Don’t become wedded to one course of action.

What I’ve seen in working with organizations around the globe is that it’s very easy to become wedded to one course of action. That can’t be your position if you want to work strategically.

When you’re approaching tasks and challenges and the inevitable same old ideas and solutions come up, ask simple questions: “What are our options here?” “Is there a different way of approaching this?”

All you’re looking for is opening up your actions to different avenues for success.

3. Lovingly steal from everything around you.

I’m not advocating a life of crime, but one thing you want to do is start stealing ideas from the businesses around you.

This is important because in too many cases, we become locked into one idea, one way of thinking or ways that projects have always been done. This is especially true in industries that have always been closely associated with project management, like construction and IT.

How should you go about stealing ideas that may be helpful to your projects?

To use a personal example, I found a use for my project management background in politics. In politics, many titles include “strategist” or “manager” or something that elicits the idea of project management and structure. But due to the intense nature and timeframes of a political campaign, most of that planning and structure is quickly tossed out of the window.

In my work in politics, I introduced the role of a traditional project manager and applied that framework to every aspect of the campaign and process. Essentially, I added a layer of change management and monitoring foreign to many in the industry.

Now think about what you can learn from outside your industry. Can you discover a management tactic from a TV show? Or is there a parallel in another industry that gives you a useful piece of insight?

Am I off base or what? Let me know below! 

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]! 

By Marian Haus

About 75-90 percent of a project manager’s time is spent formally or informally communicating, according to PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (aka, PMBOK). No surprise, then, how much communication is linked to project success.

PMI’s latest Pulse of the Profession report, published this month, reveals that up to a third of surveyed project managers identify inadequate or poor communication as a cause of project failure. A Towers Watson survey conducted in 2012 showed that companies emphasizing effective communication practices are 1.7 times more likely to succeed financially than their peers.

So what can project managers and organizations do to improve communication and hence drive success? Here are six good habits.

1. Acknowledge and accept the need for active, clear and transparent communication as a key ingredient for project success.

2. Establish a simple and transparent communication framework. This means agreeing on who communicates what, to whom, when and how. For instance, a team member might communicate the project’s internal and external technical matters (the “what”), while the project manager will communicate the project status (the “what” again) for various audiences (“whom”).

   The communication time frame and frequency (“when”) will depend on the communicated message and the targeted audience. The communication tools (“how”) could range from project status slides delivered via email to status updates exchanged on the project’s internal websites.

3. Invest in communication, presentation and other related soft skills. Above all, the project manager has to be a confident communicator. Strengthening communication skills might be especially required if the project manager grew into the role from a more technical position.

4. Encourage project managers and teams to communicate openly and proactively regardless of whether the message is positive or negative. Especially when things go wrong, communicating issues early and transparently can mean more for the organization than solving the issues itself.

5. Put emphasis on the quality and effectiveness of communications. Communicating frequently and with the appropriate tools is not enough. Effective and high-quality communication means delivering the appropriate message in a simple and articulate manner and to the right stakeholders. For instance, within the project team you might use a detailed and technical communication approach. But when communicating (to management and sponsors), you will have to simplify your message.

6. Last but not least, communication isn’t only about speaking, reporting and asking. Communication also means time spent listening to what others have to say.  

How much time do you estimate you spend communicating? What best practices can you share?

By Peter Tarhanidis            

This month’s theme at projectmanagement.com is ethics.  Project leaders are in a great position to be role models of ethical behavior. They can apply a system of values to drive the whole team’s ethical behavior.

First: What is ethics, exactly? It’s a branch of knowledge exploring the tension between the values one holds and how one acts in terms of right or wrong. This tension creates a complex system of moral principles that a particular group follows, which defines its culture. The complexity stems from how much value each person places on his or her principles, which can lead to conflict with other individuals.

Professional ethics can come from three sources:

1. Your organization. It can share its values and conduct compliance training on acceptable company policy.
2. Regulated industries. These have defined ethical standards to certify organizations.
3. Certifying organizations. These expect certified individuals to comply with the certifying group’s ethical standards.

In project management, project leaders have a great opportunity to be seen as setting ethical leadership in an organization. Those project leaders who can align an organization’s values and integrate PMI’s ethics into each project will increase the team’s ethical behavior. 

PMI defines ethics as the moral principles that govern a person’s or group’s behavior. The values include honesty, responsibility, respect and fairness.

For example, a project leader who uses the PMI^® Code of Ethics to increase a team’s ethical behavior might:

• Create an environment that reviews ethical standards with the project team
• Consider that some individuals bring different systems of moral values that project leaders may need to navigate if they conflict with their own ethics. Conflicting values can include professional organizations’ values as well as financial, legislative, religious, cultural and other values.
• Communicate to the team the approach to be taken to resolve ethical dilemmas.

Please share any other ideas for elevating the ethical standards of project leaders and teams, and/or your own experiences!