Voices on Project Management

By Cyndee Miller

We’ve been mired in the COVID muck for more than a year now. The toll on our physical and mental health can’t be understated, but we’ve also seen how it’s fundamentally altered the world of work. And even as more vaccine shots make their way into more arms, some regions and sectors will continue to feel the effects well into 2021. Yet all that uncertainty doesn’t mean project leaders are lacking job opportunities, especially as companies start to see a light.

When asked about their outlook on the global economy, 76 percent of CEOs said they believe it will improve during the next 12 months, according to PwC. This is big: That’s nearly 20 percentage points greater than the previous record high for optimism. The ManpowerGroup Q2 employment outlook survey echoed the sentiment, with 77 percent of companies expecting to return to pre-pandemic hiring levels by end of the year.

Still, the PM Network 2021 Jobs Report reveals that prospects may vary greatly by region:

Africa: After surviving its worst economic recession in half a century, Africa is projected to recover in 2021, with GDP projected to grow by 3.4 percent, according to the African Development Bank Group. But the tension between managing costs and pushing for innovation and growth can be difficult to navigate for project leaders—and their careers. “You have companies that have strategies for the new normal and related innovation investments,” says Ernesto Spruyt, founder of Tunga.io, a company in Kampala, Uganda dedicated to providing tech jobs to young Africans. “But you also have companies who try to sit it out and wait for things to go back to normal. I think the latter ones, in the end, will not prevail.”

Middle East: The pandemic’s economic toll has been exacerbated by the collapse in the price of oil, wreaking financial havoc. The lingering risks from the coronavirus and low demand for oil is ratcheting up the need for the region to diversify its economy. “The pandemic raises the importance of innovation and R&D,” says Nahlah Alyamani, PMI-RMP, PMP, PgMP, planning lead for the Eastern hub, Health Holding Co., Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Europe: Fears of a so-called third wave of COVID cases across Europe is dousing hope for a return to job market normalcy. While the economic pain varies and hiring may not have fully rebounded, look to jobs in knowledge-intensive sectors, like financial services and telecom. And there’s no denying the mass move to ecommerce. “I have noticed a huge spike for project managers in the digital space because of the pandemic,” says Luiz Andre Dias, PMP, PgMP, head of portfolio management transformation, DWP Digital, Newcastle, England. “Many digital projects have been accelerated and require a larger number of resources.”

United States: It wasn’t pretty: The world’s top economy saw the worst economic contraction in its history during the second quarter of 2020. But by March of this year, the Federal Reserve was predicting GDP would increase 6.5 percent—a sharp jump from the 4.2 percent forecast made just in December. As in so many economies, the project action was driven around companies strengthening their online infrastructure and offerings to meet consumer demand, says John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago. And that means they’re on the prowl for project talent with serious digital chops.

Latin America: One of the last regions to be hit by the pandemic, Latin America is likely to also be one of the last to exit, according to S&P Global. While economic fates vary across the region, a proven track record with managing virtual teams, leading digital transformations or change management can all set candidates apart in an otherwise crowded talent pool, says Gustavo Pastrana, PMP, senior manager in global banking software, Diebold Nixdorf, Mexico City, Mexico.

China: It was the country’s slowest expansion in decades—but it was still the only major economy to grow in 2020. “China’s job market as a whole has basically returned to normal,” said Frank Fu, founder and chairman of Shanghai Changeway Management Consulting Co., Shanghai. Project leaders looking for new opportunities should check out healthcare, insurance and online education.

India: While India’s unemployment surged during the pandemic, numbers are turning around. The country’s growing digital economy is bolstering job opportunities, with online retail and last-mile delivery services seeing an ongoing spike in 2021, and insurance and healthcare maintaining an organic growth in demand. “This is a period of radical change for businesses as new definitions of work, agility and project management emerge,” says Vidhya Abhijith, PMP, a Future 50 leader and co-founder of Codewave Technologies, Bengaluru. “Organizations are embracing a future work environment that looks like a thriving social network, with smaller groups of people connected online and moving ideas into reality.”

With such great flux across sectors and geographic regions, some project leaders are looking for safety and sticking with their current companies. But others are considering new opportunities in a time of massive change.

Project leaders need to examine their personal appetites for risk, says Lindsay Scott, co-founder of Arras People, a U.K. recruiting firm focused on project talent. “People are seeing different pockets of opportunity that wouldn’t have been existing right now if we’d not had this year of a pandemic,” she told Projectified on a jobs outlook episode. “If you’re more inclined to take a few more risks, perhaps now really is the right time.”

How are you balancing risk and opportunity as you map out your 2021 career plan?

by Dave Wakeman

I recently had a chance to chat with Mark Herschberg, author of a great new book, The Career Toolkit. Mark was an interesting person to talk with at this point because his book lays out a few essential skills and ideas that will help us navigate the rest of the pandemic, but also put our careers on a stable trajectory going forward. 

Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Mark:

1. Leadership based on position is less impactful than leadership built on vision.

We’ve all recognized this at some point in time. We see the person with the big job title who doesn’t want to take responsibility and barks out some form of “because I said so.” In Mark’s opinion, the best leaders understand that leadership is a tool, not a position on the org chart. And often the most successful form of leadership is influential leadership: the ability to get people to buy into a vision of a better future that isn’t guaranteed but is worth the effort and the risk of failure. 

One example I fall back on is a quote I learned about while working on a project with EB Research Partnership, an organization focused on finding a cure for epidermolysis bullosa. One of the organization’s co-founders is Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder, and he said the nice thing about having such a big platform as a musician was his ability to shine a light on organizations doing great work. That’s influential leadership—and it’s often a better door to success than just relying on positional authority. 

2. Communication is for the listener, not for you.

When I’m communicating with an audience or a team, I always try to remember that I need to tell people what they need to know, not everything that I know. One effective method for keeping the user in mind is to bullet point the key ideas you’re trying to deliver. At the start of a talk, for example, I lay out the three or so key ideas I’m trying to get across so folks can see that everything I’m leading up to is built on those points. 

3. Negotiation is life.

The way that Mark talks about negotiation reinforces that it’s an essential skill. As people delivering projects, all any of us do is negotiate. But when I was listening to Mark, I realized that we aren’t always labeling it negotiation. 

We might call it meetings. We might call it leadership. We might call it communication. But really, it’s all negotiation: We’re trying to win people over to see things the way that we’ve seen them or in the way we need people to see them. That’s an oversimplification, certainly. But it’s also a good way of thinking about the way we lead our organizations and teams—not through brute force, but through the delicate balance of negotiation. 

Time constraints, limits on our resources, specific skill sets: All of these are things that need to be negotiated to help us arrive at success. 

How do these leadership lessons align with your own experiences?

By Lynda Bourne

Every decision involves making a choice between alternatives, with the project leader picking from a number of options. This selection is influenced by information (albeit sometimes insufficient) and preferences rooted in values and ethics. In these circumstances, the modern trend of risk-based decision-making can be seen as a tautology: Every decision involves uncertainty and therefore incorporates an element of risk.

The worst option is to delay a decision until all of the necessary information is available—and, as a consequence, all of the opportunities have evaporated. So how do you make good decisions? The starting point is to accept there will be uncertainty in all true decisions—and the outcome matters. You have to choose between different options while navigating any number of obstacles ahead of you: incomplete information to support the decision, no clear best path and unknown outcomes of some options. The challenge is to make the best decision in the available timeframe balancing risk and reward. No process can guarantee a good outcome every time, but working through a pragmatic process can help improve outcomes.

Your decision-making process needs to:

• Define the objectives or outcomes you seek. This frames why you need make this decision and what success may look like.
• Consider the risk of each of the alternatives is by assessing the level of uncertainty and the nature of the possible outcomes. Educated guesses are okay.
• Rank the options based on the level of risk exposure and the probability of achieving the required objectives. A weighted decision-making matrix may help, but remember to keep costs and benefits in mind a well.
• Make the decision and move on to implementation.

Getting the weighting right is central to this approach. In some situations, particularly when safety is involved, dull, safe but expensive may be the best choice, particularly if the cost is not particularly significant in the overall project budget. Think about investing in the security layer for any on-line finance or ordering system, for example. In other situations where failure is only going to cause some embarrassment, innovative but risky solutions may be better, particularly if the cost is low. Case in point: No one can predict when a website will become ultra-successful (go viral), but you won’t be successful if you don’t try. Investing US$10,000 in an option that has a 10 percent chance of making US$1 million is a good investment (but prudent managers have plan B ready to roll).

There’s no way to ensure the best decision is made, and often no way of knowing if the decision you’ve taken was the best—you cannot re-run history. But you can measure bad outcomes; the worst decision is no decision. The next-worse option is a late decision. This always costs a lot of money and may result in opportunities being missed. And the next worse option after that are timely decisions based on a wrong premise—usually out of trying to avoid all risk.

If you avoid those pitfalls, you’re likely to be making a well-founded decision. This is the realm of competent managers. But you’ll also need luck on your side to be seen as making a “really good” decision. And for that, you make your own luck, to quote author Ernest Hemmingway. Deciding to make effective decisions is a choice you need to make.

What does your decision-making process look like?

by Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

Pressing into 2021, all of us must consider the skills we each need to lead through the current COVID crisis—and into the future. We all witnessed this pandemic’s damage across our businesses. And in response, many organizations have changed their ambitions and goals.

According to McKinsey, this new era of uncertainty has prompted CEOs to shift their leadership in four ways:

1. Making bold moves and aspiring to greater heights, redirecting resource capacity gained from working remotely toward these initiatives.
2. Taking notice of—and recalibrating—how they and their leaders “show up” and engage staff.
3. Shifting the main tenet of an organization’s purpose from the primacy of the shareholder to stakeholder capitalism.
4. Leaning into the power of peer networks.

While the executives at the top of an organization’s hierarchy quickly shift their mindsets, will leaders across the org chart keep up with business demands?

Here are four ways to be a more effective project leader in the future:

1. Build trust. Ensure your organizational culture leverages behaviors that motivate your colleagues and teams. Lead by example—show you can trust your team by letting junior staff members deliver a presentation to senior leadership, for example. 
2. Support career and talent development opportunities. Adopt new technologies that leverage the future workforce of humans and machines. Allow team members to explore the feasibility of new ideas and the implementation of artificial intelligence initiatives.
3. Learn to lead through complexity and ambiguity and bring others along in that journey as many continue to work remotely. Set a specific time of the day or week when you can be contacted to create the “virtual open door” policy
4. Lead through influencing abilities to more quickly respond to changing business needs. Use your peers and partners to define accountabilities and consensus on activities that can clarify one’s role to empower action.  

What are you doing to be a more effective leader in the future?

I’ve been trying to learn more about good decision-making and recently read Daniel Kahneman’s famous Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s very surprising to see the number of fallacies and biases that cloud our decision-making, with some impacting us more than others. Here are three of the most common fallacies that we encounter in project and program management, along with a few “smartcuts” (smarter way of doing things) to mitigate them. 

1. Planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate the time, costs and risks of future actions, while overestimating the benefits of the same actions
Smartcuts:
•    Conduct a pre-mortem: Think of what could go wrong, work backwards and plan for those scenarios.
•    Use chunking: Break down the project into as small tasks as you and the team can.
•    Try consensus-based estimation: This method uses conversation and convergence to reduce individual cognitive biases—but it’s time-consuming. To strike a balance, I’d recommend using it only for complex features or projects in which there’s not much leeway in delivery time.
•    Add buffer: This decision depends on a lot of factors: type of project, whether there’s a need to have a definite deadline, complexity, dependencies etc. At a basic level, if you’ve been working with the team and have a history of how much the estimates are off by, you can plan to add that much buffer. If it’s a new team, and you don’t have any idea, look for similar projects use that data to gauge the buffer.

2. Sunk cost fallacy: an increased propensity to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort or time has been made 
Smartcuts:
•    Don’t just think about the time/money already spent. Instead, think of how much additional time/money is needed and if continuing the project will be a worthwhile investment.
•    Companies can help employees overcome loss aversion by putting greater values on gains and less penalties for losses. While this is something that happens at the enterprise level and might not be in our sphere of influence, you can influence it at a program and project level when framing wins and losses. For example, instead of saying, “We were over budget by 10 percent,” try framing it as, “We were within +10 percent of our initial estimates.”
•    Avoid perpetuating the stigma that stopping a project is a failure. Instead frame it as a lesson learned and incentivize people to make such decisions in the projects and programs they manage.
•    Consider opportunity costs. By sticking to the original plan, think of all the projects you’re giving up.

3. Status quo bias: sticking with the option you’re given even though the alternatives might be better
Smartcuts:
•    When you propose any change, be very clear and intentional about why you’re proposing it. Explain the problem statement you’re trying to solve and then detail the pros and cons of status quo versus the change.
•    Evaluate the opportunity cost of making the change versus sticking with the status quo.

While it’s not possible to eliminate all biases and fallacies, being cognizant of them and recognizing them will guide us in making better decisions.

What are some of the fallacies and biases you’ve held onto and how have you overcome them?

Here is a link to the unabridged version of this post.