Voices on Project Management

by Wanda L. Curlee, PMP, PgMP, PfMP, PMI-RMP

As artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT) and other new diruptive technologies enter the business mainstream, how will this impact project management? And how will it affect your job?

In any business, understanding data is essential. However, there’s so much of it that no one human being can review it all and truly understand the trends and what’s relevant to the project at hand. That means those project managers who embrace these technologies will be lightyears ahead of their peers. And those who do not use these tools will struggle to be of value to the organization.

Back to School

First and foremost, you need to understand these emerging technologies and how they can help you lead and deliver a successful project.

While the project management profession is lagging behind in adopting AI, IoT and other vital technologies, there are myriad ways to increase your knowledge.

Take all the classes your organization offers and find out who knows or leads the areas you want to learn about. Come prepared with questions and suggestions on how AI and other technologies could help projects for the company. Why is this important?

• You can start to assess how to integrate project management tools into the AI system(s).
• You can determine what company data needs to be extracted and analyzed for projects.
• And that leads to becoming more valuable to the company. 

Sell It Through

Even after you become an expert on technologies the company has to help further the success rate of projects, your work isn’t done. This is now your project to move forward. You’ll need to share your learnings and new ideas with trusted individuals because their feedback is essential. At the appropriate time, create an executive white paper and present it to your supervisor and a project management office lead or project portfolio office lead.

Remember, you’re looking for sponsors. If you’re not good at selling your ideas, get help. Ask other leads who don’t have a stake in what you want to sell to help you understand the hot buttons for the various ideas involved with your potential project. If those issues are covered, then your idea becomes easier to follow.

Whether or not your organization buys into your idea, you are now a valued asset. If the idea was rejected, make sure you receive feedback as to why and update your proposal. Then present it again.

Will AI replace you? No. It will be an adjunct. It will help you with decision-making and doing mundane things like chasing individuals to enter their time for the project, updating the schedule, suggesting the best what-if scenario or doing your first draft of a presentation, among other things.

How have you leveraged the benefits of AI?

by Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

We are now in the final quarter of a pandemic year. With many of us still isolated and working remotely as a second wave of COVID-19 emerges, project teams and leaders alike must consider how to close out 2020. Finishing strong together in a pandemic year without burnout is the goal—and it’s a crucial one for our customers, colleagues, families and communities.

But how can we avoid the desire to crawl back into bed until we’re past the pandemic? Let’s take a moment and conduct a check to see if any of us, our colleagues or family exhibit signs of burnout. This may include feelings of being overwhelmed, a lack of passion, emotional exhaustion and falling behind on normal activities. These symptoms all lead to rising irritability, conflicts and visible struggles. 

To cope with the stress and anxiety, we must reverse this cycle. We should re-prioritize ourselves to ensure we take care of our physical, mental and financial health, proactively recognizing our pressures and setting time aside to restore our mindfulness and spend time with family. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, find a strong support network. Taking action to create more balance is restorative and puts leaders in a position to be examples to others in doing the same.

As the end of year nears for me, I recognize finishing strong and limiting burnout involves adapting to pandemic tensions and refining my approach to leadership and project management

Do more:

1. Coaching and mentoring to direct others and yourself to complete the goal
2. Maintaining focus, flexibility and agility to adjust scope plans, milestones and project schedules by working with stakeholders and sponsors
3. Collaborating with teams and staying interconnected while practicing transparency
4. Celebrating and recognizing small and large milestones

Do less:

1. Losing sight of the key priorities and getting caught up with issues of low importance
2. Blaming colleagues for missed targets rather than gaining consensus on how to plan a way forward
3. Taking for granted the effort colleagues have put into their work and not celebrating their efforts
4. Slipping into disorganization instead of maintaining administrative oversight of critical project needs

Your turn: What are some of the best ways to avoid end-of-year burnout for you and your team?

by Cyndee Miller

Resilience: the most in-demand, most talked-about and likely most used super skill of the year. The coronavirus has forced everyone to throw out the playbook and dig deep to forge ahead. My team and I picked up a few lessons learned along the way, but I was ready to hear from some real power players: Olympic Games executive director Christophe Dubi and Olympic champion gymnasts Laurie Hernandez and Nadia Comaneci. Confession: I’m old enough to remember cross-legged in front of the TV watching Comaneci as she scored the perfect 10.0 performance—the first in the history of the games. (Yes, I tried out the pigtails. And yes, there may have been a poster hanging on my bedroom wall for a bit. And yet, I couldn’t even nail a cartwheel.) Fast-forward several decades and here are few tips I picked up from the leaders at the latest PMI Virtual Experience Series: “Going the Distance: Forging Our Path Forward.

It’s about progress, not perfection—even for Comaneci. “Having a good base is very important. Everyone wants to tumble and do those difficult skills, but if you jump from point A to Y, you won’t be able to progress in the right way and you’ll have holes you’ll have to cover.”

And those skills she applied in sports—planning, discipline, flexibility—help in life, too, Comaneci said. For the five-time Olympic gold medalist, preparation is just part of the process. “Gymnastics is not a sport you learn in a month, it takes you years to put all of it together,” she said.

For Hernandez, it comes down to zooming in and zooming out to see the big picture. “It’s about making sure you’re focusing on the details, but also not letting that stop you from moving forward,” she said.

The 20-year-old gymnast knows all about refining details—and persevering. Hernandez competed as a member of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team at the 2016 Summer Olympics, scoring gold in the team event and silver on the balance beam. The rising star was set to make her comeback at the 2020 Tokyo Games—which then had to be rescheduled because of the global pandemic.

It was a tough decision for Dubi and his team: “You’ve made so much effort and you’re so close, but you have to make that call.” The two biggest tasks: recognizing the disappointment and keeping athletes and stakeholders informed.

“There was very little resistance to the decision, actually, because everyone understood the situation,” he said. “People were confined, they had friends with the virus, they were reading about shutdowns in the news. And we had overwhelming support from partner organizations.”

So the project—number 7 on PMI’s 2020 list of Most Influential Projects—continued on, with Dubi keeping the team focused on the essential moving parts, while uniting them around a common goal.

“If you can mobilize energies around the greater good, you can make sure everyone understands the role to be played,” he said. “It’s about what you can create with positive energy, when you can embrace the diverse energy. In the end it’s all hands on deck.” 

While the games have been bumped to 2021, Dubi is looking ahead to what they’ll bring to Tokyo in the future: “The very first question we ask is: What is the legacy plan? Every public investment that goes into it has to be meaningful, not just for the games themselves, but afterward.”

The decision was a bold one—and part of being a leader is having the courage to stick the landing. “When you want to invent something no one has seen before, you get criticism,” said Olympic historian and graphic artist Markus Osterwalder. “When people get something they don’t know, they reject it at first. They need time to get used to it.”

It’s no doubt been a strange and ferociously challenging year, but leaders can’t be complacent.

“The future of work is not five to 10 years out, it’s here now,” said Alison Bakken, of Thomson Reuters. “Leaders need to actually model the behavior they want to see and create an environment that’s trusting and open and where people can grow and develop.”

X0PA AI founder Nina Alag Suri agreed that the new work-from-anywhere mentality is here to stay. And that will put the focus on power skills like self-discipline, time management and collaboration.

If you missed out on the action or you want to check out some #ExperiencePMI moments again, you can find virtual experience content from the full series on demand, now through 31 January.

What do you think? Are you ready to go for the gold in 2021?

by Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

The unforeseen chaos of COVID-19 has changed the way we work, the way we live—and the way we lead. Here are three ways I’ve reinvented my leadership style in such uncertainty:

1. Increased empathy

I’ve worked in a virtual global environment for the past 20 years. Still, this crisis helped me sharpen my skills and I’ve also become a more empathetic leader. 

I’m more understanding as project delays arise. I’m more accepting of small mistakes made by my team in haste. And I’m conditioned to push through work challenges that are outside of my control, like the internet connectivity issues of teammates abroad. I’ve also noticed I’m more sensitive to my tone of voice when I communicate information to remote team members.

2. More thoughtful self-discovery

The external crisis forced me to focus on some questions that may sound philosophical, but chart a path forward:

• What is essential?
• What is meaningful?
• What impact do you want to leave?

It takes time and courage to begin the journey of self-introspection but it’s rewarding. Have you made your leadership self-diagnosis? Try repurposing an agile retrospective tool:

It’s time to take stock. Unlearning habits isn’t so easy, but taking actions now will impact tomorrow.

3. An expanded professional network

The instability of the existing job market reinforces the need to expand your network. For instance, I enrolled in an international professional community to develop marketing skills. I have the opportunity to meet coaches, HR managers, speakers and writers I’m not usually exposed to. I’m optimistic that it will open my eyes to a new learning world.

In what ways have you changed as a leader this year?

by Ramiro Rodrigues

        The baseline is a fundamental concept that still seems confusing for many project professionals. In essence, the baseline comprises initial reference data captured prior to the start of a project. This information allows the team to compare the status before and after a project to determine its impact.

        Imagine you’re at a software development company and your senior leader has put you on a project to develop a system with 10 different but integrated features. You begin by trying to detail the scope, deadline, costs, risks and all other details you believe to be relevant. Once you’ve collected that information, you’ve reached the end of the planning stage

        That’s the moment when the baseline is saved. With this snapshot of information, you know exactly where the project should be at any given moment in its execution. Right after that—when the project execution begins—you start to draw an actual line, which collects and displays data of what’s happening in real time.

        In our example, imagine you were asked to change the planned programming language to something unfamiliar to the team, therefore changing many of the product’s features. In this scenario, our scope’s “actual line,” resources and risks will be quite different from the “baseline” that had not foreseen this change.

        So, what should the project manager do? It wouldn’t be very smart to resist all changes that come up during execution—these types of shifts can be quite normal in projects. In these cases, the best thing to do is to start the planning process over and move forward. Still, the baseline will continue to serve a purpose in helping leaders identify gaps and finding the amount of effort necessary to reach project completion.

         By project conclusion, another great benefit of this resource emerges: You can compare, with consistent data, the planned results versus actual results. Moreover, a comparative review of the baseline could expose weaknesses in leadership or organization. Indeed, baselines help teams capture valuable information for lessons learned and improvements that can be applied on future projects.

         How do you use baselines on your projects?