Voices on Project Management

By Wanda Curlee

Portfolio management is slowly being adopted by corporations. Or is it? I am speaking from my perspective, which admittedly is narrow, but I wonder if company leadership has what it takes.

I have worked at different organizations—from retail and legal to medical and government—and they all say yes, they are ready to do the hard work. But when you try to start developing requirements or even do a gap analysis, there are many reasons why it doesn’t happen: leadership is not in sync, resources aren’t available or there’s not an appetite for change. Or even worse, there is only one person who champions the cause, and he or she does not have the political momentum to push the effort.

The pushback can be major or minor. Leadership might say they had no idea you would need their people to develop the processes, templates and tools. Or leadership might ask if the company can just get a tool instead? There are solutions to all of these points, but leadership may not want to hear them.

So, how do you get over these hurdles?

For some, it’s a matter of providing training and knowledge. Leadership may truly have no idea what portfolio management is. In their eyes, it’s simply knowing what all the projects are in their area. That is one aspect, but there are several steps before you even get to that spot.

For instance, will you look at all projects in the organization, or only those of a certain budgetary value or length? Perhaps a combination of both?

Then there is the question of how to slice and dice the projects.

To slice and dice, you need to understand how to relate projects to strategy. Does your organization meet several of the corporate strategies or only one? If you have a project that is not allocated against a corporate strategy or sub-strategy, then why are you doing it? It’s taking resources and budget away from projects that do have strategic value. Even operational projects, such as upgrading software to a new version or implementing new enterprise software, need to map to a strategy.

For example, imagine your company has a strategy to increase sales by 20 percent in three years. The current sales tool has received well-deserved criticisms, and the tool is too small for the current sales volume. Implementing a new sales tool probably makes sense. However, the new tool would require the company to be running the latest version of operating software. The portfolio manager would recognize this, along with IT, and the portfolio manager would argue the case that these are interrelated. The opportunity exists here to make these two software projects and all the peripheral workstreams, such as training, into a program.

Do you have what it takes to push portfolio management forward? Or will you just succumb to pushback?

Don’t be afraid to speak up. If project portfolio managers don’t advocate for the correct way to do project portfolio management, organizations will suffer in the long run. The wrong way to do something is expensive and not beneficial.

Don’t let your company fall into that trap.

What experiences have you had when pushing portfolio management forward? Please share below.

By Christian Bisson, PMP

I recently had the privilege to participate in the 9th Montreal agile coach gathering. Along with meeting great people and having a chance to exchange ideas with them, I had the opportunity to learn about “liberating structures”, a concept developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless.

Liberating structures are 33 alternative structures for facilitating meetings, work sessions or retrospectives. Unlike conventional structures, such as status reports or presentations, liberating structures are meant to distribute control of the conversation so that all participants are part of shaping direction. This ultimately helps everyone work together while feeling more in control. According to Lipmanowicz and McCandless, conventional structures are either too inhibiting or too loose and disorganzed to achieve this.

Within your organization, liberating structures can be used to organize and facilitate work sessions, retrospectives or other types of meetings. These structures range from simple and fast exercises to those suited for more structured and longer meetings, giving a diversified toolset for various circumstances.

One evening during the 9th Montreal agile coach gathering, everyone gathered into small teams, picked one of the liberating structures randomly, and took 25 minutes to understand and discuss it with the objective of presenting it to everyone else afterward within a three-minute timebox.

Our team picked “critical uncertainties”, which makes you focus on essential and uncertain realities, and then plan strategies according to different possible futures. Among brainstormed ideas, you need to identify the most robust strategies (i.e., the ones that would work with the most possible futures). You can then plan action items based on what was discussed.

Another one that caught my interest is “1-2-4-all.” It is simple and can be used in so many circumstances, yet it is efficient to help a group of people (small or large) communicate and share great ideas.

For anyone out there who is a fan of liberating structures, I’m curious to find out which ones you used, in what context, and how was the result. Please share and discuss!

By Dave Wakeman

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal branding lately. When I consider how it applies to the world of project management, I come around to the idea that maybe we haven’t put enough emphasis on it.          

Why? Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret.

Are you ready? You sure?

Not all project managers are created equal! 

This might not be a surprise. But if I ask you to step back and think about how you position yourself t, are you doing enough to differentiate yourself from others around you? 

This is important because differentiation can be the difference between working on awesome projects or not. 

So, how do you differentiate yourself as a project manager? Here are a few ideas.         

1. Focus on the outcomes you have produced.

Most of the time we think about spec, am I right? Unfortunately, that doesn’t do us the most good because just doing our job often isn’t enough to stand out from the competition. We need to know how delivering spec or going beyond spec leads to improved business outcomes for our organization, our partners, our team. 

Just think about the ways your work made your business money, saved money or sped up a project. All of those can be expressed as outcomes that will make you stand out in comparison to others. 

To turbocharge a focus on outcomes, answer the all-important question: “Why did my work matter?” 

2. Emphasize and highlight opportunities created and risks protected against.

Risk mitigation is a core skill of every project manager, or it should be. On the other hand, how often do we think about our ability to create opportunities? 

Here’s how you can put your opportunity creation into words that highlight your importance and differentiate you from other project managers. Focus once again on the outcomes and the way the opportunities repositioned your organization or your partners. Maybe you saved a lot of money due to spotting an opportunity to streamline a process.

It could be that you recognized an opportunity to add to a current project in a way that was impactful for your partners and created new revenue. The “how” isn’t so important—focus on how you are impacting the projects you work on or investigate by your PM skills. 

3. Toot your own horn.

Humility seems like a high calling. It may have been in the past, but in today’s world—where everyone is sharing their best life on social media—humility is a career defeater. 

When I first started out as a consultant a number of years ago, I had the same feeling…people will buy from me due to the quality of my work. Wrong! You have to tell people how you help them and how you can create value for them. 

You don’t have to be a blowhard to do it well. Just focus on some of the ideas we discussed above, like your ability to generate positive outcomes for your projects and partners. Show the ways that your skills have increased the profitability of your business. Share some ideas that you have developed through your experience that can help other people do their jobs better. 

The most important thing is to make certain you are letting people know that you are not just a project manager, but an excellent project manager who focuses on the right things and gets results. That’s really all differentiation is. 

How have you differentiated yourself? Please share your experiences below.

by Cyndee Miller

There’s no denying the buzz around gender diversity and parity in the workplace over the last couple of years. Last May, when PM Network ran a cover story about the state of women in project management, we saw the issue taking on an “extraordinary and undeniable urgency, with demands for gender equality rising to a roar heard around the world.” From Washington, D.C., USA to Sydney, Australia, millions of people marched for the cause. In Spain alone, more than 5 million workers took part in a “feminist strike." And it looks this year will be the same.

So after all the protests, after all the articles about equal pay in the workplace, after all the calls for female representation in the C-suite, how is it that the world has made so little progress?

Indeed, by some measures, we’ve even slid back: Last year, proportionately fewer women participated in the labor force, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) latest Global Gender Gap Report. And the situation may get even worse in a workplace increasingly driven by rapidly changing technology. Working with LinkedIn, WEF found women represent only 22 percent of the artificial intelligence (AI) workforce and that they’re less likely to be in senior roles or signal expertise in high-profile, emerging AI skills.

At the current rate of change, WEF predicts it will take 202 years to achieve economic parity. Two centuries? That’s spectacularly depressing.

In some ways, the project management profession may serve as a blueprint for achieving greater workforce inclusivity. Women are now a fixture in the profession, often leading prominent or priority projects. Check out that picture above. Those are just some of the powerful female project and program managers featured in PM Network in the past year alone. These women delivered results, from rebuilding a veterans’ healthcare facility decimated by Hurricane Katrina to testing a viticulture robot on an Italian winery. They got it done. They made strategy a reality.

The project management profession isn’t perfect, though. As in many other fields, wage disparities persist. There’s an approximately US$11,000 gap between average male and female project manager salaries in the United States, according to the latest edition of PMI’s Earning Power: Project Management Salary Survey. China follows a similar pattern: CNY220,036 for men versus CNY193,502 for women, on average.

So what needs to change? A big part of the problem comes down to actually recognizing there’s a problem. PMI 2019 Pulse of the Profession data show 65 percent of male respondents say women face “no major obstacles” in project management today. Only 39 percent of women agreed with that.

The blinders have to come off if organizations are going to attract the best project talent and capitalize on the full value women bring to the management ranks. And that’s going to take some real effort.

“Diversity, gender equality, it’s not something that changes overnight—because people’s opinions don’t change overnight, unfortunately,” says Kush Dhillon, engagement manager at Capgemini in London, England. “It’s a learning process.”

It’s also a process that must be fully supported by senior leaders committed to making it an ongoing conversation.

“And through that, I absolutely fundamentally believe—and it’s been proven—that the business will do better, the people in your business will be happier,” she says.

Ms. Dhillon is part of the upcoming episode, “Empowering Women and Girls” on Projectified™ With PMI. I got a sneak preview and strongly recommend you download it next Wednesday (13 March). After all, the discussion should go on long after we mark International Women’s Day today. (And while you’re at it, you should also check out “Women in Project Leadership — Gaining Ground” from last June.) You can also head over to fellow Voices blogger Jen Skrabak, PfMP, PMP, who recently took a look at three cognitive biases holding women back.

Get this right and the effects would be massive. According to the Women in Work Index 2019 from PwC, if Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries matched their female workforces to that of Sweden—which has a 69 percent female employment rate—the total GDP boost could be as much as US$6 trillion.

In the meantime, the reporter in me wants to hear about your experiences. Do women in project management still face significant obstacles? Are you seeing improvement?

By Jen Skrabak, PMP, PfMP

Over nearly two decades in project management, I’ve learned a number of strategies to make my voice heard and advance in my career. Much of that success has come by “leaning in,” as Sheryl Sandberg advocates.

As a woman in project management, I believe the following are key:

1. Show grit. Demonstrate courage, show your perseverance and never give up in the face of obstacles. Know that it’s a multi-year journey, and you must demonstrate the passion to achieve your long-term goals as a leader in project management.
2. Be the best. Knowledge, skills, abilities—you need to consistently demonstrate that you’re the best, and not be afraid to speak up and show it. Throughout my career, I have always assessed gaps in my knowledge or experience, and actively worked to close them. For example, although I started in IT, I wanted to transition to the business side to lead business transformation programs. I actively sought out progressive assignments by building a track record of successful projects that became larger in scope and team size with each project, until I achieved my goal of an enterprise-wide program impacting hundreds of thousands of users.
3. Execute flawlessly. Execution is an art, not a science, and it requires creativity, impeccable organization, exceptional communication and most of all, follow-through. Many of these skills are intuitive in women, and the key is to understand that execution requires the leadership of large teams through four stages:
   1. Awareness: Create the right “buzz” around the project.
   2. Understanding: Teams need to understand their role and how their actions fit into the larger picture.
   3. Acceptance: Teams need to accept the message or change by changing their behavior and taking the appropriate action.
   4. Commitment: To demonstrate true commitment, teams should help champion the message throughout the organization.
4. Build confidence and trust. Multiple studies support the notion that women are not only better at assessing risk, they are also better at guiding actions and decisions accordingly. Women should use this natural decision-making ability and risk management expertise to build confidence and trust as project leaders.
5. Communicate clearly and concisely. Keep communications rooted in data and facts, not based on subjective information or personal preferences. Women in leadership roles tend to rate themselves lower than men on key attributes such as problem solving, influencing and delegating, and rate themselves higher than men on supporting, consulting and mentoring. How much time are you spending on communicating the right messages and influencing to gain commitment to your viewpoints versus supporting others?

International Women’s Day is March 8, and this year’s theme is #BalanceforBetter. Please share your thoughts on how we celebrate the achievement of women while we continue to strive for balance for women socially, economically and culturally around the world.