Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

Uncertainty feels like the main topic in a lot of my conversations lately. With economic signals being mixed, layoffs coming rapidly and a lot of political friction happening around the world, it’s easy to understand why.

This got me thinking about some of the lessons I’ve learned throughout my career that have helped me deal with uncertainty. These four keys have helped me repeatedly, and maybe they can help you as well:

1. Communicate, but don’t BS: I always start here because when there is a lot of uncertainty, people are searching for information, facts and…well, certainty. Yet you often have none to give them.

The default action I see in many leaders is that they vomit out a buzzword-filled nothingburger that leaves their teams more uncertain and more fearful.

A better way to approach your communication is to be as clear as possible. By this I mean: Tell people what you know or don’t know.

If you don’t know anything, say it.

If you know there is going to be an update in a week or so, say that.

Don’t make up things to fill the time or space. In your efforts to give your team something, you may feed the uncertainty. Or worse, you may be flat out wrong.

2. Be flexible: This is a good rule for PMs in any environment. There’s usually never one straight line to success. In an uncertain environment, this is probably even more true.

Uncertainty demands flexibility because you don’t know when something is going to pop up and throw you off course. This could take the form of a change in scope. Or you might find that your project is shut down. There could be team members moved, fired or quitting.

All of these demand a certain amount of flexibility in service of your goals.

3. Simplify: A partner to flexibility is simplification. Complexity seems to be the norm in modern life, and when things are uncertain, we likely find ourselves adding complexity as a tool to help keep our minds off of the challenges we are dealing with.

A better way forward is to simplify your work, your procedures and your communications. In truth, simplify things every chance you get. There is psychological relief in knowing you are in control of the things that you can control.

Jimmy Johnson, the former coach of the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins, talked about telling his partner that he could sleep like a baby the night before a game because he knew he had done everything he could to prepare for it. That’s really about simplification.

You make things as simple as they can be to make sure that you are doing everything you can do to be successful.

4. Progress, not perfection: An uncertain environment might make that little voice in the back of your head scream, “Everything has to be perfect!”

There is no such thing as perfection. You need to get your head wrapped around the need to make progress and not get lost chasing perfection. Why?

1. There is no such thing as perfection.
2. If you just focus on improvement and value, you’ll be surprised how much you get done. Plus, you’ll find that sense of peace we talked about above when you simplify the job you are doing.
3. Progress is something you can measure. With measurement, you can create momentum and you can see the impact you are making—which helps remove some of the feeling of uncertainty.

As I put this list together, I realized that these ideas hold up in any environment. But it reminded me of a saying I heard somewhere about a crisis showing us who we really are. Maybe that’s what this is all about, using the period of uncertainty to show off who you really are as a leader: focused and effective.

Let me know what you do when dealing with uncertainty in the comments section.

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

Never has the new year’s greeting “wishing you health, wealth, and prosperity” rang truer. Over the last several years, we have all lived through uncertainty. This year, we hoped to lurch out of a post-pandemic crisis into a new normal with a vibrant outlook…yet quickly staggered into a slipping economic uncertainty that sharply cut short the prospects of our envisioned “normal” state.

JP Morgan’s 2023 economic outlook for the United States indicates a slowing growth rate, monetary tightening, and curbing inflation, while healthy consumer and business balance sheets could offer some growth prospects. The Conference Board observes longer-term geopolitical, environmental, labor, and inflation risks beyond 2023.

Many organizations will ebb and flow within this shifting cycle. Organizations that are well-positioned will have a better chance to adapt to the external challenges of shifting global markets to meet customer needs. They must simultaneously find the agility necessary to mitigate the internal challenges of a reduced workforce, increasing costs for goods and services, climbing interest rates, and the overall health of a company’s finances and workforce. This will challenge organizations to stay focused and chart a path forward.

This is reminiscent of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of the Endurance, which embarked on a daring expedition from the UK to Antarctica and the South Pole in 1914. Along the voyage, the crew became stranded for over two years. The Endurance became trapped in the ice while the crew waited 10 months for spring and the warm weather to thaw them out—only to be horrified by shifting ice that damaged the ship’s frame, finally sinking her.

To survive, Shackleton mounted three lifeboats to traverse 800 miles of open sea to reach help on South Georgia Island—then return to the makeshift camp to rescue all 27 men who suffered frigid conditions, hunger, chaotic seas, and mental distress. This journey is one of the greatest examples of leadership, grit, and epic survival.

In order not to succumb to the current economic and global undertones, leaders must:

1. Assess their strategies continuously to re-align with stakeholder needs
2. Rely on project leaders who are best positioned to navigate this process

Project leaders have always been confronted with the likelihood of project failure—yet they have developed a track record of delivering results. Project leaders are adept at converting strategies into clear tactics, ensuring team and stakeholder alignment, and executing projects to achieve the goals. At the core of the project leader’s success are the character attributes of authenticity, trust, resilience, focus, and courage.

What else can you do to support your teams and move forward during this year’s challenges?

By Soma Bhattacharya

When it comes to working on larger projects that combine multiple teams spread across locations with a tight timeline, formalizing a triad is one of the easiest ways to streamline the process. While working with everyone is required in all projects, a triad can help you and your team irrespective of the role you play in the project.

The simplest things create the most impact. A triad involves bringing together the product, UX and development teams. You can change the composition of your triad based on your project and invite various functions to the core team.

Once that’s finalized, the triad is responsible for the project moving forward in a timely manner. It adds accountability at all levels and requires unanimous decision making, thus removing uncertainty and the multiple approvals that often lead to a back-and-forth dialogue.

When done at all levels, decision making in a triad takes care of strategic, tactical and operational issues for the project. To ensure that the triad is efficient at all levels (from planning to implementation), it can be created at multiple levels (from governance bodies to scrum teams). This ensures the right group is involved with making decisions.

Here are few ways to involve the triad throughout the release:

1. Release/Big Room planning: The goal is to ensure that the triad is available at all levels for planning. This ensures that all requirements and risks are covered and ready while we initiate the project and continue with planning. For quarterly planning, triad leadership is involved to ensure requirements for the upcoming quarter are discussed beforehand—and everyone comes ready with the work done for the teams to start pulling in features and stories for the quarter.
2. Discovery calls: These calls can help the triad come together to plan for the upcoming quarter. They can be attended by the leadership triad as well because it involves decision making on prioritizing and reviewing features like design and architecture.
3. Team meetings: Ensuring the triad is available at the team level keeps everyone onboard and prevents unwelcome surprises. This involves the scrum team-level triad and leads to better acceptance and demos because the triad is constantly working and reviewing things together—and not waiting on last-second feedback or blockers that need discussion or escalation. These include anything from design reviews to regular standups.
4. Retrospectives: These provide a good way to understand the pain points from everyone—and start working on them through the sprints, especially when you are constantly learning and innovating as a team (whether it’s the process or technology).

Of course, there are problems that can happen throughout, but the triad allows everyone not to just function as a team, but also feel like a team. And as we all know, happier teams can better resolve complex problems.

Do you think a triad can help your teams?

by Christian Bisson

In a complex world where we strive to improve, there is one trending weakness that I’ve seen amongst many teams and organizations—they measure little to nothing, and make decisions based on “gut feeling.”

Having key metrics is a powerful tool to identify areas to improve, and not just for weak points—you want to recognize strong points as well so that you can continue them. Here are a few examples…

Value

How many times have you seen teams happy to deliver something—only to have absolutely no idea what value was ultimately gained from that delivery? There are a few ways you can be blind to the value being delivered (or not delivered):

• Not knowing how many users actually used a new feature (maybe none?)

• Was anything gained out of it? (Money? New hires or better retention?)

• What was the actual cost compared to the gain?

All too often, people waste money when they could focus their resources elsewhere if they measured the return on investment (ROI) and adapted accordingly.

Delivery predictability

What will be delivered, and when? Every organization faces a challenge to know this. And all too often, typical random delivery dates are given to stakeholders—and forced on teams. This in turn hurts the quality of the deliverable (not to mention the very small odds that the dates are even being respected).

By measuring on a small scale (like a team’s velocity throughout sprints) or a larger scale (like being familiar with SAFe and its “product increments”), you can compare results to actual data to make more reliable predictions (at the end of the day, it is still a guess).

Product backlog health

Throughout the years, I’ve seen many backlogs, from small to gigantic. And I rarely see any of them being measured to make sure they’re actually healthy.

The definition of “healthy” varies, but in this case let’s assume it means that the backlog is an ordered/usable artefact that teams can rely on to know what to work on next to bring value to stakeholders.

Here are a few things that can be measured:

• How many items are ready to be used by the team (i.e., refined)?

  • Is it too much? Too little?

• How many total items are there in the backlog? (If there are too many, it becomes clutter.)

• How much time do items spend in the backlog before they get started? (I’ve seen items rot in backlogs for years, never getting done,)

Conclusion

There are so many things that can be measured and used to properly align next steps—and they require the proper tools to do it efficiently. You want to spend as little time as possible getting the data and results that you need, and utilize reliable “live” information (with little cost to get it).

What will you be measuring in 2023? What do you think your blind spots are?

by Dave Wakeman

I was going through my portfolio recently and came across the original notes from the very first piece I wrote for PMI back in 2012.

Egad!

I then noticed that I started writing for Voices in January 2013 after I left the world of political consulting and got my PMP. (Yay for needing credits for continuing education!)

All of that made me think about the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years. As a way of celebrating our time together, here are the 10 most important things I’ve learned writing this monthly piece for PMI and ProjectManagement.com:

1. Communication is an evergreen topic. I could probably write a piece on communication every month. The key to effective communication is to listen and to try and find the hidden meaning.
2. Tech comes and goes, but the process remains. I have learned over and over again that the most important thing I can do is be process oriented because the tech and tools change rapidly, but the skills of leadership are consistent.
3. You can learn PM lessons from anyone. I’ve written about the kids I coach, Nick Saban and many other topics over the years. The key idea has been that everyone uses project management skills to achieve their goals. Good PM skills aren’t specific to one industry or area.
4. Teaching is the ultimate learning lab. Coming up with a topic to teach and figuring out how to explain it helps me really understand what I think about project management. This lesson has popped up in other locations as well, making it certain that being a teacher is the ultimate learning lesson.
5. PM skills can work for anyone. Just like I’ve learned from everyone, I’ve also seen PM skills used everywhere. I shared my experiences of good project management in political campaigns, sports teams, and when my son does his homework. We are all project managers, even if we don’t realize it.
6. Focus on service, not on “leading.” I get a lot of interesting notes and comments about how people “lead,” and I’ve found that the people that focus on “leading” are typically the ones struggling the most. For me, the lesson has come down to focusing on being of service to the team and the project. The leading will take care of itself.
7. The best PMs have a light touch. This builds on service. By a “light touch,” I mean that the best PMs don’t try to overmanage or control over decision. They insert themselves when necessary—and get out of the way when necessary.
8. You can’t be an expert on everything. Especially as there is more and more specialization, you can’t and won’t know everything—there is too much to know. You have to trust your team.
9. “Let it go!” (Just like the movie Frozen!) Following from the lesson above, you won’t have all the decisions. You won’t know all the tools. You can’t be everywhere at once. You have to give your team instructions, direction and guidance, but the ultimate success of your project isn’t in your hands. So, “Let it go!”
10. Never stop learning. Writing these pieces month after month has reminded me of the most important lesson, one they don’t teach you in college. The key to a long and successful career? Never stop learning. Things are always changing—and you have to change with them.

Thanks for reading my musings on Voices. This has been a cool opportunity to speak with y’all each month, and I look forward to 10 more years of lessons to come. And if you have a favorite PM lesson, leave it in the comments.