Voices on Project Management

During the long duration of the pandemic, each of us had to shift our work/life balance. We had to curate a new workday schedule, perhaps adding more flexibility to support multiple needs between work and family. A changing focus with customer and colleague engagement, repurposing commuting time, tending to family needs, caring for those affected by COVID-19, and supporting relief efforts are just some of the changes we had to adapt to. The pandemic forced each of us to make personal and conscious ethical decisions on the tradeoffs, but most have of us have set into a new work/life balance.

After almost 20 months, the world is deploying COVID-19 vaccines under health authorities like the U.S. FDA and Europe’s EMA, who have expanded access protocol for emergency use. The world is hopefully on a trajectory toward a post-pandemic world. Many organizations have established their return-to-work policies, criteria, and expectations of colleagues. One may observe a continuum of return-to-work guidelines built by organizations as a highly collaborative model focused on high-touch customer experience, an innovation-driven design model, or task-based transactional work. Each organization is calling to us to spend some time back in the office or in front of our stakeholders.

How does this affect us, and what do we do to prepare? Our choices can be to simply go back to a pre-pandemic “normal”; stay in the work-from-home pandemic style; or re-engage in a post-pandemic style. Regarding this last choice, we should consider how to maneuver ourselves into a post-pandemic style while still maintaining the agility of working from home. This disruption to our current way of working creates a sense of stress and anxiety as it asks us to re-engage. One must re-learn and adapt to new behaviors and approaches.

One opportunity to be better prepared may be to create a personal contract for the post-pandemic work world. The contract can be a statement or a list of priorities. Here are some tips that I will use to help make the transition better and reset myself:

1. Revisit what you and your colleagues are professionally devoted toward, and why.
2. Curate the difference of a workday at home versus in the office (or traveling).
3. Coordinate specific dates and times for in-person versus virtual meetings.
4. Make lunch plans with newly hired colleagues.
5. Start a back-to-work focus group to help facilitate colleagues’ transition back.
6. Be clear about your constraints on social distancing, work hours, and time off.
7. Schedule healthy eating times, sleeping and exercise habits, family needs, etc.
8. Identify your new peeves and triggers; be mindful of behavioral changes (from both you and your colleagues).
9. Start a journal and chronicle your path and learnings.
10. Remember: Everyone has a different path—but together we will get through it!

What would your list include to enable a post-pandemic transition back to work?

Individual decision making is fraught with biases and fallacies. In one of my earlier blogs I talked about common fallacies and biases in program management. We can mitigate these biases by using group decision-making techniques, where you encourage participants in a group to brainstorm a solution/decision. Group decision making taps into the collective intelligence of the group and increases the acceptance of the decision by all the group members.

However, group decision making has its own drawbacks. A couple of key drawbacks are:

• Groupthink – A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.
• Possible domination by the most vocal or senior person.

We can avoid these drawbacks by using some facilitating techniques that bring out dissenting opinions and give everyone in the group a chance to present their thoughts/ideas.

Here are three facilitating techniques that we can use to bring out dissenting opinions:

1. Devil’s advocate method – As the name indicates, in this technique we identify one person or a subgroup to act as “devil’s advocate.” One subgroup iden=tifies the solution or decision and corresponding assumptions. This subgroup then presents the decision to the “devil’s advocate” subgroup/person. Responsibility of the devil's advocate subgroup/person is to present a contrarian view and poke holes into the assumptions and the decision/solution. Intent of this facilitating technique is to think through alternate scenarios.
2. Dialectical inquiry method – This is very similar to the devil’s advocate method. The main difference is that in this method, one subgroup is assigned to think through one option and the other subgroup is assigned to think through the opposite option. Both the subgroups then come back and talk about both the options. The team then comes to a final option based on the group discussion. One key thing to remember when using this technique is to ensure there is diversity in terms of gender, experience, personality types etc. when creating the two subgroups.
3. Step-ladder method – In this technique…

• In the first round we ask everyone in the group to come up with their own ideas. 
• In the second round we bring in two people, have them present each others’ ideas and agree on a temporary decision/solution.
• In the third step, the third person presents his/her idea to the first two and the three of them come to a temporary decision/solution.

This continues until everyone has a chance to present their ideas in an unbiased way and their feedback is incorporated into the final decision. This is a time-consuming process, so use this cautiously.

In situations where we end up with more than one decision/solution, we can use objective criteria to converge into a single solution/decision. Here are a couple of frameworks we can use to make rational decisions:

1. Mediating assessment protocol: Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, suggested this approach for making important strategic decisions. In this method, we identify assessments or criteria that are important for analyzing a decision. We then assign individuals to conduct the assessments. Once all the assessments are done independently, the group then makes a collective decision based on individual assessments. Interviews conducted by major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook follow this protocol, wherein there are multiple interview loops like system design, coding and behavioral assessments that are conducted by individual interviewers. A group decision is made on the interview candidate based on these individual assessments.
2. Relative weighting: In this method, we identify a set of criteria that are important in making the decision and assign relative weight for each of those criteria. We evaluate the decisions based on the relative weights of the criteria and pick the one that has the maximum weight. As an example, when we must finalize a list of features to implement, we can assign complexity, feasibility and impact as the criteria—and each of these have relative weights. We then evaluate the features against these criteria.

What are some of the ways in which you have debiased group decisions? Let me know in the comments.

By Christian Bisson

In this article, I refer to “a single point of failure” as the situation when a company utilizes someone with unique expertise/knowledge that no one else has, or is the only one who does a particular task. By having these single points of failure within a team, you risk facing problems if that person becomes unavailable—or even worse, just isn’t part of the team anymore.

Fortunately, there are various ways to mitigate this!

1. Rotate roles within the team

There are several tasks that often fall by default on the scrum master or the “nice guy’s” shoulder. A good example is sharing a screen so everyone can see the backlog for a planning or a refinement session, or sharing the board in a daily scrum (if it’s not physical).

If that person is not there, then the meeting becomes less effective because the logistics (using Jira, screen sharing, etc.) is not necessarily well known by everyone.

By having a rotation system (by random name picking, for example), these tasks are eventually done by everyone and all can be efficient doing it eventually; therefore, the team doesn’t become dependent on a single person to know simple things like updating the story points of a ticket using Jira. 

I once came across a team that couldn’t do its own planning without the scrum master sharing the screen and going step by step with them, and it had been doing it for several months!

2. Conduct knowledge transfer sessions

This can be done in many ways, but I’ve seen a lot of teams planning a weekly knowledge transfer session, where each time someone presents something to the others (a new tool, something they just coded, etc.). Another good way for developers to share knowledge is for them to code pair. That way, the code itself is known by two people instead of just one; throw in peer reviews on top of that and you will be in better shape if someone leaves or is on vacation.

The idea is to avoid having only one person knowing something; always aim for a minimum of two people. If you want to identify gaps, there is always the classic “lottery winner” scenario you can use, which is to keep in mind that it’s possible for someone to win the lottery and therefore become unavailable without notice. Although it might seem unlikely, the idea is to ask yourself: For every member of the team, what would be the impact if that happened?

3. Rotate members among teams

This practice is debated, but I feel it’s a good way to make sure the knowledge is properly spread. The idea here is to have a rotation system of team members among the teams. This practice is questioned by some, who will argue that to be effective, teams need to be stable—and changing it will make it regress to the “forming” stage.

That is indeed important to keep in mind when thinking about how/when the rotation will occur, but in the long run, people will be accustomed to working in all the various teams—and also be knowledgeable in all the different pieces each team takes care of. This gives a much higher flexibility depending on deliverables/vacations/etc., and lowers the risk of losing knowledge on something within the organization.

What tips do you recommend?

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

As I shared in Part 1 of my look at diverse project teams, global projects have become the norm in many industries, and a rich source of performance. Business is done in global English, so in a certain way, that influences the project’s culture. Fortunately, cultural diversity is still present. How do you become more culturally self-aware without falling on the traps of prejudices or wrong assumptions?

Over my career, I’ve been asked the following questions:

• How long have you been living in France?
• Were you hired because you speak Arabic?
• Do you want to improve your French?
• What’s your origin?

These questions may be full of good intentions, but can also sound naïve. How much can we guess from a family name? Family names have histories, and sometimes you inherit a name from past generations with whom you don’t have any links; or you may have typically French names but with foreign origins. For instance, one of my colleagues I've been working with for ages recently told me her mother was Polish. As the last name was French, I wouldn't have guessed it.

More importantly, how do the answers to these questions help you to become culturally more self-aware? Don't they reinforce our biases? (For the record, I was born in France and don’t speak Arabic.)

Here are four ways I’ve experimented to embrace a learning mindset:

1. Set ground rules to ask personal questions

As a global project manager, it is key you discuss the ground rules and values with the team from the onset:

• Show respect and kindness
• Respect boundaries
• Shall we use first names or last names? At the beginning of my career, one British colleague asked me: “What’s your nickname?” I discovered afterward that nicknames are commonly used in some cultures (but not necessarily in France, for instance). With the strong influence of English in business, we tend to use first names and nicknames, but it is better to check.
• Another tricky aspect is the pronunciation of names. Fortunately, some social networks give you the possibility to record your name—though that doesn’t guarantee your name will be pronounced currently. You’ll have to be tolerant and accept deviations.

2. Learn by asking

Include snippets of diversity learning in your day-to-day project activities with small actions; this can also be an indirect way to ask people.

• Talk with colleagues when they have days off to understand what they celebrate (and how)
• Include the main festivals/celebrations/holidays in the project calendar
• Is there an intercultural club that organizes presentations at your workplace? If it doesn’t exist, why don’t you set one up? Or ask one member of your project team to make a short presentation about their countries/workplace as part of a small talk or happy hour session.
• Since the pandemic, I’ve asked project team members to send me pictures of their countries. I display the picture in the “sharing video” tool at the beginning of our conference meeting. It helps us “travel” and ignites curiosity to other realities.
• When I took part in events organized by our British colleagues, I was pleasantly surprised by the diverse questions about cuisine.

Don’t push back if you feel the colleague does not want to talk. Just because the projects are more international doesn’t mean we can ask any question.

3. Learn through intercultural/language courses

For a few years, I’ve taken part in many intercultural courses—although some of my colleagues told me that can be stereotypical. It’s true that if you begin with a course without having had any practice, you might have some prejudices. Going back and forth between practice and theory enables you to take small steps and adjust—and learning will stick.

Learning languages is also my passion. Through this, I could discover a lot. Talking to people in their languages (or learning some words) forges stronger connections.

4. Learn by practicing

Practice makes perfect. Through working with some of my African colleagues, I discovered how their societies are mixed. They have national holidays for Muslims and Christians. They are also comprised of many different ethnicities. For instance, Côte d'Ivoire is represented by more than 60 ethnics. It gives me humility to face my knowledge gaps.

Volunteering is another great way to learn as you go. You can deliver several projects with worldwide peers in a short period.

Global teams raise a set of challenges, but also provide a rich human experience. What other ways do you become more culturally self-aware in your project teams?

Lynda Bourne

To paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton, “A good plan, enthusiastically executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” The objective of this post is to suggest that too much emphasis is placed on developing ‘perfect plans’ that attempt to accurately predict future outcomes (a passive process)—and not enough on using the planning process to proactively influence the project’s future direction.

The thinking behind this proposition comes from American political theorist John H. Schaar, who said: “The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created—created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”[1]

In this frame, project plans become a guide to the pathway you are intending to make rather than a prediction about achieving something already fixed.

Unfortunately, the mathematical and scientific approaches to planning—particularly cost estimating and scheduling—have evolved in a way that implies that the plan is a factual statement of what will happen. This concept is embedded in contracts, law, and expert submissions going back decades. But is this approach the best way of achieving a good outcome? Fighting over what should have happened after it did not happen and allocating blame is not very useful, even in traditional industries.

My suggestion is that we adopt a more agile and adaptive approach to planning focused on engaging all of the important stakeholders. This type of collaboration is far more likely to craft success! Working with people to build a plan they are willing to commit to achieving is far better than telling them what the plan says they have to do. Then working with them to progressively adapt the plan to deal with the unfolding reality on your shared journey towards success is far more likely to optimise the eventual outcome.

The final project objectives of time, costs and outcomes are unlikely to change in most projects, but the pathway you chose to follow towards achieving these objectives is yours to make, adapt and improve along the way. The two key ingredients are building consensus and commitment with the stakeholders (particularly those involved in the work)—and then keeping them engaged. In this scenario, the project plans become a key communication tool and people are held accountable for achieving their commitments.

The analytical aspects of planning are still important, and should be used to support this approach. There is no point in committing to a plan that will deliver failure. What the analysis shows is the scope of the problem to be solved, and the solution is crafted with the project’s stakeholders. The trade-offs and challenges of project management don’t change; the difference is moving from a paradigm where the project manager tries to make people work to the plan, to one where the project manager leads the team in planning to achieve the project objectives and outcomes.

How flexible is the planning on your project?

[1] Legitimacy in the Modern State (ed. Transaction Publishers, 1981) - ISBN: 9781412827485