Voices on Project Management

By Dave Wakeman 

Last month, I wrote about how you can become a more strategic project manager. This month, I want to continue exploring the topic by focusing on a few ways to make sure your projects have strategic focus.

1. Always Ask “Why?”

This is the essential question for any business professional. But I am aware that asking the question can be extremely difficult—especially in the organizations that need that question asked the most.

Asking why you are taking on a project is essential to the project’s success or failure. Using the question can help you frame the role that project plays in the organization’s goals. It can also allow you early on to find out if the project is poorly aligned with the long-term vision.

This can make you look like a champ because you can make course corrections or bring up challenges much earlier, saving you and your organization time and money.

When asking about a project’s strategic value, you may find it helpful to phrase it in less direct ways, such as: “How does this project fit into the work we were doing with our previous project?” or “This seems pretty consistent with the project we worked on several months back—are they connected?”

2. Bring Ideas

As the focal point of knowledge, project managers should know where a project is in meeting its goals and objectives. So if you know a project is losing its strategic focus (and therefore value), generate ideas on how to make course corrections or improve the project based on the information you have.

There is nothing worse than having a team member drop a heap of issues on us with no easy solutions and no ideas on how to move forward. As the leader of your projects, don’t be that person. To help you come up with ideas to move the project toward success and strategic alignment, think along the following lines:

·      If all the resources and effort expended on the project up to the current roadblock were removed from consideration, would it still make sense to move forward with the project?

·      What actions can we take that will help alleviate some of the short-term pain?

·      Knowing what I know now, would I suggest we start or stop this project? Why?

3. Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

On almost any project I work on, more communication is a good idea. This is because the more the lines of communication are open, the more likely I’m to get information that will be helpful to me and my ability to achieve the end results that I’m looking for.

As with most things in project management, communication is a two-way street and loaded with possible pain points and missteps. As a project manager looking to deliver on the strategic promise of your projects, your communications should always be focused on information you can use to take action and move your project along.

To effectively communicate as a strategic project manager, ask questions like these:

·      What do I need to know about a project that will have a material impact on its success or failure?

·      What can I share with my team or stakeholders that might help them understand my decisions?

·      What information does my team need to take better actions?

As you can see, adjusting your vision to become more strategic isn’t too far removed from what it takes to be an effective project manager. The key difference is making sure you understand the “why” of the project. From there, you need to push forward your ideas and to communicate openly and honestly.

What do you think? How do you bring a strategic focus to your projects? 

By the way, I've started a brand new weekly newsletter that focuses on strategy, value, and performance. Make sure you never don't miss it, sign up here or send me an email at [email protected]! 

By: Rex M. Holmlin

Have you ever sat in your office and wondered whether anyone would notice if you disappeared? Whether anyone has noticed work you’ve done recently? At one point or another, practically all of us have felt that way.

One of our most important tasks as project managers is to recognize and reward team members. PMI’s PMBOK Guide acknowledges the importance of doing so by listing recognition and reward of team members as a tool and technique in the Develop Project Team Process section, which is part of the Project Human Resource Knowledge Area.

I teach project management to both undergraduate and graduate business students. When I bring up the topic of team member recognition to MBAs, who typically have several years of work experience, I always find it interesting to note how many of them feel they really can’t recognize people’s contributions.

Even experienced project managers often believe they don’t have the power to recognize or reward their team members. The hang-up seems to be that in many people’s minds, recognition and reward are synonymous with money. Since the authority to give raises typically rests with functional managers, this perspective makes sense.

But in my view it is very, very wrong.

In fact, project managers have a variety of significant tools at our disposal to recognize and reward our team members. The easiest, and perhaps the most powerful, is to thank them for something they have done. Going by someone’s office and thanking them for something specific is phenomenally impactful. Many team members are almost bowled over to discover that someone noticed what they’ve done.

All of us like to be part of something bigger than ourselves, like an exciting project. A certificate recognizing membership on a project team and contribution to the team effort can be very gratifying.

I have been involved with a number of natural disaster recovery efforts. One government agency I have worked with provides project members with 8.5-by-11-inch certificates noting their role in the disaster response and recovery effort. The certificates cost a few pennies, yet as you walk down the hallways you see them in small frames in nearly every office and cubicle.

With the advent of social media, the tools at our disposal for recognition have greatly increased. We can post a thank you to a Facebook page or endorse or recommend someone on LinkedIn. These are easy but meaningful ways to recognize someone.

You could also institute a “Player of the Month” award. Not everyone played sports when they were younger, and you may be surprised to learn how many of your project team members have never felt they were on a team. Being designated as the Player of the Month can sometimes be a life-changing event.

I believe very strongly that recognizing and rewarding team members is central to our role as project managers. If you agree, please share your favorite nonmonetary ways of rewarding team members—or ideas for doing so! I’ll collect them and make them available to our readers.

How to Make the Jump From PM to Delivery Lead

By Kevin Korterud

As project managers, our career paths typically involve increasing levels of delivery responsibility on larger and more complex projects. As we grow, many of us have the opportunity to take on delivery responsibilities that focus more on enablement and orchestration of multiple projects in a program manager role.

Beyond that level of responsibility, there is a need for people capable of overseeing multiple programs that can contain many projects. Concurrent multiprogram/project delivery involves the need for a new set of skills that transcends traditional project and program management competencies.   

In my company, Accenture, people who serve in multiprogram/project delivery roles are called delivery leads. I think of them as “super program managers”—they’re not as high-level as portfolio managers, but they also don’t get caught up in deep project delivery activities.

One of the most frequent questions posed to me is how project and program managers can “graduate” to delivery lead. Here’s some advice I’ve offered in the past to budding delivery leads.

1. Adopt A ‘Big Picture’ Delivery Mindset  

By the nature of what they do, project and program managers immerse themselves in the details around schedule, budget, scope and other project essentials. Their day-to-day roles involve processing a lot of information that enables them to make effective project management decisions.

Delivery leads, on the other hand, need to stand back from program and project management to broadly view the delivery landscape. This perspective gives a delivery lead the ability to see the interconnected delivery “big picture” that enables him or her to take strategic action to keep all programs and projects on track to success.   

2. Don’t Manage Projects, Guide Them   

In the course of typical project duties, effective project and program managers strive to resolve risks and challenges. They spend a significant amount of time reacting to unforeseen situations.

Delivery leads, on the other hand, should resist jumping into specific delivery details and instead focus their efforts on preventing situations that cause project and program managers to spend all of their time reacting to situations.

Delivery leads accomplish this by providing people, budget, tools, processes and assets to project and program managers in advance of their need. In addition, delivery leads also set policies, governance and other forms of delivery guidance that effectively orchestrate the overall delivery process.      

3. Acquire Business Knowledge

Project and program managers invest a large amount of energy and expense in becoming well-versed in practices that enhance their project management skills.

Professional development for delivery leads, on the other hand, assumes a foundational knowledge of project management that needs to be balanced with industry domain knowledge related to the organization’s projects and programs. Delivery leads don’t have to be subject matter experts, but they should be able to communicate effectively with all forms of stakeholders.

For delivery leads, making an investment in business domain knowledge such as supply chain, oil refining, equity trading or other specific industry knowledge enables them to be effective communicators.   

4. Manage for Business Outcomes      

For project or program managers, success most often comes in the form of achieving key project metrics such as schedule variance, budget variance, planned versus actual progress and other key elements of project delivery.

As a delivery lead, the measures of success change dramatically. Effective delivery leads must be able to translate project results into cost savings, increased sales and improved customer satisfaction as well as other measurements that don’t necessarily fall into traditional delivery activities. This shift in success criteria to business outcomes comes about from delivery leads being accountable for the business rationale behind executing projects and programs.     

The journey from project or program manager to delivery lead is best characterized as relieving oneself of common managerial habits in favor of broader leadership activities.

Areas such as governance, orchestrating the schedules of multiple programs, complex resource management and external dependencies become new competencies needed to handle larger delivery responsibilities. In addition, you will also serve as a visible leader to project and program managers who are starting on the same journey.

Does your organization have delivery leads or something like that role? What advice would you offer to help project and program managers who are starting this journey? 

In July 2013, a panda was born at the Taipei Zoo in Taiwan, which was undertaking its first-ever panda breeding project. While the staff was busy looking after the mother, Yuan Yuan, and the cub, Yuan Zhai, they also had another important task: making sure people heard the good news.

This is part of an emerging necessity for conservation efforts—combining public interest in zoos’ work with information on what still threatens the survival of species in the wild. In the past three years, the Taipei city government and the Taipei Zoo have been mastering this skill.

The tasks of caring for the pandas and promoting conservation required a skill set that might sound surprisingly familiar to project practitioners: planning, risk management, problem-solving, stakeholder management and multiple resource application.

The team faced its first unexpected challenge just six hours after the birth: Yuan Zhai suffered a serious leg wound. The staff immediately separated the cub from the mother and placed Yuan Zhai in an incubator.

Just as importantly, they gave Yuan Yuan a panda cub doll. This had been prepared in case of such an eventuality. Sounds from Yuan Zhai were transmitted to a speaker in the doll’s stomach so Yuan Yuan could continue to hear her cub's voice. The team hoped that the cub’s cries and happier noises would keep Yuan Yuan interested in the fate of the doll—and her real daughter.

The main tasks for the cub’s caretakers included keeping her warm, monitoring her temperature, treating the injury and recording her growth. The mother required not just feeding, but also milking, massaging and postnatal care.

The small, vulnerable, cute cub attracted huge attention. Initially she drew 200,000 daily visits to the Taipei Zoo’s website, a number that eventually rose to 2 million.

Yuan Zhai was successfully returned to her mother when the leg injury healed. With this success, the Taipei city government realized it could exploit immense public interest for its own conservation projects. It put together a campaign that linked the panda breeding project to local conservation and ecology projects.

In this way, two pandas could be used to “speak” on behalf of all wildlife. This is what environmental activists had been campaigning for: a holistic, balanced picture of wildlife conservation, not just a narrow focus on one species.

By Wanda Curlee

Situation awareness is taught to many professionals, including pilots, firefighters, air traffic controllers and nuclear reactor personnel. This useful skill has been slow to cross over into the business world, however, though it is making strides.

Situation awareness is the ability to know what’s going on in a complex, dynamic environment. This skill is valuable in project management because a practitioner:

·       Needs to evaluate multiple goals simultaneously

·       Needs to determine the importance of tasks and goals, and not be distracted by the less important ones

·       Needs to know that when team members are under stress, negative consequences may occur, resulting in poor outcomes

Let’s look at how situation awareness can affect projects, programs and portfolios.

I was once on a project that was implementing a new technology. The project manager did not know how to evaluate all the tasks that were happening at one time. Poor decisions were made because the practitioner wasn’t aware of which tasks and goals were important and which were distracting.

As the project continued and lessons learned began to be gathered, the project manager started to gain situational awareness and could share this knowledge with others.

At the program level, intra-dependencies and benefits realization are always on the mind of the program manager. He or she must understand the environment within the organization (such as the politics and the needs of strategic stakeholders) and the industry, as well as other external factors.

Knowing who has the power to do (or approve) different things can help you implement a successful program. The program sponsor can help you get the lay of the land. Thoroughly understanding a country’s laws as they relate to the program and knowing the specific standards for your program and industry are part of developing a better situational awareness.

Again, lessons learned and asking questions of subject matter experts can help. As a program manager, you may have to review lessons learned from similar types of projects to give you an understanding of which tasks or goals are most critical, and which may be just a distraction.

Finally, a portfolio manager should help leadership and project/program managers improve their situation awareness. This means the portfolio manager needs to require a review of lessons learned on a quarterly basis and establish metrics (normally tracked monthly) to look for strategic trends.

Here are some questions portfolio managers can ask to improve the organization’s situational awareness:

·       Is there a process or procedure hindering advancements of programs or projects?

·       Is the tool set correct?

·       Are certain projects or programs failing in some industries but blossoming in others?

·       Will there be a gap in resources?

·       Will there be a gap in resources with the correct skill set?

·       Is it time to re-evaluate a technology or product where sales are dwindling?

Most people in project management have some awareness of their situation.

What sets great project leaders apart is they’ve honed their situational skill set.