Voices on Project Management

By Cyndee Miller

I’m not exactly into rugby. Okay, reality check: I’ve never watched a rugby game in my life. Never even been tempted.

But author and congress closing speaker James Kerr made me think I’ve been missing out all these years. Sure, I’d heard of New Zealand’s legendary All Blacks national rugby team. And their pre-match ritual haka is truly a sight to behold. (Note to project managers: Now, that’s how you start a project.)

But what I hadn’t realized is that the All Blacks are a true case study in exceptional team performance. The team has won about 75 percent of all the games it played for more than 100 years. And it’s been ranked number 1 in world rugby rankings longer than all other teams combined.

That’s world-class success. It’s what every organization and project leader dreams of but few achieve.

And yes, part of it comes down to raw talent. You have to be very good to join the All Blacks.

But that’s not enough. Ultimately, victory isn’t about specific skills or an inspiring team leader. It’s about building a mission-driven culture that inspires every player to carry the winning legacy of the team further by constantly pushing themselves.

 “It’s the soft stuff that delivers the hard stuff.” said Kerr, author of Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life.

To write his book, Kerr was granted unprecedented access to the team. The lessons he walked away with are simple and powerful — and give practitioners a recipe for building killer teams.

It starts with a purpose-driven culture based on humility, pursuit of excellence and respect, Kerr said.

“No one is entitled to their place in the team. They have to earn it every day,” he said. “That’s important to a high-performing team. Earn your badge.”

The team culture also blows up the idea of having only one leader. Dependency can breed complacency, which leads to defeat. So the All Blacks coaches rely on one captain, but 15 leaders.

The idea is to “take people from dependence, the idea that someone else will take care of it, to independence—the idea that I will take care of it,” Kerr said.

All Blacks players don’t just take orders. “People don’t follow leaders, they follow a vision that is in their own minds. People will rise to a challenge as long as it’s their challenge.”

Beyond the immediate goals of winning a game or a championship, the team’s culture of responsibility and accountability cultivates long-term resiliency. “Leaders are creating leaders,” Kerr said.

And all team members are trained to embrace expectations: “Aim for the highest cloud, because even if you come up short, you’ll hit a lofty mountain.”

That’s fine advice for any team. I just never knew it would come from a bunch of rugby players. 

That’s it for this year’s coverage of PMI Global Congress — EMEA. I’m headed off to check out another great London project, the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the V&A museum. But worry not, there’ll be more blogging, including from next year’s EMEA event slated for 9-11 May in Barcelona, Spain. Hasta la vista.

Organizations are constantly transforming their operating models and processes and investing in new technologies to achieve their business strategy.

While project leaders are focusing on executing that strategy through the discipline of project management, they are also navigating complex environments and undefined hierarchies. In some cases, initiatives stall until a path forward is agreed upon.

Establishing a decision-making process to reach consensus early in projects will ensure higher success rates. To determine a decision-making process, start by assessing the following four tensions:

1. Culture
2. Decision rights
3. Existing policies and approaches
4. Global and social influences that impact decision-making

I used this assessment approach on a recent project to ensure stakeholder and team alignment. I was able to define a procure-to-pay process that fit the culture of the organization, and stakeholders subscribed to it.

I also was able to assign decision rights across the project budget so that the suppliers and the project team would collaborate constructively during trade-off discussions and maintain the project scope.

Next, to maintain budget adherence I aligned contract and payment policies to our suppliers’ practices to validate terms, work in progress and work completed against estimates. Lastly, I was able to ensure that changes to the project scope and budget were clearly a result of sponsor-requested alterations and not due to scope mismanagement.

Looking at these four tensions helped me identify decision-making criteria that drove team collaboration, transparency in project drivers, and alignment with sponsors to meet the strategic plan. As teams endure increasing change initiatives or complex programs, many varied stakeholders will need to be engaged to ensure consensus.

Of course, project leaders can determine what other approaches exist to drive consensus early in the project initiation phase. Some examples to leverage might include:

• Robert’s Rules of Order
• Hierarchical authorization legends that define approval levels
• Operational structures that require cross-functional collaboration to drive consensus

Being aware of tensions in the decision-making process and operating structures allows project leaders to succeed in building consensus to achieve organizational goals with less complexity.

Conducting lessons learned sessions is necessary for continuous project improvement. But not every project team or organization embraces these sessions with enthusiasm.

You’ve probably heard skepticism about lessons learned sessions. Team members might say things like, “Thank God the project is over. Let’s just move on.” Or, “What we always learn from lessons learned is that we never learn from lessons learned, so do we really need to do this?”

By not taking the time for learning, sharing and improving from past mistakes, organizations are condemned to repeat them. But the cycle can be broken. NASA, for example, learned from major project mistakes that had severe consequences. By establishing a knowledge management program that became part of its enterprise culture, it evolved into a learning organization.

Here are seven tips for planning, organizing and conducting a lessons learned session that will engage your team and yield valuable insights.

1. Set Expectations

Set the expectation early in the project that no matter how the project proceeds, the lessons learned session will be conducted at the end of each project stage or the project end.

This is how you can build in lessons learned as a planned project quality measure. Everyone will become conscious that learning from good or bad experiences is an integrated—integral—part of the project.

2. Lead by Example

The project manager should be the one planning, conducting and following up on the lessons learned. You should lead by example and show that the lessons learned matter.

3. Spread Optimism

Before starting the lessons learned discussion, praise the team for its efforts and results throughout the project. Establish a positive attitude by encouraging the team to participate actively and constructively, with the ultimate goal of learning and getting better.

4. Keep the Session Short and Inclusive

Keep the lessons learned session short: 1-2 hours, depending on the project size. Avoid monopolizing the discussions around project key players, and give everyone the chance to contribute.

5. Make Lessons Actionable

Establish simple questions such as: What went well or poorly? Is it worth learning from that? How can we improve or repeat the experience? Make the lessons learned and measures actionable by assigning them to team members for follow-up and setting deadlines for concluding them.

6. Learn From the Good, Too

Generally, lessons learned sessions are perceived as an opportunity for talking about the negative parts of the project. My recommendation is, balance the discussions by also talking about the good (what’s worth repeating), the bad (what’s worth improving) and the ugly (what should be definitely avoided).

7. Walk the Talk

Don’t make the mistake of forgetting about the learned session. Follow up on the action items and make sure the additional learning effort was worth conducting. This will also ensure continuous project improvement through lessons learned.

How do you help your team take lessons learned seriously? How does  your organization embrace a project’s lessons learned—whether positive or negative—to improve its performance?

By Cyndee Miller

It hit me about halfway through the cab ride from Heathrow to my hotel: London really does know how to rock a project. The Tower— still looking good some 946 years after the project closed.

 Granted, projects were on the brain as I was in town for my 21^st (!) PMI congress. But I also had the benefit of a running commentary from a concerned citizen stakeholder, a.k.a., my cabdriver. London’s cycle superhighway project? “It’s a horrible idea. It’s going to cause all sorts of problems.” (We shall see — look for a story on it in the July PM Network.)

The Shard, London’s latest high-rise billed as the “vertical city”? “It’s okay, but it looks like they didn’t finish it.” He was more impressed with the London Eye, and filled us in on the Ferris wheel’s history as a temporary attraction that proved so popular, the city kept it around. Talk about proving project ROI.

The impromptu lecture continued with a chapter on development projects on the East Side as we headed into Canary Wharf. Once one of the world’s busiest ports, it was reborn in recent decades as a major financial hub.

That kind of project vision has helped establish London as one of the world’s most magnetic and prosperous cities. It pulls talent and capital from around the world — and is a premier example of the giant metropolises that will increasingly define the global economy. 

“Cities are becoming so large that they are fusing together into what I call urban archipelagos,” keynoter Parag Khanna, PhD, author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, told congress goers. “These urban corridors are so large that they’re like countries unto themselves.”

It’s not just London, either. There’s also Abu-Dubai, Mumbai-Pune and Lagos-Benin City.

As the world economy continues to globalize at a ultra-fast clip, those corridors and the supply chains, migration patterns and markets that drive prosperity are morphing, he said.

That has huge implications for the project portfolios and talent management strategies of organizations competing in an increasingly connected and mobile world.

“We are in a truly unprecedented point in history,” Dr. Khanna said. “As of the last five or six years, most of the world’s population is now clustered in cities.”

So traditional diplomacy is being displaced by “diplomacity.” “The networks and relationships between cities form the circuitry of the economy, much more so than international relations,” he said.

Two things above all will define the countries and companies that thrive in the coming decades: connectedness and competitiveness. And Dr. Khanna predicted the gap between global infrastructure and defense project spending will continue to grow as more countries invest in connectivity — “the foundation of what globalization delivers.” Get ready for the Internet of Everything: 50 billion connected devices by 2020, blurring the line between the physical and digital.

But there’s a big risk in all this for global organizations looking for the right talent. In a hyper-connected and hyper-competitive world, people are on the move. The number of expats jumped from 70 million in 1960 to more than 250 million today, Dr. Khanna noted.

“People are becoming increasingly agnostic about where they live.” That growing rootlessness is part of what’s driving a global talent divide, he said.

In this crazy connected world, employees are going to want to know which organizations will help them see the world, Dr. Khanna said. That poses an interesting proposition for organizations competing on a global scale. “How are you going to find talent, train talent and retain talent in those fast-growing areas where you may not be operating right now?”

By Cyndee Miller

We all prefer the familiar. I gravitate to pizza and a big glass of red wine. I buy a lot of jewelry (usually with insects and/or skulls). And I tend to hire people who ask a lot of good questions without stirring up a lot of drama. 

That hardwired pull to what we know and like isn’t just human nature, it’s evolutionary biology. But it can also mean project practitioners are skimping on the critical thinking.

“What’s most familiar to you is you,” keynoter Margaret Heffernan told attendees of PMI^® Global Congress 2015—EMEA in London, England. “To the degree that we surround ourselves with people predisposed to agree with us, we are editing out the opportunity for challenges. And that’s dangerous because the people who are just like us won’t notice the early warning signs that we turn a blind eye to.”

She challenged the nearly 800 project practitioners in the audience to avoid such “willful blindness.”

London was a fitting venue for the gathering: It’s an ancient yet hypermodern city where people from around the world rub shoulders and help invent the future. And that future, said Ms. Heffernan, will reward organizations that help teams value diversity and avoid thoughtless conformity.

“Organizations don’t have ideas,” she said, “only people do.”

To build the teams that give them a competitive edge, organizations must foster connectedness and trust—what Ms. Heffernan called “social capital.”

“Teams that are highly connected can be more powerful and effective than teams that are highly funded,” she said. Yet that requires an organizational commitment to stop team churn. “The longer teams work together, the more effective they become.”

So how can organizations build their social capital and avoid being eclipsed by more forward-looking competitors?

Create an environment “where nobody has to ask permission to have great ideas,” Ms. Heffernan said. It’s not just about getting smart people in the same room. Three traits characterize top-performing teams, she said: Team members are socially empathic. All members have equal importance and influence. And the teams aren’t male-dominated.

The goal must be to see the threats and challenges “that we most desperately need to see, early,” Ms. Heffernan said.