Voices on Project Management

By Dave Wakeman

One topic we don’t always consider when talking about sustainability—projectmanagement.com’s April theme—is how to sustain our teams and ourselves. Because the truth is, projects can be difficult. Mental burnout can be a factor in your success and that of your team.

Having dealt with some intense stakeholders and projects over the years, I have figured out a few ways to maintain my energy and focus, as well as my team’s. Hopefully one of these can be helpful to you.

1. Plan Out Your Day: As project managers, planning is drilled into us almost constantly. But we also know that in many cases, our best-laid plans are quickly discarded.

I have learned that one way I can control burnout and stress is by planning out my day. I’m old school and do this with paper and pen. You can use your smartphone, tablet or whatever works best for you. I like to write down the five to seven most important things I need to get done each day and schedule time in my calendar for those activities.

This practice may take some time to get used to, and you may have to work with your stakeholders to enforce a daily plan, but the tradeoff in productivity over time is well worth it.

2. Breathe: A lot is made of taking breaks, balance, meditation and other terms that can come off as too “new age” for some. But the benefits of these practices are so powerful that they’re worth investigating.

Here’s how I slow down and reset myself through the power of breath: Take a deep breath for seven seconds, hold the breath for ten seconds, then slowly release the breath for an eight count. After about four or five rounds of that, I find myself having slowed down enough that I can look at my challenges from a fresh standpoint.

3. Communicate Openly and Consistently: If you have been reading my blog posts, you know I am adamant about the idea of communicating openly and consistently. From a team standpoint, having access to information, feedback and ideas can quickly ratchet down the intensity of a project.

You aren’t going to be able to share all the information you have, but if you are open about what you can and can’t share, you won’t encounter any challenges. Just the opportunity to know that their voices are heard and that they have a forum to communicate can do wonders for your team members.

However, as the leader, make sure you don’t allow your communications and sharing to devolve into negative, destructive conversations about all the challenges of the project.

It is important that you make sure that even the negative issues find some sort of positive resolution, even if the only resolution you can muster is, “I understand that this project is tough. If we can just get through this part, things should get better.”

What techniques do you use to prevent burnout? 

A team goes through five stages in a project: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. The success of a project depends on how much time the team spends in the storming and performing stages. If a team leader is good at managing conflicts, the storming stage can be shortened, and the team can gain more time for performing. That significantly increases the chances of success.

Many authors and PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide) define five techniques to resolve conflicts: withdraw/avoid, smooth/accommodate, compromise/reconcile, force/direct and collaborate/problem solve.

Aside from collaborate/problem solve, in my opinion all the approaches conclude with either one party winning and the other losing, or with both losing. I think these techniques are intended to achieve results only in the short term, and give no thought to what will happen in the long term.

If you use withdraw or force, one person wins and other loses. The winner might be satisfied, but what about the person who has lost? Will he/she not try to recover losses at the next opportunity? In my experience, if you use smooth or compromise, both parties lose by having to give up something that is important to them.

Let’s take a common example: negotiating price with a vendor. A conflict can arise because you both want a favorable price. Suppose you have the upper hand and force the vendor to settle on a considerably lower price than he or she wanted. Have you resolved the conflict? Probably not.

Since the vendor lost in the negotiation, he or she may try to gain back the lost money by working on the lower threshold of the acceptable range, trying to cut corners in the process or production, or using cheaper material. This will degrade the quality of the deliverable. What you think is a win-lose for you could easily become a lose-lose.

The same thing can happen when you negotiate a salary with a candidate, negotiate a promotion/raise with your report, or settle a conflict between two team members by either forcing one, or asking both, to compromise.

Compromise or smooth are even worse, in my opinion. They are lose-lose in the short term and even worse in the long term. That’s because in compromise or smooth, we often sacrifice important things. Later, both parties keep trying to recover the things they compromised away. They repeatedly negotiate with little takeaway. Lots of time is wasted in negotiations and productivity remains low.

I think problem solving/collaborating is the only technique that truly resolves conflicts. The collaboration focuses on the problem and helps solve it to the satisfaction of both parties—and therefore resolves the conflict for good. It’s easier said than done, of course.

I’ll focus on the collaborate/problem solve technique in my next blog. Until then, please share your views. How have you resolved conflict within your team? What were the results in the short-term and long-term?

By Lynda Bourne

Whether an individual, group or organization, each stakeholder has a unique and evolving set of expectations and perceptions.

To effectively engage with and influence this diverse community, traditional “one size fits all” approaches to project communications—such as regular reports—need to be replaced by a structured methodology supported by adequate resources that consider the complexities of all stakeholders. 

In earlier posts, I’ve discussed the relationship between stakeholder perceptions and project success and the three types of stakeholder communication. Of those three types, project relations (meaning PR/marketing) and traditional reporting cover the needs of noncritical stakeholders.

This post is focused on the targeted communication needed to change the attitude or behaviour of the small group of critical stakeholders who need to be doing something differently to support the successful delivery of your project.

Five Steps to Changing Stakeholder Behaviour

Each targeted communication is focused on one stakeholder to achieve a desired change in his or her attitude and/or behaviour. For example, maybe a functional manager needs to stop obstructing your project and actively support the loan of some key resources for critical work.

The first stepin this process is defining precisely what you need from the stakeholder. You also need to prioritize objectives so you focus your efforts on the most important changes you need at this time.

The next stepis to describe and understand the elements of the stakeholder’s uniqueness. These elements include national, professional and generational culture traits, as well as gender, personality and “their reality” (how they see the world).

Once you know what you want and understand the best approaches to use to engage the person, the third step is planning the communication strategy by designing carefully targeted information exchanges.

Strategies for achieving this can range from casual coffee meetings to formal presentations using a range of different media and messengers. You can approach some stakeholders directly, while others need to be influenced through your network of contacts. Any organizational currency you or your team have accrued can be highly beneficial, but needs to be spent carefully.

Then comes the fourth step: implement the plan and communicate!

The final stepin the process is to assess the effectiveness of the communication and adjust the plan as necessary to ensure that the stakeholder becomes appropriately engaged in supporting the project’s objectives.

The keys to effective stakeholder engagement are the strength of the relationship you have in place and mutuality—meaning that both your project and the stakeholder need to benefit from the engagement.

This process may sound like hard work. It is. But it is far better to invest in effective stakeholder engagement to make your project successful than to under-invest and fail because you do not have the support and resources needed for success.

How much effort do you put into planned and targeted communication?

By Wanda Curlee

In a recent Forbes article, PMI CEO Mark Langley talked about why employees don’t do what their CEOs tell them to on major projects. Mr. Langley said three major factors cause company leadership and other employees to fail to follow the CEO’s strategic lead:

• CEOs are busy and once the direction is given, they are off to the next situation.

• Implementing strategy is difficult.

• Governance is not in place to fulfill the CEO’s direction.

This got me thinking about ways a CEO can use portfolio management as a means to drive direction. 

A robust portfolio management office should be the gateway for the CEO’s strategic direction. Ideally, the CEO would set the strategic direction, and the portfolio manager would take this direction and drive forward. Simple, right?

In reality, the CFO, the business unit presidents and other corporate officers on whose support the portfolio manager depends have good intentions, but day-to-day activities can often take over.

To prevent this, the portfolio manager needs the CEO’s backing and needs to regularly meet with him or her. The portfolio manager also needs to understand the strategy, know how to define the strategy into programs and projects, and stay within the budget. 

Doing all this at once is akin to a conductor’s role with a symphony. All parts of the orchestra must follow the conductor’s lead. If the brass section plays faster than the string section, the music doesn’t sound good, and some listeners would blame the conductor. The portfolio manager plays a similar role.

Just like a good conductor, communication is key to the portfolio manager’s job. The portfolio manager must know how to speak to the various stakeholders to keep them informed and focused in the correct direction to carry out the CEO’s strategy.

A CFO will want financial information and may become distracted if the portfolio manager discusses scheduling in detail. Corporate officers need strategic information, the program manager needs a mixture of strategic and tactical info, and the project manager needs tactical info and an understanding of a project’s business value. The portfolio manager has to communicate at these various levels many times during the day. 

Governance is another key. Governance reviews projects and programs to ensure they meet the strategic goals of the CEO. Those that do not are rejected and are not done. Governance also assists the governance board in determining if the slate of projects and portfolios selected and within the budget allocated are the ones that should be approved. The portfolio manager normally does this for the CEO and presents the slate to the governing board. 

Once the projects and programs are approved, the portfolio manager is constantly evaluating the portfolio to ensure it meets the CEO’s strategic goals and reviewing the company’s landscape for newer projects and programs that may need to be a part of portfolio, based on the same strategic goals. In all these ways, the portfolio manager can serve as the conduit for the CEO’s strategy.

As Mark Langley said, it’s hard work. The portfolio manager is ensuring the right work is done while the project and program managers are ensuring the work is done right. Each has to do their part, and each part is hard. But with all in harmony, the organization will better realize the business benefits for more projects and programs.

By Jen L. Skrabak, PMP, PfMP

Portfolio management is in large part about enabling innovation. And innovation starts with creativity. What’s the difference between innovation and creativity? As economist and Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt once said, “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”

Because projects and programs are the vehicles for implementing new ideas, creating new products or services and transforming current state, portfolio management enables innovation.

Creativity is not enough (this is the title of an article Professor Levitt wrote in 1963). Put another way, “Ideas are useless unless used” (another Levitt quote). Good ideas must be realized to mean something.

Since project and program management are all about executing a vision, value creation and benefits realization, they provide the natural vehicle for translating ideas into reality. 

Portfolio management translates the right ideas into reality within the confines of organizations. It’s about order, process, structure and ROI.

Change Your Vantage Point

Of course, there’s always a danger of too much order and process stifling creativity. So how do we unleash creativity? Sometimes we’re our own obstacle to becoming more creative.

I believe the key to unlocking creativity is to increase our vantage points. A vantage point is just a way of observing our surroundings, facts and other information in order to create our reality.

When faced with a challenge, sometimes our tendency is to trick ourselves to view it as something we’ve seen before. Our brain does this in order to save us time. But this tendency to go on autopilot inhibits new ways of thinking and solving problems.

To see what I mean, get a piece of paper and draw a coffee cup. Did you draw the cup like this?

Most people do, since it’s how coffee cups are usually depicted. Now imagine the same coffee cup viewed from the top down.

Your vantage point matters—it frames the problem, which in turn impacts the solutions you can brainstorm.

Here’s another way of thinking about vantage points. In 2014, there were more than 108 billion business emails sent and received each day. (This doesn’t include instant messages, personal emails, social media messages and other electronic communications.)

We’re all inundated with data, information and images—your brain receives 11 million pieces of information every second from your environment. Yet it can only process 40 pieces of data per second. Which means it has to choose which tiny percentage to focus on, and which huge chunk to ignore.

How you see your reality is a choice. 

What you choose to focus on shapes how you perceive and interpret your world. Your ability to train your brain to see other vantage points is critical to innovation and creativity, and ultimately your portfolio success.

Seeing your problems, your business, your team and yourself from different vantage points increases your creativity and innovation and accelerates results. Just like any other skill, creativity is something you can develop over time. Why not start now?