Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

Wow! That year went fast, didn’t it?

I don’t know if 2021 was better or worse than 2020 because the collective sense of uncertainty was exchanged for moments of great hope that moved back to great uncertainty.

I don’t bring that up to be a downer here in the period of annual reflection and resolutions, but as a way to introduce some of the ideas that really stuck with me in 2021 and that seem likely to help carry me—and, hopefully, you—forward into 2022 and beyond.

Here are my five big lessons learned from 2021:

1. Planning is more important than ever: I took some time over the first two years of the pandemic to go back to school and study up on brand strategy, marketing strategy and corporate strategy.

And, if you see a pattern there, you are paying attention because the pattern is that you have to know where you are going before you can start down the path to getting there.

In the best of times, we get pulled in a lot of different directions, but during the last two years while the pandemic has been our companion, we’ve seen it become more difficult to find space to think—and for any of our actions to seem relevant.

This makes going through the planning process even more important because we have to stop ourselves, slow down and think. That way we can actually do something productive with the limited amounts of focus many of us are struggling through right now.

2. Leadership counts: We’ve seen various forms of leadership around the world. Some good, some bad, and some that defy description.

What we have seen in looking at all of these is that leaders matter. Leadership counts because most of the time, leaders are the ones that are helping us know what to focus on, where to put our efforts, or just help us make sense of a situation.

In projects, this same idea applies because it can often be impossible to always know how our actions are going to play out in the larger sphere of a project without some guidance from our leaders.

3. Communicating effectively is key: I’ve spoken about how the message that the person receives matters more than the message you are delivering. That is something we see all day, every day right now.

As PMs and leaders, you likely have a good idea about what you are trying to get across. Sometimes, the idea that you are expressing gets lost in translation. I think this is where the advice to talk to me like a third grader comes from.

But the pandemic has highlighted the reality that the words you say can seem clear to you—but can be confusing to someone else for any number of reasons (like lack of a clear definition of the words, lack of a shared vocabulary around the problem, or cultural differences).

The list of challenges to getting your point across is probably limitless, but our bigger challenge is to beat back on those challenges so that our message does get through.

4. The importance of a vision: I don’t know a lot of project managers that use the term “vision.” We do hear a lot of “vision statements,” but most of the time they are fluffy and confusing. (By “vision,” I mean direction, ambition, and a way of communicating your goals.)

One of the big challenges that many countries have been dealing with during the pandemic is that there hasn’t been a really good vision for what ending the pandemic will look like. This lack of clear vision for success has made it easier for communications to be confused, leadership to look tepid and for life to feel like a bit of a free-for-all at times.

You can call your vision an ambition. You can call it a definition of success. Or, you can call it something else entirely.

The lesson I’ve learned is that if you don’t have one, it becomes easier for folks to act out of fear, panic or without a shared destination—causing more challenges than needed.

5. Ultimately, teamwork is a way forward: The biggest lesson I’ve learned is the power of teamwork.

I did a podcast with the CEO of the Philadelphia 76ers, Scott O’Neil, back in June. We talked about being part of a team. Scott coaches his daughter’s basketball team and I coach my son’s soccer team. We got philosophical for a few minutes, but the big key that came out was that both of us like to be part of a team, and that being a teammate has great benefits.

During 2021, I was reminded about this over and over as we saw teams work together to overcome big challenges—like the way that the vaccines were rolled out in communities across the United States. But I’ve also seen the breakdown of teams and how much damage bad team chemistry can do to the collective effort of a team, like the way that Juventus and Manchester United have often seemed like less than the sum of their parts.

These are the lessons I’ve learned this year. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but it is mine. Let me know what you learned in the comments below.

Happy new year!

by Dave Wakeman

As we head into the homestretch of 2021, we are still being heavily impacted by the pandemic—and it seems like a society that is restructuring (or realigning) itself due to challenges and issues that the pandemic uncovered.

Reading this morning’s paper highlighted this to me. It got me thinking about the types of skills that a PM is going to need to highlight (or build) to ensure that they are on top of the ever-changing world we are living in.

Here are my top three:

1. Communication: I feel like any good list on what makes a good PM should always contain improving your communication skills, but in this regard the communication skills we need to improve are a bit more broad than normal.

In a general sense, we always want to remember that your communications need to be clear, concise and easy to understand. But as we expand here, we need to make certain that we have the ability to communicate with folks clearly in different cultures. This might mean recognizing how different phrases translate or different customs come across.

The key to being a successful communicator in a changing world is that you need to focus on the receiver of the communication—with an emphasis placed on things that might make your communications fall flat. Because even when you share a common language, the gulf in understanding can be significant.

2. Negotiation: We hear a lot about different issues that are being exposed around the world right now, like supply chain backups, staff shortages and demand issues. The list goes on and can contain hundreds of variations on each issue, but the key idea here is that even if you are dealing with a challenge, a good PM has to find ways to resolve issues. This comes down to negotiation. And what is negotiation but solution seeking at its finest?!

To be an effective negotiator in a changing world, you need to focus on your communications to begin with (like I mentioned above, communications seem to be the gateway for effective project leadership). But you also need to recognize how to frame ideas, challenges and solutions to give people win/win opportunities. You also need to be able to see different routes to success.

Probably the most important skill is to not look at negotiation as a winner-takes-all situation. Because in most instances, it’s going to be about accommodation and not capitulation.

3. Recruitment: I’ve written here over the years about how great a PM I think Alabama football coach Nick Saban is. One of his best skills is his ability to recruit talent to Tuscaloosa. Talent wins.

To be a successful PM in our new environments of change and uncertainty, you are going to need to focus on recruiting folks to your team to be successful as well.

Recruiting in this context doesn’t mean getting people to sign up as your “ride or die,” though it may require that at certain times. Instead, recruitment is likely a lot more flexible as you need people to dedicate a few hours to a challenge you are dealing with, sign off on a new piece of your project, or commit the resources necessary to help you keep your project moving forward.

As I write this out, I start thinking about how we recently discussed project management being a sales job. Then, I look at my list and realize that the key way that PMs are going to work forward now is through selling: their ideas, their partnership and their resources.

Maybe instead of a big change, the more things change the more they stay the same? Let me know what you think in the comments

by Dave Wakeman

I recently realized something that I never really thought about before (at least, I don’t remember thinking about before): Project managers share a lot of the same needs and requirements with salespeople.

Crazy, right?

Many of you are probably scratching your head, thinking, “Dave has really lost his mind now.” You might be right, but let me try and explain. Here are some things we have in common with salespeople…

1. Driving awareness: One of the key jobs of a PM is to make sure that the stakeholders and key assets of a project know what is going on and are committed to helping the project reach its goal.

That’s really just another way of saying “drive awareness.” Which is really one of the key things that salespeople do: They find targets in the market and they create attention and need through elevating awareness.

For project managers, a similar process happens when you look at the people that have an impact or influence on your project’s success or failure. You have to figure out who these people are and let them know that your project is moving forward—and what impact it is likely to have on folks over time (if you are successful).

That’s a lot like a salesperson. 

2. Expressing value: I’m a trained marketer. That means that I don’t believe in commodities. Which is good for project managers, because every project a PM undertakes should have some sort of unique value that is going to also add value to the team, stakeholders and environment that the project exists in.

As a PM, you also likely find yourself struggling to get people to buy in on the value your project creates at all times.

Why? People have different priorities. People may have different beliefs about the value of a project. Or, people just don’t want to invest in certain things.

We could go on here, but the key is that as a PM, you have to mitigate the risk to your project of people not knowing the value of what you are doing. How? By expressing the value of what you are working on.

There are two types of value to express: tangible value and intangible value. Tangible things are easily measured (like time saved, money saved or money earned); intangibles are much more difficult to measure, but they can have a big impact (like less stress, less time wasted or time saved). You make these values clear by expressing them in a manner that shows how your project directly leads to the benefits.

Again, y’all are selling!

3. Gaining commitment to action: This is the ultimate sales job. Without action, nothing happens.

In any leadership role, you end up only being successful through the efforts of others. In sales, the same idea holds. This is why the focus on commitment to action is so important.  You have to get people to commit to taking action or no change will take place.

What does action look like? A process started. A job completed. A purchase made.

As a PM, these jobs look exactly like the job of a salesperson, because you both are relying on the efforts of others to help you achieve success.

Now I may be wrong, but when laid out like this, PMs and salespeople look much more alike than we usually think they do in a lot of cases.

Or I’ve lost my mind.  (You tell me in the comments below!)

by Dave Wakeman

I just got back from taking a road trip, and while I was away for the month, I had my website rebuilt from the ground up. It turned out nicely and makes me look like I really know what I’m talking about.

All kidding aside, having to put my website in the hands of an expert in web development taught me some lessons about project management that either I forgot or needed to learn.

Let me share a few of them with you…

1. Being clear on the outcome you hope to achieve is crucial. At the end of the project, I debriefed with my web developer and she said that the nice thing about working with me is that I respect her work and don’t micromanage.

As we continued talking, I realized that the reason I didn’t micromanage the project was because I was pretty clear in the project brief with exactly what I needed to achieve and what success looked like to me.

Due to that, I was able to give her clear instructions and allow her to do the work I brought her in to do.

In managing projects, all of us should be aware that if we spend a lot more time at the start of the project being clear about the results, we are likely to need to spend less time micromanaging or “handling” things during the project.

2. Communication is key. I’ve been talking about the people aspect of projects since I started writing this column back in 2012. In doing a project to rebuild myself under constraints imposed on me by the pandemic, I remembered the importance of clear communication.

In the past, I know that I have written that the keys to successful communication are for your messages to be:

• Clear
• Concise
• Easy to understand

Over the years, maybe I’ve been guilty of getting away from those three principles, but I was reminded that these are essential communication qualities and that it is good to keep them in mind—especially when managing remotely.

3. Let experts be experts. One of the key ideas in my project management talks and writing is that as the leader, you can’t be the smartest about every aspect of your project. That’s why you work so hard to build strong teams.

As often as I remind myself, I know that I can still slip up and throw out bad ideas.

It causes two problems when I do this:

• First, it slows down things because the people on my team often have to explain to me why I am a knucklehead and why I am wrong.
• Second, it slows the team members down because they have to do their work and they end up thinking about the way that they are going to have to justify something to me. Even when that isn’t what I really want, my actions tell them something different.

Strangely, my website project came together very well and I managed to keep myself from micromanaging the whole process. I was reminded that as a leader you have to:

1. Be clear in your vision
2. Communicate effectively
3. Give experts room to do their job

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

by Dave Wakeman

Did you get your vaccine yet? In the United States, we’ve done a good job of getting shots into people’s arms—and for the first time in a long time, things are starting to look normal. For project leaders, the ramp up and ramp down of the vaccination program is likely to be a good case study. But I don’t want to talk about that today, even though it’s amazing. Instead, I want to discuss an idea that’s close to the vaccine rollout and the leadership topics that I’ve been hitting on for the last year: the idea of how to lead now. Over the last year, I’ve gone back and taken a few classes so that at the end of the pandemic, I could be in a position to deal with whatever came next. 

One of the ideas I’ve been grappling with during my schoolwork has been the idea of emergent strategy. It’s a branch of strategic thinking that says that you might make a strategic plan, but what comes out the other side might be entirely different because your strategy has to react to the world it exists in. Sounds familiar, right? Isn’t that the world that project managers live in every day? Digging deeper, I realized that we can actually learn a few lessons on leading through the end of the pandemic using emergent strategy:

Flexibility wins: I’m all for planning like I’m sure most of the folks reading this are. But the pandemic has laid bare the idea that we can plan anything with certainty given how chaotic some of the news around the virus, the vaccines and the economy was. The lesson here is that we have to maintain our flexibility. 

This is the heart of emergent strategy. You pick a destination, make a plan, but recognize that you’re going to have to change course throughout the project to achieve success. The big difference I see from normal project thinking is that in an environment like this, the formal change process likely must be managed more tightly. 

Don’t be wed to preconceived ideas: Change is constant—we know that now more than ever. One challenge of leadership in modern times, especially on projects, is that we can’t know everything. The thing about this is that we also tend to hang onto our preconceived view of the project, the plan or the world around us. This “change is happening faster than ever before” narrative is a bit overblown, but what I do know is that our day-to-day reality can be impacted pretty quickly and we need to be able to rethink the context of a project.

Be open to feedback all around you: The key here is to pay attention to what the world is telling you. These “signals” may come in the form of news reports, conversations, premonitions or experience. Be aware of what’s going on around you and try to gain a holistic feeling for the world that your project exists in. 

This can be difficult to do because in the same way that there’s a lot of important information to study and deal with, there’s a lot of noise that can get in the way of good decision making as well. So you need to constantly balance the signals and the noise to keep your project moving forward.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.