Voices on Project Management

By Emily Luijbregts

We are facing uncertain times. The “External Shock” that COVID-19 has brought to economies around the world was something that few of us could’ve predicted—deserted highways, closed schools and businesses, and an instantaneous demand to work remotely. Within the first quarter of 2020, workforces were furloughed and organizations struggled to adapt to the new world.

As project managers, we have not remained immune to this. Our projects have been cancelled, postponed or delayed. We have had severe issues with supply chains, team management and connectivity. And the uncertainty which faces us, not only for the next quarter but for the remainder of the year, has made us look tentatively towards future prospects and the ability of our organizations to survive.

If you are finding yourself furloughed or in a precarious position within your organization, you may already be asking yourself: What can I do to become more adaptable to change? How can I make myself indispensable within my team and organization? And more realistically: What can I do to make sure that I can land another job as quickly as possible?

Here are a few career tips to set yourself up for the future:

1. Update your profiles

First things first: When was the last time you updated all of your professional profiles? I’m not just talking about LinkedIn, but also PMI and ProjectManagement.com, PMTribe and others. Are you showing off all your skills, and are your job descriptions and goals concise?

It can also be helpful to analyze if your skillset is still relevant to the job that you’re looking for. This can be especially enlightening if you are working in a remote environment and can now promote your ability to manage virtual teams.

I try to update my own profile every quarter or every six months, depending on the amount of change that has happened in the previous period.

2. Continue learning

Like many of you, I’ve been forced to spend a considerable amount of time indoors in the last few weeks, and I’ve been trying to figure out the best use of my time without binge-watching another series on Netflix. One thing that I often try to reflect on are my strengths and weaknesses. What do I need to improve, and where do I excel? Then, I try to look at what I can do to turn my weaknesses into strengths in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.

If you’ve been furloughed, your company may have provided you with a learning program to boost your skills during this period. But if, like many project managers, you’ve been let go without support, there are a few free options that can support your learning journey.

For example, PMI offers free courses to anyone who is interested in project management. This is a great way to learn more about project management and refresh your existing skillset:

• Business Continuity
• Project Management for Beginners
• Agile in the Program Management Office
• PMI Virtual Resource Hub

3. Network … virtually

Have you already joined your local PMI chapter? Have you tried networking on ProjectManagement.com? I am a strong advocate for online networking, and I’ve been trying to connect with other project managers on LinkedIn and ProjectManagement.com to support them during this time with coaching or access to job prospects.

Networking is not just about searching for your next job. It’s about utilizing and building relationships with your peers that can stand the test of time. During the first month of virtual working, I scheduled and held virtual coffees with peers and team members, and also planned regular catch-ups with colleagues to make sure that we could stay virtually connected and supported during this uncertain time.

4. Connect with recruiters

Recruiters are also feeling the pinch of the economic downturn. I have several recruiters in my network who are very nervous about the remainder of the year and what it will mean for companies and their ability to provide suitable candidates. If you do not have a few trusted recruiters in your network, consider sending an updated CV or résumé to professional recruiters who might be able to help if a viable opportunity presents itself.

We all know that life will be dramatically different for many of us once this pandemic is over. Not only with respect to our careers, but within our personal lives. I hope that whatever happens in the coming year, we all come out of this crisis with our health and good humor intact. The project management community is known for its close-knit and supportive atmosphere, and I hope that in a “Life after Corona,” it will continue to be so.

Share in the comments below: What career tips would you give other project managers during this time?

By Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

No one could have expected the reality of what a pandemic unleashes on each of us—our families, communities and places of employment. A once booming economy filled with demand and focused on the deployment of strategic investments and projects has now changed. This global pandemic has brought on uncertainty, sparking leaders and NGOs around the world to step up with varying approaches to crisis management, emergency response and the critical need for communication.

The implications of COVID-19 have exposed us to new health risks, limited healthcare capacity, challenged supply chains and the need to operate in the new normal of isolation and social distancing.

Yet we all have witnessed how leadership can stand up, rally and partner with government and industry to provide guidance to avoid undue risks, maintain connections and guide us through this pandemic. While this entire episode may be distressing and taking its toll, YOU were built for this unprecedented global crisis. Your development as a leader and manager of teams and initiatives has established an excellent foundation to rely on to guide your teams through this time.

As I continue to evolve and flex my leadership style during this time period, I’ve developed a list of key habits to offer some guidance to all project leaders:

1. Reset your leadership style with compassionate behaviors.
2. Connect with your team and continue to maintain your relationships.
3. Stay in control by collaborating with your team to redesign the team’s guiding or working principles.
4. Set clear boundaries to enable the balance of work and family time.
5. Enable healthy habits for you, your family and your team members.
6. Celebrate small wins and keep everyone motivated.
7. Streamline unnecessary activities and prioritize new activities to combat the pandemic.
8. Leverage technology to maintain professional and personal connections.
9. Communicate and support your organization’s leadership messages to mitigate the pandemic.
10. Consider re-prioritizing your milestones and initiatives, and realign goals to meet long-term business strategies.

Please comment below with any tactics that have helped you and your teams endure this time and keep moving forward.

By Cyndee Miller

You don’t need me to tell you these are dark times. You’re probably stuck at home seeing the same dire headlines I am: The number of COVID-19 cases around the world has surpassed 1 million, with more than 64,000 deaths. And the end is nowhere in sight.

It’s overwhelming. Yet we human beings have a wonderful knack for pushing through. We’re seeing it every day as the global community delivers innovation—and hope—through an array of projects reimagining everything from supply chains to product design.

Just 72 hours after the French government issued a call for much-needed medical supplies, the CEO of French luxury group LVMH approved a project via text, according to The Financial Times, agreeing to transform three of its perfume and cosmetics factories to produce hand sanitizer free of charge for health authorities. Dyson—best known for vacuums and hair dryers—designed and built a ventilator in just 10 days, and the U.K. company is donating 15,000 to combat the global ventilator shortage.

Conquering COVID-19 can only happen with cross-disciplinary teamwork—reaching across organizational, political and geographic borders. Case in point: Chinese auto supplier BYD formed a task force of leaders from different business divisions and pulled in more than 3,000 engineers on R&D, design and processing. The result? A plant capable of generating 5 million masks and 300,000 bottles of disinfectant per day.

Virgin Orbit is collaborating with teams at the University of California Irvine and the University of Texas at Austin to build simple “bridge” ventilators that meet the needs of people who don’t necessarily need intensive care—and that can be quickly mass-produced. “I have never seen our team working harder. Never seen ideas moving quicker from design to prototype,” said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart in a statement.  

For all teams, agility has taken on an entirely new meaning. Industrial engineer Mat Bowtell founded Free 3D Hands to ensure access to prosthetic devices through 3-D printing. Now he’s pivoting the Australian org’s mission and using that same technology to produce free face shields. Design firm Carlo Ratti Associati and MIT’s Senseable City Lab are designing ICUs inside shipping containers, creating “plug-in biocontainment pods that can be quickly deployed in cities around the world.”

We’ve faced deadly epidemics and healthcare emergencies before, of course. And project leaders are putting those hard-won lessons to work. In Chicago, Illinois, USA, Rush University Medical Center is preparing to activate the emergency preparedness capabilities it baked into its design from the start. Built in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the hospital has the ability to surge capacity by 130 percent. To get ahead of the looming influx of COVID-19 patients, Rush has converted two units to negative pressure to prevent cross-contamination, and staff have already doubled the number of beds on two floors.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ranu Dhillon was on the front lines of the battle to contain Ebola in West Africa in 2014 and witnessed firsthand the unrelenting toll.

“In an epidemic, transmission is happening and it’s not caring about weekends, it’s not caring about holidays, it’s not caring about any other parts of life where we have momentary pauses,” Dr. Dhillon says on a recent episode of Projectified^™. “And it’s just going to keep going unless you build the system to counter it.”

Just as viruses vary, so do the responses. While in Guinea, Dr. Dhillon had full government support to acquire the necessary resources and push his containment project forward. That’s not always the case these days as leaders scramble to come together on a clear path.

“There may be certain things that are clear that you want to act on, but the pieces that have to be put into place, the players that have to be engaged in order to act in that manner, it’s really tough to sometimes align that with federal level, the state level and the local level,” he says.

But project leaders aren’t about to let a little bureaucracy get in the way of battling the coronavirus pandemic. After his own COVID-19 test came back negative, Dr. Dhillon rejoined the fight. And he’s not alone. Around the world, organizations big and small are flipping their scripts and launching whatever projects are needed in the new COVID-19 reality.

What projects do you see making a difference?

By Mario Trentim

Although we expect most organizations to have a crisis response plan in place, very few actually do. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to develop, organizations are trying to keep their heads above water as distractions and urgencies create barriers to effective decision-making. But this is not the world’s first crisis—and it won’t be the last.

Is it too Late for a Crisis Response Plan?

First things first: Every project professional needs a plan. As organizations realize they’re wasting time and resources with hasty solutions, project teams are realizing that they have to go back to the drawing board and set up a plan. A consistent and structured approach is needed to successfully deal with a crisis.

What does your PMO have to do with all of this? A PMO is uniquely positioned to solve problems that the project managers cannot solve themselves. On top of that, some PMOs are responsible for portfolio management, and they also support decision-making and the strategic planning processes within an organization.

In fact, because of the COVID-19 crisis, organizations kicked off a number of urgent projects all at the same time. These projects were created to enable remote work, fix supply chain disruptions and more. At the same time, many other projects were terminated or paused without careful analysis.

Whatever phase your project is in due to the coronavirus pandemic, it is not too late for a crisis response plan.

Now what?

If you are a PMO manager and you don’t have a crisis response plan, you must create one now. It does not have to be perfect or extremely detailed. Follow the seven steps below:

7 Elements of a Crisis Response Plan

1. Consider various scenarios: Identify a broad range of potential scenarios in order to get the big picture. Use simulations where possible and document all assumptions and constraints.
2. Develop a set of responses and alternative solutions to the scenarios: Account for facilities lockdowns, evacuation, public relations and more.
3. Combine scenarios and responses into a plan: Although it is not possible to imagine all scenarios, by combining scenarios and responses you are laying the foundation for decision-making when it comes to facing real world scenarios.
4. Define the chain of command: I cannot overemphasize the importance of a clearly defined chain of command during a crisis. It is time to refine your organizational structure and check if roles and responsibilities are complete and clear.
5. Establish a war room and backup locations: There should be a place that can be rapidly converted to be used by the crisis response team. Pay attention to connectivity, lines of communication and infrastructure in case the team needs to stay there for days or weeks.
6. Determine communication channels: Establish effective communication channels throughout the chain of command and with external stakeholders. It is very important that people know where to get official information and that they stay tuned to these channels.
7. Conduct regular debriefs and post-crisis reviews: Regular debrief sessions, continuous improvement and analysis, iterative planning and post-crisis reviews should be conducted as the crisis evolves and the environment changes.

When you and your team are playing out the potential scenarios and alternative responses, re-think the organizational strategy for the long, mid and short terms. As you pay attention to strategic shifts and changes related to the organization’s objectives, try to uncover how this information impacts the current portfolios and projects.

In order to truly be helpful during this crisis and stay relevant, your PMO needs a very clear chain of command, a war room (even if it is a virtual) and clear communication channels. Shorten the planning cycles and adopt a streamlined feedback process.

Keep in mind that during a crisis, a different type of PMO is needed: a Crisis PMO. In a time of great uncertainty, you should drop all those heavy processes used during stable times and put in place a nimble and flexible crisis response plan.

Let me know how your PMO and projects are doing during the COVID-19 crisis in the comments below.

By Dave Wakeman

My editors always say I bring an interesting perspective to project management and leadership. I like to think it’s because I come to project management from fields that are not often associated with project management, such as marketing, politics and sports.

Even though project management touches every field. 

As I’m writing this, I’ve been at home acting as chief teaching officer to my 9-year-old son, chief sounding board for my partner, chief shoulder to a lot of mentees and chief play toy to my bulldog, due to the spread of the coronavirus and the actions of governments around the world to protect their citizens and mitigate the damage of this new virus. 

While many of us are physically distanced from each other, I’ve had a lot of time to watch the responses and observe them as an exercise in project management. 

And, to be quite honest, if many of the leaders around the world were working as project managers for the organizations I work with, a lot of them would be fired. 

But … I think all of us can also learn a lot from this moment, and I hope we do. Here are three things I’m learning about project management from the coronavirus crisis: 

1. Leadership matters: I was in Australia in November, and I remember standing in the airport in Melbourne with my colleague the first time I was made aware of the coronavirus. 

Since then, we’ve seen many leaders around the world downplay COVID-19, lie about their knowledge of the disease or try to pass the buck for their poor response as the people impacted by the coronavirus continued to grow. 

Across the globe, this lack of vision, urgency and direction has marked the response to the coronavirus.

That’s a lack of leadership. 

In normal situations, we know that leadership matters and that having vision, providing guidance and supporting your team is important. In a crisis, the importance of leadership multiplies exponentially. 

This is why we have to recognize that our role as managers is to lead—to bear the brunt of knowledge, direction and action. That’s been missing in so many places throughout the pandemic. 

2. Communication is king: In general, 90 percent of a project manager’s job is communication, up and down the stakeholder map. That doesn’t change no matter what kind of project you are leading.

As we work through the impacts of the viral pandemic, we must consider what makes communication effective, and that includes things like timeliness, consistency and truthfulness. 

We’ve seen the timeliness of communication from leaders be pretty good, at least over the last few weeks. Though, if I were the leader of these projects, I’d default to communicating and explaining things earlier. 

As far as consistency, we’ve seen a number of leaders around the world change their messages and directions to citizens almost daily, which isn’t a very effective way to generate the best results. 

Finally, truthfulness. I know from experience that you can’t tell your teams and stakeholders everything all the time, due to legal exposure, security or other issues. But the malleability of the truth in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime event has been quite alarming. 

All three of these inputs are extremely important to the success of your communications with your team and stakeholders. 

3. Teamwork is essential: As project managers, we lead teams of people with diverse skills, agendas and needs. Our ability to get these folks moving in the same direction, if only long enough to complete their part in our project, defines our success or failure. 

In the global reaction to the coronavirus, we have seen a disjointed response with each country and continent going their own way. 

Lack of teamwork is harmful in this case, obviously. We haven’t taken coordinated efforts to reduce travel, slow infections and increase production of necessary medical equipment. 

But the larger point is that if you are leading a team and no one is working together, your ability to achieve your goals and positive results seems to deteriorate rapidly.

That’s on display today. 

Overall, I’ve been disappointed with the way leaders around the world have responded to the coronavirus outbreak. We mustn’t discount the lessons learned as we witness governing bodies across the globe either rise to the occasion or falter in response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

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