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What Race Cars Can Teach Us About Projects
Categories:
Project Planning
Categories: Project Planning
| My last post on when to pull over a project to the side of the road generated much action on the Voices on Project Management Twitter feed. Here, I'll expand on that theme by highlighting the similarities in the makings of a race car and a successful project. Today's race cars are a marvel of engineering and performance. They achieve these results while being extremely complicated and operating in harsh environments. However, to the spectator, racing appears to happen easily and naturally. When we see a race car whiz by, we don't see the many hours of planning that go into achieving both high speed and durability. Therein lies the parallel between race cars and projects. As project practitioners, we need to consistently ask ourselves whether our "project race car" is ready and able to win the race. This includes design and preparations before the race as well as vigilant monitoring of performance. Here are four essential components of a "project race car" that have to be well engineered and constantly monitored for your project to be a success:
How many times have you started a project "race" though one of the previously mentioned components was missing? What is the most frequently omitted element in the "project race car"? For an insider look at car racing, read about a recent keynote speech on Formula One by Mark Gallagher at PMI® Global Congress 2014 -- EMEA. |
Stakeholder Victory, Without Battle
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Chinese military general Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War nearly 2,500 years ago. But his ideas still hold value on the art of stakeholder engagement. After all he did say: "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle," which should be the ultimate aim of every stakeholder engagement process. One of the clearest messages from The Art of War is the supremacy of strategy over tactics and tactics over reaction. Yet project teams spend most of their time reacting to stakeholders with a few tactical activities, such as report distribution and progress meetings. This approach gives the initiative to the stakeholders. And, as we all know, not every stakeholder has the project's best interests at heart, and those who are supportive rarely have a deep understanding of your project's real needs. Sun Tzu states that success is driven by strategy: "All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved." Planning your stakeholder engagement should involve far more than simply deciding who needs what information. The starting point for a good strategy is good intelligence. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles." Project practitioners and their teams need to understand who's important and why; what their attitude to the work is (and why); what you need from them (if anything); and what those people want from you. After this analysis, key questions for the team include:
Now you're in a position to develop a pragmatic strategy to proactively engage with your stakeholder community, focusing on those people who matter. But beware: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." You and your team need to first understand your strategic intent and then develop appropriate tactics to implement the strategy. You could, for example, produce the standard monthly report containing data on your project's environmental protection activities. Or, if you know that several senior stakeholders you need as allies are concerned about your organization's reputation, you could highlight the team's successful environmental efforts with a photo on the cover. No senior manager ever reads a report (particularly all of the boring data on environmental monitoring in the appendix). But they can't miss a cover photo -- or how you're helping them achieve one of their organizational objectives. Smart tactics, minimal effort, and now you now have some powerful friends. Similar approaches can be used to minimize the impact of stakeholders opposed to the project if you understand what's important to them. Sun Tzu clearly shows that engaging with stakeholders requires more than reactive responses. The good news is a well-thought-out strategy -- implemented through nimble and effective tactics -- can virtually eliminate the need for reactive responses and crisis management, resulting in an overall saving of effort. "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." Does your stakeholder-management strategy let you "win first" and then deliver an outcome that benefits your stakeholder community? What other stakeholder wisdom have you picked up from Sun Tzu? |
The Leadership Lifestyle
Categories:
Leadership
Categories: Leadership
| Recently I wrote about the non-negotiable attributes of leaders. A lot of the feedback I received asked how we can use these skills in our day-to-day jobs, especially when we're encountering a business culture that doesn't always place emphasis on leadership and long-term thinking. Here are a few ways you can begin applying leadership attributes to your projects, even in challenging circumstances.
Are you -- and your organization -- willing to carry out these tips toward developing leadership skills? Take this project management leadership self-assessment to learn where you stand in six leadership areas. |
Masters of Change
Categories:
PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA
Categories: PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA
| In a world fueled by change, project practitioners — the people who truly understand it — should be revered, said author Jon Duschinsky, a keynote speaker on the third day of PMI® Global Congress 2014 — EMEA. "And yet you're not," he said. "A project manager isn't respected within society. But it's time to change the conversation around what you do by changing our words and our thinking." To change perceptions of the profession, project managers should:
The goal is to focus on the result, not the process, Mr. Duschinsky said. "Move from managing a project to inspiring people to care about the outcome." Change is a watch word at Formula One, the global auto-racing championship. "The last 15 years have seen such a dramatic change in our industry," said Mark Gallagher, who has worked on Formula One for almost 30 years. After a series of sponsors — tobacco companies, dotcoms, banking institutions — collapsed in the late 1990s, Formula One took a new tack. The organization developed a massive sporting project for the first time in Malaysia. Working in a different business and government environment, Formula One had to establish infrastructure and logistics requirements and operating procedures still used today. More recently, Formula One spotted another massive change headed its way: growing demand for environmental sustainability. It wasn't going to be an easy fix for an organization not exactly known for being green. "We take a bunch of fossil fuel and burn it, live on television, in front of 300 million people. And then we burn rubber. We also fly 500 tons of equipment around the world." Formula One had its marching orders: "Turn innovation into something that can benefit everyone." The result is an engine that still performs at 800 horsepower and lasts the same distance, but burns 40 percent less fuel. To deliver that kind of cutting-edge innovation, organizations must make the most of their teams, said Mr. Gallagher. "It all comes down to how we harness our people and get the team working with a high-performance attitude," he said. "When we can listen, they can give us the winning edge." What advice do you have for effective change management? What did you learn at congress? |
Orgs Must Take on Innovation and Complexity -- Or Else
Categories:
PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA
Categories: PMI Global Congress 2014 - EMEA
| Organizations tend to look to the past to predict the future -- yet that's not the best path to innovation, said author James Burke, Tuesday's keynote speaker at PMI® Global Congress 2014 -- EMEA. "Conformity is essential to security in the present moment," he said. "But unless an organization updates that paradigm, it won't be able to process change." To cultivate innovation, organizations must learn to think relationally and connectively across business units. And armed with transferrable skills and knowledge, projects practitioners can serve as that valuable connection. "Innovation surges in the connective space between specialist silos," he said. "The goal is to foster broad-view generalists rather than narrow-view specialists." Organizations should also be leveraging big data. "'Data exhaust' can be used for predictive analytics," Mr. Burke said, "and also helps people break out of the box." Innovation isn't the only thing that has organizations scrambling. Complexity can also threaten an organization's competitive edge -- and the projects and programs it undertakes. "Complexity deals with a lot of unknown unknowns -- things you can't predict," said Dave Gunner, PMP, PfMP, at HP, a PMI Global Executive Council member organization. "You don't know when one thing will lead to something else." Complexity means different things to different people, said Mr. Gunner, chair of PMI's Navigating Complexity: A Practice Guide core committee and moderator at a congress panel on the topic. But the three main elements are: ambiguity, human behavior and systems behavior. The predominant characteristic depends on the type of project or program you're running, said Fadi Samara, PMP, of C4 Advanced Solutions. When he worked at a startup, it was more about the systems. But the people factor often takes center stage when working on a project with multicultural teams. And beware: Sometimes it's the project practitioners themselves. "Don't be a victim of self-inflicted complexity," said Sam Alkhatib, PMP, of Cupertino Electric. "Don't do things like micromanaging, focusing on narrow projects, creating the impression you're advancing projects while in reality, you're digging into holes. Unnecessary layers of management, confused accountability and confused communication makes complexity worse." Mr. Samara said the biggest issue is oversimplification. "People underestimate complex projects due to lack of experience," he said. So what does it take? More than 80 percent of respondents to the PMI Pulse of the Profession® survey ranked leadership as the most important skill to deal with project complexity. The panelists agreed: "Leadership is what makes project manager successful," said Mr. Samara. "It gets resources to do things for you, helps you facilitate problems through relationships and allows you to navigate to a solution." How does your organization foster innovation and navigate complexity? For more congress takeaways, read the recap of the first day or check out @PMIcongress. |