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Real Results From a Dinner Joke
| Who said managing projects would be a bed of roses? You have probably experienced the same hardships I have on a few projects, especially if you manage multicultural distributed teams. Well, the global project I was leading was no exception. We had hit some bumps in the road, but finally found ourselves in an in-person project status meeting in a major city in the United States where the organization was headquartered. Brought together were distributed team members from the United States, Latin America and Germany. In the meeting, we all agreed we were in the same boat, but there were still many disagreements and moments of finger pointing. By the end of the day, with no positive outcome in sight, we were tired, frustrated and hungry. The last thing we wanted to do was to see each other that evening, but we still decided to have dinner together for lack of other plans. A large circular table held our party of 10. While we read the menus, the server asked us what we would like to drink, and that's when the magic started. The server said: "I hear different accents. Are you pilots?" To which I responded no, and then jokingly added: "We are Facebook friends from different parts of the world and decided to pick a place to have dinner and meet in person." My colleagues heard the joke and followed along. Then, the server asked us where we came from and about our interests. She became our group moderator. Every time she came to the table, she asked questions, which we answered according to our different cultures and life experiences. We realized we shared many things in common -- and little by little, we became acquaintances on a personal level. This dinner that almost everyone was trying to avoid helped us connect. The next day at the office, even though we were facing the same project hardships, our attitudes had changed. We worked together to define an action plan to bring the project back on track. We also agreed to stay on site for the next two weeks to implement the plan. And during our free time, we kept bonding by participating in shared interests. For example, those who were runners ran together in the morning, while others who were auto-racing fans visited a go-kart track near our hotel. At night, the wine lovers taught us about vintages over dinner. How do you foster bonds with distributed multicultural teams? What team-building exercise has yielded good results? Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
Troubled Portfolio, Troubled Projects
| Good portfolio results depend on a collection of integrated projects that align with and support strategic objectives. Obviously, poor project performance will hurt a portfolio's goals. What is not so obvious is that troubled portfolios can cause projects to fail. A troubled portfolio environment often results from an organization's misguided knowledge about portfolios. A bunch of projects thrown together doesn't make a portfolio. Through portfolio management, a portfolio should ideally consist of carefully selected, prioritized, monitored and controlled projects, and well-managed resources. If organizations don't have structured portfolios with guidelines and governance, they may, in fact, be creating projects doomed to fail. So the next time you face a troubled project, first assess if the portfolio is the problem. A good sign that you have a troubled portfolio is when you are facing troubled projects repeatedly. If more than 30 percent of your projects are troubled or challenged, you probably have a troubled portfolio. Other signs of a troubled portfolio include:
However, it's not enough to identify a troubled portfolio. You have to know how to fix it. Do you have a troubled portfolio because the projects are troubled, resulting in poor portfolio performance? Or do you have troubled projects because the portfolio is not well-structured, giving birth to projects troubled from the start? It would take many posts, maybe even a book, to discuss and analyze the answers to the questions above. However, here are some straightforward first steps for fixing a troubled portfolio. An executive should:
A portfolio manager should:
To what extent do you think bad portfolio management can doom projects to fail? What first steps do you take when conducting portfolio recovery? |
From Project Manager to Change Agent
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
| Employees who adapt quickly are an organization's change agents. Project managers have the potential to be great change agents — and in that role, enact change at the project team level. But that requires helping an individual accept change in the first place. To do so, I often start by looking at U.S. business consultant Charles Rogel's method, the SARA model. It describes how individuals react to change:
I have had to employ the SARA model many times, for major changes — from outsourcing to mergers and acquisitions — that have led to organizational changes and restructuring for my teams and me. As a leader, empathetic to my team's uncertain future, I have used SARA to help me guide them toward visualizing an end state that they can accept, even if it requires more time and effort than I had originally scoped for it. I have even provided placement assistance to help some individuals find their next role outside of my team. In the end, you just have to remember: You cannot force people through the process. But learning to guide them through it helps you improve your leadership ability by aligning teams and stakeholders to a common vision. What model do you use to help guide your project team toward acceptance of change? For more on change management, visit PMI's change management portal. |
The Other Lessons Learned
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| At a project's end, I sometimes have to tackle non-project lessons learned — those issues or takeaways that arise beyond what went right and wrong on the project. Here's how I've implemented some I have faced: Team adjournment. Team members must now move on to other teams and projects. To mitigate the sense of loss, arrange an end-of-project reward, such as a social gathering. And if emails, instant messaging, and social media — such as a company Facebook page — were arranged for project communications, encourage new discussions via these channels to foster continued friendships. Changes to the organization's processes. Lessons learned should provide direction on the processes that benefit the organization the most if adopted right away. Once those are identified, speak to sponsors or executives and request that a task force be appointed to evaluate these processes further. The task force should consist of key stakeholders who can make changes to processes. For example, I organized a task force to review our quality control processes on a recent production project. During the project, our quality manager only reviewed product consistency and workmanship in the testing phase. The task force, however, determined the quality manager should be involved earlier and review elements during the design phase. This ensured design elements were consistent with other products released to market and cut down on time spent on the testing phase. For your projects, if you determine your organization can benefit from the process changes identified during a lessons learned, embed change management principles in project plans to lay the groundwork for employee buy-in. This lessens the impact of new processes for the employee — and the organization. Finally, the changes may require new training, which you should champion. Without it, you'll have new processes, but no team members capable of following them. Revenue breakthroughs, good or bad. Even when your project is facing cancellation, you can help drive discussion around its closing. Prepare reports that show in-depth understanding of the issues. After all, many of the projects that get cancelled may just need portfolio realignment. On the other hand, if your project was successful, there is a new bottom line to celebrate. So if appropriate, publish your accomplishment in the form of best practices with organizations such as PMI. You can also prepare training sessions and webinars or publish articles about the organization's steps toward success. Do you look beyond the project's lessons learned for other challenges and opportunities? |
Culture Shocked Into Action
| During my project management career, I have experienced many culture shocks. But the one that changed my life happened when I joined a global corporation in Mexico in the mid-1980s. I was a recent graduate and had just finished my internship with this organization when I got a job offer. During immersion training, all the new hires visited the boardroom, lined with awards and honors that the Mexican branch had won in the past. Most impressive was the mahogany table, where many major deals went down. It was cared for like a museum piece. After several months, I adjusted to the corporate world with the help of a great manager and mentor. Soon enough, prep work started for the quarterly review meeting, when executives visited our office from the company's U.S. headquarters. To my surprise, my manager included me in the prep team, which meant I would be a presenter. When the big day came, I arrived at the boardroom a few minutes beforehand to ensure everything was in order for my first presentation to senior executives. There, I found one of the visiting top executives -- with both feet up on the mahogany table. When the meeting began, we commenced introductions. The visiting executives threw their business cards across the table as a casino croupier would, while my Mexican colleagues and I handed our business cards to them. The meeting progressed, and when the time came for one of the visiting executives to present, he tossed a copy of a handout not only to me, but also to the general manager of the Mexican branch. I was in total shock. I wondered, how could this be happening? They were high-level executives, and their lack of good manners -- by my standards -- took me by surprise. I also felt frustrated. This was not interaction I had hoped for with headquarter executives. It took me some time to digest the experience. But by the next quarterly review, I was ready to take action. I tossed my business card at each of the U.S. executives during the introductions. Before my presentation, I slid handouts across the table at them but handed them to my Mexican colleagues. My actions raised a few eyebrows among the latter. By the end of the meeting, the executive I saw with his feet up on the table months prior asked me to stay in the room. I expected to be reprimanded, or even fired. But he said: "Thanks, Conrado. Your actions during the meeting made me realize that business behaviors need to be adjusted according to location. What may be okay in my country may not be okay in yours. You taught me a great lesson. Employees like you make this a great company." That was the "wow" moment that had an impact on the rest of my professional life. I'm not recommending such drastic actions, but I felt strongly enough about my experience to take the risk. The moral of my story: Culture shock does not have to be a negative or incapacitating. I used my experience as a source of motivation, introspection and change. It led me to a lifetime of researching organizational and national cultures and sharing my experiences of working with multicultural and multigenerational teams. As a project manager, how have you recovered from culture shock and turned it an opportunity for professional growth? Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |