Voices on Project Management

By Jen Skrabak, PMP, PfMP

The future is female—but it appears project management is behind the times.

An estimated 30 percent of project managers are women, dominating administrative (project coordinator) roles instead of taking on managerial responsibilities. 

As we look at income, women working in project management around the world rake in a fraction of what their male counterparts earn:

Source: Earning Power: Project Management Salary Survey—Eleventh Edition, PMI, 2020. Originally published in the March/April 2020 issue of PM Network.

Gender inequality in project management is inescapable—but it’s not irreversible.

In a male-dominated field, how do we start carving out an equal playing field for all? Here are seven challenges we as project professionals should tackle to change that narrative:

1. Rethink Diversity: Diversity does not begin and end with gender or physical characteristics. It involves how we build teams and consider varying viewpoints based on each person’s unique experiences, skills, background and knowledge. As senior-level program professionals, we need to consider how to make everyone feel seen, heard and valued.
2. Know Your Worth: “Impostor syndrome”—feelings of inadequacy, despite evident success, and the fear of being exposed as a fraud—is real. Women are disproportionately impacted by impostor syndrome when faced with a new project, role or position, as reported by The Telegraph. Gone unchecked, it can act as a major career obstacle. 
3. Stay the Course: Life’s journey isn’t a straight line—it’s a roller coaster. Consider your strengths and what can you do (not what you can’t do). And most importantly, if you fall down or stumble, how quickly can you get back up? In the Olympics, the difference between a gold medal and no medal is fractions of a second. Remain focused.
4. Have a Game Plan: Men will apply for a job when they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, as reported by the Harvard Business Review. Most women apply only if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. Go for it, but have a plan. For any journey, you need to assess where you’re at, determine where you want to be and outline the path to get there. 
5. Take Risks: A little risk-taking can go a long way. It’s not always about whether you succeed or fail, it’s about gaining lessons learned. Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo—women can be the leaders of change, too. And don’t get too comfortable: Remember that the skills that got you where you are today may not get you to where you want to be in the future.
6. Make Your Voice Heard: Amplify who you are. Seek out sponsors who are more senior and will advocate for your career trajectory in an organization. First, build trust by performing well. Then, raise your hand to volunteer for opportunities. Make your value visible by speaking up and driving results. 
7. Visualize Your Goals: As part of your plan, chart out specific, realistic and measurable goals. Break down your progress into clear milestones.

Earlier this month, we celebrated International Women’s Day and honored the women leading project management into the future. How are you empowering women to grow within the project management field and in your organization? 

By Cyndee Miller

The push for women’s equality is a real slog. Based on current trends, WEF estimates it’ll take another 99.5 years to close the overall global gender gap. And as another International Women’s Day lands, it’s tempting to get angry or fall into a funk.

Yet there are glimmers of hope—and change. In 2019, 87 percent of companies surveyed by McKinsey and Lean In said gender diversity is a top priority, up from 74 percent in 2015. Economic parity is no longer some hush-hush conversation that women have with other women.

As is often the case, pop culture is pushing the female power message, with TV shows like The Handmaid’s Tale or Billie Eilish making history as the first woman to pick up the “big four” at this year’s Grammy Awards. Even the James Bond franchise is learning to be more respectful of women, thanks to some handiwork by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who stakes her claim as only the second woman to get a writing credit in the series’ 58-year history).

Women are driving innovation, disrupting business and changing the world. And many of those women are project professionals. Check out that video above. Those are just some of the powerful female professionals featured in PM Network^® in the past year alone. These women are delivering results, whether it was a digital reboot at a fast-food giant or patient-centric healthcare. They get it done. They turn strategy into reality.

Claudia de Moya Partiti Ferraz, PMP, has made her way all the way up to the executive suite, currently serving as CIO of Zaraplast in São Paulo, Brazil. It’s easier than it once was, but it’s “still a challenge for women to prove they are capable,” she tells PM Network^®.

McKinsey and Lean In’s research confirm her instinct, finding no decline in the number of women who say gender is a barrier to advancement or who experience microaggressions.

Unfair? Absolutely. But Ms. Ferraz says the best way for women to build their career is to follow the same advice she would give all project managers, regardless of gender: “Remain focused on delivering the project in the best way possible and meeting all the milestones in all your projects.”

Another tip for female project leaders: Don’t be thrown off guard if you’re the only woman in the room, said Asya Watkins, PMP, from EnvisionRxOptions in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. “[Team members] may not be used to seeing a woman leading a multimillion-dollar project,” she says on a new episode of Projectified^TM. “You have to be confident in your abilities. Sometimes if you’re not told this ahead of time, it could be a little jarring.”

Ms. Watkins knows the feeling well. She founded the professional network Women Of Project Management because of the void she felt early in her career.

Sarisha Harrychund, PMP, got her own gut check working on Durban, South Africa’s largest infrastructure initiative. “I had to force myself to grow in confidence to voice my thoughts, to assume responsibilities on projects, and to develop a more fearless and agile personality,” she says.

Progress is indeed happening. But now is the time for women—and men—to step up and break down barriers for female project leaders.

Celebrate International Women’s Day by sharing your action plan in the comments.

By Kevin Korterud

When I first started as a technology project manager, it was not uncommon for a project to have just one deliverable. All of the tasks in the project created the path that led to the single deliverable, which in many cases was a program, report or screen. Life used to be so easy!

As projects became more complex, the need grew for multiple project deliverables that lead to a complete solution. Deliverables now represent the “building blocks” that form a key foundational element of any project.

Whereas scheduling tasks is a fairly straightforward process that involves capturing durations, resources and successor/predecessor networks, scheduling deliverables comes with its own set of complexities. Deliverables don’t always behave in a linear manner like tasks­—so special considerations come into play with their scheduling. In addition, there are typically people and expectation factors that need to be part of a deliverable scheduling model.

Here are three essential reminders for properly scheduling deliverables:   

1. Deliverables Involve a Package of Tasks

Whereas tasks are singular items that stand alone in a work plan, deliverables have a few extra packaging steps in their path to completion.

One of the most dangerous scheduling mistakes to make with deliverables is to have a single task in a work plan that represents the deliverable. This is because of the variation in duration and effort that it takes to complete a deliverable.

Deliverables have a natural path to completion that involves a package of tasks, whose dynamics differ from normal tasks in a work plan. Project managers need to include these extra tasks that chart the lifecycle of a deliverable from initiation to completion.

For example, a sample set of deliverable task packaging would appear as follows:

You can tell from the above table that prior to scheduling deliverable task packages, project managers need to have a deliverable governance process in place. A deliverable governance process that identifies specific deliverable reviewers and a single approver are key to the effective scheduling of deliverables.

2. Deliverables May Require Task-like Linkages

We are all familiar with creating predecessor or successor linkages between tasks to form a linear series of work needed to achieve an outcome. Those linkages serve to drive schedule changes as prevailing project conditions occur.

Deliverables can require the same sort of linkages found in tasks. For example, if you have deliverables that lead to the creation of a marketing web page that involves multiple supplier deliverables, selected tasks in the deliverable package can contain task linkages. These linkages impose conditions which determine the pace at which related deliverables can be completed.

Let’s say there are three design documents from different suppliers required to create an overall design document. The build of the overall design document cannot finish before those three supplier design documents are all approved. So in the work plan, delays and schedule movements in the supplier design deliverables will drive the true completion date of the overall design document.

3. Resource Availability Impacts Deliverables

In addition to the scenario of having deliverables with dependencies, it is just as likely to have a set of deliverables that do not have any dependencies at all. These deliverables need to be completed by the end of the project but do not directly figure into the final outcome of the project. These are often process improvement deliverables that are needed for future projects that are not ready for execution.

When a project manager has a slate of unrelated deliverables, the optimal approach is to bundle them into agile-like sprints. The content of each deliverable sprint is determined by a balance of resource availability for the people who build, review and approve deliverables, as well as any form of relative priority. For example, if deliverable reviewers have low availability during a scheduled deliverable sprint, those deliverables can be pushed to a subsequent deliverable sprint.

Priority can also determine the content of deliverable sprints. Higher priority deliverables would displace lower priority deliverables to future sprints, even if work has begun on those deliverables. For example, if there is a strong need for a certain tool to be used by multiple projects, those deliverables would move into the current deliverable sprint. The deliverable sprint process allows for agility, while balancing value created from the deliverables.

As I shared earlier, life was so much easier when projects created one deliverable. Different times demand different approaches to managing deliverable schedules—especially on large transformations where there could be hundreds of dependent and independent deliverables. The last thing anyone wants to do is insufficiently manage deliverables: Leaving out one of those “building blocks” might cause the house to fall over.

What tips do you have for deliverable scheduling in today’s project ecosystem? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By Lynda Bourne

In my previous post, Innovation and Design Thinking, Part One, I focused on the personal and cultural aspects of innovation. But having an innovative idea is only a small part of the challenge. To create value, the bright ideas need to be transitioned into practical products or solutions that can be applied, sold or used.

Well-managed projects are a key element in building the new product or solution, but traditional project management, even agile project management, is rarely sufficient.

One well-established technique that bridges the gap between an idea and a practical project: design thinking.

Design Thinking

The original concept of design thinking was built around problem-solving with a shift in emphasis from traditional analysis toward innovation and synthesis. Design thinking tends to be promoted by its advocates as a complete solution to delivering innovation within an organization. A typical model looks like this: 

There are many models, with minor differences, to explain the process. But they all involve the following basic steps:

• Understand and empathize. Using observations and qualitative data, create stories that help define the problem. Understanding the context and culture of the people involved helps you to empathize with the problem. As with agile, the design thinking approach is focused on the end users’ needs.
• Define the problem or opportunity. Research and find patterns in these insights, then diagnose the problem. Translate the diagnosis into a defined plan.
• Ideate, prototype and test. Here’s where the creativity comes in. The first round of “solutions” should really be treated as a jumping off point for more in-depth iterations. Create simple prototypes that test possible outcomes, so mistakes are noted and fixed early on.
• Implement and learn. The entire process can be cyclical, especially when it comes to ideating, prototyping and testing. After implementing the solution, feedback facilitates the refining of ideas.

The problem with these models is a lack of process around creating the solution. My suggestion is using design thinking to link the creation of a culture that encourages the development of innovative ideas (the focus of my last post) with the use of project management to deliver results.

I believe that bringing project management disciplines into the design thinking process—starting from the validation of the design brief (is the proposed solution feasible, viable and desirable?) through to the delivery of the innovation and realization of benefits—is likely to result in a more cost-effective outcome in a reduced timeframe.

Innovative thinking should be encouraged within every organization. But you need pragmatic innovation to move the best of these ideas from an abstract concept to a proven concept that delivers value. Melding design thinking and project management seems to be one way of achieving this objective.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By Mario Trentim

There's an old saying: "A fool with a tool is still a fool.” And I’ve heard many project management professionals say that best practices and good methodology are more important than project management tools and software.

Do you agree? By the end of this article, you might change your mind.

A Brief Story of a Failed Methodology

I've been working as a project manager since 2001. In my early days, as an engineer, I was responsible for the technical and managerial aspects of projects. In 2010, as I moved up the ladder in my organization (the Air Force), I was assigned to implement and operate a Project Management Office (PMO). Considering that we didn't want to make large investments up front, my focus was on creating a methodology, developing templates and designing and delivering training. To my surprise, only a few of my recommendations were implemented, even though abiding by the PMO guidelines was mandatory.

I started investigating the reasons. It turned out that it was not that people didn't know the methodology, nor that they did not want to follow it. It was just too much work.

You know the drill: A project manager is assigned to a project, searches the intranet, finds the PMO site, then reads the "project management manual" and any other supporting documents for the methodology. Finally, the project manager copies and pastes files from a shared folder, and starts filling in all the templates (scattered in different files and different formats).

Truth be told, the project managers usually started on the right foot. The problems appeared as the project progressed, because it was a huge effort to keep all files updated and integrated in a coherent fashion.

Although I am talking about experiences from 2010 to 2014, many organizations unfortunately still find themselves in a similar situation today.

Productivity goes down. Project failure rates go up. And as the organization demands more training, it creates more controlling processes, auditing and extra reports—resulting in even more work.

The Solution

When I first came across Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Enterprise Project Management (EPM) software in 2003, I didn't think it would be a big deal. By 2010, I was convinced that you cannot increase portfolio and project management maturity without software.

To be able to implement a standard toolset across projects, the PMO usually starts with paper-based or Excel-based approaches. The risk is that they settle for less by not evolving into using enterprise-level business applications.

Is adopting a particular tool or software a requirement to project management success? No. But the use of project management tools increases maturity.

People often say that they will acquire a corporate project management tool once their organization is "mature enough." Going back to the beginning of this article, I am very aware of the fact that a tool is useless if you don't know how to use it. However, once you already have basic knowledge and processes, a tool can speed up the learning process—skyrocketing productivity.

As an analogy, imagine that you already have basic knowledge in math and finance. When should you buy a financial calculator, such as HP-12C? Only after five years of calculation amortization by hand? I doubt this would be the smartest choice. After all, you don’t have to become an expert bike runner before you can buy a bicycle.

In project management, some of the foundational concepts can be taught by using flip-charts, sticky notes and simple Excel spreadsheets. But you cannot teach people how to create a solid and realistic schedule and cost baselines without project management software. It is just not feasible. It is not that it is impossible. Actually, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Polaris and Apollo projects were planned without the help of software tools (nonexistent at the time). But planning for those projects took a long time.

Today, we live in a modern world in which the project life cycle is shorter. We manage multiple projects at the same time, and there is more volatility and uncertainty. Project managers have to evolve as well.

How to Implement PPM and EPM Tools

Project Portfolio Management or Enterprise Project Management is a corporate platform to manage portfolios, programs, projects and resources enterprise-wide. The PMO is ideally positioned to lead project management tool selection because it understands the big picture from different project managers, team members and business units. When assessing specific project management tools, take into consideration:

1. Functions and features
2. Implementation requirements and interfaces
3. Application maintenance, support and upgrades
4. Availability of vendors
5. Cost (including customization, licenses and more)

Depending on the size of the organization, you might prefer to execute a pilot before rolling out the tool to the entire organization. It is important to keep stakeholders engaged and informed by sharing:

• Advance announcements
• Senior management sponsorship and endorsement
• The implementation schedule
• User training

A word of caution: Do not underestimate the effort needed to implement a project management tool enterprise-wide.

In the meantime, please leave your comments and questions below.