Voices on Project Management

by Dave Wakeman

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the art of strategy. I did some research to rebuild my website during 2021 because I decided the pandemic was a good opportunity to create a new version of my business—and what I found was that around 40% of businesses have no clear, stated strategy. And, of the 60% that say they have a strategy, around 80% of those strategies don’t pass the test of actually being a strategy.

Ask yourself:

1. Do you know your ambition?
2. Are you focused in your targeting?
3. Do you know why someone picks you over someone else?
4. Have you identified the resources you need to be successful?
5. What will (and what should) your action list look like?

In a lot of ways, this looks like the role of a project manager as well. But where I really want to turn your attention to this time is to the third question about knowing why folks will pick you over someone else. Because I want to talk with you about having a competitive advantage in your role as a PM.

Let’s begin by defining a competitive advantage for our purposes as the skills, attitudes and competencies that you have that help you stand out and get your projects completed successfully even in very challenging environments.

Now, let’s look at some of the key competitive advantages that I see missing pretty regularly—ones that can change everything because you can work on improving them. Here are my top three:

1. Leadership skills: It can feel like we live in a world without leaders. Managers, yes. But real leaders feel few and far between.

In fact, I’ve seen a sharp reduction in the amount of “thought leaders” preaching leadership principles or highlighting the way that folks can be better leaders in their organizations. A leader is someone that uses persuasion, not just positional authority, to get their team to achieve the results they want.

It can also be improved by focusing on the right actions and attitudes. The first attitude is one of team over individuals. On projects, it can be easy to fall into the trap of looking at the task list and thinking of the individuals and the individual tasks independently. That’s often the road to trouble, since success doesn’t happen alone or in a vacuum. Helping your team see this is a strong start to success—and one you can work on as a PM.

Start here and master this attitude. This alone will help your leadership skills.

2. Vision: I understand how crazy this one can seem to a lot of you, but bear with me. Vision is often missing because we can all fail to see the big picture from time to time.

For PMs, it might not even always feel like an important skill—but it is, because having a feeling for the vision of what success will look like can be the difference between success and failure. This is due to the reality that in most instances, our projects are part of a larger ambition—one that might have many stakeholders and many smaller tasks or projects that lock into ours.

We need to know this, recognize what the entire scope of the environment will look like, and be able to share this with our teams. That’s vision.

You get better at vision by being willing to take a step back from the task at hand, connecting with key stakeholders and working to see the 50,000-foot view of the project. In my strategy work, the first thing we focus on is setting the “ambition” for the organization. This is simply figuring out what success will look like.

That’s vision, and if you put your organization’s overall thinking into the framework around ambition, you’ll have an easier time with it.

3. Communication skills: Since I started writing these pieces, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about communications skills because your ability to communicate effectively has arguably the most impact on the success or failure of your projects.

Why? Effective communications can help propel people to action, shortcut potential challenges, and draw people toward a successful conclusion of your project.

Where does communication fall short for most people?

1. Too much jargon or complicated language: You have to speak to the level of your audience and their understanding, not just yours.
2. A failure to listen: We are all guilty of waiting to talk at one time or another. But being an effective communicator requires a willingness to listen to the other person.
3. A lack of ensuring the message got across. I have an affinity for making sure I got my message across by making myself the point of ineffective communication. I do this through offering up that I may not have shared everything, or that I may have been too technical. By making yourself the butt of the joke, you can lower people’s resistance to saying they didn’t understand something.

These three skills are competitive advantages—and are unfortunately often missing. But like a good strategy, you can focus your energy to give yourself a chance to be more successful. Give these skils a try, and let me know what happens.

By Peter Tarhanidis, PhD

As the pandemic stretches on, work-from-home programs continue to keep teams working virtually. During this time, we have performed courageously to deliver our strategic and business outcomes. Here I will share a select review of advice from industry experts as they explore how to build a post-pandemic response strategy.

According to McKinsey (2022), organizations have pivoted to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth toward building a better world. And Harvard Business Review (2020) notes that all types of companies have navigated the pandemic by pivoting their business models in the short term to survive—becoming more resilient in the long term.

Yet not all pivots generated an improved business outcome. Three trends in particular can help ensure a successful pivot:

1. Align the pivot to a long-term trend driven by the pandemic
2. Extend the firm’s existing capabilities, further solidifying the strategic plan
3. Sustain profitability, which preserves and enhances the brand’s value to the customer

PWC’s Global Crisis Survey identified three key lessons that businesses can adopt for long-term resilience:

1. Plan and prepare for inevitable disruption by establishing a crisis team
2. Integrate teams and cross-company competencies to enable effective responses
3. Build resilience governance into the organization’s culture

An opportunity, therefore, exists to consider how to prepare your team’s competence in driving synergy and resilience in order to lead post-pandemic growth strategies—and simultaneously pivot from those same strategies.

Here is a shortlist of what leaders can do to prepare for a post-pandemic recovery and support an organization:

1. Develop mental agility to pivot among key strategies and deliver business outcomes as key shifts and business challenges arise
2. Allow the process of learning to take effect across key leadership levels
3. Integrate PMI and agile frameworks to ensure flexible planning activities
4. Employ data analytics to support key insights in customer and marketplace forecasts
5. Clarify the governance of key plans and what event would trigger a decisive strategic pivot
6. Develop talent to migrate into new areas of company strategies and projects
7. Gather teams in person in order to create synergy and move from “norm” to “perform”

In the end, the teams that are ready to execute and can pivot as necessary will be ready for the post-pandemic competitive environment.

Let me know if you have uncovered additional successful strategies—or any pitfalls to avoid—in building team synergy and resilience.

References

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business
2. https://hbr.org/2020/07/how-businesses-have-successfully-pivoted-during-the-pandemic
3. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/crisis-solutions/covid-19.html

By Lynda Bourne

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the concept of modern project management. How did we get here and where are we going?

People have been doing things that require planning and organization for millennia. But no one involved in leading these endeavors called themselves a project manager until the concept of being a project manager emerged from general business management in the United States starting in the 1930s and ’40s.

Following on from this start, the catalyst for modern project management was the development of PERT and the critical path method of scheduling in 1957. Practitioners of this new craft formed the early project management associations: INTERNET (now IPMA) in Europe in 1964, and PMI in the U.S. in 1969.

These new associations defined and created the concept of modern project management. In particular, PMI created the first project management body of knowledge in 1987 to support its original PMP examination. The structure of the PMBOK® Guide was reorganized in 1996 and remained fundamentally unchanged through to the Sixth Edition published in 2017. The project phases, knowledge areas and processes defined in the PMBOK® Guide had a major influence on the emerging understanding of project management worldwide.

The 20th century version of modern project management was based on reductionism (WBS, etc.), and focused on control (CPM, PERT, EVM). The prevailing view was the work of a project involved people with hard hats creating something you can kick.

Project success was achieved by implementing the processes in the standards effectively. Consequently, project failure could be overcome by the better application of better processes. Internationally, efforts were focused on identifying and defining the required processes, training people in the processes, and qualifying trained people as project managers (the PMP credential being the pre-eminent example).

Almost everyone involved in these developments through to the early 2000s believed projects were special and distinguishable, that project management was a transferrable skill, and that good project management could be defined. We thought that with a bit more work, we would be able to fully define projects, project management and the processes needed for project success.

Then there was entropy!
Entropy describes the level of disorder in a system and shows that all closed systems will tend to become less ordered over time. Work has to be applied from outside of the system to return it to an orderly state.

For 40 years, project management associations had worked to create order in the discipline of project management. But in the last 10 years, a range of external influences have caused a rapid increase in entropy. And because of these influences, it looks as though efforts to standardize project management into a single structure are no longer feasible.

The three primary drivers of entropy are:

1. Everything is a project. In the 21st century, almost anything can be a project. Traditional “hard hat” projects have been joined by:

• School projects
• IT projects
• Business change projects
• Research projects
• Environmental projects
• Volunteer projects, etc.

2. Methodology overload. Approaches to project delivery now include:

• Agile, including Scrum, Kanban, XP and a range of blends; with ranges of control spanning SAFe and Disciplined Agile, through to people advocating no planning
• Light and lean concepts
• Complex project management
• Traditional, waterfall, etc.

3. Project scope is expanding. Project management has expanded to include:

• Portfolio management
• Program management
• Benefits management/organizational change management
• Front-end loading

It appears there is no longer one right way to manage a project; the processes used to successfully run an agile project are fundamentally different to those needed to run a “hard hat” project. This dilemma led to the fundamental change in the structure of the Seventh Edition of the PMBOK® Guide. But this also means the concept of a project manager and the skills the person require are extremely variable.

This divergence is recognized in the way PMI is restructuring its range of credentials and qualifications. But both the revised PMBOK® Guide and the qualification framework seem to be adapting to the symptoms, rather than the fundamental changes occurring in the global understanding pf projects and project management.

The challenges for PMI, and all project management associations globally, are:

1. Refine the definition of project management. My suggestion is “The management of a temporary team, created to deliver a predefined outcome for an organization, in a disciplined way.”
2. Identify the universal factors that are consistently required to separate a project from other business and general activities. These appear to include:
   1. Temporary teams set up to deliver an objective
   2. Stakeholder engagement and communication
3. Rebuild a purpose around these core attributes, augmented with industry and methodological specifics.

This approach would produce a knowledge framework with a constant set of core skills and knowledge, supported by workplace skills such as being a scrum master of a construction scheduler.

What future do you want for PMI and the project management associations?

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP

A few months ago, I missed an important requirement in a project. Much was at stake if it wasn’t fixed on time. Fortunately, the provider could implement it on time, but it was very tight.

How did this happen? I had a complete sense of control of the project because I delivered similar ones in the past. But I was excessively self-confident and missed some steps in the process. This project also uncovered some tacit knowledge I didn’t document.

Turns out we not only have to fight imposter syndrome, but also “overconfidence syndrome.” It is a problem that can affect any leader regardless of age, gender, experience or location. 

5 main symptoms

There were some warning signs a few weeks before that I didn’t take into account. Here are some symptoms of overconfidence that can alert you:

1. You are reluctant to introduce changes. Your excuse: “It has always worked like this. Why do I need to change?”
2. You don’t request feedback. Your excuse: “If people don’t say anything, it means they are satisfied.”’
3. You shelve ideas quickly, indicating no deadline. Your excuse: “We’ll talk about them later.”
4. You begin to be more task oriented than relationship oriented. “I’m overloaded. I don’t have time to talk, and we have to move forward.”
5. You don’t acknowledge efforts made, but instead focus on what is missing. Your excuse: “I’m a perfectionist.”  

Risks of inaction

Taking no action may have harmful effects on your projects. You can make new mistakes that will delay the projects. Some members of the team will feel demotivated by the behavior you display. Some will feel paralyzed by your overconfidence and make mistakes.

Overconfidence for me translated into a kind of scornful tone that I wasn’t aware of until some colleagues raised it to me. Since then, I’ve used some simple “medicines” that worked for me…

5 healing medicines

Before hitting a wall, there are some healing recipes to set up:

1. Help a team member: It will give you a different perspective of the issues and constraints faced by the team.
2. Mentor a young project manager: For me, it works because I remember how little guidance I got—and I’m back with my feet on the ground.
3. Volunteer for a non-profit: For instance, you can spend a weekend helping an association. It is a way to meet diverse people and hear different stories of success—and failure. It reminds you how vulnerable we can be and how fragile life is.
4. Write regularly in a journal: Block some time in your calendar and reflect on what happened during the week. What behaviors are you not proud of? What kind of role model were you for the team in that particular situation?
5. Build a squad of mentors: Ask them to alert you if they notice any symptoms of overconfidence.

All of these will help you feel like you’re back in the trenches with a learning mindset! It will develop humility, tolerance and empathy.

What other healing medicines do you have to help you keep your feet on the ground despite your success as a project manager? Share your thoughts below!

By Soma Bhattacharya

Sometimes I read an article where someone mentions that “agile is dead,” or that it doesn’t work anymore. I have to pause and think where this comes from. Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that agile never said it would work for everyone.

Most teams and organizations working in agile either step into it by accident or want to try the “trend” to figure out it works for them, then continue working with it. I reached out to my friends who are certified trainers in agile, and they mentioned that they are busier than ever. That world has opened up because trainings are now online, which means you don’t have to travel anymore to take classes or get certified. In addition, the 15^th Annual State of Agile Report notes a growth in agile adoption from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021. So it looks like agile is still very much alive.

Certification or not, agile is always the most natural way of working. At least, that’s what I think. Why?

1. You work in tight-knit teams, keep distractions limited and get the work done.
2. You are transparent in your communication because the team is small and a safe place for anyone to open up.
3. You plan but always adapt and adjust the work because you are flexible.
4. You demonstrate the work, and the feedback is used to course correct

So, what’s not to like about it? Not everyone agrees; in reality, things can seem more challenging for some.

Here’s why teams don’t want to go agile:

1. Lack of empowerment and support of teams: Decisions made by teams are later turned down by managers. I have been in situations where someone from the team pulled me aside and said, “All that planning was for nothing, we were just told ‘forget the process, and this is what you have to deliver by end of the month.’”
2. Reluctance to plan for sprints and releases because everything will change later anyway: Being flexible and agile is often used as a workaround for a lack of getting your homework done before coming to the meetings.
3. Forced to deliver even when things are out of team capacity: Burnout is real, and there’s a reason capacity planning is in place. So, going out of your way to enforce more doesn’t really help in the long term (think bad quality and reworks).
4. The influencer of the team is always involved in estimations and decisions: Planning poker is barely implemented because one person makes the call. Whatever happened to coming to conclusions about the story points and the estimations? New team members are never encouraged to talk about their side of estimation…so yeah, no prizes for guessing why estimations never work.
5. Why speak up when it’s already decided? Team culture always influences team behavior. So, imagine new members when they see that everything is decided. It tells them that it’s not required to speak up to air their opinions.
6. The same old retrospectives…and no one does anything about it: A team stops doing retros because similar points keep coming up without any action items being attached to them; the solutions aren’t there, and the problems remain.
7. The stand-ups literally never end: Teams have multiple discussions where more members join than are required—and it goes on for more than an hour. (Oh, by the way: Just because you do stand-ups doesn’t mean you’re agile.)
8. I get appraised based on what I did, not how I worked as part of the team: Time is wasted. The appraisal system that rewards individuals and not teams is controversial. Imagine if team performance didn’t matter…what should you focus on?
9. We might say we’re an agile team—but in reality, we don’t follow agile principles: Everyone calls us agile, but as a team we only do what we are told—and no, we are not self-organizing because no one empowered us to do that.
10. Everyone uses agile as an excuse to not do the prep or work because everything will be done “just in time”: Instead of excuses, just make it work. Try, experiment, fail and rebuild your agile culture again.

I don’t know about your experiences, but from what I have seen, agile is usually welcomed by the teams—the problems creep in later, as it’s not something management buys into (and it’s not just me: the Annual State of Agile Report also mentions challenges in adoption like “not enough leadership participation” or “inadequate management support and sponsorship”).

I know those who are happy being agile are aligned at all levels and are working on being a better team every day. It’s all about individuals and interactions over processes and tools, right?

What have you heard from colleagues about why agile isn’t always embraced?