Voices on Project Management

By Dave Wakeman

I’m heading to London in a few weeks and while I’m there, I’m going to catch a bunch of Premier League matches. My team, Tottenham Hotspur, has had an up-and-down season—changing coaches in November, and then getting a new manager, José Mourinho. 

As I was thinking about my travel plans, I also started thinking about how managing a soccer team is a lot like managing a project. And, to take it even further, I started asking myself what we can learn from some of soccer’s best managers. 

Flexibility Counts 

As I mentioned, Tottenham had to change managers this season. In switching from Mauricio Pochettino to José Mourinho, the team found itself working under an entirely new system. Pochettino was known for speed, pressing and intensity. Mourinho was known for being more tactical, controlling and playing a style of soccer that many don’t feel is pretty.     

The challenge for Mourinho is that he came into the team in the middle of the season, so he needed to adapt to the team he had—not build the one he wanted. That meant his Tottenham team has been a lot less defensive oriented, and a bit higher scoring than a typical Mourinho-coached team. 

This reminds me of projects where we don’t always have the time, resources or skills that we would hope to have. In these cases, we need to be flexible. Is there a way to shift the timing of certain parts of the project to fit your schedule? Can you manage all the different stakeholders with their different styles of communication and their different goals? 

In soccer, you deal with complex situations that don’t lend themselves to simple or rigid solutions. When managing a project, we see the same situation occur. This means that we have to understand where we are going and be able to adjust on the fly when the situation changes, so we can get to our destination. 

Communication Matters

I think communication is one of the key skills that coaches and project managers share. I’ve always said 90 percent of a project manager’s job is communication and 10 percent is everything else. 

In watching soccer managers, I have a sneaking suspicion that the same ratio applies. Like project managers, they have to have a great deal of technical skill, but they also have to be willing and able to delegate and let other folks deliver their vision. 

In other words, it is difficult to do everything yourself. And being the public face of the project or team requires the leader to deal with key stakeholders like the media, the sponsor and the team. 

In both scenarios, communication is more than just answering questions or giving orders. Both managers spend lots of time listening to other people so that they can make decisions or adjustments, and so they have a finger on the pulse of the teams they are leading. 

Success Isn’t Guaranteed

This should seem obvious, but every project comes with a bit of risk. The same goes with managing a soccer team. Just saying that success isn’t guaranteed isn’t nearly enough. But knowing that failure is a possibility impacts the way that we all approach our jobs. 

Project leaders spend a lot of time thinking through risk management, risk mitigation and change management. Similarly, soccer managers are thinking about how their formations will impact the game, gaps in talent and a multitude of other factors that could be the difference between success and failure. 

To me, this concept gets interesting when you think about success. It requires us to do all of the same things, like understanding risk, being flexible and willing to change and communicate effectively. 

These are only my top three ways that a soccer manager is like a project manager. What would you add? Let me know below! 

By Dave Wakeman

I never like to miss a trend, so since 2020 is just around the corner, I thought I would put together a few of the ideas I’m going to be exploring in the coming year. My hope is that you all will reply in the comments section with some of your own ideas and areas of focus.

We can call it a prediction post, without predictions. Here are the three things that I’ll be focusing on in 2020:

Economic Uncertainties

As I’m writing this, the United Kingdom is holding an election to try to clarify what they will or won’t do about Brexit. And I likely don’t have to tell you there’s an election in the United States in 2020. 

Alone, these two things mean little to most project managers, but underlying these elections is a sense of economic uncertainty due to some of the issues that are driving them. 

This is a big idea to pay attention to because the U.S. and the U.K. are two of the largest economies in the world. All of us have to pay attention because potential ripple effects could sideline our projects, cut our budgets, or just cause a general sense of uncertainty to seep into our work. 

I’ll be checking the economic pulse constantly in 2020 because uncertainty of any kind can have a big impact on business, the economy and our jobs. 

Climate Change

I’m back from Australia, and while I was there New South Wales was dealing with severe brush fires. Some have attributed the fires to the impact of climate change.

Whether climate change is an attributed factor in these fires or not, the trend of weather patterns being more severe is impacting population centers around the world. 

I’ll keep an eye on this because where there are challenges, there are opportunities. As project managers, the opportunity to mitigate the impact of severe weather is a huge chance to hone our skills, develop new solutions and work on things that really do have a significant, real-world impact. 

For me, I’m going to look at every major weather event and ask what were the lessons learned, what could we do to handle it better, and what is the trend line for this kind of event so that I can better understand where my skills and mindset can add the most value.    

Changes in Technology

We take it for granted that technology is moving fast and changing the way we approach our lives and careers. I’ve been running out the flag that technology is a tool we should be using to improve our ability to do the things that only we, as humans, can accomplish.   

Maybe it will be a theme of the new year—I don’t know.

But what I will say is that technology has been a crutch for a lot of us over the last few years, and as much as it improves our ability to do things, it also jams us up or sends us down a rabbit hole of needless activity. 

In 2020, I’m going to keep an eye on how we are using technology. Can we find ways to take mundane, repetitive tasks off our plates and give us the freedom to do the things that really add value?

Or, are we continuing to allow technology to drive us and make us a tool of technology’s use?

From my point of view, keeping an eye on technology likely means spending more time focusing on the outcomes I need to achieve and thinking through how technology supports them, instead of getting lost in all the cool features that a solution has to offer. 

But enough about me. Where are you going to focus your attention in 2020?

by Dave Wakeman

Happy birthday, PMI! You gave us 50 years of projects, and all I’m giving you is this column with three of my favorite projects of all time? I kid. But reflecting on the impact of PMI and project management over the last 50 years got me thinking about how projects are at the core of so many improvements, big and small. 

The three I want to highlight this month reflect the ambition that project managers can have, the global impact of a great project, and where the next huge project innovations may be. Let’s take a look at my three favorite projects:

Putting a Man on the Moon

Can I really start anywhere else? For my money this is the best example of what great project managers, an excellent PMO and strong leadership can create. While it isn’t just one project, I think putting a man on the moon highlights several things that PMI pioneered over the years—two I want to highlight specifically. 

First, vision. When U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first proposed the idea of Project Apollo, it was all about getting a three-man crew into space. By the time the project was complete, the United States had sent men to the moon seven times, successfully landing and completing their mission six of those times. 

Second, innovation. The scope of Project Apollo changed over time, growing from the initial plan of putting a few men in space to putting man on the moon. That meant we needed new technologies and new ideas to get us there. One of the hallmarks of a successful project manager is the ability to create something out of nothing, knowing what the goal of the project is and having the framework to work within to achieve success. 

Project Apollo showed us that with the right goals, vision and sponsorship, we can accomplish almost anything. 

The Debut of the iPhone

I’m torn on this, probably like a lot of folks, because we’ve seen that as much as technology has helped us connect, learn and communicate, we have also seen the negatives. I’m going to keep the iPhone on my list of favorite projects for one simple reason that should be important to project managers: It had a clear and great project scope. 

What was termed Project Purple 2 was Steve Jobs’ attempt to create a computer with a touchscreen that you could use to directly interact with your device. When he came up with the idea of building it into a phone, the technology was new and the capacity of achieving a phone that would work without a keyboard was untested. 

But the ambition and scope of creating a computer that doubled as a phone that you could type on with your fingers won out, and our lives have never been the same. 

Tesla and Electric Cars in General

I’ll claim bias here because I know there were electric cars before Tesla came along, but Tesla was the first electric car that made it cool to drive electric. 

We can look at the original Tesla roadster as the project that launched it all. The concept was for Tesla founder, Martin Eberhard, to create a high-mileage sports car, solving a need for himself. When Elon Musk got involved in 2004, he helped move the company towards using the proceeds of the car to help fund the development of mass-market cars. 

All of this is fine, but the real importance of the project shows up in the way that the company wasn’t happy with the way that the motor and transmission worked in the chassis, forcing Tesla to build its own engines and power sources. 

What followed was the most advanced rechargeable battery for cars that the world has ever seen—revolutionizing what is possible from an electric car. 

This final project highlights how things build off each other and how projects are the basis of all good things that come to us. Because if we hadn’t developed the technology to put a man on the moon, we may have never been able to uncover the components and the technologies needed to put a computer in our pocket. And if we didn’t have a computer in our pocket, how would I ever be able to use my phone as my car key! 

While that last point is a reach, my final point is that the greatest gift PMI has given all of us as professionals over the last 50 years is a chance to learn, grow and repeat the process in a way that we can build off of all the people that came before us. For that we should all be grateful! 

Happy 50th, PMI: Here’s to the next 50! Please share your thoughts on these impressive projects below.

By Dave Wakeman

How do we present ourselves to our teams? That’s something I didn’t think about deeply until recently, when I started hanging out with Harrison Monarth, author of Executive Presence: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO. 

I had considered it, of course, but not as something I could focus on or change. And I never connected it to the effectiveness of our leadership. 

But as I thought about executive presence more and more, I realized that everything we do is marketing. So why wouldn’t that bleed into the way we manage our teams? That’s why I wanted to take a moment to highlight how you can improve your presence and leadership. 

Manage How People Perceive You

This became a big issue for me in January when I was at a conference in Texas. At least a dozen people came up to me, waving their phones in my face, practically yelling, “I listen to your podcast and I love it.”

First, I didn’t realize so many people heard my podcast, even though I knew the numbers said thousands of people a month were listening. 

Second, I never thought about the way I presented myself to others because I didn’t realize people were paying attention to me. 

I think many of us fall into that category. We take actions, live our lives and never realize we are being paid attention to. As leaders, we have to manage the way we are perceived. 

This means that our tone of voice, our dress, the way we delegate and lead meetings—basically everything we do—impacts how our teams see us, judge us and react to us. Everything counts. 

For all of you, this means you’d likely benefit from taking a few moments to jot down how you want to be perceived. Then ask yourself whether you are living up to those expectations. If you are, great! If you aren’t, what actions will you take to change that? 

Get Into the Motivation Game 

I like to think everyone has a certain level of self-motivation. I believe this is true, but I’d be lying if I said this means everyone is self-motivated in the way that I want them to be. As a project leader, you are likely confronting this same situation. 

I recently read an interesting story about Pat Riley, the legendary coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks and Miami Heat. He’s famous for throwing a bag of championship rings on the table when he was recruiting LeBron James to join Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade in Miami. 

Riley clearly knows a thing or two about motivation, but the story I read took this to another level. I learned that he would give a new 20-minute motivational speech to his team each day. From what I can gather, he never repeated them. 

This alone is impressive, but what is relevant to our discussion here is that Riley used these stories to motivate his team and to instill the right mindset and values. 

As we consider how we want to be reflected to our teams, it’s important to think about how we want them to act and behave. That doesn’t happen by chance. It is our job to motivate and inspire our teams to do their jobs in a way that reflects our shared values and goals. 

I challenge you to spend a few moments thinking about how you can inspire and lead your team. Consider the following: What stories should you share, which examples should you use and what values do you want to instill? 

Be Willing to Have Difficult Conversations 

I don’t know anyone who has rushed headfirst into every difficult conversation. Everyone has struggled to begin a conversation at some point. Yet one of the keys to successful leadership is the ability to deliver difficult conversations when you don’t want to. Often, this ties into the idea of accountability. 

If you bought into my idea about motivation, you probably recognize the importance of accountability. In many instances, accountability, motivation and difficult conversations go hand-in-hand. 

If you aren’t holding people accountable with real deadlines, consequences and feedback, you aren’t really being a leader and your presence is suffering. 

To maximize your presence, you have to be willing to have difficult conversations. You can make them easier by understanding exactly what you need to convey and sticking to your planned talking points to ensure you hit your key objectives. Couple this with meaningful accountability in the form of clearly spelled-out expectations, deadlines and consequences in case of non-performance. By doing so, you can achieve real accountability and ease some of the pressure of tough conversations. 

This idea of presence is something I’m still working through, but I’m curious about what you think. Let me know in the comments. 

by Dave Wakeman

I’ve been doing some reading on leadership. I don’t know exactly what brought the topic to mind, but I think it’s a combination of coaching my 9-year-old son’s soccer team and seeing institutions struggle to get people to take responsibility for their actions. 

As project managers, you are leaders in your organization and your team. That’s why I wanted to highlight a few leadership lessons I learned coaching a bunch of 9-year-olds—lessons you can apply to your teams.

Simplify Your Message

When we were coaching our soccer team, the other parent coaching with me came up with the 3 Ps that symbolized what we wanted our kids to learn over the course of the season. 

Those Ps were:

• Passing
• Possession
• Pressure

Each P represents a principle we wanted to teach the kids about life and soccer. Passing was about being a good teammate and recognizing that you have to work together. 

Possession was about paying attention to what is going on around you and making the proper decision.

Pressure was about taking action and initiative. 

You can see how much these things apply in life. What would happen if you broke your own message down into a simple format? Maybe even 3 Ps for your project? 

Be Decisive

In a lot of businesses and teams, people love responsibility but never want to make decisions. In coaching youth soccer, you learn pretty quickly that if you don’t have a plan and you don’t act with intention, the kids will run all over you. I think the same happens in projects without strong leadership. 

If you aren’t acting quickly and decisively, your team can start taking actions that are inconsistent with your goals and ambitions. But how do you act decisively, especially when you are operating in situations with little clarity? 

Four steps stand out to me:

• Have a plan for what you want to achieve.
• Gather information about your decision.
• Consider your options.
• Be confident and fake it if you have to. 

Recognize the Buck Stops With You

The most important thing in coaching and project management is that you have to be responsible—win or lose, succeed or fail. You have to take ownership of the outcomes you produce, no matter what. 

Why is this so important? Because when a team doesn’t have a strong talisman to identify with and look to for support, it can create a situation where the team underperforms, has a lot of disagreements and doesn’t meet its goals. 

The best way to accomplish this is to be decisive, as mentioned earlier, be clear in your communications, and be consistent in your demands and expectations. 

If you do all of that, you will hopefully find that you are not just a project manager, but a project leader. 

Have you found a way to distill your leadership strategy into a simple message for your project teams? Please comment below.