Voices on Project Management

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMI-ACP, PMP

“We miss the way you managed the project!”

After leaving my role as a project manager of a software development team, these words were the best gift I could’ve received.

It was a new team, a new innovative product development and a new experience for me. I was not a developer, I did not have any agile training and I did not know how to contribute to the project efficiently. But I observed and kept note of what worked and what didn’t—which helped me develop my skills as a servant leader.

Servant leaders are a different breed—they flip the traditional leadership model on its head. Their main goal is to be of service to their teams instead of simply focusing on the organization.

My past project work has given me firsthand experience on the benefits of servant leadership. Here are some ways to apply it:

1. Remove roadblocks.

Wherever I could, I tried to get rid of anything getting in the team’s way. Participating in meetings or writing documents was considered a waste of time by the team. So I decided to lend a hand, letting them concentrate on activities that added value.

To ease the tension between the development team and the head of marketing, I negotiated and proposed more streamlined options for implementation and brought the ideas back to the team.

I gave presentations on behalf of the team about the product and jotted down the questions I couldn’t answer. I documented and organized the information to be shared in a way it could be easily accessed. I concentrated on circulating the information within the team and tried to anticipate any issues or topics.

2. Set ground rules.

The development team complained to me after a marketing representative in the organization stepped on its toes. They needed a mutually beneficial and efficient way of working, so I stepped up as the main point of contact and set up weekly, in-person meetings.

Every Friday morning, we met with the development team. The representative loved technology and wanted to know more and engage in a knowledge exchange, but it used up a lot of our time. This person also gave some advice on topics he did not know, which didn’t always sit well with members of the development team and came to my desk and asked me questions I could not answer. Regular meetings and serving as a dedicated team liaison were not enough. At this point, it became clear that I needed to set specific ground rules, so that I didn’t diminish the trust I had built with my team or put them at risk by allowing someone outside the team to question or interfere with their work processes.

3. Reward the team.

Congratulating team members and giving them visibility keeps them motivated and builds trust. And there’s more than one way to create an environment in which your team feels appreciated. I initiated a weekly newsletter to shine a light on team achievements, even highlighting individual names. I also spoke with the functional manager about the good job done by the developers and pushed for a pay rise. I even advocated for a member to receive training on a test tool.

Looking back, the project was both a challenging and transformational growth journey. But I did learn a lot about servant leadership—trusting the team and supporting them whenever and however they need it.

How have your experiences with servant leadership shaped you?

by Conrado Morlan

The term VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world has been around for a while. But 2020 will be remembered as the year that forced every organization to deal with the VUCA world. And the most successful ones will be those that find ways to improve the capability of their leaders by acquiring new ways of thinking.

Yet even before COVID, PwC’s annual CEO survey found a majority of executives reporting they didn’t have the talent needed to grow their organizations and respond to increasing complexities.

         Today’s VUCA world demands vertical development. What exactly does that mean? The acquisition of skills, certifications, and experience is essentially learning or horizontal development. Vertical development helps the individual change to become more sophisticated, mature, and capable.

Put simply: Horizontal development transforms what you know; vertical development transforms how you think.

Typically, vertical development involves the following:

• An unprecedented experience that derails a person’s habitual way of thinking
• Meeting with people who have different perspectives to find a different way to achieve outcomes
• A process of integration to help the leader gain a different perspective and develop a new way of thinking

Vertical development isn’t exclusive to leaders at the top of the organizational hierarchy. It’s for anybody in the organization, including project professionals.

If project managers and/or organizational leaders respond to the VUCA world simply through learning a few more skills, it’s not going to produce any significant benefit. They must develop their capabilities, adapt, and expand their ability to respond to the challenges. Vertical development involves a transformation of their consciousness.

To understand the difference between horizontal and vertical development, think of a cup of water. Individuals developing horizontally are pouring water into their cups. Individuals developing vertically need a bigger cup.

As project managers grow into their leadership roles, it becomes less about their mastery of frameworks, methodologies, tools, and techniques, and more about their container. The level of consciousness to navigate the complexity of the VUCA world requires a bigger cup.

One of the greatest benefits of vertical development is how it fosters increased mental complexity, innovation, emotional intelligence, and the ability to resolve conflicts constructively. This translates to an improved ability to interpret situations and make effective decisions—two essential skills needed to tackle problems in the VUCA world.

         How are you and your team using vertical development to deal with today’s VUCA world?

by Christian Bisson

Conflicts arise on any team. It’s inevitable. What’s important is making sure they’re resolved before they grow into something bigger.

It often feels like unfamiliar territory to some, but resolver of conflicts is one of the many hats a scrum master must wear. And while there’s no singular right way to resolve conflict, I’ve found success with following steps:

Listen—actively.

Ensure those in the conflict have someone they can talk to. Once they get their feelings out, the door is open for them to act more rationally toward the other, or it gives you an opportunity to go deeper (see below).

Encourage a conversation.

It may sound simple, but a big part of conflict resolution is allowing both sides to hear one another. By default, we work to avoid conflicts and we’ll avoid the conversation that we know we should have as adults to make our conflict go away. 

As a scrum master, there’s room to suggest bringing the other party into the resolution. The worst that will happen is that the team member will refuse, giving you an opportunity to dig deeper to gain a greater understanding and then ask questions to understand what’s really going on.

Dig deep.

Even after you listen and encourage a conversation, it still may not be enough to resolve the situation. You may have to dig a bit deeper. Analyze the situation: Who initiated the conflict? In other words, who seemed to respond negatively to an event/response? That’s the first person you want to talk to. Ask open-ended questions to help the team member arrive at a rational thought/answer. And hopefully, that person will open up.

What are your biggest lessons learned from resolving conflict within your project teams

by Marat Oyvetsky, PMP

When professional service organizations work with customers to implement technical solutions, teams often rely on in-house technical staff for support and system/network access during implementation, testing, validation and training. And this is happening more during the pandemic. With limited access to onsite facilities, internal customer teams are more involved in the design and implementation process as they facilitate access and internal knowledge vital to the project. This creates management and resource issues that many professional services teams never had to face prior to COVID-19.

It starts with establishing regular communications with customer stakeholders—they’re the first line in advocating for the project’s success. They invested their company in the solution and are the champions of the project. Along with discussing the milestones, budget, issues and risks, project leaders should expand the conversation to include resource allocation for the customer’s project. Transparency is also vital in not only building trust but also in ensuring customer stakeholders fully comprehend what resources—both internal and external—are required for each task and milestone and what the overall level of effort might be. This will allow them to not only plan their own internal company requirements but to work with the project leader in planning their team’s support of the project.

Establishing internal and external customer communication becomes even more vital in situations where the implementation team relies on the customer team knowledge and access to complete certain tasks and milestones. Creating internal team meetings will allow the professional services team to discuss the project, the issues, risks and tasks associated with each milestone and align on all the project. Creating external customer team meetings will allow both teams to come together and review the project in full—addressing the issues, risks and milestones together and following a plan to completion in lockstep.

Project leaders also must be aligned with the customer engineering managers. In many cases, the professional services project leader has all of the responsibility and none of the required power necessary to drive the customer teams to complete certain tasks and milestones as they also have a responsibility to their own jobs. Communicating the tasks, milestones, level of effort and requirements to customer engineering management will allow the project leader to sync with customer management and ensure resource requests for time and deadlines are communicated and planned for. And that will keep the project and the teams on track and on budget.

COVID has created many challenges in working remotely for both professional services organizations and commercial company teams. One of the best solutions? Solid and planned communication between the professional services organization, the customer stakeholders and the teams to ensure transparency, resource planning, milestone, task and dependency alignment.

What have been the biggest challenges you’ve encountered in aligning stakeholders during the pandemic?

by Lynda Bourne

Projects mean reports! Many project teams are required to produce weekly and monthly reports for their client as part of a contract, or because of an internal set of reporting requirements. This process comes with challenges:

1. The information is out of date—project reports largely focus on what has happened.
2. Most reporting regimes use a one-size-fits-all structure. This is better than freeform reporting, but it means while all of the information may be needed by someone, there’s a lot of redundant information for almost everyone else.
3. They are time-consuming and expensive to produce.
4. The information is groomed and edited to suit the narrative the report writer would like to tell. You don’t need to be dishonest to change the impression a report creates; you simply need to understand how language works. 
5. The people who really need the information are usually too busy to read it.

That raises a big question: Do we need traditional reports? Developments in business intelligence, artificial intelligence and system integrations offer a far more useful solution—putting real-time information in front of the people who really need to know now.

Most of the information on virtually every project (even traditional construction projects) is recorded in various software tools. With a little bit of organization, the data can be brought into a business intelligence (BI) system in real time. The result: a dashboard showing what’s occurring in real time, usually with a drill-down capability to see what has changed and why.

The problem with BI is usually too much information and added noise created by different elements within the tool being updated, edited and corrected at different times. This generates false differences for short periods of time. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in to play two useful roles:

1. Within the BI system to filter out the noise: For example, if Bill’s timesheet has been entered but his work for the day has not been updated, wait until the end of Bill’s shift before flagging low productivity—his work update may be entered in the next 5 minutes. (Real time is good, but needs managing/synchronizing.) 
2. Outside of the system to learn what’s important to whom: No one can spend all day looking at the dashboard. AI can be trained to send targeted alerts when something relevant to a manager changes enough to warrant their attention. An email or an SMS is sent with a link embedded to the relevant part of the dashboard.

Do reports still have a role? My answer is yes, but it’s a different role. Reports are needed to explain something or to show the results of an investigation or inquiry. For example, a team (or individual) may be tasked to report on the preferred subcontractor to engage for a particular role on a project. The report provides leadership with the information and options needed to make a decision. In fact, this would be a far better use of the time currently spent by PMO and project staff preparing and distributing weekly and monthly reports.

I want to hear your thoughts: Do traditional reports still have a place among project teams?