Voices on Project Management

by Cyndee Miller

It’s the era of the ultra-specialized niche expert.

Companies don’t just make beer. They brew limited batches of Belgian sour ale with tones of organic blueberry and almond.

Companies don’t just crank out mattresses. They create customized sleeping experiences. Yes, there’s the traditional innerspring model available in countless iterations of firmness. But perhaps you’d prefer a foam number neatly packed up in a box? No prob.

So it stands to reason the trend would follow through to careers. In theory, organizations would seek out project and program managers with super-specialized skills, someone steeped in agile or someone with a complete mastery of waterfall.

But organizations are realizing projects don’t fall neatly into one category in the real world. One project may demand waterfall in the upfront stages then switch into agile or hybrid.

“Organizations are facing complex challenges and competing priorities,” Marivi Briz, PMI-ACP, PMP, global internet of things business development manager at Telefónica Chile, Santiago, Chile, told PMI’s Career Central. “They want project managers who aren’t just applying the same methodology to every project, but are able to build consensus around a particular approach and share a larger vision.”

Agile may get the buzz, but smart organizations know it all comes down to using what works.

“Executives care less about a pure agile or waterfall approach than they do about achieving results,” said Manuel Salero Coca, PMP, program manager director—Latin America, Huawei Technologies Co., Mexico City, Mexico. (Check out Mr. Coca’s comments in the 2018 Jobs Report in the January PM Network.)

In today’s project landscape, Rhonda V. Evans, PMP, envisions a project management office (PMO) that has “all methodologies in play.”

“You are no longer an agile shop or a waterfall-based PMO, you are a methodology- agnostic PMO,” she wrote on LinkedIn last year. “A business case or need is defined and approved. It then goes to the PMO or portfolio management team for review with the executive sponsor or product owner. … The right-fit methodology is then chosen based on several predefined factors. Each inherent framework/methodology will come with its own rules for flexing and growing and changing with the business.”

For project and program managers looking to get ahead in their career (i.e., pretty much everyone), it just doesn’t pay to slavishly follow one approach. They must sharpen their skills across the entire delivery spectrum.

“We’re in a continuously changing world, and project managers don’t want to limit an organization to only one method or the other,” said Jordi Teixido, PMP, chief operating officer at fintech company Strands and project management consultant, KION, Barcelona, Spain. “Project managers should be well-versed in standups and sprints, but also critical path and critical chain.”

And that applies to your professional brand, too. This is probably not the time to proclaim yourself a hardcore agile evangelist or a do-or-die authority on predictive.

“I’ve probably interviewed hundreds of project managers, and those who present themselves as experts in only one methodology seem destined to have limited opportunities,” said Mike O’Brochta, PMI-ACP, PMP, president of Zozer, a project management firm in Roanoke, Virginia, USA.

It pays to position yourself as fluent in all approaches — and build a social media profile that reflects your skills and strengths in each one. Alongside project details like scope, budget and schedule, professional profiles and portfolios should spell out details on the approach used to execute the project, said Wafi Mohtaseb, PMI-ACP, PMP, head of applications support, Kuwait Finance House, Kuwait City, Kuwait.

What are you seeing in your career path?

By Dave Wakeman

The holiday season has arrived—meaning a lot of socializing with family and friends. We’ll be asked about our lives, families and work. Yet, many of us project professionals have a hard time explaining project management and its value.

That’s partly because project management principles and skills have been so heavily tied to IT projects for so long. But in truth, project management is for everyone. 

For many of us that have formal project management training, explaining the value of project management to every business or industry can sometimes feel complicated. It shouldn’t be–these principles are just wise business.

So here’s a cheat sheet to help explain the profession to anyone you encounter this holiday season.

Projects are built on the backs of planning and outcomes. Any successful holiday requires careful planning and preparation.

The same is true for any project. 

While the project planning stage can be something that all of us wish went more quickly, the truth is that careful planning and attention to outcomes is wise in every organization.

Every organization could do a better job of spending time clearly defining a project or initiative around the outcomes they want to achieve, the resources they have, how much time they want to invest and the people that will be impacted.

If you don’t communicate, you don’t succeed. On the U.S. sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, there was once a character called “Drunk Uncle” who represented all the relatives you sought to avoid during the holidays.

We’ve probably all been there in some form:

• A holiday mixer where we can’t get away from a colleague we don’t like.
• A dinner party where the conversation was stagnant.
• An awkward moment at the family gathering where someone said something inappropriate.

What gets us through these moments? Our communication skills, that’s what.

To be a successful project manager, you need to be a great communicator. I’ve always fallen back on the old saying that I heard when I started out: Project management is 90 percent communication. I still think that’s the truth.

You can show this skill off during the holidays. During an awkward conversation, redirect the topic or reframe the controversial subject matter to something better. Bonus points if you are in a big crowd.

Being adaptable is key to long-term success. No matter the industry or sector, we hear a lot about the need to adapt to the market around us.

The funny thing is, as people with project management backgrounds, change is nothing new to us. In truth, managing change and keeping change in some semblance of order is almost as much of a key skill as communicating effectively. As change is inevitable and occurs more quickly, this skill isn’t just nice to have—it’s a necessity.

To put it in terms your family can understand, think about when you are trying to buy a gift that’s sold out. You don’t have long enough to order it online, and stores are closing in a few moments. All of a sudden Plan B and C start looking pretty good. It’s difficult, but necessary.

Or, illustrate the point with an example of how weather can impact holiday travel plans or how a delay in a work deadline can have you working through the holiday.

All of it takes flexibility.

The truth is that project management is life and as we head into the holidays, all the keys that you use as a project manager can help you get through the season too.

BTW, if you like this stuff and the stuff I usually post, I do a Sunday email that talks all about value, connection, and humans. You can get that for free by sending me an email at dave @ davewakeman.com

By Conrado Morlan

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” - Abraham Maslow

Over the last two decades, the project management profession has rapidly evolved. The number of professionals has grown worldwide, organizations have adopted, adapted or created frameworks and methodologies to support their projects, and technology has flooded the market with a plethora of mobile, desktop, server and cloud tools.

These tools are big players in establishing the ideal project management environment for organizations that want to track project metrics, performance, pipeline optimization, resource management, time, cost and budget—and the list can go on and on. These versatile apps also support an endless range of frameworks and approaches, from waterfall to agile to Kanban.

Organizations may go thru a selection process to choose the right tool for their environment. Many support their decision-making process with external sources from consulting companies that had reviewed several tools and classified them based on different criteria.

Once a tool is selected, the next step is to put together the various pieces of the puzzle—the project, practitioners and tool. They don’t always naturally match up—and that’s to be expected. That means training.

However, I’ve recently noticed a disturbing trend. I’ve seen several job postings in which the most important trait is the years of experience using a particular project management tool. Some of the job seekers told me that they did not get the job because of their lack of experience in a particular tool.

It makes me wonder: Are organizations “toolizing” project management? Are they boxing themselves into a tool environment? Why is a tool more important than a discipline?

Experienced project professionals exposed to different frameworks or project management methodologies may apply their knowledge to the tool and manage the portfolio, program or project. A tool expert does not make a project management professional.

Remember, at the end of the day, a fool with a tool is still a fool.

Do you think organizations are becoming “tool-centric”? If so, what’s driving this trend?

By Cyndee Miller

People like praise — and it’s not just millennials (despite what you read lately). For leaders, the point of providing positive feedback isn’t to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. It’s to build the wildly brilliant team you need to get the job done.  

“This is what builds great cultures: reinforcement,” Adrian Gostick told symposium attendees in the closing keynote. “On great teams, members root for each other — praise doesn’t just come from the top.” 

This isn’t about spraying good vibes everywhere, however. That can backfire. Engage team members in one-on-one feedback sessions, and be specific and sincere, he said. And don’t wait until a holiday party or some off-site retreat to toast your team.

There’s a straight line between positive reinforcement and two of the three “Es” — engaged and energized — that Mr. Gostick highlighted as hallmarks of high-performance cultures.

The third E, enabled, is about creating a place where people believe they can make a difference. It’s bigger than autonomy. People should feel empowered to challenge the status quo if they see better ways of doing things, and to fix a problem on their own if they spot it.

Building a culture that drives results is way more squishy than say, mapping stakeholders or aligning budget numbers — and can often prove more challenging. “The soft stuff is the hard stuff,” Mr. Gostick said.

How do you handle the soft stuff?

That’s it for this year’s coverage. Fear not, we’ll be headed back for more PMO Symposium action 11-14 November 2018 in Washington, D.C., USA.

By Cyndee Miller

It’s the not-so-secret secret: Project management doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. So it’s nice to see the best of the best get their due with the PMO of the Year award. They not only get the rock star treatment — they take that acknowledgment back to the office.

“This award is going to make us more recognized in our organization,” said Carrie Fletcher, PMP, in accepting the PMO of the Year for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

The PMO has already built up quite the track record helping provide staff members with the tools they need to deliver better patient care at Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital,

Bringing together clinical and technical teams, the PMO helps assess what projects will best address hospital bottlenecks and pain points — and maintain buy-in once the work is underway. One of the PMO’s first projects, for example, consolidated 30 different forms into a single access point for the more than 20,000 annual external referrals CAMH receives each year. That one initiative cut patient wait times in the child, youth and family service by three months.

The other finalists had impressive results of their own:

Engineering and construction powerhouse Henkels & McCoy (HMG) has seen its annual revenue more than triple since 2005. To keep every project in its US$3 billion portfolio on track, the company’s PMO relies on project controls, with regular risk reviews and clear documentation. By delivering reliable results for HMG customers, the PMO has also helped boost profitability, which has grown 110 percent since 2008.

The PMO at MetLife has helped bring strategic order to the insurance giant’s US$500 million global IT portfolio. Rigorously vetting the business case for every project — and following up after completion to make sure the intended results were delivered — has helped the PMO maximize the portfolio's ROI. Since 2014, Metlife has seen a 22 percent increase in programs that closed on time and on budget, and a 35 percent increase in overall customer satisfaction.

Look for in-depth features of the three PMOs in upcoming issues of PM Network and check out video case studies on PMI’s YouTube channel: CAMH, HMG and MetLife.

Want your PMO’s accomplishments recognized? Learn how to apply for the PMO of the Year Award here.