The Professional Project Manager

A recent Gartner reports* state that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will assume 80% of all project management tasks by 2030.

I was giving this some thought and the thing that stood out for me is that those tasks that can be automated should be automated, and using it will assist the role of the project manager immensely when used appropriately.

However, I am always reminded that project management is not just about tools and techniques but about people. I do not believe AI will provide the best solution for managing people and that activity will always need a project manager with superior leadership, communication and team development skills. This is particularly important on complex projects. AI can free up project managers from the more mundane technical tasks and allow them to focus on, and develop, their people skills and their own personal development.

I think AI should threaten those project managers who do not have good 'people skills' as it is imaginable that AI could successfully manage low complexity and smaller projects completely. I can definitely see small projects that do not require much team building, have few stakeholder, or do not require leadership being completely lead by a task oriented AI.

So, in summary I believe AI is a great tool and can help in many ways but for large, complex and people centered projects it should best be used as an ancillary tool to a well-qualified and experienced project manager. What are you thoughts?

*Link to the report here https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-03-20-gartner-says-80-percent-of-today-s-project-management

This is not a normal post for this website as most of them focus on specific tools and techniques that help the management of projects. But as a project management consultant who works globally I am on the road (and planes, and trains, and Ubers) a lot and during my travels I have put together these tips for other project managers who may travel a lot.

I was born traveling and didn't really settle in one place until my early teens. I now live between two countries in different hemispheres, and as a professional consultant I spend a lot of my time traveling around the world. As such, I consider myself quite a seasoned traveler and I’ve learned a few things over the many many years I’ve been on the road. Here are my top tips for other professionals who travel a lot:

1. Use a backpack with easily accessible laptop section for carry-on luggage. Single strap briefcase type bags get real heavy real fast if you have to walk a long way through airports. Having a wheeled carry on can be annoying when you collect your main wheeled luggage. A good quality backpack is easy to carry when pulling larger wheeled luggage.
2. Use a range of different colored packing cells to pack all your clothes separately. The colors make it easy to find different clothing and having different types of clothing in different packing cells makes it easy to find shirts, underwear, gym gear or jeans really fast instead of rummaging through a suitcase.
3. Use wheeled luggage for getting around easily. Make sure it works well being pulled on just two wheels. Only use four wheels for very smooth services. Oh, and make sure you weigh you bag before getting to the airport. Don't be the person who has to repack their bag at the front of the queue and move a book and a pair of shoes into your carry-on luggage to get your main bag checked in.
4. Throw out 1/3 of what you packed - you won’t need it. You can prove this by checking out your suitcase contents when you get home and realize you didn’t need 1/3 of it.
5. Find a laundry near where you are staying and use it. In a pinch use the hotel shower and let clothes dry overnight (a portable clothes line is great for this).
6. Wear shoes that are comfortable for airplanes (e.g. the change in air pressure will make your feet swell), and that are easy to get on and off as you go through airport security
7. Wear layered clothing so you can adjust your comfort temperature easily
8. Get yourself ready to go through airport security before you get there. Remove metal objects and put them in your bag or coat. Loosen you shoelaces. Unzip your laptop part of the bag. Don’t be the person who holds up the line doing all this (and more) at the screening point.
9. Know where your passport is at all times. Do not lose this as replacing it will take time and money and will interrupt your travels.
10. Carry enough cash for a few days’ worth of incidentals. If you carry more than that you will worry about losing it.
11. Only use your credit and debit cards at reputable merchants. If in doubt use cash. Also, use credit card over debit card as it’s easier to get your money back if it’s used for fraudulent purposes.
12. Take and wear comfortable walking shoes that suit multiple purposes. My favorites are black fashion sneakers as they can be used for casual and semi-casual events.
13. Take something to read or listen to while traveling. Make sure you have quality headphones.
14. Take a spare lithium battery for recharging your devices (make sure it’s fully charged)
15. Use Google maps and any other favorite travel apps. I have a folder on my phone just for travel apps of all sorts.
16. Make sure you have purchased cell phone data for your destination. If you are there for a while consider getting a local SIM card and pre-pay plan.
17. Make sure you have easy access to all your reservation details. You may need these to show customs officials, taxi drivers or to check in. Have them in the local language if possible.
18. Know a few basic phrases for the country you are traveling to if it uses another language.
19. Take a small bottle of hand sanitizer and use it frequently.
20. Make sure you have travel insurance, and know the terms and conditions of it.
21. Take a sealable laundry bag for your used clothing. Making sure it’s sealable ensures that the rest of your luggage doesn’t smell like worn clothing.
22. Ensure that copies/photocopies of all your important travel documents are stored in the cloud or with someone back home. This way if you lose one you can speed of the replacement process by knowing numbers etc
23. Take easy iron clothing. Some brands advertise themselves as non-iron but that simply isn’t true unless it’s 100% synthetic fabric and you don’t want to be wearing that. Take easy iron clothing and if the hotel you are staying at doesn’t have an iron you can hang it in the bathroom when you shower, and the steam will “iron” it for you.
24. Do not look like tourist. Do not be the person wearing cargo pants, hiking shoes, fleece jacket, backpack and/or bum bag. You wouldn’t dress that way for wandering around the streets of your home town so why are you dressed like that now?
25. Buy quality luggage. There is nothing worse than seeing your luggage come off a airport carousel with a broken zip or ripped surface.
26. Dress for your destination. You may leave a warm destination and be dressed for that, but once you get to the other side of the planet and its winter and all your cold weather gear is lost with your luggage you will feel good knowing you have layers of clothing with you.
27. Essentials are wallet, phone and passport - if you have these you can get other things you have forgotten.
28. Make sure you have the necessary visa's etc. Nothing worse than getting to a new country and finding out you can't enter because you have the wrong visa.

What did I forget? What are your best travel tips?

Let’s talk about personal wellbeing.

It’s not the normal topic I talk about. Usually when I post it’s about technical skills like maturity assessments, cost and time estimating, or practitioner competency development. If I talk about soft skills I talk about skills like leadership, communication and team development.

The thing I noticed about all of these skills is that they are all outward facing. They require the leader or the project manager to give something to someone else. I realized that maybe it’s time to start looking after our own wellbeing first. By doing this we can be healthier people and be better prepared for our personal and professional challenges.

This post is also founded in my own personal experience of letting a state of “ill being” sneak up on me in very small barely noticeable steps. I won’t go into too much detail but there was a point in 2018 when I had to admit that I had let several years of stress and lack of good health practices adversely impact my overall state of wellbeing. I am not the only hard working professional to end up like this, I won’t be the last and maybe you can relate or know someone who can.

What helped me recover and return to a state of wellbeing was positive psychology, signature character strengths and learning resilience techniques.

I’m going to leave you to google the science of positive psychology and it’s founder Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. The elements of positive psychology that have helped me most have been learning about and focusing on my signature strengths, mindfulness and gratitude. If you bought one of his books I would recommend “Flourish”.

The science of resilience is an incredibly powerful set of tools and insights from Karen Reivich & Andrew Shatte, which at its heart teaches us that it isn’t the event we experience that shapes us, but the way we respond to it, and we can learn to have more control over the ways in which we respond. I’m going to encourage you to get their book “The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles” and learn some practical techniques for improving your levels of resilience.

If I could pass on two basic tips that you could use immediately to increase your levels of wellbeing it would be to start a simple gratitude practice. Each evening before you go to bed either write down, or share with someone, three things you are grateful for that happened that day. It’s a great way to end the day and it’s been proven that gratitude increases wellbeing.

The second tip would be to find out what your signature character strengths are and begin to leverage these more in your personal and professional life. Everything seems easier and takes less effort when you use your signature strengths. You can take the free assessment at the link below.

So, let’s keep sharing great ideas about leadership and project management. Let’s exchange ideas about Gantt charts, kanban boards and earned value management. Let’s debate agile versus waterfall approaches. Let’s keep inspiring others with stories of great leaders, communicators and team builders. But let’s also start to talk and share stories about our own wellbeing, and what works for each of us.

Find out your Character Strengths here:

https://www.viacharacter.org/www

There is a lot of use of the word agile in the organisational world. You can see it in job ads, see it in the descriptions of the way software is developed, and see it being used to describe entire workplaces and organisations. These are the four main ways I have seen it used over the past year:

1. Agile software development
2. Agile project management
3. Agile workspaces
4. Agile working

What are they? What do they have in common?

Let’s start with the dictionary definition of the word ‘Agile’.  The definition that we find is that the word is an adjective that means “able to move quickly and easily”. I think this definition is quite accurate for each of the four uses of the word I’ve already listed.

Here is a brief description of each of these four forms of Agile:

Agile Software Development

Agile software development following the increase in the development of software which initially started with traditional or waterfall type development methodologies. During the 1980s and 1990s a growing number of software engineers realised that there were better ways to deliver software. Instead of the process heavy typical waterfall project management approaches they were advocating a range of lightweight methodologies designed to get software developed in an iterative manner that focussed on delivering continual value in highly changeable environments. They were originally called lightweight methodologies but at a seminal meeting they didn’t like the name ‘lightweight’ so used the term agile.

There are now a range of recognised Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Lean etc) and many hybrids of these.

For more information about the origins of agile software development I recommend checking out www.agilemanifesto.org and www.agilealliance.org  as beginning points.

Agile Project Management

 Agile project management takes the key concepts from Agile software development and applies them to a broader range of projects, not just software development. It focusses on delivering requirements incrementally and iteratively. Project teams focus on continual improvement and are focussed on adapting to changing requirements at any stage in the project. Agile project management uses many of the same Agile software development methodologies listed above.

I’ve been lucky enough to work in both the software development industry, and also the large construction industries in my project management career. Even though Agile project management is usually intended for the IT industry I can definitely see benefits for the traditional construction industries as well.

Agile Workspaces

An Agile workspace attempts to bring to the work area the key core principles of Agile software development or perhaps more specially the Agile Manifesto. There is a focus of flexibility and customisation that allows team members or staff members to work collaboratively and openly. The intention is to provide an office space that is space efficient, productive, and vibrant, and one that promotes creativity and problem solving. It is in direct contrast to partitioned workspaces or open plan work spaces. There are defined areas suitable for different purposes and different working styles within an agile workspace.

The perfect synergy is intended to be teams using agile project management methodologies within an agile workspace.

Agile Working

Agile working takes the concept of agile to its broadest definition and intends to provide employees with a work environment in which they can work in the way that best suits them and the organisational goals of delivering value. The focus is on work outcomes, not the hours worked. The intention is to encourage people to work in their most creative productive manner and provide the best organisational and customer value. The aim of agile working is simply to create a more responsive, efficient and effective organisation, which ultimately improves business performance and increases customer satisfaction

Here is a link to a great article on Agile working http://www.nhsemployers.org/-/media/Employers/Documents/SiteCollectionDocuments/Agile-Working-Guide.pdf?la=en&hash=C2F9D66C3C434D939B18DF1561D5AAE50250C0AD

My final word on one of the greatest changes about implementing any of these forms of Agile is to ensure that team members and/or staff are fully prepared for the change and supported throughout the transition as each of these forms of Agile requires a certain attitude and aptitude from team members and staff, and the organisational culture needs to truly reflect and support the principles of agile.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback please feel free to email me.

There are many types of projects, each unique in its size, duration and complexity. Assigning the right type of project manger to each type of project is a key factor is determining whether or not the project will be a success. Different project managers have different levels of skills and experience, and they also have difference personality attributes. This mix of skills, experience and personality attributes defines the type of project manager you are. The specific type of project manager I am interested in today is the entrepreneurial project manager.

I would proudly call myself an entrepreneurial project manager. I know that I have a very strong entrepreneurial streak in me, and this is an essential part of who I am. I have been setting up businesses, and advising others on this, for over 30 years. There have been some great successes, and also some opportunities to learn some great lessons. When it comes to the types of projects I prefer to manage, I tend to choose those where I can truly leverage my strengths in this area. What I want to do in this article is to examine what are the key characteristics of an entrepreneurial project manager and what sort of projects should they lead?

Let’s start with defining what an entrepreneur is:

From Dictionary.com: “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

There are a couple of key words there – initiative and risk. An entrepreneur takes an initiative at the earliest idea stage, and usually with a lot of passion throws themselves into ensuring that the idea becomes reality. Along the way they may have to solve a wide range of technical, legal, financial, regulatory, and stakeholder problems. In doing this they take on and manage a great deal of risk, and in fact it can be dealing with this risk that provides excitement and challenges to the entrepreneur.

What kind of projects is an entrepreneurial project manager best suited to manage?

Entrepreneurial project managers should be put in charge of managing projects:

• with a lot of unknowns,
• that involve leading a small dedicated team,
• that need a strong vision to get to the end, that
• require a multi-disciplinary solution, that
• require a great deal of autonomy and problem solving.

If you want to develop a specific entrepreneurial skill set and attitude here are nine key characteristics of an entrepreneurial project manager:

1. Motivation

Self-motivation is key. An entrepreneur must be the one who gets out of bed in the morning thinking about the project and what the next steps are to make it successful. Being passionate about a venture, initiative or project is possibly the easiest way to be motivated as it will come without trying. Don’t be afraid to be passionate about what you are doing, and perhaps only select those ventures that you are truly passionate about to get involved with. Your motivation will spread to you team members and stakeholders.

2. Creativity

This is perhaps one of the more important characteristics of being an entrepreneur - you must be able to see creative solutions. Entrepreneurs work best dealing with solutions that haven’t been invented yet and solving these takes creativity. Don’t be afraid to think of many different possible solutions. Eliminating the less effective ones for whatever reason will leave you with a creative solution. Another tip I have learned is that creativity and curiosity go hand in hand. Don’t be afraid to be curious, ask a lot of questions and develop your knowledge about a lot of topics.

3. Vision

You must be able to see into the future and imagine what the end result may be. Perhaps more importantly you must also be able to communicate this vision to others to get them to see it, believe it and commit to achieving it as well. Being passionate about your vision will help in getting others to follow you. Your vision doesn’t need to specific, it can be a general outcome focused on success, whatever that means, with the details being filled in as you move along the project lifecycle.

4. Persuasiveness

Persuading people to believe in your vision and join in the pursuit of success takes skill. There are many ways to persuade people and you will have to appreciate that your team members and stakeholders may require different ways of persuading. Remember that you are convincing people to follow you in to the unknown so practice your influencing techniques.

5. Versatility

Being versatile means being able to demonstrate a wide range of skills, and not necessarily be an expert at any of them. In many ways, the entrepreneurial project manager needs to be a jack of all trades, and master of one – being entrepreneurial! You will need to have a working knowledge of technical solutions, financial matters, stakeholder expectation management, rules and legislation. Where you don’t have the required level of knowledge you will have to bring someone into the team who does.

6. Risk tolerance

Some people are naturally risk adverse and this is a great attribute to have in many projects. Entrepreneurs tend to be more risk tolerant and will generally rely on reactive rather than proactive measures to deal with risk. There needs to be a balance to make sure risks taken are reasonable, but the nature of entrepreneurship is to take risks and reap the rewards.

7. Flexibility

You must be able to move on from what you thought was a solution when it becomes inefficient. Learn to let go, and quickly move to the next solution. Don’t get hung up on one idea far past its ‘best by’ date. Realise that change is always going to happen, and you need to be flexible. When a roadblock appears, find a way to go around it, over it or under it, and if this can’t be done, then be prepared to reverse and find another path completely.

8. Decisiveness

You must be able to make a decision and live with the consequences. If it turns out to be a wrong decision you must be able to learn from it. Making a decision means being to take on board all the available information at that time and decide what the next course of action will be. No decision is ever set in stone and you should be prepared to change it if it doesn’t turn out to be the correct one.

9. Colloboration

A great entrepreneur knows their strengths and their weaknesses and will seek out people to fill in their weaknesses. They will usually seek out people with exceptional skills in these areas. An entrepreneurial project manager will assemble a great project team with the correct balance of skills, experience and attitude. They will also know how to train people, or move them on, who aren’t quite right for entrepreneurial types of projects.

So, if you have a high-risk project with some uncertainty in the solution and outcome, consider putting an entrepreneurial project manager to work.

To end, I would like to amend this quote I found online which I think sums up the role of the entrepreneur with just my own small change. The original quote reads “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds an airplane on the way down” (Reid Hoffman), I would amend it to say ““An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and finds a way to fly on the way down”.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback please feel free to email me.