The Professional Project Manager

Should a project manager should have technical skills in the area of the project work? This is a  question I am asked frequently. Should someone running an IT project come from an IT background? Should a project manager managing a construction project have a construction or engineering background? Some people say they definitely should and some people say they shouldn’t.

The answer is actually quite simple - it all depends on the size and complexity of the project.

To begin with I need to clarify that technical work, whether its hardware, software, construction, or infrastructure related, is very different from project management work. Technical work requires a technical background, training and expertise about a particular field and using this experience to make technical decisions, often associated with the product of the project. Project management work, on the other hand is about managing the project. It involves the initiation work, the planning work, the executing work, monitoring and controlling work and the closing work. It is the developed of plans, monitoring of progress, controlling change and delivering a project to name but a few areas.

 If the project is small, then it may be that the person charged with being a project manager may also be completing some technical work on the project and as such it’s a balancing act. At times they will do technical work and at other times they will do project management work. The project is simply neither big enough nor complex enough to warrant having specialist technical and project management staff.

If the project is large and complex then, without doubt, the person acting as project manager needs to be focussed totally on one thing and one thing only, the management of the project. I’ve often said that the easiest way to understand what a project manager is, is to replace reword the title to General Manager of  a project. We all know what a General Manager does and if they are a General Manager of a large organisation they come from a management background not necessarily a technical background. Or if they have come from a technical background the best general managers have made a conscious decision at some point in their careers to leave behind their technical background and embrace a new career as a manager. This is exactly the same as being a project manager. For larger projects the project manager must be focussed on managing the project and everything that entails, and not be distracted by the technical requirements  of the work to be done. On a larger project the team should be big enough that there are other people charged with being technical experts.

The biggest problem a project manager with a technical skill can have is the inability to let go of their technical background and move onto managing the project. At some point in their careers, to be successful, they must make the decision to become full time project managers and leave behind their technical background. If they don’t they will do neither job well. A complex project requires a full time project manager. Additionally, the skilled teams responsible for the technical work don’t need someone undermining and second guessing them.

This leads us to the emergence of a new breed of project managers who are entering the profession as professional project managers with degrees and diplomas in project manager and not the typical technical background. The entry of these people into the market will change the way we view the profession. We will begin to look for people with project management credentials and experience to lead projects.

There will always be a demand for both sorts of project manger though. We will always have a career path for technical experts to become part or full time project managers, and there will be a growing awareness and value placed upon those professional project managers whether they come from tertiary education, or have made the decision at some point in their careers to be a professional project manager.

Meetings can be the biggest waste of time ever conceived. They can rob a project team of doing productive work, waste money and strip the team of morale.  I’ve seen some exceptionally bad meetings in my time, in fact this article is inspired by one I went to recently that was perhaps the most soul destroying, pointless, badly managed meeting I have ever had the displeasure of being invited to. But I’ve also seen really good meetings. What is the difference?

Well, a good meeting has a purpose, people come prepared, stay focussed, stick to an agenda and get real value from the meeting. It serves as a forum for resolving issues, making decisions and team building. 

A bad one is where people turn up unprepared, people are there who don’t need to be there, several people start having a conversation that they could have before or after the meeting, there is no accountability and no real reason for the meeting to happen. The room is filled with bored, disinterested people wishing they were somewhere else. Do any of these sound familiar? If so, then you are probably in a bad meeting. Think for a moment about the people in the room and their charge out rates. Add these up and you may be surprised about how much that meeting is costing to run – are you getting value for money?

First, before holding any meeting can you justify getting these people together? Is a meeting the best way to get the results you want? Do you know the result you want? There are plenty of other ways to discuss issues, have debates, exchange ideas, catch up on personal lives and waste precious time – meeting don’t have to be your first port of call.

So, once you have decided that there is merit in holding a meeting, set some ground rules:

1. Set a date and time,
2. Send out an agenda - and stick to it
3. Leave non agenda items for last or for outside of the meeting.
4. Start on time - if you don’t you let people know it’s ok to turn up late and they will always turn up late. If people do turn up late note this on the minutes, they won’t do it too often.
5. Finish on time- if you don’t, people won’t turn up to future meetings
6. Only have the people who need to be there for the time they need to be there – let them go when their contribution is no longer needed
7. Don’t go longer than an hour – people can’t concentrate that long, even after 30 minutes you should consider supplying food and drinks.
8. Don’t let people talk over each other.
9. If irrelevant discussion starts politely suggest people stay behind after the meeting to discuss or catch up at some other time.
10. Have someone take good concise minutes and circulate them after.

Try these rules and you may end up actually getting value from a meeting. I would love to hear from you about your best and worst meeting experiences and tips.

Have you ever been in a scenario like this? A project manager tells you that the project is halfway through, but has only spent 30% of the budget and therefore everything is going well. What's missing from the statement is, of course, the amount of work that you expected to do at this point in the project. The project would definitely be going well if you are halfway through it, had spent 30% of the budget, and achieved 60% of the work. However, it would not be so well if you had only achieved 20% of the work you expected to achieve by now. This is where the earned value management technique is useful as it compares the planned value (PV) of work completed, the earned value (EV) of work complete, and the actual cost (AC) of the work completed. Once you have successfully determined these numbers you can then use this information to assess your current state and likely future state of the project in relation to both cost and time.

Of these numbers, planned value (PV) and actual cost (AC) are the easiest to determine. Planned value is simply the budget for the work that you had planned to have completed at this stage in the project and it is determined by looking at your cost budget graph and seeing the value of work that you had planned to have created on this date. This means that total planned value equals your budget at completion (BAC), which is your originally approved budget for the project.

Actual cost (AC) of the work completed is obtained from your accounting software which will let you know the actual amounts of invoices paid for work done to date. It is always a good idea to subtract from this figure of the amount of any materials held in stock as it is goods you have paid for and have in storage but have not yet used.

The most difficult number to determine is earned value (EV) and you may need to consider the best way to determine the earned value. The formula for calculating it is EV = PV x physical % complete, but this isn’t always easy to calculate when you are dealing with projects that don’t have a lot of physical characteristics in the work being done. Instead, you could simply add up the value of all the work completed to date which is determined by looking at the original value allocated to it and not the actual cost of doing it. This can be quite time-consuming but very accurate. You can also determine earned value by coming up with a simplified metric based on broader parameters. For example on one large project I worked on which involved 10,000 m² of land area we simply ascribed a value per square metre and calculated how many square metres with complete, how many square metres were underway, and how many were not yet started, and gave each a value.

So once you have determined budget at completion (BAC), planned value (PV), actual cost (AC) and earned value (EV) you can then use this information to get a snapshot of how your project is currently performing in terms of both cost and time, and then use this information to forecast a likely future scenario for both cost and time of your project.

You can use the formulae for calculating cost variance (CV = EV- AC) and cost performance index (CPI = EV/AC) to determine how well you are performing in relation to cost. A positive cost variance is good and a cost performance index above 1 is good i.e. a CPI of 1.1 means you are getting $1.10 for every $1.00 you invest.

You can also use the formula for calculating schedule variance (SV= EV-PV) and schedule performance index (SPI= EV/PV) to determine how well your project is performing in relation to time. A positive schedule variance is good and a schedule performance index above 1 is good.

With these formulae calculated you can then use the results to forecast a likely future state of the project in relation to time and cost. You can forecast an estimate at completion (EAC) which is what you think the project is now going to cost based on past performance. There are many formulae for calculating estimate at completion (EAC) each with its own strengths and weaknesses depending on which information is included in the calculation and which information is excluded. Here are the three most popular estimate at completion (EAC) calculations:

EAC = BAC/CPI - only takes into account cost performance to date

EAC = AC + (BAC-EV) - takes into account actual cost and earned value

EAC = AC + ((BAC-EV)/(CPI x SPI)) - my personal favourite formula as it takes into account actual cost spent to date, earned value, and both cost performance and schedule performance.

Once you have calculated estimate at completion (EAC) you can then also move on to calculate the estimate to complete (ETC) which is the remaining amount of money required to complete the project, and the formula is ETC = EAC - AC.

You can also calculate the variance at completion (VAC), which is the difference between what you originally thought you would spend (BAC) and what you now think you will spend (EAC). The formula is VAC = BAC - EAC.

There are a number of other calculations you can do with earned value management but these are the most commonly used. It's pretty easy to set all these formula up in an MS Excel spreadsheet and have them done automatically. Just keep in mind that earned value management is a tool for helping you determine what was happened to date and what may happen in the future. If it is giving you bad news about your project this does not mean that is the way things will work out but it gives you a fair warning to undertake corrective actions.

I am constantly surprised by the large number of people acting as project managers who tell me that they have all the responsibility for the success of a project but little or no authority on the project.  

This means that they have the responsibility to deliver the project on time, on budget and to the required specifications but they do not have the authority to get the resources they want, manage the budget or to make decisions affecting critical parts of the project.  If you have more responsibility than authority then you are not a project manager. You are a project administrator, expeditor, facilitator, coordinator or more often than not, simply a scapegoat in waiting.

Would you accept the job of General Manager for Microsoft and then be told that you had no authority to hire and fire, to track and change budgets, to develop and market products and to influence the organisation strategically? Yet the Board of Directors will be measuring you against all these factors and if the company doesn’t do well you will be fired? No you wouldn’t, so why accept the same in project management – after all a project manager is the general manager of a project.

Allowing this situation is setting you up for stress, failure and an early exit from the profession of project management. If the level of responsibility you have is greater than the level of authority that you have then it’s like heading to the guillotine with no way to stop the blade from dropping – don’t do it!

I sense the frustration these people have and I can see the look of surprise and amazement when I tell them that a true project manager has equally high levels of authority and responsibility.

So how do you get equally high levels of responsibility and authority?

Start with your job description. If you have the title of project manager then you should have equally high levels of responsibility and authority. If you don’t, then downgrade your job title to reflect your actual position. Sure, the job title isn’t as good as you want but you will be happier. Make it clear that you will not accept full responsibility without full authority. Furthermore, you won’t accept unequal levels of responsibility and authority.

If you are going to be fully and solely responsible for delivering the project then you need the authority to get the resources you need when you need them, to control the project costs and budget, to oversee and manage changes to the project and to maintain and enhance client relationship to name just a few of the areas you must have authority in.

Only by having equally high levels of responsibility and authority can you truly be a project manager.

Why do people insist on making the same mistakes over and over again? Why do project managers not take the time to learn from the experience of others and also to record their own experiences for the future?

This blog is all about the value of documenting and using lessons learned.

I dream of a perfect project management world where every time a project manager is given a new project to work, they spend those first few hours, or first day, sitting somewhere reading lessons learned from past projects learning what the previous project manager of the team did well and also learning but they didn't do so well. Imagine a world where you can then repeat their successes and avoid their failures. These lessons learned could be stored in a central database or library and be available as hard copy or a searchable electronic version.

Imagine reading about the experience of others in relation to choosing the right projects, getting the right project team members, defining risks on a project, accurate time and cost estimating, dealing with stakeholders, quality issues and any other aspect of the project. You would learn a lot and also get a real head start on project planning. If you don’t do it, you are condemned to reinventing the wheel again and again.

Gathering lessons learned as a relatively easy process. You can start to do it at any point in a project; you don't need to wait for the end. You can do it formally through structured interviews, surveys and feedback sessions. You can also do it informally through your own observations. Obviously in order to do it successfully you need to plan to do it along with all your other project activities, and as such you need to have time, and perhaps money, set aside to carry out the work associated with gathering, documenting and storing these gems. The cost to any project of doing this work is easily offset by the direct savings and efficiencies gained on both future projects and an overall increase in organizational knowledge, wisdom and efficiency.

In addition to the lessons learned gathered during and at the completion of the project, one of the most underrated pieces of lessons learned is the post implementation review which in my experience is just not done often enough. The real value in completing a post-implementation review is to revisit the project some time after it's been completed and you check whether it did it achieve the things that you thought it would achieve. Too many people make the assumption that delivering the intended project output results in the planned outcomes. A simple post implementation review conducted 6 months later will reveal whether it did or not, and contribute to your future project selection, planning and execution.

So, start recording your lessons learned right now. Sit down and start a document and add to it over the course of your project. Encourage your colleagues to do the same and over time you will build up an impressive collection of data that will help increase the chances of project success.