ProjectsAtWork

The best project managers are like the best coaches.

As a project manager, have you ever felt that you had to overcome a reputation that preceded you? Not your personal reputation, but rather the reputation—more like a stereotype—of that title of yours?

Clutching a schedule and budget, the “textbook” project manager is laser focused on the process, while other people are doing the “real” work. The project manager monitors and measures progress with cold precision at arm's length. Meanwhile, the team is making it all happen, and other folks oversee the strategic vision and the creative stuff.

But that rep is a bad rap. It's akin to saying coaches don't matter in team sports, or, worse, "get in the way.”

Yes, the players do the scoring, the front office makes the high-level moves. But someone needs to watch the game unfold, substituting at key moments, working with available resources, knowing each team member’s skills and weaknesses, adjusting to on-the-field developments — all with the common goal of helping the team win.

Now, it’s true that some project managers feed the perception that they're control freaks who hinder creativity and improvisation. Gripping the project plan like the Holy Grail, they react to the unexpected as if it were a sworn enemy instead of an opportunity to redefine the plan, adapt, and improve the outcome. They resist negative news instead of reshaping it.

But the best project managers shatter the stereotype. Documents and spreadsheets are part of the job, of course; but they succeed because they understand that projects are fundamentally uncertain, and the best way to manage them is to expect the unexpected and embrace it. These project managers look change straight in the eyes. After all, no project is worth doing without a potential benefit, and no benefit or reward comes without some risk.

Projects are many things. They involve many people with different talents. They require collaboration and problem-solving. They have budgets and deadlines. And they all do better with a leader — a “coach” — who can watch the clock, know the score and, most important, draw up a new play when circumstances require it.

There isn’t much good that can be said about COVID-19, but it appears that many organizations, project leaders and teams rose to the challenges it posed to their work.

All of us are doing things differently than we did 16 or 17 months ago before offices closed and travel ceased. Our organizations are planning, managing and delivering projects differently, too. And in measurable, demonstrative ways, that’s actually turned out to be a good thing—or at least the start of something good.

Forced to pivot suddenly in March 2020, many organizations and teams became more focused on outcomes than processes. It was the only way to keep critical initiatives up and running, to meet strategic goals, to stay in the game. In doing so, a new kind of organization is emerging—something Project Management Institute’s new report, Pulse of the Profession 2021: Beyond Agility, calls a “gymnastic enterprise.”

These gymnastic organizations are empowering their people to become "changemakers" who, regardless of their role, are inspired and equipped to turn ideas into reality. This happens when people continuously get better at what they do, by building a holistic portfolio of skills. And it happens when they're supported by a strong organizational culture, strong leaders, and a strong talent management function.

Here are some key findings from the report, released last month:

>> Despite the pandemic, organizations and their people found new ways of working and delivering value, with digital transformation leading the charge. And although many planned projects were put on hold, of those that did forge ahead, more met original goals and business intent, more were completed within budget and on time, and wasted investment due to poor project performance declined compared to last year's survey.

>> Gymnastic enterprises were more likely to have high levels of organizational agility (48 percent versus 27 percent) and to use standardized risk management practices. They were able to adapt faster to the pandemic, being far more likely to have undergone business change in 2020. And they were much more likely to have seen increased productivity (71 percent versus 53 percent) and better project outcomes in 2020—in turn, resulting in less wasted investment, according to the report.

Gymnastic enterprises are empowering their people to work smarter in three key ways:

   1. Mastering different ways of working—whether that’s agile, predictive, or hybrid approaches, or a range of tech-enhanced tools

   2. Elevating people skills—what the report calls power skills—to ensure effective leadership and communication

   3. Building business acumen to create well-rounded employees who have deep expertise and can see the bigger picture.

The report explores these new ways of working:

>> Gymnastic enterprises are more likely than traditional enterprises to use agile and hybrid approaches, and less likely to use waterfall. Yet it isn’t as simple as moving away from waterfall, but rather taking a more balanced and customized approach for the project at hand.

>> Gymnastic enterprises are outpacing traditional enterprises in the use of cloud solutions, the Internet of Things, AI and 5G mobile internet to manage projects. But more importantly, they're using technology to augment human skills and help their people continuously improve, prioritizing the enterprise-wide adoption of complex problem-solving techniques; AI-driven tools; on-demand, microlearning apps; and career assessment tools.

Ultimately, it comes down to a people first approach. With their focus on augmenting human skills, and on creative collaboration, gymnastic enterprises put the highest priority on collaborative leadership. They also prize adaptability, an innovative mindset and empathy.

But building an environment where changemakers thrive doesn’t just magically happen. The role of organizational culture cannot be understated. Gymnastic enterprises are far more likely than traditional enterprises to prioritize delivering customer value, aligning with organizational values, and embracing digital solutions, according to the report.

Where gymnastic enterprises aren't doing better than their traditional counterparts, however, is diversity at the top. For example, just 44 percent have at least one female leader in the C-Suite. But they're working to plug the gap: 63 percent are putting a high priority on fostering a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion, versus 51 percent of traditional enterprises.

So there’s still very important work to be done. There always is. But many organizations, with changemakers at the forefront, are moving in the right direction.

You can download the full report here.

What, in your experience, are the biggest barriers to driving an innovation from within?

This is the question Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff asked 150 “internal innovators”—employees leading innovation efforts within their organizations— over the course of three years while conducting research for his book, Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. He took their responses and then interviewed innovation experts such as Bharat Anand (Harvard), Steve Blank (Silicon Valley), George Day (Wharton), John Hagel (Deloitte’s Center for the Edge and Singularity University), Gary Hamel (London Business School), Roger Martin (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto), and Rita McGrath (Columbia) to capture their points of view.

His discovery: there are seven common barriers to innovation:

1. Intent: Many would-be internal innovators have simply given up trying; they have abandoned the intent to find and pursue new innovations.

2. Need: Most employees do not understand what kinds of innovations their organizations need (e.g., less than 55% of middle managers can name even two of their company’s top strategic priorities), so for ideas, they look in the wrong places and then propose ideas of little strategic value.

3. Options: Would-be internal innovators often grow frustrated because they become fixated too early on a few, or even worse just one, innovative idea, instead of continually generating a flow of new ideas and managing them like a portfolio of options.

4. Value blockers: It is commonly accepted that innovative ideas are inconsistent with, and therefore disruptive to, a company’s current business model. This established model creates erect value blockers that prevent an appropriate new business model from forming around the new idea.

5. Act: Established organizations tend to ask one to prove an idea will work before giving permission to take action. Yet most new ideas are better suited to the opposite approach: taking action in order to prove the idea. This puts would-be internal innovators in a catch-22: they cannot prove their idea will work so they cannot take action.

6. Team: Scaling new ideas often requires one to pull together a cross-silo team that runs at a rapid pace and is geared toward learning rather than delivering results. Corporations are geared for the opposite: they are siloed, act slowly, and value results (over learning).

7. Environment: Getting support for new ideas is politically complicated because the leadership behavior, types of talent, organizational structures, and cultural norms that help established organizations sustain their core operations also tend to hinder internal innovativeness. Would-be internal innovators struggle to find “islands of freedom” from which they can access the talent, structures, cultural norms, and leadership support that support attempts at innovation.

"Successful innovators understand that, while any one of the seven barriers can crop up at any time, there is usually a natural flow to the sequence of events, a sequence that outlines a pathway of innovation," says Krippendorff. “Their ability to recognize and control that sequence, to the greatest extent possible, plays a big role in their ultimate success. I also realized that if we turn those seven barriers around and look at the obverse, we see solutions.”

To that point, Krippendorff outlines seven steps to building an innovation team, each of which we have begun presenting in greater detail here on ProjectManagement.com:

1. Remove organizational friction: Walk through the five points of organization friction (resources, rewards/expectations, risk-taking, senior leadership support, and organizational freedom), and identify what you must do to address, or at least anticipate, each one.

2. Assemble a cross-functional team: Pull together a team of between five and ten people with the right mix of functional backgrounds, who are learners (high educational level) and unrestrained by accepted dogmas (low tenure). [see “Start Building an Innovation Team”]

3. Align around an important goal: Complete a V2MOM to align the team passionately behind a compelling shared vision, with an understanding of what specifically qualifies as winning and what obstacles you will face. [This acronym stands for: Vision, Value, Metrics, Obstacles and Measures—for a deeper dive, see “Build Team Commitment to a Goal”]

4. Use metrics and data to track the most important thing(s): Decide which leading metrics your team should focus on.

5. Build a scoreboard everyone can see: Decide on a display for your team and individual metrics.

6. Establish a rapid rhythm: Agree on the frequency with which you will review your team’s progress, and set an agenda for that meeting.

7. Generate positive velocity: Celebrate early wins; allow people to strive beyond what is easy by allowing for failure.

Whether you’re an executive, project manager or team member, these are great, actionable steps to support innovation efforts in your organization. And there’s also a great piece of advice to remember for each step of your innovation journey—from Gary Pisano, senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School and author of Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation:

“The all-or-nothing approach to solving problems makes for great theater. It does not, however, bear much resemblance to how actual big problems are solved in society, business, or science. Big problems typically get tackled through a series of small solutions, each of which on its own may not seem particularly important, but that together can have a huge impact.

“We need to be thinking about a big set of ‘small’ solutions rather just a small set of ‘big’ solutions.”

New technologies, shifting business needs, flexible delivery approaches and the move to The Project Economy—all of these things are changing the profession of project management. And that shift is only going to accelerate in 2020. 

In a recent episode of Projectified with hosts Tegan Jones and Stephen Maye, project and program management leaders shared their thoughts on emerging trends in the world of projects. Here are some edited highlights:

“I believe the future’s really bright for project and program managers,” said Narasimha Acharya, assistant director in the client technology practice at Ernst & Young in Atlanta. “But the role, the knowledge, the experience that we need to be successful is, of course, changing. And it will continue to change.” 

Acharya said project management practitioners need to “be the voice of change” in their organizations, and pursue the training and knowledge needed to lead, not just manage. 

Mike Palladino, head of the Agile Center of Excellence for Bristol-Myers Squibb outside of Philadelphia, noted that the current top 10 jobs today did not exist 10 years ago. And 10 years from now, the top 10 jobs will very likely be different again. 

But Palladino said we shouldn’t get overwhelmed by the pace of change and what it may or may not bring down the road. Instead, we should practice curiosity in the here and now. And an agile mindset helps, starting with the question: “What’s that one little thing we can do to improve what we’re doing?” 

“And if we can build that [curiosity] into our lives, we build that into the way that we work, we incrementally keep looking for different opportunities to improve and discover new ideas and different ways of working,” Palladino said.

Developing a habit of curiosity can help you prepare for what’s ahead. And as things change, project managers will need new skills, including how they use data, said Fernando Antonio Oliveira, the E2 program director for Embraer in São José dos Campos, Brazil.

“We see a lot of change in the way we treat data, the way we collect data, the way we understand how the project or program is going,” Oliveira said. This data-centric approach is driven in large part by artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools that can help project managers better anticipate and prevent risks, rather than reacting to them after they happen, he added.

Kaustuv Bagchi, head of India operations for oil and gas offshore projects for LT Hydrocarbon Engineering in Mumbai, India, said he hopes disruptive technology like AI will help new project managers be more efficient and allow them to focus on different skills. 

“Earlier the focus was on knowledge and experience; now…we have technology to support project management to an extent that experience is getting digitized, so the focus is going to be moving from knowledge to application of technology, and application of knowledge, and constant innovation.” 

As a new generation enters the workplace, new approaches and ways of thinking are changing and challenging traditional project management approaches as well.

Olivier Schmitt, CEO of The Project Group France SAS in Lyon, said he sees organizations struggling to integrate those new points of view.

“The conflict at the moment in [many] organizations is it’s moving very fast at the delivery level, and it’s still very conservative at the top management level, which makes a real problem in decision-making.”

No doubt, it’s going to be a vastly different world for the next generation of project leaders. In addition to becoming comfortable with new technologies, we also will need to be OK with ambiguity, Palladino said.

“Life isn’t crisp and clear, the future’s not crisp and clear,” he said. “We’re going to have to deal with those ambiguities, and we have to figure out a way to change our thinking that it’s not just about finding the right answer, it’s finding an answer, and that’s okay, let’s develop it. Let’s further explore it and improve it and continually enhance it.”

Handling ambiguity is clearly a needed skill—and Maye noted that Deloitte recently found that leading through complexity and ambiguity was the top skill needed for today’s (and tomorrow’s) leaders. 

What do you think?

Would we ask the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony faster, or to play the Ninth Symphony and the Seventh Symphony at the same time — you know, to be more productive? No, of course not.

But how often are project teams expected to juggle multiple roles and assignments, and to do so in unrealistic timeframes? 

Doing things faster — and often at the same time — has become a way of life for working professionals (not to mention moms, students, and anyone else trying to cope with modern life). Project managers and their team members are no exception.

There you are, responding to dozens of emails before 8 a.m., simultaneously fielding random calls, updating information for three projects, and on your way to a status meeting, which you will leave early to attend another meeting about something else, while having a conversation in the hallway … deep breath, you are truly a mover and shaker. Or maybe you’re just moving and shaking?

In the digital age, we're taking productivity and efficiency to new levels, but it’s not always a badge of honor. At the least, we need to consider what productivity really means. It seems "faster" or "leaner" are the favored definition these days. I'm afraid that outlook is leading to a lot of high-speed crashes.

We’re losing touch with equally important factors like craft, care, culture and quality — never mind the value of finding pride in our work.

Tim Jackson, a professor at the University of Surrey and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, says there are many work sectors where “chasing productivity doesn’t make sense at all,” and that “certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention.” Attention!

Jackson cites a number of examples: teachers teaching ever bigger classes at the expense of actually educating students ... nurses stretched to the breaking point who are losing empathy for their patients. To take his point further, he writes, “What would be gained by asking the New York Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony faster and faster each year?”

To that question, I’ll add: And what is to be gained by asking project teams to hurry up and deliver “results” that do not, in the end, deliver real value? "Fail fast" is one thing. Fail because you're rushing for no good reason is quite another.

More studies show plainly that this 24/7 full-throttle approach to work (and to life) is destructive and diminishing — to mental and physical well-being, and to our ability to be strategic and innovate.

In the sound and fury of this "faster, faster" management/economic model, we need to mix in a few “wait a minute” moments to question all this hyper-productivity. Because doing more with less, or doing it faster, is often just doing it worse. And who has time for that?