Easy in theory, difficult in practice

Just like the officers on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (original series, please!), the personalities we bring to managing projects can be quite diverse.

This is one of the profession’s benefits – there is no single right way or best practice to managing projects. And this uniqueness also applies to growth in the profession – whether it is crossing the chasm of business domains, focusing on getting better at delivering a specific type of project or even growing your skills within a PMBOK knowledge area, there are ample opportunities for personal development.

Here are just a few of the characters I’ve run across in my fifteen year mission exploring the profession.

James Tiberius Kirk

Like Captain Kirk, these project managers emulate the motto of Star Trek’s Federation by constantly seeking out new (project) life and civilizations. They relish the unknown – once they have completed one or two projects of the same type or complexity, it’s off to challenge themselves with something different. Retaining Kirk PMs can be difficult if your project portfolio doesn’t possess sufficient depth and breadth. They also are eternal optimists – like Kirk, they don’t believe in the no-win scenario.

Montgomery Scott

Some project managers possess Scotty’s exceptional ability to turn engineering lemons into high performing lemonade. They relish the challenge of taking on troubled projects and turning them around. Rarely does some one enter this role without having gained sufficient experience successfully delivering projects from start to finish but at some point they realized that their personality and temperament are best suited to troubleshooting.

Spock

If you get off on the science or techniques of project management and find the soft side of the profession doesn’t enthuse you, you might be a Vulcan. Such project managers rarely (perhaps once every seven years?) let their emotions get the better of them which can be a crucial skill when everyone around you is losing their cool. However, this apparent lack of emotion and empathy can make it difficult for them to effectively use influence or persuasion to help their projects and having to put up with illogical behavior from their stakeholders can cause deep frustration for them.

Dr. Leonard McCoy

If you come across as a bit gruff but underneath that tough exterior beats an empathetic heart of gold, you might be a doctor not a project manager. Bones serves as a good foil for Spock with one embracing their humanity whereas the other struggles with it. Bones project managers will possess a high EQ and are confident relying on that to help them make decisions more often than with pure logic.

Nyota Uhura

Uhura posesses exceptional linguistic skills and we all know project managers like her who know just what to say in a given situation. Such project managers are very capable of managing stakeholder expectations and rarely struggle with managing the communication demands of complex projects.

So where will YOUR project management career boldly go?

(This article was originally written and published by me in April 2017 on my personal blog, kbondale.wordpress.com)

Termination of a large active project is like undergoing root canal surgery - intellectually you may realize that you need to have it in order to avoid serious long term impacts but that does not help to reduce the trauma associated with the event.

The Kübler-Ross model of how individuals deal with traumatic situations is apropos when understanding the personal impacts of project termination. In the economic rollercoaster of the recent past, we have all likely experienced the fallout of having the plug pulled on a project into which we had invested significant blood, sweat and tears (whether as a project manager or a team member).

While we can acknowledge that the project team and stakeholders are going through these phases, a project manager needs to be able to guide the team through this challenging time in order to close out the project in a professional fashion.

With that in mind, how can project termination affect some key project closeout activities?

Operational Transition

Unless there were no useful deliverables produced over the project's lifetime, there is going to be the need to transition products, processes or services to an operational state.

The operational owners for these deliverables should have been identified up front during project planning and should be ready to receive these deliverables, but there may be the need to provide training or other knowledge transfer that was likely planned for a future date. There may also be multiple open project issues related to these deliverables that were also planned for future resolution. In both cases, additional activities may need to be completed to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bath water.

The effort, timelines and costs associated with this operational transition need to be estimated and this information needs to be presented to project sponsorship for approval so that the project team can proceed.

Contractual Closeout

The decision-making process leading up to project termination should have included an assessment of the costs or penalties associated with the early termination of open contracts. If it did not, this assessment needs to happen ASAP and vendor management or procurement may need to be engaged to assist with supplier negotiations. Once this has been done, termination clauses should be exercised and all open contracts can be closed out allowing the project team to finalize project financials.

Resource Evaluation, Recognition and Release

In some cases, resources are freed up from a terminated project to work on a higher priority project. This is the happiest of cases - in the worst of cases, termination in a projectized organization could result in resources being laid off. In both cases, it is crucial that the project manager effectively communicates with all team members, empathizes with affected team members and focuses on motivating the team to complete close out activities. This may require tangible or intangible incentives, pep talks, or one-on-one conversations to help the dissolving team stay on track.

While resource evaluation prior to release from projects is a good idea in any circumstance, it is even more important in the case of project termination to help resources with future performance evaluations (or job interviews).

Recognition is also important - although it may feel more like a wake than a celebration, there is morale-boosting value in organizing and holding a (modest) get together to recognize individual achievement.

Knowledge Capture

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success" - Samuel Smiles.

Project termination provides a unique opportunity to interview team members and stakeholders when they are most likely to be conscious of what could have been done in a different fashion. While it may seem akin to pouring salt in an open wound, this practice is a good way to ensure that lessons are truly getting learned.

While this is not an exhaustive list, your organization's project management methodology should include a checklist or guidance that covers the specific activities that need to occur when projects are terminated. 

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in June 2009 on Projecttimes.com)

The term constraint ought to be banned when teaching modern project management!

To clarify this shocking statement, there’s nothing wrong with establishing targets or acknowledging the relationship between key project variables such as scope, time, resources, cost or quality – it’s strictly the misuse of the word that offends me.

A constraint represents a hard limit on one’s ability to extend one of these variables.  Unfortunately, there are extremely few cases where this is practically true. Don’t get me wrong – there are some projects where one or more variables are truly constrained – Y2K remediation projects are one example of a valid time constraint.

In most cases, when I’ve asked clients what tends to be the limiting factors for their projects, they might initially indicate schedule, cost or resources but when pushed, their project customers can tolerate some schedule slippage, some budget overruns or they are able to free up resources at the eleventh hour.

It might sound like I am nitpicking over semantics, but the impacts of blind adherence to constraints can be dire.  If a project manager believes that scope is a hard constraint, this may cause the project team to ignore change opportunities that could reduce risk, stress on the project team or increase the probability of project success.

This is not an invitation to ignore the relationships between the variables entirely – if we do, then we are as guilty as those customers that demand fast, good & cheap without something “giving”. 

A PM should never assume that a project is as constrained as it appears to be – negotiation is a critical, but often overlooked, soft skill.

(Note: this article was originally written and published by in December 2010 on my personal blog, kbondale.wordpress.com)

According to John Kotter's model for leading change, the first step to overcoming inertia requires us to instill a sense of true urgency in those we need to support, implement and sustain the change. While it is ideal if this urgency is tied to What's In It For Me, at a minimum, we all want proof that committing our time and political influence to a particular initiative at this very moment is cheaper than the cost of doing nothing.

But the steps in Kotter's model, like PMBOK processes, are not to be followed in a purely sequential manner.

Significant organization transformations usually require a year or more to become "the new normal" and we are only fooling ourselves if we assume that those stakeholders who were focused and motivated to champion our initiative in its early days will continue to remain so for the long haul. Executives and mid-level managers are constantly juggling competing priorities and as long as it appears that a change initiative is not on fire, their attention spans are likely to be shorter than that of a goldfish.

As such, we need to iterate back to instilling that sense of true urgency at regular intervals. The specific cadence varies based on the complexity and duration of a transformation. Fan the flames too rarely and the spark will be extinguished. Do it too often and you'll be treated like the boy who cried "Wolf!".

But is reminding stakeholders that they need to support us enough to gain this support? Maintaining focus requires quid pro quo otherwise we are likely to hear "What have you done for me lately?"

This is why regardless of the nature of a transformation we need to inject agility into its delivery. We can follow adapted versions of key Manifesto principles such as:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy our stakeholders through early and continuous delivery of business value
• Deliver business value frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to implement change more effectively, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly
• Change champions and the team must work together frequently throughout the transformation

Newton's first law: An object at rest remains at rest, or if in motion, remains in motion at a constant velocity unless acted on by a net external force.

While I’d hate to draw any similarities between project management and psychopaths, there’s a saying which is frequently uttered by the neighbours of serial killers right after they have been apprehended: “But he/she seemed like such a nice, normal person“. 

That phrase comes to mind when I think about just how complicated stakeholder management can be.

It’s bad enough that you have to manage highly complex projects under challenging or even unrealistic constraints, but when you add to that a mob of stakeholders which occasionally resembles a classroom of unruly preschoolers who’ve consumed too much Halloween candy, and you might be forgiven for dreaming about committing some pretty heinous crimes!

My focus is not on the needy, high maintenance stakeholders who frequently consume too much of your time.  Instead, I wish to warn you about the dangers of ignoring the ones who you never hear from.

Here are just a few ways in which quiet stakeholders could cause you grief:

• They might be actively subverting your project by poisoning the air with their staff, your sponsor or with other key stakeholders.
• You might assume that they are out there performing the groundwork with their organizations to receive the changes brought about by your project, but they may either be unaware that they need to be doing this, or,  because you haven’t followed up with them regularly, they might have given this preparatory work no attention.
• If you are not meeting with them regularly to keep them up-to-date on your project, who is?  What misconceptions or myths about your project might be getting passed along to them?
• They might think you are purposely ignoring them which might turn a potential change advocate into an active resister.

When things get extremely busy on your projects it can become very tempting to consider silent stakeholders as a blessing, but beware – those silent waters might run deep enough to drown your project!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in November 2013 on my personal blog kbondale.wordpress.com)