Easy in theory, difficult in practice

Years of failed transformations which started with practice, methodology or tooling changes are convincing many that changing the hearts and minds of all stakeholders involved in value delivery provides a more safer road to organizational agility.

But how do we change people's minds? We aren't trying to change what they do as that results in superficial agility, we want to change how they think about what they do.

Attending a course is not the answer. As Morpheus states about The Matrix: "Unfortunately, no one can be…told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."

Wouldn't it be great if there was a red pill that could flip that switch in our heads and turn us into inspiring, empowering, servant-leadership aligned, waste-exterminating leaders?

The Scrum Guide states that a key responsibility of a Scrum Master is "Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption" and surely a key element of that centers around shifting mindset. Realistically, when teams are struggling to embrace agility, the majority of a Scrum Master's efforts are spent coaching them. This is the rationale behind organizations investing in coaching support outside agile teams. But even there, many agile coaches focus their efforts on evolving Scrum Master capabilities or at best working with a few key stakeholders surrounding the project or product release.

But a fish rots from its head.

To institutionalize agility, not just from a delivery perspective, but with regards to portfolio investment making, resource allocation, and operations, mindset change is needed from the top down which means that coaching services should also be targeted at multiple levels of the organization. Having executive leaders who truly walk the agile talk increases the likelihood of senior and mid-level managers doing the same. While it is common for staff to pick up bad habits from their managers, the same holds true for positive behaviors.

How much coaching assistance and time is required to realize a sustainable level of mindset change?

As usual, it depends. Factors such as organization size, current culture and behaviors, external forces, competing priorities and overall sense of urgency will all influence the level and duration of the investment in coaching. However, just as team-level coaching should start heavy and reduce over time as our teams get better at learning to fish, executive and mid-level management coaching should do the same. At some point, just as with delivery teams, leadership teams need to become self-managing and self-disciplined.

Until someone invents a red pill (or more likely, a chip), the best alternative we have is coaching coupled with the power of imitation.

With the increasing number of Project Managers I’ve met who have expressed interest in pursuing contract work, I felt it might be beneficial to cover this topic. It should be noted that my focus is not on those Project Managers who have taken on contract work temporarily as a stop-gap until they are able to land a suitable full-time role.

It might seem surprising to you, but financial benefits are not a factor I will focus on – it is well understood that contract rates will usually be higher than full-time salary rates, but it is might be more useful to calculate net annual income and monthly cash flow.

When one factors in outflows such as health or dental insurance, financial impacts of downtime between projects, self-funded personal development such as courses or conferences, operational costs such as accounting or legal fees and the impacts to liquidity of net 30 or net 60 day payment terms, financial merits alone might be insufficient to clinch the decision.

Other non-financial benefits of contract work include:

• The freedom to decide what type of projects you will accept
• The ability to take longer time off or to spend more time on your personal development
• The opportunity to get much greater depth and breadth of experience than might be possible in full-time roles
• The chance to build relationships across many companies

But before you quit your full-time role and jump into the contract market, here are a few questions to ask yourself.

Are you a generalist?

In many parts of the world, it has been a buyer’s market for hiring managers.

Recruiters have the luxury to not only demand project management competence but also to expect that candidates possess specific domain expertise relevant to the needs of a given project. When recruiting full-time project managers, employers are usually going to consider the breadth of experiences which a potential candidate can bring to their organization as they are (or should be!) considering the long term. In contract situations which are more transactional and time-bounded, depth is often given greater weight.

Even if you have worked in many different industries and on many different types of projects, don’t despair! You might still have gained sufficient specialized project management experience which could be a differentiator. For example, if you have frequently taken over troubled projects from other Project Managers and have been able to complete them successfully, you could find your contractual calling as a recovery specialist.

How effective are you at networking?

Relationship building is critical for Project Managers regardless of whether they are working full-time or on contract. However, if you are not effective at cultivating your network, especially at times when you DON’T need something from your connections, it can become very challenging to find new gigs, especially when the supply of talent significantly exceeds demand.

It is almost impossible to get into the heads of a recruiter or worse, automated application processing system in order to craft a resume which guarantees being at the top of the candidate pile, so your best bet is to leverage the support of someone in your network to do a warm introduction for you. But if you haven’t taken the time to stay in touch with your contacts, helping them as often as you require their help, it will come across self-serving to solicit their assistance.

This can be challenging for many project managers. Some may simply not have the interest or ability to maintain a broad network. For others, if they have been managing a long-running project, it can become onerous to invest regularly in such business development activities.

How resilient are you?

NO job is a sure thing.

Even long-tenured employees are just a few days’ notice from having to find alternate employment. Having said that, contract Project Managers need to possess the intestinal fortitude to stomach a greater volume of vicissitudes than their full-time peers. Shifts in business priority cause projects to be delayed or to be put on hold and organizational restructuring can result in shifts from contingent to internal workforces.

Even if none of these occur, projects come to an end, and if you haven’t been fortunate enough to line up a new gig to coincide with the end of the previous one, you could be looking at some prolonged downtime. Yes, this might be a good opportunity to take that much needed vacation or take a few courses, but that’s all on YOUR dime!

As is often the case in our profession, there is no decision tree which will help you quantitatively determine the expected value of working as a contract project manager, but with the questions I’ve provided above, hopefully, you will be better equipped to make a balanced decision. 

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in February 2016 for Projecttimes.com)

Whether there’s a legitimate benefit or merely a placebo effect at work, there does appear to be some correlation between having had a flu shot and avoiding or at least reducing the severity of respiratory viruses.  There are, of course, a multitude of other proven and unproven preventative measures including a good night’s sleep, frequently washing hands and (if you really want to make a fashion statement!) wearing masks over one’s mouth & nose.

Similarly, in project management, there are a number of preventative measures available to us to avoid unpleasant surprises.  The whole risk management knowledge area could be thought of as a major preventative measure as it helps us to better manage the unknown.  Stakeholder analysis and management processes are also heavily focused on prevention of future issues.

A lesser applied practice is assumptions analysis.

Uncertainty is an intrinsic part of projects and yet, when we define approaches, derive estimates or develop plans, we are doing so with this uncertainty present.  If we wanted to plan our projects with full certainty, we would never complete any projects.  Hence, in the absence of total clarity, assumptions get made.

While it is bad enough to provide a single-value estimate without presenting some idea of potential variation, it is worse to do so without providing the underlying assumptions which support that estimate.  Similar, when picking an approach to meet project scope, there are usually multiple options considered and assumptions are likely made which would guide which option gets recommended.

Assumptions by themselves are not bad.  However, if we don’t document them and then fail to analyze and validate them, we run the risk of executing a theoretical plan which does not reflect reality.

On the other hand, if we regularly review & validate key assumptions, we might just buy ourselves the lead time needed to take corrective action to avoid the impacts of variances between we had previously assumed and what is real.  Furthermore, while we might consider disproven assumptions as being a source of future project issues, they could just as easily provide us with opportunities which could be exploited if we get sufficient lead time.

Assumptions analysis is a key input into risk identification, but it could also be performed independently as a routine preventative activity.  If you are maintaining an Assumptions Log for your project, you could dust it off every few weeks over the life of your project and validate that core assumptions are still valid during regular project team meetings.

An ounce of assumptions analysis might save you a pound of firefighting!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in April 2014 on my personal blog: https://kbondale.wordpress.com)

Project managers are often asked to perform miracles, so they can be forgiven for occasionally wishing for magical powers to be able to bend or break the laws of the Universe. After all, that’s what sponsors must believe them capable of doing when they demand scope, schedule & cost constraints in advance of sufficient planning!

Let’s imagine that between project assignments, you are taking a vacation in a tropical destination. While walking on the beach, you stumble over what appears to be an ancient brass lamp. You rub the sand off it and lo and behold, a genie appears in a puff of smoke! As a reward for releasing him, he offers to bestow one super power on you.

Which will you choose?

Invisibility

I’m sure that you’ve wished more than once that you could be a fly on the wall when decisions were being made about your project or when key stakeholders were talking about you or your project behind your back. Wouldn’t it be great if you could eavesdrop on all of these conversations.

But will this knowledge truly make you happy? Could you work with your team members knowing that everybody has bad days once in a while when they might not say the most pleasant things about you? Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

Invincibility

Project managers are like goalies – they are often the first to be criticized when issues arise or failure is imminent. Good project managers will also often take one for the team when criticism is being meted out. Becoming immune to the barbs of others might seem to be a good way to not get hurt.

But will such invincibility make you a better project manager? Negative feedback is an indication that you need to take some action, even if it just to find out why a critic feels the way they do.

Teleportation

You don’t have to be managing a virtual project with your team members scattered across the globe to benefit from the ability to instantly jump to a particular location. How many times have you been on a call with a sponsor or other key stakeholder and wished that you could continue that meeting face-to-face?

This particular ability deserves Uncle Ben’s warning “With great power comes great responsibility” as it could encourage you to micro-manage your team.

Jedi mind tricks

Imagine how easy our jobs would be if we didn’t have to rely on inspiring others to achieve project success. Saying “This is NOT the scope we are looking for” sounds a whole lot simpler than the effort involved in having a team analyze a change request and then trying to influence our sponsor to reject it.

Without healthy conflict and differing views, innovation and creativity rarely thrives so project outcomes are unlikely to be exceptional even if you would look dashing in a Jedi robe.

Time travel

Why hope that there might be an opportunity on some future project to apply a lesson you’ve learned the hard way if you could jump back in time and set things right?

Poor project decision or an impulsive communication – no problem! Just jump back in time and fix it.

Unsure if future market conditions will support the realization of your project’s benefits – don’t fret! Zoom forward a few months and see how things turned out.

While this is the super power I’d choose, the dark side of getting unlimited do overs is the temptation of pursuing absolute perfection. Instead of completing a project, warts and all, and moving on to the next one, we could become stuck in a Groundhog Day-like nightmare of managing the same project over and over again while trying to get it perfect.

What makes project management so challenging yet at the same time so interesting is that there are no super-powers to rely on – just the right combination of hard and soft skills mixed with a healthy dose of resilience!

(Note: this article was originally written & published by me in February 2016 on my personal blog https://kbondale.wordpress.com)

An attendee from an agile project management webinar I delivered a while back asked how one can successfully manage projects (agile or otherwise) in an organization that has major trust issues.

After thinking about all the troubled projects I have witnessed or worked on, there is little doubt that there is a correlation between low levels of trust between key project roles and the ultimate success or failure of these projects.  There might be rare situations where the impacts of a lack of trust can be mitigated – for example, crisis projects or those where explicit contractual agreements can be drawn up between players, but in most instances, this issue can be one of the most damaging and yet most challenging to address.

So how can a project manager address this?

The first step is to identify the problem and understand the magnitude of impact.  Trust issues usually manifest themselves through negative communications, CYA-behaviors and body language – all cues that require a good combination of self-awareness and good observation skills.  Tying these behaviors to project issues starts to provide evidence that there is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

At this point, there are a variety of “baby steps” that can be taken to help the project team or organization re-cultivate trust.

1. Team building exercises at regular intervals over the lifetime of the project and not just during initiation.
2. Lead by example – don’t immediately assume that stakeholders or team members are lying to you or “out to get you”.  Only make commitments that you are able to keep.
3. Hold the project organization (team members, customer & stakeholders) accountable to defined & communicated project rules of conduct and engage project sponsorship to support you in this process.
4. Cultivate a sufficiently positive relationship with team members and stakeholders so that if you observe trust-related behaviors, you can (on a one-on-one basis) coach those involved to a more positive approach in the future.
5. Make sure you have a trusted outside observer that can help to keep you “honest” by ensuring that you don’t fall into the “trust trap”.
6. Practice 360 degree recognition – even for those that you or the team might originally have been inclined to distrust.

Take the time to ensure that the project organization is aligned with the project’s goals and success criteria – misalignment is a great way to strengthen mistrust.

Organization trust issues can appear like Goliath, but the slingshots of patience & predictability can help to slay this project über-villain.

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in April 2011 on my personal blog, https://kbondale.wordpress.com)