Easy in theory, difficult in practice

No matter how good a job you do with planning your projects, if you are unable to effectively engage your team in delivering the scope of the project within approved constraints, you will fail.

Depending on the power structure of our organizations, as project managers, we might feel powerless to do more than proactively identify such issues. However just because we don’t have formal authority over team members doesn’t mean we can’t take steps to prevent team member disengagement.

I believe that the main barriers to team member progress relates to the following three C’s: Commitment, Capability & Capacity.

The need for commitment goes back to the saying I read on a fortune cookie a few years back: “People don’t lack strength, they lack will”. Commitment most closely relates to Lencioni’s "Three Signs of a Miserable Job" and is the dimension over which project managers should have the greatest influence.

If a project manager is effective at communicating the benefits of their project to the organization and to the personal goals of their team members, can help team members understand how their work efforts directly contribute to the project’s outcomes, and demonstrates a willingness and political savvy to remove hurdles from team members’ paths to getting work done, they will be one step closer in securing commitment.

Project managers should understand that in most cases, team members are looking to satisfy the top three tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as their physiological and safety needs are already being met. Project managers need to try to develop a healthy team dynamic (Love and belonging), recognize team member achievement frequently, give them the opportunity to demonstrate competency without micro-management (Esteem) and to help team members (wherever possible) achieve their personal goals through their assigned project tasks (Self-actualization).

Such goals will require project managers to not only get to know their team members as individuals, but also to form or maintain positive working relationships with resource managers such that they can fast track their understanding of what makes individual team members “tick”.

Assuming you have a committed team, the next critical success factor is capability as for most modern projects, sheer will alone is not enough to deliver project scope in a quality fashion.

Project managers will argue that their time-constrained projects should neither be primarily used as a training opportunity for junior staff nor as a dumping ground for low performing staff. We’d all like to have a “dream team”, but in very few situations is this likely. This reality should not mean that project managers should totally disengage from team member assignments or evaluations, but it does require that they prioritize the competencies required for their projects to succeed, and do a good job of positioning the critical key activities with resource managers to secure the one or two “stars” that they require.

Once again, this requires the project manager to have developed productive working relationships with functional managers to increase their likelihood of getting good talent, but to support their recruiting efforts, they should also consider actively engaging their project sponsor(s) to lobby on their behalf.

As with most influencing activities, you should effectively portray the impacts to your project timeline or quality constraints if you do not get the desired skills assigned. Having said that, it is important to be aware that there’s a very fine line between trying to optimize your project and being perceived as doing so to the detriment of the organization’s overall project portfolio!

The final dimension is capacity – do your team members have enough time to produce their deliverables in a quality fashion? It doesn’t matter how skilled your team members are, or how committed they are to the project. If they are not provided sufficient focused time to do their work, their output will be late and/or low quality.

Again, this is not an excuse for you to abdicate responsibility for the project’s outcomes – start by planning your project’s timelines with realistic estimates of team member availability and then identify the key decisions or activities which will demand the most dedicated attention. It is unlikely that you will successfully secure 100% dedicated staff for all activities on your project, but it may be more feasible for your sponsor(s) to fund back-filling or other resource augmentation strategies to protect critical path activities and decisions.

Robert Burns wrote “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley” but if you address commitment, capability & capacity, you will have established a solid foundation for your project’s success!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me on Projecttimes.com in March 2013)

In spite of an increased focus on competency in PM conferences, journals and online knowledge sources, organizations continue to experience project failures at the hands of incapable PMs.  

Identifying common negative behaviors that can contribute to these failures might be the first step towards recovery:

1. Communication imbalance – communication consumes a significant percentage of a PM’s time so one would assume that this is a competency that even poor PMs would excel at.  Unfortunately, some PMs treat knowledge & information like power – sharing it with those they wish to curry favor with, and leaving everyone else in the dark.  Other PMs have a case of verbal “Montezuma’s revenge” – this is equally bad as stakeholders are unsure what information is critical and what is minutiae.  I covered this issue more extensively in the article “A dripping faucet or a fire hose – which most resembles YOUR project communication strategy?”

2. Neglecting stakeholders – PMs can get tunnel-vision by focusing purely on their direct customer or sponsor.  While this individual might be the one signing deliverable acceptance forms and evaluating your performance, a good PM needs to practice 360 degree management – sponsor, stakeholders & team. 

 3. Inaccurate or incomplete project control books – It doesn’t matter how heavy or light your PM methodology is (or even if you organization doesn’t have one).  There’s a basic set of project data that should be kept current so to facilitate project tracking, control, monitoring and (if you win the lottery) transition.  Having an out-of-date schedule is worse than having no schedule at all – at least a stakeholder doesn’t draw any wrong conclusions from a non-existent schedule.

 4. Ignoring conflict – Conflict is a natural occurrence on most projects but accidental PMs are often unused to managing interpersonal conflicts and might be tempted to ignore them in the hopes that the situation will resolve itself.

 5. Jettisoning risk management – If a PM happens to be aware of good project management risk practices, they might not have the intestinal fortitude to “sell” the necessity for these practices to their sponsor, stakeholders or team.  Under pressure to deliver, if they skip risk management, they’ll at least have the opportunity to improve their fire-fighting skills!

 6. A blind focus on the triple constraint – While scope, schedule & cost constraints are important, a PM might ignore the fact that a project has to deliver business value to avoid “the operation was a success, but the patient died” syndrome.  Poor PMs are less likely to ask questions such as “Is this deliverable necessary to the end result”, “Are we gold-plating” or “Is this project still of value to the organization”?

 7. Poor assumptions management – Projects possess uncertainty and to try to reduce this uncertainty, we make assumptions.  A good PM will log critical assumptions, share them with the overall project team, attempt to validate them proactively, and use them as one of the inputs into risk identification.  A bad PM will forget the assumptions shortly after they were made…

By no means is this list exhaustive, so I’d encourage you to contribute some of your own in comments.  Hopefully, we can distill a comprehensive set of cardinal sins to eliminate that justification for bad PMs: “I didn’t know!”

(Note: this article was originally published on ProjectTimes.com in February 2011)

The new year is a time for making resolutions and most people’s lists are likely to include some behavior-related ones (e.g. I resolve to eat only one dessert with dinner!) as well as some goal-oriented ones (e.g. This is the year that I’ll get washboard abs without the benefit of Photoshop!). While behavior-related resolutions usually come down to our self-discipline and soliciting and receiving candid feedback from those closest to us until those behaviors become ingrained, goal-oriented resolutions might require us to do some planning and tracking.

This is especially true for personal development-related resolutions. You might be aspiring to attain a new role, a new credential or to gain competency with a new skill.

Perhaps you’ve taken the time to write down these goals and shared them with those around you. That’s great as studies have shown that documenting and communicating goals increases our sense of commitment and ownership to their completion.

Unfortunately, when it comes to personal development, reality has likely asserted itself now that we are through that halcyon first week of January. Whether it’s work priorities or family commitments it can be easy to de-prioritize those development activities, especially if there is no one reminding you of them regularly. Like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, days will turn into weeks and soon you might find yourself singing “And so this is Christmas and what have I done?”

Sometimes the problem might not be ignoring personal development activities but being overly ambitious by taking on too many at the same time and not completing them. It feels great to start something new but it can be less fun to see it all the way through especially while also juggling work and family activities.

If this sounds like you, Kanban might be just the support you need to accomplish your development goals.

Break your development objectives down into a few key activities, prioritize those activities, define the workflow for them, establish Work In Progress limits taking into account your capacity, and transfer those activities on Post-it notes to a simple work board containing high and low priority swim-lanes as well as one for blockers. Ideally this work board should be installed in a prominent location such as the side or front of your refrigerator where others will be able to see and support your development activities. This has the bonus benefit that when activities get blocked, you can draw on the creativity of your family to overcome them.

A development journey of a thousand miles begins with a Kanban step.

(Note: this article was first published on my personal blog on January 7, 2018)