Archive for the ‘Project Management Articles’ Category

This month, a very interesting book that I anticipated was released: "The Plugged-in Manger: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology and Organization to Thrive" by professor Terri Griffith, a seasoned management and technology expert. Terri describes a game-changing approach to management that is based on the concept of being plugged into each one of the organizational dimensions – people, technology and organizational processes – simultaneously. Oftentimes, managers underemphasize one of the components – say, they address the people and organizational processes, but overlook the technological dimension. Or conversely, some consider technology to be a lifesaver per se. The balance of people, technology and process is something that I think is really important for any organization, and I often referred to this triangle in my previous posts. So it was a pleasure for me to meet Terri and discuss this topic, as well as find out more about her new book. Naturally, our conversation went way beyond defining who exactly a "plugged-in manager" is, as we proceeded to talk about the role technology plays in modern business. To know more about the concept of a plugged-in manager, the best ways to leverage technology and to discover some curious examples from Terri's experience, as well as mine, I invite you to listen to the podcast with our conversation.

For your convenience, here's also a transcript of the interview below. In your work, do you put more emphasis on people, processes or technology? Do you consider yourself a plugged-in manager?

P.S. You can get your own copy of “The Plugged-in Manger: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology and Organization to Thrive” on Amazon.

Andrew: Hi everyone, it’s great to hear you on our podcast today. And let me introduce our honored guest. Terri Griffith is a professor in Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business. Located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, she studies how we mix together the technology of work (everything from telepresence to the size and type of tools a crew would use to build a fence), the way we organize to do this work (virtual teams, collaborative leadership, innovation strategies), and the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people we work with. Terri has just released a new book called “The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive.” The book addresses an important topic that’s very relevant to what I usually write about: how we become more productive, how we work together both in the same office and in virtual teams. Terri, it’s definitely an honor and pleasure to have you here today with us.

Terri: Thank you very much!

Andrew: Let me jump straight into the questions. And the first one, I think you can already guess what it is. Could you tell the listeners who exactly the plugged-in manager is and how he or she is different from most managers we see.

Terri: First I’ll say that anybody can be a plugged-in manager because I think individual contributors, as well as managers, teams and even organizations, can be plugged in. They make sure that, as they think about an organizational practice, as they think about getting their work done, they think about the people — so what the skills are that the people have, how long they’ve been in the organization, the kinds of things they like to do. They think about the technology tools that they have available to them. So, like you said in the introduction, everything from telepresence to collaboration tools, to the kinds of tools we would use to build a fence, all those are the different kinds of technologies that we have at our disposal. And then what are the organizational process issues that we need to address as we think about the work that we’re trying to get done. A plugged-in manager is somebody who’s going to think about all three of those at the same time and going to understand that you have to mix them together. So if we’re going to use a particular technology tool, we may have to provide some training, and it may work out better if we have a certain kind of individual that we’ve already hired.

On the other hand, if we have a bunch of expert employees, we may not have to provide so much training. So the people would reduce the amount of organizational processes we might have to deal with, even though we were choosing a pretty sophisticated technology. I think the big difference is plugged-in managers, plugged-in organizations, they don’t seem to think about there being a magic bullet — that if I just had that technology, or if just hired that one person, or if just changed this one organizational process. They know that’s never going to work, it’s always going to be some combination of the people, the technology and the organization that really make something work well.

Andrew: I absolutely agree with you. This triangle of people, tools and processes is definitely crucial. And in my career, I’ve seen a lot of organization overemphasizing or underemphasizing part of that. My opinion is that people definitely are the cornerstone in that. Because, obviously, people make the choices on tools and processes, but other components, nevertheless, are also very important. Do you share the same view in terms of priorities between those three?

Terri: I’d say those priorities are right, but I’m thinking about Andrew McAfee’s new book “Race Against the Machine” or even Jonathan Zittrain’s book, where they talk about how a lot of our work is being taken over by the technology itself. You know, an algorithm might be choosing what articles are going to get presented on a newspaper, rather than an editor. And so, at the tail end of the whole distribution of how we might think about how the choices get made. I’m going to say people play the biggest piece because they are generally the ones doing the work. But I think as we move into the future, we’re going to have to keep a pretty open mind. Is it a technology that’s making this choice for us? And it may be the case that, originally, it was people who wrote the code that is making that choice, but it’s going to become more of an open question as we move forward.

Andrew: Yes, that’s definitely an interesting view. I’m a big fan of AI (artificial intelligence), so definitely one thing that I see on the market today is the concept of the big data, right? That we accumulate more and more data, and we come up with more and more sophisticated algorithms to process that data and build intelligence out of that data. So that’s an interesting angle.

And one other insight that popped in my mind is that, obviously, some people are key to the success. But then processes and tools actually help them influence other people on the team. It’s kind of an interesting flow where you may have a champion, somebody who is either creative or smart or experienced or versatile in change management. And then, through the use of tools and technologies, they actually multiply that knowledge or culture power. Going back to the plugged-in manager and to your definition, do you see many managers right now who you could say are really plugged-in, or is there still a way to go for all of us?

Terri: I’m not sure about you because the technology your company is putting out is pretty plugged-in, in my perspective. But I’m a little bit sad to say that it’s more rare than it is common for me to get into a conversation with someone and to immediately be able to say: “Wow, that person gets it, that person’s completely plugged-in.” We collect a lot of data about this, and we continue to collect it because we want to make sure we have a tool that will help us assess different levels of how plugged-in you are, and then hopefully we’ll be able to change the kind of training and workshops to be based on the kinds of results that we’re getting. While a lot of people think they are plugged-in, when we actually put them in situations where we want them to make choices, often they are biased toward taking the shiny technology. And they’ll go rank a technology solution higher than a solution that includes the technology, the organization and the people.

We’re doing whatever we can to make that change, and we would like it to be really common for somebody to sit down and say: “All right, we have a new team project we need to do. What are the technology tools we are going to use, who are the people that we need to have on this team, and what’s our process going to be? Is it going to be a very face-to-face kind of process? Is it going to be more virtual? How are we going to approach the problem? And just have it be super common that everybody goes through that kind of three-point checklist of people, technology and organizational process. But I’m not seeing that yet.

Andrew: I like Gartner’s hype curve. They do an aggregate, but even when we look at the particular person or organization, oftentimes what happens is they get excited about a shiny tool, but they hope that the tool will solve their problems by itself, and they don’t make their organizational challenge, and then it drops, and they become naysayers. They become the other part, and they develop a culture of “everything is already invented.” Then I talk to those people and ask them: “Do you remember the time when we didn’t have mobile phones, Skype, e-mails, so it makes them think. If you put it in perspective, technology does change our life. You can’t delegate everything to the technology. You have to control the process, but technology does change our life in a big way. Starting from something that we consider everyday, like giving a phone call and air travel and obviously e-mail and everything else. As we look at it, more and more work becomes informational work. And that actually goes hand-in-hand with that trend of the big data that we’ve just touched because it reinforces it. There’s more and more informational work, the information systems become more and more sophisticated, and there are more and more helpful tools.

Back again to the plugged-in managers, I think this concept is very important. But why do you personally consider this is a game-changing approach to management?

Terri: I think it goes to the number of organizational changes, either technology changes or organizational process changes that fail. And the number hasn’t changed in decades! We’ve been collecting data about organizational change failure for a long time. The number hangs around 50%. So 50% of all organizational changes, either technology or process changes, don’t do what the people who set out to implement them think they are going to do. And generally it’s because they don’t manage the implementation process very well. Oftentimes, what they’ve done is they thought: “Well, if I just make this one silver bullet adjustment, and I parachute this change in, everything is going to be different.” And it just doesn’t work that way. As a result, that’s just painful as a professor of organizations to stand up in front of a class and say, “Here are all these ideas about great things you can do to improve your organization, but by the way, 50% of the time they are not going to work for you,” I would like to see that change. It’s almost painful, too. I was giving a talk on this issue last night, and they asked, “Why would you spend two years writing a book? And I said, “Because it’s painful for me to see the situation where someone’s only focused on one of those three issues.” I thought about the United States TSA, our transportation safety authority that brings us all that fine effort that we go through, as we come to the airport. And for the most part, that was a technology change. That was: “We’re going to run this technology, and the technology demands that you take off your clothes, and the technology demands that you take off shoes. And we’re going to focus on that technology.”

I think all the fighting and unhappiness that goes along with going to the airport now didn’t have to happen if they had thought about their stakeholders a little bit more and thought about how they could integrate stakeholder needs into the process that they need to make airport security good. But they didn’t think about it that way, as far as I can tell from reading the external reports.

Andrew: Yes, I think that’s a great point. Now, in your book, you speak about three key practices for the plugged-in managers. Can you please briefly describe them for the listeners?

Terri: Absolutely. The way I like to describe it is that here we’ve been talking about 3 dimensions: the people, the technology and the organization, and then we also have these 3 practices. So if we just keep in mind the number 3, maybe it’ll all help to stick a little bit. So the first one is “Stop, Look, Listen,” and even though it has three words in it, it’s still just one practice. But the idea is that you stop and you look. Can you say who are the people who are going to be impacted by this? What is the technology that we’re talking about? What do I have available to me already, or what might I need to go buy, and then what’s the organizational setting that this thing has to go into? By stopping for just a moment to reflect on what the current status is, and what the opportunities are that are out there, what the different choices are. And I think that keeps us from grabbing for that shiny thing and forgetting about all the rest. So if we just say to ourselves: “I’m going to go into this process. I’m going to think about a new way of doing things.” First thing I’m going to do it, I’m going to stop and look, and then after I take that first step, I’m going to start to listen. Well, I took the first step. What was the feedback from that? And is it going well, or do I need to make some adjustments?

So “Stop, Look, Listen” is the first practice. The second practice is really the most powerful one, and this is the issue of mixing, mixing together those 3 ingredients: the people, the technology and the organization, in a way that makes sense. And I’ve shown this a couple times, as putting out on a table all the different ingredients for a chocolate chip cookie, and if you look at those ingredients, some of them are pretty tasty on their own, but for the most part, we’re going to have a better outcome once we mix it together. We’ve got to mix it together in the appropriate proportions for what we’re trying to achieve. And so mixing becomes the key. I like food a lot, so mixing and thinking about mixing a great meal or mixing a great dish is the way I kind of keep that one in my head. And then the 3rd practice is — really, you were talking about it a little bit — how do you multiply or leverage your advantage? And it’s through sharing.

Sharing is the 3rd practice, and I’m going to kind of think aloud as I work in a team setting or think aloud as I talk to a group of executives and say, “Always look how every time I assess a situation, I’m always looking at the people, the technology and the organization. And always see how I’m trying to figure out what the blend is. I’m not going to try and change everything all at once, but I’m going to change a few things as I go along, and then gather up the feedback. But as I talk aloud about that process, I share the process, I’m doing 2 things. The 1st is that I’m spreading the idea of how to be a plugged-in manager, but the other one is, as I teach that idea through sharing, it means that the next time we go to make an adjustment, they are already going to know what we have in mind. I won’t have to implement the idea of being plugged-in, as well as implementing whatever the changes are that we’re looking at. Instead, they are already going to be aware of that part. So sharing is an important one, if we want to expand or leverage the impact that we can have in our organization. The 3 practices are “Stop, Look, Listen,” the reflective piece; then mixing, which is really where the heavy part of the process takes place, to really find out what a good combination is going to be; and then sharing, just to make it easier down the road.

Andrew: Those are indeed great practices. There was the PMI Global Congress in Dallas, and I was invited to speak on virtual teams, and I brought out the topic that in virtual and distributed teams, a lot of communications are asynchronous, compared to the team that is co-located in one office. And in that environment, sharing is really crucial because you not only want to tell people what to do, but you also want them to understand your thinking. Exactly what you said, thinking out loud, so they know your reason, and even though the communication is asynchronous, and you are not necessarily there to make the decision for them, when they need to make, it they know your reasons, so they can make a similar decision, so it’s very aligned with what you’ve just described. So in your opinion, this approach, does it differ between SMBs and enterprises?  And if so, how? And if we’re speaking about enterprise, will it work for all levels, or does it differ as we start speaking about enterprise-wide changes and things like that?

Terri: I think it’s just an issue of scale. So in a small or medium-sized business, it will be easier to demonstrate the process. Even if it’s a small organization that is virtual, it’s just easier because you’re talking to fewer people. You have more opportunity to clarify what your meaning is and clarify the approach. But even at an enterprise level, some of the top executives have the skills that they’ve learned to be plugged-in through experience, they’ve learned over time, and they are already practicing these approaches. They may not be calling it plugged-in management, but they’re certainly doing it. And as I think about executives at Microsoft that I got to talk to for the book, that would be a big organization looking at how to manage a virtual team between Washington and China. Then if I look at some of the startups that I was able to talk to in the book, they’re all doing the same practices, it’s just the matter of scale. In the larger organizations, and I’m thinking about Nucor Steel — as I say, Nucor Steel, the largest steel company in the U.S., and I think the largest recycler in the world (metal recycler). And for them the process that I would describe as being plugged-in, to them it’s just the new core way of doing things.

They’ve been building that approach since the 1960s, and it actually came from the top, which I think may be a little bit rare. Often what I see is people in the middle of the organization find that these are good approaches, and then as other people see their success, they learn from that. So it’s almost a top or bottom-down of that process in larger organizations. If you are a big enterprise, and people are practicing plugged-in management, that’s a lot of leverage, very successful.

Andrew: Now I only have a couple questions left, one would be, could you share with us some interesting anecdotes that might illustrate concept of your book or your research?

Terri: Certainly. I often think about sailing, as a process that helps people learn about being plugged-in. I have a sailboat, and I have a crew of other people on their boats.  A sailboat itself is a technology, and so if you think about the size of the sails, the size of the mast, the size of the boat, everything has to scale appropriately. Also because I’m a woman, I’m not as strong as some of these big football-player-looking guys who might be on the America’s Cup boat or something like that, and because of that I have to use more pulleys. I have a lot of pulleys on my boat because I don’t have that much strength, but I can use the technology to increase the strength and increase the benefit of the strength that I do have.  Sometimes in class I’ll draw a picture of a sailboat that has 2 sails, and then I’ll draw a picture of a sailboat that has 3 sails, and we’ll talk about the difference. As for someone who isn’t a football-player-strong person, it’s harder to pull up one really large sail. Maybe I’d be better off pulling up two smaller ones. How do you make those choices, and how do you keep those choices top of mind? And it really does back to this idea of reflection. If we’re just charging ahead, we’re not going to be thoughtful and think about the different options we might have. So if we do that “Stop, Look, Listen” practice, we’re going to think of a few more options and maybe make a slightly better choice.

Then the other example I have is probably a little more standard. Here at the university, we haven’t been all that modern about our own collaborative practice. As you can imagine, as somebody who writes about collaborative practice all the time, it’s been a frustration for me. But we’re finally moving ahead and looking at our communication and collaboration and even workflow. And I’m getting to practice these very things myself. I’m the chair of this university task force on communication and collaboration. And I can see why some people are drawn to simply make a decision and move ahead quickly. We keep pulling ourselves back and saying, “No, let’s not focus on the technology, let’s focus on the work to be done. Keep those examples top of mind. And then we’ll bring in the technology as we need to.”

Both of those, both the sailing and this collaboration task force have been great learning experiences for me.

Andrew: Yes, I think that sailing was a great metaphor because oftentimes people just go with the flow, especially if the user of technology and the decision-maker are not the same people. If their CIO chooses the software for business users, they are not necessarily going to be the most happy and productive with the defect or the most marketed choice, or the most feature-heavy choice, or the most complex choice. So that’s an interesting metaphor because they are not those football players oftentimes; they just want to get the work done.

So applying your ideas about plugged-in managers, I know you already gave a lot of good advice. Before the closing, what would be the final advice that you’d give to project managers and business managers for getting their work done more efficiently.

Terri: It’s all going to come back to the “Stop, Look, Listen” idea, but once you’ve done that “Stop, Look, Listen,” and you’ve moved into mixing together what your choices are, the simplest way I have of describing that is you don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to be a technology expert, you don’t have to be a management expert, you don’t have to be a people expert, but what you have to do is have an appreciation for all three of those being important, and then to be able to put yourself in the shoes or in the minds of the other stakeholders and really think about the work design as a negotiation. We all negotiate. We either negotiate well or we don’t, but we all at least know how to do that. And think about the organizational change. The thing that you’re looking at, as you’re trying to be a plugged-in manager, think of it as a negotiation and have the different issues of the negotiation that you have on the table be all those different options. So is it going to be a big team or a small team? Is it going to be a team that has core members, or is everyone going to be equal? Are we going to use this kind of collaboration tool or that kind of collaboration tool? Are we’re going to have experts on the team, or is everybody coming from the lower levels of the organization, and they’re going to have to learn on the job? And what’s the negotiation that I might go through that’s going to come up with the solution, that’s going to be best for us? I like to take a practice that we already understand at least a little bit, and so if everybody’s done a negotiation, then everybody has done a little bit of this mixing that I’m talking about.

Andrew: I think that’s great advice to wrap up, and I welcome all listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog to go to amazon.com and check out Terri’s new book “The Plugged-in Manager.” There are both hard cover and Kindle versions available, and if you like the book, feel free to leave a great review on Terri’s work. Terri, thanks a lot for your time today. I hope the readers will enjoy it, and I hope the rest of you day will be great!

Terri: Thank you so much. I’m going to go tweet about the conversation because you made me think about some new ideas!
Project Management 2.0

On October 22-25, PMI gathered its members and friends for the annual Global Congress in Dallas to discuss the core features and emerging challenges of the project management profession. One of the key areas of focus for the Congress was the new project management trends, i.e., those trends that may impact the industry in the coming years. Together with Elizabeth Harrin and Cornelius Fichtner, seasoned project managers, popular bloggers and my fellow PMI New Media Council members, we held a session addressing agile collaboration in virtual teams.  With over a third of projects being agile and more work being done by virtual teams, we aimed to look at how project managers can successfully combine the two. Having combined our expertise in managing distributed teams, we came up with a few practical, battlefield-tested tips in the area of communication practices, Web 2.0 tools and beyond, which can help bridge the gap for agile teams working across geographic boundaries.

In the first part of the session, Cornelius started with a case study of his own team, spread across 6 countries on 3 continents, and shared which tools and practices help them the most to collaborate efficiently. For instance, according to the experience of Cornelius' team, the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

There's no doubt that virtual teams have some very strong benefits, but there are certain serious bottlenecks, too, like the risk of miscommunication, limited visibility, etc. In my part of the session, I highlighted 5 pain-relievers that help me overcome the most common challenges in managing my team. Some additional tips came up during the Q&A. For example, when your team members speak different languages, don't let accents influence your perception of a professional. This is especially critical in the initial conversations, when team members don’t know each other yet and haven't yet built social and professional trust. Make sure that you give your team members "trust credit" in this initial phase, and always remember that behind that email ID is a real person, who likely works as hard as you do and is as professional as you are. It’s also crucial to remember and respect the cultural differences, and while keeping this in mind, work toward building a shared culture. Last but not least, as with everything else, it’s hard to create an ideal collaboration pattern right from the start. However, if you keep your eyes and mind open, constantly communicate and gather feedback from your team members, you can continuously iterate and improve. Eventually, you'll find your secret sauce for efficient remote teamwork.

I believe that one of the main prerequisites for the success of a distributed team is to make sure that everyone is on the same page – not only in terms of the assigned tasks, but also the general vision, applied processes, cultural awareness, information sharing and trust. It’ll be extremely helpful for team members to know not just what to do, but why and what lies ahead. This will help a lot in asynchronous communications, when you’re not immediately available to answer all of their questions and course correct. You have to think and communicate proactively in distributed teams, making sure you’re your team shares the same mission and vision, and understands the goals. So meetings in virtual teams are very important. Not only are they important, they are different, and in the final part of our session Elizabeth named some important techniques for making virtual meetings productive.

I’ve posted our joint slide deck on Slideshare, so that you can adapt some of these practical takeaways to your team:

To learn more details about our session and other ones, too, you can also check out recent tweets with the hash tag #pminac. Here are a couple of them:

@pm4girls: "Don't just give them tasks, give them reasons to help them understand vision and goals" @wrike talking about empowering teams at #pminac

@LewisCindy: From @wrike don't let accents influence emotional feelings about the person. Nice reminder #pminac

By the way, Wrike has just opened an interesting survey about remote work and the way workers see its benefits and challenges. I would really appreciate if you could spend a few minutes to have your say in this survey. As soon as we get enough responses, I’ll analyze the results and share them with you. 
Project Management 2.0

According to Mark Twain "There are lies, damned lies and statistics."

In fact, I was once given a book written by Darrell Huff titled How to Lie With Statistics. It looks like Mr. Huff took Mr. Twain seriously.

A couple of days ago I wrote about honest project communication and the importance of telling  the truth (honest and transparent communication). This post generated a lot of discussion on Ganthead, where I have also made a couple of additional comments—some as recently as this morning. However, as I thought about it, I decided that I wanted to include some additional thoughts.

I do believe that honesty is the best policy. Over the course of my career I’ve witnessed others who have tried to skirt that policy and found themselves in trouble (in fact, a younger version of me had to once learn this the hard way myself). Sure, there might be times when the boss expects you to lie. I think that was probably going on at Enron. And Enron is a good example of what happens to organizations that foster a culture of lies.

As a project leader if you’re asked to lie to the team, and you lie about project status to your boss, your boss is probably getting what they deserve. A culture of dishonest communication is not a healthy culture. In fact, it is a destructive culture.

Of course there are times when I have stretched the truth a bit to avoid hurting someones feelings (I think we have all done that at one time or another), however I think we all know that is not what I’m talking about. There may be some reading this who believe that I am naive and telling lies is just a part of business—people lie all the time. And, you may be right.

Fortunately, I have never been required to lie to colleagues or customers by my boss, so I can’t speak to the challenges associated with managing my career within a culture of lies. I hope that should such an occasion ever present itself, my personal integrity would remain intact. That being said, knowing the people I am fortunate enough to work with, I doubt that will happen.

The crux of the matter in terms of project communication is this: decision-makers can’t make good decisions with bad information. Period. Honest project communication is crucial to good decision-making. Anything less is asking for trouble.

Dishonesty within the project environment can’t be tolerated. One of the things I hear regularly when I talk to customers and colleagues around the world is, "We can’t trust our project data." I’m sure some of that can be attributed to old and irrelevant data, but some of it can also be attributed to the fact that some project managers aren’t truthful. Covering your behind by telling lies about what’s happening within a project may help you in the short term, but eventually  lies are discovered. This applies to team members too.

Although this might not be an "easy" black-and-white situation, it is nevertheless a very black-and-white situation.

Strategic Project Management

Over the years I have participated in a number of discussions (debates really) about whether or not project managers are decision makers. The opinions seem to be pretty polarized. The camp that says "NO" argues that the executives in the organization make the strategic decisions and project managers execute those decisions. In most organizations this is probably true.

Those that argue "YES" (and I find myself in this camp), argue that depending on the size and dynamic of the organization many project managers are a part of the strategic discussion. They might not make "the" decision, but they are part of the process. What’s more, project leaders make all kinds of decisions every day. With that in mind, I think it’s important for project leaders to build some sound decision-making practices. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert once said, "Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results."

Adams might be describing many organizations, but it doesn’t have to describe yours or how you interact with the decision-making process. Most companies don’t foster good decision-making practices—handicapping project leaders, project teams and their organizations. The answers to the following three questions will help your organization foster a workable decision-making process:

1. Who? Prior to the beginning of any project, determining who has decision-making power is the first step. Of course on most projects, there will likely be several decision makers.
2. What? Different members of the team will probably have different decision-making responsibilities based upon their role. Identifying the scope of everyone’s responsibility regarding the type of decisions they can and can’t make avoids confusion and makes it possible to streamline the process. Nobody wants to "Mother, may I?" every move they make, nor should the project leader or stakeholders be expected to make every decision.
3. How? Identifying how decisions are made and how they are shared with project team members is almost as important as the decision itself.

Regardless of you work management practices or project management tools, making project decisions is part of a project leader’s job. What’s more, it’s been said that in-decision becomes decision with time.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius suggested, "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is the noblest, Second: by imitation, which is the easiest; and Third, by experience which is the bitterest."

I don’t think there’s anyone who has to make decisions on a regular basis who wouldn’t agree with Mr. Confucius. What do you do within your organization or project team to foster good decision-making practices?

Strategic Project Management

The weather wasn’t very good this weekend. We were going to ride up through southern Idaho but  the rain (and even snow) in some places looked pretty sketchy, so we decided to visit someplace else. Paul suggested Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake.

It turned out to be a fun day on the bikes after all, even if we didn’t get to take our "planned" ride. I think it’s pretty important to remain flexible when things like the weather can get in the way. We may have had to change our plans, but we still got a fun ride in. No harm, no foul.

Riding into work this morning, I was thinking about Saturday’s ride and thought about how that applies to work and projects. Sometimes things happen that change the nature of what we’re doing, can impact scope, or might even instigate a complete change of direction. Depending upon why the changes were made may or may not indicate a problem.

The way I look at it, project execution is really where the rubber of strategy hits the road. When the business climate is volatile and market forces change, it’s important for organizations to remain nimble enough to adapt what they’re doing to accommodate the changes. Does that make the project a failure, NO. I think changes in scope or direction indicate project failure only when they are made because the project is lagging or failing to meet objectives. Strategic adjustments that change the scope of a project or cancel a project outright, do not indicate a failed project. In fact, strategic changes can lead to a successful outcome (much like our ride to Antelope Island).

It was a shorter ride, but it was a Utah State Park with lots to see—so we did. We stopped to see the sites, take in the vistas and even had a buffalo burger. All in all, it was a great day (even with the change in plans). I had some friends that went camping up in the mountains over the weekend and they saw nothing but rain and even snow. Had we gone forward with our original plan it would have been a cold and miserable day at best. I’m glad we changed plans. It made for a fun day on the bike.

Feel free to share some of your experiences when a change in direction or a change in scope resulted in a successful outcome.

Strategic Project Management

Choosing the right move

Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.”

Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one. 
For example, imagine that you increase the investment in advertising, but the return from it is not proportional. Why did that happen? It seems that the quality of leads dropped. Why did that happen? Because we didn’t have a quick feedback loop between the money put into advertising and the output from advertising that we get. Why didn’t we have that feedback loop? Because we didn’t know how to properly score leads. Why didn’t we properly score leads? Because no one did statistical data analysis. Why didn’t we mine the data? Because the process didn’t allocate time for someone to periodically mine the data.

The next step of implementing root-cause analysis is to make a proportional investment to correct each level of the problem. It helps you to avoid both ignoring and over-reacting to a minor problem. In the case above, the decisions could be to allocate some time for data mining, to score the leads, to feed that data back to analytics, and to adjust advertising campaigns based on that. You address the problem on all levels with an incremental improvement.

Every time you face a problem, you make an effort to improve the company at multiple levels with small steps. If the problem is more complex than you thought, it will keep occurring, and every time it reoccurs, you will make an incremental improvement, until it is finally solved. This way, you invest your time and money only into the part of your business that needs it the most. “Lean startups” are lean. 

You can see that this method combines learning and doing, continuously changing your company as you learn. This fits perfectly in the frame of continuous learning.

To close, I also want to mention the importance of your own unique vision for the product. I don’t mean to suggest that the shortest way to success is to simply follow every customer’s request. Those requests will often pull the company in different directions, and you don’t want to be doing Brownian motion. This is where the art mixes with the science and produces brilliant results.

What about your professional experience? How do you normally deal with failures in your business?
Project Management 2.0

I don’t think they tell this story in school anymore. I think it’s been debunked as a fabrication. That being said, I grew up learning that George Washington was honest. So honest in fact that as a boy he received a new ax and promptly cut down his father’s cherry tree.

When asked about what happened to the tree, the young George said, "I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree."

An icon of virtue for my young mind. True or not, for me, President Washington’s image remains intact.

I once worked with a manager who always said whatever it was he thought you wanted to hear. At first, since it was what you wanted to hear, it was easy to feel pretty good about things. However, that didn’t last very long. Soon (just like everyone else) I figured out that I couldn’t trust anything he ever said. The same was true about what he said to the boss. He eventually got fired.

If your colleagues, team members and even the boss can’t trust what you say, you might as well start cleaning out your desk right now. Of course, everyone likes to hear that things are all peachy-keen, but only if they are.

I learned early in my career that honesty is always the best policy. Even if the news is bad, hitting bad news straight on is always better than fudging the truth and hoping for the best. That’s not to say it’s aways pleasant. It isn’t.

What’s more, when the team sees you spin the truth to the boss, they assume you’re doing the same thing to them—and they’re probably right.

Strategic Project Management

Project management has too many acronyms.

PM, PPM, PMBOK, SCRUM, PMP, ACWP, BAC, BCWP, BOM, CPF, CFF, PDM, PMO, WBS, SWOT, TQM… you get the picture. We even have a unique way of using terms like "resource" or "resources" that doesn’t make sense to many people outside of the profession. Is it any wonder people don’t get what project managers do?

Whenever I talk to someone who isn’t a "PM" or doesn’t work in the "PMO" about what it is we do, I have to choose my words carefully or they don’t even have a chance of understanding what I’m talking about. Take "resource management" for example. "What is resource management?" they might ask.

As I explain that we consider the people who work on project teams part of the "resources" associated with getting the work done. The response is usually something like, "So you call people resources? People aren’t things."

They’re right.

Steven Covey would argue that people can’t be managed—only things can be managed. "The greatest tragedy of our time is that many so-called business leaders confuse management with leadership. Business schools have been excellent at equipping would-be business leaders to completely manage costs, cash flows, stocks, machinery, and so on. This is very correct. Things lend themselves to management because they can be controlled. ‘Things’ do not have choices. Extending the principles of managing costs, cash flows and stocks to people yields disastrous results. That’s why many so-called business leaders resort to ‘turning people into things’ so they can manage them."

As project leaders, I think it’s important to remember that words have meanings, and how we use our words really does make a difference in how we are perceived, the words we use form the way we perceive the world around us and even how we perceive others. If we de-humanize the people we work with by the language we use, I think that has a subconscious effect on how we ultimately relate to them.

I’m not sure what term would be better than resource management, but I know that I try to avoid calling the members of my team "resources" as much as I can. In project environments (or any work environment for that matter) we rely on people to actually get things done. Empowering people to maximize their contribution to something worthwhile, to create and invent, should be our goal. I know that many of you might be saying, "What difference does it make if we call them resources?"

Except for the fact that they are people, I guess it doesn’t make any difference at all. Or does it?

Strategic Project Management

Before I started my ride on Saturday, I washed and polished  my bike and prepared for a few hours in the saddle. Taking time to clean the motorcycle gives me an opportunity to inspect it and make sure that there are no glaring issues in need of attention. One of the things I like to keep a pretty close eye on are my tires. Tire condition is a pretty important indicator of the safety of your next ride. I can think of few things worse than a blow-out at 70 mph going around a corner on the highway. After Saturday morning’s inspection, it looks like I’ll be setting up an appointment for a new rear tire this week.

As project leaders, there are also subtle indicators that can give a savvy project manager an idea of how the team is performing—before a blow-out. Last spring I wrote about some of the early warning signs of a project in trouble, the equivalent of checking the tires and inspecting the bike before a ride. Although I think this list applies to almost every project, I’m sure there are some warning signs that are unique to your team. As a project leader, you should identify what they are and regularly monitor them to make sure that everyone is operating at peak performance.

Please feel to share some of the early warning signs you watch out for.

Strategic Project Management

Let the feedback direct you

John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and A/B testing. These are basic tools of the trade for specialists in marketing or advertising that enable them to evaluate the effect of every small change in banner ads, landing pages and e-mails. But this kind of testing can only answer tactical questions and normally doesn’t affect business strategy. Is it possible to make the whole business structure respond to this type of feedback?  
"Lean startups," a term popularized by Eric Ries, are particularly successful at doing this. The main idea of a “lean startup” is to deploy a minimum viable product and test it as soon as possible. In today’s software world, it’s possible to release software updates several times a day, continuously getting feedback on every 20 new lines of code and aligning the direction of the product. This way, “lean startups” meet customers’ needs much faster than big companies, like Microsoft, which have a multi-year release cycle.

In fact, staying in contact with customers throughout the creation of a product is the only way to make something they will actually use. This is especially true for the new companies coming up with new products. They always have to act in an unknown environment, relying only on their hypotheses. “No business plan survives first contact with a customer,” says Steve Blank, well known in the start-up community as the father of Customer Development theory. Our assumptions about what our customers need are no more than assumptions before we actually talk to customers and test the assumptions. Thanks to Web technologies, getting closer to customers has become a lot easier. We can regularly receive their feedback, without even getting out of the room. Still, don’t get too comfortable, since the dry bits, numbers and characters, while easy to aggregate, are often superfluous.

So, at least initially, it’s very important to get out of your office and speak directly to your customers, person-to-person. You will see your product in a way you’ve never seen it before. But this will be no more than a set of interesting facts without taking the next step – learning from the feedback you got and aligning your product vision and business strategy according to it. I will speak about this in the last post of this series. 
Project Management 2.0