Got purpose? Clearly stating the purpose or objective of your meeting, and listing the desired outcome(s), provides a focal point for the team’s conversation and sets tangible expectations for outcomes. If the objective is stated clearly, and the meeting is kept short (a half hour or less) your team will know why they’re there and […]
Category Archives: Business
The Dirty Little Secret of Project Management
Mar 12
I’ve written of my belief in using just enough, and just the right kind, of project management on this blog in the past. I found this article from HBR BLOG Network. It speaks directly to my beliefs and experience, regarding the application of just enough project management and thought you might like it: The Dirty […]
Lead people, not projects
Projects don’t care. Really.
Everything done in the roll of project leader, is about people. Leading projects provides a daily opportunity to connect people with each other. Process improvements, tac time improvements, reductions in mean time between failures, installing new tools, designing a new building, building a bridge, bringing a new product or service to market, whatever. It’s all done for people, for community. Not for the project.
The project is just the forum that provides people with access to each other and the conversation about what it is they want to do. As project leaders, we have a unique position, where we are the lens, focusing conversation and harnessing the power of the team so they can achieve.
In his book, Human Factors in Project Management: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques for Inspiring Teamwork and Motivation, Zachary Wong makes a point that, “To bring out the best in people, an organization must have a good management system and a work environment that supports its diversity of human factors.”
Mr Wong goes on to define 6 Key contributors to team success:
- Mutual Trust
- Transparancy
- Respect
- Interdependency
- Team Learning
- Recognition
How do your experiences relate to this post? Are people the most important factor in your projects?
Leave a comment below.
Related articles
- The Fine Line Between Project Managers and Project Leaders (seventhman.com)
- Project Managers … visionary leaders or shepherds? (prince2msp.com)
With Project Details, More is not always better
English: Sample Work Breakdown Structure http://www.wbs-tool.net (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A well understood and decomposed project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) provides sufficient detail to empower project leaders to lead.
Project details are important, but how much detail depends on several variables that while not controllable, are knowable. Each work package drives team performance and provides feedback with enough granularity, to indicate what is getting done, and if the team is deviating from plan, highlights where, why, and how much.
Details need to be sufficient for the project leader to clearly and reliably communicate information to the project team, project customer, and key stakeholders, and to adjust team focus and energy to recover the course or explain the impact of the deviation.
The depth of detail required is established project by project, based on project scope, needs and experience of the project leader and project team, and customer/key stake holder tolerance for risk.
Experienced teams working towards well visioned and understood deliverables, supporting leaders with moderate tolerance for ambiguity, probably don’t need as much project detail in the WBS as inexperienced teams supporting leaders with little or no tolerance for risk.
Conversely, inexperienced teams, working towards well visioned and understood deliverables, supporting leaders wanting to closely monitor a project, and with low to no tolerance for ambiguity, will require a very detailed and low level WBS that clearly defines every task and every tasks exit criteria.
The big thing is to find the level of detail that helps the project leader tell the project story in a way that stake holders can understand and are empowered to act appropriately.
This Checklist can help get your project going and keep it on track. The level of detail within each item is determined by where the team falls on the experience versus ambiguity continuum.
- Mission Statement / Problem Statement (At the very least. A full up Project Charter is preferred.)
- Deliverables
- Scope Statement
- Work Breakdown Structure (possibly a Budget Breakdown Structure (BBS))
- Project Management and Execution Strategy Statement (Traditional project gantt chart, SCRUM Framework, etc)
- Project Plan / Check sheets / Backlog and user stories
- Roles and responsibilities Table
- Defined Operating Rhythm & Communication plan
- Metrics
- Risks / Issues / Opportunities
- Project Change management system
Each of the above is worth a discussion on its own and I will follow up over next weeks.
It all comes down to managing and communicating expectations and certainty. Experienced teams will have a good idea how much detail is necessary to provide useful indications of project progress and what risks are likely to manifest into issues. They may suggest some specific areas of the Work Breakdown Structure that need a great deal of detail due to the complexity of the task, and other areas may be deliberately quite shallow based on team understanding and stability of the work.
The following links may be helpful when organizing and leading your next project:
Just Enough Project Management: The Indispensable Four-step Process for Managing Any Project, Better, Faster, Cheaper by Curtis R. Cook
Bare Bones Project Management: What you can’t not do by Bob Lewis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure
Check them out and let me know what you think!
How Great Leaders Inspire Action
The ability to inspire others is a project leaders greatest gift.
Shared inspiratin comes from leaders being able to articulate why they are doing something, not what they are doing.
Watch Simon Sinek‘s TED Talk, How great leaders inspire action and let me know what you think.
From TEDxPuget Sound, posted in May 2010
Does this model fit your experience?
Do your think you can use it in your day to day dealings with team members and stake holders?
Project Managers can thrive on uncertainty
Got ambiguity?
Today at Zen Habits, Leo Babauta, has a great article, Finding Peace with Uncertainty; http://zenhabits.net/uncertainty/ , that offers great strategies for finding your strength in the midst of any uncertainty.
What are your strategies for dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty?
Share them with us in the comments.
Enjoy!
Projects in the fast lane and how the assumption of common values can give your team a flat tire
Enabling cross cultural teams to perform well can be tricky when constrained by time and stakeholder expectations of high performance, but the results are worth the effort.
In the hustle of today’s business urgencies and emergencies cross organizational and cross national (international) teams are being called upon to solve complex, multi discipline issues. Rarely are teams launched onto critically urgent and constrained projects, allowed time to establish common values. The norm seems to be just the opposite.
Sponsors assume team members assigned to their projects have common values and a common language for expressing them, even when team members are not well spoken in the predominant language of the team. This isn’t just about foreign languages either. Technical languages can be as difficult for those outside the specialized field as French, English, or German languages are for people for whom French, English, or German are a second language . Every field of study assigns concise definitions to words used to describe conditions experienced, objects dealt with, and outcomes produced within that field of study. It’s what allows the members of that field to communicate clearly with each other. The result is a culture of specialists.
I once led a team of engineers and non-engineers on a complex project, that was started well inside of normal lead time. The team members represented a diverse mix of organizations, with specialized roles. All team members spoke English – but it took us a full day to realize that when the engineers said, “standards”, a codified system of rules; the operations focused non-engineers heard, “standards”, commonly used physical parts (nuts and bolts).
So what to do.
- Recognize and be aware that teams are micro-communities, bound together by common purpose, values, and behaviours. How well they execute and produce desired outputs and artefacts depends heavily on team member ability to communicate with each other, and the leader ability to inspire members to look past their differences outside the team, and commit to the common purpose of the team.
- Facilitate interactions ensuring communications are clear and that team members are encouraged and empowered to clarify statements or questions until they understand or are understood.
- Trust your team members and be consistent, dependable, and reliable in all your interactions.
- Listen to the team, and listen to yourself – sounds odd to say listen to yourself, but try that the next time you are talking to a team member. Listen to what you are saying – and know that the person listening only hears the words coming out of your mouth and none of the thoughts in your head.
- Lead by example. As the team leader, team members will emulate your behaviours.
- Intervene appropriately and discretely, on the teams behalf to external situations, as well as between team members or with team members when warranted.
- Celebrate success often. This sounds easier than it is. Success becomes clouded by judgement very easily. Take the win and run!
These actions all contribute to developing a positive and supportive space for the team to operate in, and re-enforces what you value as team leader. The team itself however, will grow through storming, norming, forming, and performing as team members, including you, create and adhere to their own internal cultural norms and values in order to succeed. It’s all very tribal.
Do you see your cross cultural teams suffering from a lack of common values or are they and you, making diversity a powerful lever for achieving complex objectives?
Leave a comment. Your feedback is appreciated! 🙂
Related articles you may find interesting:
- http://www.squidoo.com/tribebuilding Tribe Building Tactics by Seth Godin
- https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit5.php 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Projects – Not just for business
Stuff that makes me happy.
Consider having this kind of focus, enthusiasm, and passion on your next project.
Quixotic Fusion is an ensemble of artists that brings together aerial acrobatics, dance, theater, film, music and visual fx.
How do you keep the passion ignited?
Tools, choice, and the conversation that never ends
Neil Gaiman has a great quote, attributed to Gene Wolf, “You never really learn how to write a novel. You learn how to write the novel you’re writing.”
I find this relates well to leading projects.
There is no Platonic Project. There are projects. Lots of them, and every one contains a unique set of stakeholders, a unique deliverable, a unique set of circumstances. This makes projects diverse. Diversity means there are many appropriate ways to create the desired outcome. To be sure, there are tools and processes defined by Project Management Institute and best practices encouraged or required by the local Project Management Organization. They are like the grammar and usage rules and guidelines for authors. They provide a common framework for sharing. It remains to the project leader to pick the most appropriate tools, techniques, and processes to help that particular team achieve it’s particular outcome.
Tools range from Agile focused user stories, checklists, commitment meetings, and iterative development processes, managed largely by spreadsheets and post-its, to intensely detailed project plans, Network Diagrams, Detailed Action Plans (which are the same thing as Network Diagrams), and burn down charts generated from all manor of sophisticated software. There are many stops along the way, including One Page overviews and complex A3 reports. Tools also come in two aspects, predictive and historic. The tools chosen and level of detail needed vary as much with project outcomes or deliverables, as team experience, and stakeholder confidence. Complex manufacturing projects can be successfully led using Agile tools and techniques or by Gantt Chart and Earned Value metrics. It doesn’t matter really which tool or process is selected, as long as the conversations the tools generate contribute to moving the project forward and contain enough information to promote effective guidance.
The point is, the tools we use for leading a project exist for one purpose, to help tell the story of that project, to enable the conversation of our project to take place in a meaningful and respectful way, and through that conversation, allows us to stay the course or invoke corrections as needed to produce the outcome desired. If the tool you’ve chosen doesn’t help you lead, then get a new tool. When you choose a tool or process, think about how it will help you tell the story of your project, how it will engage your team members, and stakeholders. Be aware of the burden the tool or process brings with it. You may know the micro details of your project, but end up working 90 hours a week and have more data than knowledge for your trouble. All that data doesn’t do any good if it doesn’t help the team to be engaged and on target. Be willing to change tools or techniques as the team matures.
As a project leader, you learn to adjust your tools and techniques to ensure the highest fidelity in your teams ongoing conversation. Once started, it never ends. To paraphrase Gene Wolf, you never learn to Project Manage, you learn to manage the project you’re leading.
The following links connect to Neil Gaiman’s essay, All Books Have Genders, and a Ted Talks speech by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking . There is also a short clip on mastery from Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The surprising Truth about what motivates us Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us .
Enjoy – and let me know what you think!
http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/All_Books_Have_Genders
Alchemy, agreement, and Project Management
I’m a true believer in the power of words.
Project Managers, like alchemists, use the power of words to create and transmute ideas and energy into outcomes and realities. There is something amazing and magical about creating an outcome, a reality, that exists in the physical world, by stating a goal, committing energy, and living up to it. Project managers, through the art of project management, have one of the few avocations where realities are routinely created based on agreements derived through our words.
The alchemy of agreement, lies in being able to clearly articulate an inspiring vision. It engages and hooks the team, customer, or community and describes the outcome of the endeavour. Agreement is made that a result is desired. Plans laid, measurements installed, we execute to plan. Feedback loops tell us if we got what we desired, and if we didn’t get what we agreed to, we go back, change the agreements, or the process, or the desired result, and execute again. Like alchemists, in the end, the result we have achieved brings something new into the world, something that didn’t exist until we decided to make it, and we made it from nothing more than words and energy.
My vision for this BLOG, is to create a motivating space for myself and those who read what I post; to share my passion for people, communication, and the process of making the magic happen as a project manager.
An outcome of my vision, will be growth of community and a giving back to the community that helped to grow and inspire me.
As Stephen Covey says in, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , “Always begin with the end in mind.”
How do you live up to your goals?
The Eclectic Project Manager 