Leadership and the Project Manager-Critical Skills for Success and a New e-Book

May 19, 2009 By 4 Comments

I’ve worked around new product development projects my entire career and I’ve served as an executive sponsor for many development and strategic projects, but not until I began teaching project management to graduate students, did I fully understood the very distinct leadership challenges of these professionals. 

Not dissimilar to the plight of the product manager, the project manager is an informal leader charged with a remarkable amount of responsibility, most often with very little of the authority conferred by title or position in the organization’s hierarchy.

The complexities of this high-responsibility, low-authority position are increased when you consider the realities of most project environments.  In essence, the project manager must bring together disparate resources—often borrowed or assigned and priority-conflicted individuals, and motivate those individuals to develop as a cohesive team and to deliver high quality results.  No small task on a good day. 

Last and not least, the challenges of leading projects are highlighted very clearly in the fact that project failure rates are extraordinarily high.  While it’s never safe to generalize, there are many sources that indicate the high percentage of project failures (versus original cost, schedule or quality estimates) in new product development, IT infrastructure implementation and certainly in execution around strategic objectives (projects).  A report by the consulting firm, Ernst & Young offered survey results that indicated that 80% of the most common reasons cited for project failure are people issues. 

Where do I sign up for this job?!

As I’ve become more enlightened to the challenges and nuances of the project manager, I’ve developed a great regard for the best of these professionals that I’ve worked around and interacted with during my career. 

Great project managers are also great leaders.  The best of the project managers are senior contributors that understand their role is more about helping the group succeed than it is about conducting status meetings and revising and distributing reports.  And while these great project managers understand and employ the tools of project management effectively, they are smart enough to understand that they are much more effective when they combine the “art of leadership” with the “science of project management.”

Developing as a Senior Contributor in Project Management:

My focus in my post-corporate life is on supporting the development of senior contributors, and it was serendipitous that I was given the opportunity to conduct a deep dive into the world of project management during the past few years.  It seemed fitting to capture my thoughts on developing as a senior contributor in project management in my first e-Book.

The Interactive e-Book: 

Leadership and the Project Manager—Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance, was written to serve as a “Quick-Start” to developing as a senior contributor for anyone (certified or not) that is charged with leading and managing projects.

Key topics include:

  • Why developing leadership skills is critical to your success
  • Identifying and avoiding the common pitfalls of project managers as leaders
  • Growing your leadership credibility
  • Why feeding people PMBOK dogma in a hurricane is a bad career move
  • Improving your communication skills
  • Understanding where to focus to develop as a senior contributor
  • Developing and managing great sponsors
  • Dealing with feedback
  • Creating the high performance project team 

…and many others. 

A Social Networking Component to the e-Book:

The e-book is free, no registration required, and in a bow to my passion for the power of our social networking world, I’ve included links in every chapter to the corresponding content on this website where you can interact with each other, add your comments and even tell me the errors of my thinking!  I’ve actually not seen this done before, so perhaps we in the project management world can add our own little footnote in the emerging social networking world, while helping each other grow and develop.

Your Input Will Drive Version 2.0

I am not making a secret of the fact that this version is part of my learning process on what it takes to develop and deliver practical, high-impact content in a “Quick Start” format via an e-book. 

I’ve received some great feedback already from early reviewers, including the need for me to invest in professional graphics.  I have no qualms promising content and graphics improvements in version 2.0! Most importantly however, I’m interested in your feedback on the ideas and your suggestions for strengthening the content.  Who knows, perhaps this merits a print book in the near future.  You decide and I’ll do the work.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The work of organizations is increasingly conducted in projects.  The growth in certified project management professionals continues at a hefty clip and increasingly, non-certified business professionals are learning and utilizing the tools of professional project management.  This is all good.

However, as the most experienced and successful project managers will tell you, your mastery of the people and communication issues are ultimately what will help you improve your batting average for project successes. 

Jump in, read the e-book, put the suggestions and ideas into play and share with us how it’s working and where you are running into challenges.  Hey, this would be easy if it were not for the people.  Fortunately, people are all that we have.  

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Develop Culture Sensing Skills and Take the Blinders Off Of Your Career

April 3, 2009 By 4 Comments

 

Note from Art: at least part of this post was prompted by some truly brilliant product managers interacting on twitter.  The true-life career horror story is all my own!

One of my greatest career misfires was accepting a role in a firm where I had failed to properly assess the culture.  I was blinded by the allure of this successful and global firm and by the sharp people that I met during the interview process. 

Had I interviewed from the perspective of assessing the firm’s culture, I suspect that I would have realized that this was a highly political environment with a command and control leadership style that was counter to my own style and preference.

It took 18 months to unwind that mistake.

Fast forward a few years to where I am active as an educator, trainer, consultant and coach, and I rarely miss an opportunity in a program on leadership, product or project management to describe the importance of developing effective culture-sensing skills.

Top Sales Professionals Get Culture Sensing!

Interestingly, some of the best pros at sensing an organization’s culture are top sales performers and lateral leaders like product and project managers will be well-served to learn from their sales counterparts.  Yeah, I know.  product and project managers learning from salespeople?!  It’s like cats and dogs living together.  However, it can happen!

Think about it.  Great salespeople are expert at quickly assessing a prospect’s business issues as well as understanding an organization’s approach to decision-making.  A sales pro wants to know who makes the final decision, who owns the budget, who the stakeholders are and what the dynamics are that will allow an opportunity to move from interest to close.  The faster that he/she can understand how things happen inside an organization, the easier it is to plot a strategy.

Pay Attention: Your Culture-Sensing Skills Will Serve You Well!

I can think of few skills more important for product and project managers and other lateral leaders to develop than culture sensing. All of the expertise in the world in the science of project management or in the understanding of a proper product management framework is for naught if the individual fails to take into account and leverage cultural idiosyncrasies to achieve results and drive improvements.

While the topic of organizational culture is big and broad, my emphasis is on the practical aspects of understanding a culture.  From the perspective of someone new joining an organization, here’s just a few of the key cultural attributes or dimensions that they need to understand:

15 (or so) Powerful Culture-Sensing Questions You Need to Ask and Answer:

  1. What is the organization proud of?  Who are the heroes and what are the heroic stories?
  2. How do people feel about the teams that they are part of?
  3. How does work get done? 
  4. How are decisions made?
  5. Is individualism rewarded and encouraged or is the team, silo or unit at the top of the food chain?
  6. Am I working in a culture rich in values or bereft of any?
  7. How does innovation take place?
  8. How do people talk about the leadership?
  9. Is the spirit one of “can-do” or can’t do because”?
  10. What is the fighting style?  Can people disagree vehemently on an issue and then go to lunch, or are grudges long and deep?
  11. Is there dissonance between stated goals and priorities and where the focus is placed?
  12. What’s the accountability culture like?
  13. What type of individuals prosper and what type struggle?
  14. What role do customers and what power does Voice of Customer play in the working environment?
  15. Can people talk about tough topics openly, up and down the ladder? 

–

All of these and the many more that I could keep listing speak to various cultural dimensions that a lateral leader such as a product or project manager must understand to effectively execute on their roles.

Common misfires occur when individuals attempt to impose their own vocational dogma on a group that could care less what the PMBOK says or whether best practices in product management support the idea.  The effective lateral leader doesn’t compromise his/her knowledge or best practices, but rather, learns to play and operate within the cultural dimensions to achieve the right outcomes. 

As an executive, I never appreciated it when we were in project meltdown and I was confronted with a project manager highlighting how mucked up our processes were and how if only the team had listened to her guidance we would not be in this situation. 

The same goes for Product Managers that I’ve known that would regale me with tales of tragedy and travesty at the hands of evil developers or manipulative salespeople as their excuses for why an offering had flopped or a customer had rejected the latest release.

While those examples underscore a number of shortcomings of the individuals, they also tell me that there was little understanding on their part of how to work within or to subtly and diligently help the culture evolve. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

My Product Manager friends have quite a bit more to say about what they are describing as the “anthropology of product management” and the importance of culture sensing.  I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, and suspect I’ll be back with more.

For now, my suggested take-away is for you to think consciously about understanding the environment you are working and operating in and leverage this knowledge to help drive performance improvement.

And for the large number of job seekers in the market, remember to apply these same questions to the firms that you are evaluating as part of your next step.  A job is good, but 18 months was a long-time to reflect on my need to do a better job culture-sensing.  

 

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People-It’s Time to Learn to Say No!

March 3, 2009 By 2 Comments

One of the themes that I hear consistently in workshops and in discussions with the professionals in my MBA classes is frustration over the propensity of a firm’s leaders to never say “No” to a project. 

Lacking a viable mechanism to compare, evaluate and select and reject projects, decisions are made based on politics, gut feel and the squeaky customer wheel. 

The net result of this lack of discipline is that the people doing the work end up overloaded and overwhelmed.  They operate in compliance mode, focusing on surviving until the next deadline and adding little creative value or innovation to their activities.

This is a perfect formula to waste money, squander creative energy and decimate morale.  This “we never met a project we didn’t like” approach is also the antithesis of the formula for performance excellence.

The current economic pressures amplify the need to create better screening mechanisms and to truly manage your investment in projects with rigor and discipline.  You need to deliver the right projects effectively, and you need to learn to say “No” to some that seemed like a good idea last year and many that will jump out at you during the next year. 

Take a look at the portfolio of projects that you and your colleagues are engaged with today and make each of these projects earn their way back into the portfolio.  It’s OK and even healthy to challenge yesterday’s priorities as they bury people in today’s work. 

Use these filters:

  • Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
  • Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
  • Is it strategic?  If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today.  If not, kill it.
  • Is it an operational improvement?  If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation?  If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
  • Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
  • Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria?  Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison of alternatives? 

If you struggle to answer these questions because your strategy is vague or out of date, you’ve got another problem that needs to be fixed.  While some decry the usefulness of strategy in a time of crisis, I would argue that now more than ever is the time to create a robust, dynamic strategy and execution program.  Instead of wandering aimlessly through the minefield of the economy, I want a team that is opportunistic, experimental and focused on finding and exploiting gaps and ignoring distractions.  This is strategy. 

The bottom-line:

Your organization executes strategy one project at a time.  Too many leaders fail to support the creation of processes that effectively evaluate and manage the nearly endless list of options to work on.  Start the process by refreshing on strategy and then work unceasingly to manage and cull the portfolio in support of the strategy.  Learn to say, “No” and you’ll be shocked at how much great work your team will complete.  You might even find them smiling as they work.  

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bicycle Helmets, Texting while Driving and Project Failure

January 6, 2009 By 3 Comments

It is well established that wearing a bicycle helmet significantly reduces your chance of head injury should you fall.

It’s also not a big leap to acknowledge that texting while driving is an open invitation to an accident.  If you quit texting, put your hands on the wheel and drive defensively, the probability of you successfully getting from point a to point b increases dramatically.

The risks and consequences from riding without a helmet and texting while driving are well known and unarguable, yet many people engage in these activities assuming that they won’t be impacted.

The same human traits that drive people to do dumb things that they know can cause personal injury, appear to manifest themselves in the way many organizations pursue projects.

For those of you ready to click off yet another boring project management post, pause just a second and consider that the success of your firm is likely dependent upon how well your associates execute projects. If your firm is like many/most, you should be worried.

Strategy is executed in projects, and chances are your organization is metaphorically riding without a helmet and texting at the same time.

Every quarter in the opening session of my MBA course on Project Management, the students work in teams to compare notes on successful projects and unsuccessful projects. They consider what made the successful projects work and what went wrong that drove other projects into the ditch.

It should be no surprise that the examples of successful projects are harder to come up with than the seemingly endless supply of failed initiatives.  In all cases, and in all classes over time, the reasons for failure are some combination of the same factors that we all know about.

Common Reasons Cited for Project Failure:

  • Didn’t know who the customer was.
  • I’m not certain that anyone fully understood the objectives for this project.
  • Not clear who was in charge of the project.
  • Our sponsor was too busy to get involved.
  • We kept adding features until what we created didn’t recognize what we set out to create.
  • People who fail in our organization are shot.  No one estimates realistically…they don’t want to be the one to take the blame.
  • It wasn’t clear who was responsible for what.
  • We never heard from the project manager.
  • There was no project charter.
  • People were not accountable to the project team.
  • We would meet every week and talk about excuses.
  • The executives kept interfering.
  • We outsourced this and our partner failed.

And so on ad nauseam.

This is a real list developed over a number of classes by students who work at marquee companies.  If you are reading this and rolling your eyes and thinking, “not here,” you’re probably riding your bicycle down a slippery road with one hand texting and your eyes blindfolded. Watch-out for the truck behind the bus coming around that blind curve.

Like head injuries from a bicycle fall without a helmet and car accidents due to being distracted, every single one of the issues above and the many more that I did not list, are easily prevented by the application of well-established professional project management practices.

Make a commitment this year to improving your Project Management and Project Execution culture.

  • Make it top leadership’s responsibility to support/drive/enable improvement in project execution and project culture.  Formalize the role of Project Manager and make a commitment to introducing the new discipline.
  • Put teeth and power into the role of Sponsor.  Create a culture where sponsors have the political heft to support project teams and put them on the hook for outcomes.
  • Sponsors, see the above point.  You are responsible.  Get to work and start helping.
  • Use Chartering documents and practices to communicate a project’s importance, to establish the identity of the sponsor and the role and authority of the Project Manager.
  • Measure twice and cut once.  Be relentless on the front-end to develop and agree on scope.
  • Stuff happens.  Going from inept to competent in project execution will take time and there will be missteps.  Quit shooting messengers; create a culture that learns from mistakes and from successes.
  • Rinse and repeat.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Project failure generally has its roots in senior management incompetence, ignorance or laziness.  (Redundant for emphasis)!  Of course, senior management likely views project failure as a function of the project team and the individuals.  Chances are, the executives are too busy texting each other about the need to “make some improvements” while they are driving to work. Well, that’s one way of getting some new top management talent.  On second thought, keep texting, execs.

Filed Under: Leadership, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices

November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.

In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project.

Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:

  • The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.
  • Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.
  • Tools are misapplied.
  • The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.
  • Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings.
  • Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.
  • Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned
  • A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.
  • The Voice of the Customer is never heard.

And so on…

Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success. I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.

Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:

  • Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.
  • Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.
  • Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.
  • Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.
  • Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.
  • On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
  • Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.
  • Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.

The Bottom-line for Now

The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs.

While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives.  Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,