Common Sense and the Role of Leadership in Project Management Success
Dr. James T. Brown, PMP, offers a number of interesting observations about achieving the right balance between methodology and pragmatism in his PM World Today Viewpoints article, entitled: Why Your Project Management Methodology Doesn’t Matter Much. His central thesis is: “It is not the methodology that is the primary factor of success. It is the leadership!”
Dr. Brown encourages clients to focus on to beware that, “too much methodology can contribute to project failure.” He suggests: “Strong leadership is striking a balance between people dependency and process dependency with respect to the given methodology.”
Art’s Comments:
Dr. Brown is right to caution about the over-reliance on methodology as a guarantee of success. In particular, I’ve worked around early-career Project Managers that with the best of intentions have ridden the methodology horse all the way to project failure. By the same token, I’ve worked in client organizations where the leadership was either too cavalier about supporting the methodology or falsely assumed that they once the chosen methodology was in place, their job was complete.
An organization’s leaders must be actively involved in supporting project success, and part of their role is serving as the gatekeeper on when methodology can be sacrificed on the altar of project progress. Project Managers must be astute enough to recognize the early warning signs of methodology overload and engage their project teams, sponsors and senior leadership on the issues so that changes to the process can be properly vetted and concluded.
“One Size Does Not Fit All”
I love Dr. Brown’s phrase: “Project Management is simply Structured, Organized, Common Sense.” He suggests that if requirements are relatively fluid and the project contains high uncertainty, then is common sense to choose an iterative method. Alternatively, mission-critical projects demand a strict development methodology to minimize risk and optimize chances for success.
Art’s Comments:
Leadership plays a critical role in assessing the importance of a project to a firm’s goals or strategies. Those projects deemed mission critical merit strict (but not unyielding) adherence to a defined methodology. An established software firm with many products may be able to relax time constraints on smaller or lower priority projects without suffering significant repercussions. Alternatively, an early-stage firm dependent upon a new release to satisfy early adopter clients can ill afford to deviate from a methodology that will ensure an on-time release in line with customer requirements. Methodology and reasons for violating or adapting the methodology should be considered in the initial project planning and prioritization phases and communicated to all stakeholders.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As organizations grow increasingly dependent upon project execution and professional project management practices to drive strategy execution, a firm’s leaders have to be smart enough and engaged enough to recognize an imbalance between process and people. Methodologies are guidelines to be strictly or liberally adhered to depending upon circumstances. Good leadership in this sense means tuning in to project activities at a level sufficient to ensure that the right approaches are being applied for the right reasons. While your methodology might have its champions, don’t lose track of the fact that the methodology must enable success, not fight it.
From Imperial Court to Learning Organization
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy
Today’s post was stimulated by a great article in the July/August 2008 Harvard Business Review, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, where Professor Amy Edmonson of Harvard Business School outlines the differences between organizations that focus on execution as efficiency—doing things better and faster than your competition versus execution as learning—focusing on learning and adapting faster.
In brief, Professor Edmonson compares and contrasts the approaches used in the traditional industrial age model of motivation and performance evaluation processes versus those required for today’s knowledge-worker dominated organizations. The approaches required for success in the two models are dramatically different.
In the Execution as Efficiency model, Professor Edmonson indicates that leaders provide answers, employees follow directions and optimal work processes are designed and set up in advance. In the Execution as Learning model, leaders set direction and articulate the mission, employees discover the answers and work processes are highly fluid, adapting at the speed of organizational learning.
Practical Applications: A lot of Executive Talk, but…
When it comes to driving change, words and actions must match. Few organizations are immune to the massive forces constantly reshaping the world around us, and few organizations can afford to live solely by the Execution as Efficiency model. We live and work in a world increasingly dominated by knowledge workers, and while one part of an organization may be dominated by an efficiency orientation, other areas, marketing, sales, research and development, must move towards a learning approach or face dire consequences in the marketplace.
In my own experience working with organizations that have grown up with an emphasis on efficiency but are talking about the need to become more flexible and adaptable, it is often the people doing the talking that are serving as the barriers to change by failing to revamp outmoded systems and processes.
Five Barriers that Get In the Way of Developing a Learning Organization:
- The Imperial CEO and Royal Executives: A class system that puts undue weight on the import of executives. Instead of the executives serving the organization, it seems like the organization exists to serve the executives.
- Strategy by Edict and Set According to the Calendar: Every year at about the same time, the organization stops and waits while the royal court sits behind closed doors working out the new organizational structure and lofty statements that provide the masses inspiration to work hard until they receive fresh inspiration next year.
- Strategy by Default: “We have a strategy, and it’s to sell more,” is a commonly heard phrase in this tuned-out environment. Another is, “Strategy is for the big boys, and we’re too small to worry about anything other than doing our jobs.”
- People as Expenses: the words coming from the mouths of executives might be saying “People are our most important asset,” but the systems supporting the identification, development and retention of talent are saying, “People are our biggest cost.”
- The Functional Structure: specialization works in some areas, but in general, the silo structure of many/most orientations is the greatest impediment to shared learning. While the phrase, “we’re all in sales” is commonly shouted by salespeople frustrated with the lack of organizational support, the fact is that, “marketing is truly too important to be left to just the marketing department.”
What to Do If Your Organization Needs to Learn:
- Take the royalty out of the royal court. This culture shift has to start at the top—the non-CEO Chairman of the Board and the other independent board members have to step up and overthrow the caste system and monarchy that pervades so many executive environments.
- Recognize and act on strategy as a process that involves everyone. (I’ve posted on this one seemingly a thousand times, so I’ll spare you the details and direct you to the Strategy category on this blog.)
- A robust execution process with plenty of accountability and constant evaluation of performance and consideration of lessons learned is the fastest way to pump up organizational learning.
- Make the identification, development and retention of talent the job of every manager or supervisor in the organization. Challenge HR to create systems to support these activities and start living up to the notion that people are your greatest assets.
- Break down the walls by at least moving towards a strong matrix or a project environment for major initiatives. Cease and desist with throwing initiatives over silo walls, and build a project culture with the charter to execute and to educate the organization on lessons learned.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
It’s time to quit talking about becoming a learning organization and start knocking down the time worn conventions, institutions and processes that stand in your organization’s way. In an ideal world, this change starts at the top with an insightful leader or leadership team that understand what it takes to move from an efficiency orientation to a learning focus. In reality, a lot of this change will need to be driven by leaders in the middle that clearly see what is happening in the external environment as well as what it takes to win in that environment. If necessary, let the royals executives posture and play while you go about the business of changing the business one initiative at a time.
The Project Management Discipline of Strategy Execution
A number of months ago, I wrote about the benefit of applying professional project management practices to help improve strategy execution (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management). While many view strategy as something that is transformational (and it often is), the fact is that an organization moves from where it is today to where it has decided to go one project at a time…like a football team marching down the field on a long-drive.
In the June, 2008 Harvard Business Review, in an article entitled The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution, Gary Neilson, Karla Martin and Elizabeth Powers add considerably to the body of knowledge on strategy execution, with this excellent article, backed by a considerable amount of research gained in surveys of over 1,000 organizations. Their findings seem to support their thesis that: "enterprises fail at execution because they go straight to structural reorganization and neglect the most powerful drivers of effectiveness—decision rights and information flows."
A few key findings covered in the article:
- Employees at three out of five companies rated their organization weak at execution. (Asked: Are Important strategic and operational decisions quickly translated into action?)
- The number one rated trait (by a landslide) that makes organizations effective at implementing strategy: Everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which one is responsible.
- Of the top eight traits (17 were identified), five were tied to having effective and timely information flows and three were related to decision rights.
- Structure as an effective trait for driving strategy execution did not hit the list until number 13, with a relatively low strength index rating.
Fascinating. It's important to see a large body of research dedicated to the execution issue and it is a great learning experience to see how valuable information flows and decision rights are to successful strategy execution.
Additional Thoughts on Strategy Execution:
Structural changes, properly implemented at the right time and for the right reasons can go a long way towards addressing and improving the information flow, decision rights and collaboration issues that are so critical to strategy execution. Don't write off structure as a powerful tool in strategy execution, however as the authors highlight, don't jump to structure as the solution. It's one part of many pieces to the solution.
Back to my strategy execution as project management thesis, the best performing project teams are characterized by clear structure, unambiguous roles, detailed communication plans and clear accountability for decisions and results. Top notch Project Managers ride herd on these issues, seeking out points of confusion or gaps in information flows and fixing them in process.
The fact that the authors are able to cite as a research finding that 3 out of 5 surveyed managers believe that their organizations do not quickly translate strategic priorities into action tells me that most of those organizations have not adopted a robust project management discipline for strategy execution. And while strategy is arguably more complicated than creating a new product or constructing a building, it is very possible to structure and manage your execution program using the same approaches.
The bottom-line (for now):
Strategy execution is where value is created. The best plans are worthless unless they are backed by a group of people that understand their roles and accountabilities and that have the information they need when they need for rapid decision-making. Execution never takes place in a straight line and without setbacks. In fact, the setbacks are powerful learning experiences that a good team will leverage as it adapts and responds to internal and external factors.
A large part of the solution in my opinion is treating execution like a high-order program comprised of a series of projects to be managed. Ask a good Project Manager how to successfully pull of an execution program and I suspect they won't need to interview 1,000 companies.
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
I recently conducted a leadership workshop for a group of technical professionals at an industry conference, and as always, I walked away from the session with a couple of insights gained from the input of the participants. One that surprised me was that after talking about characteristics of high performance project teams, I asked for a show of hands from anyone that had been a member of this type of team. Only 5 out of 58 raised their hands. Even discounting for the people that don’t tend to respond to "showing of hands" requests, anything even close to the 10% range here seems abysmal.
Planning to Recognize Failure-The Project Manager’s Guide to Preventing Project Calamity
Every Project Manager with a few years of experience under his or her belt can likely recall at least one example of a major project that lived on long after the plug should have been pulled and the project canceled. The best (or worst) examples are the ego-driven initiatives of top executives that can’t let go for fear of losing face by admitting defeat.
More than a few organizations have been taken to or pushed over the edge by these self-anointed visionaries bent on changing their corporate world with some grand project. Once invested, they cannot let go, and if left unchecked, the results can be nothing short of disastrous for the organization.
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