40 Years!

On May 1, 1981, I walked out the door of ITT Mackay Marine, in Raleigh, NC, and began a new career teaching seminars. For most of the next 40 years I taught project management and related topics, and had 16 books published by McGraw-Hill and AMACOM. My first book, Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 5th Edition has been in print since 1991 so for 30 years it has been circulating. It has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese. 

The 15 years before 1981 gave me my real-world experience in managing projects. So altogether I've been involved in the discipline for 55 years. That's 70% of my life!

What has changed about the discipline? Really, not very much. Almost all of the tools existed in the 60s, because they were invented in manufacturing, and we just adopted them to manage the work of projects. This includes the Work Breakdown Structure, Critical Path Scheduling, and Earned Value Analysis. Even FMEA, which is great for risk management, was developed in the 1950s (Failure Mode Effects Analysis).

There are three significant changes that I have seen. Scheduling software that runs on personal computers probably tops the list. The first scheduling I did involved card punch input to a mainframe that was a time-share so it may have taken 24 hours to get turnaround, and if you made a typo, you got a syntax error which could take hours to find.

Secondly, the adoption of project management by software developers, engineers, and other technologists took place in the 1980s. Before that, mostly construction projects applied scheduling to their jobs. 

The other change that I consider significant is that there are now an almost equal number of women in project management positions as men. Of course, this is an across-the-board change. In 1959 when I entered engineering school at NC State University, there were around 5000 total students, of which only about 50 were women. And my seminars seldom had more than a single woman in attendance until about 2000, when the numbers began to equalize--a change that I have been delighted to see, because, quite frankly, project management is a people job and women tend to be more skilled at leading people than men (perhaps that's a biased view, but it is based on my experience with more than 60,000 students).

I quit updating my books following the 5th edition of Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control in 2011. The reason is that the discipline is pretty mature and I saw no benefit to revising a book to just say the same thing in different words. I could have added chapters on Agile, but I don't believe in writing about something I've never actually done, and I wanted my books to be based on hands-on experience.

Well, that's a walk down memory lane. The only thing I want to add is something that Alan Mulally told me, when he was President of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He said that they didn't differentiate very much between project management and general management. What he meant by that is that the methods for managing projects are perfectly adaptable to managing an entire company, and in my opinion, we could benefit tremendously if we could get every C-Suite executive to follow that suggestion.

That's all folks. Remember, project managers do it on time.

A 9 Year Old's View of the Project Manager

It's always interesting to hear what children think their parents do at work. A delightful tale was told to me by a fellow who was the project manager of a construction project in the Chicago area. They were building a new wing for a hospital, and he decided to take his 9 year old daughter to the site so she could see for herself what such a job was like.

The work was progressing nicely and the building was teaming with workers, all scurrying around wearing hard hats and conferring with each other and occasionally with the project manager. The little girl was clearly impressed. Finally she had a question.

"Daddy," she said, "do all these people report to you?" 

"No," he replied, "they have their own supervisors."

"Well what do you do if they aren't doing what they should be doing?"

"I talk to their supervisors, and they take care of it."

She thought for a moment, then with her face beaming, said, "Oh, you're a tattletale."

While her view of a project manager is definitely a bit warped, it is true that a project manager is forced to play the role of tattletale in matrix projects. We have no direct authority over the team so we have to build good relationships with both the workers and their direct supervisors in order to have the work flow smoothly.

It is this relationship management part of projects that eludes some individuals. It is so important that projects sometimes fail because the project manager doesn't handle it effectively. Although is is obvious, some miss the fact that your entire success as a project manager depends on the performance of all those people who don't report directly to you, so a significant part of your time needs to be management by walking around, showing genuine interest in what they are doing and asking if they need anything from you. That bit of effort will pay huge dividends in the long run.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and share your thoughts and experiences in the comment section. All the best. Jim

Using Project Management for ALL Work

Imet Alan Mulally when he was CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and he told me that they didn’t differentiate very much between general management and project management (PM). The reason is quite simple. Those of us who use PM know that we didn’t invent a single tool commonly used. All of them were developed to control manufacturing operations. In other words, all the tools of PM were developed to manage work, so it is the only discipline designed expressly for that purpose.

Which leads to the main point of this article — you should consider using the tools of PM for all work that you do, whether it be mundane or executive. For example, every strategic initiative that an executive manages can be planned, scheduled, and controlled using PM methods.

The basic tools are Work Breakdown Structures, which show all of the smaller tasks that must be performed to do a larger job. Schedules like Critical Path Method to work out what can be done in parallel with other tasks in order to shorten the total time it will take to complete a job. Next is Earned Value Analysis to assess the amount of work that has been completed compared to the planned amount. And then there is Risk Analysis and management using FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis), which came from engineering to determine if a design is going to be suitable for field use.

If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, there are a lot of books that explain them. My Project Planning, Scheduling and Control, 5th Edition is one. The point is to pick and choose which ones you need for a specific job. A strategic initiative may not need a schedule, but simply a to-do list. Keep it simple.

The Most Important Characteristic of a Real Project Manager

My company offers online courses in project management, and one of them includes my book, Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 5th Edition. We always send a gift card to students so they can purchase either a hard copy or Kindle edition from Amazon, before the class begins. 

So we have a class starting on November 6, and I get an email from a student telling me that Amazon says the book is out of stock, with no availability date given. Well, I don't know which version of Amazon he may have been using, but the one I accessed clearly says the book will be in stock on November 5. Furthermore, it lists 21 used copies available, and if you check those, many are like new, so if the individual really had to get a copy, he could have done so. He complained that he was leaving the country and needed a hard copy to avoid problems with Customs in foreign countries, as they will sometimes take 12 hours to examine every file on an electronic device.

If this were a one-time situation, I wouldn't be writing this blog. It seems that there are a lot of people who would rather complain than take responsibility for their own problems. And this is totally unacceptable for project managers.

You see, as a project manager, you have responsibility to get the job done, and if there were no problems along the way, you would have no job at all.

The first response to any issue in a project is to ask, "What can I do about it?"  You must own the problem and take action to solve it. Should the problem be a technical one that you personally can't solve, then your responsibility is to find a technical expert who can solve it and get that person on board. If your boss prohibits your doing this, then you are absolved of responsibility, and in fact, you are not really being allowed to exercise your skills as a project manager, and my suggestion is that you begin a job search as soon as it is feasible.

There is no place in management for whiners, complainers, or pass-the-buck individuals. There is also no place for those who blame someone else for every problem that comes their way. Management should be considered a profession, and I am certain if a doctor complained about all her problems, she would quickly lose patients. Be proactive. Express a can-do attitude. Be professional. 

Soft Skills--The Only Bottom-Line Skills You Have

The first seminar I ever taught was entitled Leadership Skills for Project Managers. It was run through San Jose State University and drew 23 participants. They were a great group and very enthusiastic. Two more test offerings were conducted and we rolled out the program to be run on a regular basis at other universities. Unfortunately, we went into a recession shortly after the initial offerings, and the seminar could hardly be given away.

Later that year I bought my first personal computer (this was in 1981) and we launched a training program called Project Management and the Personal Computer. This program was a huge success, and for the next three years, we had full classes most of the time.

Eventually I got tired of teaching the computer program and began leading Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control. This course also sold well, and continues to do so today, under a slightly different name.

The point to all of this is that companies think Leadership Skills have no bottom-line relevance, so they are reluctant to send project managers to courses on the topic. They will, of course, send the CEO to a program at Harvard Business School or Wharton to take week-long programs on leadership, but won't train lower level employees.

This is an interesting and erroneous view. For one thing, project managers usually have no direct authority over the members of their teams, and so must use influence (call that leadership) to get those people excited about their work. Yet many of the project managers are technical people who have never had training in leadership, and are often not very good at it.

Another strange fact is that our accounting practice places value on capital equipment, but none on human resources. As Peter Drucker used to argue, this is misguided. We should do human resource accounting, which would make us realize that human resources appreciate in value over time, while capital resources depreciate.

Furthermore, your capital equipment won't make a penny for you unless those human resources use them correctly, and with employee engagement running at about 35 percent, as measured by Gallup surveys, the level of motivation of most employees is not so good.

Thus the need for those soft skills. They really are the most important--possibly the only--bottom-line skills you have.

Begin With the End In Mind

This month, my daily tips are all based on Stephen Covey's book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and his second habit is to begin with the end in mind. All of us who manage projects understand that this means we should have a clear vision for the final outcome of a project.

Vision is important for several reasons. The predominant one is that you need to be very clear on what results you are trying to accomplish with your project. Another reason is that a compelling vision motivates team members to give their best performance to the project. And finally, a clear vision can be tested with all stakeholders to ensure that they agree with the final destination of the job.

In Covey's book, he is talking more about your vision for your life, rather than a project vision. Do you have a clear plan for your life? If not, you may be like most people who have regrets at the end of life--things they never did that they wish they had done.

Do you want to be a project manager for the rest of your life? Do you want to use it as a stepping stone to a more senior management position? Or are you an accidental project manager, and you would rather not be managing projects at all?

In any case, it is a good idea to think about your life and what you want to experience. You don't get to redo it, so its highly important to try to do it right the first time.

The late Steve Jobs is reported to have asked himself every day if what he was going to do that day was something that he looked forward to doing. If he said "no" several days in a row, he tried to pass off whatever it was and do something else. I think that's a good approach.

Leading Versus Managing

The sad thing about the PMP® certification is that it does not recognize the importance of leadership. The new certification requirements are going to require 8 PDUs gained through courses on leadership every three years to stay certified. That's a single day spent on the subject, and is hardly adequate.

Managing projects, departments, or entire companies is not about administrative duties but about leading people! I have trademarked the phrase projects are people® to emphasize the importance of knowing how to deal effectively with people.

This month's daily tips topic is on leadership. 20 suggestions on how to be more effective in dealing with people both as members of your project team, but also as stakeholders.

Another sad fact is that there are few really good leaders. Yet it isn't that hard. Children exercise leadership all the time. For some reason we forget how to do it as we age. Maybe the leadership cells in our brains atrophy as we age??? In any event, make it a goal to improve your leadership skills by just 8 PDUs, even if you don't have your PMP certification. 

If you aren't receiving my daily tips, get my free App for iOS or Android. It's called Highly Effective Project Manager, just like this blog.

Also, please post your comments on this blog below. I'd like to hear from you. Is the topic relevant to you, on target, or missing the mark. What else would you like for me to address. It won't take much time to comment.