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.

Is Strict Adherance to the PMBOK(R) Hurting Projects?

A Gallup research study has found that

Projects often fail because organizations put more emphasis on rational factors than on employees' psychological engagement -- and the cost to organizations is enormous (download)

The report does not say that project management methodologies and processes are bad, simply that over-emphasis on them is. The report substantiates a principle that I have considered so important that I have trademarked the expression: projects are people(R).

I don't care how you slice it, a project manager's job is to lead people to a destination, that is, to ensure that they achieve the mission and vision of a project. Too much attention to schedules and documentation, explaining every small deviation from targets, can lead to annoyance, apathy, and lack of motivation to proceed with a job.

On the other hand, taking care of the needs of project team members is the first order of business. To use a harsh and perhaps bit crude metaphor, cowboys in the early days of the settling of the U.S. understood that they had to take care of their horses, or they themselves had little or no chance to survive in the harsh country. In the same way, a project manager depends on his or her people for success. You had better take good care of them, or you may wind up in the project management desert yourself.

The Secret of Project Control, Known Only by a Few

I think it is clear that project managers are expected to control their projects so that they meet their budget, schedule, scope, and performance targets. When you really consider it, that is a tall order, because what it really means is that you are supposed to control the performance of people so that they collectively achieve these targets. It is akin to the responsibility of a CEO or President of an organization, and Stafford Beer wrote a couple of books* in which he argued that this is only possible if you manage the law of requisite variety.

This law pertains to systems, and was expounded by Ross Ashby. It says that, in any system of humans or machines, the element in the system having the greatest flexibility in its behavior will control the system.

Now if you consider a project team to be a system of humans, this law is saying that the project manager can be in control only if s/he has greater behavioral flexibility than any other element in the system. The difficulty of doing this has been expressed in the description of project management as herding cats. As we all know, cats don't herd like cattle, so the implication is that project teams are very difficult to take to a desired destination, and this is indeed true.

It seems that many, if not most, managers recognize the difficulty, and they try to reduce the variability in the behavior of the project team with prohibitions, called policies at the organizational level. I call them the "thou-shalt-not" rules for project team members. And as Tom Peters argued in Thriving on Chaos, they simply do not gain compliance of organization members.

The proper way to reduce the variability of the project team turns out to be a part of the very procedures we should use when we plan and manage a project. You will remember that control is defined as follows:

Control is exercised by comparing where you are to where you are supposed to be, so that corrective action can be taken when there is a deviation from plan.

Now since it is the plan that tells you where you are supposed to be, it follows that if you have no plan, control is impossible--by definition!

So if you follow good project management procedures, you will not only have an overall plan, but every team member will have an individual working plan that is derived from the project plan, and if he/she is following that plan, she will be in control most of the time (and will know how to recover if she loses control momentarily), and if every member of your team is in control, then the project will be also. And this is the ONLY way in which you will ever have control of a project.

For that reason, it is absolutely imperative that you practice planning at the team and individual level. Otherwise, you will spend all of your time trying to herd all the cats in your team.

Notes*: Brain of the Firm and Heart of Enterprise are Stafford Beer's books. For a more extensive discussion of this, see my book, Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 5th Edition.

 

You Can't Manage a Secret

When Alan Mulally became CEO of Ford, they were losing 16 billion dollars a year. That's 50 million a day, 365 days a year!

Each week, Alan held a business plan review meeting, as he had always done as CEO at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Each week, the stoplight reports were all green, indicating that there were no problems. Finally, in the third meeting, Alan said, "Folks, are you sure there are no problems? After all, we're losing 16 billion dollars."

The following week, one report showed a red light. When the owner got up to speak, the atmosphere was tense. Everyone was certain he was in deep trouble.

He explained that they were having a problem with the tailgate on a truck. When he finished, Alan applauded and asked, "How can we help you?" At that point one of the engineering managers spoke up. "I think we can help you with that. We've seen that problem before."

The next week, there was a rainbow of progress reports, and from then on, they began methodically working to solve all of them.

You can't solve problems in a climate of fear of recrimination. If you shoot the messenger, the person who tells you about a problem, no one else will bring problems to your attention.

Within two years, Mulally had Ford profitable again, one of the greatest turnarounds in history, and done without accepting any bailout money from the government.

You just can't manage a secret!

Overlooked Uses of Vision and Mission

Everyone knows that you need a shared vision and mission for a project. Otherwise, every team member will take you where he or she thinks you are going, rather than where the project should actually be going. But the vision and mission for a project should go well beyond this. In fact, they should inform every decision and action taken on a daily basis. And what I am about to say goes beyond the project manager. It will apply to every single member of the project team and every single stakeholder.

Every decision and every action taken in a project should be done after asking, “How do I make this decision or take this action step in such a way that it contributes to the attainment of our project vision and mission?” An alternative way to consider this is to ask if a decision choice or action will move you closer to the desired outcome, and if not, it should be rejected.

In the same way, team members should be selected by asking if they are the best candidate to ensure that the project is successful (meaning it achieved it’s vision and mission). And once selected, their performance should be evaluated based on how well it contributed to attainment of the project objective. This assumes, of course that you choose your own team members, but even if you don’t, whoever does choose them should be asking these same questions.

Remember, the vision for a project defines the final outcome you are trying to accomplish, and the mission is always to achieve the vision, so we really only need to ask if we are moving closer to mission attainment, or if we may be taking a wrong step.

As an aside, one reason priorities in an organization change with every change in wind direction is that the executives are not focused on a single vision for the organization. Either that, or they are failing to prioritize their goals, and the proof of this is when you ask for priorities and get the response, “They all have to be done.” That may be true, but without having unlimited resources, they cannot all be done at once. As someone has very correctly said, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. Study after study has found that one of the primary reasons for failure is lack of focus. Don’t let that be true in your projects.

Rethinking People Skills and Effectiveness

For a long time I have said that the most important asset for a project manager to have is good people skills. I still believe this is true. However, I recently realized that Hitler had people skills, and so do leaders of street gangs. In fact, leadership is amoral. There are leaders of every kind, in every walk of life. And most have good people skills.

However, I believe that project managers who use their good people skills to manipulate their followers, taking advantage of them, will eventually find that they are no longer able to do so, as being manipulated causes people to begin avoiding such individuals. So there is a self-protective component built into most people.

What I believe must be added to people skills is a genuine caring about the welfare of others. Most leadership experts talk about this as being servant leadership. Such leaders have the interests, concerns, and well-being of followers in mind and realize that their obligation is to influence followers to meet the needs of the organization (or project) while simultaneously ensuring that the needs of followers are also met.

I know that there are some who don't like the term servant leadership. It almost sounds like a contradiction in terms, and at the very least it sounds demeaning to the leader. So I prefer to say that such leaders enable their followers to perform at the highest possible level.

This is in contrast to those managers who try to restrict the behavior of employees out of fear that they may do something wrong. Such managers also cannot truly be called leaders. 

One point I believe is worth making: you can't fake caring about people. They see right through you. So if you find that you don't have strong feelings of concern for others, my suggestion is that you find another profession than that of leading project teams. You won't be a highly effective project manager for very long!

Learn from Negative Experiences

Nobody likes adversity, failure, or problems that disrupt one's life. Nevertheless, it is also true that nobody escapes them entirely. We all lose family members and friends along the way. We have illnesses. We lose jobs. But the thing that matters, and the thing that separates the winners in life from the losers, is how we respond to the challenges.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Psychiatrist who was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis during World War II. He arrived knowing the likelihood that he would never leave alive, but he set for himself three goals: 1) to find work in the camp, 2) to survive, and 3) to see what he could learn. He knew that if he worked, did something useful, it would reduce the probability that he would be executed, so that it actually supported the second objective. And the third objective was truly that of a winner.

And learn he did. He learned that the one factor separating those who survived and those who did not was that the survivors had some future that they looked forward to with eagerness and this gave them the drive to do positive things that the prison camp officials saw as useful.

Frankl wrote the now famous book, "Man's Search for Meaning," in which he said that human beings need meaning in their lives in order to thrive. Given meaning in life, they can withstand almost anything that life throws at them.

So there are two questions each of us should ask ourselves:

1. Do you have meaning in your life, and if not, how can you find it?
2. How do you react to the trials of life? By complaining, or by asking what you can learn and how you can best respond to the trial?

When you apply this as a project manager, you may want to ask how meaningful is the work you are doing in the project. Will the product or service provided enrich the lives of others? Does it make a contribution to your organization?

And how do you handle problems in projects? Do you respond pro-actively and positively? If not, can you change this by seeing each issue as an opportunity to learn?

I met a project manager once who stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and lost both legs. He was unusually unruffled by project issues, and when I mentioned this, he replied, "I figured after surviving that land mine nothing much worse could happen to me, so I don't let the small things bother me."

Don't sweat the small stuff! Great advice.

Managing the Status Review Meeting

Every project should have a status review on a recurring basis. Generally I recommend that these be held weekly, though bi-weekly may be okay in some cases. However, like most meetings, if these are not run properly, they will not have the intended result.

What is the intended result? To know the actual status of every facet of the project so that steps can be taken to handle problems before they become serious.

Here are the ground rules:

1. Use stoplight reports that are based on earned-value analysis (EVA) if possible. A stoplight report uses red, yellow, and green to signify that a task is in trouble, is making a transition in either direction, and is in good shape. By comparing the previous week to the current week, you can see in which direction a transition is heading. Common sense dictates that seldom does a project have all green lights. The fact of statistical variation says that there should be a few problems with schedule, if nothing else.
2. Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford and Boeing Commercial Airplanes, says, “You can’t manage a secret,” so everyone must be encouraged to reveal problems as early as possible. They won’t do this if they get beaten up for doing so. For that reason, they should be thanked and helped. But don’t try to resolve any problems in the status review meeting. Problem resolution is done in separate meetings, so that you don’t waste the time of people who have no stake in the problem.
3. On large projects or programs, every large segment of the project should be reviewed in greater detail by the manager of that segment.

One of the outcomes of this approach is that the culture of the organization can be changed from a defensive, punitive one to more open and collaborative. I recommend that you read American Icon, about how Mulally saved Ford, and Working Together, on how he managed Boeing before he moved to Ford. Mulally is probably the most Highly Effective Project Manager in the world, and you can learn a lot by studying his approaches.

As a commercial announcement, if you would like to have this blog delivered through RSS to your tablet or phone, go to your app store and download our free app by the same title: Highly Effective Project Manager. You will also be able to receive our free daily tips for project managers. Thanks for following us.

Announcing Our New App

We have just developed a new app that will be in the Android and Apple stores shortly. It will pull this blog in as new posts are written, so you will always have access to the current and back issues.

In addition, we're developing a new podcast that is for inner circle members by subscription only. There will be three 15 minute casts each week (Monday-Wednesday-Friday) so that you don't have to listen to a full hour at a time, and the subscription is sold in six month and one-year blocks. More on this later.

This blog post is to see if the feed is working correctly

Slange (Scots gaelic if you want to look it up)
Jim

Are You Being Set Up to Fail?

Guitarist Chet Atkins used to play two songs at the same time--Yankee Doodle and Dixie. In introducing the piece, he said, "You can't run a two-track railroad with a one-track mind." You also can't be a highly effective project manager in an environment that stacks all the cards against you. 

Surveys of project success have been conducted for all kinds of projects since the late 1990s. They consistently show that project failures far outnumber project successes. In fact, only about 15 to 20 percent of projects meet their initial targets (time, cost, scope, and performance). However, when success is defined as meeting targets, you are assuming that the targets are realistic, and this is often not true.

It is commonly assumed that there are three targets, called good, fast, and cheap. If we just use these, we know that values for only two of them can be assigned. The third one will be determined by a lot of factors, such as how many resources are available, whether the project manager has control of them, and so on. We also assume that priorities don't change every time the wind changes direction, which is often a fallacious assumption.

Another major factor in project success is how much time is spent developing a realistic project plan. In general, if you fail to plan adequately, you are planning to fail. NASA concluded that their projects were perfectly planned to achieve the outcomes that occurred. If the project failed, it was because the plan guaranteed failure, and conversely. In my 40 years of involvement in this discipline, I have found that many organizations actually won't allow project managers to spend the time on project planning that should be applied. And therefore, it is no surprise that their projects seldom succeed.

Finally, just how much training have you received in managing projects? No offense, but being a good engineer, programmer, IT expert, scientist, or whatever, does not mean that you will be a good project manager. You need a different skill set. As Marshall Goldsmith says in his book by this title, "What Got You Here Won't Get You There."  You need training, followed by practice and coaching to become as good at managing as you are at your technical job. And just getting your PMP® won't do it either, because passing the exam is a matter of memorization, which does not assess skill level.

My attitude has always been that I don't mind playing a fair game, but I refuse to play a game that is designed so that I can never win. My advice to you: if the environment is one in which you can't win, then you have four choices:

1. Change the environment (talk to the powers who can do this)
2. Choose to not let it bother you (I don't advise taking this choice)
3. Leave (but be careful that where you go isn't worse than where you were) 
4. Stay and be upset (this choice will take a toll on you over time)

Choice 1 is the preferred one. See if you can get your boss and higher level executives to read my e-book, How to Create an Environment for Successful Projects,* or the book by Graham and Englund, Creating an Environment for Successful Projects. Then try to get them to implement the recommended steps. If they are unwilling to change, then you will have to take one of the remaining three actions. Remember, the company may own your job, but you own your career. Only you can govern that.

Good luck,
Jim 

* My e-book is available for Kindle, iPAD, and Nook.