Thursday, November 2, 2017

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. 


Tuesday, June 27, 2017

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.