Friday, May 1, 2020

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

Friday, March 20, 2020

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.