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.

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.

You Must Begin with YOU!

It goes without saying that you can't be an effective project manager without being personally effective, yet there are individuals who seem to think the two facets are separate. Furthermore, there aren't any "tricks" that you can use to be more effective. No shortcuts. No gimmicks.

In effect, it's about building character, and developing habits that make you more effective. Some of this is pretty easy, and some is hard.

Stephen Covey hit a nerve when he wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The book was on the bestseller list for several years, and has sold over 10 million copies. In the book, he said that Benjamin Franklin would work with a principle each month and after a year, he would begin his list again. It takes time to master some habits, but in the end, it is worthwhile.

Fortunately we know more today about habit formation than was know in Ben Franklin's time. Two excellent books have been published that shed significant light on the subject. They are:

• Making Habits, Breaking Habits by Jeremy Dean
• The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Over the past 32 years, I have taught project management principles to over 40,000 individuals around the world. Of course, the principles of project management can be practiced without a person actually being very effective at the job, in part because you need more than the tools of project management to be effective. After all, at least 80 percent of the job is about dealing with human beings, and so-called people skills are much more difficult to learn than scheduling and earned-value analysis. In fact, what many project managers don't understand is that, without knowing how to deal effectively with people, the tools of project management will simply help them document their failures with great precision!

In subsequent blogposts, I'll be presenting methods for developing your skills so that you can be more effective as a project manager. Doing so can have significant effects on your career path. Being a really good project manager is good preparation for moving up to a C-level position in an organization. Not only are the methods of project management useful for any position, but you will deal with all kinds of stakeholders as a project manager, and that experience is invaluable to the senior executive.

You will also find valuable insights into being more effective in my published books. Go to my author's page on Amazon for more information.

I would like for this blog to be as useful as possible, so it will be very helpful to hear from you. You can interact with me at my membership website, www.howcanibesuccessful.net.  Thanks for your interest in my blog.

Warm regards,
Dr. Jim Lewis