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.

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!