Ambidexter

Details: Created on Saturday, 26 October 2013 01:06

I remember my father telling me years ago an important lesson in managing people in operations - the lowest performing 20% of your staff are where you, as a manager, are going to see your best results.

Focusing your time on high performing staff is often a tendency as these are your ‘go-to’ people who get things done. However, your job as a manager is to get the best results from your team. Your entire team. If at the end of the year you have given a lot of your attention to high performing staff you may have only taken someone who is a 9 out of 10 to a 9.5 out of 10 in terms of productivity, sales, or whatever it is you are managing. Conversely, if you spent more time (a lot more time!) managing your lower performing employees, you could have turned a 5 out of 10 employee into an 8 out of 10. Makes sense, right?

My question for the site is, does this operations management logic also apply to project management? Compared to an operational management role, a project manager has goals to accomplish in shorter time frames and through relationships with team members that are less permanent. Under these conditions on a project, then, what do you do with your lower 20%?

Details: Created on Thursday, 25 July 2013 21:36

Topics: Project management | Training | Prince2 | Leadership | Directing a project

The other day I read an interesting blog post by Todd Williams titled "We Need Project Leadership, Not Management". I started reading the article because at first, based on the litle intro on Linkedin, I thought it dealt with the difference between a line/functional manager and a project manager. At first it did but then it slowly moved towards stakeholder management and how project managers need to actively work with supervisors and it ended with a cry for brave project leadership. All in all quite a journey!

One of the key points I would like to highlight, not that the other points Todd makes are not important (I will address those later), is indeed the fact that we all have dealt with senior executives, project sponsors and functional managers in organizations who have no or a limited clue about the management of projects and the role they (need to) play in it.

I have been saying for many years now that we train the wrong people. Individual project managers or soontobe (as opposed to wannabe!) project managers put a lot of effort, (time and money) into being great project managers by improving their skills, knowledge and attitudes. A lot of organziations put a lot of time into developing these project managers and creating excellent project management practices. The problem is, and this is one of the reasons why indeed quite a few projects fall behind and in a lot of cases fail, that projects and the management of these projects gets viewed in a too narrow view/perspective.

Projects and project managers do not exist in a vacuum!

We know that one of the key success factors for project (management) success is senior management support. My experience is that this support can and will only be effective when and if senior management understands what a project is, what a project manager is (supposed to do) and how they need to direct/support that project.

In other words, we need to train senior management. There is a reason why in Prince2 there is an all encompassing project process called Directing a Project. Obvious question that follows is how do you get these busy bees to understand they need training.

In his article Todd gives, although not directly an important clue.

Do not be afraid as a project manager to approach those managers and point out what in your professional opinion they need to do to make THEIR (not your) project a success.

I guess it starts by indeed pointing out it is THEIR and not your project.

I would like to end with a positive experience I had many years ago.

An organization I worked for had just finished supporting a very large organization with the implementation of Prince2 and the related training of all project managers. My role, as part of post training and implementation quality assurance, was to support one of the project sponsors on one of the first projects that was going to be run conform Prince2. This turned out to be very valuable for the organization. Although the executive had participated in one introduction session on Prince2 and project management in general, there was a lot he did not realize he was supposed to do. Sure, he had lots of experience with previous projects and that was beneficial but this one-on-one support helped him to better understand his role in the overall picture and how he could support the project manager and his team.

In other words, when developing training for organizations, training individual project managers or being trained as a project manager, do not be afraid to ask about senior management training!

Details: Created on Saturday, 07 May 2011 21:58

Topics: Certification | PMI | Project Management Institute | Project management

Over the last few weeks, an intense debate is ragging on the Project Manager Network, initiated by Miles Jennings. (Great discussion Miles!). The debate is about the question whether PMP certification is becoming more or less valuable.

I would like to take a different perspective and approach on this. Let us approach this from an evolutionary perspective. We should not argue whether there should be PM certification or not, just as we should not argue the value of wings or feet for that matter. Certification is here and here to stay (for a while)

The question to ask, from an evolutionary perspective, is: "Qui Bono?” or "Who benefits?"

The simple fact there is PM certification implies something/someone benefits. Moreover, as long someone/something benefits it will be there. Simple as that.

So, who are they?

1) Certification Standard Setting organizations that charge for membership and certification related products.
2) Certification education organizations that charge for training and education related products
3) Certification evaluation and granting organizations
4) Certification consultants
5) Certificate holders (higher pay, increased likelihood of job)

What do you think?

Details: Created on Monday, 07 January 2013 19:02

Topics: Project success | Project failure | Business case

That is a the question Harold Kerzner asks and answers in the video below.

So what do we make of that? The Iridium failure is very well documented business failure of epic proportions.

An 11 year "project" that resulted in a chapter 11 bankruptcy.

It is very simple. He is wrong.

The argument Kerzner uses is that the project was managed well and was delivered on time and on budget. There you have it, a project management success. An 1996 Article in CIO Magazine called "Ground Control" by Peter Fabris has a great description of all the wonderful things the project team is doing.

The problem with this argument of course is that Kerzner applies a very narrow and in our opinion wrong definition of project management. Project management in the classical term as managing the iron triangle or better devil's-triangle of time-cost-quality. From that perspective there seems to be no arguing, the project was on time and on budget. However this narrow view of project management is the problem. Kerzner does identify as his tip-of-the-day the need to review the business case on a regular basis. His failure is that he seems to see that as outside the work scope of the Project Manager

If from day one the Project/Program Manager(s) would have (been allowed?) to consider and question the validity of the business case this might not have happened.

In Prince2 the review of the Business Case is a mandatory and recurring component!

An excellent article to read on the failure of the Iridium Project is "Learning from Corporate Mistakes: The Rise and fall of Iridium" by Finkelstein and Sanford, Organizational Dynamics, 29 (2):138-148

Details: Created on Wednesday, 11 August 2010 22:09

In a recent study(1) by Deborah H. Stevenson, Jo Ann Starkweather, called 'PM critical competency index: IT execs prefer soft skills', the authors come to an interesting observation regarding the value placed on PMP certification by IT management executives:

"PMP certification is irrelevant as a core project management competencies or characteristics as valued by IT managers [US..] nationwide."

The study was conducted in two phases. Phase one was the establish a list of common project manager characteristics that IT recruiters look for in potential candidates for hire. They did by sending out a survey to 375 IT recruiters. The survey was first validated for content consistency by interviewing the author's industry contacts. As a result of the survey they established the Project Manager hiring criteria Index

Project Manager hiring criteria Index
Ability to communicate at multiple levels	Ability to deal with ambiguity and change	Ability to escalate
Attitude	Cultural fit	Education
Experience	Leadership	Length of prior engagements
Past team size	PMP certification	Technical expertise
Verbal skills	Work history	Written skills

Once the criteria were established they sent out a 32-item questionnaire to over 3200 IT mangers and executives. They asked them to indicate on 7-point Likert scale the relative importance of each of the 15 criteria.

Extremely

Unimportant

Somewhat Unimportant

Irrelevant

Somewhat Important

Important

Extremely

Importan

The results show clearly that IT managers and executives rate soft, interpersonal skills highest.

The top three Extremely important rated criteria
Ability to communicate at multiple levels	76.6%
Leadership	74.0%
Ability to deal with ambiguity and change	50.0%

Ambidexter

Do it Right - Don't get Left behind

The lower 20%...

The lower 20%...

We train the wrong people!

We train the wrong people!

Certification! Cui Bono?

Can a project be a success and a failure at the same time?

Can a project be a success and a failure at the same time?

PMP Certification is irrelevant!

"PMP certification is irrelevant as a core project management competencies or characteristics as valued by IT managers [US..] nationwide."

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