An excellent introduction to project management. Aimed at the 'unofficial' project manager who has wound up doing it by accident—often without formal authority to back them up.
When you’re in charge of a project, you manage things—deliverables, deadlines, schedules, and scope—but you also lead people—team members, customers, consultants, and yes, even “higher-ups.” Your role in leading people is to inspire them to follow you and the project management process willingly and enthusiastically.
According to the PMI, there are five “process groups.” Technically, they’re not supposed to be “steps” or “phases” in managing the project, but it might be easier to think of them that way. They are the following:
Through our work with hundreds of clients over the years, we’ve identified Four Foundational Behaviors that will help you earn the informal authority you need to engage people fully to achieve the expected project outcomes. While we could have chosen dozens of leadership behaviors to focus on, we have found that mastering these four can make all the difference:
Showing respect does not mean becoming a doormat. Like Jennifer, you can hold people accountable while being respectful by talking straight with them. In fact, straight talk is a form of respect, if you’re considerate about it and consistently practice it with everyone at every level—from the people on your team to the key stakeholders and even the top executives.
If you are smart, you’ll resist the temptation to talk more than listen. You’ll realize that no one person can possibly have all the answers all of the time. The entire team, not just you, is responsible for the project’s success. While your job is to manage the process, more importantly it is also to inspire the people. And inspiring starts when you listen first, then talk later.
Let team members grow; don’t take all the responsibility for solving everything on yourself.
If you really want to inspire a team to play and win big, keep them informed. Clearly communicate how each person’s role contributes to the whole. Even small tasks can make a huge impact on the project’s ultimate success, and a clear “big picture” is a surefire way to keep people engaged.
Accountability as a project leader means that you are a model of excellence. You behave the way you want others to behave. The days of “do what I say, not what I do” are over. To inspire people to give you their best, they must see you “walk your talk.”
When we introduced the five process groups in chapter one, you, like many other people, may have asked yourself, “Does every project have to run through all five? What about the really small projects? Surely we can skip a few steps on small projects to save time.” Just to be clear, every successfully completed project runs through all five process groups. Of course, you complete the process groups a lot faster on a small project.
These processes aren’t meant to make your project harder or take more time. In fact, if you follow them correctly, the five process groups will simplify the project, increase its speed and quality, and provide you with a reliable routine that will help you repeat success every time.
You start by learning what everyone’s expectations are. This is key. You may think everyone has the same thing in mind (e.g., “retreat” means a retreat like last year’s), but a smart project leader starts with the assumption that nothing is clear. If you do that, you will avoid much pain down the road, pain that sounds like, “This isn’t at all what we wanted or expected.”
To get to a clear set of expectations, you must successfully answer these questions every time:
To be able to answer these questions every time, we must follow these steps:
The Four Foundational Behaviors will help you with difficult personalities. If you respect and value the perspective they bring, listen empathically to their input, clarify their expectations, and are accountable for your commitments, then you will find that some of their negativity dissipates. Lean on other key stakeholders who might help you neutralize their negativity.
A huge factor in project success is good communication. Ask stakeholders, “What do you need to know as the project proceeds? How would you like us to communicate with you?” Everyone wants information differently in our age: email, text, teleconferences, Skype. Time zone differences come into play as well. So get clear with key stakeholders on specifically what they want to know and how.
If you start your project with this rich, robust download, based on ground rules of respect and understanding, your informal authority will skyrocket.
There’s a right way and wrong way to initiate a project. The right way is to invest the time to frontload the project. The return on this investment is vast. If you do not frontload as we’ve described, you’ll end up doing a whole lot of “backloading”—tearing your work up and starting over again and again until the time and money runs out and you can’t deliver.
Communication is 90 percent of a project’s success. By documenting the top risks and the plan to offset them, everyone on your team can row in the same direction.
Experienced project managers remind us not to make task durations too long. Doing so creates a culture of procrastination, with folks waiting until the last minute to get their tasks done. In project management lingo, we call this phenomenon Parkinson’s Law—people will work through the entire time allocated for an activity.
Use the PERT formula to figure out how long each task will take.
Expected Time = (Optimistic + 4 x Most Likely + Pessimistic) / 6
In PERT, the number 4 is a weighted average. It balances out the common tendency to make unrealistically short time estimates. The number 6 refers to the number of standard deviations between optimistic and pessimistic estimates.
Milestones are up to you. For instance, if you feel the need to bring all the stakeholders back together on a given date, that’s a milestone. Put it into your schedule. Milestone meetings are great for checking the health of your project at certain intervals.
Once you understand the critical path, you will assign the best and most engaged human resources to the critical path activities. This is no place to assign new or disengaged employees; if you do, you will significantly raise your risk.
You can also pick the critical path right out of a Gantt chart by highlighting all the tasks that must start and finish as planned. They will generally be the dependencies you set up in your WBS. Remember, you already did deep thinking and planning around the dependencies. The better job you do on the dependencies, the easier it will be to chart the critical path. This is another great reason to use project-planning software like Microsoft Project. It will highlight the potential critical path for you based on the input you provide about dependencies and activity start-and-finish dates.
A project manager’s job is 90 percent communicating with team members, stakeholders, executives, suppliers, and the media—in meetings, conference calls, emails, text messages, reports, and websites. That’s a lot of communicating, and you can go crazy from communication overload if you don’t have a plan for managing it. This communication plan is the last priority of the project’s Plan.
Above all, make sure you follow through on the plan—if you don’t keep your own commitments, you will give people permission not to keep theirs.
But what does it take to execute successfully as a team? In a word: accountability. Successful project leaders practice accountability because it reinforces informal authority and ensures project success. Successful leaders hold people accountable because it is the right thing to do, even when it’s hard. If you don’t practice accountability, people won’t think you’re serious.
Great project managers prove that every request, every commitment, every missed deadline matters. And in doing so, they earn high levels of respect and follow-through from the team.
The principle of accountability is simple: When you keep your commitments, you become a trustworthy human being. You gain the trust of your team members, who will be encouraged to keep their commitments as well. You also gain the trust of your stakeholders, who will be motivated to keep their commitments to you. You are living the definition of informal authority when you inspire people to choose to play on your team.
Projects often stumble because people stumble. They get lost, they run into roadblocks, they get diverted. Your job as leader is not to manage them but to help them manage themselves. That means “clearing the path” for them, making it possible for them to keep their commitments. You engage people through consistent and shared accountability.
The Team Accountability Session is designed to do a few very specific things:
The next time you acknowledge someone for a job well done, try using this formula:
A powerful thank-you means so much more than a ten-dollar gift card, and the recipient will know exactly how to replicate the good job they’ve done. The chances are very high they will.
The project manager drives progress through transparent communication. What do we mean by “transparent”? “As project managers, we were hired to tell the truth and include the good, the bad, and the ugly in our status reports,” says one expert. “Sugar-coating project issues and problems for management will only get us in trouble later. Don’t make excuses . . . Don’t be afraid to deliver bad news. Just make sure when you present management with issues and problems with your project you have a plan to get it back on track.”
There’s a big difference between scope creep and scope discovery. As a project unfolds, you might learn things that make the original scope statement inadequate to the real need. The smart project manager doesn’t pledge allegiance to the scope statement but to the outcome the project is intended to produce. To make a real difference to the spread of infection in her hospital, Eve’s team has a duty to move the project in a direction that nobody anticipated. Always, the real goal is to serve the result, not the project plan.
Here’s how another participant described the key challenge of project management: “I have been a project manager for my whole career. I’ve worked on highly successful projects and very unsuccessful projects across several different companies. Here’s what I’ve observed: Successful projects are transparent. Everyone knows what’s working well and what isn’t. Information is broadly shared and there’s no guessing, enabling people to make small adjustments that keep the project in alignment. In unsuccessful projects, information is doled out on an ‘as-needed’ basis. People are expected to work in silos, keep their heads down, stay focused on their own part of the project, and are discouraged from asking questions.
I'm James—an engineer based in New Zealand—and I have a crippling addiction to new ideas. If you're an enabler, send me a book recommendation through one of the channels below.
