Author: Claude Emond

Humans, humans, humans

This is the fourth and final part of my little series on the rules of Lean Project Management. I wanted to write another on multitasking. But, as for any project, this little series impacted my thinking and my expectations as it evolved. I finally realized that I had outlined the essentials on the foundations of lean project management, other subjects being of a more technical than philosophical nature. Since the intention was to deliver fundamental messages, I just found along the way that the essential deliverables were there and any new one, except a final wrap-up, would add little value at the level of discussion sought.

Lauri Koskela in his landmark article, The underlying theory of project management is obsolete (https://www.projecttimes.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/ObsoleteTheory.pdf) says that the current theory of project management, as illustrated in the PMBoK, mostly defines project work as planning; not much is revealed with respect to work as executing. Projects are executed through people….and it just seems we do not know how to communicate this.

In the current theory, much emphasis is given to tools and best practices», what I call the know how to do. By the same token, when we talk about the so-called human skills (apparently these are soft), what I call the know how to be, we only pay lip service to them. This situation is confirmed and dramatized by the findings of Frederic Rodriguez, in his master degree thesis, Are the required best behaviours integrated in project management maturity models? (CESI, Aix-en-Provence, fall 2008 – my translation of the title into English). He found out that only 13 % of the points measured in OPM3 (76 out of the 589 best practices identified in the maturity model) had any link with managing or fostering proper human behaviours. So the answer to Frederic’s question and the conclusion of his thesis is NO!

I know that OPM3 is into its first revision and that there is a big international effort to develop a universal standard on project management (PMI, AFITEP, IPMA and the like all working together on this); I sincerely hope that more consideration will be given to the main resources in projects – humans.

Meanwhile, lean project management principles can really help us in this ill-covered area, as it mainly concerns itself with executing work through humans. Just look at the three rules I laid out previously:

• Rule 1 – The Last Planner rule – The one who executes the work is the one who plans the work: Expanding the project team means more last planners, the ultimate ones being those who have to materialise the project benefits once the project delivered what it had to. HUMANS PLAN AND EXECUTE PROJECTS
• Rule 2 – The Track Promises rule – Do not track time (effort) or cost. Track small promises that you can see over time: Expanding the project team means getting each promise made by the last planner who has a stake in it, and can really make it happen. HUMANS ARE THE SOURCE OF PROMISES AND RESULTS
• Rule 3 – The Expanded Project team rule – Expand the project team to include and integrate all significant stakeholders as part of the team as early as possible.
• HUMANS AROUND PROJECTS ARE MANY AND NEED TO BE ALIGNED TOGETHER THROUGH A SHARED VISION

Many people oppose PMBoK contents to lean project management approaches. I do not believe this is the proper way to look at this. Their focus is different, one promoting mainly best practices, the other calling for best behaviours. These are not opposed; they are two important parts of the same puzzle; they complement each other. However, until we merge them together to propose a better, more complete vision on managing projects successfully, I will continue to extensively promote lean project management and its fundamental proposition, spelt out here in its fourth and ultimate rule, a cry from the heart:

Rule No. 4 of LPM – Humans, Humans, Humans:

• Humans execute projects.
• Projects’ deliverables materialize through humans and for them.
• So be considerate to humans as, without them, no project can be a success.

The Expanded Project Team

I am back from my journey to South East Asia. It is time to resume my little series on the rules of Lean Project Management. This third entry will discuss the nature of the project team and its composition. It is an invitation to expand the boundaries of a project team to include all project stakeholders. It is of course linked to the proper execution of the two other rules already discussed:

Rule 1 – The Last Planner rule. The one who executes the work is the one who plans the work: Expanding the project team means more last planners, the ultimate ones being those who have to materialise the project benefits once this project has delivered what it was intended to.

Rule 2 – The Track Promises rule: Do not track time (effort) or cost. Track small promises that you can see over time: Expanding the project team means getting each promise made by the last planner who has a stake in it and can really make it happen.

The current edition of the PMBoK still makes a difference between:

• The “project team.” Those directly involved in the realisation of the project deliverables (the issues and management of this team being treated in Project HR management), and
• The “project stakeholders.” Those affected by or able to effect the realisation of these deliverables (the issues and management of these “separate” groups being treated in Project Communication Management).

And the new version of the PMBoK, coming out soon, continues to support this paradigm. This way of discriminating among project players is one of the reasons for our low project success rates (29 %), as documented by the CHAOS Report. Merging those two groups into one, the expanded (or integrated) project team, is one of the main explanations for the high project success rates (85%) documented in the British Constructing Excellence program, mentioned before in other blog entries.

I have a very fresh example in memory to illustrate the need to change the conventional view on who is and who is not on a project team. During a project management maturity diagnosis I was making with a customer (a highly innovative manufacturing enterprise), I met the manager responsible for after sale customer service. He told me of his last experience with the introduction of a new product. Since he has nothing to do directly with delivering the new product for production, the main objective of their new product development projects, he was not considered part of the project team. He came across some technical documentation on the new product just before it went to pre-production, only to realise then that the product included the very same component that was causing 90 % of his customer complaints about a similar product already in full scale production and on sale. These complaints were resulting in major on site service costs and loss of recurrent customers.

He immediately went to the CEO and had the pre-production phase stopped right there. The project team» had to go back to the drawing board, with an expensive prototype in the garbage bin and much rework to do in the very small time left to seize the window of opportunity for this new product. This mess would have been avoided very easily if this very important last planner had been integrated to the project team at the very start of its definition.

If you think that you must restrict the number of people in a project to those only involved in the direct realisation of deliverables, I hope that the little tale of disaster I just presented will have you refine your “need to know” and project team definition to include – as early as required – those who have to materialise the ROI on this project.

So LPM rule No. 3 is: “Expand the project team to include and integrate all significant stakeholders as part of the team as early as possible”.

I decided to pause again in my current series on the cornerstones of Lean Project Management to reflect a bit more on my current journey to South East Asia and what it can teach us about successful projects and team alignment. This second and last reflection in real time comes on the eve of my return to Canada, after a five-week journey where team alignment was at his best, the team being all these new people I met and who made OUR “project” a great success.

While planning this journey, my wife and I looked extensively at websites like www.TripAdvisor.com to select the best hotels and resorts possible. While reading comments and recommendations from past travelers, we could not find one single place where there was unanimous satisfaction. Even for the best of the bests, there was always someone who considered this hotel, that resort as the worst in the world, most often because s/he considered that the services received were simply horrible.

Why and how is that possible? I really believe that has to do with being or not being a good sponsor for your journey, this project that you pay for and that you want so dearly to savour. Very often, I hear participants in my workshops who complaint about the absence of their project sponsors. And when sponsors show up, it is often to ask for impossible things, while giving little consideration for the efforts of this project team that tries to make THE SPONSOR’s project a success. These sponsors just DO NOT SEE the project team and how important the mobilisation of this team is to the success of the project. Likewise, these unsatisfied travellers just do not see properly, nor respect these other persons who provide services to them.

When I travel, I never forget my role as the client and sponsor of this very personal project. What is that role? What is real sponsorship? In that matter, I adhere fully to NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) author Robert Dilts’s definition: “Sponsorship involves creating a context in which others can act, grow and excel…the sponsor provides a context, contacts and resources that allow the group or individual being sponsored to focus on, develop and use their own abilities and skills” (http://www.nlpu.com/coach.htm). Robert Dilts tells his workshop participants that you really sponsor someone when you tell them in your words and in your actions:”I SEE YOU, your contribution is worthwhile, YOU are important to me”. So, when I travel, as well as when I work with others on other venues, I try my best to sponsor them, to make them feel that they are important and that I really see them as such. It is then impossible for them to provide me with bad services, because they know I consider them and what they do. And on this journey in South East Asia, I really SAW all those people providing services to us. I harvested in return completely first rate service everywhere, by people aligned with our needs, because I was aligned with their need to be properly sponsored.

Those of us, who have taken negotiation training and/or are negotiators, know full well that nothing will happen if we do not acknowledge the other party and its expectations. Life is negotiating, a traveling journey is negotiating, and a project is negotiating. So you want to provide real, effective, sponsorship on the projects you are responsible for? This is very easy. Just look at everyone who works on the team assigned to deliver YOUR project and make them really feel that you SEE them, that their contribution is worthwhile and that they are important to you. I guarantee that under such sponsorship, YOUR project will become OUR project and will be a great success for all concerned.

I decided to mark a pause on my current series on the cornerstones of Lean Project Management to reflect a bit on my current journey to South East Asia and what it can teach us about successful projects and team alignment.

I often compare the management of a project to a journey:

• the current situation represents the point of departure of our journey (point A),
• the anticipated end-deliverables represent our final destination (point B), and
• the project itself represents the itinerary from point A to point B, the journey

On June 24th 2008, I embarked with my spouse on a five-week journey (project or vacation?) to South-East Asia to visit Singapore, Bali and parts of Vietnam. Right from the start of this “project”, we have faced minor difficulties arising from bad communication among the “team members” of this new project and the resulting misalignment of the “project team.” Within the first three days of our trip, we have already experienced three unforeseen events with frustrating affects on our journey and its final destination (the meeting of stakeholders’ expectations!):

• one team member delayed our flight from Beijing to Singapore by one day,
• another team member had us leave the Beijing airport, to spend “contingency” funds on an unplanned stay at a Beijing hotel, and
• another team member just forgot to load our luggage on the rescheduled flight from Beijing to Singapore

Everyone did his or her best and all team members were very considerate and polite with this stakeholder (me!). However, two of the main team members, The Canadian Airline and the Chinese Airline are in a new business relationship that has yet to be clarified in terms of communications between the two airlines, integrated tracking and management of luggage, local regulations and cultural differences. Both airlines did not have the same vision for this project: Canadian representatives had no clue on SOPs and rules used by their Chinese counterparts on transit situations. Actually, the Chinese faced a brand new situation for them when we arrived in Beijing unannounced by Canada (their databases do not communicate). The Beijing team members were unprepared and had different individual ideas on how to tackle this unforeseen situation. Beside this “new project”, “spontaneously assigned team members” had to cater to divergent priorities. Finally, everyone did their “project work” with all the best of intentions, but just ended up along the way failing to meet the expectations of this main stakeholder (me again!) and his now-distressed spouse.

Projects carry the same complexity and issues as a journey to foreign parts. You will have to deal with:

• different organisational and “silo” cultures,
• “spontaneous team members” who realise at the last minute that they have to contribute to the project, while having their own recurring concerns to live with and other priorities,
• team members that are not accustomed to working together
• communication plans that are, as a result, ill-designed and fail to ensure everyone is aligned towards the same global objective.

Those disturbing ingredients are found in many projects. We focus so much on the destination (the desired deliverables), that we forget we have a whole journey to live and manage together. This journey is only possible if everyone on the team is aligned and shares a common vision, not only on the end destination but also on the itinerary.

One of the major postulates of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is that: “The Journey IS the Destination.” You cannot separate the project itinerary from its end-deliverables. And, in order to achieve project goals, all team members must be aligned to see not only the same destination but also to embark on the same journey. If the journey is a great experience, the destination will be perceived as very satisfying; if it is not, then the destination cannot be savoured to its full extent. Projects are important change inducing journeys. And ultimately these journeys ARE the destination.

While I try to get my luggage back, I invite you to view the last Louis Vuitton publicity on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzp_gshdwsM). Journeys, projects are all part of life. Good or bad, they are life itself. So let’s make the most of them by ensuring that team members are aligned and all embark on a same meaningful journey.