Skip to main content

Author: George Pitagorsky

George Pitagorsky, integrates core disciplines and applies people centric systems and process thinking to achieve sustainable optimal performance. He is a coach, teacher and consultant. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict and Managing Expectations and IIL’s PM Fundamentals™. He taught meditation at NY Insight Meditation Center for twenty-plus years and created the Conscious Living/Conscious Working and Wisdom in Relationships courses. Until recently, he worked as a CIO at the NYC Department of Education.

Overcoming Your Tendencies to Optimize Your Performance

By Moderating your behavior, whether you are a Type A or Type B personality you can get even better than you already are. But, let’s focus on the Type A’s.

What happens when you meditate and cultivate some distance between yourself and the things that usually drive your behavior?  You become patient, relaxed, your blood pressure goes down, and at times you lack an overriding sense of urgency.  These are some of the characteristics of a Type B personality.  To a person with a Type A personality, Type B’s look like they are apathetic and disengaged.
Type A’s have been characterized,  as as “ambitiousaggressivebusiness-likecontrolling, highly competitiveimpatientpreoccupied with his or her status, time-conscious, and tightly-wound. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving “workaholics” who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines, and hate both delays and ambivalence.”[1]

Some highly successful people have gotten to where they are because of their Type A traits and are running out of the oomph that is required to get further ahead or to sustain and retain their current status.   They may still have  the oomph but they may be having difficulty dealing with “lesser beings” – people who are not Type A’s and those who may be less intelligent and less driven than the Type A manager may think they should be.  That difficulty may result in frustration which turns to anger which, in turn, becomes abusive behavior.

Highly driven people need to moderate their behavior and attitudes in order to work smarter rather than harder.  Because they have reached a stage in their career at which they must rely on others to get things done they need to cultivate patience and moderate the tendency to be sharp and even angry with people.

Type A personalities are often saddled with the belief that it is detrimental to cultivate the traits associated with Type B’s.  “Who wants to be apathetic and disengaged?”

Project managers can cultivate a skillful balance.  They need to be patient, objective and relaxed without being apathetic and disengaged.  They also need be ambitiousassertive (as opposed to aggressive), business-like, in control (as opposed to controlling), eager to get things done (rather than impatient and highly competitive),  time-conscious, and alert, but not tightly-wound. Being preoccupied one’s status is not a particularly useful trait, though being aware of one’s status and how to maintain and use it is.

How does one cultivate a skillful balance and become a patient, relaxed, highly motivated, high achieving project manager?  Start by doing mindfulness meditation so you can be aware enough to have the ability to decide to choose your behavior moment to moment rather than be driven to act out based on habitual patterns.  Learn to calm down. When you see yourself about to impatiently lay into someone, pull yourself back, calm yourself down and the optimal way to get what you want done.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.


[1] Friedman, M. (1996), Type A Behavior: Its Diagnosis and Treatment. New York, Plenum Press (Kluwer Academic Press), pp. 31 ff.

Agility is Essential but Process is Not

FEATUREJuly201A recent response to a blog post said that “agility is essential but process is not.”

Let’s be clear about the relationship between process and agility. There is always a process — a set of steps to accomplish something. Agility is an attribute of process.

A process may be agile or rigid to one degree or another, more or less heavy or light, defined or not, effective or ineffective.

Agility is Necessary

A process that is agile is more likely to be effective than one that is rigid, particularly when what is being done is complex and subject to change. Why? Because the ability to adapt is necessary if objectives are to be met and people’s expectations are to be satisfied, especially in a volatile environment in which there is uncertainty about requirements. 

For example, if you are trying to create a web site to satisfy the needs of an organization, attempting to document all the requirements fully before beginning the development is often not an effective approach. If an IT process is followed so that requirements documents must be completed in great detail and accepted, and every change thereafter must go through a formal change control process, there is high probability that the client will be frustrated as will the project team. Why would anyone follow such a process? Because they are codified and institutionalized; they are the rules.

Agility in this case would enable developers to work directly with clients who can make decisions about functionality and format as the site is being built. Functionality would evolve as the site is delivered and put to use.

Process is Necessary

Agility without a well-defined and effective process is chaos. It risks shortsightedness — creating a product that is not easily enhanced, for example.

In the case of the website, one aspect of process is the decision-making as to whether the project should be undertaken and how it should be managed; whether to use an Agile approach, how to capture performance data (e.g., the number of hours worked on components) and report on progress, and what kind of documentation is needed.

Other aspects are the way requirements and changes are to be handled, how design constraints and reviews are to be done, who will do testing and how they will do it.

Further, a process for product planning is needed to provide, in broad brush strokes, a road map of where the development is headed.

Maintaining the Right Balance

The notion that Agile approaches are without process is just plain wrong. If you analyze a methodology like Scrum, you can clearly see that there are role definitions, prescribed techniques, tool utilization and more. These add up to a defined process.

The Right Balance

The trick is to be able to strike the right balance. The process needs to include a clear understanding of where, when and how to change the process.

If change can take place on the fly, decided by the performers themselves at the team level, then the process is highly flexible. But for this to work in an organization, there must be standards and policies to guide and constrain the change. There must be well-trained and relatively clever performers who take responsibility for their actions and recognize the need to address both short-term and long-term objectives.

Not every team or individual has the wisdom to do the right thing. Some are so focused on the needs of the moment that they make decisions that restrict future growth and sub-optimize the overall process or program that the project is part of.

It’s like the old Zen parable about keeping horses. Give them unconstrained space and they’ll wander away. Put them in too tight a pen and they’ll kick their way out or get so still that their muscles will become weak and they won’t be of much use. Put them in a large enough controlled space and they’ll be happy and healthy. When they get to the fence, they’ll turn in another direction because there is no need to jump the fence.

The point is that we need constraints and defined processes but they must add value to both the project and the broader context of which the project is a part of. We need an effective, flexible process that gives people the ability to adapt to the needs of the current situation while adhering to best practices and coordinating within the bigger picture.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Business Analysts Need Unbiased Clarity

Based on the Article “Perceptions and Their Effects” from Breakthrough Newsletter, April 2009

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change!” – Wayne Dyer

As a business analyst one must be objective.  The primary job is to be able to reflect the needs of a situation and its nature with complete clarity and candor.  We may use modeling techniques to both elicit and describe processes and the nature of the people places and things within them but the critical capability is to be free from bias; to reflect as a mirror reflects, simply displaying what is presented to it completely and without distortion.

“This is good, that’s bad.  This I like.  That I don’t like.”   Our tendency to label things as being good or bad often puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to using our experience to our advantage and the advantage of others.

There is a parable about a man who captures a wild horse.  The people in his village say how fortunate he is.  The man’s response: “Maybe.”  Then, his son breaks his leg while trying to tame the horse.  Everyone says “How unfortunate”.  The man again says “Maybe”.  Then the army of the local warlord comes around to require service from the young men of the village.  The son is not taken because of the broken leg.  “How fortunate.”    If the “lucky” man had experienced the roller coaster of emotional responses would it have helped him?

Our perceptions are filtered by our mental models – beliefs, values, cultural norms, etc. – and by our emotional reactions.  Our perceptions drive our judgment and behavior.  To change perceptions, step back and free the mind from the habitual reactions.  Respond skillfully, where skillfully means in a way that helps to achieve goals.  

How do we step back?  Using mindfulness meditation we can cultivate the ability to be objective; to experience a state of mind that is behind (above; beyond) our normal sense of self.   This doesn’t mean to deny that we are who we are.  It doesn’t mean to give up our ego or to give up anything else.  Instead of giving something up, it is reconnecting with or emphasizing a part of our mind that is already present.    When this part of the mind is active we can simultaneously be aware of what is happening and be completely engaged in it.   

There is nothing particularly magical or mystical here.  To meditate there is no need to join a monastery or renounce the material world.  We simply learn a relatively simple technique and make the effort to use it.

When we look without filters, objectively, we can see things as they really are.  When we drop away useless or damaging mental models we are more likely to address real issues with effective responses.  As we take that step back, we are less likely to be caught up in our emotions.  That is what emotional intelligence is all about, the ability to avoid emotionally driven reactive behavior. 

If we expand this idea beyond the confines of our own mind we can see that sharing our experience with others enables us to see things more clearly; we are less likely to react; more likely to respond. 

In the world we live in there are successes and failure; positives and negatives.  We might all agree that a project or an event that fails to meet expectations is not as “good” as one that does.  How can we reconcile this with Wayne Dyer’s quote and the notion of objective, non-judgmental perception?  We can look at failures as opportunities to learn.   We can perceive harmful events as they are and be in a position to first accept and then make the best of the situation.

As Max Lerner has said, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a possibilitist.”   We can adjust our perception from looking at the past and reacting to it, to one of looking towards the future and responding in the present in a way that makes the future more likely to be of benefit to ourselves and those around us.  We can look at the glass as being half full or half empty or simply as a glass with an amount of liquid in it that just happens to be half of the glass’ capacity.  Then we can look at it with a clear mind and see what it may mean to us.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Do Agile Projects Need Project Managers?

There is a notion that Agile projects do not need project managers. I think every project needs to be managed and therefore there is a project management role. Whether that means there is person designated as PM is another thing. PM as a role can be shared. The important thing is to make sure that planning, monitoring, controlling, communication and stake holder management are being done well with the right degree of formality and discipline.

In Agile software development projects the team has all the means needed to control their work and to easily deliver metrics that give management above the project level a clear sense of progress and status.  They follow a disciplined approach that embeds quality control into their work.

There is a feature set that has been described and a very concrete set of accomplishments as the team completes the features.  Clearly someone has planned and decided on the feature set and the sequence among the features.

As the team assesses the work they apply a “burn rate” derived from work on past, similar projects – analogous or parametric estimating. As they burn through the feature set they can compare actual rates to expected to measure productivity and report accomplishments.

A Scrum Master or equivalent plays part of the PM role acting as communicator, making sure issues are addressed and buffering the team from interruptions and other drains on their productivity.

Additionally, most if not all Agile projects are embedded in projects and programs, for example, new product development, and business process improvement involving application software development.

These higher order projects are generally more complex than the typical Agile software development project and must be managed in a more traditional way, with a designated PM, while encouraging the Agile approach on those sub-projects where it is appropriate.

In the end whether Agile projects need a PM is not worth arguing.  All projects need project management. How it is applied can vary from situation to situation.

To be successful in Agile environments (and in fact to do well in most environments) PMs must first favor people over process and avoid a command and control approach, relying on and promoting a shared vision and collaboration, including healthy conflict and its resolution.  The objective is to cultivate and reinforce self-managing teams in which the team members, considered peers of the PM, make decisions and perform many project management roles.

The project management role includes a leadership component, which when done well leads to the team thinking that they did the work and the leadership themselves.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Who Is Responsible for Declaring that a Project is Troubled?

A colleague who is interested in how best to bring attention to trouble and problems in projects raised these good questions:  “Who is responsible for declaring that a project is in trouble?  Does the organizational culture support open communication or are PM’s being fired or penalized when they bring bad news?”  He added “I am still amazed to this day to hear the stories about PMs being scapegoats on troubled projects even when they are not to blame.”

The easy answer is that it is the PM’s responsibility to make sure that trouble is declared when it exists. The PM is responsible for stakeholder communication in general and project status is one of the most important parts of that communication.   But PMs are only human after all and it is quite common for humans to go into denial when faced with circumstances that are unpleasant or threatening.  There are far too many instances of managers, project managers and even regulators hiding the truth, deluding themselves and others into thinking that no one will find out or that things will somehow get better so there is no reason to alarm anyone with the bleak reality of the moment.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Then there is the blame game.  In Antigone, Sophocles wrote ”No one loves the messenger who brings bad news”.

When a messenger is “shot” because the recipient doesn’t like the message, there is a systemic problem in the organization. Over time, PMs will learn to not give bad news and effective management will suffer.  With people afraid to be the bearer of bad news the bad news gets hidden and trouble festers until it becomes too great to contain and too great to do anything about besides stopping the project.

What to do?

Take a long term, process improvement view.  It is best to create a dialog across the management chain to bring out the issue of blame, fear and the lack of candor they create.  Seek to change management attitudes and policies and to establish a reporting/project monitoring and control approach that “automatically” brings attention to trouble. This is easy to say but not so easy to do in a dysfunctional environment.

Rather than thinking that it is the PMs job to always break the bad news, hopefully we can agree that it is the responsibility of the PM to set up and use a system that delivers the news, good or bad, regularly and objectively.  With a reporting system that is rationally structured with clear criteria for setting red, yellow and green indictors at activity and project  levels there is no need for the news bearer to be brave or suicidal.  The system bears the news and the people who receive it (who hopefully have bought into the system and its criteria) are faced with the responsibility of responding to it.

Responding to bad news is easier than announcing it.  But, that is a topic for another time.  For now, assess the way you and your organization accepts bad news.  Is news of trouble seen as “bad” or is it seen as useful information that can then be used for effective analysis, decision making and corrective action?  If it is seen as bad, then you would do well to change that perception.  If it is seen as useful, congratulate yourselves and get on with figuring out how to manage the situation and how to avoid trouble in the future.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.