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Author: Kiron Bondale

Project Success starts with the 3 C’s!

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Project Success starts with the 3 C’s!

No matter how good a job you do with planning your projects, if you are unable to effectively engage your team in delivering the scope of the project within approved constraints, you will fail.

Depending on the power structure of our organizations, as project managers, we might feel powerless to do more than proactively identify such issues. However, as I hope I conveyed in “Project Managers can Prevent the Three Signs of a Miserable Job”, just because we don’t have formal authority over team members doesn’t mean we can’t take steps to prevent team member disengagement.

I believe that the main barriers to team member progress relates to the following three C’s: Commitment, Capability & Capacity. Bondale FeatureArticle March5
The need for commitment goes back to the saying I read on a fortune cookie a few years back: “People don’t lack strength, they lack will”. Commitment most closely relates to Lencioni’s three signs and is the dimension over which project managers should have the greatest influence.

If a project manager is effective at communicating the benefits of their project to the organization and to the personal goals of their team members, can help team members understand how their work efforts directly contribute to the project’s outcomes, and demonstrates a willingness and political savvy to remove hurdles from team members’ paths to getting work done, they will be one step closer in securing commitment.

Project managers should understand that in most cases, team members are looking to satisfy the top three tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as their physiological and safety needs are already being met. Project managers need to try to develop a healthy team dynamic (Love and belonging), recognize team member achievement frequently, give them the opportunity to demonstrate competency without micro-management (Esteem) and to help team members (wherever possible) achieve their personal goals through their assigned project tasks (Self-actualization).

Such goals will require project managers to not only get to know their team members as individuals, but also to form or maintain positive working relationships with resource managers such that they can fast track their understanding of what makes individual team members “tick”.

Assuming you have a committed team, the next critical success factor is capability as for most modern projects, sheer will alone is not enough to deliver project scope in a quality fashion.

Project managers will argue that their time-constrained projects should neither be primarily used as a training opportunity for junior staff nor as a dumping ground for low performing staff. We’d all like to have a “dream team”, but in very few situations is this likely. This reality should not mean that project managers should totally disengage from team member assignments or evaluations, but it does require that they prioritize the competencies required for their projects to succeed, and do a good job of positioning the critical key activities with resource managers to secure the one or two “stars” that they require.

Once again, this requires the project manager to have developed productive working relationships with functional managers to increase their likelihood of getting good talent, but to support their recruiting efforts, they should also consider actively engaging their project sponsor(s) to lobby on their behalf.

As with most influencing activities, you should effectively portray the impacts to your project timeline or quality constraints if you do not get the desired skills assigned. Having said that, it is important to be aware that there’s a very fine line between trying to optimize your project and being perceived as doing so to the detriment of the organization’s overall project portfolio!

The final dimension is capacity – do your team members have enough time to produce their deliverables in a quality fashion? As I indicated in the article “Rework and reversed decisions are bonus rewards of excessive multitasking”, it doesn’t matter how skilled your team members are, or how committed they are to the project. If they are not provided sufficient focused time to do their work, their output will be late and/or low quality.

Again, this is not an excuse for you to abdicate responsibility for the project’s outcomes – start by planning your project’s timelines with realistic estimates of team member availability and then identify the key decisions or activities which will demand the most dedicated attention. It is unlikely that you will successfully secure 100% dedicated staff for all activities on your project, but it may be more feasible for your sponsor(s) to fund back-filling or other resource augmentation strategies to protect critical path activities and decisions.

Robert Burns wrote “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley” but if you address commitment, capability & capacity, you will have established a solid foundation for your project’s success!

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An Overly Engaged Sponsor Can be as Lethal as a Disengaged One!

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on An Overly Engaged Sponsor Can be as Lethal as a Disengaged One!

Bondale FeatureArticle Feb6PMI’s 2012 Pulse of the Profession survey listed “engaged project sponsors” as one of the project management practices identified in organizations which had 80% or more of their projects meeting expectations. Most project managers would echo this finding as they are likely bearing scars incurred on past projects where they suffered from the impacts of disengaged sponsors. 

Under such conditions, for those project managers who have never had hyper-engaged sponsors, this might seem to be an ideal situation! So what’s the harm that an overly engaged sponsor can do?

Personal impacts include the marginalization of your role on your project and a longer term reduction in the perceived benefits of having professional project managers assigned to lead projects. In extreme cases, I have witnessed project managers requesting re-assignment or even leaving their company if they feel that such behavior is tolerated or encouraged.

Beyond the personal impacts, as over engaged sponsors usually possess significant political clout, if this influence is being used to divert resources from higher valued projects or they are actively conspiring to undermine other projects, this could cause the organization to not achieve its strategic objectives.

Finally, significant operational or people management impacts might be occurring if the excessive focus on the project is diverting your sponsor from their functional responsibilities.

While the overly engaged sponsor is rarer to find in the project “wild” than their more commonly observed disengaged cousins, this sub-species is more troubling because the tell-tale signs of over engagement are more subtle than those of disengagement. In fact, as many project managers might feel grateful about the excessive attention their projects are receiving, here are some tests (with inspiration drawn from Jeff Foxworthy’s stand-up redneck comedy routine) to help identify the presence of an overly engaged sponsor.

  • If your sponsor appears to be exhibiting Theory X behaviors by checking on your project’s status or open actions on a daily or even more frequent basis, he might be overly engaged.
  • If your sponsor is circumventing you by frequently providing direction or work allocation to team members, she might be too engaged.
  • If your sponsor insists on attending each and every project meeting, regardless of the meeting’s objective or audience, he may be overly engaged.
  • If your sponsor is using Machiavellian tactics to ensure sustained funding and resource availability for the project, even when the project has been clearly identified as NOT being the top organization priority, he might be just a bit too engaged.
  • If you find your sponsor is first in line to back fill for you when you are off, even when one of your work package leads or PM peers is available to do so, she may be just a little too engaged.
  • If your sponsor re-writes your regular project status reports to senior management and other stakeholders, he is definitely too engaged!

If one or more of these tests are positive, it’s still a good idea to get some independent validation before you try to address the situation. This is one of those cases where having a peer support group of other project managers within your organization can be invaluable. Review the evidence you’ve gathered with one of your trusted colleagues and see if they agree with your hypothesis.

Once the diagnosis has been confirmed, curing the disease can begin by “walking a mile in their shoes” to understand why your sponsor might be behaving this way.

If it’s the first time he has been a sponsor, he may simply be unclear on the expectations for his role as well as the full accountabilities for yours. This is why it’s crucial to review rules of engagement with sponsors and team members at the outset of a project, but even if you did so at that time, it is a good idea to review and reinforce these expectations periodically.

If your sponsor’s actions are the result of her feeling tremendous personal accountability for the success of the project (which should be encouraged) but she is worried that you’ll let her down, you should help her understand how her behaviors are undermining your role and work with her to define a progressive plan which will help her to develop trust in your ability to manage the project.

If your sponsor’s actions are not due to either of these acceptable reasons, he may simply be playing the political game to ensure he or his project succeeds at the expense of others. In such cases, if repeated objective, focused discussions with your sponsor result in no change in behavior, escalation through your own manager may be the only option.

An attentive sponsor might seem like water in the desert to most project managers, but be careful that you don’t drown in the pool of over engagement!

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Increase the Perceived Benefits of Project Management Methodologies

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Increase the Perceived Benefits of Project Management Methodologies

FeatureArticle Jan9 BondaleA PMI survey conducted a few years back supported the premise that companies which have instituted consistent project management practices enjoy a higher project success rate than those which have not. PMI’s March 2012 Pulse of the Profession publication stated that in organizations which used standardized project management practices, 71% of projects met their original goals and business intent which is higher than the norm.

These two statements would seem to support the merits of implementing a project management methodology (PMM). However, the December 2012 issue of PMI’s Project Management Journal includes an article which challenges this conventional wisdom. This article covers the results of a qualitative-based research study to assess the effectiveness of project management methodologies through a series of four case studies.

The research revealed that key benefits identified by instituting PMMs were supporting senior management in their drive to control, monitor, standardize and unify practices as well to help staff with lower levels of project management knowledge or experience. Unfortunately, minimal benefits were perceived by the group which you would expect would benefit the most from PMMs, namely, project managers!

Although somewhat counter-intuitive, these findings align well with my own observations of how successful organizations I’ve worked with have been at improving their project management capabilities.
PMM compliance tends to be strongest with junior practitioners as they find that PMMs act as a guide to give them structure and confidence to lean on in place of tried-and-true experience. Senior management also support the use of PMMs to the extent that compliance with a PMM increases the predictability and consistency of status reporting and governance practices.

On the other hand, experienced project managers don’t recognize the benefits to themselves as they will likely have worked with multiple PMMs over their careers and would have honed a set of practices which work best for them – in other words, they have developed their own customized PMMs.

Occasionally, there might be breakthroughs – for example, seasoned project managers who have never benefited from a fully automated project management information system might appreciate the reduction in project administration effort provided by these tools. However, even when using such solutions, flexibility or creativity constraints will exist which generate frustration for senior practitioners.

Just as a person can be spiritual without observing all or even some of the practices of a particular religion, competency at project management is not an effect of compliance with methodologies. In fact, some project managers I have observed as being totally compliant with their organization’s PMM regularly demonstrated poor judgment in the management of their projects.

The Guide to the PMBOK (Fourth Edition) states “Good practice does not mean the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly to all projects; the organization and/or project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project.” This may also be a key reason why agile methods continue to gain new disciples – a key tenet of agile is empowering self-managing teams to define the best methods of managing their work efforts.

So what can you do to increase the perceived value of your PMM in the eyes of your senior practitioners?

Start by classifying the practices within it into the following three categories:

  1. Mandatory practices for which compliance to a standard is essential
  2. Mandatory practices for which compliance to a standard is nice to have
  3. Optional practices

An example of a practice from the first category is creating and maintaining project schedules which adhere to a set of guidelines to enable the ability to report on a project portfolio as a whole. If project managers do not follow these guidelines, it becomes impossible to support enterprise resource management or to visualize cross-project impacts.

An example within the second category is storing the current versions of key project documents within a common folder structure in an online document repository. While it is convenient to store documents across projects using a consistent folder structure, this is a “nice to have” so long as team members and stakeholders are able to locate documents for a particular project.

Lean Six Sigma practitioners might consider the third category as “waste” as these practices are unlikely to be followed by all but the most compliant project managers.

The benefit of this categorization is it allows you to focus compliance efforts where it is crucial, but provide flexibility for all other instances. While project managers might like full “artistic” freedom, most will understand the benefits of consistency where it matters. Go one better by engaging them in the development or refinement of the must-have practices. Finally, kick it up a notch by establishing practices to address some of the pain points experienced by more seasoned project managers and you may successfully turn your former Luddites into advocates!

As Peter Senge said “We all know the difference in ourselves between doing what we’re here to do versus doing what someone said we ought to do. That’s the difference between aspiration and compliance.”

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Project Managers can Prevent the Three Signs of a Miserable Job

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Project Managers can Prevent the Three Signs of a Miserable Job

Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job” is an easy-to-read parable covering key sources of employee disengagement and what can be done to eliminate them. 

The book takes the functional manager’s view – Lencioni states on his web-site “The primary source of job misery and the potential cure for that misery resides in the hands of one individual – the direct manager”. For staff working in a matrix organization, a significant proportion of their effort is spent on projects, hence Lencioni’s recommendations should be adapted for use by project managers as well.

The three signs that Lencioni identifies are irrelevance, inability to self-measure performance or success (or as Lencioni’s puts it, “immeasurement”) and anonymity. Let’s review some ways in which project managers can reduce these sources of misery.

Unless we are sociopaths, we want to know that the work we are doing is making a difference to someone, somewhere – without that we feel irrelevant. Projects are a medium for generating value through change, and if that change is expected to positively impact some stakeholder community, then that is something to feel good about.

Project managers should always ensure that their team understand the benefits of the work they are doing. This should start as early as the project kick-off meeting but that should not be where it ends. If the project manager can solicit periodic visits by representatives from stakeholder groups to talk to the team it can help to revitalize stress-dampened spirits.

Regular recognition of a team member’s efforts is important, but a generic “keep up the good work” is no substitute for one’s ability to quantify the progress they are making for themselves. As Lencioni explains, this is one of the benefits that salespeople enjoy – they have a very quantitative method of assessing if they are succeeding! For those of us whose days are spent in a never-ending stream of meetings without producing or selling anything tangible, self-assessment can be a little more challenging.

Projects provide an excellent opportunity to avoid this source of misery. By defining and completing a backlog of work items, team members are able to quantify their own progress. While this is not the primary rationale for scope decomposition, project managers could use this as part of their “sales pitch” to convince team members that this is a necessary practice. This is also the rationale behind the agile practice of using sprints or iterations – it is a lot easier to assess progress against work items that can be completed within one sprint than it is against activities that span multiple weeks or months.

Employees want to be recognized as individuals. The ubiquitous use of the term “resource” should be banned – it furthers perceptions that team members are a fungible commodity. We may only work with assigned staff for a brief span of time, but it is in our projects’ best interests for us to get to know them as more than just a set of initials on a Gantt chart activity line.

It is a good practice for project managers to meet with team members as they are assigned to a project to review their work assignments and to set expectations for expected performance. This also provides a great opportunity to learn something unique about the team member and to share something unique about yourself with them.

Other opportunities for avoiding anonymity could be to start your team meetings by having someone talk about something interesting they did over the previous weekend. You could facilitate a team building exercise to identify team members based on a unique attribute, behavior or experience.

If you can demonstrate to your team members that you recognize and respect them as unique individuals, help them understand how the work they are performing matters and help them measure their own performance, you may realize John Quincy Adams’ quote “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

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Project Schedules Should Benefit More Than Just the Project Manager!

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Project Schedules Should Benefit More Than Just the Project Manager!

Bondale FeatureArticle Nov28I’d written an article previously which listed the benefits a good project schedule can provide, but most of those would be perceived as being of value to a project manager. “All you care about is the schedule!” is likely a complaint that has been heard by most project managers.

The danger in such cases is that project managers will struggle to get sufficient engagement or input into the creation or ongoing maintenance of project schedules. This can become a vicious cycle as the project managers are more likely to develop schedules themselves with minimal input which will only further the negative perception that these schedules are of limited value or don’t reflect reality.

While I don’t expect project managers to be primarily responsible for educating team members and stakeholders on project management practices, part of our role is to support and reinforce the importance of these – after all, we usually don’t know what PM 101 knowledge a new team member has when they are assigned to our projects!

So what are some of the ways in which project managers can convey the necessity or benefits of a schedule to their team members or to the functional managers that should support and demand their creation?

  1. It helps to establish and maintain expectations between team members, stakeholders and customers. This should help to reduce the volume of the “Are we there yet?” requests from those outside of the project team.
  2. It helps functional managers achieve some measure of predictability around resource allocation. In organizations where staff work concurrently on projects and operations, it can be very challenging for functional managers to plan for the peaks and troughs of day-to-day activities. Improved visibility into the demand from projects can at least remove one variable from this complex equation. It can also help functional managers keep project managers honest by confirming when team members are expected to be released from projects.
  3. It should help the customer and project sponsor sleep better at night! If the customer or sponsor are relying on the project manager telling them everything is on track without a method of objectively assessing that, they are likely in for an unpleasant surprise.
  4. It can provide protection to the project team if the sponsor or customer requests a change that cannot be accommodated without unnatural behaviors.
  5. It helps to pull everyone’s (that includes the project manager!) head up from getting too focused on the most immediate critical milestone, and helps to remind them that the current battle is just one campaign of a much bigger war.

Project schedules are detailed directions for travelling to a faraway land. In their absence, if the extent of one’s geographic knowledge is limited to what you can see or the places one has visited (and remembers!), it can become challenging to visit new destinations in a predictable fashion.

Running a project of even moderate complexity without a schedule is similar to navigating with those maps of old that indicated “Here be dragons”!

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