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PMTimes_Sep6_2023

Managing Stress in Projects

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

Projects are work. There are expectations and complex relationships. There is stress.

Stress in projects is inevitable. Manage it both personally and organizationally to make the best of it. Do not let yourself or your team be damaged by it. Unmanaged, excessive, and unnecessary stress degrades wellness and performance, well managed stress stimulates and strengthens.

 

What Stress Is

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, stress is “any physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.” There are four major types of stress: psychological, cognitive, physical, and environmental.

The World Health Organization narrows the definition down to define stress “as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation.”[1] Worry and mental tension are psychological stress.

 

Psychological Stress

Chronic worry and tension add unnecessary stress. Unnecessary because, with training and effort, it, unlike other kinds of stress, is avoidable. Though avoiding it takes skill and patient effort.

Worry and mental tension are self-imposed reactions to a difficult situation. They are self-imposed because they are produced by our internal mental process. And, that process can be managed. The more aware of our inner process, the more likely we are to avoid psychological stress.

Worry and tension lead to errors of judgement, outbursts, withdrawal, fatigue, and even disease. They waste energy. They get in the way of healthy relationships. They detract from optimal performance.

 

Stress is a Wakeup Call

Greeting worry and tension with self-awareness, right attitude, and skillful technique, lets psychological stress trigger the effort to accept and let go into responsive action.

The felt sense of stress is a wakeup call to address challenges and threats. With effort we can stop obsessing about the future and acting out past patterns that get in the way of healthy relationships. It takes time and patient persistence, accepting that we are imperfect, and working towards perfection without expecting to achieve it.

Transform worry into risk management and mental tension to analysis, concentration, and relaxation.

 

What Triggers Psychological Stress?

Psychological stress is linked to emotions and how and why we react to our current situation.

Psychological stress is triggered when we are faced with uncertainty, change, and perceived threats to our wellbeing. Worry is focused on a future outcome and how to make it happen, or not happen. It is a response to fear. Mental tension is emotional strain – anxiety, sadness, anger, grief. It is caused by worry, past conditioning, and wanting things to be different than they can be.

 

External stressors like tight deadlines and hyper-critical clients and sponsors cause project managers and performers to worry that deliverables will be late, they will fail to meet acceptance standards, there will be changes in staff, conflicts, weather events, delays that are out of the control of the PM, and more. Some may worry about getting fired or the next promotion, whether they said the right thing or made the right decision, how others perceive them, whether they will get what they want.

 

Cognitive Stress

We differentiate psychological stress from cognitive stress. Cognitive stress relates to the use of the intellect to perform analytical tasks, use information, plan, make decisions, and concentrate. In excess, over taxing the intellect is a cause of psychological stress. Psychological, physical, and environmental stress multiply cognitive stress.

At some point tiredness sets in, you hit a wall, logical thinking slows and stops, minor distractions become major obstacles. It is time to stop and take a break from the mental effort. Make the break long enough for you to rest and recover. It can be an hour, an evening, or a day or two.

Interestingly, it is often during these breaks that cognitive barriers disappear and there are breakthroughs.

 

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Physical and Environmental Stress

Physical stress is the pressure of doing. Muscles are exercised to accomplish work. Even sitting at a desk and working on a computer are stressful physical activities.

Environmental stress is caused by factors like noise, odors, crowding, and vibrations. It results in physical and psychological stress. When the work environment does not support the kind of work being done, performers and performance suffer.

When we moderate effort to avoid overwork, physical stress is healthy and invigorating. When we overdo it, we pull muscles and burn out. Psychological stress increases as we become physically less comfortable and capable.

For example, faced with a tight deadline, when the back starts to ache, and you can’t work without strain you might fail to take a needed stretch-and-move break. Your aches become a distraction and you become more prone to anxiety, aggression, error, and injury. Performance suffers.

 

As with cognitive stress, watch for signs like strain and discomfort. Take a break to rest and recover.

 

The Stress Response

Stress can be harmful or helpful.

Stress has a felt-sense, a bodily experience, a knowing. Symptoms are tension, rapid heartbeat, a need for help, faster breathing. Take these as wakeup signals, and you can accept and let go into optimal performance. Take them as dangerous and harmful and they become so.

Transform worry into a search for all the threats to meeting your objectives, likelihood of their occurrence and what you might do about them. Worry allowed to obsessively continue without addressing it strains the body and mind. It makes getting things done well more difficult. It is unpleasant, and when it is expressed in conversation it affects others.

 

A study cited in a TED talk by Dr Kelly McGonigal[2] found that people who did not view stress as harmful were healthier than those who viewed it as harmful. It seems logical to infer that they were better able to make the best of stressful situations and were less affected physically. Working comfortably promotes optimal performance.

 

Manage Stress

Stress is necessary and unavoidable. Manage it well and it is useful, manage it poorly or not at all and it is harmful. Becoming aware of their symptoms and impacts on performance and wellness, overstress and self-imposed stress are avoidable by matching expectations to capacity, eliminating environmental stressors, and managing the internal conditions that create worry and mental tension. Each of us can learn and use self-awareness, and breath and concentration techniques to manage our stress.

 

 

There are many techniques for managing stress. You can visit www.self-awareliving.com for some ideas. Also check out the following PM Times articles for more on this subject:

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/stress
[2] TED Talk How to Make Stress Your Friend, McGonigal, Kelly, https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
PMTimes_Sep5_2023

The Construction Industry Needs More Software Project Managers

Written by Lucas Marshall on . Posted in Articles.

An article for the Human Resource Management Journal discusses how “project-based workplaces” are characterized by “short-term interaction and involvement,” making them “particularly challenging for the individuals charged with managing performance within them.”

They single out the construction industry, “inherently unique,” and an industry that tends to “be awarded at short notice, […] reliant on a transient workforce, and [it] exist[s] within a complex multidisciplinary team-oriented environment.”

 

As the construction industry faces a myriad of challenges—persistently rising materials costs, labor shortages topping half a million, and fierce competition that is complex for firms to grapple with—there is an exceeding need for empowered project managers equipped to confront them.

Thus, herein, I’ll contend the need for project managers (particularly, software project managers) to answer the construction industry’s needs, where the construction industry can source these operational experts, as well as the unique project management skillset owners should look for when hiring.

 

Big Tech’s Displaced Project Managers to Fill Construction’s Talent Gap

If the real-time tracker layoffs.fyi tells us anything, it’s that big tech, long known for astronomical salaries, may be reaching its plateau – a bubble popping it hasn’t seen since the dot com era.

 

Among those affected by these tech layoffs are project management teams—e.g., project managers at large SaaS companies like Red Hat were among the positions recently slashed, while program managers at the country’s biggest tech firms have also been handed pink slips (e.g., accounting for 5.8% of layoffs at Amazon, 7% at Microsoft, and 17.7% at Google).

 

I’ve previously made the argument about how big tech’s software engineers may use their technical skills to help solve the construction industry’s myriad problems by helping build automated, connected workflows.

 

Project managers, too, play an important role in this equation:

  • Scrum Masters Lassoing Available Resources: Software project managers and business analysts are skilled in scrum, a particularly useful framework for dividing resources and time-boxing work into manageable, two-week sprints. Arguably, this framework has a particularly useful application to construction, an industry whose projects are regularly disjointed in nature (requiring as many as 24 specialized subcontractors in addition to fierce competition for the skilled trades we earlier discussed). The practitioners coming from big tech’s displaced software development teams can help implement this framework that will allow companies to better manage resources with clear accountability (everybody knows what they’re working on), more consistently meet project milestones through manageable and measurable sprints (everybody knows when they’re working on what), and improved quality through clearer communication and continuous improvement.
  • Building Software Interoperability: Another area project managers from the software industry are adept tacticians in wrangling is a concept known as software interoperability, how multiple software programs operate together and seamlessly share information. Just as Apple has received flack for being slow to adopt the more universal USB-C standard, construction companies often rely on multiple teams who use specialized software (e.g., ERP systems, building information modeling, computer-aided design, project management, inventory management, etc.), and these programs need to properly communicate lest companies face information silos, data duplication, and ensuing productivity issues. Software project managers can help wrangle the necessary technical resources (whether in-house or through third-party integrators) to build the interoperability a construction company desperately needs between its various systems.

 

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Harnessing Project Management’s Triangle

Another reason why project managers—software specialists or otherwise—are critical hires to the construction industry is that they are trained to understand quality that the project manager’s triangle makes up:

 

  • Quality = Cost + Scope + Time

 

The numbers don’t lie, either. Project managers at companies with a high maturity rate within the project management discipline have helped organizations outperform those with less maturity:

  • 77% of organizations with high maturity met goals/intent compared to 56% of organizations with low maturity.
  • 67% of organization with high maturity completed projects within budget compared to 46% of organizations with low maturity.
  • 63% of organizations with high maturity completed projects on time compared to 39% of organizations with low maturity.
  • Only 30% of organizations with high maturity experienced negative “scope creep” compared to 47% of organizations with low maturity.
  • Only 11% of organizations with high maturity experienced project failures compared to 21% of organizations with low maturity.

 

Furthermore, the same study found that 11.4% of investment is wasted due to poor project performance, while 67% more of these companies’ projects failed outright.

 

Project managers, skilled in juggling these triangulated factors (cost, scope, and time), are just the professionals the talent-strapped construction industry needs to understand cost, project scope, and time (and with a hawk’s eye on those factors ensuring they don’t overrun). Equally, they’re the tacticians needed to skillfully lasso multifaceted teams, understand their capacities, and time-box those sprints we earlier discussed to meet project milestones and continuously iterate to ensure quality for customers.

 

Skilled Communicators

Communication is constantly cited in academia and by research bodies as a critical skillset of a successful project manager – e.g., see:

  • Procedia Technology journal entry
  • International Journal of Project Management study of IT project managers
  • Heliyon study of construction megaprojects in Iran
  • International Journal of Applied Industrial Engineering article
  • Journal of Physics conference talk
  • European Management Journal study
  • Project Management Institute study of communication competencies and their impact on team member satisfaction and productivity
  • USC Department of Communication and Journalism blogpost

 

In construction, a project manager can help maintain real-time communication between customers and important company and project stakeholders (e.g., onsite workers, tradespeople, engineers, architects, as well as subcontractors/suppliers) of important scope changes to ensure proper accommodations are made to limit construction overruns.

 

Bottom Line

Disjointed processes have long been a characterization of the construction industry which has required a certain degree of operational finesse—that said, the industry faces unprecedented labor shortages, materials price hikes, and fierce competition for projects. As another industry—big tech—faces a surplus of technical resources, among them software project managers, one might naturally deduce that each industry meets the other’s needs. Software project managers, skilled communicators with the subject matter expertise to coordinate technical solutions, may just be what the construction industry needs to deliver projects more efficiently.

PMTimes_Aug30_2023

Revitalizing Remote Teams Across Generations

Written by Amanda Powers on . Posted in Articles.

Over the past couple of years, the skill of engaging remote teams composed of different generations has become critical for companies and teams to avoid the “Great Resignation” that has led to decreased team engagement. This article introduces various methods to highlight the similarities and minimize the differences across the generations.

 

Today’s workforce is composed of four different generations, and consequently managers are tasked with motivating teams despite the contrasting wants and needs throughout the age groups. Remote work offers many perks that people love, however one noticeable drawback is the lack of team culture which can easily lead to staff feeling isolated and disconnected. Company culture is imperative to overall job satisfaction and when company culture is poor, companies are quick to see employees quit. So, the question is, how does management equally motivate baby boomers who tend to prefer face to face communication and formal communications, while simultaneously satisfying Gen X employees who tend to prefer email and less formal communication styles?

 

For reference of the generations:

Baby Boomers: (1946-1964)

Generation X: (1965 – 1980)

Millennials: (1981 -1996)

Generation Z: (1997 – 2012)

 

Any successful leader or project manager needs to understand, implement, and compromise to appeal to the team’s communications preferences and recognition styles. This can be done by highlighting the similarities and minimizing the differences. However, this tends to force management to get a bit more creative when figuring out how to engage their teams in the remote space.

 

Highlight the Similarities:

  • People Crave Connection: A lot of the workforce can agree that moving to remote can feel more transactional. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) called Lonely at Work, highlighted that eight out of ten employees feel lonely in the workplace. A few tactics to improve this would be hosting healthy lifestyle challenges, virtual happy hours, online trivia, personality tests, etc.

 

  • Create a Mentor Program: The perfect opportunity to get the different generations working together is creating a mentorship program. According to the Cigna 360 Global Well Being Survey 2022, young employees of Generation Z are the most likely to be worried about the lack of job opportunities available to them. Mentorship programs are mutually beneficial as they provide the ability for employees to engage and develop close relationships with people in a different age group. The also provide the opportunity for mentees to learn more about different positions throughout the company and aid in boosting confidence in the workplace.

 

  • Provide Transparency on Organizational Structure: Nobody wants to be lost on where they stand within a team and/or company. For instance, baby boomers are known for preferring hierarchy, while millennials are associated with valuing clear opportunities for growth all while Generation X is associated with craving transparency. These shared values can be satisfied by posting and maintaining the organizational chart on a shared internal platform. To take this further, it is conducive for all parties when leadership provides clear written guidance on requirements to be promoted to the next level.

 

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Minimize the Differences:

  • Awareness of Team Preferences: Know how your team likes to be communicated and implement ways that meet each need. This can best be achieved by having the team complete surveys on tools such as Microsoft Forms or SurveyMonkey. Due to employees potentially being reluctant to share their true communication preferences with leadership, it is best to have the surveys set up with providing their name as optional vs. required when completing the survey.

 

  • Foster a Culture of Flexibility: Focus on what you have the power to make more flexible. Once employees have proven trustworthy and capable, there are benefits in letting employees pick projects, create their own project plans, etc. Encouraging employees to have the autonomy and creativity to know when and what is required tends to boost employee confidence and buy-in on the overarching team and company values.

 

  • Keep Customer as the Priority: When the customer is the priority there is less time for the team to have internal debates and more time for the team to focus on the mutual goal of a satisfied customer.

 

  • Communicate in Multiple Channels: People’s attention span and preferred communication methods differ; so to appeal to the variances, it is valuable to share the same messages through several mediums such as emails, meetings, articles, etc. For instance, employee A may have a hard time focusing in virtual meetings, while employee B tends to skim longer emails. This method may be harder for the project manager but is mutually beneficial by ensuring the team receives messages in the way that most resonates with them and leaves no excuses for missed information within the team.

 

 

Remote and hybrid teams are here to stay, so it is important for today’s managers and leadership to create ways to revitalize their multi-generational teams. One method managers and company leadership can build cohesive multigenerational teams is by highlighting the similarities and minimizing the differences. Similarities can be highlighted by providing opportunities for connection, creating mentor programs, and providing organizational transparency.

Differences can be minimized by boosting communication, incorporating flexibility, and keeping the customer as priority. The best interconnected teams have the awareness and structure set in place to play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so when these four generations create bonds, it can lead to today’s teams being stronger than ever.

 

 

References:
Exhausted by Work – The Employer Opportunity. (n.d.).
https://www.cigna.com.hk/iwov-resources/docs/Cigna-360-Global-Well-being-Survey.PDF
Gurchiek, K. (2016, May 9). What Motivates Your Workers? It Depends on Their Generation. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/what-motivates-your-workers-it-depends-on-their-generation.aspx#:~:text=Baby%20Boomers%2C%20like%20Traditionalists%2C%20prefer
‌Gurchiek, S. M. and K. (2023, February 25). Lonely at Work. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/Pages/lonely-at-work.aspx
Kaplan, J. (n.d.). Welcome to Generation Quit. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-jobs-generation-quiet-quitting-great-resignation-recession-economy-2023-2?r=US&IR=T
PMTimes_Aug29_2023

Burnout: What It Is and How to Avoid It

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

Burnout impacts personal, project, and organizational performance. Therefor it is important for project managers, performers, and executives to understand what it is and how to manage and avoid it.

 

What Burnout Is

Burnout is “a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”[1]

 

On a personal level, chronic stress and overwork leads to relationship problems, illness, a lack of motivation, disengagement, low energy, and suboptimal performance. Personal well-being impacts project performance and organizational health. When performers are suffering from burnout symptoms, they are less productive, more prone to leaving, less creative, withdrawn, more likely to become frustrated and angry and to engage in unnecessary and poorly managed conflict.

 

Burnout is not just being tired and needing a vacation. Studies have defined it more precisely, provided measurements, and have identified factors that contribute to it. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was developed by Christina Maslach in 1981 to evaluate and measure burnout. In her 2016 study[2] she makes it clear that, as with all aspects of wellness there are degrees of symptoms on a continuum.

 

Symptoms

Research identified three interrelated symptoms – exhaustion, disengagement, and reduced effectiveness.

  • Exhaustion is loss of energy and fatigue. It occurs when there is too much stress caused by unhealthy performance demands (chronic overwork). It can be a short-term experience following an intensive physical, emotional, or mental activity. Short-term exhaustion can be treated by moderating performance demands and taking rest and recovery time. If it goes untreated and becomes chronic, burnout follows.
  • Disengagement is affected by a sense of not being cared for by leadership and of the futility of the work. People lose a psychological connection to their work. Involvement and enthusiasm suffer. Performers, whether executives, managers, or staff, just put in their time instead of being actively engaged in their work. self-worth suffers. They become cynical and either engage in unnecessary conflict or withdraw to avoid engaging in meaningful debates.
  • Reduced effectiveness is tied to both exhaustion and lack of engagement. With tiredness, less involvement and enthusiasm, performers become less productive and less effective. That results in greater stress as performance goals become more difficult to achieve. Greater stress feeds exhaustion and lack of engagement.

 

Causes

Symptoms have causes. Identifying the causes helps us find the most effective treatment.

Burnout is the result of poorly managed chronic workplace stress. Workplace stress is inevitable, not enough stress and performance suffers, overstress and performance suffers. Managing workplace stress is maintaining the dynamic balance among personal non-workplace stress, individual psychologies, the pressure of workplace and cultural performance expectations, and physical and mental effort.

Address poorly managed workplace stress by exploring its causes.

 

  • Ignorance and not caring are the main culprits. Ignoring, denying, or underestimating the impact of overwork and chronic stress enables burnout to sneak up on you. Unlike a broken bone that results from a specific incident, it emerges overtime as exhaustion, disengagement, and reduced effectiveness interact. Without mindfulness and self-awareness, one becomes burned out without realizing that it is happening.
  • Workaholism and fear of failure are compulsions to work excessively hard and for overly long hours. This feeds the tendency to underestimate the effects of overwork as well as the stress that comes with not being able to achieve personal and organizational goals. The compulsion to work overtaxes the mind and body. It is emotional stress multiplying physical stress.
  • High-intensity workplaces. Some organization cultures reward workaholism while stoking the fear of getting fired or not getting ahead. Imagine the impact of an attitude that sees performers, including project and functional managers, as being easily replaced. Like slaves on an ancient galley, when an oarsman is burned out, they are tossed overboard and replaced.

 

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Some professional service and consulting firms bring in waves of highly motivated and capable associates and put them in a position where they must choose to devote themselves to work to get ahead or be gone. Those who manage their stress well can succeed, some realize they do not want to pay the cost for success, others keep at it and burn out.

  • Management issues. Some managers do not recognize that there are differences in people’s capacity for demanding work and stress. They may drive performance and create unnecessary stress on performers who are valuable contributors but cannot live up to unrealistic expectations. Setting irrational objectives and not providing necessary resources is a management issue that causes unnecessary stress.
  • Stress management skills are used to avoid burnout and improve performance when under stress. These skills work to relax, recover, and direct effort. They support the self-awareness needed to avoid burn out.

 

Project Work

Beware, project performance is the kind of work that can easily lead to burnout. Projects often have tight deadlines and budgets along with expectations for quality performance. If these are not managed well, project managers and performers become stressed. If they move from high intensity project to high-intensity project without a break, burnout is inevitable.

 

Treatment

Awareness of the nature and impact of burnout is the principal means for avoiding and treating it. There are two treatment dimensions, personal and organizational.

  • Personal – Everyone, regardless of their role, has the responsibility to manage their wellness. Cultivate the mindful self-awareness that gives you the ability to recognize when you are getting tired, losing your enthusiasm, and becoming less effective and efficient. Recognize it before it becomes overwhelming. Act.

Take a break or a vacation, ask for help, get some physical exercise, learn and use stress management techniques to make yourself more responsive, resilient and better able to thrive in the midst of stress. Assess your reasons for being stressed to the point of burnout. Is your stress self-imposed or driven by your work situation?

What can you do about it? Cultivate mindful self-awareness to enable you to look within and cut through whatever is driving you to overachieve. Push back to negotiate rational and reasonable demands and work schedules. Consider leaving a toxic environment.

  • Organizational – Leadership is responsible for creating an environment that supports organizational success. Success is accomplished, at least in part, by promoting individual wellness. That means to regularly assess attitudes, set reasonable demands and methods to avoid burnout. Wellness programs such as mindfulness meditation, stress management techniques, and opportunities for physical exercise and ‘being heard’ are great. They are most effective when they are integrated in a business process that promotes rational expectations and practical work-life balance and includes awareness of the impact of burnout on the business.

 

Find Dynamic Balance

Avoid burnout by managing your own stress and then use your influence to help your team find the right balance by assessing both individual and organizational goals and needs.

 

[1] How To Measure Burnout Across A Global Organisation https://lattice.com/library/how-to-measure-burnout-across-a-global-organisation#:~:text=The%20Maslach%20Burnout%20Inventory%20(MBI,the%20University%20of%20California%2C%20Berkeley
[2] Latent burnout profiles: A new approach to understanding the burnout experience https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213058615300188
PMTimes_Aug23_2023

Best of PMTimes: Does People Behavior Impact Projects? How? And What Do We Do About It?

Written by Ambadapudi Sridhara Murthy on . Posted in Articles.

We all know that projects are considered successful only when they are completed within the boundaries of scope, time, cost and quality. Bad project management is detrimental and can be very difficult to deal with – for especially large projects that involve a lot of money. A small percentage of several projects undertaken across the globe are really successful. Projects do get completed and closed but not necessarily are considered successful due to cost or schedule overruns – cost overrun – being the most common cause for project failure. Therefore, it is imperative that organizations employ better ideas and novel methodologies and frameworks in managing projects.

 

People behavior is one of the KEY factors that drive successful project management. In today’s world – virtual project teams often not co-located – are commonplace. In this environment, it is essential that behavior, emotions and culture be well understood by project managers.

Traditional Project Management methodologies revolve around sound technical and procedural factors: Scoping, Scheduling, Budgeting, Quality Assurance & Control, Risk, Communications and Procurement; and they all have very well established frameworks. Even with all these well established methodologies and frameworks, we just don’t seem to get project management right.

If you just thought “there MUST be something that is NOT well-documented or frame-worked well enough yet”, you have just arrived at the right place! The core of project management is – PEOPLE – around which all other processes revolve and interact.

 

PEOPLE CENTRIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT (PCPM)

People centric project management emphasizes that project management should be based on Experience, Dynamics, Human Psychology rather than solely on Processes. Wise project managers focus on learning and understanding how people function in an organization – both as individuals – and as a team. It is important to figure out during project initiation how people in the performing organization behave and adapt.

Human Psychology should also be considered as an integral part of Project Management. Technical knowledge and following standard processes is one aspect but that is only 30-40% of day-to-day activities. We need to better manage the remainder of the 60-70% – which is people centric.

The aspect of projects that gives project managers sleepless nights is people behavior – especially factors emerging from them – such as push-back, resistance to change, acceptance, trust etc. There are several real life scenarios project managers encounter – that emanate from these aspects. Project managers are encouraged to implement people centric management techniques that will eventually will help them implement processes as well as manage behavioral aspects of people successfully.

People centric project management differs from traditional project management in that it does not reject the basic principles of traditional project management but in addition, it emphasises that all traditional project management processes be followed as usual but be tailored according to the need in order to reap rich benefits coming from good people behaviour being exhibited as part of the project implementation.

INSTRUMENTAL ELEMENTS FOR SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF PEOPLE CENTRIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT (PCPM)

 

1. UNDERSTAND CULTURE – PEOPLE VS PROCESSES

The most important factor coming from humans including sensitive aspects is Culture. The term culture means different things to different people. From a project management perspective, culture simply means “how is stuff done here”. Culture is something that comes with people as a baggage along with them. It is imperative that a project manager understand and interpret what the culture of the performing organization is. This becomes increasingly challenging with virtual global teams. When a team member responds swiftly “It is impossible for us to carry out this work” without analyzing the work assigned – it is likely that employees are striving within an organizational culture that is not supportive of their efforts!

 

  • Study: People will likely not understand this concept at the outset – since PCPM focuses on how people function and how they apply project management to be people centric. Managing triple constraints (Scope, Time and Cost) is the objective of healthy project management. However, it needs to be understood that this does not happen in isolation. This happens in a colloidal medium where people see each other, talk together and interact with others. It is crucial that project managers don’t curb or belittle Emotions, Politics, People Dynamics. Instead, they should be seen as the arteries and veins of human life and we should be able to better manage them.
  • Analyze: How you go about implementing PCPM varies from one organization to another. It needs to be a part of the organizational strategy. Organizations would be project based – where large parts of the workforce is involved in multiple projects. Analyzing how the organization is structured helps the project manager make some of the most important people related decisions in an effective manner.
  • Adjust or Adapt?: Most project managers tend to enforce processes without understanding the culture and capabilities of the project team and stakeholders. In PCPM – focus should be on adjusting processes to fit the culture and behavioral responses rather than trying to adapt human nature to follow processes. Adjust the role and processes for people – do not enforce processes on people.
  • Propose Changes: Create a governance committee or steering committee that is part of the leadership team. Ensure that the PMO, Senior Management are on board and devise a strategy on how you will move from rational to behavior centric project management. A roadmap needs to be laid to bring about either procedural or cultural changes. In 99% cases, people work in environments that Resist Change. So, what is new with PCPM? In PCPM, project managers must educate the senior management, team and stakeholders of considering people behavior while planning each project phase of the project.
  • Gain Buy-In: The challenge for most project managers is to work with senior management and the team in tandem, to gain buy-in and decide on adjusting or adapting. Adjusting or adapting does not happen overnight.
  • Implement (Kaizen): PCPM will not happen overnight but will require a cultural transformation. PMs should quickly identify strengths and weaknesses of team members and encourage people to identify their strengths and work with their strengths. Some people will have competitive strengths and it is important to leverage their competitive skills. Project managers tend to polish people and make sure people fit the role instead of adjusting the role for people.
  • Introspect: It is essential that project managers introspect how PCPM is being implemented. The introspection frequency will depend on several factors such as the team size, stakeholder size, location of teams and stakeholders, senior management demands etc. Introspection is the only way of answering the questions “How are we doing today? Will we be able to implement PCPM? What else needs to be done to strengthen the PCPM process? How long will it take for people to be on board? etc.”

 

2. ENGAGE TEAM MEMBERS

Engaging project team members is the foundation to project success. In PCPM, it is extremely important that the groundwork be laid to engage team members and stakeholders and finally sustain in the short and long term. Focus should be setting key performance/productivity indicators for the performing team as a whole. The level of engagement of team and stakeholders should be monitored and strategies be devised to maximize the engagement levels of both at the same time. Performance, Productivity, Efficiency and Efficacy must be maximized or at a minimum balanced.

Across the project lifecycle, engagement levels of individual team members and the team as a whole should be monitored. Emotional and personal expectations of the team members must be addressed to bring about the best in them. Questions such as “How is this individual doing on the current project?”, “How does this employee react to his work load?”, “Does the employee feel good at the end of every day’s work?”, “Does the team connect their personal objectives with project objectives and organizational objectives, in turn?”, “How is the project team doing as a whole?”, “How are we engaged as a group to meet our objectives?”, “What do stakeholders/customers think abour the project team?” etc. – must be asked and answered satisfactorily.

 

At the Senior Management Level or at a PMO level (if a PMO exists), it will be important to update or change the overall project management framework to integrate all the knowledge about human nature and the questions answered above. Tools must be developed or customized to measure the level of engagement of teams or stakeholders accurately. These new tools must be integrated into the new project management framework.

Finally, the new approach of People Centric Project Management (PCPM) should be reflected in the overall PMO’s strategic objectives and long term vision/mission.

 

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3. IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONS & MOTIVATION

Emotions have to do with hormones and neurotransmitters in the human body. Emotions drive employee motivation positively or negatively. Oh boy! Isn’t it difficult to psycho-physio-bio-logically scan a person’s mind and body to anticipate what the Expressions, Feelings, Body Language, and Actions he or she may exhibit e.g.– they are sometimes Happy, Sad, Angry, Excited, Tender, Scared etc. This has been a long standing challenge for most people managers, especially project managers!

Feelings, Moods and Actions affect the manner in which team members and stakeholders carry out their work on projects and so management of emotional aspects is supreme for successful project management. A good project manager should not just be a technical person but should be a rare breed of individual who should be able to manage both the technical and emotional factors. If both factors are not managed, projects will cost way higher than what they are originally planned for! e.g. a strong skilled, high performing employee with tremendous knowledge (not shared with anyone else on the team) exhibiting negative attitude and emotions may not only choose not to perform but also may become a project manager’s nightmare if he decides to not co-operate.

Little attention is devoted to emotional factors in traditional project management – project managers must realize that this is the key reason for project failure! E.g. when we conduct lessons learned for failed projects, we focus only on the project management methodologies followed or those that were not followed – but we hardly attempt to identify the lack of focus on the management of the emotional and motivational aspects of people.

 

To ensure project success – PCPM might be a critical factor that needs to be looked into and implemented so that project managers are allowed to exhibit strong people skills and vibrant emotional intelligence!

 

There is advantage to project managers being assigned to a project during initiation and PCPM reinforces just that principle.

In ensuring that project teams will get better and provide maximum output, the following steps are recommended:

✓ Select & Recruit Team members keeping in mind the new PCPM framework, project and organizational objectives.
✓ Develop Team based on PCPM framework, keeping in mind the culture of the team on board – here we again stress on adjusting processes vs adapting!
✓ Motivate Team keeping in mind Emotional factors. More about the impact of motivation below is discussed. Emotional stability would ensure project success.
✓ Periodically Introspect behavioral responses of the team members – understand that PCPM framework needs to be iteratively fine-tuned and optimized.

Project team members or stakeholders do NOT work in an environment where they feel threatened, insecure or disarmed. Productivity is at its lowest when there is no trust and people don’t feel comfortable. If people don’t have confidence and passion for the work that they do – it does not bring about the best in them.

 

How is this addressed? Here is a simple question that will help us understand better:

Q: So, we all know from the laws of Physics that Force = [Mass] x [Action].Here, Mass refers to people and Action refers to project success. So what is the force then that needs to be applied to people to achieve project success?

A: Motivation!

Motivational factor in knowledge based industries (IT etc.) is important and is desperately needed in PCPM. Project managers need to look at alternative ways to look at projects as a social system rather than a technical system.

 

From an organization perspective, projects entirely involve around costs, risks, frameworks, internal/external market scenarios, decision making, harnessing talent, identifying critical resources etc. With virtual global knowledge teams working in different time-zones across different projects at the same time, it is very important to ensure that people stay motivated and magnetized to a specific project. PCPM becomes a guiding methodology in this dynamic environment and proper motivational drivers are a MUST. This helps get people focused on one project and give it the priority it deserves.

There are several motivational theories that can be applied in the PCPM framework but it is important to consider Motivation as one of the key drivers.

 

4. IDENTFY BEHAVIORAL RISKS USING INTUITIVE MIND-READING

Behavior refers to the range of actions and mannerisms exhibited – in this case – by people. Certain desired behavior is assumed by project managers when they stitch and integrate several of the established project management processes. This assumption is based on factors such as Culture, Attitudes, Emotions, Perceptions, Values, Ethics, Authority, Rapport, Hypnosis, Mindset and Persuasion, among others.

On most occasions some of these assumptions don’t hold quite valid. When people don’t behave like the way we originally assumed them to, their behavior seems unpredictable to us. And, when people behavior becomes unpredictable – project outcome is inevitably affected – either positively (success) or negatively (failure). Even if project managers don’t forget to include people behavior, they may find out that the people in the system don’t behave as expected, with unanticipated project outcome.

Think of the human brain emitting encrypted signals. Most project managers intercept these signals but hardly a few actually decrypt and interpret them. This act is called Intuitive Mind-Reading!

The ultimate goal of project management is to ensure project success. As part of PCPM, project managers MUST sharpen their mind reading skills and identify potential Known Behavioral Risks that may emanate from ALL people involved (team members, stakeholders, bosses, senior management etc.) in the project and adapt to this behavior to ensure that things that can go wrong don’t go wrong. Successful project managers are gifted with Intuitive Mind-Reading. During project execution, project managers must reach out to all these people involved, observe what tends to go wrong – and ensure it doesn’t.

Is Intuitive Mind-Reading the only tool for identifying behavioral risks? Not necessarily but in most cases, Yes! E.g. it is best to begin with analyzing our own behavior and from there extrapolate and extend our understanding to all types of people behavior across the team.

However, in other cases where Unknown Behavioral Risks show up during project execution, it is the skill and brilliance of project managers that helps them better manage the situation and drive towards project success.

 

5. …AND LASTLY: COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION & COMMUNICATION!

The real problem of projects is NOT the planning or technical aspects but is the day to day contact with people – which is the major nightmare and poses the biggest challenges to project managers.

At any given point of time in the project lifecycle, there will likely be hundreds or thousands of communication channels across project team members and stakeholders. These channels provide the opportunity for people to exchange information among one another. Whether it is Email, IM, Meetings, 1:1(s), Reports etc. it is important to question – what percentage of these channels actually yield positive and fruitful interactions? This will be a key indicator for project success. Project managers need to create a conducive environment for nurturing positive people interactions.

As always, you need the right blend of people in your team to talk to the appropriate stakeholders, gain buy-in and work along project integration. Once you have the PCPM thinking in place, then the next step is to focus on the project team.

In PCPM, it must be the daily duty for project managers to maintain the line of communication very open so that they keep catering to the basic needs to employees.

What needs to get communicated across and top things project managers need to keep in mind while implementing PCPM?

  • Understand and believe that project managers have the most impact in opening up communication channels.
  • Communicate what is expected of each team member
  • Establish a clear sense of what each team member’s duty or role is.
  • Provide recognition – this is actually part of communication!
  • Empower team members’ with the right tools and techniques to do the job
  • Keep your ears open to suggestions
  • Have open conversations about every aspect that requires the PCPM framework to be adjusted.
  • Frequently talk to team members about their progress and provide feedback –
  • Learn from people on how they think they connect to the mission of the project team and compare that with how you think they connect.
  • Communicate between the current statefuture state the gap  and how is the team member is doing.
  • Make Action Plans for the longer term to ensure you are actively managing the emotional and motivational aspects of ALL the people
  • Gather feedback and inputs on how are people interact with each other on their communication channel.
  • Finally, it is the project managers duty to ensure that interactions on ALL communication channels yield positive results!

The key truly is communication, communication, communication and communication!

 

CONCLUSION

If organizations want project managers to deliver projects perfectly, that cannot be done solely by following a rule book, using project management software, firefighting problems, implementing the concepts from PMBOK etc. Project managers MUST also be able to manage the thousands of interactions people have within the project and outside of it (environmental factors). The emotional bonding between individuals must be well understood and recognized to get the best out of the people. This ultimately is crucial for achieving proper level of teamwork, communication and performance that is needed for successful project management.

In addition, because our society or organization is not good at working with the behavioral and emotional drivers, we cannot motivate people to complete the project on time, cost, scope and quality. Aspects of project management dealing with people, behavior, emotions are not much stressed upon. In most documented areas, either it is in a footnote or in an appendix.

To conclude, emphasis must be on the importance of people behavior and having a framework such as PCPM – in place to account for people behavior – as an effective solution guaranteeing higher project success rates!

 

Published: 2014/08/07

 

About the Authors

Shreenath Sreenivas, B.Sc.(Hons.), M.Sc, PMP has in-depth knowledge and experience in software project planning, integration management, requirement gathering, risk management, scheduling, vendor management, contract management, execution, monitoring, controlling, quality assurance and on-time delivery. He is a Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential holder and has delivered projects successfully across a wide range of domains, such as Pharmaceuticals, Bio-IT (LIMS), Tax and Accounting, Mobile Web Apps; in addition to the field of software product development and consulting. He earned his Bachelor’s B.Sc. (Hons) & Master’s M.Sc. degrees in Industrial Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), Kharagpur, India.

Ambadapudi Sridhara Murthy, M.Tech, PMI-SP, PMP has extensive experience in the fields of software project planning, scheduling, risk management, budget management, vendor management, contract management, execution, tracking, monitoring, controlling, quality assurance, and on-time delivery. He is a Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential holder, PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)® credential holder, and has delivered projects over a wide range of domains, such as Leak Detection Software, Semiconductor software, implementing desktop/mobile websites, and Bio-Information Management Systems, in addition to the field of software services. He earned his bachelor’s degree (B.Tech) in chemical engineering from Pune University, India and earned his master’s degree (M.Tech) in computer-aided process and equipment design from REC/NIT in Warangal, India.