“What a peculiar clean freak!” a curious person might exclaim, having examined my daily to-do lists from the last two or three weeks. Intrigued they will be, and why not, for there is one particular chore that I appear to take on every day without fail.

Apparent from my daily lists, I am fond of cleaning my garage, to the point that I do it daily. Now, that’s a standalone three bay garage we are talking about and tidying it every day would be peculiar indeed. How dirty does it get in a day, anyway?

No, my friends, the only reason this item is on my daily list, is that I have been putting it off. Even not-so-gentle reminders from my wife do not seem to produce enough motivation to get me roll up my sleeves. So, what is the reason for my procrastination?

There are factors that cause people to procrastinate. More often than not, we put off things that appear to be tedious, unpleasant, uninspiring, or unimportant. In my case, the garage chore seems to possess all of these qualities. Inevitably, other tasks pop up all the time that I can mentally assign more value, more appeal and more urgency to, and so the poor garage gets bumped again.

Don’t tell me in never happened to you. The only reason I am typing up this stuff now is because I know for the fact that homo sapiens is the species that invented procrastination. Imagine a bear dragging his feet on a new winter den, or a salmon figuring not to run upstream to spawn. It just does not happen in other species, as far as I know.

Here are a few pointers to help to get over the problem.

1. Deal with tasks decisively. Tackle them as they appear, do not assign them to the ‘maybe tomorrow” category, and take pleasure in striking them off your list.
2. Use simple task lists. As my case demonstrates, they don’t guarantee that it will get done, but at least they guarantee that is not going to drop off your radar. Besides, ticking things off the list is darn satisfying.
3. Reward yourself. Do something you really like after you are finished with a dreaded chore. Have a coffee, go for a walk, listen to music, or play Solitaire.
4. Delegate, if you consistently find yourself dragging your feet on a particular activity. Others may be better suited for it. Your chore may well be someone else’s enjoyment.
5. Enjoy being productive. I guarantee that your energy level will shoot up if you deal with your task list with vigor and fortitude.

Finally, don’t dawdle, as that is even worse than procrastination. It does not take a whole day to write a project status update, nor do you have to debate with yourself whether to make that dreaded phone call. If you don’t feel like cleaning the garage right now, fine, but remember that you cannot ignore it forever!

Special Announcement: following the success of my recent speaking on best practices in business cases, I am running a seminar on June 24-25, devoted to business case and Cost-Benefit Analysis. All details are available at www.bizvortex.com.

I am going to try a little experiment this month to solicit comments for my article. I am taking the position that Project Management is a waste of time, so why do we bother.

Why do we bother taking on projects that we know are going to fail? Why do we bother taking on projects with no clear sponsor and no set budget? Why do we bother taking on projects that have no clear end date or scope? Because we can and the pay is good and someone is convinced that we are needed, that is why.
How many projects are truly successful? Every month I read about organizations that have successfully implemented this or changed that and I do not dispute the results. I only dispute the reasons for those results. Now you might think that I am crapping on the whole project management profession, but I am not. I am only making the point that these projects are successful not because someone is good at managing projects, but because someone is a good leader.

The field of project management has taken off in recent years to the point where now everyone is a project manager, regardless of experience or capabilities. I equivocate. It is like the rash of MBA graduates that have entered the workforce in the past 10 years. Having an MBA is not what is used to be or what it should be….there are too many around! Just like there are too many project managers.

What does it take to be a good project manager? Leadership and communication skills. Give people a message and get them to follow it…..it is that simple. Get everyone on the same page and working towards a common goal for which they are accountable. It has nothing to do with project management; it has to do with leadership. Who cares if you know how to track tasks in a project plan? Who cares if you can count hours and dollars against a budget? Who cares if you can review status reports? That is monkey work. What we need to focus on is our ability to lead the flock to the Promised Land.

I welcome your thoughts…..

I have a teenage daughter. This means, among other things, that I get to watch MTV’s “The Hills” evening soap opera “reality” TV from time to time. (I put reality in quotes, since how much reality is involved in the show is quite suspect.)

As I was watching an episode a few weeks back, a pretty young lady on the show found out to her feigned surprise that, despite having been employed for only a short time and having been with the organization only a short time, she had just been named as the project manager for a large Las Vegas casino/resort complex refurbishing project.

“There is my life challenge in a nutshell,” I said out loud.

Who knows how real “The Hills” is, but it’s a certainty that this kind of scenario plays out in corporate circles every day.

‘How could this terrible calamity come to pass?’ you ask.

The answer is very simple: We’ve helped make it this way.

It’s taken many years of dedicated effort, but it is fair to say that those of us in the project management industry can now claim success in attempting to commoditize the industry. Many of us have been evangelizing the concepts of project management for years, hoping to get more stature and more corporate awareness of project management. Well, you know what they say, “Be careful what you wish for…”

There are some good outcomes due to how popular and common project management has become, but there are also some negatives. Let’s take a look for a moment at what we have wrought:

First of all, we’ve made ‘project management’ a household term. If I can hear the term on MTV and on The Apprentice on network television, then you can be sure it’s understood almost everywhere in western culture. Ok, we may not all mean the same thing, but the term itself is quote common now.

Next, we’ve generated an expectation that being a project manager is something attainable by anyone. At one time we were a pretty exclusive club. Project management experts were people in white lab coats (literally) who worked in computer labs. A project manager on a huge construction project was like the CEO and not reachable at all. Now, there is an expectation that any intern could be named as a project manager.

We’ve also created a much larger industry, and an even larger audience, and that means there are more people creating more resources like books, magazines, websites and tools. I remember putting our own company, HMS onto Yahoo years ago. We were approximately the 8,000th entry on the index page. That may not sound so impressive until you take a quick online search today for some project management terms. Amazon reports 24,407 books with the term “Project Management”.

Google reports 2,180,000 hits for the term “Project Management Software”.

Speaking of project management software tools, we’ve gone a step further. To support the huge numbers of people now interested in project management, we’ve generated the notion that project management is a “solution” and that technology makes it “easy”. It’s not hard to see this by looking at some online tools. Basecamp for example (www.basecamphq.com) delivers web-based project management online for free. “…smarter, easier, more elegant way to collaborate on your internal and client projects.” it says on its home page. Ace Project (www.aceproject.com) also has a web-based product which gives limited functionality away for free. “…a feature-rich web-based project manager software that remains simple and easy-to-use,” they say.

For those purists who were sure that project management should be a “serious” endeavor, there is a level of upset in these developments. “We weren’t trying to dumb-down project management,” they say. “We were trying to get people to invest their knowledge of it like we have.”

Some of those efforts though have resulted in very divergent scenarios. If we look at the PMI (Project Management Institute) and other associations, certification was one of the paths to helping people to get some return on their training and career investment. However, the bar for attaining the PMP certification is set in such a way that it’s impossible to determine by the certification alone if the holder can manage projects at all. That’s not to discount the PMP certification (I know many of you have worked very hard at getting yours) but an indication that just passing the exam and fulfilling the points required doesn’t indicate to management your skill level, but rather your level of knowledge of common terms and practices.

If we look at the higher education front, there are some encouraging Masters in Project Management programs that I have a fairly high degree of respect for, but there is also a wide range of “Certificate” programs that have varying levels of study required and tests to pass. With such a wide range of certification options, it’s perhaps not a surprise that there is an inconsistent understanding of the values of these programs in the marketplace.

Wondering where this is all heading?

So am I.

It seems that the notion of project management has enough critical mass now that it has become part of the business lexicon. For those of us interested in the industry as a whole, that’s a very good thing. But, we’re getting to the point where we’re going to need a more detailed vocabulary. What terms should we use so we don’t confuse a career project manager with an ‘instant’ project manager? We have to be able to distinguish the capabilities of someone who has actually managed a project from someone whose experience is limited to reciting lists of acronyms and formulas and their definitions.

As I was cruising on holidays this year, I discovered that in the maritime shipping business, there’s a big difference between a “Captain” and a “Master”. The person with responsibility for everything aboard our ship was the “Ship’s Master”, I was told. “There are several Captains on board. After a further investigation, I found that to become a “Ship’s Master” is not a weekend course and a multiple choice test. The training that was described to me was more like secondary and post-secondary education lasting over a dozen years. It’s reassuring of course, to know that the person keeping your ship afloat actually has a clue and has already served an extensive internship doing almost every possible job on board a luxury liner before being allowed to run one.

It seems to me like that’s not a bad analogy for our challenges in the project management world.

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Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at [email protected].

The success of projects and their accompanying business results remains a critical challenge within many organizations today. Over the years, while we have improved in project awareness and the need for effective project management, projects have increased in complexity, diversity and even the sheer numbers of initiatives in any company’s portfolio.

At SPM we believe that project management doesn’t always get the attention it deserves at the executive level. As a result we have become pioneers in an emerging field called Strategic Initiative Management, which is a blend of traditional project management with advances in strategy execution. This is based on the foundation that executives will pay attention and listen to the truth about projects if spoken in their language and a focus on results tied to strategy.

A critical success factor for initiatives has been linked to top management support. This support is of two types – support of initiative management in general and support of individual programs and projects in particular. It is well known that it is usually difficult to tell truth to power and the culture of the organization may not want to hear issues such as ‘red’ flags. The messenger of truth often suffers tremendously.

Delivery of new products, processes and systems through the use of initiative management is a key performance factor for organizations if they are to grow and compete in today’s global economy. Portfolio, program and project managers are entrusted to see that desired changes by top management occur through the delivery of initiatives. Many organizations still use ‘accidental’ project managers who are assigned merely because they are available, have some subject expertise, or are functionally responsible for a particular business area. Management, however, gives these people the task of delivery while often putting up barriers which undermine their ability to succeed. This undermining may not be intentional but, rather, through assumptions and methods typical in a departmental environment, but that do not fit in an initiative environment. This creates significant impact on the initiative and management’s ability to support the endeavour appropriately.

Common Barriers and Solutions
Typically we see a number of common problems that put barriers in the way of supporting these programs and the project manager’s ability to deliver. These are:

• Not linking the initiative to an overall corporate strategy
• Setting deadlines based on management objectives
• Not allowing time for planning and approval prior to beginning project execution
• Pulling people off the core team (for other initiatives or operational work) without understanding the impact to the particular initiative
• Changing product specifications due to concern over the ability to deliver or understand overall deliverable(s)
• Meddling in the initiative, often by adding people, because of concern about the time it is taking to execute
• Not including customer or end user input
• Lack of useful information that puts the program, or project manager, in a reactive mode

There are a number of solutions that management can initiate to address these common problems. These include:

• Upper management must work as a team to support program or project managers; in action as well as words
• There must be a project selection and review process – typically through effective and proactive project portfolio management
• Develop process for program or project manager selection – availability is not a skill
• Commit a core team from the beginning to the end of the initiative
• Change the reward system and eliminate hero stories
• Develop an initiative sponsor system
• Ensure input from customers/users
• Define project portfolio management information systems to provide up-to-date data
• Require initiatives retrospectives – lessons learned on the specific initiative and for initiative management as a whole

Telling Truth
Identifying problems and solutions is one thing. Getting management to change their behaviour to support program or project managers is another. To date, training management on challenges, understanding strategic initiative management and their role has often met with mixed or disappointing results.

What happens when program or project managers try to deliver the information to management is that management:
a) attacks the concept – these are not problems we caused, they are caused by factors outside our control;
b) attacks the data – we didn’t do these things;
c) attacks the messenger – who are you to tell us?

This creates a significant reluctance by program or project managers to transmit unwelcome, yet valuable and constructive, information concerning initiatives and their status. Therefore, while evidence of a failing initiative may exist in lower ranks, it may not move up the organizational hierarchy. Decision makers with the authority to change the direction of the initiative are often unaware of its true status.

There is a need to educate management to help get better support, and for program or project managers to be able to speak with them at an appropriate level. Providing management with an opportunity to ‘walk a mile in a project manager’s shoes’ through simulations allows them to experience the frustrations and problems of project managers. These simulations have been delivered with success in a number of organizations.

Program and project managers also need to establish appropriate strategies for communicating with management. What are their preferences, what do they need in terms of critical and must know information? Trust and honesty between management and a program or project manager are critical. Honesty can sometimes be delivered with humour that minimizes the reaction factor. Think of court jesters who had the responsibility of delivering bad news to kings!

What Upper Management needs to do	What Program and Project Managers need to do
Be careful not to shoot the messenger (the project manager)	Know management’s level of need for information
Understand the challenges of managing projects in a diverse environment	Offer solutions and what you want them to do
Support project managers in ALL ways	Use honesty and humour from a sensible political approach
Change their behaviour and create a healthy environment for delivering ‘real’ project status	Develop appropriate levels of power and influence even though they may not have the authority

Conclusions
Successful initiatives require open and honest communications with upper management. Program and project managers need to be able to deliver status – good and bad – to management without fear. Management will allow them to speak the truth when they provide visible and behind the scenes support, and are careful not to shoot the messenger.

 

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Catherine Daw, MBA, PMP is CEO & President and co-founder of SPM Group Ltd. She provides the vision and leadership needed to evolve the firm, including the current corporate direction, to enabling the effective enterprise through strategic initiative management. Her focus is on results that matter to SPM’s clients and to ensure solutions exceed client expectations, save time and money, and help clients achieve superior business benefits. Catherine is a pioneer who possesses over twenty-five years of experience, working in a variety of public and private sector companies, holding progressively higher positions both in Information Technology and Business areas. Her personal idiom has always been to deliver results within a foundation of integrity, open communication and with a strong understanding of value creation and strategic advantage for businesses.