Tag: Leadership

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:

• Burnout: What It Is and How to Avoid It https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/burnout-what-it-is-and-how-to-avoid-it/
• Knowing Why When and How to Rest and Relax https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/knowing-why-when-and-how-to-rest-and-relax/
• Right Effort: Balancing Effort, Energy and Relaxation https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/2015-right-effort-balancing-effort-energy-and-relaxation/
• Consider the Project Environment https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/consider-the-project-environment/

[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

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.