Tag: Skills

Editor’s Comments

There’s a lot of technical wizardry involved in running a successful projects, but the kind of skills often described as “soft” are important too. They could be described as the general management skills that help make things happen in every corner of the business environment, including the project management office.

Chris Vandersluis shares some thoughts about the soft skills that need to be part of the project manager’s armoury in his article Serving Up Soft Skills, including the importance of presentation skills, negotiation and other important aspects of management that are critical to project success.

In their piece, Prioritization and Scheduling Based on Value, Bob McMurray and Steve Chamberlin believe that getting a project completed is not where the real project portfolio management challenge lies. Their view is that the most serious obstacles to overcome are those in the path of choosing the right projects in the first place. In their article they give some ideas on how to prioritize and schdule projects to maximize project value.

Monthly blogger Andrew Miller expresses the possibly controversial view that Project Measurements are Waste of Time – and explains why he holds that view. Mike Lecky talks about a number of integration tools that help to make work easier for project managers and help ensure the success of projects.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Project Times and that you’ll give us your valuable feedback to help us with future issues.

When I first got started in the project management software business, I knew that what people needed to be trained in to be a good project manager was the Critical Path Methodology calculation. If only someone knew this magic algorithm, they too could be a good project manager. I still have course materials that include exercise after exercise about how to do forward and backward passes of the CPM calculation.

How far we’ve come!

I’ve had the pleasure lately of working with some people at McGill University who are attending classes to learn more about being a project manager. It’s an advanced class so we’re not spending much of our time on learning how to manually calculate a project schedule. After all, there are many tools that can do it for us. Instead, most of our time is spent on the so-called soft skills that a project manager needs to survive.

I’ve often said that someone who wants to implement organizational project management (these days the most popular term for this is EPM or Enterprise Project Management) needs to be 50% technician, 50% therapist, 50% teacher, 50% mentor and 75% Guru. It’s no small challenge. The problem is that in almost all cases, people are swimming upstream when they want to deploy project management as a common process across the organization.

We’ve got three clients who’ve just hired someone to head up their new PMO and EPM deployment initiative. I’ve got great sympathy for the people doing the hiring. How do they find just the right person for this?

I’ve been thinking about what survival skills I’d go looking for in such a key person and I thought I’d share them this week here.

Presentation Skills

It’s amazing to me how many people in business are awful presenters. This is very much a nurture skill (as opposed to a nature skill that you got by virtue of your DNA). Virtually anyone can learn to present adequately and most people can learn to present very effectively. There are public speaking courses all over and we’ve often sent our staff to them. There are a few basics of presenting that are so simple that no one should be without them. Here are just a couple:

1. For the love of God, please, please don’t read your PowerPoint slides. If you do what you’re silently saying to your audience is, “You must be illiterate. Thank goodness I’m here to read these for you!”
2. Make sure people can see what you’re presenting and hear what you’re saying. That includes the volume of your voice, distractions such as outside light or noise, people talking etc. Never, never try to talk over someone else.
3. Know who you’re presenting to. If you don’t know by the time you start. Use the first few minutes to make sure you know who’s in the room. If you don’t have any clue about your audience, it’s almost inevitable your comments will be off target.

Negotiation

This is key to any project manager’s job but it’s particularly critical if the person we’re talking about will be changing the organizational culture. I’ve never seen an EPM environment created because of pure authority or just at random. It inevitably comes through generating a consensus, and being able to negotiate is the central skill required for that.

Organization/Document Management

This may be one of the most important personal skills. I’ve seen people who are wonderful orators and fabulous hand-shaking people-people but they can’t find a single thing on their desk or on their laptop. If you want to be the person who will create a PMO, then you’ve got to be all about the process and that means being able to track the documents that are a part of what you’re creating.

Basic Technology

I can’t tell you how many people I meet who don’t know how to effectively use Word or any word processing software. The same goes for Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The result is, that I find people writing emails, letters and other communications that are terribly formatted and very ineffective. Training for these tools is available from your nearest bookstore and that means there is little excuse to not have these skills. Using your basic desktop product skills is so fundamental. I don’t see how someone can advance without them.

Leadership

Ah, the most elusive of all! There are so many books, courses and conference sessions on leadership that you can feel swamped with too much advice on how to achieve it. I think this is partly because leadership is related to so many other skills and, in the end, is more a way of being than a particular skill. That being said, there’s plenty you can do to be a better leader. Being prepared, taking initiative, offering to be responsible for something all make a difference. People also have to have some desire to lead, as no amount of books will make a leader if there’s no desire. So I’ll have to put this into a category of personality traits rather than skills.

While we’re talking about personality traits, a desire to learn is critical. When we hire new technical people in our firm, we tell them a few things during the interview process. First, we let them know we only hire people who are ‘quick studies’; people who learn quickly. Then, we tell them that more important than that, is that they will never learn enough. Their training will never be over. The people who succeed in our line of work are reading constantly. After all, you’re reading this and have done for the last few minutes in order to get this far. I do the same. I’ve easily got an hour a day of reading in my industry which I need to just to keep up; to keep constant. People who are looking for the quick fix (can’t I just take the blue pill?) in training will have a much tougher time being successful in deploying organizational project management.

You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned any of the traditional technical skills in project management. Do you need to know about time management and scope management and change management and risk assessment and quality control and so on? Of course you do. If you’re going to be working in the project management domain then you need to be not only very knowledgeable about the building blocks of project data but also have experience with using them.

But, if you’re going to be a person who deploys project management not just for yourself but also for others and, in particular, if you’ve been given the job of deploying project management for an organization, then avoid your soft skills at your peril.

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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]. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Editor’s Comments

Isn’t it the way of the world that we’re always looking for inspiration, that unexpected thought that seems to come like a bolt from the blue. In 10 Ways to Inspire Your Team, Michelle LaBrosse says that Inspiration comes, not from vision and mission statements, but from example and gives some practical primers on how you can inspire your team.

At some time, you’ve probably asked yourself or been asked by others, “what is a project management office? And, depending on the organization, it could mean many different things. Ian Gittens knows that the PMO can have many different titles, with many different functions. In Creating a Successful Project Management Office, he examines the different roles and expectations that term project management office conjures up.

We have a new blogger this month, Ilya Bogorad, who joins David Barrett and Claude Emond with their views on many of the changing issues in our business. We hope you find their comments interesting and food for thought. Also, take a look at our Forums and add your comments to those we’ve received already.

Finally, it remains to wish everybody a successful, prosperous and happy 2008 and to say we hope that this issue of Project Times will inspire you to keep coming back.

In today’s digital world, what employers are looking for may surprise you. They assume you’re going to be technologically literate and that you have the skills that are specific to your industry. Once you have the basics, they want to know that you can perform, achieve results and play well with others.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2007 survey, employers rated communication skills, and honesty and integrity equally at the top of their list of what they look for in potential employees. Following closely behind communication, and honesty and integrity were: interpersonal skills, motivation/initiative, strong work ethic and teamwork skills.

What struck me as I read those skills was that all of them are inherent in project management, and it emphasized what I’ve believed for years: project management is a career accelerator.

Here’s how you can use project management to put your career in high gear:

1. SHOW RESULTS. Project management is the art and science of getting things done. When you improve your project management skills, you know how to get things done quickly, and even more important, you learn how to document the results. In our careers, we are often as good as our last hit. You can’t be a one-hit wonder. Instead, you want to keep charting, year after year, with success after success. 
2. BE EFFICIENT. When you apply project management principles to your work or your home life, you stop reinventing the wheel. Project management teaches you how to make the most efficient use of resources to generate the best results in the least amount of time. At the end of every project, you capture best practices and lessons learned, creating an invaluable documentation of hits and misses. Sound too good to be true? Good project managers do this on every project, and you can, too.
3. CREATE AN ONGOING DIALOGUE. One mistake I see a lot in project management and on teams is the assumption that there’s one meeting and everyone goes away, and then the communication ends, and somehow everything is still going to magically get done. Your communication skills are not about your vocabulary. They are about how you manage your communication. Are you communicating frequently enough and with clarity? Are you communicating what is relevant? Are you communicating your successes?
4. PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS. People hear the word teamwork, and they groan or they say that they are, of course, a team player. That’s why I like to bring it back to the kindergarten place in our mind: Back to the sandbox. Do you play well with others? Do other people want to be on your project team? Are you respected? Do you listen actively to what others have to say? Good project managers know when to lead and when to get out of the way. When someone is interviewing you, you know what that person is thinking: Can I work with him? Will my team work well with her?
5. LET YOUR CONFIDENCE SHINE. When someone shows confidence, everyone in the room feels it, too. One thing I consistently hear from our students is that the biggest payoff from their project management training or PMP certification is the confidence that they gained. They went back to their job with a solid project management foundation that made them feel more competent and able to project more confidence to their team and their boss.
6. KEEP YOUR COMMITMENTS. Missed deadlines and projects that slip through the cracks are career killers. Project management skills focus on timelines and results that build your reputation and give team members a reason to trust you. “I know that I can always count on her (or him) to get the job done.” That quote can – and should – be about you.
7. GET A GRIP. Good project managers don’t have to freak out. They can remain calm and in control because they have a Project Agreement which has all the critical information about the project in it. They know when all the deadlines are, who is responsible for what and when, and they’ve also documented changes. Everyone wants to have someone on the team who can stay calm when a project gets rocky, and bring stability to chaos.
8. ADAPT TO CHANGE. Don’t ignore change. Companies change. Deadlines change. People come and go. Good project managers know they often have to adapt their plans and document what has changed and how that impacts the entire project.
9. KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What skills do you need to move from the status quo to the next level? Once you have a solid foundation of project management skills, keep building on that foundation. Don’t stagnate. Continuous learning and a thirst for knowledge are always attractive to employers and team members.
10. LEAD WITH PURPOSE AND PASSION. People will follow those who know what they are doing and who can generate results. Project management is a powerful leadership tool because it not only shows us how to keep our eye on the prize and the purpose, but it’s also about the passion to achieve and succeed. Nothing feels better than accomplishment.

Getting and staying certified is one way to get your career on the fast track and watch it soar. But take time to have some fun along the way. Try our crossword puzzle and see how many of the 10 ways you can remember. Then get started by downloading our complimentary PMP toolkit at www.cheetahsmartstart.com.

Buckle up and enjoy the flight!

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Michelle LaBrosse is the founder and Chief Cheetah of Cheetah Learning. An international expert on accelerated learning and project management, she has grown Cheetah Learning into the market leader for project management training and professional development. In 2006, The Project Management Institute, www.pmi.org, selected Michelle as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the World, and only one of two women selected from the training and education industry. Michelle is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner & President Management program for entrepreneurs, and is the author of Cheetah Project Management and Cheetah Negotiations.

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