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Demystifying Project Management
By Darshana Patel on Tuesday, April 25, 2006
I recently purchased an “Easy” button from Staples. I chuckle every time someone presses it. Childlike it may be, but the “That was easy!” message resonates profoundly in all of us, no matter what our function - business owner, CEO, manager, or results producer. Our duties tend to be oversimplified by our peers, our subordinates, and most obvious - our superiors. Taking a strategy, an objective, or a directive and having to execute with hopes of producing timely and quality results is no easy feat.
As a result, in recent years the focus on Project Management (PM) has increased exponentially to alleviate ineffective project execution and poor program results. Many of you may in fact be certified Project Managers and now speak the same flavor of “PMese.” Others of you may have joined the 25% of organizations that have created a Project Management Office (PMO) to standardize PM processes, align projects with business strategy, increase accountability of project teams and senior management, and improve cross-departmental communication.
All of this focus on Project Management and commitment to PMO frameworks are fabulous. But why, then, do projects still go off course despite these wonderful frameworks, methodologies, processes, workflows, ROI models, project charters, signoffs, tollgates, traffic lights, dashboards, and binder-filled project artifacts?
Allow Me to Demystify
The answer is simple. These frameworks concentrate on processes and tools. People have been left out of the equation. I’m not referring to organizational alignment or cultural evolution. I’m just talking about people. Our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, our hidden motivations, our hang ups, our questionable ability to overcome conflict, our individual inclinations for being a leader or follower in a team structure, our ability to negotiate effectively, and our hesitation to communicate bad news. Unless you get back to the basics and learn to communicate, projects will fail. Communicating is 90% of what a Project Manager does. This standard should apply to the rest of the project team.
The answer is simple. These frameworks concentrate on processes and tools. People have been left out of the equation. I’m not referring to organizational alignment or cultural evolution. I’m just talking about people. Our quirks, our idiosyncrasies, our hidden motivations, our hang ups, our questionable ability to overcome conflict, our individual inclinations for being a leader or follower in a team structure, our ability to negotiate effectively, and our hesitation to communicate bad news. Unless you get back to the basics and learn to communicate, projects will fail. Communicating is 90% of what a Project Manager does. This standard should apply to the rest of the project team.
3 Steps to Improving Project Team Communication
1. Take the time to identify and research all the project stakeholders and participants, understand their agendas, motivations, and history as it relates to the project. Project stakeholders sometimes appear at the eleventh hour; that can be a major problem if you did not foresee that the individual was a stakeholder at all on this initiative. Spend the effort upfront in looking for upstream, downstream, and executive-level stakeholders who may seem apathetic about the initiative in the beginning and then take a keen interest in the project when it’s too late to accommodate his or her needs.
2. Foster openness and nurture a culture in which roles, responsibilities, needs, and expectations are clearly articulated and, more importantly, updated as necessary as the project evolves. Bottom line – have those difficult discussions on who is responsible for what and when and how their roles affect the overall project success. Get the team onboard with understanding the dependencies on their deliverables, thereby driving team cohesiveness and breaking functional silos.
3. Get the project’s political risks on the table and understand the organizational impact of the initiative. Expand your thinking beyond the myopic view of the project. The PM and the entire project team should be aware of the individuals and teams in support of the initiative and those from which to expect resistance. Create a plan to overcome the pockets of opposition. This is where the art of project management can save a project and where the science of project management fails. This is critical step to project success but a touchy subject in the most environments. Refer to step 1.
Don’t be surprised at what you find at the end of your organization’s journey in PM evolution. You may in fact come back to the realization that organizations are run by people and that you can’t put process around personality. So in the midst of all of our PM templates and processes, we need to embed one important factor, and the riskiest one by far – the human element. The pure lack of predictability in human behavior can doom the best-planned project. Communication both deep and wide on a project is the best mitigation plan for the risk-infested human mind, human heart, and human soul.
A paper trail of emails and project binders for the “CYA” mentality only go so far to ensure project success. Go back to the basics. After sending the email, pick up the phone, talk across the cube wall, or take ten steps to the coffee machine and just communicate.
We can consult about how to build the frameworks for project success tailored to your culture and unique organizational needs as a first and very critical step. Beyond that lingers the human factor. Foster an environment that promotes effective and safe communication within and among project teams. Follow my advice and to complex projects, you’ll be saying, “That Was Easy!”
Darshana Patel, PMP
Vice President OnSite Project Governance
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