PM Best Practice: 2014

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (8 of 9)

Is Agile a project management discipline or really just a form of task or workstream management?

This is the penultimate entry in my series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal.

Agile is a mindset, not a methodology (or a process). PMBoK defines a Body of Knowledge for creating a methodology (and processes), but it is not a methodology. Agile is a way or practice or technique for delivering products or solutions. So are SEI’s Capability Maturity Model – Integrated (CMMI) and the Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF). Neither Agile, nor CMMI nor MSF are disciplines for delivering projects. (For more on the relevance of this, I refer you back to an early series on the P&SD PM, the Consultancy PM, and the philosophical relevance.)

Agilists are special only because they are so sensitive to anything that hints of management or structure. Working with agile teams is similar to working with many creative types: artists, painters, novelists, musicians and designers, for example.

What do we learn from this? That there is so much market demand for a product delivery solution with PMI’s imprimatur that PMI has responded by offering the PMI-ACP®. Should PMI also offer specialized domain-specific certifications for pharma research, product design, architecture, prototyping, etc? Likewise, should they offer project management certifications for CMMI and MSF shops?

So I wandered off the trail and fell off a cliff. Let’s get back on the main trail and respond to Morris’ question: What Agile is is really not relevant. That it’s not a discipline for delivering projects is all that matters. And PMI is losing focus by responding to these distractions.

I get to drill deeper into that last comment in my next post.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (7 of 9)

Is program management just the management of projects with shared aims and possibly resources or does it have some special ownership of delivery of the business case benefits? If the latter, why? Shouldn’t projects also have this concern?

This is the seventh in my series of posts
commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal. We are nearing completion of this series, with just a little wrap-up remaining.

In my previous post, I described a vision (or maybe it’s just a prediction) where senior leadership of the enterprise recognizes the value of enterprise (organizational) change management and the Project Management Office (PMO) is a strategically positioned general business service, on the order of Finance and HR.

In today’s world with generally weak PMOs, project management is in place to serve as agents of other organizational leaders – leaders who have strategic responsibility and delegate the tactical delivery to the PM agents. As PM continues to mature and organizations recognize the value of organizational change, PMO oversight and management of the organizational portfolio will elevate PMO leadership first to valuation of the profit-loss (revenue vs cost) of the change portfolio and eventually to recognition of the asset value of the project portfolio. This should happen naturally and organically, much as Finance moved from obscure back-office accounting responsibilities a century ago.

The real question is whether the leading project management organizations of today (such as PMI), recognize this evolution and take proactive measures to guide the future, or do they keep their feet securely grounded in the traditions of the profession and slowly wither into obscurity, or do they flounder reactively, without vision or philosophy, responding to the latest fad (to foreshadow the next post), until organizations realize that the value and esteem of the credential are so diminished that it is no longer relevant.

Here’s where I break with Morris: What’s the point of this question? What is a task? What is a project? What is a program? Yes, PMI has its definitions, but are they adequate? A project is composed of Deliverables, Activities and Tasks. A well-defined task has a single owner. It is a black box delegated to one person. But, let’s say an executive tells his assistant “I’m going to the convention. Get me a flight, hotel and car.” Is that a project or a task? It meets all of the components of the definition of a PMI project.

My point is that there is really nothing to distinguish a task from a project, except hierarchy. Further, if you conceptualize a well-defined program as consisting of projects and deliverables (within those projects), then there is nothing really to distinguish a project from a program except hierarchy. We have a natural recursive-descent system that just happens to have different names for nodes based on arbitrary values of size and scale (if you think that’s not true, compare your programs, projects, deliverables and tasks to NASA’s).

I realize Morris is trying to make a point about how PMI defines and explains these terms. But he’s fixated on arbitrary labels. To assume they’re inappropriate and then try to make sense of them just confuses me. If they’re wrong, just say they’re wrong and offer up the improved definitions, conceptual framework and explanations.

So project management, whether that’s managing programs, projects, tasks, activities, deliverables or recipes (just tossed that one in to see if you’re paying attention), as I’ve explained over the past several posts, has to have a tactical delivery component and, at some level and possibly formalized at some point in the future, the strategic organizational-benefit elements. It isn’t either-or. Though it may be temporally not now, but then.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (6 of 9)

Should project managers work to achieve effectiveness goals (value, functionality, business performance) or just stay with efficiency ones (on time, in budget, to scope, etc.)?

This is the sixth in my series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal. With this question, we transition to a new, much more comfortable, area of inquiry.

Is it possible to distinguish between what a project manager does and what project management is?

In these posts responding to Morris’ questions, I have generally taken a practical, realistic, down-to-earth perspective. In one way that makes sense: I’m a practicing PM who works in the enterprise; Morris is an academician. I am pointing out the practical, realistic flaws with what I see as his ideal vision. But that approach appears to put me in opposition to Morris.

And that is what is neither fair nor appropriate. I support his vision. It’s my vision, too. My comments are not for the purpose of shooting down and deriding Morris’ vision, but rather that in exposing the cracks, we can seal them and strengthen the foundation of a broader, more strategic profession of project management.

Mike Rother, in Toyota Kata (2010) describes the Toyota continuous improvement practice of establishing a target condition and then working to achieve it (chapter 5). The target condition has to be some better state and the approach for achieving it has to be unclear, to be determined. The target condition is some future ideal state that the worker then, in incremental, experimental steps, strives, with their supervisor, to achieve.

I hear in Morris’ questions: Are these the ideal states that the profession should be striving for (working toward) as the future of project management? If so, and I believe so, then what is the next incremental step to get us there?

I actually see us already progressing in the right direction, though fitfully and reactively, rather than strategically, proactively and guided by a philosophical/ academic vision. In the world of our past, companies were uncomfortable with change (projects), so they temporarily brought in specialists (PMs) to manage and drive the change. As companies become more comfortable with change, as they recognize that change is continuous and that it’s necessary for competitive advantage and survival, they are institutionalizing the organizational change capability into a permanent, operational component of the organization. It is called the Project Management Office (PMO).

With this evolution, the project manager role is changing. Historically, the PM’s value was as a hired gun brought in to deliver a higher-level vision – that is, deliver the tactical expertise for planning, managing and controlling time, cost and scope – for benefit of a change agent within the organization. This was how they were valued, rewarded, measured and compensated.

The PM of the future, though, will be a resource within the PMO. The PMO will be responsible for delivering the change and will have developed criteria and methodologies for doing so. The PM of the future will be rewarded, measured and compensated for compliance to and practice of the processes, use of the standard tools, and appropriate knowledge, skills and capabilities of the tools and processes.

So the flaw in Morris’ question, above, is that it should be “Should project management work to…” Project managers of the future will still do the same tactical activities they do now – maintain schedules, track costs, calculate earned value, identify and manage risks, etc. But they will do them following the proscribed processes of the PMO, rather than as craftsmen imbued with a mysterious skill. It is the PMO that will do the meta-activities of managing a project: Plan cost management, plan schedule management, plan risk management, plan procurement management, etc.

It is the PMO that will have the seat at the table to drive the enterprise effectiveness goals of the project, the program and the portfolio.

Regrettably, the poor PM of the future will not even have the golden triangle of constraints to point to when describing what they do. They will have to pull out a thick procedures manual instead.

The future is sunnier for the profession, but the professional suffers.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (5 of 9)

Does project management cover Estimating and Contracts and Procurement? Are they parts of the discipline? (Organizationally, they are often not treated this way.)

This is the fifth in my series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal. Maybe I’ll finish this before the anniversary of its publication.

This is one of Morris’ questions that is a challenge to grasp because it seems the question is broken. After all, Estimating is clearly defined in PMBoK planning processes for both cost and time management. And Project Procurement Management is one of the 10 Knowledge Areas. Therefore project management (at least, the PMBoK) does cover both of these topics and they are inarguably part of the discipline. What is Morris thinking?

Let’s think for a moment about how a government agency awards a contract for road or bridge building. The agency will decide the road or bridge goes here, gets a budget allocated (estimation), buys up the necessary land (procurement) and only then issues the RFP for the engineering, design or construction firm to put steel and tarmac where the agency already decided it should go.

Lest you think that technology (my domain) is different, for large projects it is normal for executives to already have a cost limit, expected delivery date, expectation of technology partner, and whether the project will be done with in-house, outsourced or consulting resources – all before they let the project start through the official project methodology, phases and gates.

Morris expands further on this: “similarly the project management team should provide input into commercial matters, beginning with the project strategy and the choice of contracting strategy; in particular, what functions to contract out, what resources are available, and how risk should be allocated. These typically come under the purview of the ‘Contracts and Procurement’ function but since they can all massively influence the way the project is managed, one would expect the project director (or equivalent) to be engaged, shaping thinking and decisions. The alignment of supplier aims and practices with the sponsors’ aims should be a major objective in this new environment.” (p18)

Are those activities project management? Arguably, they are general (operational) business strategy and planning activities when they are done as part of business continuity, operations, development and growth. But they are project management activities when done within the milieu of the project. Should general business activities be project management when, ex post facto, they were done for what subsequently becomes a project?

I think it’s relevant to note a similarity that, in context, becomes, I guess, an analogy. In technology, teams are generally matrixed and split responsibilities between projects and operations. The operations responsibilities generally include support and maintenance. Maintenance is planned and can be coordinated with project activities. But support is on-demand and, on occasion, team members have to respond immediately to priority one situations that can take significant time away from the project. And regardless of the project state, the support activity always takes precedence. Ops trumps projects. It’s just the way it is. The point being, when the question arises, above, of whether these activities are operations or project, maybe ops trumps projects applies there, too.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (4 of 9)

Should there be, resources allowing (personnel, funds), one [senior] person responsible for, and in charge of, the project from beginning-to-end? (What does ‘beginning-to-end’ really mean?)

Well, yes, of course. And with that I could be done with this post.

This is the fourth in my series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal.

The underlying intent of this question is, of course, much more complex and involved than a literal reading of the question indicates.

Morris, if I can presume to speak for him here, is implying that what we call project managers are only responsible for the tactical delivery of the project execution (monitor and control), but should be responsible for the strategic up-front initiation. What I don’t know is if he believes that the Executive Vice-President of Finance, who currently has those up-front responsibilities, should be labeled the project manager or just that the PM should be seated at the table when the EVP is thinking about initiating this project. I think realistic practice is that neither of those will (generally) happen any more than a department manager, who should be at the table when the executives are determining strategy for that department, will be there. (Though it may evolve that the Chief Project Officer (CPO) of the enterprise of the future is at the table.)

In a top-down, command-and-control organization, someone at the top decides something needs to be done, when they need it done by, how much they’re willing to spend to get it done, and, in many cases, various levels of detail about how it will be done. That executive who was there when the decision was made to start the project is responsible and considers the project benefit to them, so they don’t want someone else getting the credit for the project’s success. At the same time, that executive delegates, as they should, the tactical, day-to-day, delivery responsibilities of the project to someone who is qualified for that role and purpose. I’m sure it’s only coincidental that the executive now has a scapegoat if the project goes south (we had a great plan that showed it was a major benefit; it was only the delivery that failed).

So, executives should be held responsible just like bankers should’ve been responsible (i.e., paid the price) for the real estate collapse and financial meltdown, presidents should be held responsible for failed police actions and nation building across the globe, and officers shouldn’t get huge bonuses when their companies perform in the toilet.

I’m not being cynical (though I’m expressing cynicism with a broad, thick, dripping brush). In fact, that is the reality of political maneuvering and a demonstration of the skills that successful people have and are able to apply. If we called that top person a project manager and made them responsible, they’d still hire someone else for the delivery, delegate that responsibility to them and then take credit for the successful project while assigning responsibility for failure on the delivery technician, by whatever title. Label the boxes what you will, it doesn’t change the results.

The bottom line is that I’m responsible for monitoring and controlling a project (which implies relative to a plan). Delivering a result, a solution, a product or a service is not project management, whether it’s for an on-going operation or a temporary endeavor. Those things can be done without project management (e.g., CMMI).

Something is a project if and only if there’s a plan for delivering it and there is monitoring and controlling relative to that plan. The project manager is the person doing that monitoring and controlling, generally as a delegee on someone else’s behalf.

That’s what I do.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (3 of 9)

When and how can we get away from a PMBOK that is based around what was chosen as being ‘the knowledge that is unique to project management’ rather than that which we need to know in order to develop and deliver projects successfully?

This is the third in my series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal. This post takes up the third question, above, which needs a bit of context.

In the earliest editions of what is now PMBoK, PMI’s focus was only on the knowledge unique to project management, thus excluding general and domain-specific knowledge (though even this has questionable elements). So, to know what you needed to know to manage projects, you had to know the PMBoK content as well as other stuff.

Morris has a fixation on PMBoK, even though he identifies several other BOKs (APM, IPMA, ENAA and EPMF) that don’t have this omission or limitation he identifies. What I find most frustrating, though, when reading Morris is trying to determine what he means by the distinction of knowledge unique to PM vs what “we need to know in order to develop and deliver projects successfully.” This is a refrain from both the PMJ article and the book, but I struggle to find concrete examples of content that should be present but isn’t.

It’s frustrating because I want to agree with Morris that PMBoK is incomplete, but I don’t just want to know the disease, I want the prescription to treat it, too.

I think Morris is on much firmer grounding with his ninth question (to get ahead of myself) that challenges the foundation of PMBoK: is it a reactive response to what PMs do or is it grounded solidly and strategically on a valid logical/ philosophical model that defines and encompasses the PM domain. My interpretation is that PMI has been struggling over the past several years because their foundation is the Project Manager, but the future focus is on the PMO. That is, historically the PM was responsible for delivering the project and was therefore responsible for cost, schedule and scope.

In the future, the team and the sponsor will have responsibility. The PM will be responsible for (and measured by) following the processes and applying the tools that the PMO defines as appropriate within that organization for delivering successful projects.

PMI, thus, has lost its footing and is stumbling as it struggles to make this transition from the importance of the PM to the importance of PM processes. OPM3 has the potential to lead the way, but it goes back to Morris’ ninth question: is the PMBoK descriptive of what we do (and there are a lot of us doing a lot of different things called project management) or is it prescriptive and defining what is the domain and the boundaries of project management? The latter is strategic and provides the leadership and vision for the future. The former is historical and will be useful in a few years to analyze the demise of PMI.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (2 of 9)

If it does not cover the front-end (a) is it fit-for-purpose (b) do we need an enlarged discipline or body of knowledge to cover what we need to know about managing the overall project? (Since managing the front-end is key (i) in building-in value (ii)in building-in [or out] future problems.)

Morris, Peter. Reconstructing Project Management Reprised: A Knowledge Perspective. Project Management Journal, Vol. 44, No. 5, October 2013, p13.

In my previous post, I noted that I have started a series of posts commenting on nine questions that Peter Morris asked in his October article in Project Management Journal. This post takes up the second question, above, which is a continuation of the previous post: what is the “scope” of project management?

Some executives are tossing around ideas for boosting revenue. They float this idea. They float that idea. At some point, somebody says, “That sounds good. Let’s do a quick reality check to see if we should commit budget for it.” If it doesn’t pan out – if it’s dropped without going through planning, execution and commission – was it ever a project? If not, then when does something become a project? When does this activity transition from on-going operational strategic leadership to a temporary endeavor?

If it does become a project, the vision, exploration and creation were surely part of the project, as was conceptualization, strategy, and the operational activities of enterprise leadership that normally precede “Let’s get a PM assigned.” But are these exploratory and creative activities part of what we would call the project before the fact? If they are, should a project management professional be engaged at these early stages?

How many project ideas have you known to originate from speculation about spending: “If we do this project, we’ll be so much better off because our expenses will be $xxx.” No, the project driver for discretionary projects is revenue and the factor that chills the enthusiasm is spending. So it is that Morris talks about the front-end activities – the pre-project activities – that are not considered project management and are the responsibility of executive leadership, whereas the PM is responsible for controlling spending.

Yet, how can you separate the Yang of expenses from the Yin of revenue? It wouldn’t be a project if it weren’t for the expected benefits. But Brent Flyvbjerg lists a host of reasons why technological (longest, tallest, fastest), political (monuments and attention), economic (making money off the project) and aesthetic (design and iconism) sublimes can lead project originators to exaggerate the benefits and underestimate costs and difficulties (“What you should know about Megaprojects and Why: An overview,” Project Management Journal, April/May 2014, vol 45 #2, 6-19).

Further, as Peter Taylor explained in the December 17, 2013 webinar (PMI and INPDCoP membership required) “The Journey of Expectation Management” for the PMI Innovation and New Product Development Community of Practice, expectations (and constraints) for projects are often set and locked in before the project manager is engaged. Yet, as Taylor goes on to say, it is the PM who is held responsible for project failure (often true even when the product is a resounding success: the PM for the Ford Taurus project was reprimanded for going over budget; the architect of the iconic, and 1,400% cost overrun, Sydney Opera House was so publicly humiliated that he never led another development of consequence).

Think about a bridge design where an artist and a financier draw up a bridge concept, go through the business case approval, then only bring in the engineer to monitor and control the construction. Would you want to cross that bridge? When we come down to it, isn’t that exactly what we have with projects? Engineering is a professional discipline and has licensing, legal precedent and authority for being engaged in civil projects. Is that what it would take to get PMs engaged at the start? Is that what it would take to eliminate Chaos from projects?

Monday, May 5, 2014

Reconstructing Project Management (1 of probably 9)

Does project management cover the management of the project front-end, the definitional, development stages, or is it concerned essentially only with execution delivery? What should it be responsible for? How far does it stretch into concept definition at one end and operations at the other?

Morris, Peter. Reconstructing Project Management Reprised: A Knowledge Perspective. Project Management Journal, Vol. 44, No. 5, October 2013, p13.

With this post I embark on what I hope will be a series of nine posts, which diverge considerably from how I have historically presented content on this blog. My focus has been on PM Best Practices and, as a practicing PM, my posts – at least from my perspective – have been intended as practical guides for the functioning PM in the trenches. For the next couple of months, however, I’m going to wander into the (cue theme from The Twilight Zone) wilderness of PM Existentialism.

Peter Morris authored Reconstructing Project Management (2013) and was invited by PMJ to encapsulate the book for its readers. If permitted (I’ve asked the publishers of PMJ for permission, which is still pending, to quote from the article for this series), I plan to take nine questions that Morris highlights in the article (Figure 3 Current issues in project management as a discipline, p13) and add my commentary and color, hopefully without getting too lost.

However, I don’t want to give the impression that Morris’ article is these nine questions (which, by the way, are also on page 111 in the book) or, even, that they are the central theme. In the article’s eighteen pages, Morris condenses, presumably, the topics, points, arguments and themes of two-thirds of his book. I’m pulling these nine questions, then, completely out of context and I encourage you to read the article (and the book) to understand his thesis. When I read these nine questions, though, they spoke to me so deeply that I felt compelled to explore them beyond the (here I avoid the use of “mere” or “just”, maybe “unadorned” works) concrete expression that Morris has given us. Further, I believe there is a tenuous link to my series on Governance.

By tossing these questions, like grenades, on the floor without further expanding on them, Morris challenges us to face the assumptions and core values that define our profession.

Practically a post’s worth of preamble, so let’s get to it…

Enterprise leadership holds their quarterly off-site to review strategy. They return and the business line VP needs to replace the legacy, proprietary application with a cloud-based SaaS application that is the market leader. She assigns a director responsibility for accomplishing this, who engages a manager to lead the day-to-day tactical project delivery effort. The manager, following the company’s methodology, prepares a business case, a charter, a staffing plan and a time and cost schedule. These are approved by the Director and the project kicks off.

Who is the project manager for this project?

There is so much depth and complexity in Morris’ first question (above). When I took the PMP certification exam, the model project manager we were told to visualize was the construction PM for whom a sponsor provided money in exchange for a commitment to scope and time. At that time I worked for a large IT consulting and project management company with aspirations of offering clients responsibility to deliver their projects – high value contracting based on responsibility for deliverables, not time and materials.

Fast forward to the world of today: that company is limping along as a has-been, ne’er-heard-of-‘em firm and the PM community is bifurcated between reality and wants. As a profession, we want responsibility for the projects, but in an enterprise reality where, instead, we are just responsible for delivery for someone else.

Executives, managers, and operations leadership make the strategic decisions about what projects to run and have ownership of the operational project decisions (funding, scope, who will be on the team and whether to pull the plug when things go akilter). They don’t want the mundane tactical responsibilities (and risks) of project delivery, but at the same time there are three market factors that prevent the elevation of professional project leaders into that sphere. First, those operational leaders, having gotten where they are, are not going to trust someone else with the responsibility (and esteem) for success with their vision. Second, without projects, their jobs are just, let’s face it, boring. Projects are the spice to the same daily gruel they otherwise consume (and that consumes them). They live vicariously through our efforts.

The third condition that reinforces the status quo is that, if other project managers are anything like me, we love delivering projects and don’t want those boring, mundane operational responsibilities. We are too happy doing what we’re doing to want to trade this for the better world where projects are run by project professionals, but at the cost that we are tied down to quarterly budget cycles, annual personnel reviews (which, btw, should be annual budget cycles and quarterly personnel reviews), product support and maintenance, and enforcing all the petty practices and policies of the very model of a modern major enterprise.

So we take the bones we’re fed, we deliver the project to scope, time and cost (or, in a more mature organization, to process), celebrate the successful delivery, hand it over to them to support, and happily walk away to pre-storm with our next project team.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

What is the Most Important Skill for a Project Manager to Have?

Srini was a veteran project manager, but had never coached a junior project manager before. Sarah was a newly hired junior PM who had the right credentials and some experience. They were at lunch and Srini was describing the organization, the key people Sarah needed to get to know, and the background for their project processes. He was winding down when Sarah asked him, “What is the most important skill I should develop to be a successful project manager?” With the cynicism that years of political maneuvering had created, he thought, “How can someone be so innocent?”

The introductory paragraph is fictional, but I encounter this question regularly on LinkedIn group forums. I almost always want to throw my hands in the air and scream at the person who asked this question how they could be so naïve. Or maybe they are intentionally trying to cause trouble and controversy. Either way, the question is just So Wrong.

But then I sit back, let my breath return to normal, and pop a few Metaprolol (no, I don’t really do that). When I’ve calmed down, I realize there is an appropriate answer to this question. (Before reading further, do you agree that there is an answer? If so, what would you say is the most important skill for a PM?)

Let’s break this question down. A PM has to have a variety of skills across several domains: political skills (for navigating successfully within an organization), social skills (for dealing with stakeholders and motivating team members), emotional skills and technical skills in both the project and product domains. How can anyone say, conclusively, that any one specific skill in any one of those areas is most important over all of the others?

Further, PMs operate across many organizations, industries, cultures, etc. And whatever conditions may be appropriate with a specific team, they change and evolve over time. So how can anyone say, conclusively, that any one specific skill is most important over all these different environments and at all times?

Realistically, they can’t. Except…

Let’s take a momentary interlude here. In one LinkedIn discussion I followed on this topic, the comments eventually reached the consensus that soft skills were the most important skill set for contemporary PMs. I don’t disagree that soft skills are important for success, but, well, doesn’t the question assume that you have the hard PM skills? And that if you don’t have those, you’re not a PM and, thus, the value of soft skills don’t apply? Or, from another approach, can you say that, universally, soft skills are always more valuable than other skills in all environments at all times? I think anyone stating that is naïve. I mean that this way: there are environments and times that demand other skills that are more important (even if you don’t encounter those conditions very often) and, if you haven’t, then you naively assume that what you’ve encountered is sufficient.

Getting back to the discussion then, what is the answer? Is it flexibility? I think that’s a good answer. The PM often has to be flexible about how they mix and match the skills on a particular project or assignment, but, as good as this answer is, I don’t think flexibility is the best answer.

My vote for the best answer to the question “What is the most important skill for a PM?” is Balance. Balance so accurately describes what we do: we have to balance the inflexible demands of the iron triangle of scope, time and money. We also have to balance our approach to each project to deliver precisely the right mix of soft and hard skills appropriate to that situation. We even have to change at different times during the project which skills we present.

If I answer otherwise – if I name any one skill – that indicates that I believe that one skill is universally more valuable than any other skill, which just is not the case. It is the complete mix of skills, appropriately stirred, combined and presented in the right way at the right time that makes for a successful project manager over many projects over a long and successful career.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Tailoring Rule

"Professionalism is knowing how to do it, when to do it, and doing it.”

- Frank Tyger

When people choose to complain about project management, one frequent refrain is the burden and overhead of all that process. (I believe this is often a red herring, used by detractors who are concerned that project management best practices will expose their delivery weaknesses, but today’s discussion is to address the valid concerns for appropriate levels of process.)

A typical organization does many different types of projects of different sizes, styles and complexity. For example, an IT department might have projects for:

Infrastructure
New software development
Enhancement and maintenance
Product selection, acquisition and installation

Since all projects, regardless of size, style or complexity have many common elements necessary for success, does that mean that the organization only needs one methodology? Well, yes. And no.

If the organization has one bloated methodology dictating that all projects must produce all deliverables from identical templates, then those people who complain about too much process have a (partially) legitimate complaint. It’s legitimate because for most projects there will be too much process, but they are complaining about the wrong thing.

However, there are so many common and essential elements for project success that no organization wants to manage multiple (many? dozens?) of different, but similar processes. How to resolve this contradiction?

Both SEI’s CMMI and PMI’s PMBOK® Guide provide for Tailoring. Tailoring is an important but rarely formally practiced principle. In fact, in all of my years of consulting across a broad range of companies, I’ve encountered numerous cases where formal practices are ignored or circumvented because they are too onerous or just irrelevant, but in only one case have I worked at an organization that formalized process tailoring.

Even the description in PMBoK does little to suggest that the organization should establish tailoring in the formal processes: Initiation and Planning includes “guidelines and criteria for tailoring the organization’s set of standard processes and procedures to satisfy the specific needs of the project” (27). This description makes it sound like tailoring should be done inside the project to customize the organization’s standards rather than that the organization’s standards should specify the tailoring appropriate to different projects.

For example, an IT software development project, an IT software implementation project, an IT infrastructure project and a business process redesign project all have many similarities on how they should be run (they should all have charters, business cases, status meetings, risk logs, change management, etc.), but also significant differences (a new software development project won’t need the RFP activities in the implementation project and the BPR project will need a host of training and documentation activities that will not be needed for a back-office infrastructure project that has no end-user visibility).

Further, for a sufficiently small project, the charter could be fully contained within an email and the change approval process will need to be sufficiently streamlined, since long decision timeframes would jeopardize the delivery of the project. In contrast, a long, complex, risky project wouldn’t want to make change decisions too informally or too quickly.

The process burden needs to be appropriate to benefit the project – designating those best practices that best assure project success – while addressing project risk without over burdening the project. A requirements document for a small project might be a few pages, whereas the requirements document for a large, complex project could be a tome, with sections and subsections for business requirements, functional requirements, technical requirements, non-functional requirements, etc.

One size does fit all in project management, as long as that one size addresses the principles of successful project management. (Is that a tautology?) Organizations with best practices are clear about what processes are required and how those processes are customized based on type of project, complexity, size, risk.

The mistake often implied by those that complain about excessive process is that the situation would be better if there were no process. But processes evolved because lack of process (chaos) could not be relied on to consistently deliver successful projects, whereas the use of the processes improved the project success rate. The solution to excessive process burden (or bad process, for that matter) is not eliminating process. Rather, the solution is to fix the process through lessons learned and continuous process improvement.

Of course, organizations are even worse at lessons learned and process improvement than they are at projects. Look for my eventual series on lessons learned to address just this subject.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Command and Control

Command and Control: Nuclear weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the illusion of safety. Eric Schlosser. The Penguin Press, NY. 2013.

Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser, is not a project management book. Quoting the inside cover of the dust jacket, “Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years.”

The anecdotes, stories, and discussions in the book are about systems and practices in operations, maintenance and support. But projects culminate in systems and practices in operations, maintenance and support. Command and Control is a case study – or a collection of case studies – on topics near and dear to project management: risk, management and control, communications management, and lessons learned. I can recommend the book as a fascinating read for any number of reasons, but this is a blog on project management best practices. Let’s look at a few lessons for us: the few, the proud, the PMs.

Excluding military veterans, few of us will have the opportunity (if you call it that) over the course of our careers to participate in a true life-or-death project. But the servicemen depicted in Command and Control worked too close to a nuclear core sitting on top of an unstable mixture of liquid fuel and oxygen packaged in a paper-thin shell and buried in an underground containment vessel cum concentration chamber. The book describes occasions when the fail safes intended to protect them (and us) worked and, in minute by minute detail, one specific occasion when they didn’t.

Much of the book is about the history of super-secret military nuclear arms development and deployment during the cold war. It is worth reading this book to see how often it is one person, championing a cause against a tide of resistance, who is responsible for the implementation of a failsafe or risk-reducing feature that ultimately saved lives. I think this is an apt metaphor for my experience getting owners and sponsors to responsibly address both project and product risk.

I was also fascinated by the account of the unintended, unplanned testing of the limits of the launch complex blast doors – and the conflicted confidence, by the various players, in the structural integrity of those doors under catastrophic load. Not to mention the comical -- in other circumstances – decisions to override, bypass and ignore the available protective features. In our projects, how often, in our urgency to get a system out the door, do we face similar choices and make similar decisions? For what our project deploys to production, do we ever plan for operational systems management in a disaster under realistic, degraded conditions?

Another relevant theme is organizational decision making under stress. The US military operates in an hierarchical, command and control structure. But when she’s about to blow, that structure broke down because of both communication limits and independent agency. The fog of uncertainty when radios don’t work, the most knowledgeable person can’t be reached, the tools don’t give the information needed, leadership is communicating conflicted priorities, and different experts give contradictory advice at high volume, means that wrong decisions will be made – at all levels up and down the line. Further, the guy in the bunker, face-to-face with the devil, may decide that he knows better what to do than the general sitting safely under a far-away mountain. Or he may decide to follow orders anyway, despite knowing it’s the wrong decision. The book tells the tale of a real event, so there is no magical fairy tale ending. We as PMs need to understand that, for all our expectations that the team will follow where we lead, those team members are each independent agents with their own motives, priorities, and interests that may – or not – coincide with ours.

Another theme we can learn from is the lessons learned result. It’s disappointing that over 50 years later, we still haven’t learned to address the systemic root cause of a failure rather than blaming the grunt on the ground. After all, fixing the root cause means addressing a capability that management and leadership is responsible for; blaming the grunt deflects the attention away from the upper castes. This is a topic I am preparing to take up at length in the near future.

We as project managers have two levels of learning from Command and Control. One is that we can see how things really work when the fan is spinning – it isn’t clean, it isn’t pretty, and it’s not like they describe in the textbook. Just as importantly, we should also pay attention that our projects, which end and we walk away from, produce these things that people have to live with and work in. It was projects that built the Titan II missile, the launch complex, the operational processes, and all the complex and complicated pieces that came together and, well, blew up. It was our professional ancestors that built these products and systems. What will our progenitors a half century from now be reading about us?

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Conflict

"All polishing is done by friction. The music of the violin we get by friction. We left the savage style when we discovered fire by friction. We talk of the friction of mind on mind as a good thing.”
- Mary Parker Follett

“Conflict is as inevitable in a project environment as change seems to be” (Vijay K. Verma, The Human Aspects of Project Management: Human Resource Skills for the Project Manager, Volume Two, PMI 1996). So begins chapter 3 on Understanding Conflict. (I have a hardcopy of the book around here somewhere, but for my refresher for this post, I re-read chapters three and four from PMI’s eReads member benefit.)

I completed my five-part series on governance in the project context and project conflict seemed the natural successor to that series. After all, putting a governance system in place establishes a state of conflict that is beneficial to the project. A good project manager and a good PMO will understand the different types of conflict and know when and how to use them for the project’s benefit.

I’ve worked with many managers and project managers that are conflict averse. When I bring it up with them and point out what they are doing, they often readily acknowledge what they are doing and are still hesitant to change. This style is consistent with the earliest management and project management practices, which was to avoid or reduce conflict.

Eventually, accepted practice was to allow natural occurrences of conflict to develop, the behavioral view. The latest practice, the interactionist view, is to encourage appropriate conflict, much as implementing project governance creates a conflict between the governance team and the project delivery team, that, when done properly, benefits the organization and the project. Verma goes much further into these three views.

The whole notion of stimulating conflict is difficult to accept because conflict traditionally has a negative connotation. However, the interactionist view encourages conflict. There is evidence that, in some situations, an increase in conflict actually improves performance (Verma, ibid, chapter 4). However, too much of anything is detrimental. They key is finding the proper balance (foreshadowing for a future post), as shown in this table from Verma’s book:

Table 3.1: The Value of Conflict
Positive Aspects	Negative Aspects
Diffuses more serious conflicts	Can lead to more hostility and aggression
Fosters change and creativity as new options are explored	Desire to "win" blocks exploration of new opportunities
Enhances communication if both parties are committed to mutual gain	Inhibits communication; relevant information never shared
Increases performance, energy, and group cohesion	Causes stress; creates in unproductive atmosphere
Balances power and influence if collaborative problem solving techniques are emphasized.	May cause loss of status or position power when both parties take it as a contest of wills and strive for a win-lose outcome.
Clarifies issues and goals Negative Aspects	Real issues overlooked as positions become confused with personalities

So what is the best practice? Expect conflict. Find the proper balance between avoiding conflict and stimulating conflict. This means both averaging toward the center of the spectrum, but also having a high deviation. This way, conflict management becomes another tool available for you to apply appropriately as conditions warrant.

So are you a conflict traditionalist (conflict is bad), a behavioralist (conflict is natural) or an interactionist (conflict should be encouraged)? How about the management and leadership (these, of course, are two different groups) of your company? Does that explain your company’s performance?