Can Your Project Managers Actually Manage?

Let me begin by saying that the Project Manager Professional designation, or PMP® is a great idea. All certifications are aimed at ensuring competence in the area of certification. However, we know that there are incompetent practitioners of all professions, including medical doctors, engineers, and certainly project managers.

The big problem is that the only efficient way to test a person is to administer a test of knowledge. Skills testing is far more difficult. Yet this is exactly what sports teams do. They watch potential players perform and choose those who have potential to contribute to their success. Can you imagine a sports team giving potential team members a 200 question, multiple-choice exam and selecting those who make the highest scores?

This confusion about knowledge versus skills is also one of the problems we have with training programs. Senior managers insist that they cannot afford for their people to be away from the job for several days at a time. So they want to shorten our seminars from three days to one day. I always ask what they want the trainees to do when they are finished. "We want them to run projects," they say. My reply is that they will not be able to do so in a single day of training. They then want to know what the trainee will be able to do, and I reply that they may be able to talk about project management, and not very intelligently at that.

When you consider that most projects waste around 30 percent of every dollar spent, and that can be tens of thousands of dollars, in my opinion you can't afford the false economy of not providing the right training for them. Perhaps a major reason for our problem is that we believe imparting knowledge is giving them the basis for being good managers. It is not! Managing is a performing art, which means it is skills, and you can only learn skills by practice, not sitting in a lecture. Until we learn this, our managers will continue to receive the wrong kind of education/training.

Training is not an expense, but an investment, and if it is done correctly, the return on that investment is huge. You can't afford the cheap approach, unless you don't care if your organization suffers huge losses because of incompetent management.

Slange,

Jim

® PMP is a registered trademark of the Project Management Institute.

Projects Don't Fail--People Do!

I know, it may be semantics. We talk about project failures. And maybe we know deep down inside that it is really people who fail, but I think it is worth making that understanding explicit, rather than implicit. Because if it remains implicit, then it is very easy to bypass accountability for failure. And the people who fail should be accountable for the failure, not some abstract entity called "The Project."

Someone at NASA once said that "Projects are perfectly planned to fail from the beginning." (I don't know who said it, but she/he should get a commendation for calling it to our attention.)

Let me give you an example. A team at a software company (all will remain anonymous, to protect the guilty) was given a project to do, and asked how long it would take. They were told that they had 10 programmers to work on it. They estimated that they would need about 20,000 programming hours to do the job, so with 10 programmers, it would take about 2,000 hours of calendar time, or roughly one year. So they optimistically announced that the job would be complete in a year.

Nobody bothered to actually create a proper work breakdown structure, much less a critical path schedule. They just launched the project. After all, what's important is getting the work done, and planning does not produce code.

Then the fun began.

The project leader discovered that a couple of programmers assigned to the job didn't know how to program in C+. The wife of another programmer--who was a critical player on the team--was experiencing a problem pregnancy, so he was away from the job a significant amount of time. Then there were technical difficulties caused by an unclear definition of exactly what the software was supposed to do (unclear vision, specs, and so on). To make a long story short--a very long story--the project took three years to complete, not the one year that was originally announced.

You could fill volumes of books with examples like this. It is not a cliche to say that, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Yet there are many managers who believe that planning is a waste of time. They also fall into the trap of saying, "We don't have time to plan--we have to get the job done." What they don't realize is that, the tighter the time frame, the more important a plan becomes, because you can't afford to waste any time at all, and only a good plan will help you minimize rework and false starts.

Before he became president, General Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." He was absolutely right. Your plan may be made invalid because of circumstances beyond your control, but the process of planning will usually enable you to recover much faster than if you were just "winging it" to begin with.

As a general guideline, one hour spent planning will save you three hours of execution time, and a corollary is that bypassing a few days of planning can easily cost you several weeks of execution time.

Projects fail because people fail to plan and execute them correctly.

Slange,

Jim Lewis

The Highly Effective Project Manager

I was checking Google's® keyword search statistics a few days ago and found that the term project management was entered over a million times last month. The term project management training was searched about 40,000 times. Now the Project Management Institute has about 300,000 members and Gantthead newsletter has about 500,000 subscribers. I think it's safe to say that project management is no passing fad.

Since I'm in the business of providing project management training, it is of considerable interest to me to understand why people want to pursue the profession (assuming that it is one). What I've found is that all too often they want to be project managers because of the status and (sometimes) higher pay that they can get as engineers, programmers, and so on. But they don't really have any passion for managing. (I wrote about this in a previous post.)

First of all, I don't think anyone ever got really good at anything that they had no passion for. But the second aspect of this that troubles me is that I meet people who have the personalities of a barracuda, and I cringe when I imagine being a member of their project team.

There are two things that I think must be true for an individual to be an effective project manager:

1. Have passion for the job itself, and
2. Recognize that project management is more about dealing effectively with people than it is about administrative work.

So I suggest that, if your passion is for something other than managing projects, you avoid the trap of becoming a project manager. The same is true if you don't like spending most of your day dealing with people.

But if you must be a project manager, for goodness sake, work on becoming a more effective individual first. Read Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and then try to make those habits your personal habits. Don't just read the book. You have to live it.

And you know the nice thing about this--even if you later decide you don't want to be a project manager, becoming a highly effective individual will be good for you for the rest of your life.

Slange,

Jim Lewis

www.lewisinstitute.com

www.drjimlewis2.com

The Sad State of Project Management Training

Perhaps I should have entitled this blog, The Sad State of Education In General, rather than just singling out project management training. The reason for the sad state of education is that very few subject matter experts (SMEs) know how people learn. Furthermore, they believe that if they impart information they have given you knowledge, and it simply isn't so. I can tell you that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi times the radius cubed. Wonderful, I've imparted information to you. But unless you know something about solid geometry, the information is absolutely useless, and certainly does not constitute any real knowledge.

Now as for how people learn, it makes no difference whether you are learning content or skills, you must ultimately apply or perform them in some way to really learn them. When you took math in school, the teacher showed you how to solve problems. Nevertheless, you didn't really know how until you sat down and worked through a number of problems. And the same is especially true of skills--you don't learn to ride a bike until you get on, fall off a few times, and over time learn to balance yourself. It is also very important to note that you can't teach someone else to perform a skill that you can't do yourself.

So back to project management training. I said you can't teach skills that you can't perform. Can you imagine a physician trying to learn surgery by just reading a textbook or being taught by someone who has never done surgery? A retinal surgeon told me (in the days when they still did surgery with a scalpel) that you learn how to perform surgery by watching someone else demonstrate, then by doing it yourself, and finally, by teaching someone else! This is extremely significant. I have learned more by trying to teach project management than I did when I was actually performing it.

Now this will sound harsh, but it is absolutely true: you can't learn how to be a project manager from a college professor who has never been one. Managing projects is all about people skills. How do you get people in your team to do what needs to be done when they often have no commitment to your project and you have zero authority over them? If you've tried it, you know the difficulty you face. Professors usually don't.

Furthermore, it is unfortunately true that many former project managers can't teach you either, because they approach the learning environment with a death-by-lecture approach, and they employ 400 coma-inducing PowerPoint® slides, which means they can kill you even faster than they could in the days before the technology came along.

So a word of advice to you: If you need training, select a program taught by someone who has actually been a working project manager. Find out how they teach. Ask for references from former students and also from the instructor's former employer (if they are new to the business). Find out whether it is worth your time. And find out whether your employer will support you in applying what you learn. If they won't, you probably should wait until you work someplace where you will be supported, because lack of support on the job is one of the major reasons why training appears to fail.

If you have found a really first-class program somewhere, that you would recommend to others, post a link to it in the comment section below. I'm sure other readers would appreciate the referral.

For suggestions on a project management curriculum, you can also visit my web site to download a brochure on courses that you will find helpful: www.lewisinstitute.com.

Let me hear from you,

Jim

Project Management Is For Everyone

A lot of people think that project management skills are just for people who actually manage projects. That's not true.

Actually, the tools of project management were invented by manufacturing people to help them manage work in general. Thus, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) was developed to help identify every single activity that had to be performed to produce a manufactured thing of some kind. Schedules (critical path in particular) were developed to sequence that work. And earned value was originally a standard cost system that allowed industrial engineers to track performance of workers in manufacturing. Scheduling may originally have been part of operations research, but in any event it was an attempt to reduce throughput time.

So the methods of project management are actually just a collective set of tools to enable the management of work--of any kind, including such non-mechanical things as surgery, marketing projects, weddings, and so on. For that reason, everyone can benefit from applying the tools of project management to their project work.

One of my books, Fundamentals of Project Management, published by AMACOM, may be just right for a novice, as it presents the tools in a very non-technical way. For the individual who is actually managing projects as a career, my book, Project Planning, Scheduling and Control, 5th Edition, published by McGraw-Hill is more appropriate.

Just one observation, no matter what level of project manager you are: If you have no plan, you have no control of your project work--by definition! That hardly makes sense if you want some assurance that you can make your targets.

Happy planning!

Integrity in Project Management

A friend was telling me that a young Arthur Anderson was told by his boss to fake some numbers. Anderson refused. He said that an auditor was bound to report honestly, not manipulate the data. In other words, he had integrity.
Early in my own career, I gave my boss an estimate for how much a project would cost. He protested that the numbers were too high, and said I should be able to do the job for less. My team and I had worked very diligently to develop those numbers, and we felt that they were as accurate as we could make them, given that all estimates are guesses that are based on whatever history you have.
The boss gave me a good brow-beating. He said that if the cost of the project (which was to develop a product) was as high as I claimed, he would not be able to get a satisfactory return on the investment. I replied that I could not help him with the ROI, and that I would not commit to a lower number. In fact, I told him that he would have to get another project manager if he felt strongly that the job could be done for less. With that, he accepted my numbers and asked the company if he could do the project with a lower projected ROI than was normally required. They agreed, and we did the job. Several years later, he got out of the market he was in because he could not sell enough product to get the returns required.
The point is that he made a business decision based on what I gave him as an estimated development cost. It may sound like I was being insubordinate to refuse to commit to a lower number. Had I done so, however, it would have made the situation even worse.
It is the responsibility of a project manager to provide estimates that are as accurate as possible and to stand firm on them. Business decisions are made based on what we tell senior managers. If we provide them with inaccurate data or facts, they will make incorrect decisions. It's a matter of having the integrity to stand fast.
As someone once said, "I can always get another client [or job], but once I lose my integrity, that's it. I can never get it back." Do you have the integrity to put your job on the line?

Success Keys: Compelling Vision

This is the first of the keys to having successful projects--you must have a compelling vision. That is, the project must be one that will produce an outcome that people find exciting, challenging, and worthwhile. Clearly, whether people find a project exciting will depend on their own internal motivation, so a project manager needs to understand team members in order to select those who will be excited to be part of the team effort. As I have told my seminar participants, there are people who love climbing cliffs. I am not one of them, as I have vertigo. So I would not be excited about a project to scale Mount Everest or even one of the cliffs in my Asheville area, and there are many of them.

But the last project I managed was to develop a state-of-the-art communications receiver which would be used on large ocean-going ships, such as oil tankers. I loved that job. So did members of my team. There were several challenges that made the job fun for engineers. We had to

1. Be able to manufacture the radio for 30 percent less that the model we were replacing.
2. Have it tune in 10 Hertz increments instead of the 100 Hertz increments that the old model tuned in.
3. Improve other performance characteristics, such as selectivity, sensitivity, and so on.
4. And we were trying to out-class our competitors!

Other Examples
If you think about other projects that must have had compelling visions, many come to mind. One that I have always pondered is the building of pyramids in ancient Egypt. Contrary to popular belief, these were built mostly by ordinary Egyptians, not slaves. We know this because they lived in little villages near the pyramids that they were building and left records of their work.

Another example is the space program. In the early days, the challenge was to put a man on the moon and get him back safely by the end of a decade. Part of the challenge was also to beat the Soviets, who scared us when they launched Sputnik.

Finally, a current one is the challenge facing Alan Mulally, now that he is CEO at Ford. The crisis facing the auto industry is huge, and in a recent Fortune Magazine article, Alan presented his vision for what he wants to achieve with the company.

Two Kinds of Visions
There are actually two kinds of vision that are important for project managers. One is a vision for the outcome of the project--that is, what the project is going to deliver. The second vision is about how people will work together. This vision is equally important, because you do not get high performance from a team just because they are working on something they find exciting. If working conditions are bad, it will eventually kill their passion for the job. If there is a lot of interpersonal conflict, bad relationships with supervisors or clients, and bad treatment by managers, they will eventually give up.

Mulally's entire Working Together principles have to do with how people were to interact on the 777 program, and eventually in the entire organization once he became president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. These included such principles as everyone is included, whining is okay occasionally, and the data sets us free. At the height of the 777 program, there were about 2200 engineers at Boeing working on the job and over 97,000 people scattered around the world. Did all of them catch the vision? Probably not. But if the core team did, that helped to at least spread it to some degree.

Benjamin Zander
If you want to see a compelling presentation on the power of passion, watch the presentation by Ben Zander at the TED conference: http://tinyurl.com/n2huwa. At the end of his talk, Zander says he gauges how much passion people are feeling by whether their eyes are shining. And he goes on to say, if they are not shining, we should ask this question: "What am I doing or being that keeps my followers from having shining eyes?" It's a question we should ask constantly, and we should be surrounded by team members whose eyes are shining.

Warm regards,
Jim Lewis

(c) 2009 by James P. Lewis, PhD