Not Going to Davos

In keeping the austerity of our times, I also sent in my apologies saying that I didn't think it would be appropriate for me to go to Davos.

Questions a Change Agent Ought to Ask

Susan Cramm of Harvard presents interesting questions from the new HBR article "How Project Leaders Can Overcome the Crisis of Silence."  We are all familar with the type of statistics persented, that 70% of IT-enabled business initiatives fail or fall short of expectations.  The authors try to get project leaders to engage in five conversations to gain greater insight into whether a project is going in the wrong direction:

1. How often do you plan projects around how you would like the business to operate rather than the way it really operates?  How often are estimates and deadlines set using the PDOOMA methodology (PDOOMA - Pulled Directly Out Of My Ass)
   
2. How often is the Project Sponsor drafted, un willing or uninterested?  I've written on this before "Project Manager: Right Person, Wrong Title" and unless the Project Sponsor is fully committed and powerful enough, there is no amount of project leadership, management or funds to make a project succeed.
   
3. Are we faithful the the approval process?  How often do we follow a process when it's beneficial only to leave it when it's more expedient to cut corners?
   
4. Are we honestly assessing our progress and risks?  How often do we put in work arounds, short cuts or make desperate efforts to complete a deadline knowing things have been left out?  How do we communicate the issue after it has happened?
   
5. Are team members pulling their weight?  What can we do about it if someone isn't?
   

These are all discussions the project leadership should have.  Not only to gain insight into them, but also to find effective ways leaders can confess if the pressures of deadlines have forced them to take short cuts they would rather not have taken.

Firms Urged to Try and Keep Staff

This story from the BBC should give everyone cause to pause.  While it came out a couple weeks ago, it only recently came up as part of discussions with UK personal.  While the idea is well meaning, the reality is that firms have to operate within budgets.  If they are not generating enough revenue, they cannot carry staff.  While no one enjoys laying people off, if cash-flow cannot cover expenses, choices must be made.  Even if they are driven by short-term thinking, if you cannot meet obligations, there is not long term.

Redundancies should be a "last resort" as firms trim costs in the economic downturn, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says.  Planning for recovery by keeping staff is a better approach, it added, saying an average redundancy costs employers £16,375 before any savings are made. 

The CIPD has put together a formula to estimate the financial cost of redundancy:
(n × r) + (x × h) + (x × t) + ny (h + t) + wz (p - n)
n = number of people made redundant
r = redundancy payments
x = number of people subsequently hired
h = hiring costs
y = percentage quitting post redundancy
t = induction/training cost
y = percentage quitting post redundancy
w= average monthly staff salary
z = percentage reduction in output per worker caused by lower morale
p = number of people employed prior to redundancies

Source: CIPD

Layoffs should be the last resort, but however compelling the equation is in theory, it doesn't change the difficult reality many firms face.  No one like making these types of decisions, but the decisions must be made.

Classifications of Knowledge

Pawel Brodzinski got me thinking more. [Editor: How can it be more, it's a first] The question is  what is taught or can be taught by PM organizations and what is learned.  Long before I can remember understanding it, someone beat into my head that there are four classifications of what we encounter:

1. Data - This is everything available from what day it is, to footbal score to manuals skimmed through.
   
2. Information - This is data that is relevant, for example that PMI stands from Project Management Institute and what can be taught about methodologies.
   
3. Knowledge - This is the ability to use information in a meaningful way and must be learned.  For example, when you need to expend the effort to do risk and contingency analysis.  Someone can teach you what risk analysis is, but you have to learn when to do it and how long to keep doing it before it ceases to add value.
   
4. Wisdom - This is the experience gained from executing projects where you should have done risk analysis and having suffered the consequences and also where you did risk analysis and it wasn't necessary.  Wisdom is the experience of having lived through the ramifications of knowledgeable decisions you made.
   

When I say there are limits to what you can get from PMI or any other framework or methodology, part of it is that you can only get data and information.  You must live through and experience projects to gain knowledge and be sufficiently tendorized to develop wisdom.

While it wasn't written about PM, anyone who has lived through the permutations and frustrations of projects can identify with the sentiment and understand of wisdom presented by William Blake (in 1796 or so) in The Wail of Enion from “THE FOUR ZOAS” 

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat, the nettle for a nourishing dainty:

I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a Poison Tree:

I have chosen the serpent for a counsellor, and the dog for a schoolmaster to my children.

I have blotted out from light and living the dove and nightingale,

And I have causèd the earthworm to beg from door to door:

I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just:

I have taught pale Artifice to spread his nets upon the morning

My heavens are brass, my earth is iron, my moon a clod of clay,

My sun a pestilence burning at noon, and a vapour of death in night. 

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,

Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath -- his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain. 

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun,

And in the vintage, and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn:

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,

To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,

To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season,

When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs: 

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;

To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter-house moan;

To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;

To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;

To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers. 

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill, 

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, 

and the soldier in the field when the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead:

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity --

Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.

Concerns about Emphisis on Project Management Methodologies

Paul Ritchie at Crossderry Blog has pushed me to think more clearly about the structures and guidelines in various approaches to project management.  I'm not trying to downplay PMI or any other methodology. PM is an evolving discipline. The structures and guidelines put forth by PMI, CMMi, PRINCE2, ITIL etc are important and have personally helped me immensely. 

My concern is that the structures and guidelines of PM (Project Schedules, Risk Management etc.) are the easy parts. As so often happens, people focus the most attention on making the easy and quantifiable things easier. Often what is most important are the non-quantifiable things. For lack of a better word, judgment. Warren Bennis has a beautiful description of judgment, something like: 

Judgment is like the Yeti. You can see it's footprints, but you never see the Yeti. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, PM has been linked with technology.  For large IT implementations, it's indispensable. But I'm not sure that link is beneficial to its development as a management discipline. Talk to someone in the construction industry and they will tell you a totally different story about PM. Talk to a wheelman at a restaurant. The wheelman is the person who makes sure that everyone at a table gets their dinner at the same time and at the same temperature. Talk to someone in the movie industry about making a movie, and they will all tell very different stories about what is essentially project management. Wouldn't those insights do more to further the discipline of PM then the refinement and codification of the structures and guidelines of PM? 

Fortunately or unfortunately, the people who have the most interest in furthering the discipline of PM are the people who have based their careers around training, consulting and perfection of the mechanistic elements of PM. Those are all important skills, but they are skills that downplay the art and the judgment aspects of PM. From my experience, the more I see PM structures and guidelines, the fewer footprints I see from good judgment.

A perfect example of where structure and content are perfectly merged and judgement is totally missed is provided by America’s Finest News Source (The Onion) in Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

Photo Credit: CG

How Do You Measure Time and Why?

The greeks measured time in two ways.  Chronos, the quantitative measure of seconds, minutes, hours and days and Kairos, the separation between two moments of important opportunity or discovery.

It’s easy to measure chronos, every project schedule does that with the help of every clock.  How many hours, days, weeks months will that task take?

Kairos moments of great advancement or great breakthroughs.  It’s no more possible to plan that then it is to plan when you’ll meet someone and fall in love.

Do we measure chronos and hope for kairos? 

What Project Managers can Learn from Day Traders

A Little bit about Day Traders

In the world of financial services, day traders have existed since the first days of formalized markets.  What distinguishes a day trader is that they have to close out all their positions every night.  Meaning, they start with everything in cash in the morning and end with everything in cash at night.

So, if I’m a day trader and I start with $1,000,000 in the morning and after I close out all my positions I have $1,200,000, I made 20% on the day.  If this happened, I would be an extraordinarily happy person.

A day trader will make thousands of trades in the course of a day.  They watch what’s happening on the market and try to get a sense of the direction it is going in, and with this sense stay one step ahead of the market.

If they see a gap between the price someone wants to buy a stock at and the price someone else wants to sell a stock at, the day trader will try and fill that gap and make their profit in the process.  It is a very fast moving world where one succeeds figuring out what’s happening before other people do.  If you get it right, you can make a lot of money.  If you get it wrong, you lose a lot of money.  And every day, at the close of the day, you know the score.

What Project Managers can Learn from Day Traders

Project Managers try and makes sense of what is happening on a project.  They understand where the project is supposed to go, they try and understand where the project is going, and they try to fill the gap so the project goes in the right direction.

Things to think about:

• If you had to close your position every day, how would it look?
• If you resolved everything you did in the course of a day into one metric, like a day trader does money, what would that metric be?
• Would you want everyone on the project and at the company to know that metric?
• How would that change what you do?

Inquiring minds want to know…

Henry Ford would tell you, Methodologies (PMI, Agile, PRINCE2, etc.), like History, are Bunk

Dr. Martin Luther King used to end speechs by quoting a prayer from an old slave preacher.  It’s an apt description of approaches to projects today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

On July 15 2008, PMI presented the finding of their four year, $3M study looking to see if project management added value. You can see their presentation here: PMI Presentation.  What did they find?  Dr. Janice Thomas and Mr Mark Mullaly found what most of us know; PM is messy, painful and immature, but what are the alternatives?

PMI, Agile and PRINCE2 all try and provide methodologies or frameworks to increase the chances of project success.  This is difficult as projects often pull people from different departments together to work on a project. While that is what the project requires to be successful, what does that mean for the people pulled from the different departments? Is the project of primary importance to them or is what’s happening in their department of primary importance?

Business in Silos
When the modern corporation was formed, different departments were organized around specific functions. Accounting, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Operations and even IT all had separate requirements, required different skills and had different, recognizable purposes. These departments offered structure, communications channels and common ground which was the basis for working.

Large projects rarely fit in any of those silos.  People are drawn from across the organization, often temporarily, to work on that one project. Where is the common ground or structure?  Where does their loyalty lay?  Can any externally supplied methodology or framework replace corporate power, communication and funding structures?

What is Project Management?
According to the PMBOK guide, “Project Management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.”

Whether constructing a building, making dinner or developing software; there are processes that will help one be more successful. At its core, that is project management.

Different Industries are Different
Is the process for constructing a building the same as the process for making dinner? Is it even similar to the process for developing software? No, the processes must be different. Are the skill sets required to succeed at each step similar? No, safety concerns in construction are obviously different from cleanliness concerns in cooking or complier concerns in software.

Can the Processes in One Make you Better in Another?
The roots of project management probably come from construction. The Romans realized foundations were needed before building walls and roofs. Specialized skills and the coordination between them are as appearant in the Roman Coliseum as in a modern sky scrappers.

At a very generic level, the ideas of critical paths, deadlines and dependencies may cross industries, but do the specialized skills to be successful in each area align? No. Safety concerns in construction are paramount. Cranes falling in Houston are catastrophic to that project, but not a concern to someone running a restaurant. Cleanliness hopefully is an overriding concern to the restaurant owner, but unfortunately isn’t so critical to software developers.

What is Project Management?
According to the PMBOK guide, “Project Management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing.”

Whether constructing a building, making dinner or developing software; there are processes that will help one be more successful. At its core, that is project management.

Different Industries are Different
Is the process for constructing a building the same as the process for making dinner? Is it even similar to the process for developing software? No, the processes must be different. Are the skill sets required to succeed at each step similar? No, safety concerns in construction are obviously different from cleanliness concerns in cooking or compiler concerns in software.

Can the Processes in One Make you Better in Another?
The roots of project management probably come from construction. The Romans realized foundations were needed before building walls and roofs. Specialized skills and the coordination between them are as appearant in the Roman Coliseum as in a modern sky scrappers.

At a very generic level, the ideas of critical paths, deadlines and dependencies may cross industries, but do the specialized skills to be successful in each area align? No. Safety concerns in construction are paramount. Cranes falling in Houston are catastrophic to that project, but not a concern to someone running a restaurant. Cleanliness hopefully is an overriding concern to the restaurant owner, but unfortunately isn’t so critical to software developers.

Are the Methodologies Bunk?

History is bunk.  What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites? — Henry Ford (Source: NYT, October 28 1921, p. 1)
The methodologies can be a starting point, but too often its easier to focus on the methodological steps rather than thinking long and hard about what is happening on the project and the future.

• What is the business environment your company is working in?
• How is that environment changing?
• What is happening inside the business?
• What is the state of the project?
• Where does it need to go?
• What needs to happen to get it there?

Maybe they are not bunk, but rather like training wheels.

Project Manager - Right Person, Wrong Title

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.        - John Maynard Keynes

We are living in times of great change.  In two years, few of us will be where we are now.  This week I will publish five posts that attempt to live up to Keynes’ advice.  Please join me and be a little wild with your words.  Today, let’s think about and vote on what our job title should be.  Based on voting and suggestions, other options may be added.  While this election may not be as captivating as the US Presidential elections, let’s make it a relevant assault on our thoughts.

Before we begin, I have a confession to make.  I’m more technical architect than project manager.  I’ve project managed because the PM was “asked to leave” and being the architect, political expediency dictated that I fill both rolls.  If my view is jaded, it’s because I am.  I also have the scars to prove I’m not unfeeling.

Experience teaches that we should beware of fancy titles.  They often forewarn of responsibility without the power to execute.  ‘Project Manager’ and its grandiose cousin ‘Program Manager’ are both wonderful titles, but do they accurately represent the job?

Please consider the following and vote:
Project Journalist
In an ideal world, the senior person responsible for suggesting the project and getting the budget should have their future with the company tightly linked to the success or failure of the project.  If the project succeeds, they should get bonuses and recognition.  If it fails, they should forfeit this year’s bonus, return the previous year’s bonus and lose 10% of their salary to recompense the company for some of the project costs.

The project sponsor would need someone who could give them an accurate picture of what is happening on the project.  Where schedules are, who’s confident, who’s nervous, where are things going well, where there are problems and maybe even well thought out ways to improve.  A project journalist: someone who is savvy, interested in seeing the project succeed and capable of providing an unbiased account of what’s happening and why.

Project Scapegoat
Honesty is the best policy.

Project Enzyme
Enzymes are biological catalysts, or chemicals that speed up the rate of reaction between substances without themselves being consumed in the reaction. (Source)
This would be the perfect title if it didn’t have the worst abbreviation – PE.  Consider the following:
•    “Oh god, you’re the PEe on my parade.”
•    “Oh look, it’s the PEon.”
•    “Don’t look now, but here comes the PEze Corp.”
•    “Honey, I got promoted!  I’m a PE!… Why are you looking at me that way…Where are you going…”

Project Manager
Voting is strictly anonymous, so no one will know the troglodytes who vote for this title.

Other
If you have other suggestions, please make them comments section.  Meaningful additions will be added as options. Think of this election as being like Illinois politics- vote early, vote often, VOTE HERE.  You don’t even have to pay…