What should you look for in a project?

Many projects fail and many projects are going to be dropped.  Many of us will be handed projects we have to manage, good bad or otherwise, others will scramble to find work, so this question maybe pointless.  But it's not a pointless question, I think it's the most important question to ask.

Three elements determine a projects success more than anything else:

1. What is the project going to do?
   
2. Why is the project doing it?
   
3. How will the project be done?
   

PMI and Agile and other approaches dwell on the "how" element of project management.  This area is important, the devil is in the details.  However, I believe the other two elements: 'what is being done' and 'why is it being done', will tell you more about a projects chances of success than 'how it's being done'.

What are we trying to do?  

Is the project going to increase sales?  Is it going to improve productivity?  Is there enough real value in the outcome to justify the costs and keep people focused when the environment changes.

If you're wondering about this, think of it this way: If our company's stock price (or sales) fall by over 50%, is what we're doing compelling enough to continue the project?  If the answer is anything other than an unambigious "yes", think long and hard about whether you really want to devote large parts of your life and energy to a fantasy.  

My old boss drilled into my head that the difference between hallucination and vision is whether its worth the effort. [Editor: Funny, your dates give that reason for dumping you.]

Why is the project being done?  

If it's some managers pet project, even if that manager is the CEO, the chances of it's successful completion drop dramatically.  If the devil is in the details, god is in the "why".  If the "why" is compelling enough, almost any project will find a way to succeed.

There are two really compelling whys:

1. The project will increase sales.
2. The project will decrease costs.

If one or both of those goals are intuitive, obvious and achievable, the projects chances of success are excellent.

I'm all infavor of understanding the "how", but if you can pick which projects you work on, think about the "what" and they "why" too.

Is it the Environment or the Actions which Make You Successful?

If you want something to be successful, do you create the environment or pull the trigger? If you are going to have a successful project, the correct environment needs to be created. Pulling the trigger is nice and that is what people will notice, but success depends upon preparation. That preparation is rarely noticed. The most aggressive actions in the wrong environment end up looking silly.

Think about it this way, do forest fires occur when someone carelessly throws away a match? Well maybe. If you throw away a lit match in a green forest with rain falling all around you, it's very unlikely a forest fire will result. If it is in the middle of a heat wave with the grass burnt brown and hot Santa Ana winds blowing at night, a roaring forest fire may result. What is critical is the environmental conditions in which the match was thrown.

It's the old line about the straw that broke the camels back. Straw is essentially weightless, but under the right conditions, it can wreck havoc. Maybe those conditions are an overloaded camel or some other environmental situation.

If you want tremendous results, look at the environment, the necessary preparation to succeed within that environment, get the preparations underway and then at the right time, pull the trigger.

Have You Prepared Yourself for the Opportunity to be Lucky?

Someone once said that luck is the intersection between preparation and opportunity. If you prepare yourself and hit on the right opportunity, you have made yourself lucky. Congratulations, you are participating in a good life. You should be happy and your friends should be happy for you.

If you want to create something, doesn't it take more than luck? You need an idea for what you want to create. You need a plan and to know what the plan will require and whether it's feasible.

If you have a feasible plan, you need to find the missing pieces. When you find the people with the correct preparation to complete your plan; you need to articulate it in such a way that, it is in their best interest to make your plan succeed. They need to see your plan as their opportunity to make themselves lucky.

If the plan requires capital or assistance to be successful, then everyone needs to see how it benefits them to have your plan succeed. They all need to provide input to fill in the missing pieces so the plan has the best chance of success.

Finally, you must have enough time. It takes time to come up with an idea, make it feasible, find the right participants, get meaningful assistance, refine the plan and then execute it successfully. All of these things are important, but they all start with you. Have you prepared yourself for the opportunity to be lucky?

Photo Credit: Eric Lafforgue

What Makes a Project Succeed? The Project or the Management?

What is it that makes a project succeed? Is it the methodologies, the risk analysis, the reporting, the communications ability and talents of the managers or is it the project? This question came up as a result of a discussion about a story that Richard Feynman told, explaining what he called Cargo Cult Science. The story goes as follows:

In the South Seas, there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

How many project are really important or are there times we're waiting for planes to land?

Photo Credit: escapista

Are You a Tribal Leader?

How does a manager get their power? Maybe it's organizational, maybe it's access to information, but if you're on a project team to initiate something in a company, it comes from the people on your team. Do you understand the stages and dynamics of the team interactions?

Dave Logan has a great book out discussing different team stages and their dynamics. I consider Dave a friend with great insights. [Editor: Yea and you've also deluded yourself into thinking Natalie Portman would be your friend.]

Working with BNET, Dave's released a video describing these stages.

Briefly, the Five Stages are:
1. Life sucks.
2. My life sucks. [Editor: Working with you, that's me!]
3. I'm great.
4. We're great.
5. Life's great.

Check out the video and buy the book. You and your teams will be more successful.

Poker and Project Management

These two are at the opposite end of the spectrum. PM is about planning, critical paths and resource allocation. It is logical, analytical and linear. Poker is about intuition, betting big when opportunity’s ripe, reading situations and constantly readjusting.

Knowing how to do both is critical. Poker shows you a lot about someone. How they manage their emotions, act when the cards fall their way, act when they’re back is up against a wall. In PM parlance, how they manage risk and success.

More importantly, you see how people react under pressure, inside and outside their circles of competence. Intuition benefits you within your circle of competence. In friendly games, dealing and calling the game circulates. You can’t always play your game, but you can pick which games, which situations and how much you bet.

If you really only know five-card stud, you’re best off betting conservatively in Omaha or Pirate’s Booty, but then going big when the situation is right in five-card stud. Sticking with what you know gives your intuition its edge.

You’ll never win if you don’t play, but you won’t win consistently if you don’t play smart. Poker compresses all of life’s lessons into a brief, pressure packed situation. Is there a better way to learn about people?

How many PMs play poker with the team? Isn’t that what you’re doing on a project?

Photo credit: Wiseacre_Photo

Should You Manage People or the Environment?

Fish do not notice the water in which they swim.

Every company has a culture. There are myths and stories that are told which reflect the company culture. Its hard to define, its difficult to see and it affects every decision, project and action a company takes.

Is it easier for a fish to swim with the current or against it? Does the pounding rain, rocking waves and conflicting currents lead to curious and creative fish or small, protectionist and defensive fish?

Should you try and manage the fish or will you do better managing the environment?


Photo Credit: Olive Eyel

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part IV

Bill Miller and I have been talking about whether it is better to align people or let them align. You can read the other three parts here, here and here. Its been a great discussion, to make it clearer, I'd like to reframe my response. I always hate it when girlfriends do this to me, so I'm apologizing up front. [Editor: No need to apologize, I've been suggesting girls do that to you for years and it's benefited me tremendously.]

A little background on business
To get some insight to this, let's think about why businesses were really founded. The modern corporation came into being in Britain in the early seventeenth century, when some very intelligent and presumably humble nobleman noticed that there’s no correlation between intelligence and wealth. In fact, there may even be an inverse correlation, but I’ll resist the urge to rant about Paris Hilton and spare you my other Hilton-esque urges. [Editor: Please do.]

What these noblemen realized was that if they gave up a portion of their capital and entrusted it to an organized group of intelligent, motivated and hungry workers selected from the masses, they could make themselves much wealthier. A side benefit to this was the incredible improvement in the standard of living for those working for them. This is the genesis of the modern corporation.

Why is this important? What these noblemen and now women realized was that they had to set up the appropriate structures so the intelligent, motivated and hungry workers had proper direction and incentives to make the business successful and them wealthier.

Project Structures
Should teams self-organize? Absolutely. As a project goes along, the team needs the freedom to realign itself to meet the demands of the project. What an effective manager does is define the structures within which to project will operate to deliver what the business needs. If the project team has the correct direction and incentives, they will align themselves and the project has a better chance of success.

Does this make sense?

Photo Credit: Eric Lafforgue

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part III

Bill Miller, confound him, asked an excellent question. Normally I avoid people asking excellent questions, but as he paid me the compliment of commenting on what I wrote, [Editor: and I made sound intelligent] I felt obligated to respond. And it is an excellent question.

What is the essence of self organization as opposed to their being organized?
The crucial question is responsibility. If a group organizes itself, the group is responsible for the outcome. If someone else organizes the group, the organizer is responsible the outcome.

If ten kids get together to play basketball, then they choose teams, call plays and evaluate the results. If a coach organizes a team, schedules the practices and calls the plays, then the coach is responsible.

Accepting Responsibility Versus Diffusing It
If three people get together and start a company to implement a new idea for running projects, they are responsible for developing the products, the methodologies and finding the customers. If their products and services work, customers continue working with them and the company grows. If their approach doesn't work, the company goes out of business. Those three people and the others who join them are responsible. (This is how CAP was born)

If a company decides that it wants to implement a new program, it picks three people and tells them to implement it. The first thing those people do (if their smart) is ask for more money, more people and more time. In this situation, it is in the three peoples' best interest to make the program as large, as expensive and as time consuming as possible. If they are smart, they diffuse responsibility, but accept credit.

What Advantage do Entrepreneurs Have?
An entrepreneur and the people starting a company take responsibility for making it succeed. People taking a job are responsible to do what someone else organized for them to do.

Are both important? Absolutely.
Which one is likely to effectively produce defined products and services?
Which one is likely to produce innovative products and services?
Which one are you looking for?

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part II

Bill Miller made an interesting suggestion about self organizing teams. As kids playing baseball, the first decision was often who would be the two team captains. Those captains then picked the teams. Sometimes they were the two best players or more often the two players most able to help their team win. As kids, we knew what was important to win.

An interesting circle of dependencies. The kids picked the captains and the captains picked the teams. Almost an implicit contract. The group gave the captain the right to organize the team, but if the team didn't win, but they had to win to be captain in the future.

Captains changed. Sometimes one person was a captain for one sport, but not for another. Sometimes frustration over past performances lead to minor mutinies. [Editor: That will be fine, thank you.] Sometimes new leaders emerged as time went on. What's important is that the process was self regulating. If the captain helped the team win, they continued as captain.

Can Business be Self Regulating?
There are obviously differences between ten year olds playing baseball and business, though I suspect there are not as many as one might hope. How different would it be if the workers picked the manager? If the people working on a project were responsible for identifying the person most likely to make the project succeed, who would they pick? And why?

Often times in business executives picks a manager or team lead and then charge that person with assembling a team. What if the team were selected first and that teams first responsibility was to pick the team lead?

Have you heard of people taking this approach? How did it work out?

Do You Align People or Let Them Align?

People are inherently self organizing. Who did you make friends with when you were a kid on the block? When you went to school, there were many kids in school, but there were a couple who became your friends. Why?

Are you organizing your teams so the become more efficient and effective, like the swimmer on the US relay team? Or are you hampering the very creativity needed for great advancement? Not sure? Think about how insurance or stock exchanges came about.

Why is it Called a Stock Exchange?
In 1680 Jonathan Mills opened a coffee house on Exchange Alley in London. It started attracting like-minded individual who would buy and sell stocks and commodities. By 1698, John Castaing had started posting prices. Taking the street name, Exchanges were born.

A Second Example, Lloyd's
Likewise, around 1688 Edward Lloyd opened his coffeehouse, Lloyd's. It attracted merchants and ship owners. By 1692 it moved to Lombard St and was later incorporated as a society, and insurance was born.

Why Organize the Self Organizing?
If kids can organize a football game all on their own, why inflict organization? Because organized teams beat sandlot teams. Companies are organized to clarify roles and responsibilities. Accounting and Finance are different from sales. Likewise project teams are organized to ensure the right people are in the right roles with the right responsibilities. [Editor: Can't my responsibility be to roll you under?]

In your company and projects', are you organizing to amplify peoples' abilities so the team succeeds and wins the gold?

What do you Pay Attention to? VED Analysis

If a surplus of information leads to a deficit of attention, how do you decide what to pay attention to? In the world of projects and corporate communications, consider using the benefits of VED Analysis to separate what is Vital from what is Essential from what is Desirable.

VED Analysis
VED analysis comes from the world of evaluating what medicines are stocked, especially where trade-off have to be made and lives are at stake. It is a system of setting priorities and drugs are classified according to their health impact.

In the world of projects, where there are limited resources and steering committees or project leadership teams need to evaluate alternate approaches, what about using VED Analysis to classify options by considering what their outcomes would be? If the suggestion out lead to an outcome that is vital, how should that be compared to an outcome that is essential or desirable?

Would changing your analysis simplify the evaluation process?

Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

How to Engage People

Dennis D. McDonald in his always educational blog, got me thinking again today. He is absolutely right when he says that blogs would greatly improve communications between distributed teams. The real difficulty is getting people to participate.

The Problem
It is fairly well understood that in most social type application, from youTube to blogs, that 2 to 3% of the people contribute 90% of the material. The question is, how do you get the other 97% to engage? [Editor: 97% of them are intelligent enough not to engage with you. I'm so jealous of them...]

The Solution
You have to offer a way to get feedback in a simple way that requires little effort and recognizes their input. That is why we give people the ability to answer questions (multiple choice, percentage, yes/no) and rank people based on the accuracy of their answers.

As a manager, you don't know what they answered, but you do know that Dennis is more involved and knowledgeable than Andy. [Editor: That's not saying much. The slowest third grader is more knowledgeable than you.]

If you make things entertaining and engaging, people will participate. If you set up a little competition that rewards their engagement, they will engage more.

If you want to know more, email me: ameyer@go2incent.com

Why Thresholds are Important for Project Management

Barry Shore had an interesting post on why it's hard to pull the plug on projects. This caused me to think further about the importance of project thresholds. Threshold evaluations of projects shouldn't be continue/end project decisions, they should be places where the steering committee or project leadership team decides if the project should continue on it's current path or if one of the contingency paths should be followed.

What is a Threshold?
When you have a major project, there should be a few threshold gates (2 to 4) where the steering committee or project leadership team evaluates the progress of the project against predetermined metrics. A decision should be made about whether the project should continue on its current path or if it should go on a different path, a contingent path.

Going into a Threshold Meeting
Unfortunately, often threshold meetings are seen as go/no-go evaluations of a project. Really, they should be evaluations of whether the project is on the correct path currently or if one of the contingent paths or even a new path, is the better way to go.

One of these paths may lead to be project being rapidly ended, but that should not be the only alternative. There should be multiple contingency paths so the leadership can evaluate what is the best route, not whether the project should live.

Have you seen situations where companies have done this? What were your experiences?

Response to "Freedom is Overrated"

Professor Andrew McAfee has an interesting blog entry Freedom is Overrated in his Harvard Business School blog. In it, he discusses Facebook and Twitter and asks about their uses as business tools. In response to his question, I made several comments from my personal experience . I have found that social networks are used on the fringes of business, not in core businesses. I'll offer an example of the first, reasons for the second and insight into what I think will happen with them.

Use in the Fringes of Business
Please note that my saying "Fringes" is not pejorative, but rather it refers to the outer edges of the network, which is where the really interesting things happen.

One of the great things about FB (Facebook) is that it allows people to create verifiable and yet pseudonymous users. Furthermore, it allows you to create private groups, where only people who are known and invited can participate. Might there not be groups who want to securely blog and discuss events who would find FB useful?

Core Businesses Concerned about Social Tools
Many executives and managers in core businesses are rightfully concerned about the time wasting that accompanies FB and other social tools. There is also a security threat, which is very real. Additionally, there is the bigger issue, that there isn't a clearly defined business problem that social tools solve. Finally, there is the hurdle that many in IT view social networks, SaaS, etc as a threat. This is a valid concern, which, coupled with other issues, will probably keep social tools out of core business applications.

There are business leaders struggling to get blogging and other social/collaborative tools used in corporations. Their struggles are interesting to consider and offer interesting insights that the creators of social tools are not paying as much attention to as they should.

What I Believe will Happen
I do believe these tools will be used, but not in their social sense. They will be used as compliments to other processes (project management, corporate communications etc.) in modified forms. There are people whom I greatly admire who are trying to do this. They are the pioneers developing new, more efficient methods of solving business problems. I look forward to hearing about their successes and insights.

Is Adding Value the Correct Question to Ask about Project Management?

The Project Management Institute (PMI) is trying to prove that project management adds value. Their proof will come as a stunning surprise to no one. Project management is the expense of implementing a project, not the value. If the project is worthwhile, the project is worth the expense. At its best, good project management will minimize the expense.

Why Does Someone Start a Project?
People don't usually start projects for the joy of doing the project, they do it because they want the value that the project adds. For example, someone wants a bridge over the river, so they go through the process of planning and constructing the bridge. Does the construction add value? No, its the bridge that adds value, the construction is the expense of having the bridge.

When someone decides to implement an ERP system, they are not doing it for the pleasure of examining their processes, changing them and implementing them through some new piece of software. They do it because they want to plan their enterprise resources. The project management and the project are the expense of doing that.

What is the Correct Question?
Someone may ask if there is enough value in the bridge or in having their resources planned? These are excellent questions, which in many cases should be closely scrutinized before beginning a project. However, once the decision has been made to execute the project, project management is the expense of executing the project.

An expense is an expense, how can it have an ROI?

Why is Value so Difficult to Measure in Project Management?

People struggle quantifying the value of project management. Partly because people value the outcome not the process. When you go to a restaurant for dinner, you care about the dinner not the process by which it was made. Part of it is also the new projects are difficult. Making dinner is a known, repeated process. Implementing a large new application in your company hasn't been done before. That makes it difficult.

Change is difficult and no matter what anyone says about their experience, they've never made changes in your company before. I believe the measure of this difficulty was described a long time ago:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more doubtful in its success, more dangerous in its execution, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Their support is lukewarm partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the existing laws on their side, and partly because men are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience.” - Machiavelli

Its easy to forget that people have struggled making changes for a very long time. New technologies don't change that. Machiavelli wrote this in about 1515. Maybe things haven't really changed all that much in the last 500 or so years.

Are Project Managers Marooned on an Island?

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 paths for promotion. These departments offered structure, communications channels and common ground which was the basis for understanding.

Project management for larger projects, doesn't fit in any of those silos [Editor: we prefer the word department, thank you.] For a large project, people are drawn from across the organization, often temporarily, to work on that one project. Where is the common ground or structure?

Is PM unique?
PM often is unique, especially in organizations that are not focused around doing projects. Not only must the team get from NY to LA, but often times they have to invent the car, build the roads and put in the gas stations.

Not only does the team have to get from NY to LA, they have to go through the four stages of team development (Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing), usually very quickly.

What happens after the project?
All of this is very interesting, the question of whether project managers are on an island, but for someone with promotion aspirations, what is the next step after being a PM?

What have you seen?

Does PMI (Project Management Institute) find value in Project Management?

On July 15, 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

Their results reminded me of Churchill's quote about democracy:

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. — Winston Churchill

PM is messy, imperfect and immature, but what are the alternatives? I give Dr. Janice Thomas and Mr Mark Mullaly credit for presenting as objective of a report as they could. PMI gave them a lot of money to say that PM adds value. Reality is messy and that is really what their study found.

Consider that they looked at 65 companies in different industries, countries and organization structures. They looked at private, public, government and sole proprietorships. What insights do government findings offer to sole proprietorships? Equally, PM in office construction bears little resemblance to PM in software development. They also found that culture and context in China bear much resemblance to that in the US. All of these affect outcomes.

To me, what they did was the equivalent of asking 65 different groups of people who grow vegetables to comment on the value of water and fertilizer. I'm not sure what conclusions you could draw looking at my mother's tomato plants in Wisconsin, hog farms in Canada or government farming cooperatives in China.

I'll save researchers $3M and emphatically state that the empirical evidence shows that fertilizer is valuable.

That's pretty much what I think PMI found. Any thoughts?

Personal Project Planning

Have you ever interviewed someone for a project management position and heard them rattle on how great they think PM is? How it makes everything better? Everything more organized?

Here's a question to ask them. If they're married, did they put together a project plan and schedule for their wedding? If their single, dating works just as well, but the wedding a beautiful example.

If people are so enthusiastic about PM, why don't they use it in their private lives? A wedding would be the perfect situation. There are a large number of people, many things to be taken care of, a deadline, dependencies etc. Custom made for project planning.

Except, I've never had a single person who did it. If it's good for work, why don't people use it personally? If they don't use PM personally, how committed to it can they be at work?

Things that make you go, hummmmm