The Project Management Manifesto, Part II
As you might have noticed by the title of this fair article, this is Part II of my Project Management Manifesto, about what it takes to be a Good project manager. If you missed Part I, which (hopefully) answered the question of what a project manager really does, I encourage you to jump back and have a look: at least 35 others in the world already have, so don’t get left behind.
I felt as if the project team had just been chewed me up an spit me out into the train to head home. They had decended into yet another level of disfunctional: The architect was expressing his creativity not so much in the design but moreso in the names he called the builder, the builder excelled only at shrugging their shoulders and telling anyone who would listen that they were being delayed, and one member of the team had either mysteriously disappeared or was simply ignoring us. The client threw petrol on the already smoldering issues by beating you on the head with reminders about finishing on time and following these up by throwing up roadblocks which usually involved hiding behind a gaggle of at least 37 stakeholders who all needed to approve everything down to the toilet paper holders. The project was failing, and I felt that somehow it was all my fault. I was in the middle of it all and at a loss to solve the problems, and felt as though I was doing a good job only of pointing the lemmings in the general direction of the nearest cliff. On time and under budget? I’d have been thrilled with being somewhere in the neighbourhood of both.
This shouldn’t have surprised me, as I’ve gone through a rough patch or two before. What I was having a hard time with, though, is how this could be happening now? You see, this was a relatively recent occurrence, and my ego was in shambles. Shouldn’t I have it all figured out by now?
Recent results indicated that this was not the case. I decided what I needed to do was to go back to the start, break down my experience and then pick through the pile to pull out only the important bits, the keys that would help me get back to being Good.
A long time ago, I was a know-nothing new graduate sitting across a massive rose-coloured polished wood desk from Jim, the President of the company. He loomed over me, looking on with an expressionless stare and listening as I nervously rattled on about all the important things I learned at university. When it came to the part of the interview where I got to ask a few questions, I swallowed hard and asked him this corker: ‘What’s your goal with the company?’
He paused, cracked an almost inpreceptable grin, and said, ‘To make lots of money’.
Thus my career began, with the bare minimum in the toolkit: my university book learnings, which amounted to very little, and my new found understanding of what it’s all really about: to make lots of money. From there I have been schooled by mentors with philosophies like ‘things will turn the corner’ (undoubtedly when things were or had gone to hell), was given books with titles like Now, Discover Your Strengths, and was indoctrinated into flavour-of-the-month philosophies like Total Quality Management and The Toyota Way. All this, an MBA, and umpteen projects of different sizes, types, and degrees of difficulty brings us to today.
Twenty years on I should be feeling pretty invincible, right? Set to cruise my way into directors positions, fame, fortune, and my photo in the Australian Financial Review along with some other successful white guys in suits. With my project going down in flames, though, I felt more like the only photo I’d be seeing more of would be my LinkedIn photo while I was trolling for a new job.
Running a successful project is never easy, and what makes it harder is that it’s different each time. So how can I distill that into a few keys to being Good? Certainly just sitting back and relying on the years that have gone by was a strategy that hadn’t served me well. I’ve thought and pondered and hollowed out my soul and come to a number of conclusions. I should start by saying that being a project manager is somewhat technical, however you can be good at the technical side of building or programming or whatever, but be a terrible PM. So while some technical skills are important, I think they are not as important as simply being a solid, productive manager.
That said, I’ve boiled down being a Good PM to four principles, and here they are:
You need to be ultra productive and efficient. Face it, either you’re on multiple projects and there’s lots happening between them all, or you’re on a single mega-project and there’s lots happening. To be Good, you need to stay on top, make sure things are happening, keep it all moving forward. My tips:
- Turn off your email. When you’re simply reacting to and being interrupted by what’s firing through the computer at you, you fail to take on the bigger, messier, and harder tasks that are often the important ones that really need your attention. I try to ignore my email for the first couple hours of each day to be able to focus on something bigger.
- Keep a list, and be aware of priorities. Always ask yourself — am I being productive, or just active? If you’re just being active, you’re not getting the high priority stuff done. And keeping a list will mean that you don’t have to remember. I keep a list, check it every day (sometimes twice) and find that it not only helps to keep me on task, but the simple act of writing the list helps me to always look forward, which is essential.
- Question all meetings. Meetings are a festering wound in the property industry. I find that many of my colleagues (yours truly included) spend half their productive hours sitting in meetings and listening to someone read from the minutes of previous meetings, and weekly or bi-weekly meetings are the norm just because that’s the way things have always been done. This kind of thinking is an extraordinary waste of time. I contend that one should never have a meeting without first questioning whether what the meeting is intended to address couldn’t be done so better or quicker or nearly as well in another way.
You need to be a jack of all trades, but master of none. Ok, there’s a tiny bit of technical stuff to this, but we’ll just dance around it. Project managers operate across multiple disciplines —amongst many things there’s a bit of finance, a little operations and understanding how all the different aspects of the project are meant to be working together and in what sequence, and even some strategy when it comes to things like stakeholder management and dealing with local Councils. As a PM, you need to be comfortable with all that. After all, you’re responsible for everything (and nothing). But don’t mistake this to mean that to be Good as a PM you need to be good at all disciplines. You realise you’re seldom the smartest person in the room, right? As soon as you humble yourself to that fact, become comfortable admitting when you don’t know what’s going on and with asking questions when this happens, not only will you find that the project will benefit because the questions will lead to more questions and getting to the heart of issues, but you’ll start learning new things by default. Learn to rely on the experts.
Stay Flexible. Being flexible is so important for all aspects of the work. For as much as you may want to take a cut-and-paste approach to projects and systems, in my experience this approach is littered with potholes. Automating some of the job is fine, however don’t take it to the nth degree by making up a template for everything and just turning the crank. This approach can get you to good, but won’t get you to exceptional. As I noted above, every project is different, and this also extends to every situation, every problem, and every client. I once worked as a client advisor on a project where the client wanted to be kept abreast of the details of progress every step of the way; this new facility was their baby. However, the project director only knew the mushroom approach to client management — feed them shit and keep them in the dark. He was the project director, and he knew best. His attempts to keep operating in this way only led to him alienating the client, who couldn’t wait to be done with him.
Projects are run by people. It’s a people business. As I noted in Part I of the Manifesto, working with people is one of the main things a PM does, and is the most important. This seems like a silly observation, as most jobs require working with people, but the way a project manager handles the team — diplomatically, fairly, positively — sets the stage for the project and separates the good from the fraught. The bottom line is that if you want to be Good, you have to be good at working with people, which takes as much time and effort as does learning how to build. Part of this is that you need to realise the goal of interactions isn’t about winning, the goal is a successful project. Further, you cannot forget that the members of your team are people and just because someone did something for you because it is their job to do it — wrote you a report, answered your question, etc. — doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say thanks.
As a corollary to this, Pick Up the Damn Phone (PUTDP). In our digital world, actually speaking with people is a lost art, however it is so useful not only for building decent relationships, but for helping you to get things done (being ultra productive).
I made small changes first. I started making more phone calls to ask questions, which helped me learn about and help in solving the important problems. I kept lists for myself, and lists for other team members to help keep them focused. The architect and the contractor then started getting along when everyone was focusing on what mattered. The missing team member turned up. The 37 stakeholders were still a problem, but with everything else at least pointing in the right direction, I was feeling less chewed up, and my ego was on the mend.
Just having 20 years experience and leaning on it is not enough. The science to being a PM is in being smart about how you’re expending your efforts, and in focusing on a handful of key principles. The art comes when the 20 years of projects, management philosophy mumbo jumbo and sage advice from Jim come together to fill in any blanks and make those principles hum.
I know that the lemmings will start heading toward the cliff again at some point, and hopefully I can keep them from getting to that point. However when they do I’ll be ready, because I know how to be Good.
Here ends Part II of my Project Management Manifesto. Stay tuned for the Epilogue, which ties up the What (Part I) the How (Part II) with some thoughts on Why — why should I waste time being a project manager anyways?
