Donna Fitzgerald

Several months ago the Wall Street Journal and I were having what amounted to be a discussion on the elasticity of demand based on pricing.  They billed my credit card for a full priced renewal and I called and cancelled.  They then called me about once a month and tried to get me to renew with offers that included only a very small discount.  I continued to decline and told them I had been subscribing in the past at a certain price and I was absolutely unwilling to pay more.  I admit I almost changed my mind and relented several times in the 3 months I was paper free, but like everyone else in today’s economy I have less disposable income than I did before and I found it hard to justify exceeding my desired budget for subscriptions.  

While in the process of finishing up a note about ensuring organizations have competent project managers, I ran across an article that contended that project managers were so focused on the metrics of “on-time and on-budget” that they had become incapable of actually remembering that the goal of their project was to deliver strategic business value.  What was interesting about the article was that it wasn’t a rant against project management — it was a proposition for “strategic architecture” which to the author was the role of the person chartered with ensuring the project actual solved the problem/delivered the value it was supposed to when it was chartered.

I found this disturbing on so many levels I barely know where to start.  Mostly I guess I just find it terribly sad.  I believe in projects as a way to deliver strategic results.  I also believed (when I was actually managing projects myself) that at least 50% of my job as a project manager was helping the team make the decisions that needed to be made to ensure that we did deliver the results.  That meant a continuous process of keeping the big picture view of where we were going so we could nip here, tuck there, and add something somewhere else.  The purpose of the schedule and budget was to make sure we stayed in the parameters of the value proposition.  It was the fine art of making sure that all the pieces not only fit together  intellectually but that they came together in reality that always intrigued me.   The thought that people are now contending that PMs are simply incapable of doing the integration and value assurance piece of the project leaves me disheartened.

Of course maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong.  If I were starting my career all over again maybe I’d be a strategic architect and I’d be writing about the importance of having someone on the project that can do the value assurance work.  I’m not sure I’m willing to admit defeat on the project front yet, but since I’m a big advocate of always being willing to entertain the notion that reality is changing before my very eyes, I’ll just add this to my list of things to keep watching, just like any other risk symptom

“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”

Found this quote in a ComputerWorld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7).  While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to the essence of what Project and Program management of software projects is all about, especially since it so perfectly encapsulates the concept of servant leadership.

It occured to me that I write about servant leadership and yet it seems I haven’t really defined it.  From my perspective the concept of servant leadership begins with accepting that it is the team or the group or the society that creates the outcome.  The role of the leader then is to effectively empower or give “permission” to the “team”  to make the change and to remove as many roadblocks as possible so that they (the team) can be successful. And the secret to empowering the team is to respect them as the creative, valuable, talented people that they are.

If this sounds too touchy-feely for some of you let me assure you it’s not.  The flip slide to the coin of respect is demanding people live up to their potential.  Slackers get booted off the team.  Likewise destructive worms (no matter how brilliant and talented) get shown the door as well.  Committments are honored by everyone or “contracts” are renegoiated.  Everyone owns their own failure (no blame game allowed — EVER).

Now on to another one of my aha moments.  All of what it takes to manage this way seemed pretty instinctive to me when I started my career, but that was just youthful arrogance.  It was instinctive because I was surrounded by lots of great people who subtly reinforced me for doing the things described above and who boxed my ears every time I did something stupid (bad donna — 20 lashes with a wet noodle).  I recently had the opportunity to test some of this out myself with a very large team of Gen Ys and I can now safely say I appreciate how much work everyone put into me, especially when the trick to this form of mentoring is to make it look like benign neglect.

I’ve said to a lot of clients that I think they’ve hired poor project managers but the more I think on it the more I believe that poor choice of people is only half the problem.  The Gen Ys who worked for me had great raw potential.  Some of them would have made it to become great managers and leaders simply because they had good training from their parents.  Some of them will become good because of managers who helped them in their career, and some of them no matter what anyone does will fall by the wayside on their journey to become leaders.  My guess is that the born leaders number no more than 10% and all we need to do with them is leave them alone.  The ones who can be developed into leaders are probably the next 40%  and this is where we should be investing our time in order to keep our profession vibrant and valuable.

I’ve never bought into the myth that obtaining an MBA has anything to do with superior leadership or management ability.  So it was humbling to find that my blog post  was chosen as an example to help young MBA applicants write their leadership essay.  My post said leadership was simple: Vision, Courage and Responsibility, and that it was these three elements and not position in the organization that constituted real leadership.  

One of the things I like about writing this column is that it gives me the opportunity to poke at topics until I can come up with something concrete (which then generally turns into a Gartner research piece).  Obviously leadership is one of my hot buttons this year since I spend a lot of time talking to heads of PMOs about the leadership crisis they face. Their PMs at best approach the three elements of leadership in reverse order — and yes order makes a difference — and at worst fail on all three elements in their entirety. 

I’d been thinking that the problem was the PMs that they’d hired were simply unsuited to the work but what I now realize is that nobody has actually taught them how to lead and more importantly no one has given them “permission” to see themselves as leaders.  Some of us simply lead through inclination.  We see something that needs to be done, it takes more than a single person to do it, we go enlist other people and viola instant team and instant leadership.  The Darwinian method worked for me but I now realize that I spent my early career in an environment that naturally produced leaders (Silicon Valley in its heyday).  If a company culture isn’t designed to encourage this natural formation then we actually have to learn to grow them ourselves.

Now the light bulb has turned on over my head, I realize that I’ll have to figure out how we can begin to design a sustainable method for growing a crop of leaders. And YES it really is OUR responsibility since it turns out we have the most fertile fields.  Projects and programs are fantastic places to develop the skills and abilities we need in our future leaders.

By the way for those of you already in a PPM leadership position, I might suggest that I’m offering you a golden opportunity to improve your own cache.  One of the fastest ways to move up the ranks is to not only do your own job exceptionally well but to do something completely above and beyond your current job assignment.  Most people do that by picking something their boss is passionate about.  I have found that it works even better is you pick something the company as a whole values to work on.  For a whole lot of reasons I won’t go into here — you’ll ruffle less political feathers if you do it smartly.

I was writing a review at Amazon this morning and I noticed that a book review I had written a couple of months ago had been listed as unhelpful.  The book is good, I said it was good and yet someone didn’t like what I said.  Ok, I can live with that. Since I have strong opinions, which I express at the drop of a hat, I’m used to people disagreeing.  The problem with this situation was that there was something that struck me as being slightly off.  After investigaging further it turned out that a single unhelpful vote had been logged against every review of the book.  

I was just reviewing a presentation for a client and the light bulb just went on.  The presentation discussed the common problem with having too many projects that don’t actually further the strategy and the presentation seemed to imply that this was a process compliance issue.  I can understand their perspective.  Layout the steps and any monkey will follow them.  The problem is the quality from this approach is TERRIBLE.  A much simpler approach which actually takes less time and is much more effective is to make sure that PEOPLE are involved in and committed to the fruition of the strategy.  This is a simple concept known as creating a shared vision.

Maybe there’s no room for that in companies any more, since we’ve created the cult of the celebrity CEO and the new aristocracy but it seems such a waste.  About 5 or 6 years ago I had the privilege of sharing a picnic bench with Ken Oshman, the original CEO and one of the founders of Rolm.  In reflecting on old times it was clear to me that Ken still had a vision of what the company should have been and where he would have headed the business if we hadn’t sold to IBM.   Ken had a Vision and he had no trouble sharing it.  I worked at Intel before that and it went without saying that Andy Grove had a vision.  I worked for Sun after I left Rolm and Scott McNealy was happy to share his vision for the company with me as we chatted in the hallway one morning.  The key of this story isn’t that I was in a position to rub elbows with these gentlemen – the key was that I could then carry these conversations back to my own team and make sure that the work we did supported where Ken or Andy or Scott wanted us to go.  I also don’t mean to imply that the transmission of vision needs to come directly from the CEO.  I’ve worked in companies where the CEO was so far away from me that he could have been on another planet, but I knew where we were heading because the EVP I worked for was the vision carrier.

Maybe I’ve been in unusual circumstances but I don’t think so.  A couple of months ago, someone reminded me of the story of President Johnson’s visit to the Kennedy space center.  It seems as he was touring the facility he stopped and talked with the custodian and asked him about what he did at the space center.  His answer was “Mr. President, I’m helping send a man to the moon.”  That to me is still the most classic example of a shared vision.

As PPM leaders we are natural vision carriers and vision is viral.  I think we should concentrate more on sharing it early and often to ensure it gets into our projects rather than on worrying about creating a Process for insuring compliance.

Mumble, mumble, mumble.  Life has been busy in Gartner Land and that means that somethings (like cross posting to my personal blog) have had to slide.  Not sure why I decided to take 10 minutes and post something yesterday but I’m glad I did.  Turned out I’d been hacked.  Yeh, I was stupid (I hadn’t upgraded) and yeh I got what I deserved BUT as you’d expect, my real lesson was that I had underestimated the lifecycle “cost” of the blog. It was a pretty easy mistake to make.  After all, in my mind my personal blog was just supposed to be a duplicate of my Gartner blog with just a few more personal things thrown in along the way.  Risk?  What risk?  It was supposed to be simple. 

All of you out there who manage projects and programs for a living are welcome to have a good laugh at my expense.  I do know better.  I know that Murphy is always lurking in the shadows and he’ll launch a sneak attack whenever you least expect it.  I know that things always take longer and involve more work than I’d hoped.  Not only do I know this but I’m famous for reminding all of you that risk management is EVERYTHING.  The problem is it’s just too easy to take your eye off the small things ….

So now with the help of my fantastic in-house IT department (otherwise known as my husband) we’ll get it fixed.  I will also commit to getting better about backups and upgrades.  The big lesson out of this is that Murphy gets his foot in the door when you’re running to hard to make sure you’ve done everything you need to do. 

So to every frazzled PMO director, stressed program manager, exhausted project manager, and numb portfolio manager my advice of the day is to slow down.  You’ll get where you’re going faster.

I found this on Glen Alleman’s Herding Cats blog and it was simply too good to not reprint in its entirety

People, Processes, and Technology

People, Process, and Technology is a common management consultant set of “pitches.”

I’m here to say it’s in that order. And the order steps down in logarithmic. Meaning Processes is e (2.71821) less than People. And Technology is 2.71821 less than Process.

This put process 7.29 less than the people.

Want to find the way to increase the probability of a project’s success – It’s not the tools it’s the people.

“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.”
                                                                             Peter Drucker

If I had to indentify 2 areas that I believe PPM Leaders will need to increase their focus on in 2010, it would be communications and change management. 

I have adopted a simple approach to communication over the years, breaking it down into outbound communications, inbound communications, and continuous polling. 

Outbound communications is the classic concept that most people think of when they talk about communications, i.e. what do we want to tell people?  The problem is for most project centered organizations the answer to that question is often as little as possible.  I prefer  starting the process of outbound communications with the question “what information do people need and want from my organization in order to be comfortable with the work we’re doing?”  Another secret about phrasing the purpose of outbound communications this way is that it should automatically start to lead to what change management efforts might be necessary to support the work currently underway.

Inbound communications as a process is something most PPM organizations simply ignore.  Smart program managers generally stumble across the need for inbound communications management as a separate function because of the criticality of coordinating so many diverse functions and people.  Inbound communications management is a little tougher to do right than outbound, because it requires creating a mechanism whereby team members and stakeholders feel free to communicate and are comfortable their messages will be heard and acted on appropriately, and no what I’m talking about isn’t issue management.  The trick with inbound communications is often hearing what isn’t being said as much as what is.  If anything inbound communications management is a risk management technique.

Continuous polling is an outgrowth of the hallway and the water cooler conversations.  It’s one of the reasons why we talk about management by walking around.  People need an ability to share ideas and concerns that are too poorly formed to make them official.  On the other hand they are perfectly willing to share them on a casual basis.  Essentially the channel needs to fit the message. 

Obviously I’ve only hit the high points here but I think we need to start talking more about how we communicate, with whom, and how often if we want to deliver better PPM results

I promised that I’d pass along some thoughts about the PPM Summit so here goes:

1) We had a terrifically engaged audience.  I’ve been speaking at one conference or another for just a few weeks shy of 13 years and hands down I felt that the attendees where there because they really cared about running a program or a PMO or because they actually managed a portfolio.  The Gartner events folks set up quite a few peer networking events and based on my read of the audience there was ample opportunity for attendees to meet and share with others.

2) Everyone wants to be a program manager.  Seems reasonable since we all stood up on stage and said program management is the next big thing BUT there’s a problem — real program management the way Gartner defines it shares very little overlap with project management.  In fact I routinely tell PPM Leaders that only about 20% of their PMs will ever make it as program managers.

One interesting outcome of this interest in program management is that it’s given me a new goal.  I’m sure of the 20% — it’s based on natural selection and skills cultivated from early childhood — but I’m now wondering if there’s a way to increase that percentage just a little.  Or maybe a better way to think about this is what do we need to do to clearly and cleanly identify our future program managers and equip them for success.  Definitely something I will be adding to my research agenda for next year.

3) Personal power vs position power seemed to be a background issue in some of my discussions.  This topic is worth at least a half dozen research notes.  The problem is most of what I want to say someone can misconstrue.  For example a simple statement — do what YOU believe is right for your project, program or company and ask for forgiveness later, is good advice unless you’ve completely misread your management and your company culture.  If you have misread your company you get fired — if you haven’t you get promoted.

Of course this is a hard lesson to learn.  Even I screwed it up royally once and this was after years of nailing exactly how much I could get away with.  In my case I made the mistake of trying to do my job (as I wanted to do it) and NOT covering my boss’s posterior first.  It was naive and arrogant on my part and I paid the price.  I only bring this up because it’s one of the reasons that PMOs and project management adoptions fail so often the first, second and even third time they’re tried.  360 degree servant leadership (with a passionate drive to get results) is the only approach that really works, but sometime it’s easy to take your eye off the ball.

More thoughts from the summit tomorrow.