“Appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.”

                                       MACHIAVELLI

I found this quote from Machiavelli in something I was reading this morning.  I generally like to focus on positive management behaviors but this one hit too close to home.  Many years ago I worked for a man who I later found out used The Prince as his personal management bible. 

When I first met this gentleman I reacted the way everyone did when they met him.  I was captivated and delighted that I would be privileged to work for such a terrific individual.  He was brilliant, he was funny, he knew everyone in the company and he was a master glad-hander.  He also promised me that I could go out and do my job with the complete understanding that his job was to have me back and that he wouldn’t let me down. 

Two years later I had finally figured out that everything he said wasn’t even close to the truth. If you are tempted to laugh at my naiveté – let me ask you to hold those guffaws.  I am not, nor have I ever been politically unsophisticated.  I never trust easily and I can spot a liar a mile a way.  What I couldn’t spot was a sociopath.  And make no mistake what Machiavelli is advocating in his quote above is sociopathic behavior. 

I admit that I was warned.  A few people in the company came up to me and said “Watch your back – you really can’t trust him” .  Being prudent by nature I promptly began quietly asking the opinion of others who knew my sponsor.  When I got back nothing but praise I decided that the warnings were a result of unique circumstances and wouldn’t pertain to me.  Was I wrong. 

Over the next year and half little things happened that seemed strange (randomly finding that I’d been knifed in the back over small things) and then one day the mask slipped.  I was facilitating an offsite meeting and 20 people had flown in from all corners of the globe to work out some issues we had.  Essentially no one in the field was happy with the way corporate was doing things and this was the meeting were we hoped to work out a plan to resolve the issues.  I was running the meeting because in theory I was the one person who both sides (the field and corporate) trusted. 

As meetings sometimes do – this one quickly started to go downhill with the corporate senior VP basically telling everyone he didn’t give a d*** what they wanted – he was in charge and everyone could live with the service he chose to provide.  Just before the meeting reached the boiling point my sponsor stepped in and pulled rank on the corporate VP.  He told the field that he had heard and appreciated their difficulties and that he would personally work with the corporate VP to make sure that the changes that needed to happen happened.  The tension level dissipated and the buzz in the room immediately became how lucky everyone was that they worked with a man of the stature of my sponsor.  Except….

Five minutes later I was in the hall (away from the meeting) with my sponsor and the Corporate VP when my sponsor turned to the corporate VP and said “Do whatever you want.  I’ve got them calmed down and as soon as we get them on their airplanes and away from here it won’t matter what you do.”

I admit I was shocked.  He had just assured 20 people that he would make things right and five minutes later he had effectively sold them all down the river, while leaving them singing his praises.  I transferred from that project three weeks later and six months later was working in another division (as far away from my former sponsor as possible). 

What’s the moral of this story?  A lesson that it took me years to learn.  There are sociopaths working in organizations.  As PMs our job is to identify them early and avoid them as much as possible, even if it means that we have to deliberately chose to de-scope part of the project.  Even writing these words makes me crazy.  In my heart of hearts I still think I was doing the right thing and on the surface it worked exactly as planned (if you weren’t privy to the hallway conversation) but doing the right thing only lead to a pyric victory. 

Running projects and programs is some of the most difficult work I’ve ever done in my life and doing it perfectly requires almost prescient judgment and a deep understanding of the difference between what is right and what is correct.  The right things to do was have the meeting.  The correct thing to do was to avoid the confrontation especially since 8 months later the organization was dissolved and the corporate VP retired.

Sharing stories of lessons learned – especially the painful ones is risky for the teller of the tale, but I wish someone had been honest with me about this subject earlier in my career. Whether acknowledged or not there are people in corporations who behave exactly as Machiavelli suggested.  Your job as a PPM professional, if you chose to accept it, is to identify them and work around them with craft and guile equal to their own.  It won’t be easier and it won’t be comfortable but you can do it and still preserve your own integrity if you are smart.

Upon reflection I’ve decided that readiness for an EPMO has two dimensions – the first is whether or not the company is ready but the second and possibly more important issue is whether or not we are ready as individuals to do what it takes to get the job done.  Are we willing to put in 5 years of hard work to build a foundation of trust and results though out the enterprise first?  Are we willing to do what the company wants first–rather than insist on putting our judgment of what they need first?  Are we willing to invest the personal time and effort necessary to build a relationship with the man or woman we’ll be working for?

At various times in my career I’ve answered yes to these questions but upon reflection there was one time when I answered no and worse than that I have occasionally been guilty of saying that the company wasn’t ready when in fact it was me who wasn’t ready to do the hard work that was going to be required to capitalize on what little readiness the company did have.

While my story will be different than anyone else’s I offer it because it shows a case of ego-centric blindness that we all suffer from to a greater or lesser extent.  I could offer the excuse that it isn’t failure if you let an opportunity pass you by and that it isn’t failure if you are so focused on what you want that you can’t hear what someone else is offering you. But the truth is that it is failure.  There’s nothing wrong with saying no to an opportunity that isn’t right for you (and this one wasn’t right for me) but there is something sad about not being able to even see or acknowledge the opportunity because it didn’t come wrapped in the right package.

To make a very long story short I was consulting at a company several years ago and my executive sponsor recognized that that I had the background and the experience to build something he was only vaguely aware he needed. Without talking to me he was busily making plans to hire me when I chose to take another job in his organization (also without talking to him).   Let’s be clear what was going on here.  If he had made me an offer to set up the EPMO then and there I would have taken it, but he correctly knew that positioning me elsewhere in the organization to give me time to build grassroots support and acceptance was a better approach than simply creating a top-down organization. I, on the other hand, saw a fun and exciting opportunity to do something completely new elsewhere in his org and wasn’t willing to invest years in building something I had already built and run successfully elsewhere in the past.

So here’s the learning.  If there’s a mismatch between your readiness and the organization’s readiness the organization’s needs ALWAYS TRUMP YOURS.

So how has this reflection changed my own thinking?  I would have to say profoundly.  Running an EPMO isn’t like running finance (something else I’ve done in the past).  It’s a unique function and as such needs to be in sync with the organization at a level that most other organizations (like purchasing and IT) don’t need to be.  This means that in order to be successful you either need to build it yourself over multiple years or you need to have already invested multiple years in the company to have established yourself as a know quantity if you are going to succeed with taking over an already established EPMO.

If you are interested in learning more about our view of the EPMO please check our research

The Enterprise PMO: An Emerging Force in Strategy Realization (free to current Gartner clients)

Years ago, I used to schedule 2 days a month to work from home with the intention of actually thinking about what was going on around me and making sure that I understood the bigger picture (how my boss was looking at things, how things might be affecting my staff, what the ultimate outcome would be of all the work we were busy doing, etc). I also tried to read divergent material to make sure my world view didn’t get too insular. The truth is that while I scheduled 2 days a month I only actually took about 1 day every two months, but even that level of reflection proved valuable.

Things have changed for many of us since we went into an office every day. Working from home can make the work day expand to something approaching 24/7. It can also make it much harder to gain the altitude necessary to see the big picture. Twitter helps with the alternative perspectives if we are careful to follow the right mix of people. But we still need to take time to think.

I’d like to suggest that everyone designate at least one Friday a month to getting out of your normal work-a-day mentality and think about what you and your team members are actually accomplishing. What value are you really delivering for all your hard work? Who are you making happy? Then add a triple loop learning concept to your reflections. Based on the way you are working today what culture and ultimate outcomes are you building for tomorrow?

It might take a couple of months to get the hang of building the big picture but I have always found the process a valuable one when I’ve taken the time to do it. I often discover that there’s a risk lurking in the dark corner of possibility that if I get on it now I can keep it from ever happening. I have also realized that a class of work that we’ve done no longer needs as much time and energy as it did in the past and that we should refocus our priorities to something that is of much higher value now. I also found that taking this time made me a much better leader, if for no other reason than my team knew they could trust me to keep them safe from things they didn’t have time to see themselves because they were so busy doing the work we paid them to do.

I’d be interested to hear how what approach others use to accomplish the same thing. Also if you decide to spend a Fridays getting a big picture view I’d love to hear how that pays off for you as well.

So what did I observe on my travels?  The unfortunate side of the equation two things that stuck in my mind.  The first was that too many companies are struggling with incorrectly scoping their projects and programs and the second was is that too many companies absolutely had no idea of either the role or the benefits that can be gained from program management.

To go a little deeper into the scoping issue that I observed, the problems seems to be a struggle between IT and the business as to who does what when, and with how responsibilities should be partitioned between each organization.  Our research has shown this is a very prevalent problem with companies at PPM maturity level 2 or below (see Exploring Level 2 of the Program Portfolio Management Maturity Model for more details) but knowing it’s common doesn’t make it any less comfortable for the companies that are struggling with the issue. 

To be honest the program management issue surprised me.  Naively I had come to the conclusion that most of the program management misconceptions were limited to North America but on this trip I found it not to be true.  The GFC (otherwise known as the Global Financial Crisis) has caused organizations that might have known better two or three years ago to make the decision that they should approve all work at the project level even if they knew it was or should be part of a program.  To make matters worse organizations were also beginning to add back in all the project processes and governance that programs are designed to simplify which was unfortunately beginning to result in higher cost, longer project durations and potentially a higher level of duplicative or unnecessary work. 

Of course I don’t want to leave the impression that everything I observed was negative.  As frustrating (for clients) as I found the two issues above I also found some overwhelmingly positive factors.  The first big plus was what I would consider a sea-change in management’s willingness to be involved in creating a culture of results.  I normally bend the ear of anyone who will listen about the dangers of believing that projects can be treated like a repeatable process.  According to me, no matter how attractive it seems, the notion that if the requirements and the estimates of cost and schedule are right up front it’s possible to get to the end with absolutely no variance or change is based in wishful thinking and not fact.  This trip when I explained that the reason for this was that projects and programs generally function as complex adaptive systems with inherent risk and unknowns I saw both nods and active requests to “tell me more”.  Given that I did my public conference presentation on the “Uses of Chaos theory in Program Management” 14 years ago at a PMI conference, I was delighted to see interest and inherent understanding of the subject in many of the companies I spoke with.

Finally the interest in how to move to an Enterprise Program Management Office from an IT PMO (see The Enterprise PMO: An Emerging Force in Strategy Realization) has been encouraging.  While developing an EPMO isn’t appropriate or desirable for every company it’s an approach that a significant number of companies are finding valuable as a way to ensure that they have rapid and effective execution of strategy in today’s uncertain economic times.

All in all the trip was a wonderful opportunity to meet and speak with clients and even though I always say I’d like to travel a little less, every year I find it an opportunity I don’t want to pass up.

This morning I woke up thinking about how important safety is as a concept in a project environment and the proverbial light-blub went on over my head.   In the Agile world, safety is an important element in team building.  Effectively if your team is spending too much time watching their collective backs or playing politics (or even ranting about politics) then they aren’t getting anything done.  As leaders it’s our job to make our teams feel safe to get their work done.  The only way to accomplish this that I know of  is to be willing to give up most of our own safety issues and that — the last time I checked–takes courage.

Obviously it’s not my intention to demand anyone take a risk they aren’t comfortable with but some jobs are more ‘risky” than others.  Back when I started my career we had the simple statement “if you don’t like the heat get out of the kitchen”.  We all knew what it meant and we all accepted that we were playing bet your career when we took on a difficult project.  Back then part of the basis on which I took a project was a calculation of the odds of succeeding.  I used to joke that 51% was a sure bet and I’ve even taken a program where management put the odds of success at 20% and still been successful.  Obviously the quality of the team and the support factors available to the project had to go up as the odds of success went down, but the truth was most things aren’t quite as difficult as people feared once there was true commit to achieving the goal.  There are exceptions of course.  Some projects I’ve been offered have been suicide missions–carelessly crafted and designed to fail for political purposes.  I will never forget a gentleman offering me a job leading an ERP implementation all the while chortling that they’d pick my bones for supper.  (Yes, it really did feel like a bad fairy tale – needless to say I ran as fast in the other direction as humanly possible)

Reflecting back on what I’ve seen in my own experience and my discussion with clients I think there’s a simple rule of thumb.  Anyone who needs to be completely safe can’t lead and shouldn’t be asked to.  Additionally high process, excessive rules and responsibility delegated upward under the guise of governance all contribute to environments were the possibility of leadership has been sacrificed on the altar of risk avoidance. 

Projects are risky, uncertain undertakings with no guarantees of success.  As leaders we need to be very clear about that to everyone involved and make the appropriate decisions about who we put in charge.  My suggestion is we shift our perspective and focus a away from things like certification and a whole lot more on things like leadership born through an innate sense of courage.  Bottom line:  I can train someone on how to create a Gantt chart or how to put together a scope document.  I can’t put steel in spine where it isn’t already.

So what does that mean if you are managing a project team?  Turn on IM obviously, but from here it gets much more difficult.  I was privileged to have managed a young develop staff several years ago (90% of them were under 30 and the youngest was 19) and I didn’t have a complaint in the world.  I’m not sure everyone else can count of being so lucky.  What I’m concerned about is a workforce that has never been exposed to competition or honest feedback.  Once upon a time, in a world far away I had a new college grad who worked for me that thought he was God’s gift to the universe.  Yes he was smart, but he’d never had to compete against people as smart or smarter than he was and he simply couldn’t cope.  He actually told me that he expected to have been promoted within six months of joining the company because he was sure we would recognize his brilliance.  Within three months of his hire date I had him on verbal warning and eventually we were forced to fire him because he simply couldn’t get it through his head that we had rules and that our rules pertained to everyone, even him.

Back in the 80s, the story I’m recounting was an oddity and rather sad.  Unfortunately, with many of the trends that are going on in the educational system I’m concerned that this story might become the norm and not the exception.  So what do I think was the difference between what I’m seeing now and what I managed just a few years ago?  Economic reality.  Nobody who worked for me lived at home with their parents.  Almost everyone who worked for me was married with a spouse who stayed home with their children.  They were smart, talented and driven to succeed.  They felt they had to be in order to take care of their families. 

So circling back around to my starting proposition; no we don’t need to make a lot of special concessions to the next generation.  We need to be reasonable (turn on IM, don’t worry about facebook, understand they are more electronically socially networked than most older employees) but mostly we just need to treat them the same way we treat everyone who works for us; with respect and with confidence that they are competent to get the job done.

In my world a request of information is always one of the first ways that any individual can begin to prove their leadership capabilities to an organization. If the boss says “Can you ask Gartner about X? Can we improve it, reduce it, change it, etc?” then what should come back is an answer that includes the requested information AND a well thought out recommendation as to what the organization should do to actually make good use of the offered advice (which by the way we are always happy to help you prepare if you are a client). In my experience the people who get ahead in organization have all these recommendations. Even if they weren’t accepted, there’s generally often unspoken credit for effort. The rule of thumb is usually that while the first time doesn’t have to work, the goal is to figure out why the proposal was rejected and how to use the next opportunity that presents itself to provide recommendation that are a little closer to the needs and desires of management until the stars align and the proposal is accepted with a “looks good, why don’t you run with it” response.

If you are a senior manager, then I suggest that you owe it to your staff to make sure they understand that they will ultimately be judged by their willingness to contribute solutions, not just effort to the organization. If you are having trouble getting this point across, because you let them upward delegate too much then get a copy of Managing Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? by William Oncken and Kenneth H. Blanchard. It’s been out of print for years BUT it’s the single best guide I’ve ever found for solving this problem. If you aren’t yet a senior manager and you’ve passed up opportunities to prepare these recommendations then I suggest you also get a copy of the book. A little bit of initiative doing what’s important to management rather than just what’s important to you has never been known to hurt a career.

 Looking at Daniel’s pictures I was struck by how many things had changed.  Going to Japan just seemed like a big deal to me in 2006.  Today it’s just one more long airplane flight.  In 2006 I knew lots of people who had been to Japan but seeing their pictures would have been a process of going to their house, waiting for them to find them and then flipping through the hard copies.  Today tweetdeck offers me a personal slideshow, delivered to my family room 24 hours a day, and Daniel isn’t even back from Japan yet. As far as its come, technology isn’t completely ubiquitous yet.  We loaded Skype to Daniel’s computer the day before he left only to find out that there isn’t any Wi-Fi available in his dorm room.  Our assumption that it would be there is almost laughable but it reflects how we all see the world today.

So what does all this have to do with PPM?  Two things; the first is our potential project staff really is global and we need to begin understanding how to work effectively with a geographically dispersed team (especially those of us in the United States).  If this sounds like old news, I’m not sure it is.  We all went international years ago but I think we did it with our eyes closed.  We just treated everyone the same and tried to adjust for time differences )or at least that’s how I handled it).   Now I think we owe our team members a little more personal touch (which means a little more travel on somebody’s part no matter how grueling).  The second point is back to my refrain that PMs are luddities.  We need to not just embrace communication and social networking technology.  We need to lead because we’re the ones on the front line.

I know we’re all busy, but our professional lives are not completely defined and bounded by the PMBOK.  To be perceived as leaders in our organizations we should be looking for areas where we can establish leadership naturally and I think collaborative technologies and the fine art of managing in a global world is a golden opportunity that is being handed to us on a platter.

Thoughts?  Opposing opinions?

 When I was much less experienced than I am now (reader younger) I routinely came up with good ideas of how we could improve the way we did things.  I had two ways of handling these good ideas.  In some cases I’d go walk around and talk to the people in the chain and say “are you on board with this if I implement it?”  If they said yes, I never asked permission I just did it.  These tended to work out quite well.  The problem was always with my big ideas that involved spending money or getting other business units to change where I didn’t have a personal network.  Generally I’d have to go to management and 99% of the time they’d say “Good idea, but not now” and sent me back to my office.  Most staff professionals get very angry and very frustrated when their ideas get shot down but I found it left me more curious than anything else. I knew they had a reason for making the judgment they did – I just didn’t understand it – hence the light bulb moment.

 What I now understand is that contrary to most literature, incremental change imposed by somebody with a bright idea is VERY EXPENSIVE and largely unnecessary.  Joe Proctor, a former CIO of Intel, gave me the best advice on the subject I’ve ever received.  His question was “who else thinks this is a problem worth solving right now?”  Sometimes Joe and I didn’t see eye to eye but that question was profoundly brilliant and is 90% of the threshold condition for making any change (the other 10% is what I call the burning building test — but that’s a subject for another blog).

So a proposal that does not have advocacy from a broad range of people is simply too expensive to do because it creates unnecessary change AND change has a price.  (see my blog The Unfamiliarity Factor is Critically Important in Change Management).  The more I think about this the more I understand why I’ve looked at some of the “level 4 continuous improvement” literature and shuttered in horror (and NO the Gartner maturity model for PPM does not have a continuous improvement level).  I believe in continuous improvement but it absolutely has to be from the ground up.  If it’s top down it needs to be so clear cut as to why it should be adopted that people are literally beating on management to let them do it.  

There’s an old book call Up the Organization by Robert Townsend that had another piece of advice that I immediately knew was absolute wisdom the moment I read it.  Townsend’s contented that it was essential to never introduce a small change unless people were so busy and so stressed they would accept the change with open arms because it was going to help them (he was talking about adding staff but the advice is extendable).

I hope by sharing my insight that I can possibly help reduce the frustration I know many of you feeel about the fact that your organization is refusing to follow your lead and get on the formal project management process bandwagon.  After all top management asked you to make the change and then they (senior management) refused to force people to accept it, leaving you feeling like you are banging your head against a stone wall.  But feeling frustrated isn’t worth your time.  The answer to the problem is actually very simple if you can’t sell it bottom-up and there’s no burning building to drive adoption top down — go back to the drawing board and rethink what you are doing.

Thoughts?  comments?  Violently disagree???

Don’t get me wrong – I believe in process (with a lowercase p). So why do processes work when Processes don’t?  The answer is actually rather simple.  A process (small p) says begin by establishing if the thing that is happening is abnormal in any way.  If so go into problem solving mode immediately.  Apply judgment, knowledge and experience until it’s fixed.  If it isn’t abnormal – follow the standard practice.  Anthropologically this works very well because human beings are hard wired to do very rapid problem identification.  If you tell them there are bad things in the proverbial bushes they will keep their eyes peeled.  At this point some of you are probably saying “But that’s what I’m afraid of…  When they take independent action they just make things worse”  and my answer would be,” possibly true”.  And here is where we come full circle.  If you reserve problem resolution to management (as defined as those individuals who get paid to think about what they do”) then all the problems are going to come to your desk anyway, so tell me again what the big P Process actually accomplished? 

By the way I should mention that the litmus test on what’s a big P process is always the fact that somebody somewhere feels the need to do a compliance audit to ensure adherence to the Process (not success in creating the results of the process but adherence to the Process itself.)  I understand that for many people the advantages of compliance auditing for adherence to process boarders on religious faith and I am normally open minded enough to entertain that there are many paths to the same outcome BUT I absolutely draw the line on this one when it comes to PPM processes. 

I should say very clearly that this is MY OPINION.  It is not a Gartner Position.  There are lots of folks inside the company who feel just as strongly in the other direction.  My reasons for airing the issue are that I think we as a community need to discuss it.  My objection is that we are wasting time, money and  people, none of which we can afford to waste now or in the future.  On the other hand, there’s always an open mind hidden beneath my diatribes and if there’s a middle ground I’d love to find it.