Finding The Right Question

What is the difference between a project manager and a program leader?

That would beg the question of what the difference is between a project and a program (or programme, as many of my international colleagues would spell it). 

Programs, unlike projects, are, by intention, transformational.  As a consequence, here are some characteristics of programs that are different from projects:

• The stakeholder landscape includes Board level and cross-functional senior executives
• The nature of a program is often a “bet the company” strategic effort
• The specific work plan is not knowable at the beginning of the journey
• Expanding value delivered is more critical than controlling scope
• The performance of a team of hundreds (not dozens) needs inspirational (not controlling) styles of leadership
• The solutions that leverage such significant business value have many potential failure points
• The organizations responsible for delivery (internal IT, software vendors, consultancies) must also adopt a “bet the company” level of commitment.

(Some of you may have noticed that the previous seven bullet points seem curiously correlated to my view of the dimensions of project/program health.  No coincidence there.)

So how does that translate into the differences in our personal “game” as we move from project manager to program leader?  Here is my view of the critical areas that require a transformation in our own competencies:

• Executive level relationship management – we must become trusted advisors to a wide variety of senior stakeholders
• Leadership and personal power – we must achieve through influence and coaching, not through command and control
• Understanding and delivering business value – we must gain a deep understanding of the business problem, and ensure that all aspects of the program are driving to optimize business value
• Articulating a vision – it is our ability to inspire that will keep everyone moving toward the goal, in spite of fears, anxieties, and confusions that are inherent in programs
• Masterful negotiating skills – we must be able to craft a win-win situation among the many (and often competing) internal and external organizational objectives.

Sound a bit daunting?  Here is the good news:  I believe that effective program leaders are made, not born.  That is to say, one can learn and acquire proficiency in the competencies I have listed above. 

Mind you, these competencies do not come easily or quickly, but there are approaches that will accelerate these aspects of professional development for the program leaders of tomorrow.

The investment of time and money required seems appropriate if you’re going to “bet the company” on the competency of a program leader.

What does it mean to be “professional”?

Whether we are advising external clients or our own senior management, whether we are in the role of strategist, planner, marketer, seller, developer, implementer, or general manager, we are called upon to act and behave “professionally”.  So what does that mean, and more interestingly, how can we grow in this important aspect of our careers?

I think about professionalism in three fundamental dimensions:  presence, values, and intellect.  And I think it is entirely possible to grow in each of these aspects over the course of a career.

Presence is the most straightforward dimension and the easiest to master.  At the simplest level, this means not slurping our soup.  It means showing up on time and dressing appropriately.  It means treating everyone with courtesy and respect.  There is a form of professional behavior for virtual interaction as well, or what I have described elsewhere as one’s Virtual Intelligence Quotient (VQ).

Values represent a more nebulous dimension, because situations - and our behavioral response to them - are rarely categorized in purely black and white terms.  As professionals, though, we are called upon to behave truthfully and courageously.  We should be prepared say what people need to hear, not simply what they want to hear.  And we must do this constructively and tactfully, often in the face of subtle or not so subtle pressure to go along with the crowd and not make waves.  We are likely to face situations, over the course of our careers, when the only real choice we have is whether we make a career decision early, or whether we will be forced to make one later, but we will be making a career decision.  We can learn to recognize those situations and act early and professionally.

And finally, there is the dimension of intellect.  Sometimes this is referred to as thought leadership.  One organization I know is using the term “eminence”.  Both terms imply that we must do two things. 

The first is to have a point of view.  It is not enough to merely be smart.  You have to be smart about something, in a way that not many others around you are.  You must use your smarts to develop insight.

Second, it’s not enough to have insights if no one knows you have them.  “Thought leadership” implies that you are operating in some arena and in some fashion to have people perceive you as an intellectual leader.  “Eminence” implies that some audience has deemed you as being eminent in some field.  So we need to learn how to convince others we have something to offer intellectually. 

In fact, this is not so hard to do.  There is usually some local chapter of some related professional organization that would be willing to let us speak at their next meeting.  Or perhaps there is a professional publication for which we could write an article, or at least a letter to the editor.  Within our organizations, there is likely some form of a knowledge management function who would be delighted to receive a submission describing some best practice or sample product.  Some might even consider going the route of blogging!

Yes, but what if we do that, and someone finds a hole in our argument, or points out some aspect that we hadn’t fully considered?  That, in fact, is the real beauty of the dimension of intellect.  Every time we get a response like that to our point of view, we have an opportunity to build a better, more robust one, in a way that we couldn’t if we just sat by ourselves and contemplated our professional navel.

We used to say, in the consulting world, that we didn’t know anything of value that we didn’t learn from a client.

And so I come back to my contention that in each of these three dimensions of professionalism, we can aspire to achieve new levels of behavior and performance.

It just takes a bit of self-awareness and a willingness to work at it.

Why don’t good methods prevent project planning failures?

Is there now some scientific thinking to suggest method development is a fool’s errand? 

In his recent book, “Streetlights and Shadows;  Searching for the Keys To Adaptive Decision Making”, Gary Klein makes an interesting case.  He presents a number of arguments, with many disparate real world examples, to show that the more complex the situation, and the more extensively documented the procedure (such as most IT development and implementation methods!), the less likely a competent professional will use it, and the more likely that an inexperienced person will perform at a mediocre level at best.

Let’s run that by one more time.  If the target audience for an IT method is experienced project managers, they probably won’t use it…  And if the project manager is inexperienced and the project is a complex one, we are pretty sure that’s a recipe for disaster…

Hmmm…

Maybe we need to re-think this a bit.

Historically, project managers have railed at methodologists for not understanding the complexities of project life.  (There is an old joke that asks, “What’s the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist?  Answer:  “You can sometimes negotiate with a terrorist.”) 

So when the project manager asks the methodologist, “What’s the shortest time that this type of project can be done, with acceptable quality, under the following circumstances?”  The answer often sounds like, “I can’t tell you, but you better have these 1200 line items in your work breakdown structure.”

Why are we surprised, then, that good methods do not appear to prevent project planning failures?  Indeed, my experience suggests that most project managers rarely reference method materials, but they almost always reference work plans from trusted sources (and sometimes the only source they trust is themselves). 

And the corollary might be:  why are we surprised when “bad” methods (like the seductive siren song of Rapid Application Development or Agile Development) are adopted with almost religious fervor and mis-applied in complex and mission-critical situations?

So what’s the answer?  Well, if we can’t get methodologists to adequately address the real world of project management, why don’t we educate project managers to have a better understanding of methodology?

I am not arguing that project managers re-invent a method for every project (although many like to do that).  I am saying we might limit the prescription of methods to, say, 25 tasks (5 life cycle phases with 5 tasks each, perhaps) and then teach project managers to build plans that answer my two favorite questions:

          1.       How will we know when we are done? 

          2.       How will we know we have a good solution, not just any solution?

This, of course, will necessitate extra effort and intelligence at the planning stages of complex projects.

Oh, right, that could be a good thing…

In these difficult economic times, where can I cut corners in my project (and still succeed)?

In the classic three-element formula for projects, you can play with any two of scope, time, and resources.  If you are trying to reduce resources (for economic reasons), and your world will not let you take forever to finish, then you must reduce scope.  How do you figure out the minimum levels that will still lead to success?

 

Here are some thoughts to guide those decisions, based upon the dimensions of project health known as the Seven Keys To Success.  If a contemplated reduction in scope would jeopardize one or more of these dimensions of project health, then in my view cutting corners in that fashion would be ill-advised.

 

And there are two fundamentally different ways to cut scope:

 

Reduction of features and functions

 

This can be a highly successful way to reduce costs (and also speed up the schedule, and perhaps even reduce risk).  The health dimension to monitor is Business Benefits Will Be Realized.  If the contemplated reductions will not too adversely impact the business case (and the reductions can be added to a later version, perhaps) then cutting corners this way can make a lot of sense.  One caution:  the judge of this should be the business sponsor, not the Project Manager or the IT function.

 

Cut tasks in the methodology or radically reduce their level of effort 

 

This is the second, and potentially more insidious, approach to reducing scope.  Remember that a methodology is supposed to provide a reliable answer to my two favorite questions: “How will we know when we are done?” and “How will we know if we have a good answer/outcome, not just any answer/outcome?”  (On these two questions hang all the methods, the controls, and the quality.)

 

So what might we be tempted to cut? 

 

IT history is replete with ideas like “Rapid Application Development” and “Agile Development”, often followed by lots of project failures, because practitioners of these approaches tried to cut too many corners in the early stages of understanding requirements.  You can’t reliably manage the twin health dimensions of Business Benefits Will Be Realized and Work And Schedule Are Predictable if you follow a flawed method. 

 

Here’s another temptation:  let’s cut all the “soft” activities like communications, change management, and perhaps even training.   After all, they don’t contribute directly to the production of a working solution.  Perhaps they are unnecessary.  Perhaps, if you have fewer stakeholders/users than you have programmers.  Perhaps, if there is no apprehension among anyone about how their world might change.  Perhaps, if the new functionality is so trivial and obvious that anyone will come up to speed instantly. 

 

The first and most critical dimension of project health is Stakeholders Are Committed.  And project managers cannot merely wish this to be the case.  Even the Business Sponsor (the most important stakeholder) cannot dictate a healthy level of commitment from all the other stakeholders.  It does in fact take some communications, some change management activities, and some training.  Be very careful about what corners get cut here.

 

The bottom line

 

Cutting corners judiciously can help us get through these tough times.  Just be sure that you don’t sacrifice good health and success for the sake of (apparent) expediency.

What Is So Hard About Getting Governance Right In IT Projects?

Maybe just one word:  responsibility.  Or more specifically, the fact that s/he didn’t take the appropriate level of responsibility.

 

So we reduce it to an after-the-fact blame game:

• The Business Sponsor was missing in action (didn’t take responsibility for the business benefits)
• The IT Department didn’t understand the business needs (assumed responsibility that wasn’t theirs)
• The Project Manager didn’t blow the whistle in time (can’t be responsible for everything, but certainly is responsible for knowing when things aren’t healthy)
• The Contractor took the money and didn’t meet deadlines or satisfy the user (we paid them a bunch of money, so they must be ultimately responsible, mustn’t they?).

 

These common (and often justified) complaints are firstly symptoms of flawed governance, and not fundamentally of individual incompetence or bad behavior.

 

So let’s start with the First Law of Project Governance:  There must be a proper, and properly functioning, Steering Committee:

• “Proper” means that it is chaired by the Executive whom the organization will be holding accountable for the promised business benefits and costs.  Its members are other executives who lead organizations that will be impacted.  One of those will be the IT organization, who must advise on the technical aspects of total cost of ownership, technical risks, and so on.  The bigger the business impact, and the more cross-functional the operational changes will be, the higher in the organizational food chain that Business Sponsor must be.  Almost never is it appropriate for the CIO to chair the Steering Committee.  Unless the cost and impact is so small and so contained to the IT shop that the top executive wouldn’t know or care if it failed.
• “Properly functioning” means that the Steering Committee meets at least once a month (and a minimum of six times in the life of the project).  These meetings must have an agenda designed to illuminate major project issues that require decisions and actions from members of the Steering Committee.  The Chair of the Steering Committee must be present and engaged.  The Project Manager must own the agenda for raising critical issues and recommending a course of action.  He or she must also report back on results and timeframes from previous decisions.

 

So what’s so hard about that?

 

Well, it takes time and focus for the right people to be doing the right things in a Steering Committee.  Sometimes they legitimately don’t have the time to spend, and/or other matters are consuming their focus.

 

When this is the case, serious consideration should be given to cancelling or postponing the project.  Or better yet, redesigning the project scope to have a big enough impact to support the right behavior.

 

If we fail to recognize this problem early, we are almost certainly going to be playing the blame game later.

If you could invent a video game called Project Management, what would it be like?

Here’s my version.  Imagine this:

 

You, the Project Manager, are at the wheel of a race car traveling at high speed over open ground.  Off in the distance is a wall stretching as far as you can see from left to right, but in the middle of the wall is a hole about twice the width of your car.  The challenge is simple.  Steer through the hole and you win the prize, and the faster you get there, the bigger the prize.  Miss the hole, and you smash into the wall – no prize, no more fast car, no more driver.

 

So what’s the catch?  Well, obviously crosswinds, bumps, loose suspension, and other factors tend to take you off course.  All that’s fair game.  What makes this challenge difficult are the following two limitations you must learn to deal with. 

 

First, your steering wheel only turns five degrees left or right – you better be making a lot of small corrections early or you will get yourself to a point where you no longer have room and time to correct. 

 

Second, you can’t turn that wheel by yourself – you have a partner in the car with you, your Executive Sponsor, and you only get to make steering corrections if he or she agrees to help.  So you better be good at communicating with that Sponsor about when steering corrections are required and why. 

 

Does this metaphor for managing projects sound too simple?  Of course it is.  But I think it’s instructive, for three reasons:

1.    You must partner with your Executive Sponsor in order to take corrective actions.

2.    All projects, including successful ones, require lots of corrective actions. 

3.    This isn’t as simple as steering one car toward one hole in the wall.  You have to manage (or steer) seven different kinds of vehicles simultaneously if you want to grab that prize and avoid crashes.  That is, I believe there are seven dimensions of project health you need to be continuously monitoring.

 

Do you have the instrumentation to detect distance from center line (and rate of change), distance from “the wall” (and rate of change), and whether enough time remains for a five degree correction to take effect? 

 

If not, you’re driving blind, wondering when your screen will say, “Game Over!”

How can you take advantage of organizational change?

Oh, no.  Yet another org change!  Just when you finally got comfortable with your position/role/boss/colleagues.

How can you turn this from threat to opportunity?

By accepting the fact that it probably means you need to change as well.

“In what way should I change?” you ask.  “And what will it mean to my career?”  “What’s going on in this organization anyway?”

Good questions, wrong sequence.

The way to deal with organizational change is to first understand why the organization is changing.  Odds are that your organization is responding to changes in its environment.  Clients are asking for different services and solutions.  Competitors are changing.  Technology is changing (duh!).  And of course, everyone is being affected by the economy.

So answer these questions, in this order:

· Why is my organization changing?  (at the Business Unit level)

· What does my organization need to succeed? (at the profit center level)

· Where would my organization benefit from some leadership and vision?  (at the group level)

· How do I need to change and grow to provide that leadership and vision?

The way to change this personal threat into a personal opportunity is to start with the big picture first, and make the personal decisions within that context.

Then go for it!

How can Virtual Reality be even better than face-to-face in delivering world-class professional development events?

Ridiculous. Not possible. After all, if you want to change performance you must change behavior. To change behavior you must change thinking. And to change thinking you must change beliefs.

And that is why we go to the trouble and expense to design and deliver face-to-face professional development education – to have belief-changing events that begin the journey toward significant changes in performance. I can think of five aspects that form the “Wow!” factor in world-class face-to-face facilitation that drive the “new performance through new beliefs” results we seek:

    1. Psychological safety

    2. Behavior experiments

    3. Perceptual reframing

    4. Feedback and reflection

    5. Bonding with a support group for ongoing development.

Could virtual reality possibly be even better than face-to-face in these critical aspects?

Well…

Psychological safety

In one VR event I participated in recently, during the debriefing a woman said, “My avatar is tall and thin – and I am not! I felt like I could try some things that I might not have been willing to try face-to-face.”

VR by definition lends itself to simulation in a fail-safe environment. VR is being used to simulate business experimentations and outcomes that would be far too complex and costly to replicate “in the flesh”. VR is also being used to simulate health care situations in the training of doctors, nurses, and EMT personnel that cannot safely and realistically be replicated in real life. It provides a safe world in which professional development is enabled through trying – and perhaps failing – at new endeavors.

Behavioral experiments

In another recent VR event designed to simulate a complex engagement for IBM, the participants were from an intact team based in Beijing, China. Lack of experience and some cultural hurdles limited their willingness to engage in conversation with their client executives. When the VR situation forced them to do this, they experienced the positive results, and thus it created a deep learning experience. In a face-to-face situation (and in a face-saving culture such as this), they may well have retreated into paralysis rather than tried something new.

Perceptual reframing

Some educators have developed VR experiences in which one’s avatar perceives the environment in ways that normal people in real life cannot. Two such environments that I have heard about involve psychotic breakdown episodes (to teach what it is like to suffer a severe mental illness) and the reactions of an autistic child (to sensitize parents and educators to an autistic child’s world view).

I also learned my own lesson about VR perceptions and their transference to real life. In one VR event, even though I knew who the people were behind their avatars, and had previously worked with them face-to-face, I found myself reacting to their physical appearance and beginning to make presumptions about them on that basis that in real life (upon reflection) I knew to be erroneous. It was a deep learning for me that I needed to listen to the human being and avoid stereotyping based upon appearance – a great lesson for those hoping to enhance their multi-cultural competence.

Feedback and reflection

It is not enough to try something new – the learner also must get feedback on how they did, and be given time to reflect on their own reactions. Although this is the basis for powerful learning, face-to-face events tend to be limited in this area by the need for an affordable number of facilitators and a relatively few learning objectives (and hence a homogeneous set of participants).

The VR events that WTRI has been able to design are able to capture the interactions between a participant’s avatar and an artificially intelligent “robot” avatar that relate to different learning objectives for different levels of participants. These can then be fed to a facilitator for a debriefing with the participant that is tailored to their professional development objectives. For example, a team analyst might get feedback on their response to 10 separate situations in which they were required to gather information through a client interview process. A team leader or the project manager would get feedback from a different set of interactions, in which they should have displayed an entirely different set of behaviors, relevant to their roles. The technology available in a VR simulation makes this variety and extent of facilitator feedback far more practical than in face-to-face venues.

Bonding with a support group for ongoing development

Professional development events don’t immediately take the business performance of an individual to a new level, but they can jump start that journey and be an important accelerator in career advancement. A significant enabler of the continuation of that journey is the support network formed from that event, although interactions among that network almost always have to happen virtually, due to the fiscal constraints imposed on learning budgets these days.

Not only are VR event participants already equipped and ready to reconnect inside a virtual world, but preliminary pilots with WTRI on behalf of IBM learners indicate that even participants of face-to-face events are more engaged in reconnecting in VR than they are in other forms of virtual connection such as teleconferencing and instant messaging. Participants find that the atmosphere created in VR is more “intimate” somehow, and is emotionally engaging enough to momentarily shut out the distractions of the real world in order to focus exclusively on their colleagues.

So is Virtual Reality always better than face-to-face in delivering world-class professional development events?

Perhaps not always. But in many circumstances, it is much more than merely “as good as” face-to-face. It can also be much less expensive in terms of the total costs of design and delivery, especially for geographically disperse organizations.

And one last thought. More and more of the work force – the millennials especially - will expect to see it offered by employers of choice.

How Can We Learn To Be Courageous Project Leaders?

There is a saying in the field of Change Management about people being averse to change.  “The pain of status quo has to be greater than the pain of change.”

Here’s a new one for Project Managers.  “The fear of remaining silent has to be greater than the fear of speaking up.”

And what are the situations that test our courage?  How about:

• A key team member with uniquely valuable skills is being a jerk;
• A client/business executive is undermining the team’s success; or
• Your boss is asking you to perform miracles.

I believe that project life sometimes presents you with only two choices:  do you want to make a career decision now, or do you want to make one later, but you are going to make a career decision.  I also believe that those of us who have developed any kind of a reputation for delivery under adversity have much more power and credibility than we typically credit ourselves. 

Bosses want us to help them see the world through rose-colored glasses.  And some of them are pretty good at applying coercive pressure to get us to agree with them, when we know in our fat little hearts that the situation is deeply troubled.

Yet we often stay silent, and pay the price.   Why?  Because we fear for our jobs?  But if we fail to deliver, aren’t our jobs just as much, if not more, in jeopardy?  Not to mention our mental and emotional health...

How can we learn a different behavior?

By remembering our experiences, and those of our colleagues.  We must remind ourselves that the fear of remaining silent should be greater than the fear of speaking up.

What would your competitors do if they could learn faster than you?

Or better yet, what would your organization do if it could learn faster than your competitors?  The concept - and most interestingly, the science - of accelerated learning is explored in an article by WTRI.  They believe that:

"...the 'accelerated learning' cycle may be the most crucial to meeting a company's mission critical goals. However, accelerated learning doesn't just refer to faster training for new employees, it requires rethinking how you look at problems, from the shop floor to the executive suite. Accelerated learning involves three key elements:

1. Focus. Its not about getting the job done, but getting the right job done, using the right people

2. Adjust. Develop the ability to rapidly readjust one's focus to the right problem

3. Apply. Harness and apply the existing expertise within your company to tackle novel situations. "

What I find especially intriguing is the idea that this acceleration of learning can be achieved in a virtual environment - all the benefits of reducing costs to connect people, coupled with the safety and mind-expanding benefits of simulation.

So who will benefit from this first - you, or your competitor?