Finding The Right Question

What is the point of reporting project or programme status?

In many organizations, the more visible the status is to higher levels of the organization, the less meaning it has.

Wait...what?

So if an executive wants to know how a portfolio of projects is doing, and which projects might be about to experience challenges, she may be pursuing a lost cause?

Yes.  For two reasons. 

First, many project managers have learned that “yellow light” or “red light” status reports make their lives more difficult with unwanted and generally unhelpful attention.  “Green light” status reports, on the other hand, make it easier to focus on productive work, which may allow one to skate through the challenges and end up with a successful outcome.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

Second, as I have written elsewhere, what gets measured and reported on most status reports is rarely of any use in predicting and articulating the need for helpful and timely intervention.  In many organizations, even if their status reports were accurate, the “yellow light” - and especially the “red light” - reports would be describing train wrecks in progress.  Executive intervention would likely be too late to alter the course of history.

So what is an executive responsible for a portfolio to do?  And what is a project manager navigating a career to do?

The answer in both cases, I contend, is to be a leader of cultural change.  Leading downward, executives need to celebrate and reward those project managers who raise flags and ask for help in a timely fashion.  And leading upward, project managers need to report status on the most important, and leading, indicators of project health, along with their recommendations for corrective action by the appropriate executives.

Without such a culture that clearly values the discussion of timely corrective actions, status reports may be little more than a nuisance to project managers and an empty comfort to portfolio executives.

Not much point to that.

How do you manage a career if career planning doesn’t work?

“At no time in my career could I have predicted five years previously where I was going to be or what I was going to be doing.” 

That statement is true for me (across the span of a forty year career), and I believe it is true for most, if not all, professionals.

Terrific!  So career management is like betting at the roulette table? 

Fortunately, no.  It is true that specific steps and assignments cannot be accurately planned far in advance.  But there is a push-pull strategy that can be used to accelerate career advancement.  It involves the pull of a network of mentors/sponsors and the push of a personal desire to stretch into new competencies and expertise.

One model for this strategy has been articulated by Linda A. Hill, a Harvard Business School Professor who has done extensive research in this area.   (You can purchase this article for $6.95 from this site.)  She describes a repeating cycle in which a stretch opportunity is orchestrated through a personal network, resulting in new competencies and a more prominent reputation, leading to a more powerful network that helps provide the next stretch opportunity, and so on.

That would explain why accurately predicting the next five years is not possible.  But what makes it intentional and what makes it happen faster rather than slower?

I believe the answer lies in what we choose to do in growing our networks and in pushing ourselves to stretch.  Elsewhere I have written about one’s Personal Board of Directors.  This concept involves intentionally recruiting mentors/sponsors (the pull side of the strategy to find stretch opportunities) as well as trusted advisors and coaches (the push side of the strategy to help understand the necessary areas for growth and to embrace the challenge of stretching).

In the final analysis, you can’t plan a career far in advance. 

You can, however, put in place your own mechanisms to build competency and reputation.

Do that, and the rewarding career will follow.

It’s a sure bet.