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Integrity Matters

15 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

“Yahoo confirmed in a Sunday afternoon press release that CEO Scott Thompson will step down, effective immediately,” writes Catherine Smith for the Huffington Post.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States and supreme commander of the Allied forces during World War II, said, “The supreme quality of leadership is unquestionable integrity. Without it, no real success is possible.”

About a week ago I wrote about Thompson and how he falsified his background on his resume. Although I’m convinced that we have a flawed system for hiring talent by relying too heavily on resume scrapers to search for keywords (which might have contributed to why Mr. Thompson opted for lying on his resume) the fact that he did calls into question what Eisenhower describes as the “supreme quality of leadership”. It’s no surprise to me that Thompson has stepped down.

Over the years, those leaders I have responded to the best have been those I felt I could trust. I could trust what they said. I could trust the motives of what they did. And, I never had to second guess them.

Some time ago I wrote about honest project communication and was surprised that the reaction wasn’t a unanimous, “Yeah, honesty is the best policy.” I have to admit, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about those who suggested that it was OK to lie to colleagues, co-workers and team members than I should have. I have even recalled some of the poor leaders I’ve experienced over my career and recognized that many of them were liars. They lied to me. They lied to the rest of the team. They even lied to our boss.

It was Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.” I have observed that the great leaders I have worked with, regardless of their position, were men of unquestionable integrity.

I recognize that for many this isn’t black and white, but maybe it should be.

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Apply for a New Job, Get a Project?

14 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Michael Schrage’s recent post: Projects Are the New Job Interviews, on HBR.com. “Resumes are dead. Interviews are largely ineffectual. Linkedin is good. Portfolios are useful,” says the research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s center for Digital Business. “But projects are the real future of hiring, especially knowledge worker hiring. No matter how wonderful your references or how well you do on those too-clever-by-half Microsoft/Google brainteasers, serious firms will increasingly ask serious candidates to do serious work in order to get a serious job offer.”

Are you seeing this in your organization? I am.

Job applicants here are asked to complete some kind of project to demonstrate how they think, how they approach work and whether or not they really understand what they say they understand. In a previous life, I worked in an organization that conducted what we called “auditions” for potential hires we really liked. We’d bring them in for a day (we paid them of course), and had them work with the team. At the end of the day, if we liked them, they left with a job offer.

I’ll admit, both scenarios are still artificial, but they provide something a resume doesn’t, an opportunity to see how potential hires work under pressure, how they think on their feet and whether or not they really have the skills they claim to have (you can’t find that out with a resume scraper looking for key words).

Like a resume or an interview, I’m not convinced that projects are anything more than simply one more data point. I do agree they offer a better glimpse into a potential hire’s skills than a resume.

“Ultimately,” writes Schrage, “the reason why I’m confident that ‘projects are the new job interviews’ is not simply because I’m observing a nascent trend but because this appears to be a more efficient and effective mechanism for companies and candidates to gain the true measure of each other. Designing great applijects and projeclications will be a craft and art. The most successful utilizers will quickly be copied. Why? Because the brightest and most talented people typically like having real-world opportunities to shine and succeed.”

Would you rather make your next hire based upon a keyword-dense resume, or because he or she wow’ed you with the results of a successful project?

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Strategically Thinking About Managing Work in the Cloud

10 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

There’s a lot of talk about working in the “cloud” these days. If you’re like me, you have some personal storage in the cloud, a handful of the apps you use every day are in the cloud and your company is always looking for new ways to work in the cloud.

Earlier this month, Mark Thiele suggested, “As an IT community we are still stuck in the past relative to the strategic nature of cloud. Many of us are looking at the adoption of cloud as just another technology, and are leaving the decisions on how to adopt, own, and manage the cloud up to engineers.” Managing the cloud “…is not an engineering decision—it’s a strategic one,” says Thiele.

I agree. What’s more, managing work in the cloud just makes strategic sense to me—particularly with distributed teams. I know of a number of project managers that regularly work with teams spread throughout the country, and the world for that matter, who deal with time zones, languages and the communication issues associated with the every day. The cloud makes it possible, but they’ve all developed strategies that make it work.

The world has become a pretty small place since I started my career—the technology that allows me to interact with colleagues instantaneously from around the world continues to blow my mind. Computers, cell phones, VOIP, and video conferencing allow me to work from almost anywhere in the world. Although my adult children harass me about growing up when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we did get a lot of work done without cell phones, personal computers, or SKYPE

As convenient as things are now, there are some unique challenges to working in a global project environment. Organizations regularly working with teams from around the world need to consider their strategy for dealing with cultural, language, geographic, and time differences that can sometimes make working with global teams problematic.

The Challenge of Different Time Zones: Collaborating with teams in South America, China, the UK, and Cincinnati can sometimes be problematic. For example, as I write this at 7:45 am local time, it’s 11:45 pm in Tokyo, 2:45 pm in London, 12:45 pm in Rio, and 10:45 pm in Beijing. The challenges of putting together a project team meeting with a globally diverse workforce are sometimes as basic as determining what time to hold the meeting.
A Possible Solution: Nobody on the project team should be asked to regularly stay up until 2:00 am just to make it more convenient for you. Everyone on the project team should be able to share the burden of an inconvenient meeting time once in a while. A simple solution is to try to hold team meetings when everyone is at work, which might be early in the workday where you are and later in the workday where part of the team is located—at least everyone should take turns meeting at inconvenient times.
The Challenge of Bringing the Team Together: Sometimes it’s important to bring the team together, which has the potential to be pretty expensive.
A Possible Solution: At @task, we have global project teams that work out of Europe and Asia. Although we don’t get together often, we do get together. Online project management tools help organizations collaborate and work together in different countries, timezones, and languages—but the need to get together doesn’t completely go away. Personally meeting together as a team once or twice a year is important for building morale and team esprit de corps.
The Challenges of Different Languages: The nuances of different languages beg for miss-communication. Even where your particular language is spoken as a second language, it’s critical that communication be clear. We need to be cautious, particularly where the lion’s share of communication is written, where body language and facial expression are not available to aid understanding.
A Possible Solution: Video conferencing is a good option, but at the very least, make sure emails contain all the information necessary to communicate your ideas clearly. I try to address all my emails with a salutation and a name to remind me that I am actually communicating with a real person. Even amongst my co-workers, where English is our native language, we sometimes misunderstand and misinterpret an abrupt email.
The Challenges of Cultural Differences: If part of what defines us is our shared experiences, taking time for global team members to become better acquainted, and share experiences to create a team culture is important. This is true even if your team only spreads across your own country.
A Possible Solution: Take the time for global project teams to become familiar with each others varied customs and cultures. It might be as simple as sharing a regional dish for lunch. In this regard, a little effort goes a long way.

Working in the cloud allows us to work globally, but it should also encourage us to think about how we use cloud-based tools strategically. Simply having the ability to collaborate on projects, tasks and issues with team members from around the world isn’t enough—we need to think about how to do it best. How do we use our cloud-based tools to maximize the contribution of everyone on the team—regardless of their location?

What do you think? Is project management in the cloud tactical or a strategic play?

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Lost in the “Queue”? Some Work Probably Should Be

9 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Last Spring while working in London, my colleagues and I spent one evening exploring the city and found ourselves in the Sunday evening crowds around Piccadilly Square. Wandering around, we came across a Haagen Dazs® ice cream shop and thought we’d order one of their delicious milk shakes. Like every other time we’ve been on the road and thought one of these delicious ice cream confections sounded good, the place was reasonably busy. We took our place in line (or the queue if your in England) and patiently waited our turn.

It wasn’t long before some self-important guy with fancy shoes bust in expecting his order to be taken—however he’d tried to enter at the wrong end of the queue. Upset that he had been ignored (while uttering a number of expletives) he stormed out frustrated that the person behind the counter had the nerve to expect him to take his place at the back of the line.

This is not an uncommon problem in many organizations. All too often it feels like the squeaky wheel gets the most attention while more important work sits patiently in the queue waiting. Sometimes because of the title or authority of the “squeaker,” insignificant work gets top priority—which makes capacity planning problematic at best and impossible in many cases.

In my opinion, before we can accurately capacity plan, we need to effectively manage the queue. This is much easier for project teams that work on the same types of projects on a regular basis; and more challenging for companies that are always doing one-off, special projects—but it can be done.

When I first started managing projects I used a whiteboard to manage the queue. It worked, but it required me to capture email requests, assignments made in meetings and other requests manually. I’d then add them to the queue, prioritize them and begin the project planning process. I liked the fact that the whiteboard was on the wall in front of my desk and that I could keep an eye on my projects and how the team was progressing—but it wasn’t very efficient. I spent a lot of time at the board updating status, re-prioritizing and making notes. Good, but not great.

Although I’m not a certified “Scrum Master” I have led a Sprint or two. I like the idea of the backlog, which is a lot more efficient than my old whiteboard, but it has its limitations.

Managing the queue becomes really important when your team does a lot of ad hoc work like my team does or provides shared services to your organization like many in IT, marketing or HR. Sometimes things fit nicely into a work breakdown structure, but this isn’t always the case. In a recent webinar, I heard Forrester’s Tim Harmon suggest that for most knowledge workers, over fifty percent of their work is what he calls unstructured/ad hoc work. In conversations I’ve had with project leaders over the last year, they all tell the same story: there’s a lot of work done by project teams that are short-duration one-off requests from colleagues, managers from other departments and peers that eat up a lot of team members’ time. Sometimes the project manager might know about these requests so he can accommodate them within his or her capacity plan, but not always.

I use our software to help manage my queue. Some of the most commonly requested project types are templated with the building blocks (established by best practice) already in place so we can apply them as needed to any upcoming plan. Internal customers can enter their request into the queue and I can prioritize, plan and execute as needed. Even one-off task requests come through the queue so I can add them to my work list, prioritize, take care of them myself or assign them to another member of the team. Managing the queue makes it much easier for me to address the likelihood that a new project request can be completed and when it might be executed with the person making the request. The queue informs the discussion about capacity and prioritization—making it easier to say “no” when needed or to “pivot” and change gears when required.

Before we can manage capacity, we need to manage the queue. I know what works for me. What works for you?

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Are Afterhours Work Emails Sending You to an Early Grave?

8 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

“If you’re one of those people who chronically checks work e-mail—on the weekends, at night, in the wee morning hours—then STOP,” reports the Huffington Post.

I browse through several online newspapers each morning, and the headline, Taking A Break From Work E-mail Could Help Curb Stress: Study, caught my eye. According to a new study from UC Irvine and the U.S. Army, taking a break from work email can lower stress and improve focus.

“We found that when you remove e-mail from workers’ lives, they multitask less and experience less stress,” said study researcher Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine.

I just heard the collective groan from all of my colleagues who are regularly sending emails and texts to each other after hours—and the cheers from my wife who regularly asks me what is so important every time I glance at my iPhone when it “buzzes” at me.

The researchers attached heart rate monitors to people working at the computer in an office setting and measured their heart rate variability—a signal of low stress (a constant heart rate is linked to higher levels of stress).

“The researchers found that when provided access to checking email, the study participants were constantly on ‘high alert’—with more constant heart rates—and changed screens 37 times an hour, on average.”

The study also showed when cut off from their email for five days, their heart rates became more variable—thus under less stress. They also changed screens about half as many times an hour.

Here’s another question for you. Do you ever “think” your smartphone has buzzed to let you know you have an email when it hasn’t? My wife laughs at me every time that happens to me. The study also found that this is not uncommon and calls it “phantom alerts”.

I’m not sure how much work we’d be able to get done without email. Email is integral to what I’m doing on a daily basis. It’s become a critical component to the way most people communicate and collaborate with each other.

Although email may be here to stay, constantly being “on” isn’t good for anyone’s health. Finding the right balance is an individual thing, but I will probably continue to check my email and my wife will continue to roll her eyes at me. Maybe if I leave it alone while we’re conversing at the restaurant I’ll be able to reduce stress at two levels.

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Good Decisions Demand Trustworthy Data

7 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Is your project data trustworthy? If you answered “no” or “I’m not sure”, you aren’t alone.

I’ve observed this to be a pretty universal conundrum. What’s more, it compels us to ask the question, “If some of the data associated with project-based work is questionable, is there a way to improve its overall trustworthiness for decision-making?”

I believe there is.

There’s been a lot of dialog recently about the impact of social media on the project management process. And, for the most part, we seem to fall into one of two camps. We’re either advocates of embracing social media or we are opposed to it. I fall into the former camp. I’m a big fan of embracing the social media metaphor.

The key to whether or not we have trustworthy information to make decisions depends upon how accurately we can capture project information at the source—individual contributors on a project team. Like most of you, I’ve spent my fair share of time going from cube to cube asking, begging, and cajoling for a status update. I’ve also watched team members fumble around looking at notes, whiteboards and scraps of paper to pull that information together. Each time I was frustrated at how inaccurate I knew my report was going to be before I even started.

Most team members don’t really get the project management process. They look at project managers as one more hindrance to actually getting things done. Of course, this isn’t correct, project managers are facilitators and help get the work done, right?

I’m convinced that engaging the team in the project management process is crucial to collecting accurate and timely project information that can be trusted to inform decisions. What’s more, I think the social media metaphor can help us do it.

Why is it that the same folks who chafe at updating their project status in PM tools will spend hours at home “updating status” on Facebook and other social media? I think the answer is pretty straightforward:

Social Media Provides Value to the User

If the only value updating status in your project management software provides is giving you (the project manager) accurate information to push up, it’s not enough value for most team members to contribute. In my opinion, social media provides value at a couple of different levels that we can and should be implementing into the project management process:

Social media is about collaboration: Post an update, get a response. Make another update, start a conversation. That isn’t happening in most project management software. Tasks get pushed down. There’s little if any dialog. There’s no request for comment. The obligation is on the team member to finish his or her task in the time allotted and that’s pretty much it. Not a very collaborative way to collaborate on projects, tasks and issues is it? Incorporating the social media metaphor into the PM process allows team members, project managers and others to collaborate about work in a way that feels natural to the Facebook generation. If the metaphor works and is accepted by the workforce as meaningful, does it really make sense to fight it? Embrace it. Leverage it.
Social media is about recognition: One of the things I’ve noticed over the last few years is the recognition component of social media. When people post an accomplishment, their friends and followers within their network seem to come out of the woodwork to congratulate and praise it. Applying the public nature of the social media metaphor to the PM process allows team members and other colleagues to make comment and acknowledge the accomplishments of their coworkers. Additionally, when everyone’s accomplishments (or lack thereof) are visible to managers and their peers, people tend to perform at a higher level. It’s more difficult to sit back and pretend to be busy working. Whether or not you are is visible to everyone on the team.
Social media isn’t very complicated: I must admit, I did have a younger colleague show me how to use Facebook initially. It took her about two minutes to completely explain how it worked. I didn’t need to attend a multi-day training program to figure it out. When was the last time you were able to start using a project management tool with that level of ramp up? I know, what project management tools do is a lot more complicated than Facebook. I get it. However, they don’t need to be that complex for the individual on a project team.

The real linchpin to whether or not we have trustworthy data to make decisions is the individual contributor on a project team. I think it’s past time we started looking at him or her, and how we can best engage them in the process, to make sure that the information we rely on to make smart decisions is timely and trustworthy. Let’s give them some value so they’ll become willing participants in the process.

What are you doing to engage the team? Does your software help you do it?

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That’s Why They Call It Work?

4 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Several months ago I read an article published by Liz Ryan in Businessweek. I’ve unashamedly ripped off her headline, but I’ve been sitting on this one for a long time because, although I think she’s right, it isn’t the way most project leaders and other business leaders look at their roles.

She talks about the volume of mail she receives from retired CEOs whenever she talks about leadership principles. She may be talking to CEOs, but I think the same ideas apply to how we interact with people and lead teams. The opinions of the CEOs she hears from seem split down the middle.

“A great deal of my retired-CEO mail floods in when I write about leadership,” writes Ryan. “The retired-CEO population (or at least the subset of it that writes to me) is split roughly down the middle in its views on the employer-employee relationship. When I write something like, ‘An employee’s job is to give 100 percent at the job every day, and an employer’s job is to give the employee a reason to come back to work tomorrow,’ half of my retired-CEO correspondents say, ‘Hear, hear!’ The other half write, ‘That’s horrible of you. What’s happened to the American work ethic? You should be telling people to knuckle down and make money for their employers.’

This is nothing new. Bosses have been having this discussion for the last 30 years that I’m aware of. The conversation usually starts with someone asking, “What’s happened to the American work ethic?”

The same people who are asking that question today don’t know it, but their bosses were asking that same thing about them 20 years ago.

“My dad had that true-blue work ethic, and I don’t blame him,” says Ryan. “It’s part of who he was, but he also had every good reason to believe his employer would do the right thing by him year in and year out, and it did. It was a different time. Who would take an entry-level sales job out of college and go on to have eight kids under the assumption that more and more responsible and lucrative work would emerge in time to sustain the growing family? That wasn’t a bad bet in 1950. It would be financial folly today.”

I agree when Ryan suggests that it’s my job to give 100 percent each day and it’s my employer’s job to give me a reason to come back to work tomorrow. Unfortunately for a lot of teams, challenging economic times have made everyone lazy. Companies haven’t had to make the workplace any better, so they haven’t. The whole “do more with less” mentality has helped American corporations survive the last few years, but they’re doing it with employees suffering from burn-out or worse, paycheck employees who are just there because it’s a job and it pays the bills.

“The old saw, ‘It’s not supposed to be fun—that’s why they call it work,’ is one of my grumpy former-CEO pen pals’ favorite rants,” says Ryan. “The crazy part is, I don’t believe for one second any one of those guys (all guys, so far, in my retired-CEO fan club) actually managed that way during his corner-office days.”

She argues, and I agree, do we really want team members who are only here because it’s a job and a paycheck? Don’t we want team members who are here because they want to contribute to something meaningful—make a difference? “If it isn’t fun, the CEO so quick to say, ‘That’s why they call it work,’ is screwing himself over,” writes Ryan.

I’m not suggesting that the workplace needs to be filled with silly games, artificial team-building exercises or the like. What makes the work fun is the challenge of doing exciting things, contributing to something meaningful and doing the work that you’re the best at. All the things we typically talk about when discussing team member engagement.

By the way, I’m fortunate enough to work with people who are incredibly engaged and work very hard to contribute to something meaningful and valuable to our customers.

Over the years I’ve worked for and with a number of people who “watched the clock.” Employers who expected their staff to put in more than 40 hours each week and colleagues who refused to put in any more than that. I think both views are shortsighted. I think it’s time we worried less about the assumed hours-for-dollars contract and focused on the value people bring to the table (and granted, some of that value is the time they spend on the job), but the lines between work and personal life have become so blurred over the last few years that many times employees who leave the office at 5:00 or 6:00 pm may be headed home and off the clock, but they are still thinking about and solving problems that make a positive difference at the job. I know my colleagues and I often share emails, text messages or phone calls over the weekend, while on vacation or other times when we’re not at work.

I entered the workforce many moons ago (when dinosaurs roamed the earth according to my kids) sweeping the floor of my fathers warehouse. He would hate this post—he was a “clock watcher.” However, like Ryan, I think it’s time we change the way we think about how we lead the team and the type of environment we create. Work should be fun.

What are you doing to create a “fun” environment on your project team?

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Barriers to Innovation

3 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Robert Half recently asked executives about the biggest roadblocks to organizational breakthroughs. 35 percent of chief financial officers said “a lack of new ideas” is the most difficult barrier to innovation. 24 percent cited bureaucracy as the top killer of creativity with 20 percent blaming being bogged down with daily tasks or putting out fires.

Responses from 1,400 some odd CFOs from a random sample of U.S. companies all answered the following question: “What is the greatest barrier to your company being more innovative?” Here are the responses:

Lack of new ideas—35%
Too much bureaucracy—24%
Being bogged down in daily tasks or putting out fires—20%
Ineffective leadership—9%
Other—1%
Don’t know/no answer—11%

I don’t think anyone would disagree that innovation is what helps keep companies growing and profitable. Environments that foster innovation also keep employees engaged and excited about coming to work every day. Robert Half suggests six tips for creating an environment that inspires innovation among teams. I like the list:

Engage the entire team: If we can’t engage the team in what we’re doing, we’ve lost before we’ve even begun. This should be no surprise to anyone who leads a project team—particularly those who work with matrixed teams cobbled together throughout the organization. Although I’m fortunate enough to work with the same team on almost every project, many project managers aren’t so lucky. Facilitating an environment where team members feel engaged isn’t brain surgery, but it does require some effort. Is your team engaged? Here’s a brief quiz that should give you an idea.
Remove the red tape: This often manifests itself in lengthy approval processes that force work to a standstill. I once heard a colleague lament, “I want to produce. I don’t want to sit around all day thinking about producing.” Sometimes it’s a matter of empowering people to make decisions about their specific role. A few years back I learned of three keys to smart decision making, I’ve tried to embrace them because nobody wants to be forced into asking “Mother, may I?” every time they need to make a decision.
Keep it collaborative: Collaboration is more important than competition. It’s critical to create environments where people can effectively collaborate and work together. I don’t think there’s anyone who wouldn’t agree that a collaborative work environment is more productive, yet far too many organizations don’t create environments that encourage collaboration. Not long ago I wrote about four key elements that should be part of a collaborative environment, collaboration can sometimes be messy because we all have divergent opinions, but it’s well worth the efforts.
Build a better brainstorm: We’ve all been in brainstorming sessions that felt like a waste of time bouncing ideas around that all sounded stupid—until we landed on that one really great idea. I’ve discovered that you’ve got to go through a lot of really bad ideas before you identify the good ones. I’ve also noticed that this gets easier the more you do it.
Give ‘em a break: I’ve discovered that mistakes increase for every hour over nine or ten hours people work in a day. Burnout is a serious problem and in reality, when teams are putting in a lot of overtime, it’s an indication of a project in trouble—not a successful initiative. I grew up in an era when the amount of time you spent on the job was a badge of honor. I’m not sure I feel that way anymore. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO leaves the office at 5:30 pm every evening, “Are you putting in the hours?” might not be the right question anymore.
Seek inspiration: As the project leader, its important that you have the skills you’ll need to inspire the team. That also implies that you are inspired yourself. Make sure you set aside time to do whatever it is you do to unwind and clear your head. For me, there’s nothing like sitting on the saddle of my motorcycle or in a comfortable chair with a good book. I recently discovered that reading a novel is actually considered a great way to help master interpersonal relationships (as well as unwind). Whatever it is, make sure you spend time recharging your own batteries.

What are the barriers to innovation within your organization? Among your project team members? What are you doing about it?

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Project Management is Really Work Management

2 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

The lines between what we call work and what we call projects is starting to blur. Last spring I attended the Gartner PPM summit where Audrey Apfel suggested in the next few years 30 percent of what we traditionally call “projects” will not be considered projects anymore. “The work isn’t going away,” she suggested, “but how we categorize it is going to change.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone leading teams these days. Dealing with Ad Hoc work is part of the challenge project leaders face every day as they struggle to wrap their heads around capacity and resource management. If a project manager doesn’t have visibility into all the work on the table, how is he or she ever going to accurately plan for the resource needs of any project.

I was involved with a focus group of several project leaders a little over a year ago who initially suggested that they don’t manage any ad hoc or unstructured work with their team. “We do projects. Period,” they asserted. However, after a deeper dive they all admitted that ad hoc requests were an issue they were all struggling with as people from outside the team made relatively small one-off work requests that on the surface probably felt like fairly benign interruptions, but cumulatively had a negative impact on team productivity.

Interestingly last fall Forrester’s Tim Harmon (in a webinar sponsored by AtTask), shared an interesting statistic. Tim suggested that on average over 50 percent of the work done by project teams was non-project, ad hoc work. For some teams the percentage could be higher and for some lower (if you’re percentage is lower, consider yourself lucky). If half of the time a project team spends at work each day isn’t related to the project plan, I think it’s safe to say that project resource plans that don’t take that into account are doomed from the start.

Whether we like it or not, we need to start looking at how we manage projects differently. I’ve always been an advocate of a methodology-neutral approach to how we manage projects—throw ad hoc work into the mix, and we really need to take a different view. Here are a few suggestions:

In-bounding work is more critical than ever before: Ad hoc doesn’t mean unimportant. Although some very important work might not need a project plan (a “to-do” list might be all that’s required), evaluating and prioritizing simple work requests are every bit as important as it is for projects. I liken it to putting a fence around the team so the team’s focus is on prioritized work and not the personal agenda of a particularly squeaky wheel. This is a lot easier for organizations where work requests (projects and otherwise) are filtered through a formalized request process. This gives them more visibility into all the work and helps them better allocate resources to accomplish those initiatives that provide the most value to the organization.
We need to look a everything (including projects) in the context of work: I think the idea of project teams working exclusively on projects is a pipe dream. We need to implement systems and tools that give project leaders visibility into all the work being undertaken by the team. Without it, they’ll never be able to accurately plan for those initiatives that ultimately become projects, capacity planning will be impossible and project plans will be crippled from the start. Let’s face it, project management really is work management.

A one size fits all approach to managing projects and other work just doesn’t work. Just as some projects are more suited to an Agile methodology as opposed to a more traditional approach, all work won’t fit neatly into a project plan—however, we still need visibility into what’s going on. Visibility into all work makes it possible for project leaders and decision makers to understand the real story behind what’s happening within their teams and allows them to get out of theoretical capacity planning and really manage their human capital.

Are you seeing this within your teams? What are you doing about it?

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What Can We Learn From the Search for bin Laden?

2 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

It’s been a year since US forces found and eliminated Osama bin Laden. If you’re like me, you’ve got to be asking yourself, “How did the world’s ‘most wanted’ man keep himself hidden from the United States for so long?”

In a recent NBC News article, Amna Nawaz postulates that he had help, lots of it.

“If you’re a six-foot-five Arab, and the most wanted man on the planet, you can’t just walk into a place like Pakistan without support,” Kamran Bokhari, vice-president for Middle Eastern and South Asian Affairs at Stratfor, a global intelligence company said. “So what’s the nature of that support?”

It’s not unusual for projects to have detractors, some even become saboteurs, which the search for bin Laden demonstrates can make project success practically impossible.

“U.S. officials publicly state they have no evidence that any Pakistani institutional leaders had any knowledge of bin Laden’s presence here, nor played any role in helping to move him,” writes Nawaz. “Privately, however, some admit that the deep mistrust between the two nations has led to strong, lingering suspicions within many in the U.S. that Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency—Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI—must have known, at some level.”

As with most projects, high-level detractors spell disaster for unpopular projects—regardless of how valuable the initiative might be.

I’ve noticed over the years that this often manifests itself as “fear of change” or resistance to change. In most cases this is really a fear of the unknown and can sometimes even create detractors. Here are some of the most common fears that organizations face from project detractors resistant to change:

It’s different. Realizing that there are some people who really thrive on change, but most people don’t, is important. You might get push-back simply because it’s a change. I think the key here is to understand that sometimes it takes time for people to embrace the change. Whether it’s a new practice, a new process, a new boss or a new project—giving people time to accept change is important.
Some people (managers and team members) are uncomfortable with the additional scrutiny that often accompanies change. If your organization is implementing a project review process to evaluate potential projects, some stakeholders might be a little nervous that their proposed projects might not stand up up to peer review. It’s important to realize that projects that might be important to one senior manager or stakeholder might not be important to another. Making the review process transparent and understandable to everyone often helps reduce those types of concerns and minimizes the danger of project saboteurs.
Some projects are more important than others. Implementing a sound work management methodology will mean only those projects that provide the most business value will get pushed forward—not the “pet” projects of influential stakeholders. Because this might negatively impact some projects, there are stakeholders that may try to block the process and even stand in the way of project success.
There are tough decisions to be made. Sometimes it’s not easy for decision-makers to make choices regarding projects and people, but it has to happen. It’s important that senior managers understand that they have a responsibility to the organization—not just their individual departments or careers. There will be some who don’t like this fact.
Implementing change takes time. Regardless of the change, it never happens overnight. It takes time to implement new methods, it takes time for people to accept the change and accommodating for that time is crucial for change initiatives to be successful.

The search for bin Laden teaches us the value of keeping detractors from becoming saboteurs. Have you ever had to deal with people who actively fought against one of your projects? What did you do?

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