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3 Keys to Working With Virtual Teams

16 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

“Go West, young man,” wrote Horace Greeley.

I live in the west. Smack dab in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. I don’t tote around a six-shooter, but I do drive a Jeep, like to go camping, often wave a fly in the air trying to catch fish and otherwise enjoy playing in the mountains or the high deserts of Southern Utah.

After you escape the bigger cities and get off the Interstate, there’s a lot of wide-open country—towns are about thirty miles apart. It’s the distance a buggy or a horse and rider could travel in a day (and the distance I can cover in my Jeep in about 30 minutes). My world is a little smaller than the early settlers in Utah.

However, organizations doing project based work have a world that has become even smaller. The vast array of technological tools available today are getting better and better at making virtual project teams effective, allowing people to be accessible without being in the same building, the same country, or even the same continent.

Some of the benefits of building virtual teams include:

Organizations can hire the best people for the job regardless of geographic proximity
The overhead expenses related to brick-and-mortar office space can be reduced
Global project teams make it possible for work to be virtually done around-the-clock

The benefits of working with virtual teams can be pretty substantial, but there are some considerations that need to be taken into account before jumping in with both feet. If you’re considering working with virtual teams, let me suggest the following regarding people, process, and technology:

People:

Trust yourself and your employees
Clearly communicate roles, responsibilities, and expectations
As a team, understand how productivity will be measured

Process:

Build a communication plan that takes into account the diverse geographical relationship of the team
Define an electronic records archiving policy
Establish an electronic communications standard

Technology:

Use collaborative workspaces to manage project content
Deploy and use an online “chat-like” capability
Use Internet-based meetings with both voice and video

Project management solutions have come a long way in the last few years, making it possible for organizations to manage projects and teams from anywhere with an Internet connection. When looking for a technology solution, it’s important to consider a few things like foreign language capability, platform independence, collaboration and communication capabilities, as well as scalability of the network and online access. The right solution will help address many of the people and process requirements of working with a virtual team.

Do you have experience working virtually with a project team? Please share what you’re doing to promote efficiency and effectiveness with a global team.

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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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Employee Loyalty: A Casualty of the New Normal?

11 May 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

According to Knowlege@Wharton, MetLife’s recent 10th annual survey of employee benefits, trends and attitudes released a few months back shows employee loyalty at a seven year low. “One in three employees,the survey says, plans to leave his or her job by the end of the year.” What’s more, “According to a 2011 Careerbuilder.com report, 76% of full-time workers, while not actively looking for a new job, would leave their current workplace if the right opportunity came along. Other studies show that each year, the average company loses anywhere from 20% to 50% of its employee base.”

Wow. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we were all just happy to have a job?

This is very consistent with a Gallup pole published last year that claimed 71 percent of the workforce is “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work. In other words, they are emotionally disconnected from their work.

Last fall, in an article published on the Grapevine, Owen Morgan asked, “So why are so many employees currently thinking about changing employers—and at a time of such economic uncertainty?”

The last few years have been hard on everyone, the companies we work for, our bosses, their bosses and our team members. Listening to the radio the other day, I heard that U.S. companies are dealing with the last several years of hard economic times much better than our counterparts in Europe. They suggested this is largely to do with U.S. corporations’ ability to do more with less. In reality, I guess it should be really defined as the U.S. workforce that was able to keep their jobs, were willing to work longer and harder to keep the companies they work for afloat.

This is a good thing, right?

Wharton management professor Adam Cobb sees another reason for this loyalty problem, “When you are talking about loyalty in the workplace, you have to think about it as a reciprocal exchange,” says Cobb. “My loyalty to the firm is contingent on my firm’s loyalty to me. But there is one party in that exchange which has tremendously more power, and that is the firm.”

According to Cobb, when employers complain that employees have no loyalty anymore, it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. “Imagine a different world where firms took care of their employees, and loyalty was reciprocal,” he suggests. “Would employees be job hopping to the extent they are now.”

Most companies (and their employers) have thus far survived the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And those same employees have watched loyal colleagues suffer the consequences of layoffs, and the termination of many loyal and hard-working people with little, if any, regard for their loyalty or length of service. This doesn’t create an atmosphere of loyalty within an organization or on a project team.

According to Cobb, we’re suffering from behaviors that started about 30 years ago. “Firms have always laid off workers, but in the 1980s, you started to see healthy firms laying off workers, mainly for shareholder value.” In their announcements of pending staff cutbacks, “firms would say, ‘We are doing this in the long-term interest of our shareholders,’” Cobb notes. “You would also see cuts in employee benefits — 401(k)s instead of defined benefit pensions, and health care costs being pushed on to employees. The trend was toward having the risks be borne by workers instead of firms. If I’m an employee, that’s a signal to me that I’m not going to let firms control my career.”

I guess the short answer is yes, employee loyalty is a casualty of the new normal. The question then becomes, what can I do about it?

I was looking back over some old resource material the other day and found (or re-found) an article from Entrepreneur.com that offers seven suggestions for how to keep good team members, as the economy improves. I think these suggestions apply very well to team members:

Revisit Old Promises: It’s important to address any benefit cuts or salary freezes which were agreed upon by team members due to economic conditions, but it’s also important to review any other promises made to the team that may have been forgotten. For example: the extra day off for working the weekend, the bonus that was promised but wasn’t realized, etc. The team will remember, so you had better remember too.
Take Action: If employees have concerns or complaints, don’t ignore them. If team members are asking for additional responsibilities, give them an opportunity to participate in an expanded role on the team. When team members feel that their voice matters, they are more inclined to feel satisfied at work.
Have Fun: A lot of teams plan activities outside of the office. If that works for your team, that’s great. However, it is possible to make the work environment a fun and enjoyable place to be. Focusing on “all work all the time” can make the job a drag. Sometimes all it takes is a 5-10 minute break during the day or bringing in a pizza once in a while to ease the tension and make the workplace fun. Be creative.
Keep Talking: Keep the team up to date regarding the status of the company and its prospects. This can go a long way to ease fears about the future. Our company meets together every quarter to talk about our successes (and failures) during the quarter. We also get an update on our company’s health. I find this hour very valuable and appreciate that our CEO makes it happen every quarter. It may not be a company-wide meeting in your organization, but you can certainly keep your team up to date.
Be Transparent: Make sure to communicate both the company’s good and bad news without “sugar-coating” the bad news. It’s important to speak to every member of the team individually from time to time to let them know how they are doing and how they fit into the company’s (and the team’s) plans for growth.
Address Inequities: Rewarding employees based upon performance can be a good idea, but if there are significant pay inequities on the team, they aren’t a secret. Now is a good time to address pay inequities with raises where appropriate. As a project leader, you might not have the authority to implement a pay raise for a key employee, but you sure have some influence with who does.
Be Realistic: As the economy improves, you may very well loose some team members to the “bigger or better” opportunity. However, if you can show the team that they are important to the organization’s success, and are open and honest with them regarding what’s happening at your company and their future, they will more than likely stick with the team.

I don’t believe there’s a silver bullet for this, but before you whine about the lack of employee (or team member) loyalty or their motivation, maybe it’s time to stop giving lip service to creating a great place to work and focus on actually doing something about it.

I’m convinced that it’s the individual members of a project team that are the key to project success, just as it is the employees of an organization that create success. What are you doing to build loyalty among the members of your project team?

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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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What is Collaborative Work Management Anyway?

30 April 2012 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I talk a lot about “Work Management” in my blog posts and this blog is even named the “Work Management” blog, but what is Work Management, really? I’ve been asked that question several times, so this is a post about how I define Work Management and how it relates to traditional project management—and why it should matter to all of us. I personally think this is a really big deal—maybe even a game changing shift in how we look at work and interact with the management process.

Work Management represents an evolution of project portfolio management (PPM) and is a paradigm that recognizes that a person’s workday consists of more than structured project-work; it includes ad-hoc requests that come from colleagues, personal tasks, goals, objectives, and repetitive duties that must be understood and prioritized. The goal of this approach is to provide a 360-degree view of all work, including a space to collect, prioritize and manage work with tools that help teams work collaboratively on the things that matter most to an organization.

How is this really different from Project Management?

I consider traditional project management to be a sub-set of Work Management. The Work Management paradigm is an on-ramp to all the work done by teams (including traditional projects), enabling project leaders and other managers to evaluate potential and current projects, set the right strategic and tactical objectives, validate corporate initiatives, and promote and execute on those projects that provide the greatest business value (within the context of all the work done within an organization).
How does this impact teams and culture?

As workplace culture changes (generation X and Y are accustomed to having more control over what they do and when they do it than any other generation of workers before them), a people-centric Work Management approach doesn’t treat the workforce as resources to be put into productivity buckets, but rather as the linchpin to business success. Assigning work has evolved into a collaborative process between organizational layers and peers.

This democratization of how work is allocated represents a paradigm shift recognizing that those closest to the work understand it the best and should have the ability to help set timelines and milestones for deliverables. Today’s leaders are expected to look ahead and plan to overcome obstacles through better communication, not increased micromanagement.

How does Work Management accommodate structured project-based work?

Looking at projects from the perspective of Work Management frees us from dependence upon any single execution methodology like Agile/Scrum, NPD or waterfall; which are all accommodated within a successful Work Management Approach.

The traditional project management paradigm teaches a top-down planning approach, which attempts to align people, skills, time, and activities. Unlike this approach, which relies on a centrally owned and managed process with people reporting status against a plan, a Work Management approach seeks to democratize the project plan and invites feedback regarding time-lines and deliverables. Enabling individual project team members to make commitments regarding project delivery dates facilitates a more accurate picture of project status and provides managers with a forward-looking view of the schedule.

Empowering everyone throughout the organization involves people in the execution of structured work and delivers a rich stream of contextual information into status and activity.

How does this accommodate unstructured work?

Most of a person’s workday is spent managing unstructured work (requests from peers, colleagues and work that is not associated with formal projects). Work Management provides a workspace to capture unstructured work from various sources to facilitate collaboration including: wikis, blogs, document sharing, meetings, chat and group resource scheduling. It also provides visibility into what others are working on, enabling comments and updates around projects and tasks.

In my opinion, the biggest change associated with a successful Work Management platform is a shift from a focus on work governance to a focus on optimization. What are your thoughts about this new paradigm?

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