Triple Constraints

As the year 2009 comes to an end, many people are getting ready to make New Year’s Resolutions. Many of these are the ones we hear year in and year out:

• Lose weight
• Quit smoking
• Stop drinking
• Get out of debt

These are all noble goals and I wish those people making these resolutions the best of luck in trying to keep them. I too will be making some resolutions this year, but mine are focusing on how I conduct myself as a project manager. Here they are:

#1 Listen more than I speak
One of the key responsibilities of a project manager is to know what is happening with their project. This involves working with all team members and stakeholders to learn the current state of the project. This may seem like it requires extensive speech by the project manager, but experience project managers know that it takes just a little prompting to get your stakeholders and team to open up and provide you with the project’s temperature.

#2 Focus on my team, and not my computer
Project management software is everywhere we turn. It promises to make us better project managers and to make our projects run smoother. Project management software is a useful tool in the project manager’s arsenal, but it is not a predictor of project success. I will admit that in the past I have become enamored with PM software, but I learned that to make my projects truly succeed I needed to focus on my team. The team is what accomplishes tasks. The team allows me to meet deadlines. The team is responsible for delivering a quality project.

#3 Answer questions before they are asked
While it seems to run contradictory to #1, this resolution does not. This year I am going to do my best to proactively address team and stakeholder questions. Project managers often know what the stakeholders/customers need to know, but we often wait for the question to be asked because we hope it will give us more time to remedy any bad situations or increase the positives we can report on.

#4 Accept responsibility for more blame
Project managers are people. As such, we attempt avoid negatives in our lives. One such negative is blame. Many people do anything they can to avoid blame. This may temporarily make them feel better, but in the long run it can only hurt more. By accepting blame during the course of a project, project managers help their team build a sense of camaraderie because they feel that they are working together instead of just being led by the PM. Also, accepting blame professionally can actually help your career because it shows your boss that you understand the importance of accountability. Now don’t get me wrong…I am not saying that you should accept the blame for all things that go wrong on your project. Instead, take responsibility for those things that you could have impacted.

I believe that these resolutions will help me be a better project manager in the coming year and for years to come. I hope that you think about how you manage your projects and come up with resolutions for yourself. Please feel free to share your resolutions with your fellow readers below so that we can all improve ourselves in 2010.

This past Christmas weekend, I visited my wife’s family. It was a lovely time and we had lots of good conversations. One of the conversations we had was about careers. Most of the family is out of college, and we all have different careers. One is a lawyer, one is a salesperson, one is in marketing, one is an engineer, and I am a project manager. Most of the other professions are easy to explain, but mine is more difficult.

After explaining to them the basics of what project management is, I was left to detail how I got into project management. This sounds like a simple topic, but it was not straight forward. I was a psychology major in college and never thought about a career in project management.

My first few jobs after college were not what you would call project management jobs, but they did require many of the same skills that project management requires. And they all seemed to lead me down a path that resulted in project management as a career.

One of these jobs was as the assistant manager of a golf course. One of the responsibilities of this job was to facilitate and arrange corporate golf outings to our resort. The skills that were required for this job were organization, prioritization, and communication. These same skills are essential for the successful management of projects.

Another of my earlier jobs was as an Information Systems Coordinator. This job required that I work with various stakeholders to define business processes and requirements for newly-developed internal systems. This job helped me to gain experience in requirements gathering and stakeholder management. It also shifted my career from more service-centric to increasingly technology-centric jobs.

After this job, I received several more technology-heavy jobs. These jobs all required that I increase my technical aptitude and my ability to manage the deployment of the systems I was involved in. It was this responsibility of overseeing the deployment of systems and projects that ultimately led me to project management. I noticed that my interest and passion laid with ensuring that my stakeholders and customers were satisfied with what I, and the rest of my team, delivered.

It was at this point that I began to more rigorously attempt to increase my project management knowledge:

• I read every project management book I could get my hands on
• I took online training courses that prepared me for the PMP exam
• I listened to project management podcasts
• I attended project management events and conferences

It is this combination of experience, training, and involvement in the project management community that has brought me into the project management fold. It has been a winding path from being a psychology major at Notre Dame to being a project manager for a technology firm, but it has been a path I am glad I walked down.

Now I ask you the same question that was the impetus for this post:

How did you get into project management?

This advice is a supplement to an article posted here recently by Chris McSpiritt.

Project Managers who earn their professional certification through the Project Management Institute (PMI) are required to complete ongoing training to retain the PMP credential. PMs are given three years to earn a required 60 PDUs. There are a lot of ways to complete the training, 12 of which are outlined at PMI.org, but many of these options are expensive. I’m hoping to get you started without breaking the bank.

Free Podcasts
The first thing you should do is start listening to Project Management-related podcasts. Every hour of content is worth one PDU. You can earn up to 15 PDUs this way, in category 2 SDL (self-directed learning). I recommend the Project Management Podcast which is hosted by Cornelius Fichtner, PMP. He provides great content that is worth your time. And there are plenty of free episodes. Listen to the PM Podcast here. And here are the instructions for submitting your PDUs to PMI.

Free Course Downloads
Another method for earning free PDUs is through self-paced online courses. IBM offers a full suite of courses that you can download for free. All together, you can earn 19 PDUs by completing the available e-kits. It’s a great option from a trusted company. You can download the e-kits directly from IBM.

Free Webinars
Certain trainers offer free webinars as an introduction to their service. For example, you can earn up to 8 free PDUs by watching the courses available from IAG Consulting.

Inexpensive Online Training
There are a lot of trainers who offer inexpensive training courses for those looking to earn PDUs in a pinch. PM Educate offers a package that would award you the full 60 required PDUs for $500 – or even less if they are having a sale. PDUs2Go also has a training suite that can earn you the full 60 PDUs for as little as $600.

Training Directly Through PMI
And of course PMI offers online training courses as well. For example, the course titled Project Movie: A Practical Application of the PMBOK will earn you 15 PDUs at a total cost of $500 for PMI members.

So there are a lot of free or inexpensive options out there if you shop around a little. Please feel free to add any suggestions by submitting comments to this article.

A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled “How Football Coaches are like Project Managers“, which compared project managers to football coaches. The article discussed how coaches, like project managers, are responsible for the following:

• Procuring superior talent
• Preparing the team
• Motivating the team

When a coach accomplishes the above tasks, they are likely to have a successful tenure. This is evidenced by trophies, rings, and accolades.

However, it is more often the case where a coach is not able to accomplish all of the above tasks. When this happens, the team does not win enough, and eventually the coach is let go. This recently happened when my alma mater decided not to retain Charlie Weis as head coach. It was not his lack of commitment, effort, or passion that caused him to lose his job. It was the lack of wins over the past few years.

Project managers are also judged by the bottom line.

You may have assembled and trained a dynamic team. You may have motivated the team to work hard for you. You may be liked by your superiors. However, do not be complacent because of these factors. Any project manager knows that he/she is only judged by the success of their last project. A project fails or succeeds because of the entire team, but as the sports cliche says, “You can’t fire the whole team”. When the project fails, it is often the project manager who bears the brunt of the responsibility.

However, there is the flip side. When a project succeeds, the project manager is often the one who receives the lion’s share of the praise. We can all think back to when we were riding high after the success of an important project.

The bottom line is that we, as project managers, know where we stand. We are accountable for the success of a project and we cherish that responsibility. We like assembling our team and going to battle with them. We enjoying helping our players grow on the field of play. And most of all, we like looking up at the scoreboard when time has expired and seeing that we have won.

When many people think of project management they think of rigid adherence to rules and defined process. They often envision a project manager sitting in front of his/her laptop receiving updates from the team, entering it into Microsoft Project, and then creating status reports. While this may be the case for many projects, it does not do justice for the true role of the project manager.

Many readers of this blog, and of other project management articles, believe that project management is all about people and communication management. This hits closer to home in terms of the real responsibilities of a project manager. The project manager is not just a robot who receives information and databases it; rather he/she is an active participant in the conversation that is project management. The project manager is constantly communication with team members and all project stakeholders. They receive constant updates on the project and then work to utilize that information to make sure all parties are informed so that progress can be made.

In reading the book The Speed of Trust by Steven Covey, a book I highly recommend, I came to further realize the role that trust plays in project management. As the author points out in the book, trust is an attribute that can contribute to the success or failure of a project as much as any other.

Let’s examine how trust can impact your project:

The project manager must trust that the project team is being honest about task estimates.

We all hear stories where project teams pad the estimates for how long tasks will take to complete only to have the project manager reduce the time because they know the team is padding the estimate. This is counter-intuitive in that it requires additional time/energy to complete the estimation/planning phase of the project. If the team and project manager trust and respect each other, then the process can be smoother and no one will feel that they are being manipulate.

The project manager must trust that the stakeholders are being honest about requirements.

When a project is in the requirements phase, the stakeholders have a great deal of input into the direction of the project. If this direction is not accurate, then the entire project is off-track from the onset. Sometimes the stakeholders are not sure about all requirements, and this is ok. There are entire agile methodologies designed to handle situations where all the requirements are not known or clearly understood. It is up to the stakeholders to define the requirements clearly up front or to alert the team that there are many unknowns.

The project team must trust that the project manager is keeping them informed of all changes to the project(requirements, schedule, etc.)

The project team is responsible for the creation of all project deliverables. As such, they need to be aware of any changes that may occur to what and when they must deliver. This ties into communication, but the project manager needs to instill confidence in the team that they are heading in the right direction. This can most easily be accomplished by being open and honest with the team. This trust will help the project manager manage and motivate the team as well.

The stakeholders must trust that the project manager is keeping them informed of all changes to the project (costs, schedule, etc.)

The project manager is ultimately responsible for the success of the project and they are accountable to the stakeholders. The stakeholders hate nothing more than to be surprised on the date of a deadline with the news that the project is missing its milestone. Also frustrating for the stakeholders is to be informed by the project manager that the project is significantly over budget. Both of these situations can result in the project being terminated prior to completion. One way to ameliorate this situation is to be honest and open with the stakeholders whenever things are slipping. Don’t get me wrong, they won’t enjoy hearing this unpleasant news. But at the same time, they will respect you for being honest about the situation and this can lead to them giving you a little more slack.

In Conclusion

We have examined some high-level ways in which trust and honesty can improve the health of your project. It is not always the easy thing to be honest at all times with your team and stakeholders, but the benefits of establishing truest are worth it. A team that trusts you will often work harder for you. Stakeholders that trust you will often give you the benefit of the doubt.

The effects of not being trusted are not something that you  want to encounter. They are manifested by a team that does not put full effort into the project and stakeholders that hedge their bets when it comes to the project and your career. So be sure that you treat trust as a resource that needs to be vigilantly protected.