Make the right call

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and it has made all the difference.—Robert Frost

There is a new sheriff in town when it comes to better project managers, and it is a trait that I first learned about as a young officer in the military. The trait is called “situational awareness,” and to demonstrate what that trait encompasses, I give a dramatic example from when I was on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. One day during Desert Shield, we had an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) flying over the southern Iraqi “no fly” zone, when two unidentified helicopters were flying near the border.

After several attempts to hail the helicopters on friendly frequencies, the AWACS performed its mission by calling in fighters to get up close and personal with these aircraft and determine their intentions. Once the fighters came into visual contact with these helicopters, they identified them as Iraqi Hinds and fired their missiles, killing all aboard. It would not be until after all the aircraft had landed would they learn that they had shot down two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters and killed 12 U.S. soldiers.

This travesty was a wake-up call to the military services that there must be more situational awareness between the branches on missions, flight plans, and communication frequencies. I am happy to say that this problem has been mostly addressed with a common reporting system that allows the services to share this information across silos. As interesting and sad as this story is, what does it have to do with project management? Everything—although the decisions we are making every day are not all “life and death” decisions, they are critical to our company’s bottom line and they are “life or death” to our teams, careers, and families. Clearly, to be the best when there are nearly three million workers who refer to themselves as “project managers” means that you have to distinguish yourself from the crowd and have excellent judgment, problem-solving skills. an Overall situational awareness of your company’s mission, vision, and objectives will help set you apart.

As part of this understanding of your company’s vision, you must also have a vision for your team and yourself. This is a concept we refer to in our book called becoming a 360- Degree Thinker. This is when we look at our company’s history to understand where we’ve been to then understand how we arrive at where we’re heading.

Becoming a 360-degree thinker means a leader will seek first to:

• Understand the vision—Know the vision of your company for the next one to five years and understand your role in making that vision reality.
• Know the business trends—Keep up with the latest trends in business—for example, a trend lately is for businesses to enlist “cloud” support for their e-mail or other software needs.
• Active learning—Be sure you are looking to constantly improve or grow your skills such as getting a Lean Six Sigma certification or an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) credential.
• Build the team and communicate the vision—Whether the team is granted or you must recruit and build the team, make sure you are including them in the vision for the organization and that the team members understand their role.
• Proactively analyze the processes—Don’t wait for something to break; measure the effectiveness of your processes and always consider how you might make things easier and more efficient for the team and your company.

Once we have introduced the concept of becoming a “360-degree thinker,” we apply these skills to attaining success as a modern leader and explore several concepts from our book about performing as a leader in today’s business environment. Our three-step process starts with understanding and planning a journey of personal improvement. Sun-tzu says in The Art of War (Sawyer, 1994, p. 135), “Thus it is said, one who knows his enemy and knows himself, will not be endangered in a hundred engagements.” We believe that this is the initial concept of situational awareness taken to the next level so that you can:

• Understand the competition as well as yourself and trends in the field—you MUST be better than most in all that you do!
• Learn and understand the goals of your co-workers, superiors, and team members as well as yourself; the platinum rule, “Do unto others as they want done unto them!”

Let the students work on their own mind-map for their personal journey of self-improvement. Some students feel comfortable sharing and others do not. We encourage them to continue this exercise in privacy and to use it to build their own three-to-five year vision for their career. We then explore some concepts that we believe will distinguish one project manager from the crowd by building the “spirit de corps” within their teams:

• Use ingenuity and innovation to anticipate and plan for the future: host brown-bag lunch seminars or virtual webinars where you use a white board and call on people one by one to give their ideas about a particular challenge.
• If the team is geographically and time zone separated, use creative tools to collaborate—there are many that are free and easy to use (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn). A few clever “cloud” tools can help bring you together as a team.
• Keep a spreadsheet with the current week’s tasks, assignments, and goals visible to everyone; if you are virtual, find a way to do that “in the cloud” so everyone knows where you are and where you are going from day to day, no matter where they are in the world.
• Talk by phone, chat via instant messenger (IM), lead video calls on Skype, or interact in some way with the team daily; the dialogue will encourage problems to be highlighted early, while you still have time to act and correct.

There are also ways to be more successful as a leader in the modern era by leading from wherever you are in the organization. By this we mean that participants can make a conscious choice to become a leader wherever they might fall in the organizational chart.

• “There are no small parts, just small actors”—Stanislavski

• Every role is important, especially in the current economy, so make the decision to lead up, lead your peers, and lead your team.
• Give thought to your ethics, integrity, morals…keeping high standards and never compromising will make you stand out from the crowd—it’s a mind-set.
• “Lead, follow, or get out of the way” (Thomas Paine)—Participation in events such as learning events and Project Management Institute meetings means that the participants have great potential as leaders and therefore, are bound to navigate a journey of continuous improvement based on their calling.
• Project managers can always seek out ways to affect their companies no matter where they are in their careers or in the organizational chart.
• Trust is essential to effective modern leadership: building trust with their teams, their bosses, their suppliers, and customers. Doing what you say and saying what you are doing lends to leadership by example.
• Transparency is the new motto: sharing all project documentation, even the ugly, is the new credo in our business. If you aren’t prepared for the information to possibly appear on the Wall Street Journal, you better figure out why and make changes.
• Whether folks are halfway across the room or across the world, you have to figure out how to connect with them at a human level to make your working relationship successfully. No amount of tools can overcome that fact.
• Understanding the communications model of your team is necessary to build trust: how often you expect to communicate with team members, vendors, customers, etc.—Define this early and make sure everyone involved understands and agrees with the model.

Also, it is critical in the modern era that the project manager learns to make the right call, regardless of the time zone, continent, or locale of members of the team. This will involve a manager who will

• Embrace the diversity of the new global working environment.
• Get educated on the different groups involved in your work and understand their time zones, culture (high context/low context societies, etc), language, seasons, holidays, etc.
• Understand the value of different perspectives when focusing on a situation and welcome new ideas that may not have been possible to generate from your paradigm.
• Keep various lines of communication open so the team understands that you really do have an “open door” policy even separated by continents and 13 time zones. And make sure they all know that you don’t shoot the messenger when the news is bad news.

Finally, it will be important that a leader acknowledge and praise the work of their team. To do this successfully, leaders must remember to

• Celebrate successes and give praise for specific achievements by the team; and
• Understand that people need to feel they’re valued, especially when working remotely from the physical locale of the company so make sure to:
  • •  Speak, instant message, or video teleconference at least once a week or daily will help you lead in these situations more effectively.
  • •  Make it popular to achieve; be creative about how you give praise: for example, this past year, my work with Appirio (www.appirio.com) and how they use Demo Jams to reward clever problem solving or the CloudSpokes (www.facebook.com/cloudspokes) effort on Facebook to encourage collaboration.

Another useful tip we have found that brings success in the modern workplace is to have the ability to develop highly optimized teams. We call on experts from Harvard who researched the necessary ingredients for forming a highly optimized team. Bruce Tuckman and Harvard Business School found that there are five enabling conditions for efficient teams:

• The team has to feel like a team. Tuckman’s (1972) stages include forming, storming, norming, and performing.
• The team must have a clear purpose. Define the team with a project charter, even if this is not a normal process within your company, so that the team can understand their mission.
• The team must be organized in a way that can achieve the overarching purpose and or goals that have been set through the project charter.
• Operate within a supportive context. Make sure that when your team needs support through late-night working sessions, for example, bring in meals or get the team supplies that encourage progress and show that you provide that support.
• Make sure that you act as a coach and give guidance where needed but allow for the natural leaders of the team to emerge whether they be leaders in project management or technical leaders in your industry.

These are some of the obstacles to getting teams to a “highly performing” state:

• Rigid role hierarchy—Coaching and understanding the concept of teams becoming self-organizing.
• Being tactical in focus and not strategic—Teams not having the “big picture” of the company and not understanding or not agreeing with their role in that future.
• Not enough communication—Leadership does not have enough timely and effective communication with employees or teams about what they are asked to do and why it is critical to success.
• Leaders are not providing individually focused coaching of team members—Leaders should keep real development plans in mind for members to encourage high optimization and high morale.

To summarize what it takes to develop “highly optimized teams,” remember these concepts:

• Project team needs to be at the “performing stage” of Bruce W. Tuckman’s (1972) stages of group development.
• A project manager needs to communicate the team’s purpose clearly and concisely.
• The team needs to focus on self-organization and capitalize on each other’s highly developed competencies (overdeveloped strengths) to achieve the overarching purpose and goals that have been set.
• A project manager will make sure that the environment provided for the team, whether virtual or in person, is supportive, collaborative, and encouraging.
• Coaching is an important factor of the “highly optimized team,” and the project manager needs to make sure that each individual team member has access to coaching and the tools he or she needs to make the project successful and personally satisfying.

The next “right call” we explore is the area of successful virtual team management concepts. To succeed at virtual team management, we recommend a better understanding of the spectrum of expertise in this area with one extreme being an open leadership style and the other end of the spectrum is the self-organizing team:

• Read Best Practices: Five Strategies for Leading Diverse, Distributed Teams to Success by Mary Geresh with Margo Visitacion, David D’Silva, and Adam Knoll (2010).
• The success of the project will depend on how effectively and cohesively the team is led and managed, regardless of its location, time zone, or language.
• Explore a style that lies between the open leadership style of management and the self-organizing team concept.

Open leadership style is explored in the book “Open Leadership, How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead” by Charlene Li (2010) which proposes the following:

• Changes in how we work and communicate require giving up control completely, communicating openly with transparency and authenticity.
• New rules that we are bound by in today’s workplace, created by a new culture, which thrives in a world where openness is the new standard.

We conclude our exploration of different effective virtual team management styles by discussing: “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, Reinventing the Workplace for the 21^st Century” by Stephen Denning (2010) who proposes the following:

• “…the possibility of self-organizing, that is, the autonomy to decide how to organize itself and how to solve the problem.” (p. 95)
• We have to assess culture, language, personality style quickly and be more innovative with the leadership style that we apply to virtual teams.

After we’ve covered these concepts, we begin to explore how to lead teams and even organizations through effective change. We talk about the different kinds of changes that project managers are faced with in the modern work environment and offer case studies on how to be effective at leading teams through changes.

There are two different kinds of changes:

• Involuntary—change is forced upon us. These examples are discussed:
  • •  Market share is being lost and you must react fast to remain competitive.
  • •  Lost employees within the first two years of service and the need to understand how to retain the “corporate knowledge” that is leaving.
• Voluntary—changes we choose to make to remain effective. These examples are discussed:
  • •  Take on the marketing and sales of a new product line.
  • •  Shut down a project as complete or because it is losing money (earned value management system [EVMS] data might be showing that it’s time to kill an effort due to profit loss).
  • •  Decision is made to outsource a portion of the business (software development, e-mail server hosting, security, or document shredding services) to save money.

How do we effectively introduce the concept of seeing and presenting changes to give new perspective to their teams and fellow employees? These are some ideas discussed:

• Change creates challenges and opportunities for us!
• Recognizing change to help us grow:
  • •  Look at data, metrics, and lessons learned to anticipate the need for change.
• Anticipate needed changes to help plan how to react and communicate to teams.
• Know how to deal with change to give us more credibility with teams.
• Understanding how to manage change can ease the journey for our employees.
• Leaders must have done their homework on the change which lends to credibility.

Understanding the path to successful change helps participants visualize the way to make it happen in their work environments. We offer these ideas to “lead through the change”:

• Success comes from influencing the team to embrace change and enable you to lead the organization through change.
• Discuss concepts of practical experiences about managing teams and being a positive leader in any organization through various kinds of changes.
• Examine strategies and key elements identified for assured success when faced with change.

Finally, we summarize the methods for leading successful change projects.

• Overcome resistance to change by talking about the real reasons behind the change, the expectations for betterment of the company, the product or service, and the team member’s role in the success of that change.
• Before you can ask people to change, you have to have a solid relationship with your team. You must have their trust so in this moment, before you have to ask for more of others, you must know that your trust and credibility is strong with your team:
  • • • Ask yourself, “What is my relationship with my co-workers?” before you have to ask much of your team by making significant changes. (You can get information from surveys, 360-degree feedback processes, and “lessons learned” sessions after projects complete.)
    • • Understand what your “Leadership Maturity Level” or style is—that could be evidence driven, passion driven, relationship driven, or a blend of all of these?
    • • 360-degree reviews, annual reviews, customer feedback.
  • •    Be prepared to make personal changes before asking others to change.
  • •    Know what happened in the past before making changes for the future.
  • •    Show others how change will benefit them or make their work life better in some way.
  • •    Give others ownership of helping to form the change or implement the change:
    • •Create small pockets of people who really understand and embrace the change and create evangelists!

Both authors felt it imperative to cover the modern project management office (PMO) success tips since so many companies and organizations are starting to utilize this structure in their organizations. We explore the different kinds of PMOs and discuss helpful tips should a project manager be responsible for starting an internal PMO or involved in the team that is establishing the PMO for a company. We discuss the following:

• Long-term commitment needed by the company;
• Business case with “opt out” plan defined;
• Understand the ROI; be able to measure, track, report;
• Plan to plan the PMO; really decide the structure;
• Pick the PMO team, if you can or let them pick you; and
• Market the strategies and get buy-in for early adoption.

Understanding the different types of PMOs is critical as well so that a company can make an informed decision about how it wants to structure the PMO. There are different types of PMO structures:

• Center of Administration—Matrix management model where project managers don’t report directly to the PMO chief.
• Center of Excellence (CoE)—All project managers report directly to a PMO chief and use/promote a common set of tools, best practices, and collaborative data for managers in the company.
• Center of governance—The core methodology of the company is housed here but project managers report to various business units throughout the organization.
• Combinations of these—where an organization might choose to have a CoE for project managers but the project managers actually report to BU managers.

We discuss the procedures to establish a PMO by exploring the different types and understanding the goals and mapping these structures to the longer-term strategic plan for the role of the PMO in the organization. The steps we explore are:

• Plan and strategize about the role of the PMO in the organization.
• Structure the team (whether the PMs will be direct reports or a dotted line via matrix management model to the PMO).
• Foster a “Center of Excellence” attitude about your PMO’s role in your company, regardless of your PMO type.
• Understand how to scale existing resource tracking, reporting, risk management, and metrics (project, quality, cost, and delivery) processes via the PMO.
• Establish a “Success” database with case history information that will be useful to the “collective” moving forward.

We bring the presentation to a close with the final chapter on managing “cloud projects” and cover key concepts from our chapter called “Lasso the Clouds.”

• You need more than the A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide)—Fourth Edition (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2008), more than just what you’ve relied on in the past—you have to stretch yourself and your knowledge
• Doing work consecutively is not an option anymore—you must figure out how to do concurrent work streams; understanding economies of scale
• Still need to plan, design, implement, and test as always but need very close interaction with your client as it is inevitable that neither party will consider every issue
• Your toolbox still applies: PMBOK^® Guide, ISO, LSS, Agile, SCRUM, Waterfall, Spiral—all have points that are useful in the modern era but no one method is a silver bullet

What is all this talk about cloud projects and are they so different from the same problems project managers face any day with any project. We answer with a resounding “no” and give the following examples:

• Challenges with “cloud projects” don’t sound so different.
• Still have to get the customer committed to provide constant feedback.
• Understand the environment and all the systems impacted by changes.
• Optimistic estimations by technical team have an impact, as they always do.
• Suggest running demo’s in front of the customer to make sure you are getting it right.

Finally, we summarize all that we’ve covered in the session and invite questions and discussion from the audience:

• The new project management essential: situational awareness.
• Modern leadership 101—anyone share one of their mind-mapping results?
• Highly optimized teams—not as structured and people do what they can do, want to do, and do best.
• Successful virtual team management—open or self-organizing…you might have to give up some control.
• Change made successful—understand the blockers to change and lead through them.
• PMO strategies—the types of PMOs and strategies for success.
• Lasso the clouds!—learn to project manage those new “cloud” efforts.
• Tying it all together—we summarize key points from the presentation and make sure we emphasize how to make use of this information in practical terms.