To manage a project is to sell that project, every single day

Just like many who find themselves suddenly in a management role, my first days as project manager presented me with a myriad of challenges, especially because it happened only two years after I graduated. I had the technical knowledge, thanks to the numerous credentials and diplomas I had obtained, but the biggest challenge for me was, unsurprisingly, people. I couldn't seem to get my ideas across, or influence anyone. People would not take my projects or me seriously. Some team members complained that I was too authoritarian; some said I was too aggressive. My superiors gave me straight A's on my technical performance but D's and F's on my “people skills.” What are people skills? I thought. Must be nonsense; I never heard about them in school.

Looking back, I can clearly tell that the problem was larger than I thought at the time. I was naïve enough to think that since I was managing a project for an organization, everyone in that organization would support it, and me. Everyone would feel obliged to do their best and perform just as they should … but just as you would expect, I learnt the hard way. Life became a nightmare and I thought I was a complete failure until a friend of mine pointed me towards a few books on his shelf and started lending them to me one after the other. They completely transformed my management style, and my projects have been successful ever since.

The titles you will find in this paper have all been featured on one or more international bestseller lists. Professionals from all walks of life refer to them for “self-help,” management and leadership lessons, and help improving their “people skills.” What I have done time and time again with these books is read them, jot down a few notes and tips that “I will try tomorrow” or “I will try over the next week,” and then repeat the cycle. I practiced those tips carefully, making sure I tailored them to the context of my profession: portfolio, program, and project management. In this paper I share the ones that resonated most with me, and proved priceless in advancing my career and creating successful situations on the projects I managed.

The author of this paper does not have any relationship with any of the authors of the following books or their publishers, nor is he or the company he works for in any way affiliated with them, and he has no interest in their promotion.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

It is very hard to write an introduction about a book that sold over 15 million copies and contains six pages of praise by renowned thought leaders inside its cover. This is work that transforms the reader's thinking and attitude toward others and life in general. The lessons that follow are only a summary of the contents that have been chosen due to their relevance to project management.

Habit 1: Be Proactive

Here is the first surprise in Covey's book: “While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries” (Covey, 2004, pp. 70–71). Every time I read this statement it reminds me of my own interpretation of the text: “Proactivity is not natural. People are not proactive by nature. They need to consciously make a decision to be proactive, but before that, they need to understand what proactivity is and what its merits are.” And then, the thought process leads to another question: “But whose responsibility is it to make them aware of proactivity and its merits? Who is the one responsible for influencing them?” and the answer is always: “Me, the project manager!” Covey states that being proactive is “more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions” (Covey, 2004, p. 71).

In the context of our profession, this means that it is up to us to deliver our projects and their anticipated benefits. We are completely in control of the project if we decide to be. Rather than wait for a project team member to take action or complete a deliverable, we need to make a conscious decision to proactively manage that individual, or better still, influence that person to proactively perform on the project and render it successful.

Project failure can always and easily be blamed on circumstances, conditions, or any other impersonal factor. A large portion of proactivity is taking the responsibility for project success. Note that I mentioned “responsibility for project success” and not “credit for project success.” In the same chapter, Covey has a section called “Act or Be Acted Upon,” and that is exactly what happens if you are reactive as opposed to proactive on a project. You get acted upon. You and your project fall victim to the actions (or lack thereof) of others.

Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind

Of course we “begin with the end in mind”—we are project managers! The whole idea of a project is to produce its end deliverable, so why should this habit even be mentioned in this paper?

The simple answer is that I have seen more project managers who completely forget about this than ones who keep an eye on the end goal of the project.

And then there is another argument: In his book, Covey says that the purpose of this habit is to “begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference ….” We commonly use the term project life cycle and describe events that happen “throughout the life of the project.” Therefore, by virtue of our profession, we agree that projects have lives of their own. We as project managers should be cognizant of this life and of the fact that we have the power on our projects to influence the end state of the project. Consequently, we project managers should start each day with a short plan of action that answers the following questions:

What do I want to do with this project?

What should its end state be?

What can I do now to influence that end state?

And we should map these three simple questions further to project management:

When is it due? Are we on track? What can I do about it today?

How much should it cost in total? Is it within budget? What can I do about it today?

What are the deliverables of this project? Are they going to happen? What can I do about that today?

Why was this project initiated? Will it satisfy that need? What can I do about it today?

What might stop me/us? What can I do about it today?

To help you put this into perspective further, consider your last project meeting. Better still, consider your worst project meeting. How did that go? Would it have gone better if you had asked yourself—and then your audience—the above questions?

This habit of Covey's always works. It helps me plan for my days and my meetings with clients, sponsors, and team members, and it also helps me organize my priorities and those of my colleagues. It helps me keep focus on what the project is and why it came into existence, rather than let the specific details take control of me and my time, and consume the project.

Habit 3: Put First Things First

Before I start describing this habit and how it relates to project management, I need to make reference to A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide), now in its fifth edition, which explains the importance of managing dependencies. Many project managers overlook, or underestimate, this important ability.

While this paper will not address the differences between discretionary, hard, and external logic, it builds on the merits of discretionary logic and how that is aligned with this habit in Covey's famous book. The fact is that simply rearranging the sequence of certain tasks on a project can lead to major advantages being realized, including but not limited to: reduction of risk, expeditious project delivery/completion, optimized resource utilization, and reduced cost.

In a broader context, there are four keys to project success related to this habit:

1. Prioritize: Make sure that your project team, through your project plans, addresses priorities first. Things (activities, deliverables, work, or management tasks) that matter most should be done first on your project.

2. Eliminate fat: Another fancy word for this is being “lean,” which simply means remove all unnecessary work that doesn't add value to the project or the organization, and make the scope as concise as possible. Try to achieve more with less.

3. Do what needs to be done: Make sure that all the “preparatory work” for a certain deliverable, or for its handover and transition to business as usual, is done and completed on time, at the beginning of the project.

4. Don't procrastinate: If there are tasks that can be done immediately, start them immediately. Don't wait if you don't have to.

A good tool to help you achieve the above is the following table from Covey's book (2004, p. 151):

Covey stresses the importance of moving into quadrant II, in order to achieve the following results:

- Vision, perspective

- Balance

- Discipline

- Control

- Few crises

Public Victory

Before moving on to the next habit, it is beneficial to emphasize the section of Covey's book called Public Victory, considering what Covey calls the “Paradigms of Public Victory Interdependence.” In this section, Covey makes the metaphor of the “Emotional Bank Account,” which refers to the amount of trust one can build in a relationship and “the feeling of safeness you have with another human being” (2004, p. 188).

In my paper “How to Secure Stakeholder Buy-in and Sustain it” I emphasize the need for executive stakeholders to be assured that the project management team is (a) capable of delivering the project and (b) committed to delivering the project regardless of the challenges that might (and probably will) arise during the lifetime of that project. I also state that project team members want to feel (a) safe in that the project manager will support them and “have their backs” when something goes wrong, (b) that their project team members are equally qualified and capable, and (c) that the project manager has the ability to see the project through. All of the above can be summarized in one word: trust.

Covey's Emotional Bank Account banks on trust. You, as the project manager, have to make enough deposits into each of your stakeholders’ accounts “through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping … commitments” (Covey, 2004, p. 188). According to Covey, an important underlying factor to achieving the above is communication, which is also emphasized in the PMBOK^® Guide under the Project Communication Management and Project Stakeholder Management Knowledge Areas.

Building on the metaphor, Covey states that people (in this case, you as the project manager) need to make deposits into the (stakeholders’) Emotional Bank Accounts so you can make withdrawals later. Here is a list of “Six Major Deposits” that Covey describes, and their mapping to our world of project management:

Habit 4: Think Win-Win

Take a minute to think of the last time you, or a project manager you know, thought: That is not my problem. The supplier/vendor/contractor is the one to worry about it. Then, try to recall the results of that attitude. Was the outcome successful? Could it have been better? The answers are probably “not really” and “yes,” respectively.

One other writer whose work addresses the relationship with suppliers as a win-win partnership is David Taylor, who did so in his book The Naked Leader Experience. Taylor says that your relationship with suppliers should always focus on enabling them to win. When your suppliers win, they make you win, and as a result your project becomes successful. It is also important to consider that internal stakeholders have vendor-customer relationships between them. If the design team needs to complete the design for the production team to develop it, then the production team, and the project manager, are customers of the design team.

Consider the following: If you squeeze a supplier into a losing deal, or if you ask them to deliver in an unrealistic timeframe or to work under unfavourable conditions, why would they be keen on your project's success?

Always remember that a supplier who consents to a win-lose situation skewed in your favour will always seek opportunities to compensate for that loss later. At best, they will give higher priority to more rewarding relationships.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

“We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first” (Covey, 2004, p. 237). Just as the PMBOK^® Guide emphasizes the importance and criticality of communication, Covey states, “the ability to [communicate] is absolutely critical to your effectiveness” (p. 237). And that communication is “the most important skill in life” (p. 237). He further explains that the most understudied aspect of communication is listening, and that it is crucial to listen empathically to others in order to understand them.

Listening empathically means listening to your stakeholders with the intent of understanding their concerns, expectations, situation, and perspective. This is often overlooked in project management, as we tend to assume—mistakenly—that all stakeholders are as keen on the project as we are. We also tend to think that we understand exactly what the stakeholder is saying and jump to conclusions, make assumptions, and respond immediately, all based on our own perspectives.

Once we have captured the stakeholder's perspective, understood what interests or concerns them, and come to grips with their position, it is now our task to be understood. Every time I discuss the communication model, I emphasize that the responsibility to understand a message is on the sender, NOT the receiver. The three ingredients you need to build on to be understood are:

- Your own credibility—your emotional bank account

- Emotional alignment to the other person

- The logic and reasoning of your message

If when addressing a stakeholder any of the above is missing, that communication would not be very successful. There are plenty of renowned works on body language and nonverbal communication, all of which address the second ingredient, emotional alignment. A key skill for project managers is the ability to interpret body language, and the ability to communicate what they want through their own nonverbal communications.

Habit 6: Synergize

This simply means that you need to look for the added value in the relationships you have with your stakeholders, especially your team members. By demonstrating mutual respect, and being empathic, you will easily realize that the value of your relationship is greater than the sum of its parts. Synergy is different from cooperation. In the case of cooperation, you work with your stakeholders to produce a deliverable; let's call that deliverable X. When you work with a stakeholder to establish synergy, the product of your efforts becomes X+Y. The Y differential is the empathic engagement of the stakeholders and their extra efforts that create more value willingly and with pleasure.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

By reading this paper and its associated presentation you are doing just that. Sharpening the saw means you have to always be at your best. Showing up on time, dressing for the occasion, and enriching your knowledge and skill sets are all forms of sharpening your saw to succeed on your projects. PMI updates its standards once every four years, adding new tools and techniques, new processes, and new knowledge areas, all of which are forms of sharpening the saw. Remember to constantly update and refresh your skill sets.

Can you imagine someone who doesn't use a computer today? How would they be able to succeed?

To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink

Pink was one of the speakers at the PMI^® Global Congress (2013)—North America, in New Orleans. Before that, I had heard about his work but not about him. I was interested in attending his session, as I was in sales—after all, a CEO is nothing more than a glorified salesman. After attending the session, I immediately purchased Pink's book To Sell Is Human. The lessons below have been priceless.

We're All in Sales Now

Whether we realize it or not, as project managers, we are in sales. Our work involves selling our project, its status, its progress, the changes we want to do to it, the corrective action we want people to do to bring it back on track, and even the regular work they need to do every single day. Our sales efforts culminate in the following activities that we conduct on our projects: “persuading, influencing, and convincing others … we deliver presentations to fellow employees and make pitches to new clients. We try to convince the boss to loosen up a few dollars from the budget or the human resources department to add more workdays” (Pink, 2012, pp. 19–20). Persuasion and sales are the same. “We're moving other people to part with resources—whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention—so that we both get what we want” (Pink, 2012, p. 20). According to Pink, we are all in sales now because project management “requires elastic skills—the ability to cross boundaries and functions, to work outside your specialty, and to do a variety of different things throughout the day” (2012, p. 43).

If any project manager were to ask my opinion on how to develop himself or herself beyond PMI certification or “sharpen the saw,” as Covey puts it, my advice would be to learn how to sell and improve his or her selling skills, period.

If you have come this far in reading this paper, I have sold you. I managed to attract your attention through the title and abstract, and, persuaded you to give some of your time and effort to my paper. To do that, I relied on the following three tips from Pink's book:

Attunement

This is taking Covey's empathic listening to another, higher level. What Pink is referring to is being fully aware of the other person's perspective and “the ability to bring one's actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you're in” (2012, p. 70).

He says that in order to attune yourself, one of the tactics you can use is to increase your power by reducing it: “Start your encounters with the assumption that you're in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side's perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them” (Pink, 2012, pp. 72–73). This means that you need to leave your throne as project manager, and be humble with your team members—give them a sense of approachability and openness, and the security to confide in you and to give you the keys to their personality.

He also says that it is important to remember that people exist within contexts, that they have their biases, preferences, and experiences. Some of us deal with team members as though they were robots, ignoring the fact that they have careers, families, personal lives, and previous experiences of which we need to be cognizant and considerate.

Buoyancy

I have never been made aware of a project where negative occurrences didn't happen. It could be an activity that wasn't done, or got delayed, or a risk that materialized, or an item that went over budget, or a complete failure. Adversity is part of project management just as falling is part of learning how to ride a bicycle.

The same applies to sales. Rejection is an integral part of the process, and dealing with it, just like dealing with adversity on projects, is an art. Pink refers to research that says that in order to stay buoyant, to float above the negative experiences, you need to experience three positive situations for every negative situation you encounter. The ratio is 3:1.

Now this coming part struck me. Pink said that YOU have to create your own positive experiences, and no, this is not by asking your acquaintances for good news. Pink's advice is to seek events that have a positive impact on you, reading a favourite book, or listening to music, or any similar experience. Remember that President Kennedy resorted to the same technique before resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis—he went for a swim.

Stay above the diversity, and keep your team buoyant, too. Celebrate success, and incorporate fun into the work routine

Clarity

Finding the right problems to solve is critical to successful project management. In some cases, project managers are either too aloof, not engaging in the problems facing their projects or exerting enough effort to solve them, and at the other end of the spectrum are the project managers who are too intertwined in the details of their projects, living the life of a sole fire fighter in a bushfire. None of these are as effective as the project manager who finds problems to solve. “People most disposed to creative breakthroughs … tend to be problem finders. [They] sort through vast amounts of information and inputs, often from multiple disciplines; experiment with a variety of different approaches; [and] are willing to switch directions in the course of a project” (Pink, 2012, p. 129).

Project managers need to be explorative. They must always remember the progressive elaboration inherent in their projects, and seek to understand and process information about their projects, team members, and stakeholders to find and preempt problems and resolve them. In the past, a project manager would have gained plenty of credibility by their ability to answer questions. Today, their ability to ask stakeholders the right questions and probe to find issues that need to be addressed is what makes them stand out from their peers. This is also very much aligned to the concept of project risk management: being able to identify what could happen in the future—to hypothesize—and work to resolve causes of those risks or develop response plans as appropriate.

While the above plays a great role in the elevation of the project manager's credibility, it also promotes selling the project by gaining, sustaining, and regaining buy-in from stakeholders, including but not limited to senior management, the project management team, the project team, and the customer through demonstrating the value of the project, its requisites, and success in contrast to the status quo.

Pitch

In this chapter, Pink makes reference to Dale Carnegie and his advice “to be ever ready with our ‘elevator speech’” (2012, p. 159). In project management terms, every project manager must always have the “elevator status report” of her project ready. Just imagine this: You meet a stakeholder, the CEO, in the elevator, and he or she asks you what the status of your project is. What happens next can have a beneficial or detrimental effect on the project as well as your career. If you have a comprehensive answer, you are very likely to establish credibility by demonstrating that you are on top of your project, and may even have a shot at directing his or her attention towards a decision that needs to be taken or an issue that needs to be resolved. If you don't have a status report, the opposite will happen: Your credibility and the success of your project will be undermined.

But the above is not confined to the CEO or upper management, as the same applies to the most junior member of your team. If they meet you in the elevator and inquire about the status of the project, how you answer them establishes your credibility and worthiness of the role of project manager. People normally want to work and associate themselves with successful leaders, and through the demonstration of knowledge and awareness of the project, you establish that you have the potential to render your—and their—project successful. On the other hand, those few minutes in the elevator may give you an opportunity to influence your fellow team member in a way you otherwise wouldn't.

Pink also mentions that people are becoming increasingly busy, and their attention spans are dwindling as competition from emails, phone calls, text messages, and multiple matters that need their attention compete with your message. Always keep this in mind when performing your role as project manager and communicating with stakeholders. Here are a few tips to remember:

1. Stakeholders are concerned with what matters to them most:

a. Is this going to happen?

b. Will we spend more than we want to?

c. Will we have it when we want it?

d. Is there any damage we need to be aware of?

2. As long as your stakeholders agree to it, the simpler the report, the better. Use colours to report status. “Red-amber-green,” or traffic-light reporting, works effectively in most organizations.

3. Have the detail ready for when you need it, but don't use it unless it's necessary and don't get mired in it when you do—the drill-down effect.

4. Executives don't care about your fancy equations and curves.

5. Everyone appreciates simplicity.

6. Keep your emails short, and choose intriguing subject lines. “Three issues that need resolution on the choice of technology” is more likely to spur interest than “Technology” or “Technology options for the OBC on the e60.”

Your Suppliers Are Your Partners

This entire section is based on the book The Naked Leader Experience by David Taylor.

Many projects fail because of a mismanaged supplier-customer relationship. While many who read this statement would agree, some of them might think that it is always the supplier's fault, and to those who do, this section is of extreme importance.

Without Your Supplier, You Are at a Disadvantage

The establishment of what a supplier-customer relationship really is fundamental to the understanding of this section. A supplier is a provider of a good, service, or result to another entity—the customer—who would be at a disadvantage without that good, service, or result in return for the customer's time, money, or effort. The following example further elaborates:

If you decide to buy a car next month and you go to the nearest dealership, that dealership is obviously the supplier of the car and you are the customer, but that's not where the relationship ends. If you do not buy the car, you are at a disadvantage: The need behind your decision to buy the car in the first place remains unfulfilled. It could well be that your current car isn't as reliable or efficient as a new one would be, or that you need another car to meet family demands, or that you desire more space or utility in your new car. If the dealer were to say, “I am sorry, we're not going to sell you a car,” you haven't satisfied that need.

We Are All Suppliers, Just As We Are All Customers

Another aspect of the supplier-customer relationship lies within context. In reality, we are all either suppliers or customers depending on the situation. While reading this paper, you are the customer and PMI and the author are both suppliers of knowledge and information. When the financial controller in an organization presents financial cash-flow statements and analyzes to management, the financial controller is a supplier and management is the customer. When management provides direction and feedback to the financial controller, the roles are clearly switched.

Putting all the above in a project management context is easy. Recognizing internal supplier-customer relationships can be directly traceable to dependencies between tasks or deliverables. The person/entity responsible for a predecessor task/deliverable is a supplier to the person/entity responsible for a successor task/deliverable who becomes their customer by nature of the relationship. This can be traced through a network diagram starting with the initial tasks on the project all the way to the closing, hand-over, and transition tasks for the final deliverable(s). The following example further illustrates:

The above example can also be used to clarify the concept of disadvantage. Simply, if the designer does not perform on task 1, the editor will not be able to start and complete task 2, and/or if the design department does not complete the design, the project, the project team, the design and marketing departments, and the organization would not satisfy the need for which it was undertaken.

Even Suppliers of the Smallest Product Are Your Partners

It is important to note that the above applies to external project team members as well. If the editor in the above table was a contractor, or outsourced in any way, the example and its logic would remain unchanged. Although it may seem obvious, it is often not in the perception of the project manager (or that of other stakeholders) that external suppliers are project team members. Even the suppliers of the simplest, most low-tech items on a large, high-tech, complex project are highly significant. Can you imagine an airplane without the screws and bolts for the passenger seats?

In conclusion to this section, it is a best practice to treat suppliers as you would your team members, applying best practices described in other sections of this paper and in other works. Treating them as your partners means that you recognize that their success is correlated to your success and the success of your project. One aspect of vendor-customer relationships is the emphasis of win-win scenarios as described by Covey. Project managers who think that a win-lose situation means they are superior will pay the price later, as suppliers who are squeezed into a situation of loss will either:

1. Compromise on quality or time to recuperate their losses, or

2. Give priority to more lucrative, winning engagements or contracts.

References

Aziz, E. (2014, October), How to secure stakeholder buy-in and sustain it. PMI Global Congress 2014, USA, Phoenix, AZ.

Blanchard, K., & Johnson, S. (2003). The one minute manager. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Carnegie, D. (1998). How to win friends and influence people. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

Covey, S. R. (2004). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. Kottayam, India: DC Books.

Pink, D. (2012). To sell is human: The surprising truth about moving others. New York, NY: Riverhead Press.

Taylor, D. (2012). The naked leader experience. London, England: Transworld Digital.