Being a project manager

Abstract

More still than the effective application of project management tools and techniques, it is the area of the project manager's skills, competencies and behaviours that can be shown to determine the success or failure of a project. Within the last few years, a number of standard publications have been produced, providing lists and descriptions of these competencies. These descriptions tend to be fairly dry and academic and refer solely to the project-level deliverables rather than addressing the wider picture of the human and interpersonal level. Authors of fiction, on the other hand, provide stories where the development of the situations and their outcomes depend principally on the personalities involved. This presentation will combine the two approaches: it will explain and analyse a number of the currently available models and illustrate these with the help of the adventures of the melancholy knight and perpetual example of hope over experience, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Introduction

When I first came up with the idea of using the tales Don Quixote to illustrate the behavioural strengths and weaknesses of project managers, I expected to be able to provide a light-hearted guide to key components from a number of standards. What I discovered, as I developed the ideas in more detail, is that the first lesson from the tales of Don Quixote is that people's behaviours and motivations are much more complex and subtle than you first expect: that behaviour does not depend on a single characteristic, but on a profile of characteristics; that each situation can reveal characteristics of a person in a way that contradicts the conclusions from some other situation, and that behavioural profiles change over time in a way that may be independent of the individual's starting position.

Background

On the 400^th anniversary of the tale of “The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha” becoming available to the public, it is fitting that the lessons of what is widely considered to be the earliest novel written in a modern European language should be discussed in Madrid, the city where the book was first published. You will rapidly understand that Don Quixote represents the project manager, that his faithful – and long-suffering – companion Sancho Panza embodies, with the addition of Don Quixote's horse Rosinante and his own ass Dapple, the entire project team, and that the incomparable – though largely imaginary – Dulcinea del Toboso, to whom Don Quixote dedicates his exploits is the incarnation of the project sponsor.

The Project Management Institute (PMI^®) publishes a “Code of Professional Conduct” in order provide rules and guidance for all practitioners and promote a fair business environment for project managers (PMI 2006). In addition, there are a number of documents outlining both technical and non-technical competencies required by project managers (PMI [PMCDF], 2004; GAPPS, 2005). All of these professional publications list the competencies required by project managers who wish to demonstrate expertise in their chosen field. PMI's Competency Development Framework considers three dimensions of competency:

• □     Knowledge: what you know,
• □     Performance: what you can deliver, and
• □     Behavioural (personal): how you deliver (see Exhibit 1)

Exhibit 1: List of PMI Personal Competencies

The GAPPS document describes an overall, integrated, hierarchical model which combines the technical and nontechnical competencies. A mind-map based on the GAPPS pre-release draft is shown in Exhibit 2

Exhibit 2: Representation of GAPPS Competencies

Within this paper, although the main focus will be on the PMI behavioural competencies, in situations where Don Quixote's adventures provide relevant insights, reference will also be made to performance-based competencies from GAPPS. The overall analysis will lead to the discovery that the PMI set of behavioural competencies is not complete and that several extra behavioural competencies are required in order to characterize a “balanced” profile.

First Steps

Alonso Quijano is an eccentric scholar who has immersed himself in collecting and studying tales of chivalry. One day, he decides that the time has come to put theory into practice: he needs a steed, armour and a mission. In accordance with his newly-defined mission to live the life of a knight-errant, he adopts the name of Don Quixote de la Mancha. This decision already provides an insight into his character: high on self-confidence and initiative. He has also demonstrated high-level scope planning. He also shows some of the weaknesses that will handicap him throughout his adventures: when he discovers that the helmet of his suit of armour is defective and that he cannot mend it, he makes do with faulty equipment. This lack of concern with quality, accuracy and taking one action to completion before moving on is a drawback of his enthusiasm and self-confidence. Here we already see that behavioural strengths can have disadvantages unless they are balanced by complementary behaviours: enthusiasm to move on needs to be balanced by a concern for completing correctly what you have already started.

Don Quixote understands that famous knights-errant – and this also holds for project managers – undertake the work not for themselves, but in the interest of a sponsor. In the case of Don Quixote, he dedicates his efforts to a largely imaginary damsel whom he refers to as “Dulcinea del Toboso”, a farm-girl who knows nothing of this honour. This demonstrates clearly the risk of replacing information gathering (in this case stakeholder analysis) with wishful thinking. Throughout the stories, Don Quixote will view the world through the pages of his books on chivalry.

Initial Adventures

Don Quixote rides boldly out with only his mission and his horse Rocinante for company, and arrives at a country inn. In keeping with his delusions, this inn becomes a castle. The inn-keeper and the “ladies of the night” are the Lord and his Ladies. Don Quixote behaves impeccably with them, based on his understanding of the situation, but realizes that, although he has a role and a mission, he is not officially empowered as a knight-errant: he therefore requests that the “lord of the castle” should knight him. This shows a good understanding within Don Quixote's imaginary world of the organizational and administrative rules: similarly within the project world, the importance of obtaining empowerment by means of a charter should never be overlooked; it is, however, also important to verify the authority of the person providing the empowerment. Don Quixote did not rate highly on this criterion!

When Don Quixote is ready to leave the inn, he is, naturally, presented with the bill. In his world of chivalry, knights-errant are welcomed freely at castles and not required to pay. The inn-keeper does his best to make Don Quixote understand that this is not an acceptable way of working. The lesson here is that a project manager should always check with all stakeholders that the rules and assumptions within the project are also acceptable to them. Once again “self confidence” needed to be counter-balanced by “information seeking” and “organizational awareness” – and clearly the concept of budget planning was never addressed at all. This shows the value of a model such as shown in Exhibit 2, to serve as a detailed checklist prior to committing to a plan.

On the way home to fetch money and fresh clothing, Don Quixote comes across a farmer whipping a young boy rather than paying him. Don Quixote shows his commitment to the code of chivalry in helping the weak: he threatens the farmer and forces him to promise to pay the boy. However, he then rides off and – unsurprisingly – the farmer than beats the both even harder! Even within Don Quixote's imaginary world, this can only be seen as a major failure: once again, his impetuous desire to move on destroyed all the good of an action because it was not balanced by a concern with achievement at each step of the way.

Don Quixote then meets a group of merchants and orders them to proclaim the beauty of Dulcinea. There is a misunderstanding and Don Quixote believes that they have insulted her. He therefore attacks them to demand an apology. Rocinante stumbles in mid-charge, and Don Quixote falls to the ground. One of the merchants' mule-drivers beats Don Quixote. There is never any doubt about Don Quixote's courage and commitment to the cause; however, as in this situation, insistence that all other parties – however loosely involved – should see the situation as he does is a frequent mistake: commitment always needs to be balanced by interpersonal sensitivity.

A labourer finds Don Quixote lying by the road and helps him back home.

In project management terms, this first outing can be assimilated with a feasibility study – from which Don Quixote will draw some lessons, but definitely not enough!

Transition

Don Quixote's friends, a priest and a barber, with the help of his housekeeper and his niece do their best to make sure that he will not repeat his folly. They use both their rules and his: they burn his books and wall up his library, but they tell him that a great enchanter came and removed the library. In a project environment, this would be similar to the project steering committee behaving untruthfully when blocking the project budget by telling the project manager that the resistance came from an external, political source and not from them. This is not a valid – nor an ethical – approach. To Don Quixote and to any committed project manager, this will actually harden their resolve to pursue the project, and weaken the authority of the steering committee.

Don Quixote prepares for his main quest. He recruits an illiterate labourer, Sancho Panza, who rides off on his donkey Dapple, with Don Quixote in search of the fame and fortune that Don Quixote promises him. Once again, Don Quixote's commitment and self-confidence are such that he does not consider taking into account the feelings of his family, his friends or those of his companion.

The Main Journey

Don Quixote and Sancho come to a field of windmills, which Don Quixote identifies as giants. Despite a warning from Sancho Panza, Don Quixote charges one at full speed, and his lance gets caught in the windmill's sail, throwing him and Rocinante to the ground. Don Quixote explains to Sancho Panza that the same enemy enchanter who has stolen his library turned the giants into windmills at the last minute. Although this explanation strikes us as ridiculous, it is consistent with the assumptions on which the entire project is based – and that the steering committee supported by mistake. This shows the importance of periodically challenging the assumptions on which the project strategy is based. This behaviour is not explicitly mentioned in the “Cognitive” unit of competence in the PMI model but is key to benefiting from the lessons of experience.

After a number of other adventures, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stop to rest and eat lunch. Rocinante wanders off into a herd of mares owned by a group of horse-traders and tries to mate with them. The horse-traders beat Rocinante and Don Quixote flies to her rescue. He and Sancho lose the battle. This does show a very praiseworthy courage in defending members of his team, even when it is fairly clear that they were not totally in the right and that the battle may be painful.

Don Quixote gets Sancho Panza to lead him to an inn to recover from the battle. Once again, Don Quixote mistakes the inn for the castle – and shows that he has not learnt from his initial outing: he attempts to leave without paying. This time, the inn-keeper and his friends capture Sancho Panza and punish him for his master's shortcomings by tossing him in a blanket. Don Quixote is too tired and sore to be able to help him. This adventure contrasts directly with the incident in the field of mares: in this case, Don Quixote behaves extremely badly – even within his imaginary world: although he has been told the rules, he gets a member of his team into trouble and then does not have the strength to defend him. Here he fails to learn from experience (poor cognitive behaviour), to demonstrate team leadership and to consider the effect of his actions. In fact, he ignores the entire spectrum of risk management throughout all of the adventures: courage and commitment overwhelm any considerations of analytical thinking or planning. This shows once again the fact that each behavioural characteristic has the potential for strength or for weakness depending on the balance between them.

Return to the Village

Don Quixote decides to write a love letter to Dulcinea and tells Sancho Panza to take it back to her. On the way, Sancho Panza meets Don Quixote's friends who are in search of him in order to bring him back home. They use a subterfuge, based on Don Quixote's delusions, to trap him, and place him in a cage on the back of an ox-cart.

While Don Quixote is out of the cage having lunch, he sees a group of penitents carrying an icon of the blessed Virgin Mary, on their way to pray for rain. He thinks that the penitents are rogues who have captured a lady, and attacks them. He gets severely beaten by one of them. Sancho Panza thinks Don Quixote has died and mourns his friend aloud. Don Quixote hears Sancho Panza's words and is so moved that he agrees to go home until his luck changes.

This is the first time that Don Quixote has shown any reaction to the feelings of others and this demonstrates how initial shortcomings in a behavioural area can be influenced by experience and by the varied characteristics of other members of the team. Even Don Quixote, who lived in a make-believe world finally made a decision based on a real-world situation: emotion had an effect where reason and subterfuge failed.

The next section shows how these concepts of behavioural balance and behavioural evolution can be formalized by use of “behavioural influence matrices”.

A Formal Analysis

The Behavioural Influence Matrix

The basis of the analysis is the concept of interdependence between the separate behaviours. For example, as has already been seen, initiative can be strengthened by self-confidence, and these traits can work against concern for order, quality and accuracy. This concept of an inter-dependent system can best be shown in the form of a matrix: each cell indicates whether the behaviour in the corresponding row has a reinforcing effect (cell value 1), a counteracting effect (-1) or no effect (0) on the behaviour in the corresponding column. The matrix based on a purely personal viewpoint of the dependencies between the behaviours in the PMI list is given in Exhibit 3.

There are a number of additional features of interest in Exhibit 3

Exhibit 3: Behavioural Influence Matrix

• □    The diagonal elements are set to 1 (positive auto-reinforcement): as will be explained below, this is required in order for correct processing of the effect of experience
• □    Three behaviours have been added to those in PMI's Competency Development Framework:
  • Integrated Thinking, within the Cognitive unit
    • -      This is the personal competency by which large ideas and detailed concepts are reconciled (e.g. matching top-down and bottom-up thinking): Don Quixote's lack of this competency was one reason that he could observe the real world and still not realize that it did not match his conceptual view
  • Self awareness and a Value system within the Personal Effectiveness unit:
    • -      Self awareness represents the ability of a person to recognize their particular characteristics and preferences: it is a key element in consciously enabling the effect of the interaction between behaviours. In addition, if you can remain aware of your assumptions, you can challenge and reassess them periodically. For example, if Don Quixote had been aware of his over-reliance on fantasy, he might have made the effort to listen more closely to the down-to-earth advice of Sancho Panza.
    • -      A Value system corresponds to a preset profile of opinions and assumptions against which the importance and effect of each of the other behaviours is measured (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person's degree of self-awareness). In common with all of the other behaviours, if this one is too pronounced, it can be detrimental: for Don Quixote, his value system, based on an idealized code of chivalry, took priority in all circumstances. It does, however, have the benefit of providing a consistent benchmark against which to judge and be judged.

Learning from Experience

The balancing effects between behaviours, as shown by the behavioural influence matrix, have an important effect on a person's behaviour in a particular situation at a given point in time. In addition, as with any systemin which tere is feedback, the interactions between components – in this case, between the behaviours – has the repeated effect of modifying the balance of those components. For example, as shown in Exhibit 3, “Concern with order, quality and accuracy” will be weakened by the degree of Achievement orientation and increased, based on the amount of Analytical thinking. Translated into mathematical terms, if the behavioural profile at a given point in time (t) is represented by vector B_t, then the effect of the behavioural influence matrix (BIM) is that

Equation 1:        B_t+1= BIM x B_t

Successive applications of the feedback, representing the effect of learning from ongoing experience, therefore lead to

Equation 2:        B_t+N= (BIM)**N x B_t

This form of analysis can be found in other studies of similar feedback situations, such as Structural Analysis and the use of the MICMAC approach (Godet 2001, Bredillet 2000).

The Resultant End-State

Rather than calculating each successive value of B_t, by applying Equation 1, the alternative is to calculate the value of (BIM)**N in order to arrive at the value of B_t+N directly by applying Equation 2. Note that the value of the cells of (BIM)**N should be scaled in order to keep the maximum absolute value of any cell in the resulting matrix to 1.

As the Behavioural Influence Matrix is raised to higher and higher powers in this way, its values tend to stabilize. The resultant matrix represents the inherent structure of the behavioural system, based on the initial assumptions of interdependence between its components. The result of carrying out this calculation leads to the “End-state Behavioural Influence Matrix” shown in Exhibit 4.

Exhibit 4: End-state Behavioural Influence Matrix

The cells with the maximum influence have been shaded. Similarly, and as explained in the MICMAC references, the behaviours can be separated into four sets:

1. Driving components: those behaviours that have the overriding effect on the final profile
2. Driven (dependent) components: those that have the least direct effect
3. Autonomous (excluded) components: those that are least dependent on others – they will tend not to change over time
4. Threshold (pivot) components: those that are fairly weak at driving or being driven. They are likely to be the most unstable or unpredictable.

Applying this analysis to the expanded PMI set of behaviours as analysed in Exhibit 4 gives the following results with respect to the MICMAC classification:

• □     Driving:
  • Flexibility
  • Directiveness
• □     Driven:
  • Impact
• □     Pivot:
  • Value system
  • Self Confidence
  • Achievement Orientation

It is then very instructive to evaluate what this actually means to the evolution of an initial behavioural profile – that is to say: starting from a given behavioural vector B₀, what is the final “mature” behavioural profile?

This calculation was carried out on a behavioural profile developed for Don Quixote, based on what his adventures told us about him. Then, in order to evaluate sensitivity to different starting behaviours, the end-state profile was calculated for a number of different initial profiles. It turned out that the result is largely independent of the initial profile: the end-state depends almost entirely on the values in the influence matrix. Put another way, the final behavioural profile depends not on your starting profile, but on the internal characteristics that govern the interactions within your complex system of behaviours. This would seem to support the behaviourist psychology that people's behaviour is programmed-in and cannot be changed by external events. In the case of the Behavioural Influence Matrix in Exhibit 3, the key characteristics of the resultant behavioural profile are as follows:

• □    Main strengths (value greater than 0.5):
  • Achievement Orientation
  • Impact and influence
  • Directiveness
  • Self-confidence
• □    Main weaknesses (value below -0.5):
  • Concern for order, quality and accuracy
  • Relationship building
  • Flexibility

Conclusion

Behaviours, individually, do not determine the overall effectiveness in any particular situation: the mix of behaviours and the characteristics of different situations can lead to seemingly illogical and contradictory effects.

Although the initial Behavioural Influence Matrix was developed in a fairly informal manner, it is revealing to discover that it leads to a steady end-state that corresponds very well with the set of behaviours most strongly demonstrated by a large number of people in senior positions – managers, politicians, etc. However, if you modify the dependencies as defined by the Self-awareness behaviour in the matrix, you find that you can have a considerable influence over the end-state: this implies that if you become aware of the effect of your behaviours, you have some control over the way in which your character affects your behaviour. Even Don Quixote, trapped in his world of make-believe, took a step along the path back towards common sense, under the influence of the emotions caused by an external source – Sancho Panza's sincere grief for the apparent death of Don Quixote de la Mancha.

It would be very interesting to carry out a survey within organizations in order to obtain a consensus set of values for their Behavioural Influence Matrix, and then evaluate what this implies as an end-state and compare this with how those organizations actually behave, as well as with their published statements of cultural values. But in the same way as for volume 2 of the adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, that is another story.