Emergency Procedures for PM's and Teams

If you are a Project Manager or a Team Member, two of three reasons underlying your O-O exposure are also your inoculation remedies: lower cost and higher skills. If you are a Manager, make sure you read the next part of this article: Emergency Procedures for Managers. In the meantime, continue reading because what’s relevant for your staff ought to be relevant for you, too.

Lower Cost: Threat and Remedies

The flight of white collar jobs to countries where the average pay is one-third that of the US has been going on for quite some time. In today’s economy, expect this trend to continue.

Your potential remedies include working for less, producing more, finding a unique niche, or waiting 100 years until those countries’ new prosperity causes your competition to cost more than you do. By using any one or a combination of these remedies, you can lower your cost per result by 3x and match your competition. You must meet the competition, or make it irrelevant by establishing a niche market for what you do. Which remedies do you prefer?

Higher Skills: Threat and Remedies

Your competition for your job may be hungrier than you are (at least right now). And many of their nations are improving incentives for investment. Their companies are boosting their training and human resources development, while the U.S. continues to focus on quarterly short-term profits.

Your best overall remedy is to invest in yourself; don’t hope and wait for your organization to do it. From a Project Manager or Team Member perspective, you should focus on skills pertaining to one or more of these six areas: strategic vision, a Competence-based certification, communication, staffing and delegation, follow-through, and the front and back ends of the project life cycle.

The six areas listed above are those where your competition is either outperforming you or will eventually strive to do so. In either case, you still have time to compete and establish an edge.

Strategic Vision Skills

Some members of your competition have a cultural planning horizon that stretches 100 years. Their ability to focus on long-term goals is one of their keys to success. In the USA, our planning horizon too often ranges from 3 months to a year, with a primary goal of pleasing Wall Street.

You, however, must start thinking like your competition while continuing to please your management. Hone your ability to establish a project vision, communicate it to others, show how short-term results contribute to the vision, and then track your performance in realizing it. Easily said. Well, we didn’t say your treatment would be easily done.

Certification of PM Competences

Intuitively or otherwise, most people understand that to survive and advance they need to update their technical skills. Today, it can be just as or more crucial to update your project management skills. But don’t stop there. Expand your skills! Get certified! Get recognized! Then set up mentoring programs to help your peers. After all, expertise is the best example of compounding interest.

For Project Managers, certification in your discipline is a good start. Those of you with other skills should search out the appropriate certifications. Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional certification is good start. But you have a unique opportunity to go beyond that.

The newly announced asapm® Certified Senior Project Manager (IPMA Level-B) program assesses a Project Manager’s performance-based Competence. This can be a more reliable indicator of performance and potential than other certifications. You can stand above your competition if you earn the Level-B Cert before others do.

Communication Skills

In a recent technical support call to a website hosting help line, I received impeccable service from a well-spoken support representative. When I asked if the server was down he told me the server was half the world away from him (only 500 miles from me). I congratulated him on his American English, and he said my area code prompted which American accent to use.

Given that project management is a set of specialized communication skills, how are yours? These skills include persuasive speaking and presentation, active listening, critical reading, and effective writing. Your competition recognizes the importance of communication; do you?

To gain an edge, become adept with your interpersonal skills: learn to relate well to those with different personal styles; read body language; instill confidence and passion in your topics. Use eye contact to improve trust, an American strength when used appropriately. Further improve trust with open-ended questions and active listening. Understand, read and play the politics of each situation you encounter. And don’t mistake brown-nosing for politics.

Staffing and Delegation Skills

Smart Project Managers staff their projects with people who are smarter, more motivated, and more experienced than they are, and then effectively delegate work to those people. Your leverage grows when you can find others who can complete assignments with higher quality and at twice or better the speed that you can. A common occurrence? It can be. Barry Boehm, in his 2000 update of COCOMO, cites a mere half-dozen skill factors that (considering the range from very low skilled to very high skilled) can increase project effectiveness up to 100 times!

Find and cultivate those superstars! Build the business case for making them available to your team. And then learn to delegate more effectively.

Can your Team Members tell you a handful of ways to get their assigned work done faster and more frugally at the same or higher level of quality? If not, then your delegation skills probably need improvement. The best delegation uses directives sparingly and encourages feedback so that Team Members will fearlessly tell you how their skills and time can be better used.