Higher Skills: Threat and Remedies (continued)

Follow-Through Skills

As important as it is to demonstrate the skills covered in this article, it’s even more important to make and follow-through on commitments. We see many Project Managers and other professionals who are all talk, very little action, and even less follow-through.

Your remedy is to do what you say you will. Commit to needed actions in your organization, and then track and report your progress. This is a proven way to keep your visibility high with your peers and Managers. Take the actions needed to achieve your commitments on time. Show you delivered the business benefit that was described in the Project Charter.

It seems strange, but Project Managers can be some of the worst in the skill of follow-through. Your competitors are winning because they demonstrate strength in this area. You can at least match that strength.

Front- and Back-End Project Management Skills

IT professionals and many in other disciplines are most vulnerable in the middle of their project life cycle (the darkest areas of the gradient-shaded graphic, below). It started with outsourcing the Construction activities. Then Design and Testing were outsourced. Now the O-Os are threatening to take over Requirements and Implementation.

What’s left? The beginning and end of the project life cycle: Project Initiation and beginning of Use (also known as the Warranty Period)

To be a successful project initiator, synchronize your project portfolios with enterprise vision, goals, and objectives; employ skills for managing risk, and analyze project benefits relative to costs.

And at the back end of the life cycle, during the Warranty Period, you must be adept at capturing and applying Lessons Learned; prove you met the objectives and business need; demonstrate that the project achieve the promised benefits; and manage the impact of the change in the enterprise.

As Project Manager, don’t be afraid to help your Sponsor become a critical evaluator: It is far smarter to kill a bad project early than to send it elsewhere for discount development.

In our experience, employing the above remedies can improve projects by a factor of 10x-30x.

Sidebar: Don’t abandon your technical skills, but provide a more balanced platform for displaying them. For IT, this means you must get out of rolling-your-own code! Evaluate and install package or component options, which can significantly cut mid-life-cycle costs. If you must code, then use iterative methods that keep you closer to your customer; this can provide more value sooner and keep you more visible.

Emergency Procedures for Managers

Fifteen years of de-engineering the organization has decimated the ranks of Managers, just as it has done to Project Managers, Team Members, and other professionals.

In some organizations, many of the best Managers left because they still had value in the market. Of those who remained, some were dedicated to helping their people and their organization survive, while (too many) others believed staying put was the only way they could survive.

From this morass arose a clever thought: Let’s outsource our less-effective business functions to someone who can manage our work better than we can, and profit from it! Note that we are not saying outsourcing is always bad, because it really can work best for some non-core business processes. Sadly, there is also a fair amount of O-O disease that happens just because business competitors are doing it, and it appears viable in the absence of contrary information.

Some of the most effective Managers we’ve worked with in the USA and other countries consistently demonstrate traits that are key to a successful project climate; this makes them huge value-add in their enterprises instead of overhead. These Managers know that by staffing and funding a project appropriately, you can use its ROI to invest, launch and complete (for example) three follow-on, concurrent projects. Just as in the case of compounded interest, you increase your ROI from 3:1 to 9:1—and more. How do the “savings” of your failed project compare?

The Managers who consistently increase project ROI share many traits. Of these, we think that seven traits are key to O-O survival: appropriately managing process and project work, vigilance in prioritizing their project portfolio, staffing top priority projects effectively, removing barriers to project work, establishing relevant measurements, developing resources, and establishing a consistent project process.

When you adopt these traits for better management, your range of possible improvement can be 3x–9x just as it is for other successful Managers.

Some managers may think you are exempt from the OO disease—that it only affects staff. Guess again: recent estimates are that 25% of the offshore outsourced positions by 2015 will be those of middle and upper managers!

Managing Process and Projects Appropriately

The role of a Manager, from first-level Supervisor to Chief Executive, has changed during the last 30 years. Some of the players have not. They do not understand that, today, the majority of white-collar work in most companies is project work and not ongoing process work. Further, they do not understand that you manage project work differently than the way you manage process work.

“Starve the Process.” In process work one approach is to avoid adding staff while workload increases. One uses numeric controls to monitor the quality of results. Managers only intervene to add resources when failure rates increase. Starve the process and adjust when indicators warrant.

Applied to projects, that approach results in under-staffed efforts that ultimately cost more, come in too late and miss opportunities, reduce scope and quality, and earn less than their intended ROI or even result in negative ROI. Your remedy: learn how to manage project-oriented efforts. Although you may succeed in starving the processes, you should feed the (right) projects.

Prioritizing the Portfolio

A classic cause of project failure is when organizations try doing too many projects at once with too few resources to staff them. This is the old “we’re losing money hand over fist, but making it up in volume” approach.

continued: Next Page