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Chapter 1
Start Well to End Well
Bad News early is Good News.
ā Steve McNamara
In this chapter:
- How to really do more (projects) with less (help, money, time)
- Why project management is not too hard or academic for you to use every day
- Using PMI's methodologies and other project management methods
- How to feel like you've accomplished something at the end of each day
- How to stop trying to control and start managing
- How to establish the partnerships required for projects to be successful
In today's chaotic business climate, multitasking is the norm. Jobs have been trimmed, and companies are doing more with less. Roles and responsibilities cannot be defined clearly enough to adapt to the work responsibilities required to flex with the chaos. No one is accountable, except you of course. People are juggling multiple projects and often acting as the project manager for a team of one.
Lou's Project Management Diary
As part of a recent study conducted by Towers Perrin and the researchers of Gang & Gang, a randomly selected group of 1,100 employees and 300 senior human resource executives working for midsized and large-sized companies in the United States and Canada was surveyed. Participants were asked to describe their feelings about their current work. The study captured participants' spontaneous emotional responses about the total work experience. The study determined a set of reasons for workplace negativity. Here are the top five:
- An excessive workload
- Concerns about management's ability to lead the company forward successfully
- Anxiety about the future, particularly longer-term jobs, income, and retirement security
- Lack of challenge in their work; boredom that intensifies existing frustration about workload
- Insufficient recognition (including salary) for performance, contribution, and effort
Think about a project that you are on right now. Use
Sidebar 1.1 to think about your project experiences.
Sidebar 1.1: Emotions Exercise
Take a minute to write down responses to the following on a piece of scrap paper:
- What is a negative emotion you have experienced on this project?
- How intense (1 = low, 10 = high) was this emotion?
- What were a few of the events that triggered this emotion?
- What is a positive emotion you have experienced on this project?
- How intense (1 = low, 10 = high) was this emotion?
- What were a few of the events that triggered this emotion?
The negative emotion is an uncomfortable place in your mind, but I'd like you to stay there for a moment so you can learn more about your current project management competence. If you are like many of my learners, you have written down the word āfrustrationā or āstress,ā or something like that. Overall, 80 percent of the learners in our classes list one of these two words when they do this exercise. As a mini-snapshot of current work, the thought that 80 percent of workers are stressed out is not a positive sign. When we are in an almost constant state of frustration, we don't make good decisions, and our projects struggle.
Let's look at some of the other potential triggers. Your list may include:
- People who aren't accountable
- People who won't deliver on or meet their promised deadlines
- Not enough time
- No executive support
- Unreasonable budgets
- Internal political battles that have nothing to do with the project
- Stakeholders continually changing the scope of the project
- No help
Then, many of our students share the impact of this emotional state on their personal life. These impacts include:
- Limited time and energy for families
- Health issues
- The threat of unemployment due to project failure
In this book, you will learn how to respond to these triggers with preemptive strikes. You will also learn how to recognize when you're lying to yourself, thus creating some of the very stress-inducing triggers you blame on others. Project success through good project management is all about communication with yourself and others. Projects break down during phase transitions and hand-offsāand in large measure due to self-deception.
Return to the positive emotion you wrote about in Sidebar 1.1. The positive emotions tend to be more diverse, which makes sense because what motivates individuals varies greatly. Notice what motivates you and keep it in mind for when your projects head to the negative side.
A Brief History of Project Management
Work has changed and accelerated, contributing to our feelings of stress and frustration. How many times a week do you leave work overwhelmed? Or put another way, how many times a week do you never leave workāeven if you physically leave the office? Today's technology allows work to follow us 24/7, wherever we go, nagging us about all we've left unfinished.
Gone are the days when you, along with a team of people, were dedicated to a single project. Sure, you may have had your day-to-day job responsibilities, but you were able to focus many hours a day on one single project. Handing off or transitioning between project phases was easier because the other people on your team were also dedicated to your single project. Today, most people are juggling multiple projects at a time. Whenever you need something from someone else, you might be interrupting them at work on another project or, in our digitally connected world, sorting through their email. A recent statistic claimed that workers on average spend half of their day processing emails. My theory is that 75 percent of that time is spent trying to frantically delete, save, or somehow get rid of emails, not actually processing something important.
Project management, which realistically has been around since the Egyptians built the pyramids (at least!), became an official practice in 1969 with the beginning of the Project Management Institute in the United States, known as PMI (www.pmi.org). This international not-for-profit association researches and establishes best practices in project management. The collection of best practices is called the Project Management Body of Knowledge, or PMBOK for short (pronounced as a word, pimbok). PMI also offers an increasing number of certification programs, including the Project Management Professional (PMP pronounced as letters, for obvious reasons) certification, which requires extensive project work, training, and a rigorous written test. PMPs must attend training and development programs to keep their certification as well. Your local PMI organization is a good resource for inexpensive, quality training and the place to go if you would like to be a certified project manager.
Many of the techniques and processes in the PMBOK assume that a project manager is a dedicated specialist. Due to the complexity of technology and work, I believe project management is no longer just for specialists but a required competency for all business workers. Learning project management as a competency is different from project management as a specialty, profession, and full-time job. This book will focus on the competency of project management as opposed to the career.
In addition, traditional project management starts with the project manager building the due date using a detailed project plan, a process I will refer to as āgoing forward.ā In a sense, the professional project manager is calculating when this project will be done. I believe most of us are āworking backwardsā; in other words, we are working back from a fixed date and/or budget. You will learn more about this important difference when you get to Chapter 3, on planning the project.
If you are a PMP-certified project manager, this book will add value to your knowledge by providing you with simple techniques that may help you influence your stakeholders and sponsors more effectively. If you are not a PMP, you will acquire a process and simple techniques that will increase your work capacity, augment your project success, and perhaps more important, improve your state of mind. The ideas in this book are completely consistent with PMI's PMBOK, although some of the terminology has been simplified to appeal to this book's audience.
No matter what your background, this book will give you practical, effective project management techniques and tips, especially if you are juggling multiple, smaller projects. If you are managing a large global or multidepartmental project, these techniques will not be sufficient but may be used as a starting point. Still, most readers will be able to apply these techniques to manage their own portfolio of projects, which are often done with temporary help and driven by aggressive timelines and limited budgets.
What Is a Project?
I've already mentioned the current state of work and the increasing levels of complexity.
Now, let's try another exercise to see why you may be frustrated. Grab another piece of paper and give yourself no more than two minutes to write down what's on your to-do list right now. Write down at least five things but no more than ten. Notice the emotions this list generates and how it impacts your sense of self. Next, refer to
Sidebar 1.2.
Sidebar 1.2: Your Business Objectives
Follow these directions using the list you have created:
1. Is each item on the list something you can get done in less than four hours if...
