The Project Book

The complete guide to consistently delivering great projects

Colin D. Ellis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780730371410
• eBook ISBN: 9780730371465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

** Winner AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS - BEST GENERAL BUSINESS BOOK 2020

** Finalist AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS - BEST BOOK 2020

Deliver great projects every time

Projects are the lifeblood of organisations, but many projects fall short of expectations because of poor project management and/or poor project sponsorship. In The Project Book, author and 20-year project management and sponsorship veteran Colin D Ellis teaches you the skills and behaviours required to make your projects succeed, every time.

The best projects, whether they are delivered in an agile or waterfall way, are a result of the people that lead them and the environment they create. This fail-safe and comprehensive handbook shows you how to develop the mindset and communication skills to create projects that leave a legacy for you, your team and your organisation.

Project leaders and senior managers in all business and technical disciplines will benefit from the insightful guidance this book offers and better project outcomes will result. Split into two parts, individually addressing Project Leaders and Project Sponsors, this book guides large project facilitators to understand the importance of people over processes.

• become a project leader that people trust
• build a team culture of collaboration, agility and creativity
• upskill executives so that they're catalysts for transformation
• develop the organisational discipline needed for successful projects
• create a mature environment for your projects to thrive

Engaging, informative and humorous, The Project Book will help project managers, project sponsors, scrum masters and product owners across all organisations to deliver successful projects in a way that customers will talk about for years.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The best projects are made possible by the people who lead them and the environment they create for good people to do great work. These projects are led by project leaders, not managers.

Yet for the past 20 years organisations have focused on method implementation as a means of achieving consistent success. Great leadership, we’re told by the management books, is the cornerstone of success, so why has this truth been missing from project management for so long? The world is full of qualified project managers with endless certificates and letters after their names, yet time and time again they’re letting project stakeholders down.

Project management has to change

Organisations simply cannot continue to see more than 60 per cent of what they do fail every year. They should be angry and embarrassed. They should be looking for every way possible to improve on this record, rather than continuing with the same tired old quick-fix approaches they have used for 20 years.

What’s worse is that there are no statistics to prove that these old approaches even work, except for those produced by the companies that sell them. I’ve read many public- and private-sector project management capability reviews, all of which say the same things:

• Projects lack leadership.
• Project managers lack emotional maturity.
• Project sponsors aren’t interested enough.
• The cultures that projects exist within aren’t conducive to success.
• Organisations are doing too many projects.
• The methods used by project managers aren’t used consistently.

When they receive such a report, most organisations will skip over points one to five and head straight to six, insisting on more process to generate greater consistency of delivery.

They’re wrong, of course. The only way to get consistently good delivery is to ensure that the people responsible and accountable for project delivery know how to lead and create cultures that others want to be a part of, then have the discipline to get it done.

Projects are about people

My view is that there are only two reasons for project failure: poor project management and poor project sponsorship. Every factor that contributes to project failure will come back to one of these root causes.

Part of the problem is that lots of organisations still don’t really understand project management, despite having shelves full of textbooks. They think of project management as the triple constraints triangle.

The triple constraints diagram (or iron triangle) depicts the three elements that projects are bound by and that project managers need to be mindful of when planning and delivering projects.

Project managers used to say that two of these elements must remain fixed at any one time, but that was in the days when IT ‘dictated’ projects. Nowadays if a customer wants to change the scope and has the time and money to do so, then frankly they can do whatever they want and the role of project management is to make it happen.

It’s also worth saying here that time, cost and scope are characteristics of a project, not of project management, and project managers should not be measured on these variables.

The next figure illustrates the characteristics of project management, whose job it is to deliver the outputs (not the benefits) required by the customer within the constraints that have been set.

Remember, it’s who you are as a person and the environment you create for others to do great work that will make you successful as a project manager.

You need to understand the difference between leadership and management and be able to switch between the two as required throughout the lifecycle of your project. Great leadership provides the foundation for successful project management.

You also need the ability to build and maintain team cultures and be flexible about how you do things in order to reflect the nature of your project. This is the agility we now yearn for, an agility that existed before the technology boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and that can be used just as easily today, although not on all projects. More on that later.

Finally, there are the methods, the process and techniques that support project managers in building and implementing the plan. Applying these approaches alongside the behaviours expected of leaders will provide the stability and consistency of success that organisations seek from their project management.

Today there are many methodologies and associated techniques that you can draw on, and I have tried not to dwell on these in this book. My emphasis, as you will see, is on ensuring that you understand the leadership and culture aspects of project management, because these are the things you rarely read about and practise, yet they are certainly the most important factors for success.

Remember, the best projects are made possible by the people who lead them and the environment they create for good people to do great work. In comparison to project managers, these project leaders are few and far between. Read this book, then set yourself on a course to becoming one of them. The world needs you.

PART I
LEADERSHIP

There are about a million (really, I’ve counted them) blogs and articles that articulate what leadership is. Many great business figures and authors have added their own thoughts on this. From the business world, Peter Drucker proposes, ‘Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations’. For Ken Blanchard, ‘The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority’. Bill Gates predicts, ‘As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others’.

‘It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front,’ wrote the inspirational leader Nelson Mandela, ‘especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership’.

My favourite definition of leadership was offered by Maya Angelou: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’. If you aspire to becoming a project leader, this empathetic approach to people will be the foundation for success in everything you do.

To become a leader, you don’t need an MBA or PhD or project management qualification or Nobel Prize. Nor do you automatically become one when you have ‘manager’ or ‘director’ in your job title. To become a leader you need to make a decision. You need to decide whether you want to serve others and be the kind of person they aspire to be. Or not.

If you don’t want to serve others and be a role model, that’s totally fine. Being a project leader isn’t for everyone; after all, if everyone in the world was a leader, we’d get nothing done!

If you’re still determined, then you’re on the wrong side of a lot of hard, but ultimately rewarding, work on the journey to becoming a more emotionally intelligent version of yourself, starting with changing the way you behave, talk, listen, laugh, deal with poor performance and innovate. It’s possible you’ll have to completely reinvent who you are. You’ll have to identify and learn about the stuff you’re not so great at and spend your weekends cramming, reading books, blogs and magazines, and mapping out new routines to change old habits.

For far too long the corporate world has downplayed the importance of emotional intelligence, dismissing it as one of the ‘soft’ skills, which are among the hardest things to change.

In his ground-breaking book Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, Daniel Goleman identified emotional intelligence (EQ) as the key differentiator for leaders. ‘What makes the difference between stars and others is not their intelligent IQ, but their emotional EQ.’

This is every bit as true today as it was 24 years ago, and it will remain so into the futu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
• PROJECT MANAGEMENT
• PROJECT SPONSORSHIP
• FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• REFERENCES
• READING LIST
• SOUNDTRACKS
• CONTACT DETAILS
• INDEX
• End User License Agreement