Preface

The Complete Project Manager describes how effective practitioners integrate key people, organizational, and technical skills. Success in any environment largely depends upon completing successful projects, and successful projects are done by skilled project managers and teams, supported by effective project sponsors. The integration of a spectrum of skills enables certain individuals to make a difference and achieve more optimized outcomes.

A goal for this book is to develop project management “heroes.” As described by Joseph Campbell (2008), “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won.” Our “call to adventure” is to visit what might appear as a fairy tale world; however, all ideas, concepts, and practices shared in this book come from the real world. They are immediately applicable and serve as road maps to greater project success.

While not technically autobiographical, this book shares experiences, stories, and resulting insights from authors and colleagues, accumulated over decades in real-life project environments.

The ultimate aim of this book is to help you, the reader, develop a more complete portfolio of skills, knowledge, and attitude that is the right set for you to excel in today’s competitive environment. Through a storytelling approach, the book explains the necessary skills, uses case studies to model how to implement those skills, and seeks to motivate you to strive for the right mix of soft and hard professional skills that will help you create an environment that supports greater project success. The goal, aside from creating awareness about how incomplete we are, is to equip you and your colleagues to be leaders and managers in project environments—and beyond.

We describe a project office of one (POO), a position that is possible in an organizational culture that supports the essence of a project office but not its structure. People can embrace this role without formal authorization or title. Project offices of one are change agents—individuals learning to unfreeze, change, and refreeze the people around them, offering tremendous value. The steps along a path from chaos to nirvana can be taken by individual project managers—or others who are doing projects or leading a change effort and just happen to have the aptitude. People who function as project offices of one want the outputs they create, through a set of activities, to be great instead of average, and the outcomes to contribute to and fit with organizational goals instead of going on the shelf. POOs make this happen through their knowledge of leading practices and their experience with project management processes.

Updates in Second Edition

Based upon conducting a large number of seminars on this material, we discovered additional material, tools, and viewpoints that add clarity and usability. We resequenced the chapter order to first cover personal skills that most people find themselves lacking or need additional help to develop. Then we move on to bigger-picture areas involving interactions with others, such as conflict management, change, and environmental skills. Thus, we set a foundation for individuals and then equip them to create better outcomes when working with others. We also captured benchmark data that helps when comparing performance levels.

New topics and tools are added, such as ethics and leading and managing millennials when working with cross-generational project teams. We also include examples for evolving skills, such as strategic thinking. Updates may be found throughout each chapter. A focus on integration, knowledge management, Agile, talent triangle, business value, and role of the project manager are topics updated in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), 6th Edition that map extremely well to this edition of The Complete Project Manager.

We believe this material is now more complete. The need for project professionals to become more complete looms as a larger imperative more than ever before. We agree with Michael O’Brochta’s opening words that we want you to be inspired to broaden and deepen your skills.

Need

While many professionals develop their craft through advanced education and on-the-job experiences, there comes a time when an enhanced skill set and a new perspective on working with people are necessary in order to advance to the next level of performance. How do you move beyond this plateau? This book provides a thorough, holistic approach to open eyes, minds, and doors. You can apply new thinking to your own organizational environment immediately. We pose an organic analogy from molecular chemistry that suggests myriad combinations of skills for individuals to adopt.

If you want to progress personally and professionally as a project manager, you need to make a plan. Our hope is that this book provides insights to help you make that plan and achieve developmental objectives.

People allow many “enemies of change”—such as “not invented here,” “too busy,” “not enough time,” and cognitive blindness—to inhibit adoption of better leadership and management practices. Some of these enemies might be ingrained beliefs, harbored by people over a lifetime of experiences. We cannot change those beliefs; we can only change the believer. The way to do this is to provide enough evidence and examples that tap into your internal motivational drivers. The next step is for you to implement a complete systems approach that achieves greater results … and is simple, yet powerfully—and universally—effective.

One goal for this book was initially articulated by our colleague Dr. Robert Lauridsen, whose purpose in his consulting business is “achieving competitive advantage in the Age of Interaction … improving the way humans interact with others for the sake of achieving common goals.” In addition to this goal, we set out to write a book that we wish we had read when first starting out in our careers. This book covers all topics not taught in professional curricula but that are necessary for successful careers, such as how to get along with others, manage upwards, negotiate, sell, and handle conflict.

You may not be aware of the need to change your thinking and of how a current mindset can inhibit your performance. This book steps through the means to adopt, adapt, and apply a different approach. A change in thinking and taking action leads to more consistent, timely, and better-quality results. This happens because complete project managers apply necessary leadership, influence, sales, and negotiating skills that they had previously overlooked or underapplied. By consciously applying these skills, you increase your competencies and gain recognition for achieving business outcomes that had heretofore eluded you, leading to greater levels of personal satisfaction and professional advancement.

A project manager needs this book because it answers the question, “Where can I find real case studies and examples in which soft project management, environmental, leadership, and business skills are explained and illustrated?” In our approach, people matter.

The in-person seminar that accompanies this material appears as an effective means to reinforce and practice the concepts. Together, we create participant futures. Scott Bridges says, “I have attended many PMI seminars over the years, and I really enjoyed what Randy and Alfonso did and conveyed in the material and their unique and entertaining method of delivery …. I now look at everything as an advertisement for project management and indeed it is in the very being of fabric of our lives, instead of just in the PMBOK Guide or in a seminar, a PMI chapter meeting or a work project. Alfonso and Randy convey this brilliantly through the unique use of multimedia, showing of movie clips, personal experiences, speaker quotes, cartoons, and almost every media one can think of. This made for a very unique and personal experience and the best I have experienced with a PMI seminar! I will actually be seeking them out in the future.” Another participant offered, “Best trainers I have ever met in my lifetime.”

Intended Audiences

The primary audience for this book is project, program, and portfolio managers, in all disciplines and industries, commercial, nonprofit, and government. This is a huge audience; note that the Project Management Institute boasts over 750,000 members worldwide.

You may be new to the project, program, or portfolio management profession and seeking a primer to get started in the right direction. You may have a few years of experience and a desire to get on a fast track. You may have lots of experience but have come to realize that a fresh start and changed thinking are on the agenda, perhaps triggered by layoffs, job changes, or other transitions.

The secondary audience is individual contributors, subject matter experts (SMEs), project team members, managers of project managers, project sponsors, and other executives. If you are among them, you may be new to your role and wondering what you are getting into. How can you better understand your people, their roles, and the expectations for the people you work with? Or you may be experienced and looking for leading practices that can accelerate your performance. This audience is even larger than the number of project managers. We hope your experience with this book prompts you to share it with this extended audience.

Purpose and Uses

This book steps through the means to adopt, adapt, and apply a more complete approach to leading and managing people, leading to more consistent, timely, and better-quality results. It is designed to accomplish miracles, in a sense. It will help you achieve greater results through changed thinking in a way that is simple and immediately actionable. The concepts are easy to understand, universal, powerful, and immediately applicable. There is no complicated model to understand before applying what you have learned.

You as the reader may already be aware of what you need to do, but for any number of reasons, you are not doing it. This book supplies the why and how. It provides case studies and examples of real people applying the concepts, thereby demonstrating their feasibility. It removes barriers to implementation. These barriers may be environmental, executive, or business-related—anything that has seemed like an obstacle and has delayed projects, caused cost overruns, lowered quality, or caused deliverables to not meet requirements. These barriers existed because people were not aligned and motivated to perform. To overcome them, you may just need to see a model for how a task or process can be implemented. This book shows you complete ways to look at your situation and see new solutions or apply old solutions in new ways.

Are you seeking the missing ingredients that will help you move from good to great? Are you looking for the next generation of skills, mindsets, and processes to transform your performance as a project manager or sponsor? This book will guide you in developing the leadership, learning, means, and motivation to advance both personally and professionally. Case studies help you learn from personal reflections and from others about successful practices and identify how to apply these practices up, across, and down the organization, especially in politically charged situations. You will discover how soft project management, environmental, leadership, negotiating, and influence skills can be creatively applied. The goal is to integrate knowledge and skills that make the difference in achieving optimized outcomes, increased satisfaction, and bottom-line results.

We downplay academic models and prefer a storytelling approach where concepts are grounded in real-life experiences. The book draws from a culturally diverse set of contributors, so it may appeal to people from various professions and different countries coming together to better understand how to work with each other.

The book may be used for self-study; it may be a reference that readers come back to repeatedly to refresh thinking or gain new insights; it may be used by book clubs and executive gatherings to trigger sharing of similar or different experiences; it may be used by universities and training companies in courses on management and leadership; and it can be used by the authors and other consultants in seminars they facilitate worldwide.

We find that the response we get from audiences around the world to our presentations, seminars, and blogs is heartily positive and remarkably different from their response to other people and books. People find passion and “the truth” in our writings. Our energy and enthusiasm for managing projects come through and are motivating and encouraging. A seminar participant remarked that our “insights and style bring the concepts from ‘way up there’ to ‘right down here,’ equip you with the tools, and empower you to act.” (And nobody else can tell the same stories and share the same humorous examples, collected over seventy years of combined experience.)

Contributions

While much of the conceptual material in this book is not new, the primary innovation we strove for in writing it was to weave skills from a broad spectrum of disciplines together with examples of how the application of these skills leads to greater success in project-based work. Our goal is to provide a refreshing, positive, motivational, and useful guide—one that integrates skills from multiple disciplines.

We the authors are adept at providing critical feedback, grounded in practitioner experiences and applied through systematic frameworks, to participants in workshops and courses and consulting engagements. This experiential approach carries over into this book. The book integrates theory and application, humor and passion, concepts and examples, drawn not only from the authors’ vast experiences but also from other contributors who have shared their case studies. These contributors represent some of the best talent in the world, culled from our close association with them in projects, programs, seminars, and conferences worldwide.

There is a broad base of knowledge and practices to draw from in the project management and management fields in general. Many books do not address the complete set of skills project managers need to use for success in today’s environment. They fail to include social and emotional skills that are important for leadership and management. Where can readers turn to make sense of it all? Who can provide stories and experiences to cut through all the noise?

This book combines the technical, behavioral, and systems thinking approach to project management and flavors it with unique examples that have universal appeal. It relates to, builds upon, and extends material from our previous works. Creating an Environment for Successful Projects summarizes the skills of the “Successful Compleat Upper Manager.” Dictionary.com defines compleat as “highly skilled and accomplished in all aspects; complete; total: the compleat actor, at home in comedy and tragedy. Origin: 1875–80; earlier spelling of complete, used phrasally in allusion to The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.” We believe that historic definition applies as well to this current work.

Elements of change management, upper management support, and attitude are covered in Creating the Project Office, Project Sponsorship, Today Is a Good Day, and The Influential Project Manager. This book also complements chapters we contributed to other books, such as Rosemary Hossenlopp’s Organizational Project Management, The AMA Handbook of Project Management, and Lynda Bourne’s Advising Upwards, as well as many papers presented at PMI and other professional association conferences. We also expand upon material posted at blog.projectconnections.com, LinkedIn.com, and other websites. For additional tools, checklists, tables, practical suggestions, and examples, be sure to consult the companion book The Complete Project Manager’s Toolkit and website www.completeprojectmanager.com.

In writing this book, we took Good to Great and In Search of Excellence as well as The Soul at Work and Crossing the Chasm as inspiration to show how a broad set of concepts apply specifically to you as a project, program, or portfolio manager in your quest to improve project management and your own performance.

In spite of concerns from our editors, we tend to mix voice and person. We use the first person plural “we” when covering beliefs we have in common. We switch between “Englund” and “Bucero” and use the first person “I” when sharing personal examples. We talk about complete project managers in the third person when describing ideal characteristics. We use the second person “you” when passing along advice to you, the reader. We ask for your pardon in using this mixture and hope this explanation helps to make it work for you.

Key objectives we anticipate for readers of the book are to:

•  Change thinking about twelve necessary people skills to become more complete as project managers, lead change, resolve conflicts, and enhance on-the-job performance

•  Apply different approaches to leading and managing projects, through assessment of skills and environments, sharing examples and case studies, and identifying proven practices

•  Realize what needs to be done to negotiate, sell, and achieve more optimized project outcomes; learn how to do it, especially in complex and political environments; integrate implementation strategies; and have more fun, both in the learning environment and in the workplace

•  Access tips and techniques from enthusiastic, experienced practitioners

•  Better develop project and program management professional careers through enhanced abilities to influence all stakeholders

We believe healthy environments allow people to consistently and sustainably achieve project success. Sponsors can do a better job of guiding and supporting project teams, and project managers can expand their people skills. Career portals may look upon large plateaus that symbolize being stuck doing the same things over and over again with seemingly little progress. Distant mountains represent challenges that, if we choose to address them, move us to new career heights. Expanding a complete project manager mindset can move us forward.

We are writing a new edition of this book because we are EXCELLENT—we know that if we work hard and smart and keep learning, we can improve the contents. We believe we have much to share and are capable of contributing extraordinary insights to others in this profession.

We make no claims in the following chapters to completely cover the topics we discuss. The content in this book is not an exhaustive representation of a complete project manager nor is our treatment the only way to success. We offer points of view grounded in real-life experiences from our journeys. We welcome you to share learnings from your journeys with us.