Chapter 11. How to Make Project Management Work in Your Company
It is one thing to know how to manage projects. It is another to get people to actually do it. Running by the seat of the pants seems a lot easier than doing all the planning, scheduling, and monitoring that have been presented in this book. Even when people invest three or four days in project management seminars, you find that they soon forget what they have been taught and go back to the old ways.
I have struggled with this problem for twenty years and finally have some answers. Here are suggestions on how to make the principles of project management work in your company:
• Dr. W. Edwards Deming learned more than fifty years ago that if you don’t get top management involved in a program, the program will be short-lived. This doesn’t mean just having them pay lip service to it. As Tom Peters suggests in his book Thriving on Chaos, if an executive wants something to happen in the company, she has to change her calendar; she must spend time talking about project management, sit in on project planning or review meetings, start asking to see people’s project notebooks, and ask questions about how projects are doing. In other words, she must show an interest in the subject.
• Companies must build into performance appraisals items that evaluate a project manager’s use of the tools. They should reward people for practicing the best methods and, if necessary, sanction them when they do not. But be careful. Be sure upper management is not keeping managers from practicing good methodology.
• It helps to have the entire team trained in the basics. After all, when you tell members of your team that you want them to do a WBS for their part of the project and they’ve never even heard the term before, they can’t very well deliver. I have found that project managers generally need a minimum of three or four days’ training in project management, and team members need about two days’ training.
• I have found that senior management should have a brief overview of the principles so that it knows what it is realistic to expect. One of the most common causes of project failures is unrealistic expectations on the part of senior managers. However, I have found that most senior managers are so busy that you can get them together for only about three hours—if you can even do that. We have finally videotaped a briefing and cut it down to one hour and fifteen minutes, just enough time for busy executives to learn what they need to know to support and drive the effort.
• After the training is complete, pick a project that already has a pretty high probability of success—don’t pick your hardest job; the probability of failure is too high—and have your trainer/consultant walk the team through the steps. This is the hand-holding phase, and I have found it to be essential (as have a number of major companies with which I have worked). It really helps to have someone assist the team in practicing what it has learned. All new procedures feel awkward when you first try them, and an outside expert makes things go smoother. In addition, an outsider can be more objective than members of the team.
• Plan small wins for people. Forget the Pareto principle. It’s wrong in this particular instance, even from an economic point of view. According to Pareto, you should begin with your most important problems and solve them, then move on to the simpler ones. Sounds like good economic sense, but it isn’t. It ignores the fact that the biggest problem is also likely to be the hardest to tackle, so people are more likely to fail, become demoralized, and give up. No sports team ranked number 10 would want to play the top-ranked team for its first game. It would prefer to play the ninth-ranked team maybe, or even the eleventh. Don’t set the team up to be slaughtered!
• Practice a lot of MBWA (management by walking around) as the project progresses, but do it to be helpful, not in the blame-and-punishment mode. Give people strokes for letting you know about problems early, not after they have turned into disasters. Don’t be too quick to help them, though. Give them time to solve the problems themselves. Just ask them to keep you informed and tell them to let you know if they need help. Be a resource, not a policeman.
• Do process reviews to learn and to try to improve whenever possible.
• If you find you have a problem child on your team, deal with that person as soon as possible. If you don’t know how to handle the problem, talk to someone who has the experience and who can help you. Don’t ignore the problem, as it can wreck your entire team.
• Be very proactive, not reactive. Take the lead. Break roadblocks for your team members. Go to bat for them.
• Have team members make presentations to senior management on their part of the job. Give them credit for their contributions. Build ownership.
• If you are running a project where people are assigned temporarily but still report to their own bosses (the matrix organization), keep their managers informed about what they are doing. Try to build good relations with those managers. You may need their support to get the job done.
• For those tasks on the critical path of the project, you may find that you have to physically collocate the people doing those activities so that you don’t have them constantly pulled off to do other jobs. Major corporations are using this method more and more today on highly important projects.
• It may be useful to consider setting up a project support person or office to do all scheduling for your project managers. Rather than have everyone try to master the software, it may be better to train one or two people to competence level, with users trained only enough to know the capability of the software. Under this scenario, project managers give raw data to the support group, which enters them into the computer and then gives back the schedule; the schedule is then massaged until it works. Subsequently, the support group does all updates, what-if analyses, and so on for the project manager.
• Along this line, have a person assigned as project administrator. This person either does the project support or delegates it. He also sits in on project review meetings, holds the team’s hands to walk members through planning and audits, and so forth. Naturally, you need to be running quite a few projects (at least ten to twenty) to justify this position. Such a person can be helpful when the people who are managing projects have little experience with managing or perhaps have poor skills in dealing with people, or both.
• Benchmark other companies to find out what they do with project management. Note that, when they don’t practice good methodology, that does not give you grounds for abandoning it yourself. I know of one major corporation that does not track actual work put into a project, yet the company is extremely successful. However, the fact that it doesn’t track work is going to lead to problems eventually. It does a lot of other things really well, however, and I would not hesitate to benchmark those things.
• Have individuals take responsibility for being champions of various parts of the project management process. Perhaps you can make one person the earned value champion, who goes around the company trying to get everyone on board so that they all use that method. Another could take responsibility for dealing with WBS notation, and so on.
• Join the Project Management Institute, attend its chapter meetings, and learn more about project management from other professionals.
• Try to read current management books and glean everything you can from them that will help you do your job better. Managing projects is a demanding job, and you need all the help you can get.
• Consider changing the structure of the organization to be project based. Tell all functional managers that they exist to serve the needs of projects. Many of them will scream. Some may even quit. But, in today’s world, where most of what gets done in organizations is in project format, this makes good sense.
• Set up a project management function, with dedicated project managers. You don’t have everyone doing accounting. Not everyone is good at it. This is also true of project management. By making it a function, like all the others, you provide a way for dedicated individuals to hone their skills and get really good at the job. An excellent resource for this is Graham & Englund, Creating an Environment for Successful Projects (1997).
• Look at managing projects as a challenge or even as a game. If it doesn’t strike you that way, it probably won’t be very exciting. Experiment with new approaches. Find out what works and keep it. Throw out what does not.
• Finally—good luck!