4 DON’T FORGET THE SOFT STUFF
Project management is largely about hard skills: dates, money, resources, ticking off tasks. But to do those successfully, you need an appreciation of ‘soft’ skills: those elements of project management it is too easy to overlook when faced with time pressures and other crises. Soft skills are also important in a project environment because frequently the project manager will not have line management authority for the people working on the project.
GATHERING FEEDBACK – AND ACTING ON IT
At one UK healthcare firm, the IT project management team realised that they could probably do better on their projects – if only they knew what their project customers wanted them to improve. They realised that waiting until the end of the project to carry out a traditional post-project review meant that the feedback that was provided came too late to proactively do anything about it. While it was useful to know for the next project, there was rarely a high degree of overlap between projects so the lessons learnt were archived for posterity rather than for action.
The team implemented a simple survey that they could use monthly to gather customer feedback throughout the life cycle of a project, not just at the end. Project stakeholders were regularly asked for their comments on four measures:
• How well the project team managed issues.
• How well the project team communicated.
• How well the project deliverables were being integrated into the existing hospital processes.
• How well the project was going overall.
For each measure, the customer was asked to score the project out of 10. They were also asked to identify their top three issues.
Project managers could then take this regular feedback and act on it, resolving the top three issues and aiming to improve the scores each month so that they (and their stakeholders) could see regular improvements in the way the project was being run. This approach enabled the project managers to improve stakeholder engagement and demonstrate that they were actively listening and acting on any concerns.
This regular, constructive approach to feedback enabled one project team to move a stakeholder’s score from 5 to 9 out of 10 over the course of 10 months through regularly reviewing expectations and improving process.63
‘Soft’ skills are as much a part of the project manager’s job as making sure tasks are delivered on time, and as much a part of the overall success as your end product. They include:
• stakeholder identification and management;
• understanding the culture of the team;
• putting together and using a communications plan;
• being present and available for your team;
• giving them praise and guidance;
• getting buy-in from your team and also from the senior management – in practice, not just on paper;
• understanding who is accountable for decision making;
• ensuring people know why the project is happening;
• offering training to back up the communications if necessary;
• being positive and an agent for change yourself – never let anyone catch you saying the project is a waste of time!
Flick through the rest of this book for examples of these skills in practice.
Improving your soft skills will help you get the best out of your project team. Academics have long been searching for the magic bullet that makes one project team more successful than another and even within a single organisation with a common culture and well-motivated staff some teams will just perform better than others. Marla Hacker has researched the theory that the individual characteristics of team members and the dynamics within the team both influence how the team will perform. She studied 22 teams made up of three or four people drawn from a group of university engineering students. The teams worked on a project over a semester and were graded in relation to the other teams, providing an incentive to perform well. To analyse whether individual characteristics made a difference to the team’s overall performance, Hacker asked each student to complete a questionnaire about themselves and their experience. For the team dynamics part, the students rated their team’s performance on 12 factors including quality of discussion and level of agreement. Hacker’s research concluded that only one factor made a difference to team performance: the students’ average academic results, which she believes is representative of ability to accomplish tasks combined with the students’ ability to motivate themselves.64 She found no link between the students’ demographic background, experience or team dynamics and team performance.
Project managers often wish they could handpick their team to get the ‘best’ performers. Hacker’s research shows that it does not matter whether you choose your team or have them allocated to you because their individual social and employment backgrounds, and how well your group dynamics work, will make no difference to the team’s ability to perform well. While her study was not carried out in a workplace environment, an appreciation of soft skills and team interactions will certainly make your job easier.65
Balance the technical aspects of project management with paying attention to the ‘softer’ elements to help embed the change and support the project team with the implementation.