This chapter is based solely on my observations and no claim is made to any psychological, academic, or clinical expertise on my part. We have all read about right - brained versus left-brained predisposition, about multiple intelligence, and about IQ and EQ. My thoughts as a project manager are crafted into a simple, easy-to-understand-and-apply thinking model to assist in constructing your project team.
Before starting any project, the project leader is faced with what is often the most difficult decision concerning the entire endeavor: Who to put on the project team. Nothing is harder than identifying the right mix of people. It's like cooking: If your ingredients are poor, no matter how wonderful the recipe and how carefully you follow the instructions, the end result will be wanting. But get superior ingredients and mistakes and accidents can often be made up for.
The same thing holds true for project teams. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the types of people I want on my teams. And, yes, people come in different " types. " I don' t mean this in a denigrating way or that I stereotype people, such as the popular Type A and Type B personalities. But each of us has strengths and weaknesses. Albert Einstein was a great physicist, but that doesn't mean he was a wonderful athlete. Bill Gates is an innovative genius, but I doubt he is a great violinist. Michael Jordan could play basketball like no one else, but baseball was another matter.
After years of experience, scores of projects, and a fair amount of time thinking about the issue, I've identified three types of people who, when brought together, create an ideal mix for managing any type of project, and for our purposes here, specifically IT projects. Some people fit into two of these types (few have all three attributes). Figure 3.1 shows how these types can overlap. They are the ingredients you need to help assure your project team is successful. When you have these types represented on your project team, you have all the strengths you need and the ability to override any notable weaknesses. Let's look at these three types.
Visionaries are generally your brightest and most creative team members. They are out-of-the-box thinkers; they think about things in novel ways; they can dive deeply into a subject or think across a wide range of subjects. They're not encumbered with the structure of how things are. They turn things upside down, twist and turn them in new and unique combinations. The IT world enjoys a particular concentration of visionaries.
As a project manager, be aware that it is absolutely essential to have visionary thinkers on your team. They may sometimes create unique difficulties, but they amplify the deliverables of a project, and they enhance and augment a project's outcome.
They find solutions to intractable problems. They challenge conventional thinking and are less encumbered by "group think." You will often hear them say, "Why not..." or "How about..." I cannot imagine a robust project team without visionaries.
Even though innovative visionaries are essential to a strong project team, like every type of thinker, they come with unique challenges. The liability of visionaries is that they are not focused much on the commercialization or the actual completion of the work. Once they've completed thinking through a problem, they are on to the next thought. They generate lots of ideas, but others must implement them. So as you proceed forward on your project planning before the project actually begins, know which of the visionary's ideas to incorporate and which to leave unused because you cannot use them all. Once the project has begun, the visionary's liability is "scope creep": always ready with ideas—they say, "Oh, let's add this" or, "let's tweak that"—they can come up with so many ideas and expand your project in so many ways, it will never get done.
One other thought about intelligent visionaries. Attempts to motivate by recognizing and appreciating their efforts is substantially more effective than praising their intellectual gifts. This seems particularly applicable following a series of failures. Those acknowledged for effort seem measurably more resilient and continuously engaged than those whose intellect is over stressed.
A talented and gritty mountain climber and professional speaker, Todd Skinner, taught his listeners about "getting on the wall." His experience in free climbing many of the most challenging vertical ascents in the world taught him that the time eventually arrives when planning must be declared adequate and climbing started. And, more importantly, by "getting on the wall," you learn what you never could have learned any other way—you become capable.
Start-to-finish thinkers on projects are get-on-the-wall types. They are anxious to get going and start doing. They think about what they need to do first and then they get started. They believe you are not fully capable when you start, but become capable as you progress, so the sooner you start, the better.
This approach is based on the belief you can't know all that will happen or plan for every contingency. If you wait until you get all the answers, you'll just never start. The start-to-finish thinker is anxious to get going, to get on the wall. Building the initial One-Page Project Manager (OPPM) starts at the beginning. They reason: "We need to start with this, and then move on to that...and then that..." until complete. You may soon find them losing a little focus as the planning becomes increasingly granular or prolonged.
In IT projects, you will discover a concentration of start-to-finish thinkers working primarily in programming and not so many gravitating to the business analysis roles.
As a general rule, they are not particularly outstanding delegators. They have learned that they do things well. They are confident. They are highly effective individual contributors. Handing off work to others is difficult. They may even feel some level of guilt when delegating to others what they themselves could do.
Start-to-finish thinkers are essential to a team because of the energy they bring and their focus on the task. You want them because of all the things they're focused on. They work to meet deadlines. The visionary concentrates on a project's scope, often venturing beyond; the start-to-finish player thinks about how to complete the task on time.
You will find finish-to-start thinkers in the libraries of any major college. They have their pencils lined up, their calendars telling them when they plan to study for every class, and their books in order.
On a project team, they picture in their mind every project in its finished form. They know what a project will look like when it is done. With the OPPM, they start with the end in mind and build tasks and time lines backward to the beginning.
These are your best planners. They construct the OPPM right to left rather than left to right. Once all the tasks have been identified, they think about filling in the circles. This is in contrast to the visionary thinker who doesn't think about circles or dots at all. The start-to-finish thinker starts filling in circles left to right: this is done first, this is done second, this is done third, and so on. The finish-to-start thinker fills in the plan right to left: if this is the finished product, then to complete it they have to have completed this, and before that they have to complete that. They go backward. They calculate the time to complete a project from the end to the beginning, and as a result, they often end up with a longer time line than, the start-to-finish thinker.
The weakness of finish-to-start thinkers is that they can overplan. The proverbial analysis paralyzes. They do not get on the wall soon enough; they wait and wait to get started. The start-to-finish thinker says, "Give me a couple of ducks," and he's off. The finish-to-start thinker wants all his ducks in a row.
My wife Meredith is a start-to-finish thinker, and I am a finish-to-start thinker. As such, we nicely complement (or clash with) one another. We had a home remodeling project. I did the planning and worried about which were the load-bearing walls and what needed to be done, and I planned and planned. But the weakness of thinkers like me eventually came through, and nothing was getting done. I was undergoing paralysis by analysis. One day I returned home to find Meredith had taken a sledgehammer to a wall and reduced it to rubble. She had enough of my planning and figured it was time to start doing. She did more than "get on the wall," she took down the wall.
A team of all finish-to-start thinkers will overplan your project, and be assured, they will not overspend the budget. Time line—well, that's another story.
Many IT people have found success in this type of thinking. They have learned to "start with the end in mind." For IT projects, however, the "end" is difficult and costly to fully specify because users can't completely identify everything they will need. Therefore, experienced CIO's often partition larger projects into more definable chunks. By bounding both the scope and the time line into more manageable chunks, a propensity for finishing to start thinking is constrained to limiting the planning time. This also provides for some early deliverables while ignoring for the time being, scope that may expand in a future chunk.
Another proven method for addressing these challenges is the "path-based" approach explored by Harvard Professor David Upton (see "Radically Simple IT,"Harvard Business Review, March 2008 by David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats).
I have generally found that finish-to-start thinkers have, as a strength, a natural inclination to delegate and are comfortable surrounding themselves with people who are more competent than they are. They think about what processes or systems are needed for a project and who the best people are to accomplish what is needed, and they can be fearless at going out and getting them.
The visionary guarantees scope creep to a project, which affects both cost and the time line. However, scope creep is not always bad.
The start-to-finish thinker may paint you into a corner by starting things before they are fully thought out, requiring additional money and resources either not planned for or required to reverse and repair.
The finish-to-start thinker is slow to begin and may allow the time line to slip, especially in the early planning phase. This is a greater risk for longer projects.
People are not one-dimensional. They are multidimensional and possess varying degrees of each type of thinking in their approach to projects. Generally, one type tends to dominate, however.
There are a few remarkable project leaders who are in the triangle in the middle of Figure 3.1. They fire on all pistons, are bright and intuitive, have all sorts of ideas, and jump into a project right away with just the right amount of planning. These are unusual animals.
People who have strengths as visionary and start-to-finish thinkers will get a lot of things started but suffer some false starts. They have a pile of books on their nightstand, all partially read. They are good at starting things, but often lose interest before the project is completed. They are bored easily and crave the thrill of starting something new.
Visionary and finish-to-start thinkers can really slow down a project. They plan things to death and are usually quite risk averse. They visualize how they want to finish a project and then envision a new more expansive conclusion. They have good intensions, but can't get off the starting block. If they are writing a letter, they wait until they get more stationery or have cool postage stamps, and then they'll write and rewrite and rewrite some more. At the end of day, their backwards planning is overcome by evolving vision.
Those who combine finish-to-start and start-to- finish thinking are rare. Give them a set of plans, and they're off doing and accomplishing. On a vacation, they have everything planned. They know what they are going to do each day. They may miss, however, some unique opportunities or unusual activities only contemplated by the creative, visionary thinker.
The project leader needs all types of thinkers on the project team. This way, the leader can tap the strengths of all of them. The leader also must understand which people are one-dimensional or two-dimensional (the three-dimensional person is so rare you'll have no trouble knowing who they are). In simplest of terms, you need the visionary for the project's scope, the start -to-finish thinker for your time line, and the finish-to-start thinker for your budget.
How to identify who is who: If you think about the people in your organization in terms of these three types of thinkers, you'll probably be able to quickly identify who fits into each category. Start-to-finish are all about getting things going. Finish-to-start thinkers are all about careful planning. Visionary thinkers are all about possibilities.
Pure finish-to-start thinkers are good collaborators. Pure start-to-finish thinkers are quickly engaged. Pure visionaries are not good team members because no one can think as fast as they can. They don't work well on committees; instead, they work within their own minds. Nonetheless, you need all three types on your team.
How do you identify who is who in your company? Walk around your office at 5:00 in the afternoon. The visionaries are alone. They are probably sitting in a chair reading a technical journal or just thinking. Or perhaps they are huddled over their computer keyboard and writing. This is their private time. They are pondering.
The start-to-finish thinkers are busily working. There is paper all over the place; they are fully engaged. The finish-to-start thinkers have an office filled with people. They are writing on white boards, discussing things, and working things out. They are working with their collaborators, planning things, and thinking things through.
No one is good at everything. You need a team with visionary thinkers, start-to-finish thinkers, finish-to-start thinkers, and those who are multidimensional. A team with all of these attributes has great strength, and it can deal with all types of weakness. This is a team that can make the most of the OPPM and be most successful at completing your project.