The Scars to Prove It

Knowing how to manage projects involves more than understanding the academia of project management; it is about becoming a "hardened, weathered operator". There are some skills that you just cannot teach, says Tony Clasquin, CIO for Wealth Management at Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA).

Clasquin likens having good project management instincts to acquiring peripheral vision. When a young child is crossing the road, its parents hammer the message: "Look right, look left, look right again" because the child's peripheral vision has not yet kicked in, whereas adults can see dangers well in advance. Clasquin thinks the PMBOK provides a stepwise process (the "look right, look left, look right" of project management) for the many whose project management "peripheral vision" has not yet developed.

Experienced project managers grow their knowledge by encountering failures and by looking into the eyes of people around the room and asking whether they really understand what they are doing. After all, a project only gets there because of people, Clasquin says.

However, project managers must also learn to distinguish between "being right" and "doing right", he says. To explain, Clasquin uses another analogy. In Australia the law says you must walk, not run, across a zebra crossing, so that motorists have time to stop for you. To walk is to "be right". If you found yourself in the middle of a crossing and a big truck came careering around the corner and was bearing down on you, you would have options: you could stay where you are, continue walking and die legally, or illegally run for your life.

"That's the difference between 'being right' and 'doing right'," Clasquin says. "If you run for your life, yes, you have broken the law, but you've actually got a desired outcome. You're alive and you have helped the driver have a very, very awkward time with the police.

"Likewise in project management I see people say: 'I have e-mailed that person to do [a task] but he still didn't do it'. While e-mailing that person may be 'being right', it certainly isn't 'doing right', which would mean making sure the job gets done. If the person doesn't consume instruction by e-mail, he might respond better to a friendly chat or a phone call. Perhaps his boss needs to give him a push. Either way, 'doing right' involves finding a way to ensure he gets the job done."

Beaten Into Submission

Another problem arises when project sponsors, rather than using project management tools to reach agreement with the project leader, use the tools to batter him or her into compliance.

It is a more common phenomenon that you might think, according to David Maxfield, director of research, VitalSmarts. Maxfield's company and The Concours Group teamed up to conduct a global study of more than 10,000 projects. The researchers were trying to work out why between 70 and 80 percent of projects fall short of their goals or fail outright. Six different Fortune 500 firms worked with the two organizations in focus groups and interviews, while participants from 30 worldwide firms completed a detailed survey.

The study, Silence Fails: The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution identifies what's missing by focusing on five specific categories of conversations — conversations that are so important, that when even one of them fails, a silent crisis ensues producing failure 85 percent of the time. "When these conversations succeed, the failure rate is reduced by 50 to 70 percent," Maxfield says.

"One project manager said: 'Well, I tried to push back and my sponsor pencil-whipped me into submission. We've got all these project management tools, but instead of using the project management tools to help us all understand and come to a common agreement, they used the project management tools to beat me into submission until I just gave up and said: 'Okay, I will just try and do what you want'."

Maxfield claims up to 80 percent of projects experience this problem, but while 25 percent of project managers dissent, only 18 percent are able to confront the issue effectively. The other 7 percent said they tried to take issue with the approach, but ended up being "thrown out" by their sponsors. And in about 75 percent of projects, the problem continues for the life of the project and beyond. Improving project management performance involves improving conversations between members and stakeholders, he says.

Dimension Data's Petty says another way to lift the project management game is to maintain the links between project team members and their performance measurement system and original manager. "In managing you have almost got, if you like, a perishable resource, so you don't push them as hard as you possibly can until they break," he says.

And if Terra Firma project manager Ignacio Inchausti has any doubts as a project manager about the performance of any team members he will always make contingency arrangements. That can mean increasing the rated risk of the project. "There is no point fooling me and no point fooling the stakeholders or the clients. People are increasingly having to deliver more with less and that places a high premium on risk mitigation."

Inchausti believes it is not only possible, but essential, to capture that political savvy in a knowledge warehouse. Capturing lessons learned is part of the discipline, he says. Whenever his team initiates a new project or starts working on one that has been greenlighted, he immediately turns to similar projects from the past to evaluate estimating experiences and lessons learned.