The dual personality

Let me start this post by posing a question. Are you the same person you are at work as you are at home? Or do you adopt a work persona - an outer shell which allows you to be the person you need to be at work. Or do you believe that you should be all of who you are no matter what? Do you feel that having a work persona is tantamount to lying?

In recent years (even weeks!) I would have said adopting a work persona is tantamount to lying. I would have said if you can't be yourself and let people go hang if they don't like what they see, then the job isn't for you. But lately I have been challenging this view of the world.

Project Managers are chameleons. We have to adapt to suit our situation. We have to be mentor, counsellor, friend and protector (to name but a few) as the situations throughout the project change. We have to adapt our approach depending on the people we're dealing with and what we need out of them. If that sounds manipulative, well, it is.

And we cannot do all this without changing that outer shell. I have also long been a proponent of a more relaxed style of Project Management. I still am. However, with that relaxed approach, comes a need for toughness. A steel which can make you put your foot down and refuse to budge when you know you're right. And not accepting all aspects of what is needed for a Project Manager is basically not accepting all aspects of yourself. Which is not beneficial to anyone. But how do you balance this?

If you are a natural leader then this comes easily. You have a flair for when to be tough and when to let things go. When to be like a dog with a bone and when to roll with the punches. But for those of us who do not find this coming naturally need something else. And this is where the work persona comes in. It does not have to be hard and fast. I like to think of it as an invisibility cloak - I am always there but people see what they need to see. My other trick is to fake it till you make it. I have a number of leaders I revere (for their technical ability, leadership style, or charisma) and I pretend to be them in a given situation. And before long you find yourself acting the way you need to act without thinking. You won't always get it right. But you keep trying and you'll get there. 'Good judgement comes from experience - unfortunately experience comes from bad judgement.'

Control....or why it's better to manage without it

It has been a while since I posted anything - for the readers I've got, I apologise! Lately I have been musing over the percieved holy grail of project management - control.

I say it as a percieved holy grail, as we love our lists. We have lists documenting the lists which we have so we know which lists contain which list items. Lists give us the illusion of control. Yet the simple truth is that in todays business industry, people demand project managers who can work in a matrix environment. Basically, you need to run the project without having direct managerial responsibility for anyone. This can be terrifying to some project managers as they don't know how to enforce control without having the tools this provides them.

But what if this strive for control is what is causing the problem in the first place? A project is late, we say the PM let the timescales out of control. A project is over budget, they didn't control the finances well enough. A huge issue comes out of nowhere (think swine flu where whole floors of people were sent home) and the PM didn't think through all the angles and identify the risks correctly. Phew - what a responsibility! We have to be a timelord, chancellor of the exchequer and psychic! I don't think so! What if we just stopped trying to control everything. What if we accepted that we'd commit to do our best but that sometimes things happen which we can't control. What if we just let go.

And you know what? Deliverables come in early. People don't feel as pressured so they work harder and produce more. By treating people as the adults they are, they live up to and exceed your expectations. The workload as a PM becomes lighter and we can spend more time building relationships with senior stakeholders to ensure we have the networks in place in case the brown smelly stuff does hit the fan we have contacts who can make things happen to help us resolve the problem. As soon as we relax, the project takes on a life form of its own almost and it begins to run in the best way possible.

But in order to do that, we as PM's have to give up control and accept that our way might not be the right way.

Less Comms, Better Communication

I read an interesting article on the eBCS newsletter the other day - a new book is out by Peter Parkes called "Neuro Linguistic Programming for Project Managers". Its all about communicating better. How often have we heard the old mantra - we need more comms. It's usually inspired by people not knowing what's going on and feeling left out of the loop. But what if, as Peter suggests, we need less comms but better? And what constitutes better? We all know we have to communicate differently at different levels of the organisation - and being a Project Manager is all about being good with people. And surely communications is a key part of that.....

So maybe we use the phone, rather than email, maybe we pop up to someones desk, rather than phoning. Maybe, rather than spending hours defining the risks of a project we also spend some time to find out peoples birthdays. Maybe what we need is to humanise the project environment. Stop calling people resources - and treat them as human beings. And then maybe we can shift a mountain or two. Before stopping for a team lunch.

Methodologies - Reminder as to why they're useful

In our day to day lives, we never stop to think about the good practices and principles which methodologies try to help us with and which inevitably get left to one side as we rush through just trying to get the project in on time.

But what if we began to make time to do things properly. To ensure we had everything written down and agreed? That we'd made sure we had the bases covered? Would this then provide us with the time to get all the paperwork done as we wouldn't have to rush around because we'd got everything lined up previously?

To my knowledge, no-one has ever followed a methodology through to the very end. If you have, I'd love to hear from you and whether it made a difference.

For me? I've been reminded today through teaching PRINCE2 to someone that there is a good reason why these methodologies exist and why they are so detailed. Documents I'd forgotten about which we need to ensure both us and the customer have an enjoyable project experience. IT has a bad reputation for projects....what if we decided to make a change and do things properly?

To use those inimitable IT words...."Hello World!"

I have no doubt seriously upset some very experience Project and Programme Managers out there with my little snippet, snide, jibe, whatever you want to call it about managing to be successful at what I do (no, I don't mean the flying) without having to bully, backstab or generally upset my project teams. And in my experience - this is the default status for many PM's. We are generally a race of untrusting, paranoid and pyschotically attentive to detail people who can forget we're dealing with human beings, people and not 'resources'. I object, quite strongly, to my team being referred to as if they were the flipchart. Trust me, it won't get us out of a sticky spot when it all goes wrong and late nights are called for. It just sits there, fresh paper demanding new ideas and better ways of working, judging all us people beavering away for our inadequacies. But enough about my relationship with my flipchart, thats not why you're hopefully reading this. Its certainly not why I'm writing it!

So now comes the dilemma. What to put in a first post? It must be witty and eye capturing surely....it must grab and hold attention. But forget all that. I'm writing this not so much for you, the reader, although I hope you do enjoy it. I'm writing this because I want to show people how they can also be good project managers. I want to eventually have a whole bunch of nice, well adjusted PM's chatting away to each other through this blog, helping each other out. I happen to have been blessed with a Fellowship from the BCS recently and that does indicate I know something of what I'm talking about. So does my significant global experience in managing large IT projects and programmes (yes, there is a difference...don't get me started on portfolios). And my somewhat strong self-belief that there has to be a better way than some of the things I've seen out there. So I figured there's no point berating the world, I need to share these thoughts. And see what happens. It may be this winds up being a time capsule of ideas which someone finds buried in cyberspace in the years to come, long after I've finished writing it and thinks its ground breaking and sells it as their own idea.

Well, don't. I fly planes and I have connections. I will find you....and thats a handy link into my flying piece. I am learning to fly small aircraft (don't call them planes, that really upsets proper commercial pilots. or do. for a laugh) and recently have had the blinding realisation that it has remarkable similarities to project management. You're ultimately accountable, you have stakeholders demanding pointless updates (like where you are, where you're going and why on earth you've wandered into the path of an EasyJet flight due to land), you have a fixed scope (trust me, you try and do something out of scope and bad things happen. like stalling) which constantly tries to change on you and when an issue arises which comes completely out of left field you have to make a call which can either win you accolades or plummet you into the depths of humiliation. It is true Panic Management at its best. Which when you think about it is the core of a good PM. You never show fear, never run in the hallways of the office. Something goes wrong and you calmly assess the information, make a decision and go with it. And live with the consequences. Even if that results in a 60ft bounce, 4 subsequent bounces, a broken plane and some terrified firemen while you sob your heart out (this did actually happen to me).

Feel free at this point to discuss.....