Journyx Project Management Blog

A recent Project Times article lists the following 10 leadership qualities as required for project managers:

• Inspires a Shared Vision
• A Good Communicator
• Integrity
• Enthusiasm
• Empathy
• Competence
• Ability to Delegate Tasks
• Cool Under Pressure
• Team-Building Skills
• Problem Solving Skills

These skills enable project managers to keep their team motivated and to adapt to different situations that arise. They are necessary in order to steer projects through the inevitable storms that come. A ProjectSmart article agrees, stating that “a project manager with a combination of strong project management technical skills and relevant leadership and other important skills will find him/herself in a position of strength within their organization and a valuable resource overall.”

What would you add to the list?

Kimberly Wiefling at ProjectConnections has written a new article about “catalytic events” that can lead to permanent behavior change and improvement. She encourages readers to work to find permanent solutions to recurring problems, using the following analogy:

Imagine a parking garage that installs timestamp machines at the entrance to spit out tickets than can be checked upon exit to verify the total time spent in the garage, but without the gates that force cars to stop until they take the ticket. Without the gates in place, some people would surely forget to take their ticket at the entrance. Maybe a pile of tickets would accumulate at the base of the machine—no big deal. But from time to time there would a line of cars backed up at the exit when an exiting driver finds themselves ticketless. The parking garage attendant is left to sort out the mess. Repeatedly. Yuk.

Simply installing a gate at the entrance that is raised only once the ticket is removed ensures the right behavior by the customer—each driver must take a ticket before entering the garage. As long as the gate is working properly, and ignoring the possibility of criminal activity, the problem of forgotten tickets is now permanently solved. Of course the driver could still manage to misplace or lose the ticket, perhaps by removing it from the car, or—in the case of extremely messy cars or disorganized drivers—the ticket could actually become lost inside of the car itself. (Maybe in the future parking garages will just slap a barcode on the outside of the car when you drive in, or just take a picture and use pattern recognition to match exiting cars with entering cars, who knows.)

The entrance gate is a permanent solution to a recurring problem. Having seen recurring problems on project teams decade upon decade, and growing weary of asking, urging, coaxing, begging, and pleading with people to change their ways, I dream of such remedies to errant behavior!

Can you think of ways to address recurring problems and change behaviors in your organization?

Carl Pritchard at ProjectConnections wrote a new article, “Falling in Love with GREAT Communications,” that addresses our everyday methods of communication and offers suggestions on how to improve them. E-mail, voicemail, conference calls and face-to-face meetings all have certain types of protocol that we would all do well to remember. Here are some of Pritchard’s suggestions for each.

E-mail:

Be consistent about the use of the To:, CC:, and BCC: lines. To: people are those who have to take direct action related to the e-mail. CC: folks? They’re the ones who are being informed, but we want others to know who they are and that they have visibility on the information. Still, if you’re on the CC:, there’s no need to make a direct response. And BCC: folks should be those who have a need to be informed, but should not be included on the inevitable parade of responses that may follow.

Voicemail:

As the person leaving the message, keep it succinct. If you hit voicemail and don’t know what you’re going to say, hang up. Think it through. Come back. Then leave the message.

Conference calls:

If there are any handouts or materials that were sent out in advance, have them on a website as well, so that latecomers can pick them up

Face-to-face:

Schedule interactions. Give the person you just bumped into the opportunity to walk away. If they don’t have the time to spend with you, they won’t be focused on your message. Give them an “out” in case they aren’t ready for the face-to-face experience.

A Project Times article notes that “the difference between decent project management and excellent project management can be measured in delays, cost overruns, lost customers, employee misery, and business jeopardy.” The writer goes on to list 8 ’secrets’ that separate the excellent PMs from the decent, including:

• Always looking ahead and anticipating and preventing potential problems

• Ensuring that team members have complete and clear assignments regarding who needs to do what by when

• Knowing when to push, when to be patient, and when to intervene

• Shifting easily between the nitty-gritty details of execution and the high-level options and opportunities that impact project scope and quality

(You can read the entire list of secrets over at Project Times.)

Judging by this list, it seems that what makes a project manager truly excellent is years of experience that teach him/her how to read situations. They know what certain team members need from them, as well as what needs to be tracked and heeded in order to avoid major problems. They don’t waste time on the things that do not matter, but they do keep an eye on the things that do.

What would you consider a key trait for project managers?

The International Community for Project Managers is a repository of articles, links and other useful pieces of information for project managers. (In fact, our CEO is one of their contributing writers.) One of their recent articles, “Implications of Diversity on Project Management,” raises an issue that most of us might not always consider – the fact that diversity in project teams is not only beneficial and desirable, but is also something that must be accounted for and managed in order to maximize value. The writer says, “Of the many factors that are used in global management work, the most important – and most impulsive – are employees. While capital, land and technology can be planned and hazards predicted and managed, employees are most difficult to manage globally.” She goes on to suggest not only fostering team diversity, but also addressing it by encouraging team members to talk through their feelings about diversity and to communicate their way to a better understanding of each other.

How large a factor do you think one’s cultural and professional background plays in their interaction with other team members and with you, the project manager?

This year is going to be tough. The forecasters are all over the place about the outlook.

Which indicators you use in your planning – economic growth, profit levels, unemployment rates, commodity prices, the value of the dollar, or others – how you see 2010 may be very different from the person right next to you. We are in a period of uncertainty. You can expect to face continual demands on your leadership and management skills. Some leaders will fail; they won’t be up to the demands. Others will shine and may look back on 2010 at a year that really fueled their career trajectory.

Here are five tips that could ensure you’re in the latter group:

1. Remember that it’s not what – but who. The most important decisions you will make as a leader; are always about people. You may think they’re about systems, things, or money, but they aren’t. When I sit with clients and discuss the best and worst decisions they remember making, it’s always the people ones. Surrounding yourself with the best people is important at all times of course. But during uncertain times – it’s critical.

Read more at TechRepublic.

Project Manager Sherry Martin couldn’t stop thinking about her last team meeting as she walked down the hall towards her office. Slamming her office door behind her, she let out an exasperated scream and looked for something to punch! Her team was driving her absolutely crazy and she channelled Scarlett O’Hara as she proclaimed, “I will never run a meeting like that again!” Her problem in a nutshell boiled down to three really difficult personalities that continually recurred on her team. These personalities were indeed a cancer not just infecting the team and its results but also spreading throughout the group and impacting the other team members as well.

Sherry needs an antidote… now!

Here’s a little help for Sherry, and for you! Let’s explore these common dysfunctional personalities and how to effectively manage them.

The Dominator

We’ve all experienced “the dominator” in one-way or another. Some people tend to dominate discussion simply because they’re excited and overzealous. These can actually be assets to the team if we can find appropriate approaches to harness and manage all that positive energy. Unfortunately, most of us are more familiar with the other type of dominator – the overly aggressive, bullying personality that tramples on others’ comments and may attempt to hijack the meeting completely! Sometimes, these dominators are overly negative “That’ll never work here!”), and other times they just won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise. In either case, dominators can certainly sour not just the effectiveness of the meeting, but also the morale of the team.

Read more at Project Smart.

As we kick off 2010, it seems appropriate to consider how to “start on the right foot”. After all, in 2009, many businesses were suffering in the recession and searching for cash flow; thus, many projects went on hold. However, in order to thrive in 2010, it will become critical to get in front of the competition and put in extra effort on key business projects. One fail-proof way to achieve these goals is to ensure the best project leaders are focused on the core projects.

In my experience in working across multiple industries and with many different Executives, leadership is the number one key to project success. I’ve seen mediocre projects succeed with excellent leadership while sure-to-succeed projects fail due to a lack of leadership. Thus, finding and keeping the best project leaders is critical. What are the top traits of successful project leaders? Project leaders do the following:

1. Set Direction. As with all leaders, it is vital for project leaders to set direction. It is the leader’s responsibility to develop the strategy and communicate it clearly and repeatedly to the project team and throughout the organization.

Read more at Project Times.

Your project teams are already using collaborative and social networking tools, whether your organization embraces them or not. They’re using these tools to build relationships, share information, and collaborate. This presents a great opportunity for improved project success. While many corporations struggle to find ways to live with the social/business networking and collaboration trend, project teams can thrive on it.

While many collaboration and networking tools exist, there are three that merit strong consideration by project teams: Microsoft® SharePoint®, Facebook, and LinkedIn®. These tools can help create an environment conducive to informal learning, team collaboration, and information access and decision making. But these benefits won’t happen organically. It’s up to project managers to take these collaboration and social networking tools and mold them into a powerful project management function.

Read the rest of this article by Dr. Karen McGraw, CEO of our partner, Cognitive Technologies, at PM World Today.

I’m all for being there for people, honest I am. It’s just that people take advantage of it if I am.

So for the ‘productive lazy’ project manager, I would suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for the lights to be on and for no one to be home; not all of the time obviously, and at critical times access and visibility are all too important. But for the rest of the time, why not let the whole team work a few things out for themselves, take some degree of responsibility and decision making, and generally get on with the tasks at hand.

Being there when you are really needed and being there all the time are very different things indeed.

Being reachable in a controlled manner, and within an acceptable timeframe, to answer appropriate questions (and not stupid ones) is equally important. The last thing you want is a long line of people queuing up at your desk waiting to ask advice, and your phone flashing with an ever increasing number of messages, and all the time your inbox is reaching capacity with demands for your attention.

Read more at Project Times.