A Sixth Sense for Project Management - Softcover

Roeder, Tres

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1456730444 ISBN 13: 9781456730444

Publisher: Authorhouse, 2011

Synopsis

Tres Roeder lays out a system to help you succeed not only in your projects, but in any interpersonal relationship that requires a change in behavior. Tres Roeder's 90 percent project success rate stands well above industry averages. In this book, Mr. Roeder lays out how he succeeds by using a balanced approach of technical project management skills, business acumen and sixth sense people skills. Sixth sense people skills are unlike any people skills guidance you have ever received. Read this book and forever change the way to manage people and projects.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A SIXTH SENSE

FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENTBy TRES ROEDER

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 Tres Roeder
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-3044-4

Contents

Foreword..........................................................xiA Profession in Trouble...........................................3Birth of A Sixth Sense for Project Management.....................13A Call to Action for a More Balanced Approach.....................21Awareness.........................................................33Whole Body Decisions..............................................45Clear Communication...............................................55Adaptability......................................................71Diplomacy.........................................................77Persistence.......................................................93Intuition.........................................................107Your Ticket to Learn..............................................115Acknowledgements..................................................119Notes.............................................................121Index.............................................................127

Chapter One

A PROFESSION IN TROUBLE

A Sixth Sense for Project Management® is Roeder Consulting's framework for managing the human side of change. Deploying A Sixth Sense for Project Management®, Roeder Consulting has led client projects to successful outcomes 90 percent of the time. Considering all of the variables in people and projects, we feel good about these results.

Throughout this book, I will reference Roeder Consulting and our work because it will be helpful for you to understand what our company does. In short, we are a ten-person consulting and training firm focused on helping clients change successfully. We measure ourselves by the metric in the first paragraph of this book. Did we lead the client's project to a successful outcome? Did we help the people in our training programs lead their organization's to a successful outcome? After some ten years of working on major change initiatives for a variety of organizations, I have grown to appreciate the absolute criticality of properly managing the human side of change.

I worked on projects for many Fortune 500 clients. I do not discuss the names of the clients in this book for confidentiality reasons. Some Fortune 500 projects I personally worked on have been front-page news in the Wall Street Journal. Others have been highlighted by the chief executive officer in the annual report for positively contributing to the company's performance. I mention these details only to provide perspective on the size and scope of projects I have been involved with. I also led projects for midsize and small corporations and not-for-profit organizations.

In all cases, projects and change are about people. People skills are so important that I began a personal journey to learn how to manage people during times of change. I call the contents of that body of knowledge A Sixth Sense for Project Management®. Later, I will share more details on the story of how I created A Sixth Sense for Project Management®.

Today, Roeder Consulting trains thousands of project managers and other leaders of change on these principles. A number of these people personally tell me that our approach has altered the way they think about managing change. One of the most satisfying times this occurred was earlier this year in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had just completed a training course to a group of almost twenty-five people. One of the gentlemen in the room had spent his career managing projects. He had, perhaps, twenty-five or thirty years of experience and he was on his second training course from Roeder Consulting. He told me our programs had caused him to rethink his approach.

The Sixth Sense tools and techniques we are using can be applied by all project managers. We are not doing anything you can't do. This book will outline the steps you can take to improve your rate of successful implementations too.

Research shows that many projects fail. One commonly quoted research study from the Standish Group reports that, on average, only 32 percent of all information technology projects succeed. Clearly, project management is a profession that must do better. In section one, I will discuss how we ended up in this environment of high project failures. Also, I will share a brief history of A Sixth Sense for Project Management® and how it fits into a balanced approach. Finally, in this section I will ask you to join me in embracing the changes we must make to elevate the profession of project management to the next level.

What Is a "Project Manager?"

This book frequently uses the term "project manager." By this term, I am referring not only to people who are professionally certified as project managers by the Project Management Institute (PMI) or a similar other group, but also to the much larger audience of people who find themselves leading projects. This larger group includes, but is not limited to, organizational consultants, business analysts, many human resources professionals, executives, and people of all kinds of backgrounds in roles at not-for-profit organizations. When you stop to think about it, much of what we do in life is a project. And much of what you do may be referred to as "project management."

PMI created a standard for managing projects called the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). According to the PMBOK® Guide, "a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result." If you are conducting work that meets this criterion, then you are a project manager. "Project manager" may not formally be in your title, and you may not even be employed, but that's what you are doing. Perhaps you volunteer with a parent-teacher organization and are in charge of the annual picnic. That's a project. Perhaps you are on the swim team and need to arrange transportation for the local swim meet. That's a project. Each of these activities has a defined beginning, a defined end, and a definite result that must be achieved.

Finally, I use the term "project manager" and "project leader" interchangeably. I believe people who manage projects are leaders.

Many Projects Fail—Lack of People Skills Is a Primary Reason

Only 32 percent of information technology projects, as I already stated, are successful. This troubling statistic is the result of the extensive research of the Standish Group. Standish compiled these results from over 70,000 IT projects. Even more troubling, our performance is not improving. The success rate for projects six years earlier was 34 percent.

My experience has shown me that inadequate management of people-related issues is often at the heart of project failure. One such area is lack of business ownership and accountability. Have you ever had a project where the executive sponsor did not support the project? I know from discussions in our public classes and webinars that projects typically do not succeed without business ownership and accountability. If we are going to reduce this cause of project failure, we need something more than what we are currently doing. We need A Sixth Sense for Project Management®.

Another cause of project failure is that the team lacks authority or decision-making ability. In Roeder Consulting's training programs, we have asked the following question for years: "Do all of the stakeholders in your projects report directly to you?" I have never met a project manager who answered that every stakeholder reports directly to him or her. We ask another question as a follow-up: "Do any of the stakeholders in your projects report directly to you?" Data from several of our global webinars, representing 776 respondents, showed that 76 percent of the audience did not have any of their project stakeholders reporting directly to them.

Project management is a profession of people who must accomplish results through other people. We need other people to approve our budget. We need other people to sign off on the scope of the project. It's not that we aren't capable of doing it. It's simply that this is the way the project management role is typically structured. Other people need to make decisions. Learning how to have other people support us is not a skill that we traditionally learn in project management training. If we are going to reduce project failure, we need something more than what we are currently doing. We need A Sixth Sense for Project Management®. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss the critical importance of the people skills that are embedded in A Sixth Sense for Project Management®.

The first piece of research that emphasizes the importance of A Sixth Sense for Project Management® comes from the doctoral studies of Dale Christenson, PhD. Dr. Christenson is one of the first people in the world to receive a PhD in project management. A tall gentleman with a large swath of hair parted on one side, his presence is formidable, as one might expect from the former assistant deputy minister and member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

For his doctoral research, Dr. Christenson studied sixty-five peer-reviewed articles on successful projects. He scoured these articles for the common elements of project success. He found that seven "critical success factors" are consistently present when projects succeed. I have summarized each critical success factor below in roughly the order of importance. For example, senior management support is the most important critical success factor. Each critical success factor has a major people skills component.

Senior Management Support

Intellectual, financial, and political support from senior management provides a critical backdrop for project success. Senior managers who are also in project management roles are likely to use interpersonal skills to deliver results. As one's career advances, the importance of technical project management skills typically decreases as the importance of people skills increases. Project managers who are not senior managers, but must work with them, will also find that their interpersonal skills are important to successful relationships.

Clear Goals

Project teams are more likely to succeed when they know where they are going. Clear goals are primarily about business acumen and sixth sense people skills. Business acumen involves an understanding of how the project is tied to organizational goals and the specific elements of those goals the project will achieve. I will discuss business acumen in more detail in chapter three. Sixth sense people skills train you to learn a person's true goals in a project and gain alignment from all the key stakeholders on those goals.

Competent Project Manager

Regardless of an organization's tools, processes, culture, etc., the project manager must be skilled to deliver results. I have heard some organizations claim that they just need to set up the right system to manage projects. With the right software and processes, they argue, project management will succeed.

Dr. Christenson's research and my personal experience do not support this argument. Instead, they confirm that the project manager does make a difference. Regardless of how great an organization's systems and processes may be, there is still a need for a talented, well-trained project manager to deliver results.

Adequate Resources

Having adequate resources means having enough resources and having the right resources. The term resources applies to both human resources and financial resources. Identifying and securing the right resources is a sixth sense people skill. It calls on disciplines, such as these:

• Awareness—to determine what resources are needed. • Clear Communication—to state your case for these resources. • Diplomacy—to secure the resources.

Project Management Framework

The essence of this critical success factor is that we need a road map to guide us from project start to project completion. However, there is not one best project management framework. It is situational. I will address this in chapter seven when I discuss the Adaptability Discipline. The point I want to make here is that you are much more likely to succeed if you have a framework. Frameworks can be very simple or quite complex. Following a project framework is a technical skill. In chapter three, I will discuss technical skills in more detail. Knowing which framework to use and how to adapt it to your needs is a sixth sense people skill.

Control System

Your project management framework must be controlled. In other words, you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people are following the methodology. Further, you need a way to get people back on track when they stray from the methodology. A control system, like a project management framework, is a technical tool. Using the control system is a technical skill. Selecting the right control mechanism, adapting it to your needs, and knowing how to have the conversation with people when they stray from the methodology are all sixth sense people skills.

Project Vision

In addition to the above six critical success factors found in the current literature, Dr. Christenson argues that project vision is also a critical success factor. His research dissertation supports this proposition.

While I mentioned clear goals above as a critical success factor, it is vision that guides those goals. Vision tells us why we are doing what we are doing. A pedantic conversation about the definition of goals versus the definition of a vision is beyond the scope of this book. I have seen many clients spiral into hours of lost productivity arguing about the definition of terms such as these. The important point to grasp from this list of critical success factors is that someone, or some group of people, needs to clearly define why a project exists and what it is trying to accomplish. Let's call that a vision. The vision is particularly helpful when the specific path your team is on comes to a dead end. If you are guided by a vision, you can say, "Well, that road did not lead me to the vision. What other ways can I get there?"

This vision must be shared in order to be effective. Creating a shared vision is a major challenge for many organizations. Regrettably, different people and different divisions often operate in their own direction. Sometimes, in the worst cases, they are counteracting each other's efforts and working against what is good for the enterprise. A vision is clearly in the realm of business acumen—understanding the competitive marketplace and developing strategies to succeed as an organization. Articulating the vision is a communication skill and that puts it into the realm of sixth sense people skills. Furthermore, knowing how to adapt your approach when you reach a dead end is a sixth sense people skill.

In summary, all seven of Dr. Christenson's "critical success factors" have a people skills component.

More Evidence People Skills Are Present When Projects Succeed

Researching the Value of Project Management, coauthored by Mark Mullaly and Janice Thompson, showed that people skills correlate to project success. This study also showed that in some cases, when we do not adapt our approach (Adaptability is one of the six disciplines of A Sixth Sense for Project Management®), we may actually destroy project value. I discuss this research in more detail in chapter seven.

Listed below are several additional studies proving the positive correlation between the project manager's people skills and project success:

• "The primary problems of project managers are not technical but human. Improving project managers' technological capabilities will be helpful only to the extent that this improves their abilities to communicate, be organized, build teams, provide leadership, and deal comfortably with change." (Posner, 1987) • "Personal competence may be a better predictor of a person's potential to perform ... than functional competence." (Cheetham and Chivers, 1998) • "The human side of project management is more important than the formal aspects." (Lechler, 1998) • "Without mastering the timeless· soft skills to supplement the hard skills ... few project managers will succeed." (Jiang, 2002)

Further, it has been shown that the people skills required of project managers vary by project phase. According to project management professor Gregory Skulmoski from the College of Information Technology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, and project and program management professor Francis Hartman from the Zulich School of Engineering in Calgary, "Effective questioning and listening skills are critical at the start of a project in order to understand the business problem and preliminary requirements ... (T)heir importance declines in the close-out phase in favor of writing skills."

In summary, there is an overwhelming body of evidence showing that people skills are critical to project success. Indeed, many studies show that people skills are more important than technical skills. Further, project managers must develop a portfolio of people skills to accommodate the varying needs of each phase of the project. One or two people skills will not do; we must possess a deep set of interpersonal capabilities. Clearly, successful project managers need A Sixth Sense for Project Management®.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A SIXTH SENSEby TRES ROEDER Copyright © 2011 by Tres Roeder. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Authorhouse
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1456730444
• ISBN 13: 9781456730444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144