We all screw up from time to time.

It’s in those moments when the most important thing is to know who to blame.

Blame Management

Just kidding.

I just had an eye-opening experience. One of those ‘duh’ moments where something didn’t go as planned with my project. It was a simple, small piece of our system design that sounded great in discussions and on paper, but turned out to be unworkable.

After beating myself up a bit because we should have been able to discover this about 5 months ago, I reframed the problem.

Here’s how.

The 5 Whys

Developed by Sakichi Toyoda, this technique for root cause analysis is a big part of Lean Thinking. It’s also what we just used on my team to extract a big lesson learned from this problem.

Very simply, you start with the problem and ask why it happened. It’s important to not place blame per se and focus on objective causes instead.

Here’s an example that’s fresh in my mind, made generic for public consumption.

The Problem

Even though all stakeholders got together to discuss the new design and no flaws were found with it, we have uncovered a fatal flaw with the design now. It could have been discovered 5 months ago but was only found just now.

We’ve already solved the technical problem, what we’re doing here is discovering why it was a problem in the first place and why it took so long to discover it.

Why # 1

Why did a flawed design get universally accepted as valid?

It looked good to everyone at the time. We didn’t spot the flaw.

Why # 2

Why didn’t we spot the flaw?

This was an implementation detail no one thought about at the time.

(Important point: This is where it’s tempting to place blame on ‘those guys’. Don’t let the 5 Whys turn into the 5 Blames here. Think about the process, the system first. Usually it’s not a bad apple.  But sometimes it is….)

Why # 3

Why didn’t anyone think about this implementation flaw at the time?

Because we hadn’t implemented anything.

Why # 4

Why hadn’t we implemented anything 5 months ago to validate our design?

We don’t release software until our waterfall milestones come around for major releases. Our development is done in silos with coordinated releases. We didn’t have a minumum viable product (MVP) or prototype to work with.

Why # 5

Why didn’t we have an MVP or prototype to work with?

Because we have not fully adopted lean thinking in this area.

Solution

Further adopt lean thinking and processes by developing rapid prototype code every time there is a major design change, a minimum viable product (MVP). Iterate on the MVP while getting continuous feedback from stakeholders.

Original link: Blame Failure On Your Project Stakeholders

Related posts:

1. How To Assure Project Failure

I have found this to be true in my own experience. The way to really engage teams and get them motivated to do great things is to empower them, build trust with them, and help them recognize they are awesome and doing awesome things.

I got a bonus in my paycheck this year. Meh. It doesn’t motivate me, and neither do the annual performance reviews. What I REALLY care about is what my customers think of me, what my team thinks of me and how they are doing, and that my management and company care about and value my efforts.

Watch this and comment!

What are your experiences with monetary incentives for knowledge work?

Original link: Monetary Bonus Incentives Make Knowledge Workers Less Effective

No related posts.

Oh yes, let’s have fun with this one, shall we?

I want your myths in the comments, bucko!

Good Project Managers Make All Decisions By Themselves

While it’s true that project managers do have to make the final decisions in many cases on a daily basis, we certainly should not make them by ourselves. We utilize a portion of our daily stand-up meetings on my teams for discussion topics. These can be technical decisions or issues someone has run into which need to be addressed, or sometimes it’s just a new idea someone had about how to make our product better.

There are cases where I ask various individuals what they think and then make a decision, and other cases where I can delegate the decision to a team member or lead. Whenever possible, I like to have the team make their own decisions and not rely on me for this. Intelligent empowerment makes for a better team and a better end product.

Good Project Managers Deal With Problems Themselves

There is an ironic reality in which the more you fear failure, the more likely you are to fail. I’ve seen project managers try to cover up problems many times, and I’ve even done it myself. But that’s not a good way to run a project. The more open and transparent you can be with everyone, the better your chances of success. This is because you build trust by being open and honest, and you get help from other players when you need it.

Good Project Managers Are Control Freaks

Many have the image of a project manager as being a micro-managing control freak. Scheduling down to the nth degree is the best possible schedule, right?

Wrong.

I think the best project managers I’ve worked with do the exact opposite. They let the team manage their workflow and concern themselves mainly with interfaces to other teams or dependencies of some sort. I think project managers should be just another participant on the team when it comes to managing the day-to-day workflow of the team, unless the team runs into a problem and asks for help. For example, sometimes team members may have difficulty making a priority call about what to work on next. The project manager (or product owner if you are doing Scrum) can help by prioritizing items in the backlog this way.

Good Project Managers Make Projects More Complex

In my experience, this happens when the models of the project (WBS, schedule, etc.) do not accurately reflect reality. There certainly are cases where the project really IS that complex too. I think the best project managers are able to employ the least amount of complexity in project planning and execution artifacts as is possible and responsible.

If every one of your stakeholders can’t look at each and every project artifact and understand it intuitively, it’s too complex.

So, what project management myths would you like to debunk in the comments? I’m excited to see them!

Original link: Project Management Myths Debunked

No related posts.

What’s the hardest part of landing a new role to advance your career?

I asked this question in a poll recently on the Career in Project Management LinkedIn Group.

The top answer was that finding organizations and jobs seems to be the toughest challenge, at least from the people who responded to the poll I put up.

It seemed to me this was the case too from conversations I have with the community on the LinkedIn group and in the comments here.

Research Organizations, Not Jobs

The most important point on this topic I can stress is that it’s a much more important and productive use of the job seeker’s time to target organizations they want to work with, rather than relying on the job boards and applying to everything that moves.

If you are currently unemployed I won’t begrudge you looking for and applying for individual jobs too. But a focus on targeting organizations should be paramount in my opinion, and for the currently employed I think it’s the only approach worth pursuing.

Targeting organizations takes time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll make progress.

What Do I Do?

I teach people to narrow down their focus to 3-10 organizations they would like to work for. The research step takes some time and you’ll end up narrowing down a list of 30-40 or more companies down to the select few that have the right fit for your career goals, company culture, location, industry/domain, size, etc.

The question is whether they are a fit for you first, then you can see if you are a fit for them.

Favorite tools of mine include your local Chamber of Commerce member directory and LinkedIn advanced search. An even better source of information are your friends and professional network. Tap into their personal experience with organizations they have worked for or are currently working for. Ask them if they know of a good company with the attributes you desire.

Your process could look something like this:

1. Identify the key attributes that are important to you. Examples include size, industry/domain, commute time, and aspects of company culture.
2. Create a draft list of 30-40 candidate organizations. Don’t worry about evaluating them too deeply yet.
3. For each organization on the list, evaluate them through research on the attributes you care about.
4. Narrow down your list to 3-10 organizations.
5. Rank those remaining candidates in order of your preference.
6. Start building a relationship with these organizations, starting with the top one on the list first. You can do as many as 3 at a time, but I don’t recommend trying more than that at a time. Focus is important.

For more on what to do in #6, see my previous writing “How To Connect With People In Your Target Organizations.”

Hey, do you go through something similar to this yourself? How would you change my approach? Please share your thoughts in the comments, everyone benefits when we share!

You can choose to A) leave a comment below or B) share this with others who will benefit from reading it.

Original link: How to Find the Right Organizations For Your Project Management Career

Related posts:

1. How To Find Project Management Resources
2. How To Find Project Management Training on YouTube Like A Ninja
3. How To Connect With People In Your Target Organizations

If I had only started sooner, I would be much further along in my own project management career.

I’m sure you probably feel the same way.

Here is someone just getting started who reached out to me for guidance. If you are starting out in your project management career (most of us are probably well past high school age!) you will find the information below helpful as well.

Josh,

I am interested in becoming a project manager. What subjects are required in starting this career since I am just coming from high school?

Kerdel

Great question and I’m glad you are thinking about this already!

Narrow Your Focus

Think about what industry you’d like to manage projects in first. Project management has skills that cross-cut all industries, but in many cases it is an industry-specific skillset as well. Construction project management is very different from software engineering project management, or events management, or bio-pharma project management.

You may well find that the ‘Project Manager’ role isn’t really what you want, but you still want to work in a project environment. See this great discussion on the PM Career LinkedIn Group for some good tips there. (Join the group if you haven’t already!)

Industry/Domain Specific

Given the answer to this question, you may want to focus on getting a degree specific to your industry or function. A computer science or engineering degree is a good route for leading to a career managing projects in those domains. A degree in aerospace may be a good idea if you want to work in those types of programs, etc.

General Leadership and Management Skills

Regardless of which industry you choose, there are managerial and people-focused skills you’ll want to study and hone. General management and leadership skills are critical. The study of psychology and group dynamics are also very helpful and provide information for daily decision making and strategies you’ll put into place as a project manager. I’ve found my background in organizational change management and process improvement to be very actionable and helpful as well.

General Project Management Skills

As far as general project management skills go, there are concepts in the project manager’s toolkit that apply broadly across all industries and functions you’ll want to study as well. Learning the fundamentals of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, and closing projects is something that is useful in any project. Even if you use Lean/Agile practices or other approaches these groupings of activities happen within all projects.

Learning By Doing

As always, I highly recommend doing your utmost to find an internship, volunteer position, or other role where you can start practicing what you are learning in school or self-study. That is the very best way to become proficient and increase your career opportunities. You can use the strategies in “Just Say Yes!” to create opportunities for yourself.

Will you leave a comment below with your own advice for Kerdel?

(photo by JSmith Photo)

Original link: Project Management Classes and Subjects To Study

No related posts.

Should we trust our intuition? Find out in this guest post by Shim Marom

Common wisdom will tell you that Intuition is an internal perception of reality that is not directly associated with any reasoning process. If you are a project manager early in your career you will most likely seek guidance and mentoring from more experienced project managers. And as you observe their conduct there is a good chance that along the way, when inquiring about this decision or another, you will get a response suggesting that their decision is based on gut-feel, i.e. their intuition.

There is a powerful body of evidence suggesting that some people are ‘gifted’ with consistently accurate intuition that allows them to make successful decisions and predictions about the possible outcome, the result of their action. We all know some “how-to” books, written by professionals, primarily in areas of finance and investments, advising on the steps they have taken in genuinely uncertain times, resulting in out of the ordinary success.

By its very nature, invoking intuition is a product of dealing with situations of uncertainty, or more specifically in the way we react to a possible risk (and opportunity). It is our immediate response to a question that results in an action (or deliberately refraining from one).

In a project environment, intuition can and does play a role in planning activities. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are the ones we mostly rely on to provide planning estimates. We rely on SMEs in varying circumstances; we need their advice to forecast project activities for which they have direct past experience; we also ask for their advice to forecast project activities for which they do not have direct experience but are believed to be close enough to a point where their gut-feel and intuition could provide a good-enough estimate.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, that depends.

Daniel Kahneman discusses the topic of intuition in his recent book titled “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. He brings examples for both supporting and rejecting the validity and accuracy of intuition, as a decision making tool. He concludes that intuition is only valid when it is associated with a skill. And to acquire that skill two conditions must exist:

1. An environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable, and
2. An opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

When a situation is subject to a statistical regularity then the intuition can be said to be based on a skill. So, for instance, if a developer is asked for the estimated effort for completing a piece of work, the estimate provided should be examined against the above criteria:

1. Is the planned development sufficiently similar to work done in the past and, if so,
2. How often was this work carried out?

If either one of these parameters is unsatisfactorily answered the chances of the intuitive estimate hitting the mark are low, to say the least.

If you are a project manager early in your career trusting your gut-feel could be successful and propel your professional aspirations into new heights, but only if you are lucky. For most people, trusting their intuition could be a risky proposition, unless that intuition is backed by the conditions outlined above. Make sure you back your professional decisions and directions with the skill and experience necessary for increased chances of success and use your intuition as a backup mechanism only – not the prime tool for making managerial decisions.

Shim Marom (@shim_marom) is a project manager who lives, writes, speaks and works in Melbourne, Australia. Shim is the owner of quantmleap.com, a blog dedicated to project management while incorporating the latest in science and psychology to better understand and explain people and organizational behavior and attitudes.

Original link: The Value of Professional Intuition in Project Management

No related posts.