Why is it that people don’t like to be micromanaged, but when they become managers that’s exactly what they do?

Look, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I find this contradictory behavior a tad strange. I think project managers mircromanage because 1.) they don’t have confidence in the ability of the people who work for them; in short, they believe that their team members don’t have what it takes to get the job done; and, 2.) they hold the view (perhaps subconsciously) that no one could do the job as well as they themselves could do it so they need to stay on top  of them to make sure it’s done right (meaning, the project manager’s way).

What signals do you send when you micromanage team members? I think it’s simple: you don’t trust them. You don’t think they can do the job, or worse, you let them know you think they need to be constantly prodded to get the job done. In short, you become worse than a guard in a watchtower monitoring their every move. Hey, even prisoners get to exercise in the prison yard! Not a pretty picture.

If you find yourself micromanaging people, the good news is there’s something you can, and should, do about it. For example, examine the number of reports and reviews you have with your team and eliminate some while keeping a set schedule of critical meetings. Make sure you and your reports agree as to what reports are required and when.

If you are being micromanaged confront your manager. Probe as to why he or she believes it’s necessary for you to be subject to such constant supervision and monitoring. Describe how you can provide them with the information they need without having to resort to such counterproductive tactics. I once told a manager of mine that he was acting in a way that indicated he was almost ashamed of me as one of his direct reports. Believe me, he never expected me to say that, and his behavior changed immediately.

Reasonable people will understand your feelings and make attempts to change. Some people, however, aren’t reasonable. If you’re working for a Theory X manager in Theory Y clothing, you’re in for a struggle. Not to say it can’t be done, but it’s going to take a bit longer than expected.

So, to answer my own question, are you a Project (Micro) Manager? If you don’t like to be micromanaged why in the world would someone else want to be?

 Maybe PMI is right when they say the sky’s the limit when it comes to project management as a discipline. Years ago, PMI estimated there were 16 million project managers in the world; and, we once read where Microsoft had sold 20 million versions of Project. If you consider there are probably at least three people on a project team (small, I know), then conservatively there are 60 million folks who may identify themselves as project managers.

So, having 17,762 job openings may seem like a mere few considering the overall number of project managers, but I think it’s still a lot of jobs especially in this day and age.

Not convinced? Well, let’s say half of them are bogus or just plain lousy, like processing turkey droppings into liquid fertilizer (that’s a real job by the way), and 20% of what’s left are in places that you can’t even pronounce let alone move to. That still leaves you with 7,105 positions available that might work out.

 O.K., O.K., I will agree that half of those jobs are geared for people who have unusual skills like a combination of brain surgery and air-conditioning repair. Even then, you still have 3,553 jobs to look into. What? Did you say nepotism? All right, so 30% of these jobs were written for someone’s uncle, brother-in-law, cousin or sister.  You’re now down to 2,487 positions to investigate.

What???? Half of what’s left don’t come with stock options like those lucky folks at Facebook? As they say in Brooklyn, NY “fuhgeddaboudit.” So, now you have 1,244 jobs left to apply to.

Seems like no matter how you look at it, and no matter how many obstacles you can dream up, there seem to be plenty of PM jobs around. Not a bad business to be in I’d say.

Of course, all this is easy for me to say given I have a job, but it still strikes me that even with the economy being what it is, there’s still opportunity to be had if you know where to look for it.

In an interesting blog post David Gelber, author of The 3 Power Values provides some pertinent examples of disastrous business results from being obsessive about these behaviors. They intrigued me so I decided to write about them in a project management context. See what you think.

Commitment  to deadlines—While this is at the core of successful project management, when the schedule becomes sacrosanct and we do everything in our power to meet it, we create more problems than their worth. A colleague of mine once called this phenomenon SOT, or “you know what the S means” On Time. The State of Maine was under a court order to launch a system to pay for the medical care of indigent residents. They were hopelessly late and launched without proper testing. The result? The system rejected more than a quarter of a million claims and the State’s CIO found another job running the local YMCA.

Excessive Optimism—Optimism can be a powerful influencer on projects. But when team members see things that are problematic but won’t report them for fear of being rebuked or ostracized, or worse, being accused of being negative, everyone pays a heavy toll. If everyone walks around with a happy face because they don’t want to tell you what’s wrong, you’ve got big problems. How do you know if your team members are being honest with you? NASA’s Challenger disaster was the direct result of members not speaking up with negative information.

Having a competitive mindset— We want our team members to be totally dedicated and committed to our projects because we want to deliver and be seen as successful project managers.  But when project managers raid other projects for members, or team members constantly try to outdo one another for your attention, the company, and the project will suffer.  A back-biting, “I got mine Jack” environment, where individuals see themselves in a zero-sum game and will do anything to “win” creates a toxic work environment. Just look at Wal-Mart’s problems with alleged bribes to Mexican officials so they could open stores faster than the competition. They’ll pay dearly in the court of public opinion if found guilty.

Staying focused on the goal— The end-game is important but too much focus can radically alter our good intentions. A friend of mine is working on a project where she is required to produce one deliverable a day. She said she would get that deliverable out no matter what because her job is riding on it. Do you think she’s going to provide the same level of quality she did to these deliverables before management issued the “edict.” Be careful what you ask for. You may get something completely different!

Sticking to a budget— Weird and unfortunate things happen when financial performance becomes an overriding objective. Take Boston’s “Big Dig,” a massive construction project that suffered stupendous cost overruns (460% over budget). Although I don’t think anyone knows for sure, we have to wonder if the rush to finish the work in one of the tunnels caused a 12 ton concrete slab to collapse on a female commuter. In my personal experience, rushing to finish a job is the leading cause of quality issues, regardless of what type of work you’re doing.

Wanting to please management—If we’re honest with ourselves, we like the idea of those around us working hard to earn our respect and a “pat on the back.” But we need to be careful not to create a culture in which those who please us the most get ahead. When team members try to please us they will produce estimates and agree to schedules that are unrealistic and cannot be met simply because they fear your rejection. I worked with one guy who consistently failed to deliver because he always said “yes” to any request. In fact, the very thing he feared the most, being criticized and demoted because he was afraid to say no,  actually  happened because he said yes and didn’t deliver.

Your next project manager?

Are you a bully? Do you bully your teammates, vendors and weaker stakeholders? Most bullies don’t even know that they are one. Do you?

Well, to find out, see if the 13 statements below describe you. Be honest. No scoring is necessary. By the way, the assessment is excerpted from “The Hidden Cost of Executive Bullying” by Susan Annunzio, CEO of the Center for High Performance.

1. #1 You tend to label people who disagree with you as “naysayers,” “risk averse,” “incompetent” etc.
   #2 You are taken by surprise when things go wrong.
   #3 No one ever finds fault with your point of view.
   #4 You deliver results but people don’t enjoy working for you.
   #5 Your direct reports (project team members) rarely tell you bad news.
   #6 There is little disagreement or debate within your project team.
   #7 When your team does debate an issue, there are clear “winners” and “losers.”
   #8 You always believe you are the “smartest guy in the room.”
   #9 You believe you are better at almost everything than anyone else on your team.
   #10 You fall in love with an idea, position or deal.
   #11 You blame others when things go wrong.
   #12 You rarely admit mistakes or apologize.
   #13 You are an expert at “gotcha”-catching others in an error.

By the way, I recall on a trip to Australia that my colleague there said that “bullying” is actually against the law which I found very interesting. In fact, The Australian magazine The Age reported a while ago that Sally Berkeley, formerly a senior executive at Pacific Brands, filed a $9 million law suit alleging she was bullied by her superior. Not only is this type of behavior completely counterproductive, in Australia it comes with a heavy financial toll as well.

The "Unsinkable" Titanic

The Titanic sank 100 years ago on April 15, 2012. And yet, given the press, it seems like it sunk yesterday. For many years, speakers at project management gatherings have used this most unfortunate disaster to highlight lessons learned we could apply to our projects; and, a vast majority of these lessons had to do with risk management, and rightfully so.

That said, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown a bit weary reading these project lessons learned from this event; that is, until my boss, John Elsey, ESI’s president, sent me a link to a white paper on the subject authored by the head of R&D for the Forum Corporation, a sales and leadership training and consulting company. (Full disclosure: Forum is a wholly owned subsidiary of Informa PLC, ESI’s parent company; and, Forum’s head reports to John).

In her highly readable and engaging paper, Leadership Failures Sink Unsinkable Ship, Jocelyn R. Davis, weaves the harrowing tale of that fateful night with the three “leadership traps” that often “sink” a company in times of crisis: namely, lack of clarity, unity and agility. She provides powerful examples of how the Titanic’s leadership, and in particular its Captain, missed all three that night, resulting in the deaths of 2,223 people (only 706 survived).

Ticker tape parade in Lower Manhattan

But the one fact that I had never read about, and the one I believe was at the root of the fatal shipwreck which Ms Davis brings forward was the finding that Captain Smith wanted to reach New York in record time. Why? It’s anyone’s guess. He might have pictured himself atop a float being carried down the “Canyon of Heroes,” Lower Broadway in New York City, in a ticker-tape parade. Or maybe, he had a huge bonus riding on beating the published schedule. Whatever the reason, he ordered his men to fire up two more boilers to increase the Titanic’s speed but did not put more resources looking out for icebergs along the way. In other words, he assumed an enormous amount of risk to meet his objective, but had no mitigation plan in place to deal with it.

If you’re going to go faster through dangerous waters, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to have more of your staff looking out for icebergs? Sadly, he did not do so.

Sound familiar? The “boss” wants the project done “faster” but will not authorize the needed extra resources to make it happen. The boss reverts to the “just do it” platitudes and cliches that so many leaders succumb to hoping these alone will motivate the staff. Sure, we all need a surge capacity every now and then, but “smart” leaders know if they want to shrink time, there’s a cost of doing so. Too bad the poor passengers of the Titanic had to pay it.

By the way, if you would like to see a restrospective on the ship watch this short You Tube video. That said, I just can’t seem to get that Celine Dion song out of my head.

Alan Mulally, CEO, Ford Motor Company

Don’t recognize the name Alan Mulally? Well, he’s the former CEO of The Boeing Company who was hired by William Clay Ford, great grandson of Henry Ford, in 2008 to turn around the Ford Motor Company. And, turn it around he did.

By the end of 2011 Ford turned a net profit of $20 billion on sales of $128 billion. It distributed profit-sharing payments of about $6,200 to each of 41,600 employees. And, on Friday, March 30, 2012, Ford’s stock price hit $12.48, up from $1.01 the day Mulally took over (a 1,136% increase..I know your personal investments didn’t hit that mark).

As you can imagine, Mulally did a lot of things to make this outstanding performance happen, and of course, he didn’t do it alone. But underlying all the initiatives was one really big one: changing Ford’s backbiting culture, a culture manifested by “theatrical” meetings and back-door deals, to one where transparency, forthrightness, and honesty were encouraged if not demanded.  And, it all began with the way meetings were conducted.

How did he do it? First, he eliminated all corporate-level meetings and introduced two new ones in their place: a mandatory weekly business plan review and a “special attention” review meeting. The former brought together the senior team who reported its progress on specific goals, and the latter was held when executives addressed issues that required a deep dive to figure out what was going wrong.

Ford used to mean Fix Or Repair Daily: not any more

But not everyone thought this was such a good idea. For example, Mark Fields, head of Ford’s Americas business really wanted to know if Mr. Mulally really wanted business plan meetings to be forums where problems as well as progress were discussed. If that were the case, the meeting would run counter to Ford’s culture in which those meetings were really “political theater,” according to Bryce Hoffman author of American Icon, Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company, a compelling book about the turnaround. Seems like the real decisions in the company were made off-line because executives just couldn’t stomach describing the truth in a PowerPoint presentation. But Mr. Mulally pressed on.

Mr. Hoffman writes about one meeting where, taking Mr. Mulally at his word, Mr. Fields reported a delay in a product launch because a test driver noticed a grinding noise in the car’s suspension. Others around the table thought Mulally would go into a rant and publicly upbraid and humiliate Mr. Fields; instead, he started clapping, praising Mr. Fields’ willingness to report the delay. Two weeks after that, other execs came to the meeting reporting problems that they were having as well. This was a huge turnaround in Ford’s culture, and it worked because of Mr. Mulally’s behavior.

What about you? First, do you hold too many project meetings? Are they the right kind? Are your folks afraid of telling the truth? Do they sit there silent and then approach you afterwards with their real feelings? Don’t tolerate that sort of behavior. Make sure that if they have something to say, they say it at the meeting otherwise they need to abide by the old saying heard in most wedding services that goes like this: “If anyone objects to this marriage, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear the person officiating the marriage say this, I sometimes wonder if the bride or groom will speak up.

The second is an example of how nonlinear dynamics manifests itself in society.

Recognize this man?

Tunisian Street Vendor Mohamed Bouazizi

He is Mohamed Bouazizi, the poor Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire to protest his deplorable living conditions and abusive treatment by the local police. He subsequently died of his wounds which set off a storm of protest and revolt that has resulted in collapse of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, is causing serious societal problems in Bahrain, and widespread unrest, death and destruction in Syria.

The third example comes from the business world. According to the authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos, FedEx managers determined that their pilots were spending too much unproductive time deadheading from one city to the next and that they were not flying enough in any given month as a result. In other words, FedEx was paying a lot of money to fly their pilots around when the pilots should have been making the company money by flying packages around. So, they made a “tweak” to the scheduling algorithm to increase pilot productivity.

Switch used to fire up the new scheduling system!

When they “flipped the switch” on the system, it spit out schedules so rediculous it had pilots flying pan-Pacific flights followed immediately by pan-Atlantic flights with little time in between to recover. Their schedules were so chock-a-block with flights they didn’t know if they were “on foot or on horseback” as my Great Aunt Olive Reilly was so fond of saying. Long story short, the pilots walked off the job, demanded more pay, fewer flying hours than they had before and a number of other concessions, all of  which they received.

Edward Lorenz gave us a name for nonlinear dynamics that you may recognize: he called it the “butterfly effect.” Actually, it came from a paper he wrote in 1972 entitled Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” In other words, can a small perturbation in one part of the system have such a ripple effect throughout that system to ultimately cause a massive impact down the line? In each of the above examples, it did.

What about your project? What small perturbation in your labor supply, stakeholder expectations, work space, working conditions, or supply chain, can have massive consequences for the cost, schedule, or quality of your project? Only a good job at risk management can have you constantly asking these questions and keeping an eye out for nonlineaer dynamics. They’re out there, just waiting to get you!

I just finished Steve Jobs  by Walter Isaacson. It was a great read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Jobs was, by all accounts, a rather “mercurial” figure, prone to publicly humiliating his staff, shunning family members, adopting the oddest of diets, all while pursuing perfection in every product Apple produced. Not sure I’d want to work for him, but I do know I sure would have liked to have had some of the “founders” stock options! Oh well, there’s always the New York State Lottery.

But, to me, the most intriguing part of the story dealt with Jobs’ design sense. Although he had plenty of it, he hired a Brit by the name of Jonathan (Jony) Ive, who I believe is still at Apple, and who connected with Jobs at a very deep and fundamental level. It was Ive who came up with many of the product features and design the world finds so appealing in Apple products.

Jobs, by the way, was no slouch himself from a design point of view. He would often seek inspiration cruzing up and down the aisles of the kitchen department in his local Macy’s store “oohing”and “aahhing” over the appliances designed by, or under the influence of, Dieter Rams, at Braun. Now it makes sense. Braun products are cool, and many of them are white. Also, Jobs never liked his corners square, he had to have them rounded. That’s why all the icons on the iPone and iPad are rounded rectangles.  But I digress.

Braun toaster...pretty cool!

In one of the Cupertino buildings, Ive had his workshop. Off limits to many, Jobs visited it every day, making suggestions constantly. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one. They would make the models using some sort of foam so they were fast and easy to change if someone (i.e., Jobs) came up with a better idea.

Ive knew that Jobs hated formal presentations about products (other than the launches he was so famous for delivering himself at MacWorld). In fact, Jobs hated PowerPoint presentations of any kind (was it that Microsoft wrote the software, or he hated the formality and stiffness of them?…a little of both). When asked what made Apple so successful with their design Ive’s remarked, we “iterate every day and don’t make dumb-ass presentations.” Thus, the title of this post.

To be sure, there are many projects for which this approach simply won’t work. Imagine “iterating” every day when building the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world located in Dubai. Never happen. However, if you’re in the product world (and software is a product of course), what Ive is saying is that the iteration schedule is real time, it’s daily, it’s constant, it’s relentless. In other words you never stop. It’s not weekly, monthly, or some artificial time-box people create for themselves. Apple went way beyond the current fascination with Agile using the Scrum approach, an approach that certainly can work in many circumstances.

Hey, if it works for Apple it may work for you too. By the way, as you can see below, as of the day I wrote this post, the NY State Lottery was up to $200,000,000. You can buy a lot of Apple products with that!

Bodega on 1st Ave in Manhattan advertizing the NY State Lottery

PMO "Dead on Arrival" after only 4.1 years

In ESI’s soon to be released Global State of the PMO for 2012 survey (our second annual one), we asked those surveyed if they had worked in or with a PMO in their organization that had been terminated. If they answered yes, we then went on to ask two more questions:  1.) How long was the PMO in operation before it got the ax? and 2.) What was the primary reason for disbanding it?

We received some very interesting replies as you might imagine.

First, the average age of the PMO when it was terminated was 4.1 years with the “range” of answers spanning 4 months to 20 years. Yes, after 20 years one of the respondents stated their PMO came to an end. The answers though clustered somewhere in the 2-5 year time frame which appears to be consistent with other research on the topic.

Let me ask you this….How old is your PMO? Has it exceeded its normal life expectancy, at least given ESI’s survey results? Based on its current performance, how long does it have left?

Next, we had the respondents write in their comments telling us why they thought their PMO was disbanded. Here are the top five reasons.

1. Company reorganization. Many respondents commented that the reorganization was focused on decentralizing core business functions. In the case of project management, the decentralization resulted in project managers being placed in the business units rather than under the control of the PMO. As such, no PMO was required.

2. Cost concerns. The PMO was perceived as overhead and in seeking to reduce costs, which many organizations are doing in these tough times, the PMO was viewed as a cost that the organization did not want to bear.

3. Lack of executive support. Two areas were mentioned here. First, many people commented that the PMO “lost” the support of the executive responsible for it. Second, the executive responsible for the PMO left and was replaced by an executive who didn’t believe in PMOs.

4. PMO doing redundant work. If an organization is seeking to cut costs, one of the easiest ways to do so is to identify components performing the same, or virtually the same function. In certain organizations represented in the survey, when management looked around it noticed that the business units were doing the same work as the PMO.

5. The PMO was ineffective. Rather self-explanatory, but given that many PMOs concentrate more on whether project managers are using a methodology than if the PMO is instrumental in moving the business forward, it is not surprising that certain business heads will come reach a conclusion that such an organization is not needed.

As you read these reasons, it is obvious that many of them are related. For example, a PMO can lose executive support because its work is not deemed as effective. That will also lead to a business head questioning its expense and reach a conclusion that it can be shut down with no real impact on the business.

What's more important to your execs? Making money or using a PM methodology?

If you are a PMO Head, or work in a PMO, and if you want to have a longer life expectancy than the average, you’d better sit down with your key stakeholders and figure out what’s really important to them and start delivering big time. You may not have that much time left!