Project Management Just Unnecessary Overhead?
March 3rd, 2003 by HalWhy fight a company culture that doesn't support project management practices. Instead, go stealth. That's the advice of Donna Fitzgerald writing in her column for Builder.com The Nimble Project Manager. Donna has been writing the column since September '02. She is also a co-founder of the The NewGrange Center for Project Management.
In the first of her three-part series on Stealth Project Management Stealth PM: How to craft a successful launch, quietly Donna offers three sets of declarations and standards for organizing a stealth project.
The three golden rules of stealth project management:
- Keep the focus on tangible results, not activities.
- Fly under the radar.
- Beg forgiveness rather than ask permission.
Create an initial area of order:
- Get clarity on the constraints of the project before you begin.
- Get agreement on the appropriate level of risk in the project.
- Objectively assess your sponsor and stakeholders.
- Develop a scope statement.
- Have a team-planning meeting to create a shared vision of the project.
Establish the communications channels:
- Get agreement that the PM will be notified when a task is complete or falling behind, a.k.a. the no surprises policy.
- Get agreement on status meetings.
- Communicate with stakeholders via an informal kick-off meeting.
These are quite good lists of the declarations (agreements) needed to organize any project, particularly her advice to have team members declare tasks complete at the time they complete their tasks rather than waiting for the next status meeting. If only the next two articles were this good.
In her second article Stealth PM: Staying on track Donna falls back on conventional wisdom of managing projects making the usual prescription to control time, scope, and risk.
Donna wraps-up the series with Stealth PM: Learning from your mistakes. She urges the stealth PM to conduct an informal lessons learned.
- The document review
- The schedule review
- The staff review
- The communications review
- Reviewing the project diary
- The Personal SWOT review
- The feedback review
Donna describes the first five reviews as private thinking and investigation actions. Only at review six, the feedback review, does she write about getting others' views and assessments on project performance.
While stealth PM might be a legitimate approach, it is based on a resignation towards the organization and in many ways is just a rehash of conventional wisdom. It's the resignation that bothers me. Project managers and teams do their best work in moods of ambition, determination, and appreciation. What a hill to climb starting out in resignation. The three-part series takes a blind-eye to this issue. Successful projects are much more than the sum of their practices. It takes people operating in good spirits while tending to an always uncertain and unfolding future. Perhaps that's why some companies don't support usual project management practices; they are insufficient for success.
Related Posts
- Do Your Meetings Stink? Simon Ramo claims to have attended over 40,000 meetings in his career. According to Ramo, most meetings stink. Larry...
- Nudge and Clarification Johanna Rothman and I mostly agree. Sunday, she posted a clarification More on Faster Cheaper Projects to her early pos...
- Multi-Task Your Way to Un-Profitability I so am enjoying Frank Patrick's series on Projects and Promises. Part 4 - Multi-Project & Mixed-Function Multi-Ta...
- Unwritten Rules of Management Business 2.0 and others turned a little pocket guide into a hot management resource when they told the world about Rayth...
- The Truth about Common Project Management Misconceptions Hold onto to your hats! Mark Zweig, as usual, freely speaks his views. He just did so in a webcast on project perfor...
March 4th, 2003 at 12:20 pm
I completely agree with your comments on Ms. Fitzgerald advices.
Managing a project cannot be an underground operation or a shy, resignated adventure where you beg for support.
She’s on the right track on the first part when she asks for some committment to report completed tasks, thus putting some of the responsibility at the right place.
However her post-mortem stuff is a team-deprived exercise, failing to recognize that it is the process of sharing feelings and opinions (the conversation) that get you to realize collectively if you were part of a success or a failure, not an end-of-project report prepared in solo by ’superprojectman’!
Starting a project while being resignated and not confronting (confrontation: that’s the way I do it) the stakeholders to face reality and take personal and collective responsibility for the success of the project is the sure recipe to failure.
A while ago, I gave a presentation to university students (doing their Master degree in PM) where I stated that the success of a project relied entirely on the committment to say the truth and to get the truth on status, forecasts and capabilities (to meet or not to meet agreed-upon goals), at all time. I was telling students that if they had not the required means or the time to meet what was expected from them as a project manager, they just had to say NO (and tell why); a student told me (those are full grown adults having a day-time job as managers) that acting like that was like admitting that you were incompetent. My answer was that not being able to say NO, when asked for stupid deadlines and the like, was the perfect way to kill your project and be the perfect scapegoat (the incompetent in charge).
For myself, I have yet to see a boss or a client rejecting my requests for support, better means and more time by saying NO to ill-thought of requests (and explaining why); and I have worked for really difficult bosses and clients, but most of them were not stupid (as the resignated project manager might think) and agreed to requested changes because they had their part to play in the success of a project and knew about it from the start, and were reminded about it by my insistant ‘NOs’.
Then I say ‘NO’ to resignation-project-management and YES to complete truth and collective accountability to tell and get the truth. Truth and realism are what makes project management (or any management venture) succeed. Voilà !!
Claude
March 4th, 2003 at 1:37 pm
Bravo :+:
April 24th, 2003 at 5:52 pm
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at these comment that my advice was rooted in the fact that I was resigned to the fact that things couldn’t change. Resignation simply isn’t a word in my vocabulary, so I must have chosen the wrong words or emphasized the wrong things from your perspective somewhere in my article.
In the short term I will stand by my statement that any company is what it is As PM’s we need to get our work done in what ever circumstances we find ourselves, and . complaining or bemoaning the fact that the company isn’t different is simply a waste of time. But acceptance of this reality DOES NOT EQUAL resignation. You and I are in total agreement that nothing positive will result from an attitude of resignation or grudging acceptance. From my perspective I approach an environment that requires stealth project management as a foreign land. The customs are different and the language is different and if I want to be successful I need to figure out how I can stay true to my own set of values while at the same time not offending the natives. As I hope I have repeatedly stressed the secret is to have RESPECT for the company and their chosen culture. From my perspective resignation and respect are mutually exclusive concepts in this situation.
As a side note: I want to thank who ever wrote the original review (I’ve seen this posted twice so I’m unsure as to the original author) for the wonderful job he did summarizing the article series and I am flattered that it interested him enough to take the time to do it in the first place.
I also want to thank everyone for pointing out how easy it is to misread what I was saying. We all take certain things for granted and I appreciate beeing shown a blind spot in my thinking and in the future I will strive to be much clearer that I’m not talking about resigned acceptance of a bad situation.
April 24th, 2003 at 6:15 pm
On to comment number 2. I was not advocating personal post project reviews as a replacement for group post project reviews. I am a complete believer in PPRs BUT I am painfully aware of the gap between what we should be doing as PMs and what most of us do as the path of least resistance. My point was that that there is never an excuse not do a personal PPR. No one can tell you no, no one can look down on you and the pay back is substantial. Again I apologize if I came across as presenting it as an either or proposition.