Successful project management is simple…or is it? Lee Iwan (I don't know who s/he is) suggests there are 16 steps to delivering projects successfully. In an article appearing in Lifehack, Lee proposes a Step-by-Step Beginner's Guide to Project Management. If only it were so simple.

The leader-manager sees that the participants are acting as a team — taking care of each other.

These are the 16 steps:

1. Determine the objective and specific desired outcome. Write it down.
2. Identify and organize the people who might be interested or are required in order to bring the project to completion. Ask them to participate, and comment on their level of enthusiasm or belief that the project can or will be successful.
3. Identify a project leader and coordinator, this should be accepted by all involved in the project. No consensus, keep trying.
4. Begin “brainstorming” and create scenarios on how to achieve the desired outcome (this may have be broken down into sub-tasks). Make a date when all this creative thinking will be finished and a written draft can be printed and shared.
5. Identify factors that influence or limit the project that are beyond your control (global economic forces, natural disasters, competition, etc.) and factors that are in your control (capital invested, personnel, prices, etc.). Identify the risks or warning flags that might surface. Write this down.
6. Determine and identify the tools (capital, equipment, machinery), the people (administration, sales, suppliers, customers), and the time required to complete the objectives. Write this down.
7. Organize the people involved in the project. Review the proposed project, the factors of influence, the tools, people and time. Determine the best path, tools, time frame, and write it down.
8. Organize the tasks and sub-tasks in chronological order. Write it down.
9. Ask each participant if they are committed to participating in the project, completing their tasks on time and reaching the final outcome. If there is no commitment, find out why and resolve.
10. Develop a list of initial actions and outcomes that must be started and completed. Identify the responsible parties and dates. Write it down.
11. Request specific (realistic) dates for the completion of tasks, sub-tasks and objectives. Write it down.
12. The leader must follow-up on all dates and compromises. Make this information public to all others involved in the project. Communicate all deliveries of sub-tasks, or lack of delivery with the group.
13. Make certain that the group knows the status of the project at all times, everyone should either be waiting for information or the outcome of an ongoing activity, or actively working on obtaining information or finalizing an activity.
14. If a group member is unable or unwilling to finish tasks on time, discover why and take immediate action to support or replace the member.
15. For any major problems or setbacks, get the group together to work out new scenarios and dates of completion.
16. Celebrate the big milestones and victories.

It's not a bad list. If you only followed Lee's advice, then you would do ok with your projects. However…the author misses a central aspect of projects. Project participants are autonomous. They have the opportunity to say, "No," even though they often go along saying, "Yes." They also are likely to misunderstand what they are asked to do, just like you and I misunderstand what we are asked to do.

Projects require leader-managers who care for the project participants. The leader-manager sees that the participants are acting as a team — taking care of each other. Success depends on those relationships to avoid misunderstanding and to create a project setting where intervening in each others' work is not seen as meddling.

Tom's manifesto is one shiny silver lining.

Silver linings are everywhere if you're looking. I just found one in the Bill Swanson misdeed. You probably remember Bill is the CEO of Raytheon…the one that plagiarized the work of others and then promoted it as his own turning it into the must-have management guide for 300,000 people. I wrote about Bill's transgressions in the post Stand on the Shoulders of Others. A few days ago writer Tom Ehrenfeld, The Startup Garden, published a manifesto at ChangeThis, The Rewritten Rules of Management. Tom's manifesto is one shiny silver lining.

Tom starts with a recap of the flap. He quickly moves to some basic lessons for leaders. The irony of Swanson's misdeeds is the hypocrisy of his own leadership acts once he was caught. Had he only followed his espoused theories there would not have been a flap. Tom takes Bill to task for that and proposes we hold ourselves and our leaders to the same standards.

I really like Tom's finish,

"Business books are a small but emblematic artifact of this powerful culture. They give us small doses of insight and inspiration when done right. While many titles today are cynical, inauthentic, and unoriginal, the best of the batch provide leverage, guidance. When we accept leadership lies, we become complicit in a greater fib. So let’s demand that Swanson do more than shrug off his actions."

Tom's call for change is timely and well-argued. His writing is a joy to read. Treat yourself to it today.

While on our trip to Toyota Georgetown, Norman Bodek arranged a visit at one of the leading lean education centers in the world, the University of Kentucky Center for Manufacturing. David Veech was our host. He toured us through the labs where we saw students (at 6:00 PM) redesigning factory layouts using 5S and redesigning production settings starting with current state value-stream maps. The students were articulate, engaging, and they knew their (lean) stuff.

UK offers a series of programs for students and for industry practitioners. Their programs are geared towards manufacturing. Their attention is on the materiel process. We had the opportunity to interact with their faculty. Good people with big ambition.

If you are doing projects, specifically construction projects, I suggest you call on the work of the Lean Construction Institute and the International Group for Lean Construction. However, if the basic nature of your work is production or fabrication, then the people at UK can really help.

I've been on two Toyota plant tours and visited another 20, or so, plants in Japan. The Georgetown, KY tour was great. The conversation with Gary Convis, President TMMC, was outstanding. Norman Bodek has been on hundreds of plant tours looking at lean. In his words, "I've never learned more on a tour than the one hour we spent with Gary." At the end of the Toyota tour I asked the executives and project coaches to share the lessons they were bringing back to the construction project setting. I went around the room giving each person the opportunity to offer a lesson. We did this two times. Here are their lessons in the order offered:

1. The use of visual management was far more than expected. Will attempt to over communicate project key performance indicators and goals.
2. Stopping to fix the problem — jidoka — could lead to far fewer quality problems.
3. Executives have a role to play in project kaizen activities. Gary Convis, President of Georgetown operations, got involved in kaizens in a coaching capacity.
4. Staff project roles with people with the appropriate skills and interests. Develop the basic skills for the work in construction.
5. Use five whys at the time variances (problems) are identified.
6. Encourage trade labor to change roles throughout the day. This avoids repetitive motion injuries, reduces boredom, and builds an appreciation for the conditions of completion for work.
7. Clean as we go throughout the day. Assign accountability for workplace orderliness. Use indicators — andon — to signal that the work teams recognize that they are keeping their workspaces in a condition for others (and themselves) to proceed with work.
8. Thinking that we already know — that we are the best — is the enemy of learning and becoming lean. We must overcome that.
9. Celebrate success as it occurs. Celebrate the work of teams.
10. A lean approach requires a different culture (from the usual AEC project).
11. Don't hesitate to display banners, mottos, and team improvement projects across the project work site.
12. Keep everyone informed everyday (throughout the day) of the key performance indicators for the project.
13. See that the whole project organization — owner, architect, contractor, sub-consultants, and sub-contractors — are all using the same language of improvement.
14. Training can begin at the earliest encounters with prospective employees. It can help us select the best people for our projects.
15. Have the client involved at appropriate times throughout the project.
16. Pay attention to the details. It can lead to higher quality and customer satisfaction.
17. Evolve a lean approach on projects and throughout the organization. Start with a focus on quality. Follow that with improving production throughput. Finish by reducing costs.
18. Use color charts, displays, and signaling to draw attention to anomalies and to what is important.
19. Organize people into small teams — five people — with a working leader who can fill in for everyone else. Use multi-skilling to develop a response capability.
20. The person performing the next operation is your customer. Make sure people know who will be working next in the workstream, especially when they work for another organization or company.
21. We observed a simplicity in the language at Toyota. Find ways to communicate what is requested, standards of performance, and details so that they will be understood.
22. Have a 15 minute stand-up meeting every morning with all the supervision to review progress and to pursue an improvement agenda. Finish the day with a similar meeting to provide the opportunity for supervision (last planners) to declare complete on the promised work for the day.
23. Establish standard work — the currently understood best way — for key project operations.

I didn't have the opportunity to share my impressions with the group. Here are three key lessons:

• Work to a pace that both allows the team to meet the project goals and doesn't overburden them. Pacing reduces one source of variability while simplifying planning.
• Use improvement activities — project kaizen — as the principal means of engaging project team members in meaningful work that advances their careers.
• As leaders, involve yourself to ease the work of the project team members rather than operating in the illusion that you can control.

Norman Bodek made numerous comments. Here are three of the more memorable ones:

• As managers, adopt the approach of ask questions, don't tell.
• Small, very small improvements that don't require management approval will accelerate project performance. Norman calls it Quick and Easy kaizen. Using that approach Toyota got 40 20 million adopted improvements in 20 40 years. That is more than 100 adopted improvements/person/year.
• Teams are far more creative than individuals. Organize recurring team activities for sharing and improving upon individual creativity.

We'll do a Toyota Georgetown visit again. But before that I am taking another 18 lean construction leaders to NUMMI. That is where Gary Convis started out. I can't wait to listen to the lessons from that tour. I'll share them with you.

Grace is a word that I don't encounter often in business. But as I get ready for a trip with clients to visit Toyota's Georgetown, KY assembly plant, I must tell you about Norman Bodek. I've invited Norman to visit with my clients before. Each time the experience getting ready for our time together is as remarkable as the time spent with him. Norman brings a humility to every encounter. He thanks me for the littlest of tasks. He appreciates me for sharing my perspectives. He talks of how he has been blessed that he can share what he learned from Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. Norman Bodek is an examplar of grace.

I am spending the better part of three days with Norman. Four colleagues and eight construction firm executives are making the pilgrimage to Toyota with Norman and me. All have read Jeffrey Liker's book, The Toyota Way. All firms are in the midst of bringing lean practices to delivering projects. While the assembly operations at Toyota are nothing like construction planning and operations, we're making the trip to boost our ambition.

This week Toyota is celebrating 20 years of making cars in Georgetown, KY. It is a wonderful time to be with Norman, godfather of lean production. I expect we'll have some fascinating conversations on kaikaku, kaizen, and as Norman puts it, "the miracle of standard work". And we'll do it in the presence of grace.

We live in a time that makes it easy for those who are curious to get a leg up on their ambitions. Only a few years ago it would take days of tedious research to discover the insights and lessons of others. Today it is easy. Google, Wikipedia, and the New York Times archives are treasure troves for anyone with just a little curiosity and 10 minutes to spare to produce a starting off compendium. You'd have to be hiding under a rock for the last ten years not to know that. Yet, the plagiarists and scoundrels among us appear to be ignoring that facticity.

For the last two weeks, I've been entranced by two stories of misdeeds. The first is the episode of the Harvard undergrad with the six-figure book advance who incorporated other authors' text word-for-word in her novel. The second is the story of Raytheon's CEO William Swanson's presenting others' maxims as his own. I shared his rules with readers, Bill Swanson'sW. L. King's and Donald Rumsfeld's (and others') Unwritten Previously Published Rules of Management Success.¹ I'm not the only one who gushed about Swanson's keen insight. Business 2.0, The New York Times, and USA Today all had leading stories on Swanson's pocket guide.

The waste of this shamelessness is Bill Swanson's commentary on others' rules is quite good.

I won't attempt to chronicle the events. (GoogleNews Swanson's Unwritten Rules if you're interested.) What bothers me most is the shamelessness of their actions. Haven't they learned that when they wrong another to apologize? Saying, "I regret not giving enough credit to someone else's work," is not an apology. Saying, "I'm sorry for hurting you. I will never do it again. Let me do something to compensate you for that." That is an apology. We learned that in kindergarten.² But apparently not all of us learned the lesson.

The waste of this shamelessness is Bill Swanson's commentary on others' rules is quite instructive. It offers a view on a CEO's perspective. It's a great gift. I'm not saying that there is something really special in his commentary. I'm only saying that glimpse can shape how we engage with people who have power and authority. Swanson had the chance to be an example of someone who succeeded by standing on the shoulders of others. Instead, he chose to mis-represent himself.

I'll finish this commentary with Swanson's (or whoever's) oft-quoted Rule #32: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter — or to others — is not a nice person." Swanson comments,

"Watch out for people who have situational value systems — who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with…This is not the make of a leader.

Bill, I agree with you. Apparently, so does the board of directors of Raytheon. The board cut Swanson's compensation following a jump in company earnings.

Some people think the board didn't act swiftly nor deal with the seriousness of his infraction. It doesn't matter. His career is over. There will be no more national awards, no more prominent positions on boards and philanthropies, and no more invitations to speak at graduations. Bill Swanson will have to leave his position as CEO of Raytheon before the year is out.

1. I'm leaving the Swanson's list up on this website for reference. [ ⇑ back ]
2. Robert Fulgham, "Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody." All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten [ ⇑ back ]