Right-Brain Project Management: A Complementarry Approach
340
Right-Brain Project Management: A Complementarry Approach
340eBook
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Overview
•Explore the current landscape of project management, which highlights contemporary projects that are complex and aggressive
•Examine topics that address how people grow and develop patterns of thinking and attitudes that have a profound effect on the management of projects
•Consider what truly motivates people to get out of bed and right to their projects
•Evaluate the profound changes that take place on projects and how to navigate those changes
•Discover the seven principles of right-brain project management, founded on the powerful and rich processing capabilities of the right brain
Learn how the successful project manager can become a whole-brain project manager by enlisting resources from both the right and the left sides, and how to further enhance project management by incorporating innovation and flexibility.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781523096008 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 340 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
What's Wrong with Project Management?
If you want to make God laugh, have a definite plan.
Anonymous
Sam, the project manager, had a "deer in the headlights" look as she prepared to address the stakeholder meeting and deliver more bad news.
Her project, like many of her peers' projects, was late and over budget. Finishing the project would likely require that some features be abandoned or deferred. Sam felt bad about how things had gone astray and feared that the stakeholders would decide to terminate her project.
She began to speak. "Let us start with the status of the project and then talk about where to go from here."
In this book, we will do just that: we will talk about the status of the project (and, by extension, project management) and where to go from here.
For too many projects and too many project managers, Sam's story is familiar. As someone who provides training in project management, it is a story that I sadly hear all too often.
But, First ... What's Right with Project Management
To begin talking about what is wrong with project management, let us first say that a lot is right with project management. Every year, numerous projects are completed to the satisfaction of stakeholders and team members. These projects often proceed to conclusion without trauma; many other projects hit close to the mark with relatively little trouble.
Some projects even surpass all expectations and accomplish the truly remarkable. Such efforts deserve close study to discover the source of their energy, and we will spotlight examples of these projects in this book.
Clearly, effective management of projects, while elusive, is attainable.
There is much reason to celebrate these project management successes. If one gives any deference to either Murphy's Law (whatever can go wrong, will go wrong) or Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics (the universe tends toward disorder), then any effort that overcomes these laws to accomplish something of value is a testament to human ingenuity, will, and industry.
Unmet Expectations
Notwithstanding the project management successes, we all know that lots of projects are train wrecks. Of course, in any statistical population of performances, there will be those that underperform the mean. Nevertheless, this situation should not be acceptable to those who invest their time or money in troubled projects. While we cannot realistically expect every project to be phenomenal, it is reasonable to expect that every project will at least meet agreed-upon goals.
The prevalence of troubled projects suggests to many that if project management cannot produce success more reliably, then something is wrong with project management. "It is no exaggeration to claim that project management as a discipline is in crisis...."
Let us say simply that the overall impression of projects and project management is that they are disappointing. There is typically a mismatch between what is expected of projects, project managers, and project management, and what they actually deliver. This mismatch can be viewed from three perspectives:
• Expectations are unreasonable.
• Performance is not sufficient.
• Both expectations and performance are out of line.
Many who manage or execute projects in today's Church of Real World Projects will eagerly stand and shout "Amen" to the proposition that expectations on projects are unreasonable. Project teams are expected to work miracles with unproven technologies on a blazingly fast schedule with the barest of resources, not to mention with team members who have never met because they are scattered around the globe.
This approach might work if a successful outcome were somehow guaranteed. However, with increasing expectations comes increasing uncertainty that the outcome will meet those expectations. These expectations also reduce the likelihood that the project will finish at all.
Depending on one's perspective, a case can be made either way about the reasonableness of expectations on projects. Although it is appropriate to be realistic about what can be achieved, the topic eventually leads to a dead end for a simple reason: it is ultimately a moot point.
It is certainly possible, and perhaps likely, that expectations are unreasonable. It is also unlikely, however, that individuals with the power to make decisions will lower their expectations.
Humans have an innate and endearing preoccupation with greener grass. Someone, possibly the folks in the marketing department, will salivate over the opportunity to promise something faster, better, or cheaper — or better yet, all three. Project sponsors, customers, and upper management are typically willing partners in the quest for the impossible or merely unlikely.
If there is little that can be done to push back on expectations, project managers and teams have two options.
The first option is to say no. Perhaps a widespread project worker strike would convince those with unrealistic expectations to back off, but such a strike is not likely to happen. Individual project workers may say enough! — but it will likely be to the detriment of their careers. Faced with such negative consequences, the second choice, and the one taken by the vast majority of people, is to grit your teeth and soldier on.
Mediocre Performance
While it may be tempting to assign all the blame for substandard project performance to excessive expectations, we must also conclude that the way project management is practiced leaves something to be desired. Consider the following statistics.
In its 2004 survey of 10,640 projects, PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that only 2.5 percent of companies achieve budget, scope, and schedule targets on all projects.
The 2004 Standish Group survey of information technology (IT) projects indicated that only 34 percent of such projects succeed while 15 percent fail completely and 51 percent are challenged with budget overruns, late delivery, or reduced benefits. Nevertheless, this performance is a considerable improvement over previous experience for the ten years that Standish has conducted the survey.
It is reasonable to conclude that mediocre performance has come to be expected as the experience of project management in organizations.
Perhaps there is an interaction between unrealistic expectations and mediocre performance. I once had a supervisor who stated that he took any project schedule estimates given by a subordinate and automatically cut them in half. His rationale was that engineers and software specialists were always purposely pessimistic in their estimates to avoid having to stretch their limits. I was glad we had that little conversation, because from that time forward, I automatically doubled or tripled any estimate I gave him.
The consequences of project failures and disappointments are significant. In a revealing analysis, Oak Associates applied the results of the Standish survey to financial performance. The impact of typical survey performance as compared with completing all projects successfully is an astonishing 58 percent reduction in sales and a 92 percent reduction in profit!
To restate, if performance on the failed and underperforming projects were improved so that all projects performed as expected, the gain in sales would be 136 percent and the improvement in profit would be an unbelievable 1135 percent!
It is amazing that companies can stay in business with mediocre project performance. It is also no wonder that organizations have a sense of disappointment in project management.
As shocking as these numbers are, perhaps the greatest effect of poor performance reaches beyond the business bottom line. When projects fail to meet financial and performance targets, morale suffers collateral damage. The most common intangible impacts are staff cynicism and negative cultural effects. Considerable stress is associated with projects that go poorly, and the effects can become additive. These consequences have a profound impact on the company environment and a detrimental effect on subsequent project work.
Companies that experience project failures also report that their relationships with customers suffer through decreased customer satisfaction or loss of competitive advantage.
Rules ... and More Rules
What is being done about project performance?
The majority of suggestions and recommendations in the project management community aimed at improving performance involve implementing better standard project management processes. This approach focuses on improving the maturity of project processes used in planning and executing the project.
Without a doubt, maturation of project processes is valuable and worthwhile, and it has been proven to increase the effectiveness of project performance. The downside of this approach is that it takes time and effort to make these improvements. Consider a widely used measure of maturity, the Capability Maturity Model developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Using this measure, the median maturity level across industries is level two,6 with level five being the highest level. The survey that determined this median concluded that there is "... a relatively low degree of project management maturity across industries." For an organization to improve by one level in the maturity progression requires "a very concerted effort" and may take a year or more.
Insights abound about the problems and limitations of project management as it is practiced in organizations today. Fundamentally, it may be helpful to think about rewriting the rules.
Before we consider rewriting the rules, however, it is useful to take a look at some different perspectives on what is troubling project management. Why do so many people perceive that project management is failing to meet the mark? Four observations can shed some light.
Where Are the "Jump Out of Bed" Projects?
One of the primary reasons for high expectations on projects is that "... projects are important vehicles for implementing corporate strategy and effecting change." While this explains the expectations, something else is at work here.
Observation 1: Most projects lack a compelling motivation.
Projects, and organizations, often fail to work on what is really important.
If you ask project stakeholders for the justification for their project, they will likely refer to customer requirements or financial benefits. There is nothing wrong with such reasons, and they are absolutely necessary.
But, as the timeless song says, "Is that all there is?"
Would projects be more successful if teams felt that what they were doing was critical to someone? Would teams be more motivated if they felt some strong emotional push to achieve the end results?
The motivation we're talking about here is not just the rational "I know this is in my best interest" type of reasoning. The motivation we seek is the impetus to get out of bed in the morning and get into the office because the project is that important.
It may come as a bit of a shock that organizations often do not work on what is really important. This is not to trivialize the projects that are done and the products they produce. It is simply an observation that project management, strategic management, and portfolio management do an inadequate job of establishing a compelling reason for the projects selected.
What do we mean by a compelling reason for the project? This justification is far more than the benefits to the customer and the financial benefits to the organization. The key issues are: What is it about a project that makes us eager to work on it? What will make us want to drop everything to work on this project? What will provide a satisfying reward for everyone at the end of the project?
Projects are often executed distantly removed from the "soul" of the organization (if the organization can be said to have a soul).
This is largely a result of the misperception that project management is simply a method for executing a company's operations. If the overall company strategy can be considered the soul of the company, project managers and their projects are often considered cogs in the machine, not prime movers. This perspective is illustrated in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey: organizational considerations caused 59 percent of project failures. If projects are important, why do organizations fail to support them well?
If we take as a predicate that a company's values are embodied in its strategy, then any disconnect between strategy and project execution is serious indeed.
Make Sense ... and Make Success
Organizations do an inadequate job of establishing a common understanding in project teams and stakeholders of where the project is going. In project management circles, this is frequently cited as poor communication. Good communication and common understanding are critical to project success, and poor communication is a pervasive problem.
While many reasons contribute to the difficulty encountered in reaching a common understanding of project goals, it seems that what is commonly called poor communication is better approached as difficulty in making sense of the project.
Observation 2: Projects and organizations have a hard time making sense of the project.
While communication processes and techniques are important, in reality the difficulty in communication comes largely from two sources. First, poor communication is really a symptom of the lack of compelling motivation. Second, project stakeholders pay far too little attention to the processes of communication on a project.
The distinction between communication and sense-making is important and valuable. A focus on communication implies that early in the project there exists a definite and reliable embodiment of what everyone is working on, presumably what is described in the customer requirements or specifications. While this may be true for some projects, it is often a fallacious assumption.
In reality, many projects are commissioned with an evolving understanding of the end point. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, but it becomes a huge problem if everyone involved doesn't understand this reality. The project processes must be consciously designed and executed to accommodate this evolving understanding.
Improvement in communication focuses on technique; sense-making focuses on collectively developing and understanding the end point. Conventional communication remedies are predominantly aimed one way: to enhance the team's knowledge of the documented end point. This is the perspective illustrated in the famous line by the prison "captain" in the movie Cool Hand Luke, "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."
Sense-making assumes that everyone on the team has a valuable perspective to bring to the table. It is this network of the team in conjunction with the customer, sponsor, and stakeholders that together identifies and then creates the solution.
Observation 3: Project teams struggle with complexity and ambiguity, as well as with pressures to resolve these issues quickly.
Contemporary projects are affected to a significant degree by complex and ambiguous issues. Many projects attempt to incorporate unproven technologies. Other projects commit to specific results with only a rudimentary definition of what is to be accomplished. Virtual teams are assembled with no history of experience together. Overlaid on these complexities is usually a tight schedule and a paucity of resources.
These issues of complexity, ambiguity, and time pressure greatly exacerbate problems of making sense. It is no wonder that most teams vacillate between two approaches: running hard and hoping to figure it out, and being frozen by the incomprehension of it all.
Project managers are typically taught to take steps to lower project risks. Accordingly, a common approach is to attempt to eliminate complexity and ambiguity. However, this approach is not compatible with the real world.
None of us is clairvoyant. Even the most thoughtful, enlightened planning process will not eliminate the unknown or unforeseen. To believe that we can "control" the future through planning is folly. We are better off accepting this reality and adapting accordingly.
If the environment at the start of a project is uncertain, the appropriate approach is to accept — and adapt to — the complexity and ambiguity. Adaptation requires agility. Unfortunately, however, many processes in an organization work against agility.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Right-Brain Project Management"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Management Concepts, Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Management Concepts Press.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Doug DeCarlo, xv,
Preface, xix,
1 What's Wrong with Project Management?, 1,
2 Child's Play ... and Maturity, 15,
3 Two Brains Are Better than One, 37,
4 Motivation: The Need to Act, 57,
5 Projects Create Change, and Change Needs Leadership, 73,
6 Tools of the Trade: Working with the Right Brain, 93,
7 Doing What Works: Contemporary Projects in an Accelerated World, 115,
8 Making the Complex Simple, 129,
9 That's Incredible: Case Studies of Phenomenal Projects, 145,
10 Principles of Right-Brain Project Management, 159,
11 Discovering Fire: Finding the Compelling Purpose, 169,
12 Solving the Mystery: Making Sense of the Project, 187,
13 A Trip to the Laboratory: Experimenting and Adapting, 205,
14 Painting without Numbers: Creating the New Reality, 219,
15 Doing Business with a Handshake: Exercising and Fulfilling Trust, 235,
16 All That Jazz: Hitting the Sweet Spot, 255,
17 Telling the Story: Leaving a Legacy, 269,
18 The Heroin Us All: The Moral of the Story, 285,
Index, 305,