Elizabeth Harrin has an interesting post up at A Girl’s Guide to Project Management called Use your experts. Despite my general lack of understanding of the importance of a good haircut (as anyone who has seen me recently can confirm…) I was interested by the idea of a project manager as someone who knows the right people to ask.

I’m fully on board with this idea, as I think a good project manager has a set of skills around helping people to work together, recognising when expertise is needed, and bringing in advice when necessary.

For those of us looking for contracts, though, we’re seeing a different trend among recruiters. While there has always been a bias towards hiring project managers who have already worked in a specific industry for that specific industry, it seems to me that this is getting worse.

Often I am seeing contracts coming up advertised as project manager positions which seem to be something else. Many of them are starting to really be adverts for a subject matter expert, with a bit of project management thrown in on the side. For example, I recently looked at a position which was asking for someone who could carry out a technical analysis, complete a full network design, and be able to go hands on to deliver it, dealing with all the technical issues along the way. The project management of this was really an afterthought, tacked on to the role.

Now, it’s understandable, with the constraints on funding in all businesses, for businesses to be trying to get this kind of ‘two for one’ type of individual. Many project managers, having come from a background where they did this work before moving onto project management, may indeed be able to fill this kind of role.

Is this a trend away from the idea of a ‘generalist’ project manager, I wonder? Is project management coming to be seen as a set of ancillary skills, something which can be of support in your usual role, rather than a role in itself?

What do you think? Are you an expert who does project management, or a project management expert?

Here’s a selection of project management articles I’ve been reading over the last week. Hope you find them useful!

• I Just Want Everyone To Be Happy! – PM Hut
  

  It may seen at times that the success of the project is measured by the percentage of “smiley faces” among the project participants. However, project managers know that there are often unpopular decisions that must be made for the overall good of the project. While no project manager lasts long if everyone is always unhappy, there are times when s/he may have to make some people temporarily unhappy.

• Finding the Reasons for a Project – Herding Cats
  

  If anyone is looking for one killer answer to why we need Project Managers in IT or software development, this is it. Who manages the demand? Who manages the capacity?

• An Approach For Wording Risks – Better Projects
  

  Sometimes a risk is expressed as just a couple of words, which although may speak volumes to its author, don’t always give enough information to all relevant project stakeholders – for example, ‘content migration’ or ‘server load’ or ‘key resources unavailable’ are some risks I have seen recently documented. The ambiguous language can become a problem when it comes time to rate the risk and to devise mitigation strategies.

• The Need for Definition in Ethical Project Management – The Art Of Project Management
  

  Is it possible that company leaders are causing ethical dilemmas by not really understanding philosophical aspects of ethics? The importance of ethical business practices are being stressed, as are the findings that ethical leaders tend to be more successful. However, leaders don’t seem to be spending enough time stressing the simple truth that what is ethical to one stakeholder may not be ethical to the next.

I read an interesting blog post the other day, called How Consensus Decision-Making Creates Shared Direction in a Team. The gist of the article is that for a team to be highly energised and committed to their work, they need to share a sense of direction.

Now, I have to say that I broadly agree with that. When working with a project team, one of the most important things you can do to build that team spirit, and the commitment to work through the problems that will inevitably arise, is making sure everyone knows the end goal, and wants to achieve it.

But I don’t think it is possible to get 100% consensus on every decision, every time. Sometimes it may just be that there isn’t time to go through all the other options to come to the full consensus. This is unfortunate, and if at all possible you should seek to make the time.

Other times, though, it will be because the people in your team also have competing and conflicting aims. The nature of a project team means you are likely to have people from many different areas of the organisation, and some of their aims may be different to the aim of the project.

For example, I recently worked on a project to completely change the way printing was handled across an organisation. The aim of the project was, ultimately, to save the organisation money, by eliminating excess capacity, and expensive processes used. One of the areas of excess capacity was in an internal print unit.

Now, the person who lead the team responsible for the internal print unit had, not unnaturally, a desire to protect her team from any possible cost-savings, and, ultimately, from possible redundancies. This is a perfectly natural desire for a manager who has worked with their team for many years – but it was at odds with the aim of the project.

One way of dealing with this would be to simply exclude that person from the team – if they have a competing goal, it makes no sense for them to be involved, right? But that person was also a source of valuable information about the current situation, the demand they currently deal with, and so forth. For the project to be a success, that information was needed and so, in at least some way, they needed to be part of the team.

So if exclusion is not an option, and you can’t reach consensus on the way forward, what do you do?

Well, then someone has to be the bad guy. Someone has to make the decision about what is the right way forward for the project. That means taking account of concerns about other areas, certainly, but it also means having to make a decision that some in the team may disagree with.

Of course, this is an awful situation to be in for the dissenting member of the team, and it’s important you understand that. But the project is working to provide a benefit to the organisation as a whole, and sometimes that may mean certain parts of that organisation suffer. Someone needs to make the decision to move forward.

It’s not nice, it’s not fun, and I hope it’s not just a desire for alpha male behaviour coming through, but sometimes you have to be the bad guy – and be willing to take the fallout from that.

Times are tough for everyone out there at the moment. The economies of Europe and the US are slowing down again, and there are real fears that they could dip back down into recession. So it’s only natural that businesses are looking to cut their costs – but sometimes they are making the wasteful saving of doing without good project management.

I’m hearing of companies who are running projects to try to save money, but starting themselves off on the wrong foot by not putting in place adequate project management. Projects designed to reduce costs, ranging from outsourcing entire IT departments to staff reduction work, are being begun, but there is a reluctance to bring in the necessary project management expertise. This can either mean internal project management resource is being overstretched, or someone with little to no experience is asked to make do as best they can.

The problem with this is that effective project management will actually save these companies money. Think about it – a good project manager will anticipate problems, and avoid or solve them. A good project manager will have planned well, so there isn’t any wasted time waiting for something else to be done before work can continue.

Too often the perception is that project management is a mostly unnecessary overhead, because it is all too difficult to demonstrate the ways we have reduced timescales, or avoided problem – some senior managers seem to think a problem avoided is one that never really existed.

By cutting project management, companies are making problems more likely to occur – and any delay they cause is a cost. I worked on a project recently that would, when it was implemented, start saving the organisation thousands of pounds a week – or to put it another way, the company was currently losing thousands of pounds a week. That means any delay quickly starts to cost far more than a project manager would!

I understand the temptation that senior managers may feel to cut the upfront cost they can see, but it is something we as project managers need to fight against – because down the line, problems will crop up which cost more than the solution of good project management does.

Here’s a selection of project management articles I’ve been reading over the last week. Hope you find them useful!

• A Manager’s Guide to Building a Relationship with the Team – PMHut
• My Story: Working Smarter; Not Harder – Project Smart
• Plans Are Meant To Be Changed – Herding Cats
• Will Project Management Software Solve the Project Failure Problem? – A Girl’s Guide To Project Management
• Agile? Waterfall? CMMI? EVM? All of Them and More! – Software Project Management
• The Cult of Done Manifesto – Better Projects

We all want to have successful projects. But what do we mean by successful? It’s not just a matter of hitting our milestones, on time and on budget. It’s also about making sure that the project goals are of value to the organisation we are working for.

At the start of every project, you will produce, or help produce, a document that sets out what success looks like, the business case. That means you need to be able to examine the situation the organisation is in, and identify what problem the project will solve.

But this work doesn’t just stop there – while you may be working away on your project just fine, there will be other things happening in the world! It’s important that you remember to revisit the business case often, to check that the project is still meeting a need.

Remember, a project that is managed perfectly won’t necessarily be a success. Don’t forget to look up now and then, and take a look at the wider picture. A successful project isn’t about perfect documentation, it’s about delivering something that benefits your organisation.