Risk is the absolute best thing you can have in your project. Yes, you read that right. I’m a project manager who craves risk, who wants risky projects.

I feel like I should start a support group: “Hi, my name is Trevor. I am a project manager and I like risks”. But my group wouldn’t be trying to stop anyone taking risks, it would be encouraging it.

Think about it. A project is a new venture, a new risk. Or to use another word from the same root, a project is a new adventure. Now, doesn’t that sound better? Doesn’t that sound a bit more, well, exciting?

“A new adventure” brings to mind much more interesting ideas and concepts than “a new project”. We think of excitement, of courage, of winning through against the odds. In other words, we think of the upsides of overcoming danger, the positive aspects of risk.

For many project managers, though, “a new project” immediately brings to mind thoughts of caution, of danger, of failure. We think of the negative aspects of risk. And not unnaturally, we start to think of how to get rid of the risk from the venture, to ‘de-risk’ the project.

But consider this: Any project has to include risk. Yes, it has to. A project is about change, about creating something new, or doing something differently. And any change has a risk associated with it – we simply can’t know exactly what will happen.

But this isn’t a bad thing! It is thought that the word ‘risk’ derived from an Arabic word ‘rizk’, meaning ‘to seek prosperity’. Similar words were used in the Middle Ages specifically to do with the dangers involved in sea trade, in sending goods you had paid for out onto an unsafe sea, in the hope of selling them for a profit elsewhere.

If you think about it, we often use risk to mean the same thing today – we risk our money by buying shares, or by trading in commodities, or even by starting a project! We are putting our money in harm’s way, risking it being wasted or lost, in the hope that we will in fact get a bigger return.

Risk is good. Without an element of risk, we won’t be able to achieve success. Without risk, we don’t have a project. Without risk, we’re just doing the same old thing again – we’re doing business as usual management, not project management!

And usually, the bigger the risk, the bigger the potential reward. A big reward sounds great! So why do we all, (project managers, I mean) seem to avoid risk wherever we can? Well, that’s what I’m going to talk about tomorrow. See you then!

(Image courtesy of szlea. Some rights reserved.)

Following on from my post last week, Managing versus Directing: PRINCE2 2009, here is a video in which the Lead Author, Andy Murray, takes us through the two new publications that will be available. The video is from Best Management Practice.

Well, we’re heading into a long weekend over here in the UK, where hopefully we’ll all get to have some down time, a chance to let our brains catch up with our bodies for a bit.

All of us are guilty at one time or another of letting ourselves get distracted from the important parts of our job. As an example, take a look at this experiment by Gantthead’s Dave Garrett. (Yeah, I cheated and answered twice – what can I say? I must be indecisive…)

None of those answers are wrong, or unimportant – but how often do we forget about them?

For example, right now, there is a big buzz around using social media in project management. This is something I happen to think will be big in the future – I’ve written about the Social Media Project Manager before, and there’s even The Social Media Project Manager Slideshow. But, and it’s a big but, there are still lots of challenges in the way.

And I think one of the challenges is that some of us, and I include myself in this, get very excited by the technology, and focus on that, and forget about the real strength of social media – that being the social part. The people part.

As the Project Shrink says, projects are about humans. And he’s also done some thinking about what problems in project management social media can solve which is well worth a look.

But back to my more general point – we all need to take some time out every now and then to make sure we are still able to spot the important things. So, over this weekend, relax, take some time, re-connect with the important people in your life.

And, yes, have a quick think about what is important in your current project, and what isn’t. Then you know what you need to focus on.

Have a great weekend.

As I mentioned last week, the PRINCE2 project management methodology is currently undergoing a ‘refresh’ to make sure it fits the requirements of the marketplace. The new version, PRINCE2 2009, will be released on 16th June.

One of the major changes has been to slim down the PRINCE2 manual… by splitting it into two. The new version will have two different volumes, Managing Projects Using PRINCE2 and Directing Projects Using PRINCE2.

As you will have guessed, the two volumes are aimed at different users. Those of us who are project managers will be interested in the Managing manual, while senior managers and executives who will be involved at the project board level will be interested in the Directing manual.

Now, in a way I can see the sense of this split. The current PRINCE2 manual does talk about the various responsibilities and duties that project board members need to be aware of, but much of this information is buried amongst the nitty gritty of applying the methodology as a project manager. I can certainly understand that senior staff simply aren’t going to plough through a manual like that.

Indeed, I still think one of the most important things I do as a project manager is to sit down with senior management involved with the project and explain exactly how they fit into the project world – including how they need to hold me to account!

So I can see this splitting of the manual going one of two ways. It is possible that the Directing manual will start to be seen as vital reading for executives. Because they are involved in projects, they will work to make sure they understand their responsibilities, duties, and powers, and we as project managers will gain the benefit of informed and aware executives.

Or, of course, it could be that executives won’t pay a blind bit of notice to the Directing manual – without any qualification (yet) based on it, they may just not waste their precious time reading a rather dry text. Which would leave us as project managers buying both manuals, just so that we can again sit down with our project board and brief them on what they need to do in the project…

Maybe it’s the incorrigible cynic in me, but I rather suspect the second scenario is more likely. But at least we’ll know exactly where to find the information for our briefings…

What do you think? Do you think I’m being too cynical? Can you see other advantages to this split? Let me know!

Yesterday was the PMXPO 2009, an online project management conference. It was a fantastic event, and I want to thank all the people at Gantthead for putting it together. I really enjoyed the presentations, and learnt a lot.

The presentations that were given were:

• Fourth and Goal: Making the Tough Calls that Make Leaders Successful
  Bill Cowher, Former NFL Coach, Pittsburgh
• How To Win The Super bowl of Project Management
  Harold Kerzner, Senior Exec. Director, Proj Mgt. IIL
• Agile Project Management for Extreme Projects: Getting a Grip on Chaos
  Doug DeCarlo, gantthead SME, Extreme PM
• Rethinking Project Priorities During A Recession
  Michael Wood, gantthead SME, Process Improvement
• Making Successful Decisions: A PM’s Path to Success
  Dennis Buede, PhD, Author
• Mind Mapping Meets Project Management
  Andrew Makar, PMP, gantthead SME, PPM
• Managing Projects to Deliver Maximum Business Value
  Rodney J Trent, President, Stratex Services

Now, as I said, the conference was yesterday… but thanks to the wonders of virtual conferences, you can still go and see the presentations! Just pop along to the PMXPO 2009 site and register – and get watching.

(Oh, and for those of you who are PMPs, you can also earn PDUs from the presentations – what more reason do you need to check it out?)

Something big is going to happen with PRINCE2 very soon now. The old version is undergoing an update, or as those responsible call it, a “radical evolution”. And it looks like this could be very interesting.

PRINCE2 is often attacked for being overly bureaucratic, or too complicated, or needing too much documentation. This update, which will be release on 16th June 2009, is tackling these complaints head on.

The biggest change has to be the introduction of a set of seven principles for PRINCE2:

• Business justification – A PRINCE2 project has continued business justification
• Learn from experience – PRINCE2 project teams learn from previous experience (lessons are sought, recorded and acted upon throughout the life of the project)
• Roles & responsibilities – A PRINCE2 project has defined and agreed roles and responsibilities with an organisation structure that engages the business, user and supplier stakeholder interests
• Manage by stages – A PRINCE2 project is planned, monitored and controlled on a stage by stage basis
• Manage by exception – A PRINCE2 project has defined tolerances for each project objective to establish limits of delegated authority
• Product focus – A PRINCE2 project focuses on the definition and delivery of products, in particular their quality requirements
• Tailor – PRINCE2 is tailored to suit the project’s size, environment,
  complexity, importance, capability and risk

This is an important development for PRINCE2. Not because the principles are new – they’re not. They’re the same principles that good PRINCE2 Practitioners have been using all along. But this is the first time that they have been set down and expressed as part of the methodology.

There is more information in Andy Murray’s presentation on the PRINCE2 update. Andy is the Lead Author for the update, and you can read more on the PRINCE2: 2009 Author Blog.

So, the latest Standish Report is out. The figures in it are depressingly familiar. More projects are failing. Only about a third of projects are succeeding – on time, on budget, on scope.

Now, there are a lot of reasons to be dubious about the CHAOS report statistics. The categories are fairly vague, and don’t appear to look in any depth about whether (for example) a project being cancelled was a good project management decision or not. The methodology they have chosen for the study is unclear. So as an absolute measure, they’re not up to much.

But because the report has been produced for a number of years now, with, presumably, the same methodology, we can get some value from using them as a relative measure – are things getting worse, or are they getting better?

Well, in fact, the figures for project success seem to be holding roughly level over the past few years. There has been an improvement from the original report back in 1994, which suggested a success rate of 16%, but we seem to have been hovering around the 30% mark for many years now.

And this is worrying, considering the amount of effort that has gone into developing better and stronger project management methodologies, techniques, tools and so forth. Taken at face value, the CHAOS report would suggest that we needn’t have bothered!

That suggests a couple of possibilities. The first one is that as a group, project managers have simply got it wrong. Perhaps the tools we are using to manage projects, the methodologies and techniques, simply have no effect. All we have done is made our own lives harder, but at least we haven’t damaged the projects we work on.

I’m not really inclined to believe this possibility. (Though, of course, as a project manager, I have a vested interest in saying a methodology is needed…) The reason I’m not convinced is that the methodologies have been developed from the experiences of many project managers. They are finding new ideas that work for them in their projects – they are seeing an improvement in the project management process by using these techniques.

The other possibility is the one I am interested in. It’s loosely based on the Red Queen Hypothesis. What if project management is getting better, but projects are also getting more complicated? What if we’re running just to keep still?

Think about the IT projects you’ve been involved with over the years. Have they become more complicated? Have our ideas of what we can achieve become bigger? Do projects now pull in many more aspects of the business than they used to?

I’m not even entirely sure how you would test this idea. (Always a hallmark of a less than perfect hypothesis…) It would require some way of evaluating the complexity of a project against a baseline – a baseline that needs to stay steady as the world changes around it, and as new technologies may make some of the assumptions in the baseline wildly incorrect. Now that would be a study worth doing.

I genuinely don’t know. My personal feeling is that, yes, IT departments are willing to take on more complicated projects these days. But I’m wary of drawing a conclusion from my own, purely anecdotal, experience. Others may have had very different experiences.

But certainly when we think of how much more we can do with IT than we used to be able, of the added complexities of what it can achieve, there is a certain attraction to the Red Queen idea. But maybe it’s just wishful thinking and self-justification on the part of a project manager…

What do you think? Are we getting better? Are projects getting more complicated? Or have we just overloaded ourselves with methodologies we should dump? Let me know!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know this already, but yesterday I passed my PRINCE2 Practitioner Re-registration exam. PRINCE2 has two levels of qualification, Foundation and Practitioner. A Foundation pass lasts forever, and you need to have one before you can take the Practitioner exam. A Practitioner pass needs to be renewed every five years if you want to keep describing yourself as, well, a PRINCE2 Practitioner.

Given that here in the UK PRINCE2 is the de facto standard for project management qualifications, I’m happy to have passed the re-registration exam – it means I can still compete for contract jobs!

But… I have to admit, I wasn’t that thrilled with the exam. More particularly, I wasn’t pleased with the format of it, because I think it reflects a worrying trend from the owners of PRINCE2.

Way back in the mists of time, when I first got qualified, the Foundation exam was a multiple choice exam, which it still is, and the Practitioner exam was essay based, which it no longer is. Now, the Practitioner exam is an “objective testing examination”. Which, as far as I can tell, means it is multiple choice. Complicated multiple choice, granted, but multiple choice all the same.

I’ll admit it, I have a terrible prejudice against multiple choice exams. The last one I had done was the PRINCE2 Foundation exam. Essentially, this was just a memory exercise – it checked you knew what the various PRINCE2 terms were. Which was fine, given the level it was aimed at – it was a first step on the qualifications ladder for project support staff, and others who needed to show they had a basic knowledge of PRINCE2.

But I’ve always thought that to test real understanding of a subject, you need to send someone off with little guidance, to navigate their own way to the solution. And that’s why I liked the essay style Practitioner exam I originally took – the demonstration of understanding was all in your own hands.

That’s not to say that the re-registration exam I took didn’t test understanding. The format of the questions was such that it did require you to have both a knowledge of the PRINCE2 methodology, and an understanding of the processes within it.

However, what it didn’t test was an understanding of the principles of project management, of when it was appropriate to use the various processes the methodology uses, and even more importantly, when it was appropriate not to.

Now, a lot of you will probably be thinking, and quite reasonably, that PRINCE2 is a methodology, so an exam to be registered as a Practitioner of it should only test understanding of the methodology itself. It’s a persuasive argument, but not one I accept.

PRINCE2 is in the interesting position of being the de facto project management standard in the UK and much of Europe. This means, I believe, that it not only should try to spread itself as a methodology, but also to spread an understanding of what project management is, the principles behind it. In my experience, PMI just isn’t well established enough over here to do that job.

To me, the key to working with and using PRINCE2 effectively is a thorough understanding of the principles behind in. Maybe I was lucky in the way I was taught it originally, but the emphasis of the trainers was very much on why certain processes and procedures were used, not how to use them. And the reason for this was that they continually stressed the need to ensure you were applying PRINCE2 in a flexible and light touch way.

I can practically hear the howls from the Agileists out there at the suggestion PRINCE2 can ever be light touch or even flexible. But it really can. If you just took the PRINCE2 manual and tried to apply everything in there to a project, you’d kill all but the largest projects straight away. But PRINCE2 is designed to be scalable – and that’s where it gets tricky.

Because the only way a methodology can be scalable is by using the judgement of the people applying it, by using the experience, understanding, and plain common sense of the project manager to decide what is needed for any particular project. And the ability to do that is something that is very hard to test.

I’d also say it is impossible to test in any sort of multiple choice exam.

And that’s why I preferred the essay based exam. By having the ability to write an open-ended answer, the person being tested can not only demonstrate an understanding of the processes, but also explain how he would apply it in the specific scenario given. He can, in short, demonstrate his abilities as a project manager, not as a PRINCE2 regurgitation tool.

Now, I can understand why the people who look after PRINCE2 would want to move to this “objective testing” exam format. If nothing else, it’s an awful lot cheaper to grade a paper when all you have to do is scan the answer sheet for the right marks in the right places (or, in my case, just have it all done online). And it moves it towards the style used in many other qualification exams.

But I think they are ultimately storing up a huge problem for themselves. There is already a body of opinion out there which thinks PRINCE2 is simply awful, too heavyweight, too inflexible, too much of a pain. I’d argue the real problem these people have come up against is poor project management, poor project managers, where a methodology has been applied without much understanding of the principles behind it.

Worryingly, this style of examination seems, to me, to be encouraging more of this type of project manager. All it will produce is someone who understands the processes very well, but doesn’t really understand the reasons for them. Essay based exams are much harder to grade, but the reason for that is that they need to have a real live human being doing it. And that ‘problem’, of needing a human being, seems to me to be, in fact, the greatest strength of them.

Because a human being is able to read the essay and get a real feel for whether the person writing has understood what is actually happening in the scenario, has understood more than the right cookie cutter to pick up from the PRINCE2 tool box. And being able to assess that seems to me to be incredibly valuable.

If it becomes the common view that all a Practitioner qualified project manager brings you is someone who will blindly apply a methodology with no thought as to whether it is appropriate, all qualified Practitioners will suffer. In short, I worry that this style of exam is, ultimately, going to devalue the PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification.

What do you think? Am I just being snobbish about multiple choice? Am I wrong in thinking a PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification should be about more than memorising the PRINCE2 manual? Is PRINCE2 already seen as too heavy-handed a methodology to ever use? Do you think PMI is in a position in Europe to take up the mantle of spreading awareness of the principles of project management?

Recently, I put together a little series on the social media tools that project managers could use to help manage their teams and their projects. I’ve distilled some of this into a presentation, which you can see here:

You can get more information about any of the tools and techniques at The Social Media Project Manager – Roundup page. Hope you find it useful!

The G20 summit has just ended in London, with an agreement every representative there has signed up to. The leaders of the 19 leading countries in the world, and a representative of the EU, have agreed to collectively contribute $1 trillion dollars for various schemes designed to help the global economy, and to tighten up regulation of the financial industry.

Now, I’m not going to try and critique the agreement, or pronounce on whether or not it will be successful in helping the global economy. For one thing, I’m not an economist – and not even economists seem agreed on whether this will help or not. More importantly, that isn’t what this blog is about!

Instead, I want to look at something we can all learn from – the process that the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seems to have gone through to try and get an agreement. (Well, not just him – mainly his staff and officials, but you know what I mean.)

Negotiation is something we all have to do in our jobs, though I’m assuming generally your negotiations don’t have quite as much impact as his…

What did Gordon Brown do to get agreement?

First of all, he had to clarify to himself exactly what he hoped to achieve. In this case, he obviously had to work with a wide variety of experts in the subject matter. His time as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK Finance Minister) presumably meant he had some experience, but he is a professional politician, not an economist.

But his experience in this area means that, if nothing else, he already had a circle of advisers he knew and trusted, who he could turn to to get the information he needed.

Once he knew what his aim was, Gordon Brown began a tour of many countries around the world. He made sure he visited strategic countries, those who were regional leaders, to both sell his idea to them ahead of the summit, but also to gather information from them, to see what modifications he might need to make to his own position.

This was a vital step – it showed he was willing to be flexible, willing to listen, and willing to work with others to get to a solution all could agree to.

Importantly, one of the main early visits was to the United States. Any agreement absolutely had to have the United States on board, otherwise it would be doomed to fail. Gordon Brown had to make sure very early on that the UK’s aim fit with the aim of the United States, and that the two countries could work together.

After this worldwide tour, the summit itself began. By this point, Gordon Brown knew that his aim was in accord with that of the United States, and knew how close it was to the aims of the other countries who would be attending. His work beforehand also meant he knew what was important to each of the other countries present.

This enabled the horsetrading aspect of the negotiation to work. The final communique is a balance of the positions of the participants. Some things from the original UK position were presumably dropped (increased spending by all countries to stimulate their own economies?) while others were strengthened (tighter regulation of financial institutions?).

By making sure everyone could identify something in the final communique that they wanted to have, Gordon Brown could make sure everyone present was happy to put their name to it, and be seen smiling in the final ‘family photo’ at the end.

So what can we learn about negotiation from this?

Well, we can identify some clear and simple steps we can apply to our own negotiations:

1. Define your position.
   Before you go into any negotiation, you want to make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve. What would be the best result you could hope for? What areas are you willing to compromise on? Which aren’t you? Talk to your own circle of advisers and experts to decide what is important to you, and which isn’t.
2. Understand the position of the other players.
   To reduce surprises in a negotiation, make sure you spend some time gathering information about the likely position of the other participants in it. Sometimes you can only do this by putting yourself in their shoes, and trying to decide what they will be trying to achieve. Other times, you can actually go around and have meetings with them, to listen to their point of view. Regardless of how, always try to understand where they are coming from, and why.
3. Get the most important players on your side.
   If there are key players in the negotiation, whose lack of agreement on its own could scupper the whole deal, make sure you get them on your side early. Going into a negotiation without knowing if the most important person there agrees with you or not is risky at best, and foolish at worst. It may not be possible to get agreement beforehand, but at least make sure your position fits with your belief of what they want.
4. Be flexible to get agreement.
   Play off the various positions against each other. If one aspect is important to one player, compromise on that to gain something from them that is important to you. With a multi-party negotiation, this can become very complex! But because you have gathered the information beforehand about their positions, you will have a clearer handle on their aims, and will be able to plan ahead some of the concessions to make.
5. Make sure everyone can claim a success.
   There are very few negotiations that are a simple battle, that can lead to a winner and a loser. It is better by far to make sure everyone gets something, that everyone can claim the negotiation as a success. By working like this, everyone in the negotiation will be working together to make it successful, rather than having some acting defensively.

By keeping these steps in mind, hopefully we can have more successful, and you never know, maybe more pleasant negotiations in the future!

What do you think? How do you approach negotiations? Do you use the same approach for negotiations internal to your business as those involving someone external, be it a supplier or customer? Let me know!