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Over the years you hear many stories and myths surrounding project management. Some of these take on a life of their own and gain notoriety within the workplace. We take them at face value and accept them readily without any reservation.
We see such situations in everyday life. Like the poker player who insists on sitting on a lucky chair, convinced it will bring him or her a huge win. Or a birthday, when the individual feels that blowing out all the candles on the cake with one breath will make their wish come true. Some of these situations can be seen in our projects at work. Here are some examples:
"Let's send people on some project management training and all our projects will be executed perfectly from start to finish."
A very sinister scenario in that senior management hold onto the fact that all will be well when sending some of the project team to a few days (or even hours) training on project management. Typically, individuals learn from the training and are excited about the new skills attained. However, the workplace offers little or no support in the utilization of such skills. The individual's enthusiasm is squashed and the materials gather dust with other training materials collected over the years. A lot more needs to be in place before project benefits are realized. For instance: In which situations is the individual expected to utilize the skills? How will the individual be supported and motivated to utilize skills? How will the organization measure success in the individuals contribution? How is the impact to the business measured? Are we working on the right projects? How will we manage the scope of the project in reality? Who can initiate projects? What is our communication plan? What are our capabilities? The factors that affect success are numerous and further thought is required prior to expecting the miraculous. Exposing people to skills is one thing; enabling and supporting the skills is another.
"The best project managers are the ones that run around in a frenzy and are constantly stressed out."
You have someone who is the Super Project Manager in the workplace. They seem to be running around at a hundred miles an hour, working around the clock to get the project delivered and are hailed heroes at the end of it. Think about it, if the project manager appropriately manages scope, resources, schedule, risk and other aspects of the project, then maybe they would not be in such a constant panic. Okay, okay for those of you who have become all uptight by this, even great project managers can display such symptoms when the workplace does not support utilizing or supporting best practices in project management. Sometimes we underestimate or don't give enough credit to the project manager who never hits the spotlight. Perhaps it's because they are managing the project skillfully and don't need to run around in a frenzy.
"Communicate, Communicate, Communicate - you cant do enough of this."
If you have not heard this mantra in the workplace, you must have been on another planet for the past decade. I can't tell you how many times I have seen project teams blame poor communication on the failure of projects. I'm going to turn this around 180 degrees. I firmly believe that over communication is a major source of project failures. When you get into developing project plans down to minute details, cutting and slicing this data multiple times, sending and updating multiple spreadsheets worth of project data, producing detailed team summaries, department summaries, division summaries, and executive summaries, then quite frankly you are hindering the progress of the project. Not only have you lost the plot and become a slave of the must communicate more syndrome, you are also distracting the team and becoming a pain. Communication needs to be focused and useful.
"The Project Manager must be a subject matter expert."
This point raises the most controversy but let's agree that the skills, processes, and methods a project manager applies are universal and can be applied to any industry. When you insist on subject matter expertise as a mandatory requirement for a project manager, you are setting the expectation that they will be doing project work (when they should be managing the project). This expertise also gets in the way as they drive their own thoughts, decisions and solutions to project situations, rather than letting the teams involved progress forward. Keep on asking thought provoking questions and be rational in your thought process. Let the team work out the finer details and the project manager focus on the bigger picture.
With over 17 years of project consulting experience, Vijay Aluwalia is actively engaged with clients in a project and change management capacity, and focuses on coaching leadership and management teams.
VARUNE Project Leadership
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