Building Empowered and Committed Teams

By Raymond Posch

In business, work is done by individuals or by teams – either functional teams or project teams. Organizing and building effective teams is a core competency of business management; and where projects are concerned, it is a core competency of successful project management as well. In my opinion, project managers understand this critical successful factor much more clearly than most other business managers because the team is so crucial to project success.

In this article, I want to look at high performing teams and the role of empowerment… Only a few times in my career have I been involved with truly empowered teams, and it is amazing what they can accomplish.

High performance teams – teams that perform at very high levels – almost always have three critical characteristics (among others):

• The team is empowered to accomplish the goals of the project; 
• The team is truly committed to accomplishing the goals of the project; and 
• The team is the right team with the right skills for the project. 

... full article

What Matters Most in Life also Matters in Projects
By Raymond Posch

The other day I came across a recap of one of the most enduring and fascinating research studies ever done on human behavior and the factors that matter in success and happiness. I have read reports on this study periodically over the last couple of decades as my interest in the subject has grown.

The study set about to analyze which factors matter most in whether a person is successful (by various measures), healthy, happy, and regards his life as well lived when he looks back in the later years of life.

The project was called the Grant Study, named after it's sponsor, W.T. Grant, the founder of a department store chain. For 72 years, the study at Harvard tracked the lives of 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s.

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How Issues Management can Make a Huge Difference to the Customer
By Raymond Posch, PMP, CPM

Back in 2001, I was a project manager for a hosting company. The project managers primarily managed the projects of moving new customers with large web sites and associated web applications into a dedicated hosting environment. Each project involved architecting the hosted solution, acquiring and installing the hardware and software, migrating the customer's web sites, applications, and content, and bringing them to full production operation. The projects usually involved a large number of people, both on our side and on the customer's side.

In December of that year, I was asked to support a large existing customer who was already fully moved in, so it was actually more of an account management role. But I think the story and lesson is totally applicable to project management.

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The 5 Top Skills of Good Project Managers
By Raymond Posch

I've worked with and managed project managers over many years. Based on my own observations of what I did or did not do well on my projects, and similar observations about other project managers on their projects, I offer my assessment of the top 5 skills of good project managers:

1. Attention to Achieving the Project Goals – In many types of projects, especially technology projects, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the details and the technology and lose sight of the business goals. The focus of the team and the project shifts to a technology goal – for example, build an XYZ system, instead of focusing on solving the business problem.
   
   The project manager and the team need to clearly understand the business goals before detailed planning and work starts on the project. Then, the project manager needs to remind them regularly about the goals and how the project work relates to those goals. 

... full article

The Power of Choosing
By Raymond Posch

Someone asked me if I really believe that companies have ever empowered their employees. This was following my newsletter article on empowered teams (in Issue 4).

"Isn't that really one of those idealistic things... something that everyone agrees is a great idea, but which no real company ever does?", he asked me. He went on to say that he had never met any managers who were willing to share their power with the people who worked for them.

I think it's very sad that empowerment is still so uncommon after so much has been said about the subject over the last ten years or more. And though it is uncommon, empowerment has happened and does happen. It's one of those things that allows those few rare companies who empower employees to stand out miles above the competition. And my friend is right, managers (especially senior managers) in the herd companies are indeed, for the most part, unwilling to share their "power".

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On Communication and Coordination
By Raymond Posch

Probably the single most important thing that is needed in managing a project – especially any large project – is communication and coordination. I treat them here as one activity because, in a project, the purpose of communication for the most part is not just to send information in one direction, but to solicit responses and to coordinate actions.

So “communication and coordination” is the core activity that a project manager does, day in and day out, to make a project happen. Now that is not to say that communication and coordination should be the only thing. A project without a plan is merely unorganized activity and is doomed to fail, at least by most measures that should be applied to business projects. (And believe me, there are lots of “cowboy” types that think they can just work it out as they go. Yee hah!) So planning is also absolutely critical.

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Leverage the Team
By Raymond Posch

It is often tempting to a project manager, especially if he or she is also a subject matter expert in the type of project to be performed, to do too much planning independently and to make too many independent decisions.

By independently, I mean without the direct involvement of the team, and often with too little direct or indirect input from the project stakeholders. This tends to be especially true for a project manager who is fairly new to the project management role.

Experience teaches, however, that the project manager needs to use the power, creativity, and collective intelligence of the team. ...

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Common Barriers to Successful Projects - #1-7
By Raymond Posch

Experienced project managers are well aware that there are many barriers to success. To be honest, there could be an unlimited number of barriers that could be listed. I have identified 27 that are fairly common in my experience. Some of these are fully under control of the project manager, and it is his or her responsibility to take charge and do it right (and avoid the problem). Some may be only partially controllable by the PM and partially affected by factors outside of his or her control. And some of these are fully outside of the PM’s control. 

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Common Barriers to Successful Projects - #8-14
By Raymond Posch

In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to projects success that are fairly common in my experience. Here are the next seven in my list: 

8. Poor requirements gathering, analysis, specification – Having well understood requirements is critical to project success, regardless whether a classical waterfall, iterative cycle, agile, or other methodology is used. If you do not have the requirements, the team cannot develop the solution to those requirements. So having a methodology and understanding how to work through it is important. Also, the PM must determine who will do the gathering, analysis, and specification of the requirements – ideally it should be done by business analysts who are knowledgeable about business requirements for the type of project. 

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Common Barriers to Successful Projects - #15-21
By Raymond Posch

In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to project success that are fairly common in my experience. Here are the next seven in my list:

15. Not getting team commitment to the plan – When the plan is developed with team involvement, they will naturally be bought in. But by asking them to commit to the plan, they will more likely point out where they have doubts about or problems with the plan. When the team resolves those issues and commits individually and collectively to the plan, probability of success quadruples. Believe me.    

... [Read the full article]

In this series, I am writing briefly about some barriers to project success that are fairly common in my experience. Here is the last set in my list:

22. Lack of resource management in the organization – Of course there is some kind of “resource management” in place, but if the organization has not stepped up to managing specialized people resources in effective ways for competing projects, there will be many issues like several mentioned in this list.    

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Restarting a Project
By Raymond Posch

This is a story about having to stop a project gone wrong, examine the team dynamics and project approach that was not working, and then restart the project with a major replan of team organization, work effort, and timeline. (This story also has some useful lessons learned that are applicable to process improvement projects generally with a successful methodology.)

The Context

When I was the PMO manager of a dot.com startup, I was asked to lead a project to "achieve CMM level 3 in the shortest time possible". This was for a subsidiary of Perot Systems that was developing advanced ecommerce systems. It was during those exciting times of the dot.com boom.

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Project Management Maturity in IT
By Raymond Posch

Back in December, Glen Alleman wrote a post on his Herding Cats blog about project management maturity. It was entitled “Knowing How Much a Project Costs is a Measure of PM Maturity” ...
 

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Filed under Project Management Organization, Cost/Budget Management

Projects and the ungrounded middle
by Raymond Posch

Project management today - on being agile and adaptive
by Raymond Posch

Plan and Act Based on Reality
by Raymond Posch

Part of the project manager’s job is to help the business understand the reality of what the project will take in terms of the time and cost to produce a particular result (i.e., scope and quality). ...

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How to know you're adhering to core PM principles
By Raymond Posch 

Glen Alleman is one of the project management experts who writes articles for Project Success Tips, and he is both a true PM expert and a prolific writer. He cranks out posts on his blog, Herding Cats, at a rate that is astonishing.

I strongly and sincerely believe that the best way to achieve project success is through understanding and practicing the project management principles. ...

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Roles and Responsibilities
By Raymond Posch 

I thought I would briefly revisit roles and responsibilities and the RACI matrix today. In projects and processes, sometimes there may be questions or confusion about who is responsible for what. If work is not getting done and people are pointing fingers at each other, you definitely know that there is lack of clarity about responsibilities.

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Also see more articles by Raymond Posch on his blog on the Project Success Tips site.