Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 1)

Ernest Baker, PMP, gave a presentation at the recent PMI Global Congress North America called ‘Ten troublesome project management ideas and how to combat them!’ I thought the content was worth sharing, as he had some good, practical examples of why things go wrong on projects and what we can do to stop them from happening.

Baker is President of Start to Finish PM, Inc and the aim of his presentation was to make us, as project managers, more aware of the “potentially bothersome” ideas that some stakeholders come up with. By recognising them, we would then be in a far better position to combat the dangerous ideas and assumptions about project management before they become a significant problem for the project. Essentially, it’s all about managing stakeholder expectations.

So, what were his top ten dangerous ideas? We’ll look at two today, and the remainder over the coming days.

1. Just Do It!

Baker said that the top symptoms of a ‘just do it’ culture were:

• Executing without planning
• Meeting a scheduled by doing not by planning
• Creating a fixed date schedule by drawing up the plan before the scope is defined
• Evidence of people mind-reading and not getting proper requirements or estimates
• Ignoring the balance between scope, schedule, budget and quality (a variety of the triple constraint so beloved of project managers)
• Lots of activity but not necessarily a lot of productive work taking place

In short, working in a ‘just do it’ environment means that you’ll deliver your project by luck and working a lot of hours rather than skilled project management. And it probably won’t deliver to stakeholder expectations anyway.

If you feel that you work with stakeholders who hold this kind of attitude, this is what you can do to combat it:

• Agree how things will be produced as well as what will be produced: this offsets some of the issues around taking the time to plan
• Include project management tasks and outputs as deliverables in the plan
• Gather metrics about time spent ‘doing’ project management – again, this will show that it isn’t that time-consuming a task and makes it transparent.
• Don’t charge your project management time (if you do time recording) to product deliverables. Instead, charge it to those project management deliverables in your plan.
• Incorporate lessons learned and process improvements
• Send your stakeholders on some training!

2.  Rewarding Heroic Behaviour

Sometimes, you need to make a concerted effort to get something done. Being a hero is sometimes a good thing, but Baker argued that it is often heroes (and heroines) that get rewarded – whereas the project manager that doesn’t get their project into a mess goes unnoticed. There is a risk with rewarding hero-like behaviour – the project managers stepping in to sort out a mess may find themselves in a high profile, high success role, but being in a mess is not a behaviour to reward at all. Companies which value heroes often overlook those project managers who plug away at it, develop excellent project schedules and don’t mess up. Surely that behaviour is more worthy? Symptoms of an organisational culture that rewards heroic behaviour are:

• Projects being completed by the heroic efforts of a team
• The leader of that team being praised for their work and leadership
• Resources are allocated from well-managed projects and given to the ‘hero’
• There’s a focus on managing issues instead of managing risks

Moving away from this culture isn’t always easy. In fact, as a project manager there is a limit on what you can do to influence organisational culture at the highest level. But you can address this challenge in some ways:

• Reward your team for the behaviour that you want them to show i.e. structured, planned effort
• Establish your project objectives and make sure everyone is clear what is expected of them
• Define success criteria at the outset, including what this will look like for stakeholders, scope and schedule.

Tomorrow I’ll be looking at three more of Baker’s troublesome ideas and how to address them!

Related posts:

1. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 2)
2. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 3)
3. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 4)
4. Balancing Critical Project Success Factors – Selling Good Ideas
5. Managing Project Change Control