Project Management and Human Nature

“You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around — and why his parents will always wave back.” – journalist William D. Tammeus

As a father, I completely understand this quote and I’ve done this many times. It’s absolutely true. As an author and reader, I’m intrigued by it. And that I heard it on an episode of Criminal Minds this year surprises me. In fact, I posted it to my Facebook account and numerous people commented on it and ‘liked it’, but I bet they would all be surprised it came from that show.

Enough about the quote, let’s talk about human nature. What is human nature? Wikipedia states that ‘human nature’ is the concept that there are a set of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that all ‘normal’ humans have in common. Ok…hopefully I’m categorized as normal…depends on the day of the week probably. Answers.com defines ‘human nature’ as the sum of all qualities and traits shared by all humans. And the online Merriam-Webster dictionary site defines ‘human nature’ as the nature of humans – especially the fundamental dispositions and traits of humans.

So, back to the topic of project management. How does human nature apply to project management? Here are my thoughts…. I’m thinking it centers around a few concepts or activities such as communication, organization, control, ambition. While we don’t all have those traits, I think most individuals who would be categorized as somewhat normal have something within their being that, under the right circumstances, strives to achieve those traits. Yes, that’s what I’ll cling to. Now let me quickly apply that to project management.

Communication

As humans, we all feel the need to communicate with each other from time to time. It’s my experience that your average project manager is – or should be – on the high end of that need. Communication is key, but it still must be good, timely and effective communication. If you’re on the quiet side, you’re probably in the wrong profession.

Organization

Ok, as for me, I’m not the most organized person at home…just ask my wife. But as a project manager, I’m usually pretty organized. I wake up late at night if I’ve failed to send out an email or feel the need to update my team or the customer on something and I have to get out of bed and do it then or I’ll never get back to sleep. I must have a routine schedule for each of my projects – a regular weekly formal status call with the team and customer, a specific day of the week when the revised project schedule and status report goes out, and a specific day of the week when I have a ‘scheduled’ call with my team – I say scheduled because there’s always a lot of unscheduled communication with them also.

Control

Control kind of goes hand-in-hand with organization. The project manager must remain in control – they must be the person that the organization, the team and the customer sees as always ‘in charge.’ Otherwise, chaos will take over. It takes a certain personality….a certain confidence. If you don’t have it, you’ll likely find out soon enough. At least your team and customer will.

Ambition

Finally, ambition. The project manager must have ambition…ambition to reach the final goal for the project. Ambition to take on more responsibility. Ambition to progress in their field. If you lack that ambition, then you’re less likely to stay on top of processes and the current technology to do your job well. And it will show in your work. Project success is hard enough to achieve given all of the potential obstacles and factors. It’s critical that the PM have the ambition and drive to succeed and lead their team and customer to similar successes.

PM Best Practices for the New Project Manager

PM Tips is designed to be a discussion area and information source for both the experienced project manager and project managers with little to no experience. For PMs with a significant amount of experience, many of the things that are generally considered ‘best practices’ are things, hopefully, that we do without even thinking.

For the new PM, however, these concepts can not be taken lightly as they may not be intuitive yet and newer PMs may even be working in an organization that provides little to no support for the PM process. In some smaller organizations or companies where IT is a sidebar rather than a primary focus, the newly anointed PM may be standing alone trying to get their arms around a portfolio of ‘projects’ in various stages of disarray.

How do you jump in and take over managing in this type of situation. I’d like to discuss that at length and share my thoughts, but that’s probably for another article. Here, I’d like to discuss some of the ‘best practices’ that the new PM should employ as basics to getting started on the road to good, solid, project management performance. Paying close attention to these 5 key areas will help the project manager stay on track toward a successful project conclusion. The degree of effort that is put into any of these areas depends on the size, timeframe and budget for the project, but they all must be performed.

Scope Management

Get a good handle early on as to the proposed scope of the project that you’ve been handed. Gather as much info concerning the scope from whoever closed the deal and handed you the project. Jot down any project requirements you don’t fully understand and be sure to discuss those in detail with your customer before or during the kickoff meeting. This proposed scope is critical because it is the basis for the project, the input for the project schedule and ultimately what your project will be judged against.

Reporting

A good rule for the PM, at a minimum, is to provide your team and your customer with the following, in terms of project reporting on a regular basis:

• Weekly project status report
• Weekly budget status/forecast update (if applicable – discuss with your customer early on)
• Weekly revised project schedule

The project status report will be the document that drives the weekly status call with the customer and the weekly revised project schedule will be what shows the team and the customer whether or not the project is on track and will let each team member what their responsibilities are for the week and for the rest of the project.

Budget Management

It’s imperative that the PM management the budget and the forecast (both financial and resource) very closely. Whether that gets shared with the customer regularly may be a matter of corporate policy or may be based on your customer’s preferences. But at the very least, the PM must be on top of this at all times.

Losing control of the budget and the forecast – which can be relatively easy to do – can cause major problems down the road as the project nears completion. Finding out in the late stages that you’ve run out of money is hard news and sharing it with your customer as a ‘surprise’ will not only result in great customer dissatisfaction, it may either get you pulled from the project or it may get the project canceled on the spot. Both are bad for your career.

Timeline Management

The project schedule is what lays out the entire timeline for the project identifying key deliverables and milestones. As mentioned in Reporting above, the project schedule is a critical piece of information for each project team member and must be revised and distributed weekly to everyone.

I’ve not managed a project yet where the original project schedule remained unchanged throughout and I just managed from it. Because of change orders, issues, customer preferences, or revolving project resources, there are monthly, weekly and sometimes daily changes to the project schedule. Those must be accurately noted and distributed to the team and the customer on at least a weekly basis.

Customer Communication

As the Project Manager, how and what you communicate to the customer will go a long way in determining customer satisfaction on the projects you manage. Keep them engaged in all critical project communication. Don’t keep the bad news from them…but don’t tell them the sky is falling all the time either. If you have bad news to share, be well prepared to deliver it. In fact, it’s best if you already have a planned course of corrective action. But if not, share it with the customer and ask them to share in the corrective action. It’s their project, too…and they want you to succeed.

Defining Risk Management – Part 5: Risk Tolerance

In this article, we will cover risk tolerance – your organization’s ability to tolerate different risks and identify those lines in the sand for tolerable risks and intolerable risks. Many factors can weigh in to an organization’s ability to tolerate certain risks. Some that come to mind are: how critical is the risk to the success of the project, will avoidance cost us on the project or cost us a certain level of customer satisfaction, and how does the cost/benefit analysis on the risk compare with the profitability of the project and the risks potential impact to that profitability.

This discussion on risk tolerance comes mainly from another excerpt of the book “The Project Management Question and Answer Book.” After reading, please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject as I feel this one is critical as we move forward on our projects. Do we care about certain risks? How much effort do we put into avoiding or mitigating certain risks based on their perceived financial or schedule impact…etc?

What is Risk Tolerance?

Risk tolerance is the willingness of some person or some organization to accept or avoid risk. In any group of people there are gamblers or risk takers and there are nongamblers or risk avoiders. People who have a low willingness to accept risks and the consequences of risks are called risk avoiders. Those people who are willing to take risks are called risk takers.

It is important to know that people and organizations have differing risk tolerances. Some customers do not want to risk the delivery of the project they are paying for by taking a chance on something new. Other customers will welcome the opportunity if the danger is not too great. For example, if we were manufacturing a product like some of the products that are advertised on late-night television, we would probably have a relatively high risk tolerance for the product’s failure. This is because the product is priced very low and is not going to put anyone’s life in danger. Customers buying very low priced items can expect them to have a shorter useful life than the advertising indicates. If customers want a product that will last longer, they buy an item that is built better and is probably more expensive.

This ability to choose is related to risk tolerance. In the mind of the consumer there is a tolerance for risk, which is expressed in his or her willingness to spend money. A consumer who is interested in having a highly reliable product that will last a long time is willing to pay more to get these features. Another consumer who is not willing to pay more to get a better product will be more accepting of the risk that the product will fail.

If we draw increasing impact and increasing probability on an X and Y axis, we can draw the locus of all points of equal severity as a line on the graph in Figure 1.

Figure 1: RISK TOLERANCE

Acceptable risks are any risks that are below and to the left of this locus of points of equal severity. Unacceptable risks are those risks that have a severity above and to the right of this severity line.

If we shift the severity line up and to the right, as in Figure 2, we are describing a person or an organization that is more of a risk taker. That is, the severity of the risks that one is willing to take is higher than before we shifted the line, and the person or organization shown is more of a gambler.

Figure 2: RISK TOLERANCE: GAMBLERS

If, on the other hand, we shift the line down and to the left, as in Figure 3, we are describing a person or organization that is less of a risk taker. That is to say that the severity of the risks that a person or organization is willing to take is less than before we shifted the line.

Figure 3: RISK TOLERANCE: AVOIDERS

In the classes we teach, we often perform the experiment of telling the students that we are willing to bet money on the roll of a single die, a cube with a number one through six on each side. (That’s half of a pair of dice to you nongamblers.) In the bet we say that if the die comes up with a one or a two, we win. If the die comes up with a three, four, five, or six they win. The question is, “Who would be willing to play for a penny?” Nearly everyone stays in the game at this point.

Then the stakes are raised to one dollar, and some of the people no longer want to play. As the stakes are raised higher and higher, more people drop out of the game. Eventually, unless there is a really hard-core gambler, everyone drops out of the game because the stakes are too high.

Even though the odds are very favorable, four chances out of six to win, when the bet is high enough, people will not play because the pain of losing is too great even when there are favorable odds. This is a great example of risk tolerance. Individuals and companies do the same thing with threats and opportunities. In risk tolerance we are concerned with people’s personal values and views as well as the company’s values and views. We may be dealing with a high-flying company that is willing to take many chances, but the individual who is representing the company may not be willing to stake his career on the risk you are suggesting. On the other hand, we do not want to be misled by the salesperson who is optimistic about everything until the sale is made.

Risk tolerance is somewhat describable in monetary terms. Our risk tolerance is how much we are willing to lose if the risk happens. In the case of a product that is sold to a consumer, the cost of the failure of the product might be the cost of the repair or replacement of the product if it fails. In the situation where someone’s life is in danger, these decisions become much more important. The tolerance for a risk that is life-threatening is very high indeed. This is because we cannot put a monetary value on human life.

PMTips: What We’re Here For

After 372 posts, nearly 500 reader and author comments and almost a quarter of a million words written over the past 7+ months, I’d like to take a moment to step back and discuss what we’re trying to do on the PMTips site.

First, let me say that this has been an extremely interesting and challenging twist on Project Management for me. To actually put thoughts to writing on past experiences, ideas, headaches, mistakes, frustrations and of course successes has been very rewarding for me. I find myself always looking forward to the next article and working to come up with fresh ideas to share or information from favorite articles or books that others may not have run across yet.

The PMTips “About” tab states the following….

PMtips.net is a blog about project management, collaboration, knowledge management and all other work 2.0 concepts present in today’s web 2.0 world.

This is a collaborative project that has several authors each of them master in the field. The purpose of this blog is to offer practical tips, tricks how-to`s and to serve as a resource for shedding light on the tools, trends, and practices that can make the life easier for many of use dealing with different challenges on a daily basis.

Its wished-for audience are those who do not use PM tools and are not seeing themselves as PM’s, but actually they do their work; people who just started being PM’s in organizations, small, medium, or larger, and are constantly searching out answers that can help them do their work more efficiently and profitably.

At PMtips.net every day new posts are posted which will help you win in your business. We invite you to visit us often and to share your insight with this community as well, since without having you as part of the conversation our aspiration to be helpful will become harder to achieve.

Looking at paragraph #3 I think we’ve gone far beyond that. We strive to be a good, useful resource to new PMs, but the comments and challenging feedback we get from experienced PMs helps to motivate the writers here and has forced our readers and our authors to think about certain PM topics in new and innovative ways.

As always, though, were are here to help PMs who are struggling or need information and answers. I’ve personally sent out more than 50 copies each of Risk Management Plans and Project Communication Plans after writing articles about each and offering templates. We’re just PMs like everyone else out there, but if there are needs for these types of tools – whether we’ve written about them or not – or questions that need answered on topics not yet covered, always feel free to send us those thoughts either through a comment or directly to an author at their email address. The door is always open.

Thanks again for reading and I am personally looking forward to much more interaction with our reader base.

Is PMP Certification Worth It? – My Analysis So Far

The original article “Project Management: Is PMP Certification Worth It?” has been live for only about 48 hours and has already generated nearly 50 comments and they are still coming in. I wanted to take this opportunity and give my thoughts on what’s come in and where the discussion seems to be going.

First, let me clear a few things up based on several of the comments.

• I do know what a project is – it’s not a confusion of terminology based on PMP vs. non-PMP term usage or PMI vs. non-PMI term usage. I’ve managed enough projects for a long enough time to know the difference.
• I do know the difference between a project and a program. I’ve managed both…as I mentioned I’ve managed engagements anywhere from a 1-month $5k project to a 5-year $50 million program.
• I do not have my PMP – and that is not what this platform is about. It’s about discussion on its value and where the industry is going and what current hiring practices are.

Ok..that said, let’s move on. Many of the 50 comments are my responses – I want to be sure to respond as quickly as possible to those who choose to comment. And at PMTips we welcome all comments – just keep them in good taste because we’re looking to provide helpful and useful information to Project Managers in all industries and want people to keep coming back and using PMTips as a resource.

Findings So Far

At this point, I would say the comments are leaning toward “yes, it’s too bad that companies are screening for PMP since it’s basically a sign that you’ve passed a challenging test, but given the state of the economy and industry, you should probably just make sure you have PMP certification.” Regardless of how you personally feel, if you’ve read the comments I think you’d agree that those are the general feelings. I would have to agree with that statement myself.

The Interview

If you find yourself an out-of-work PM and you’re actively looking for a PM position, then it is highly likely you’ll face situations where you are screened out if you don’t have PMP designation on your resume. Whether HR departments are becoming lazy or don’t have the skills to adequately screen just on experience or they just have too many resumes to go through and too little time…at any rate you’re going to face it. Since there isn’t really anything else you can do about it, the only thing left is to start documenting your experience and training, send materials into PMI for approval, get approved, study for the test, sit for the test, and pass it. It’s not cheap if you’re paying for it all on your own, but it will likely help you get to the next step in the interview process.

If you are less experienced and looking to get more information for re-training to get into the PM field – meaning PMP certification isn’t even an option for you yet - there are US options open to you in terms of free student financial aid and guaranteed student loans. I worked on both of these government contracts in application development and project management roles in the 1980’s and 1990’s.  In Canada, if you were lucky enough to have your parents start this early, you may also have the option of an RESP. An RESP is a Registered Education Savings Plan, a fund that is started at birth for post-secondary education payments.

Getting Hired

I still contend that PMP certification won’t get you hired. It shouldn’t. Experience, personality, confidence, and possibly references should get you hired. The PMP designation should only get you in the door to present yourself. I still stand by my statement that this is a sad indication of where we are at this point. Experience, a good resume, and lots of experience should get you at least a phone interview and a chance to show your confidence and experience. But I believe in many cases those chances are squelched for some good PMs because they lack the PMP designation.

Summary

I’m not sure where this is all going – I’m looking forward to more comments on the original article and probably some comments on this article. So far I’ve only been personally bashed a couple of times, but I’m not sensitive and I always enjoy a good discussion. If you never cross the line into some controversy, you’ll never get the good discussions going. I knew this one would generate some emotions and the excellent readers at PMTips have certainly not let me down.

I welcome everyone to comment no matter how you feel. Go to the original article at www.pmtips.net/project-management-pmp-certification-worth/ and comment and you can comment here, as well. And as always, you can track down my email in my profile and send me a personal message if you’re not comfortable posting here. A few have already done that, but post here if you can as it always seems to generate good discussions. If we get enough additional comments, I’ll write another follow-up like this one. Thanks again!