Project Management and Culture

A German colleague once commented (during a lager-filled post-project celebration) about how different German and US project management looked to her. She said, “We often wonder in Germany how you Americans successfully got to the moon.” As the Germans nodded, the Americans (being so articulate in our own language) retorted, “Whaaaat?”

Basically, she saw American managers spending significantly less time planning before the execution stage than her German counterparts. Her perception was that Americans have a higher tolerance for unresolved issues and that we tend to gloss over risk planning because we believe we’ll be able to handle whatever happens because we’ve padded the plan. I think the term “cowboy” was used.

Well! What a thing to think - who do they think they are? (more…)

Bad Luck, PC Hell and Healing From Grief

Risk management has always been tricky. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine the myriad ways in which something could go wrong until it goes wrong. While being a pessimist helps, even staunchly negative thinkers can sometimes be surprised by the smorgasboard of disasters the life serve up. I recently experienced a triple decker computer disaster that lasted 2 months and derailed several key projects as well as siphoned off every ounce of patience and calm that I had at my disposal. What can we do when unforeseen, and perhaps unforeseeable, risks descend upon us like a flock of buzzards? Sometimes it feels personal. Read on for the gut-wrenching chronology of my own brush with computer hell, and one possible approach to dealing with strings of unmitigated bad luck on a personal level.

(more…)

Part 6 of 6 on Teamwork: How the PM can make or break the project’s teamwork

Today I wanted to tackle how project managers and their approach to that role can be seen as boon to teamwork – or conversely be one major reason the team does not work together well.  In my experience project management is often viewed by team members not as an enabler, but as some separate and materially unrelated function to the ‘real work’ they need to do.  It represents not a valuable facilitator of their work, but rather an attempt by someone in charge to control their work in a negative way.  That perception can lead to conflict and resistance to working collaboratively with the PM.
Here’s are a couple of typical situations that show how such attitudes toward the project manager role can occur:

(more…)

Part 5 of 6 on Teamwork: Pervasive Personal Responsibility, Accountability, and Initiative

One of the things I’ve tried to do in this series is use some “word pictures” – ways of describing things that  hopefully bring an idea or  behavior to life so that it’s easier to apply in the real world.  I love the phrase “victim or vanquisher?” because it evokes for me VERY clear pictures of two different behaviors.    I’ve in the past described my PMness as being a “paranoid PM bulldog” – which for me conjures up the picture of someone continuously on the watch for what could go wrong and highly persistent in dealing with everything that needs dealing with.   Using words like this helps me better paint a picture of adjectives-and-behaviors-in-action to help people (including myself) truly “get” how we need to act differently.

To wrap up my thoughts on teamwork as exhibited by individual team members who are not the project manager (I’ll talk about that person tomorrow), I want to end with another word picture.   

(more…)

Part 4 of 6 on Teamwork: Bottom Lines - A tool for achieving interpersonal teamwork

A friend once emailed me with a burning question about “A Situation” with a particular team member. What had started out as some displays of mild to medium recalcitrance - the team member resisting some advice in preparing for a design review, then being pointedly late on a couple of key deliverables - had spread to an underlying feeling of tenseness in every interaction. He really didn’t know where it was all coming from, and thus what to do about it.  But nobody would say that this pair was working together well as part of the team at this moment!

This request made me stop and think about the various tools I’ve picked up over the years for getting to the bottom of such issues. One in particular I’ve found incredibly useful for making discussions of differences less personal and easier to resolve is having a discussion of personal working-together “Bottom Lines.”     This approach was introduced to me by a colleague years ago, and I can safely say that its use salvaged a fraying professional relationship and has kept us from killing each other ever since.

(more…)

Teamwork: Victims and Vanquishers (part 3 of 6 on observations on true teamwork)

My first two posts in this teamwork rumination (last week’s post here and yesterdays “part 2″ here)  set up the idea that “great teamwork” really comes from  proactive, high-quality contributions of individual team members.  In this post I want to relay a few  thoughts about what team member attitudes are behind such contributions, and additional examples of what it “looks like” on projects.  I personally think that to have any chance of achieving the teamwork we want, we have to be able to concretely describe what it looks like.  Conceptual alone doesn’t cut it, how does everyone need to behave, what kinds of thing should they DO?     (NOTE:  later this week I’m going to cover the project manager as part of the ‘teamwork equation’ and how project managers choose to play their role can either foster or destroy great teamwork. Hope you’ll keep reading this week for that!)     When I think about the people I value having on my project teams, I think about the people who know how to make a difference no matter what the circumstances.  Those people demonstrate “ownership” of project outcomes, and “initiative” to contribute in different ways to make those outcomes a reality.  What’s the difference between those people, and those who I tend to peg more as “whiners,” people who perhaps give up in the face of adversity or complexity; perhaps don’t see it as “their role” to take the lead in pushing past challenges?   

(more…)

More on “teamwork” - how individual team members’ knowing and doing makes the team