The Practicing IT Project Manager

New project management articles published on the web during the week of September 19 – 25, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Laurie Keyser Brunner observes, “People are now the primary investment within organizations. As such, professional development initiatives must keep pace.”  Blended learning is the key.
• Conrado Morlan writes to us fifty-something project managers about leading multi-generational teams.
• The current PMI Community Post asks, can a project manager become the next CEO?
• Josh Nankivel has been overwhelmed lately, and neglecting his blog.  So now that he has a few minutes, he writes about how we should handle these times as opportunities.
• Elizabeth Harrin is another iPad fan, and she has a few favorite apps to share with us.
• Jeff Oltmann says you shouldn’t wait until the end of your project to think about how to close it, and shares seven tips to smoothly transition to on-going operations.
• Peter Saddington shares a screencast from Michael Sahota on selecting Agile methods that are appropriate to organizational cultures, based on the book, “The Reengineering Alternative,” by William Schneider.
• Matthias Marschall takes a different approach, contrasting Scrum and Kanban in terms of the amount of change required to get started.
• And Alan Dayley considers the potential impact of limiting work in progress, using whatever techniques come to hand.
• Sally Elatta just completed the PMI-ACP exam.  She shares her thoughts in a retrospective (hey, it’s about Agile!) and some specific study tips.
• Pete Cohen provides an excellent “sentence template” for wording risks.
• Jordan Bortz debunks all those job postings for “ninjas” and “rock stars.”  In short: we don’t know what we’re looking for, but we want you to be really good at it!
• Craig Curran-Morton has a two-parter on the problems with RFP’s.  You know: that’s when the purchasing folks ask for “rock star ninjas …”
• Glen Alleman juxtaposes two of his favorite quotes to illustrate why conflict is a necessary and desirable part of getting things done.
• Kerry Wills is mentoring a few project managers, and shares some recent advice he gave on priorities in starting up a new project.
• Mike Inman finds an error in some materials he had printed, followed immediately by an opportunity to practice some personal integrity.
• Johanna Rothman on influence, negotiation, and working around those who play zero-sum games.

Enjoy!

Two recent subject trends have been evident in the LinkedIn discussion boards and in the project management blogosphere.  The first is the simple question: do you have to be a subject matter expert in order to manage a project, or can an experienced project manager handle any project, just using standard techniques documented in the PMBOK and other reference documents?  To me, this is an easy answer: project managers spend the overwhelming majority of their time communicating, so you need to know enough about a subject area to hold up your end of the conversation.  You also need to be able to facilitate communications and decision making both within the project team and with and among the stakeholders, so you need enough knowledge of the arts and practices to be effective.  But a number of other project managers seem to disagree, and at least a few have made interesting, if not completely compelling, arguments.

The other subject might be a bit more esoteric: does the PMBOK document a methodology?  The PMBOK itself seems to say it does not; however, there are a number of folks who apparently believe that the documented processes, organized into specific process and knowledge groups, make a pretty valuable template.  And it’s hard to argue against the point.  A lot of organizations have project templates that use the process group names for project phases, and refer to a number of deliverables called out in the PMBOK processes.  Many of us point out that the PMBOK is merely a collection of frequently useful (and thus commonly used) processes, organized for easy reference and study, but a number of Agilistas carry it even further.  They argue not only that the PMBOK is a methodology, but that it follows a “waterfall” approach, despite the note on page 40 that processes can be useful at different points in a project life cycle, and that some may be executed iteratively.

So I had something of an epiphany this afternoon, when an article I was reading made passing reference to Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”  The book details Campbell’s theory that important myths from around the world that have survived throughout history share a common structure, which he called the “monomyth.”  The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or “boon”), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon).

Now, no one is going to mistake the phases of the monomyth cycle for the Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing process groups described in the PMBOK, but the fact that both abstracts are so persistently present and useful in their respective domains says something about their validity.  They also have a lot in common in terms of the endeavors they describe – temporary, unique, goal-driven, and ultimately about delivering beneficial changes to stakeholders other than the principles.  And just as the monomyth cycle is present in stories ranging from those of Neolithic tribes and the Bible to “Star Wars” and “The Lion King,” so are the basic processes of the PMBOK applicable for projects ranging from construction to product development to IT infrastructure to organizing coverage of the Super Bowl.  They’re both about the common structures of uncommon experiences.

So I’ll continue to argue that the PMBOK doesn’t document a methodology.  But perhaps it does present a common set of themes that will be useful in just about every “unique, temporary endeavor” undertaken with the goal of delivering benefits to stakeholders who aren’t directly participating in the action.  And like Campbell’s monomyth, it will be adapted based on the circumstances, goals, and needs of the culture using it.  And while a construction project manager wouldn’t be very productive managing a software development project, just as Thor wouldn’t know what to do with a light saber, they’d both understand where they are in their respective cycles.

New project management articles published on the web during the week of September 12 – 18, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Matthew Ferguson is arguing for putting people at the forefront of process design, and uses his friend’s new luxury commuter vehicle as a metaphor for what not to do.
• And Hajar Hamid argues for using process improvement as a learning and coaching opportunity.
• Meanwhile, Derek Huether describes a user-hostile self-service gas pump that takes ten seconds to respond to input and never quite provides the response he was expecting.
• In part two of his series on the five questions PM’s must ask, Glen Alleman addresses the question, “What does done look like?”
• Meanwhile, Ted Hardy is extolling “the Cult of Done,” although he’s having problems spelling “manifesto.”
• Peter Saddington reports on anti-lean, anti-Agile startup Yottaa (pronounced like the Jedi Master), which is started as global organization.  Intriguing …
• Even Johanna Rothman is saying that Agile is not a silver bullet.  Egad – is a giant asteroid heading this way?
• Todd Williams says a project manager’s job is to deliver value.  He even has a formula for “value,” although one variable is labeled “inquantifiables.”
• George Huhn is advocating use of Monte Carlo estimating techniques to predict project portfolio value.  The hard part is getting your stakeholders to accept probability distributions as an improvement over a single number that won’t be correct.
• Elizabeth Harrin explores (and debunks) the seven reasons project managers fail to use agendas.
• Leadership coach Glenn Gutek says, “All leadership begins with ‘self-leadership.”  Or as Grace Slick put it, “Lead yourself – you deserve it.”
• John Reiling sees the possibility for unity in the recent 9/11 commemoration ceremonies, and asks how diverse (and unified) are your project teams?
• Bruce Benson shares an anecdote on communication, compliance, and inadvertent clicks to porn sites.

Enjoy!