PMcrunch

There is one thing that you can do on your project or program that can yield the best results for the organization, for your team, and for yourself.  It goes way beyond any project management tools or techniques.  It even goes beyond applying a typical methodology to your project plan.

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What is Project Leadership all about? What constitutes leadership, and how can we measure it? Why is it important to us? These are some questions that arise for me when I think about what I call the “Menund’r'm Conundrum”.

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When we set-up a project team for a new project or if we take over an existing project, we have an opportunity and a responsiblity to create new norms and a new atmosphere in which project team members can flourish.

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I receive weekly “Monday’s LeaderTip” from David Peck, an executive leadership coach. This week he has a survey out there that I thought was quite good, and I recommend taking it if you want to do some introspection on your current status as a leader versus manager.

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As summer nears, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, thoughts of more time off and vacation occur for most of us. As project and program leaders, it is good, for a moment, to reflect and review our perspective on time off, especially in the current business environment.

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I am struck by one common thing called Integration Across Disciplines. I think this is one of the most important concepts in project management, and even more so in program management.

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In most situations on projects, failure simply is not an option. The project or program must succeed one way or another. We need to grapple with whether to do the project on one level; but once that decision has been made, it needs to be executed successfully.

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Many project management positions are just that — positions managing projects. However, many other positions seemingly in project management are much more positions in programmatics. They involve tracking, reporting, working with metrics, and passing information on to decision makers. While, often, there is a need for these functions, there, often, also is not.

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These tough times are different from past recessions in that “visibility is low”. What I mean by that is that it is not just a matter of seeing that sales had declined a certain amount, or that certain costs had reached a certain amount; it is not just that there is a general slimming or pruning of weaker competitors across the board. The problem is that it is very hard to predict with any reasonable level of certainty what is going to happen next and, thus, we find ourselves driving through our challenges “with low visibility”.

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Sunk costs are exactly as the name implies: they are costs that are “sunk”. The money spent is irretrievable. It is gone, history, sunk. However, often there is either a misunderstanding or an emotional attachment to money that was spent. This is a difficulty that we, as forward looking project managers, need to remember.

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