Projects must end; otherwise they’re Programs

There is a lot confusion about the difference between Project Management and Program Management. Project Management is a fairly well established field with several competent authorities offering accreditations that are increasingly recognized by industry. On the other hand, Program Management is a much less established field primarily existing in very large organizations running multiple concurrent complex projects. There are some accreditations for Program Management and these are slowly evolving into recognizable designations in industry.

In my career I’ve run several large projects. At one point I was managing two large multi-million dollar projects that ran concurrently. At this point a Program Manager was instated to attend to the larger issues of both projects as they related to corporate governance. This falls in line with fundamental difference between Project and Program Management. Let’s explore the fundamental difference by starting with some simple definitions.

Definitions

Project Management is concerned with the completion of specific objectives within a finite well-defined time frame.

Program Management is concerned with aligning the objectives of multiple projects with each other and, in some cases, to those of the corporation at large and often is an ongoing concern with no defined ending time frame.

With these simple definitions in mind, project managers need to work towards the completion of well defined tasks. Accordingly, all projects should have a plan; a written, documented plan. This plan should be shared with stakeholders. If a project is worth doing, worth your time and effort or, more importantly, other people’s effort or corporate resources, one should write up a project plan. If the scope of the project is relatively small, then the project plan can be commensurately brief. It may comprise nothing more than a visual timeline with brief notes. Complex projects should have a more suitably comprehensive project plan.

It’s important to document any project plan for several reasons:

1) Project status briefing: Projects require regular updates to be provided to stakeholders. Having a project plan will manage stakeholders’ expectations. Additionally, it provides a baseline to establish and measure the continuing progress and ultimate success of the project.

2) Schedule end date: Projects must end, period. Resources are assigned, effort is gauged, goals are documented, and outcomes defined—all bounded and definitively constrained by a hard calendar date and documented for all to see in the project plan.

Conclusion

If there is no end date planned and scheduled then either it’s a Program—which can be ongoing by definition—or, more likely, you will be wasting time and effort.

Make a project plan, define an end date and work smartly towards success.

 

Coaching minor league hockey — or how I learned to step up and be counted

Ten. Ten years old. That’s how old he was the day my son came up to me and announced, “I want to be on a real hockey team”. We had played knee hockey with mini sticks for years. Then he upgraded to road hockey and every year we added a new piece of protective goalie equipment. But now we faced a significant commitment in ice hockey.

I spent a frantic summer perusing used hockey gear shops, acquiring items through flaky Kijiji sellers and finding some sales on new gear. Ultimately the effort yielded a reasonably functional first set of hockey equipment for both goalie and player. The goalies additionally act as players when another goalie is taking their turn in nets. Every year we would again replace a few items that were too worn or, more frequently, too small.

After the first year of sitting in the stands cheering him on, I found myself intrigued by the coaching system. So it was off to the local police station to get the compulsory police check and then the full day Speak Out training course through the hockey association. I then signed up as a volunteer parent for his team. We were in need of a team trainer so next was certification for Trainer Level I then Trainer Level II. Before I knew it, I was on the bench for games and on the ice for practices as an assistant coach.

It all happened rather naturally as I was funneled though a system that thrived on eager parent volunteers. The simple act of standing up and being counted followed by some demonstrations of knowledge and an ability to lead, landed me in a leadership position for a team that comprised more than a dozen boisterous teenagers. Often more challenging than the boys themselves, were the more than two dozen affiliated hockey parents who frequently presented their emphatic opinions in subtle demonstration of their vicariousness.

I learned to adapt to the new locker room environment. I occasionally was even able to demonstrate some hockey prowess to a crowd of teens who could skate circles around me all day. Most importantly I had to navigate the politics of minor hockey league parents.

For the kids it was life lessons about teamwork, being on time, listening to directions, getting along, time management balancing school, family and hockey and staying in shape. For me it was leadership lessons in corralling the distracted, frequently disinterested team and managing the politics of vociferous parents.

Life takes you to funny places and is always ready to teach you a lesson. My coaching experience comes from an unexpected surprising situation. As an added bonus to this serendipitous leadership experience, I got to connect with my son in a way that never would’ve happened from up in the stands.

Leadership how-to: disparate personnel? employ personal connections

In my career I’ve often found myself in the position of providing leadership to a team of people with greatly varying personalities and expertise. In this position you cannot expect to lead by having all the answers—you will typically have members on your team that know considerably more about their area of expertise than you do. Anyone can be managed, but building effective teams takes more than this. How, then, do you provide leadership when you’re not the “know-it-all”? How do you garner the respect necessary to effectively lead?

Sometimes
it’s easy

When leading teams, sometimes I’ve had the good fortune to work with like-minded individuals with similar backgrounds. Such is the case right now where I’m leading a team of global Sales Engineers—professional engineers with backgrounds much like mine. In this case it’s relatively easy to connect with my team members at a direct work-related level. I’m personally familiar with the challenges facing my team and can apply my experience and leadership skills to provide direct guidance. While this makes the challenge of leading somewhat easier, you still need to earn their respect, which can be more complicated when your basic skill set is not greatly different from the team’s. It’s important to focus on building meaningful relationships based upon mutual professional respect.

Sometimes
it takes more work

One of the more challenging leadership roles I’ve had is leading a team of both professional engineers and engineering technologists. In this case, you need to manage these very different team members very differently. You need to step into their shoes and be able to understand how things look from their point of view. The metaphor may be cliché but illustrates my experience that an empathetic leadership methodology is a critical professional leadership competency. It is also required for effective consultative selling—a subject I’ve already written about frequently in this blog.

Sometimes
it’s downright challenging

One of the most challenging leadership roles I’ve handled is that of project manager in large, multi-company international projects, interfacing with people of wildly varying backgrounds and expertise. As project manager, you don’t have the luxury of an organizational chart to establish your leadership responsibility. Your name won’t appear in a box near the top of the chart with an impressive title clearly demonstrating your authority.

Instead you’ll have all the responsibility but not enough of the authority. Furthermore, you can expect to matrix-manage team members with areas of expertise entirely different from your own, such as: finance, production, detailed engineering design. This calls for a different strategy, seeking out common ground for building strong working relationships.

A
personal connection
can help

A particular member of one of my previous teams was a pure scientist. He was extremely technically knowledgeable in the theory and application of advanced RF modulation. He was also a particularly eccentric individual. I was struggling to find common ground, professional or personal, upon which to build a relationship. With a bit of probing he told me he had a Yamaha RD350 motorcycle. I had a Honda 650 Nighthawk motorcycle. He built his own speakers and owned a pair of venerable Wharfedale speakers. I built my own speakers and subwoofers and owned a pair of venerable Klipsch speakers. Many conversations ensued about motorcycles and stereo speakers. These simple commonalities served to form a solid basis for our relationship which evolved into mutual respect and, ultimately, more effective leadership to get project objectives accomplished.

Conclusion

Successful leadership can be accomplished with numerous techniques. My consultative selling, project management and team management experiences have demonstrated to me time and time again that the player-coach leadership style—and building relationships based on empathy and personal connections—are powerful tools in any leadership arsenal for managing teams.

The Latte Huddle—leadership with socialized efficiency

Methods to improve productivity, innovation and morale are continually sought by high performing companies. Sometimes enterprising employees are forthcoming with ideas to enhance one or more of these. More frequently, a company hires a management consulting firm, they inform about industry best practices or new trends, and these methods are implemented internally.

One method of promoting productivity and innovation is enabling “water cooler” discussions. Incidental encounters of personnel from different departments can lead to innovative discussions and foster team building. Additionally it may lead to problem solving solutions not otherwise possible with the limited interaction scope of colleagues who normally work together. Steve Jobs obsessed about office layout attempting as much as possible to enable these “serendipitous encounters“. He made overt design choices, such as bathroom placement, to maximize personnel cross-pollination.

Another method, the “morning huddle“, or “stand-up meeting”, really gained popularity a few years ago. Some companies took it very seriously and instituted it across the board. Like many popular management styles, such trends are not typically new ideas—usually they are merely rediscovered concepts perhaps applied to a different sector of industry. So it is with the huddle. Its origins may stem from Scrum or some other agile development practice. Despite having origins decades ago, it exploded into popularity a couple of years ago, was widely implemented but seems to have quickly diminished in popularity over the past few years.

The waning of its popularity is a shame. There is a lot of value in having these concise, small group meetings in any high productivity multifaceted organization. They serve to align priorities, bubble up problems for immediate action, promote communications and enhance team building. The key is to keep them efficient. Take lengthy subjects offline and always focus on just two or three key elements for the huddle, e.g. brief summary of tasks for the day, identify obstacles, communicate priorities, socialize corporate vision/strategy.

I instituted daily huddles with my Sales Engineering group when it was entirely located at one physical location, headquarters in Ottawa. Since then I have successfully diversified my team into a globally based, in-region team which has necessitated a change in how I effect group leadership. Back in the heyday of headquarter-centric Sales Engineering, I conducted a daily mid-morning huddle but…

I took a slightly different tack—I conducted these while to–ing and fro–ing a local Starbucks. We took turns buying the lattes. These huddles were short and effective. They served to align priorities and address concerns before they became unmanageable. Hosting them off-site, in the privacy of a vehicle, encouraged open frank discussions without fear of being overheard.

The whole daily ritual took no more than twenty minutes. It was very sociable and highly effective. However, it raised a new problem that required an inventive solution: how to determine who’s turn it is to pay for the lattes! A long time ago, when my group was just two of us, it was relatively easy to remember. When I hired a third member into my group, it quickly became a challenge to remember the order of who previously paid so as to ascertain who’s turn it was to pay at the present huddle.

Necessity being the mother of invention, we put our heads together and came up with a unique solution to this problem. We applied our engineering expertise and acumen to the problem and devised a web application to track who paid when.

After burning the midnight oil a few times, the web server and application was up and running. With access from our ubiquitous smart phones, we were able to start logging who paid for the lattes. It also automatically calculated who had paid the least overall and suggested that individual user as the next one to pay.

I learned a lot about web servers, SQL databases, HTML5 and PHP as result of this hands-on development experience. I even made a native Blackberry 10 mobile app to access it.

The Latte Huddle—simple, social, geeky and effective. Consider adding one to your leadership regimen. You’ll be amazed how adding the element of relationship building to an efficient work-related huddle yields employee effectiveness.