Effective IT Project Management: I Know It When I See It

IT Project Management seems to be one of the more difficult, etherial roles to pin down and define – there are as many best practices and traits for success as there are people offering those opinions.

Certainly the PMO training, certifications and an understanding (and use) of standard PM methodologies are important, but in many cases there doesn’t seem to be a high correlation between formal training received and actual effectiveness on the ground. Many of my peers have commented on the large “standard deviation” in PM effectiveness on their own teams, and we’ve all heard the reports of 25% – 50% failure rates for IT projects, not a great statistic.

I‘ve had the good fortune to work with many excellent project managers over the years, but was never easily able to articulate those traits that separated out the really effective ones from the rest. I am thinking of a popular old quote from a 1964 Supreme Court case, in what was surely an uncomfortable day of trying to define what “obscenity” was (with pictures), Justice Potter Stewart said:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it “

So what is it that makes for a truly effective project manager? A search of the consulting and project management sites yields a lot of good ideas, including:

The Basics – It’s all in getting the project basics right, including items such as clarity of roles and responsibilities, communication plans, project documents, the diligent use of the chosen methodology and the reporting process to management and stakeholders.

Level of Oversight – The trick is in determining the appropriate closeness with which to track the developers and other project participants, hands-on versus hands-off. Do they know what they are doing? If so, leave them alone and let them create their best work, if not, watch them like a hawk.

More Business Focus – The key is to focus heavily on the “business side”, including the minimum number of business executives you’ll want to have as sponsors on any project, and measuring your progress against their expectations for delivery, rather than any IT-focused measures commonly found in the project documents.

Scope Planning – If you can successfully manage scope and keep it from getting away from you, then you have indeed cracked the code, and everything else should fall into place.

Defining Success – Figure out what success looks like, and measure yourself constantly against that goal, utilizing your tools and methodologies only as means to that end, rather than deliverables in themselves. You don’t deliver projects, or project documents; you deliver solutions to your customers.

Learning From Failures – Spend an appropriate amount of time on the back-end of each project, particularly those that don’t meet expectations in some way, to determine what went wrong. Establish a feedback loop to incorporate those learnings into future initiatives, customizing the approach for your team and the organization you work within.

Being Flexible – The tools are just the starting point to support the project; you’ll need to figure out what is required for each initiative, whether it is more business involvement, swapping out resources, tweaks to your development methodology or other changes to make it successful.

Focusing on Challenges – Spend the bulk of your energy on identifying and moving through the challenges the team is facing in real-time. Global Knowledge has a good post that suggests:

“When the team is together, routinely and continually find out what the barriers are.
Simply ask:
• What’s working well on this project?
• What’s getting in our way?
• What can we be doing differently?
• What can I be doing differently?”

…and then figure out what is needed to move the ball forward. One nit I have with this same post, and a notion that I have seen repeated elsewhere is:

“Most project managers see themselves as primarily score keepers who stay on top of what’s going on. That’s called managing.”

There are perhaps too many individuals who focus solely on score keeping and reporting while viewing this as “managing” a project. Managing includes all of the above capabilities, and especially pushing through challenges. Without that, its a Project Coordinator role (not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Both roles are valuable, but lets be clear about the differences. A lot of trouble arises when a leader thinks she has assigned a Project Manager to an important initiative, and immediately begins to have project statistics “punted” back at her, with an expectation that she will step in to see what the issues are and find a way to get things back on track.  This can lead to an uncomfortable “…you must not understand, THIS IS WHAT I HIRED YOU FOR..” conversation.

What the above list suggests to me is that the Project Management role overlaps many of the traits valuable in any senior leader:

• A great set of skills brought to the table (tools), and the confidence to leverage them
• Always fits the approach to the situation at hand
• Understands that methodologies are only a starting point
• Comfortable in multiple roles (motivator, drill-sergeant, analyst, facilitator, salesperson)
• Does not shirk from challenges, but rather seeks them out to be eliminated
• Endlessly resourceful, does not give up easily
• Takes real ownership, seeking to solve as many challenges as possible before passing an issue on to others, or up the chain of command

I have always thought of the project management track as an excellent place to source future leaders, because of the breadth of challenges faced and capabilities required. I feel strongly that this is a role where great talent should be rewarded as such, and that we should fight the tendency to gravitate toward the mean in compensation.

I’m interested in your thoughts or additions to this list. Do you have similar expectations of your project managers?

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Tagged as: Program & Project Management