Author: Alicia Trelles-Duckett

A few weeks ago we held a course on Project Management Fundamentals. Every student introduced themselves; they were all seasoned professionals with 7 years of experience or more in their field. Justine worked for a manufacturing company. Kumar was a software developer. Ann deployed projects for a Cable TV provider. Carlos was a construction manager.

An interesting situation developed when we started discussing what constitutes a project. I asked the students for examples of the types of projects they deployed as part of their work, so I could tailor my stories. The examples were varied of course, as many initiatives can be considered a project. Kumar indicated that sometimes he needed to develop fixes for software bugs; Justine said that sometimes she had stations to install or replace in her manufacturing line. Ann mentioned she needed to plan Cable TV installations for her technicians.

I tried to understand Ann’s project constraints a bit better. Were the installations for new construction? For a group of existing customers? She seemed confused by the attention. The difficulty finally dawned on me when I asked what constituted the beginning and the end for her projects. She answered: “The first and the last day of the month”.

With a bit more discussion we realized that it was a misnomer to call her role a ‘project manager’, as her responsibility was an operation, not a project. Although she planned and assigned technicians and equipment for a whole month the effort never ended, it never ended. Similar to ‘payroll’ for example. She was astonished that neither she nor her management had realized this before. Her job planning, yes, but it never ended, which projects must.

Why is the differentiation important? Because one would optimize efforts that have a distinct beginning and end (projects) in a totally different way from efforts which are continuous and sustain the organization (operations). Everything from staffing to funding would be done considering different priorities and goals. Although Ann stayed in the class, I saw her on the last day signing on to a ‘logistics’ course.

The 21st century has brought a great increase in projects with companies in the growing economies of Brasil, Russia, India and China (for which Goldman Sachs coined the acronym of “BRIC” countries). There is no denying that, with the emphasis of multinationals in fulfilling the demands of those growing middle classes, many project managers can expect to perform projects with team members from those countries sooner or later.

A good friend recently was asked to go to Shenzhen to manage a project for his company’s Chinese business partner. As any good international traveler would do, my friend Fareed did as much research as possible before going to China. He read plenty of books on Chinese culture and customs; he got a Chinese cookbook; he even rented Chinese movies in Mandarin (with subtitles in English of course).

All this research yielded the following picture: the Chinese are a hard-working, collectivistic society. They are quite accepting of people in power and are highly contextual (which means that they take their cues from the situation more readily than from what is written).

I saw Fareed after his trip and asked him how the trip, and the project, had gone. “Great” he said “but instead of highly collectivistic I found everyone in China to be highly individualistic”. Based on his research, he had gone expecting people to act based on what was best for their group. Yet, everyone from the local builder, developer, driver, even the secretary took initiative and performed tasks depending on what was best for them, not necessarily their company. That came as a surprise.

We chatted about it at some length and finally arrived at the following conclusions, which we will apply to our future projects: (1) although a highly collectivistic culture in the past, given recent economic and other liberalization, Chinese culture may be changing from highly to moderately collectivistic. Maybe some day they will become an individualistic culture, much like the American or the Australian. And (2) whatever ideas you may have about another culture, even when based on research or experience, be ready to toss them out the window, as cultures are alive and constantly changing.

A good friend who shall remain anonymous deploys projects for a large IT organization. Recently, as often happens, our conversation strayed into “work” topics. This time the subject became her Program Management Office, or PMO, with which she was greatly annoyed.

“The volumes and volumes of reporting and paper my PMO demands have become completely unwieldy ”… “What’s worse is that, after all the hours the different measurements, trackers, logs and reports take nobody looks at them, much less management!” It appears Line of Business managers were now asking for reports additional to PMO reporting so they would be relevant, thereby increasing time demands on project managers.

It was not always like this. When the PMO first came into being in that company, about a decade ago, it was well received and immediately successful. Projects back then were just “stuff that needed doing”. No standards, no templates, no regular reports. Some project managers were more skillful than others, and they got better promotions. But with the PMO, all projects began to be more successful. Common reporting began. Tracking progress began. Unsuccessful projects were reshaped or cancelled. A few years later unfortunately, PMO demands had snowballed , and many new rules for projects had questionable value.

Last year, for example, their PMO had issued the mandate that the time units for all projects had to be “days”. Any project artifacts not in “days”, had to be edited and re-published using “days”. Every estimate, every schedule, going back a year. The reason was that the PMO felt it was pivotal to link all project schedules such that they could be rolled-up into one grand, “master schedule” for the whole company. My friend was aghast. “Hundreds of [obviously unpaid] hours required of project managers to retrofit project documentation, and for what?” … “Show me a single management decision that was made or changed from rolling up these collective schedules. Does any manager even look at these rolled-up figures…? She had a point.

So it is critical that management in our PMOs remain vigilant. It is important that they stay relevant and engaged, so they don’t take the PMO in questionable directions. PMOs are a natural source of change in the organization. If they cannot effectively introduce important changes, who will? Here are a few recommendations for PMO management:

Identify And Rank Problem Areas

The PMO and its management should be able to articulate at any given point which are the company’s pain points they are solving. What areas in their projects need improvement? What is their ranking? Is it profitability? Is it resource utilization? Then introduce new changes slowly, careful of correlating them with expected business benefits everyone (or at least senior management) considers strategic .

Seek Feedback From Experienced PMs

More managers could take advantage of the knowledge their more experienced resources have. Who better to evaluate what works or does not work in projects than the people who have been deploying them for customers, for years? All too often a good solution has been crafted by those in the front lines, but the problem remains unresolved because no one has asked those with first-hand knowledge what a good approach might be.

Retire Tools That Do Not Work

Finally, PMO management needs to be courageous enough to alter, or retire altogether, tools that are not producing expected business benefits. Maybe the tools take too long to deploy. Maybe they place additional hours of burden on project managers. Implementing a project is tricky enough, so let us try to not give project managers, additionally, the PMO Blues.

In this ever shrinking business world, it is not uncommon to deploy a project with colleagues from different countries, with cultures different from our own. We can even implement a project in our own country and easily have stakeholders, say, from India, China, Mexico, Canada. Each one will bring different points of view, dependent on their upbringing and experiences (read ‘culture’). So it is a great business advantage to have project managers who are able to navigate these different cultures, and not end up in the difficulties Mrs. Muddle finds herself in.

Mrs. Muddle is a very capable technical project manager from Ohio, where she still lives. She has a science degree from a major US university and, because all her projects finish on time and on-budget, Management has chosen her to lead the expansion of key manufacturing equipment in their US and in their Asian (South Korea and Vietnam) locations.

After a kick-off meeting in person and a scope definition workshop, Mrs Muddle wanted to publish some ground rules for the ongoing status meetings. She had noticed that the Asian project managers −Mr. Moon-ki from South Korea and Mr. Chuyen from Vietnam− brought to the meetings no less than half a dozen colleagues. She therefore issued the rule that, henceforth, only the project managers should attend the status meetings.

Her edict was met with shock and discomfort in the Asian teams. Mr. Moon-ki informed Mrs. Muddle that he absolutely did not have the delegation from his management team to commit the company to any decision whatsoever. Mr. Chuyen made very clear that since the project required tasks from finance, engineering, IT and other disciplines, he could not agree to anything on their behalf. Mrs. Muddle tried to make her colleagues see reason, indicating that it was more efficient to deal with just one person than casts of thousands. She was confused as to why such a reasonable rule would make her colleagues angry.

What she failed to recognize is that South Korean and Vietnamese cultures are highly collectivistic, and that these gentlemen were unwilling to make any moves that would upset the peace of “the group”. In some societies, like the USA and Canada, being “individualistic” is a desirable trait. But in many parts of the world, the interests of “the group” do take precedence over the needs of “the individual”. Mrs. Muddle was astonished when her manager called her. Seems like they needed to schedule an apology meeting with the Asian subsidiaries…

As inevitably happens at the beginning of a new year, with all the thoughts about resolutions, a few colleagues and acquaintances have been examining their jobs and careers.

Some are considering entirely new fields, like the lady who is considering leaving her IT job to open a hip Bakery because bread has always been her passion. Or the chap who is thinking about turning his corporate strategy expertise into strategy for a non-profit organization. While I was considering these various cases, along came a friend with her own dilemma. Let’s call her ‘Maria’.

Maria is the office manager for a small business and, as is often the case with small businesses, did so much more than just managing the office. She fixed problems with unhappy customers. She coordinated travel schedules. She orchestrated salesmen’s (and equipment) participation in trade shows. She even oversaw the installation of their first automated payroll system.

A few weeks ago Maria mentioned that there was an opening for ‘Event Planning Coordinator’ which she considered her dream job. Lots of travel and interesting events of all kinds. No way would they consider an Office Manager for that position, she thought.

I told her in truth she was not an Office Manager, but a Project Manager. And events were just a different flavor of project: They had a distinct beginning and an end; they required her to stick to a budget; they meant coordination of resources; often they needed change management.

Maria saw the parallels too, and filled her job application describing her projects as events. She was complimented for being such a well-rounded candidate (after coordinating a payroll migration, a trade show in Las Vegas should be easy!) and got the job.

So really, Project Managers can be successful in any field that requires the deployment of limited resources for a specific end, with a prescribed amount of time and money. Including not-so-obvious fields such as Cruise Director, Wedding Planner and Disaster Relief Coordinator. Now, I wonder if I can come up with parallels between managing projects and a Bakery…