PM Perspectives - Article Listings

Improve your Megaprojects Briefing Process with Collaborative Briefing

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Getting the brief right is crucial to delivering a megaproject on time and on budget.
However, stakeholder participation and engagement, which are crucial to a full understanding of a project and its requirements, are often missing from the briefing process.

Researchers Jacky K.H. Chung of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Mohan M. Kumaraswamy of the University of Hong Kong and Ekambaram Palaneeswaran of Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, have developed a collaborative briefing framework to more easily engage a large group of project stakeholders in the briefing process.

Their framework uses information and communication technology (ICT) to facilitate stakeholder management, which in turn improves project-briefing efficiency and reliability.

The researchers first developed a generic briefing framework for large-scale construction projects and then invited feedback from a focus group of 11 executive-level construction-industry practitioners in Hong Kong.

Their collaborative briefing framework has five core elements:

1) An integrated briefing team that includes a large group of stakeholders categorized into core briefing teams, stakeholder support teams and facilitation teams

2) A collaborative-briefing job plan that describes the approaches, styles, procedures of the briefing process

3) A computer-supported, co-operative work platform. This is an online system that assists and improves the sharing and exchange of project information, ideas and knowledge among team members

4) value-based requirements-processing models. These are computer-based, briefing modeling techniques that help team members to define, translate, analyze and prioritize project requirements

5) Facilitation models. These are computer-based decision-analysis tools that help facilitators to coordinate, manage and motivate discussion between team members in order to build consensus through the co-operative work platform.

The framework introduces the "hybrid briefing method", which supplements face-to-face discussions among the core briefing teams with electronic discussion for the stakeholder support teams.

The researchers found the collaborative briefing framework delivers the following benefits:

•Accurately and transparently identifies key project requirements

•Standardizes jobs tasks, increases productivity and generates a full record of the process

•Promotes stakeholder engagement and assigns appropriate weightings to each stakeholder in order to balance their influence and power in discussions and outcomes

The researchers suggest this hybrid briefing method, using ICT, could maximize the benefits-to-costs ratio of expanding stakeholder engagement in briefing. They also expect the framework will promote accuracy and transparency in identifying and processing project requirements, and more effectively integrate stakeholder contributions.

Source: Chung, J. K. H., Kumaraswamy, M. M. and Palaneeswaran. E. "Improving megaproject briefing through enhanced collaboration with ICT", Automation in Construction, 18:7, November 2009, pp. 966-974.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser University, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK. © Reich, Gemino, Sauer (2012)

Applying Lessons Learned to a Project

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

How often does your organization apply the lessons learned from past projects to new projects?

If you say "rarely", you're not alone. A recent survey of 961 experienced project managers found that although 62 percent had formal procedures for learning lessons from projects, only 12 percent adhered closely to them.

Yet transferring such knowledge from one project to another can offer enormous benefits, says Dr. Blaize Reich, a professor of management information systems at the Segal Graduate School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. "Lessons learned are the vehicle to improve individual and organizational project competency and project success," she says.

That's why she and colleagues Dr. Andrew Gemino of the SFU Faculty of Business Administration, and Dr. Chris Sauer of Saïd Business School at Oxford University, recently interviewed 15 experienced information technology (IT) project managers in New Zealand and North America. They wanted to discover how organizations capture lessons learned and apply them to new projects.

Their findings, however, were discouraging. "Although many tools and processes exist for capturing such information at the end of a project, few organizations bother to use them," says Reich. End-of-project post-mortems were infrequently and inadequately performed. "Project managers cited the usual problems," she says. "A lack of time, key people not available, a culture of blame..." And, as one interviewee noted, "most projects don't have enough budget to support any good closure."

Still, the interviews did yield some best practices and suggestions from the project managers, resulting in two key principles that project teams can use to more easily capture lessons learned:

Project teams should start sharing knowledge at the beginning of each project
Lessons learned should be captured when they occur, not later

"These two principles work together," says Reich. "The first sets a tone of active learning by involving team members in reflective thinking and asking them to pool ideas. The second suggests some timing and techniques to formalize this learning."

Continuous Learning, From the Beginning

The researchers recommend using a skilled facilitator to lead the initial knowledge-sharing discussion. A good facilitator will encourage people to express their fears and past failures as well as their successes and creative ideas. This information can then inform planning and risk management for the current project. "By not censoring ideas and views, the project manager can deliberately encourage a culture of learning and speaking the truth," says Reich.

Since most project managers are under pressure to get a project underway quickly and demonstrate early progress, Reich says it's important to incorporate the initial knowledge-sharing meeting into normal planning practices, perhaps during the creation of the risk register or during a methodology acceptance meeting or a regular project planning meeting. All members of the project team should be involved, she says, including the client and sponsor, where possible.

Capture Lessons Learned When They Occur

"Abandon the idea that comprehensive lessons learned can be produced at the end of a project," counsels Reich. Instead, develop a culture, a methodology and tools for creating project logs, then refine these as the project proceeds. This repository of team memory can be used to document critical decisions and train new team members. It will also form the basis for a "lessons learned" document at the end of the project. Individual project managers can each create their own log or a project office could create one all-encompassing log.

The researchers recommend making entries in the project log at several key points in a project:

At the end of each major phase - as hand-over notes for the next group, noting areas of concern, decisions still to be made, etc.
Whenever key decisions are made or changed - to document rationale
Whenever key targets or deliverables change - to identify why this happened, what was decided and whether follow-on work is needed

"Project logs are useful for making decisions and rationales available to the entire team," notes Reich. As project phases are debriefed and documented, the team will gain in confidence and cohesiveness. The logs also remove the pressure at project's end to document lessons learned. Says one survey respondent, "All you have to do is go back and synthesize the log and boom, you've got it."

Finally, say the researchers, don't forget to mine the project log for ideas to incorporate into project methodologies.

Source: Reich, B.H. "Managing Knowledge and Learning in IT Projects - A Conceptual Framework and Guidelines for Practice", Project Management Journal, 38:2, June 2007, pp. 5-17. (Winner, Best Paper of 2007 from PMJ.)

© Reich, Gemino, Sauer (2007)

This article was reposted in 2013 with minor typographic corrections.

Study links good leaders to successful projects

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

While good leadership must have something to do with successful projects, it's surprising how few studies have examined this correlation.

A new study from the United Kingdom however, finds that there is a statistically significant relationship between the two, and pinpoints the leadership dimensions that most influence a project's success.

Researchers Linda Geoghegan of Electronic Data Systems and Professor Victor Dulewicz of the Henley Business School at the University of Reading hope that organizations can exploit this knowledge to improve project outcomes.

Using a project-success questionnaire and a leadership-dimensions questionnaire, the researchers set out to examine leadership in a large U.K. company. In all, 52 respondents (81 percent of the company's project managers) completed both questionnaires.

The researchers divided their study into two groups. They administered leadership dimensions questionnaire (LDQ) to project managers who had worked on projects with budgets greater than £350,000 and gave a project-success questionnaire (PSQ) to project sponsors for projects of a similar size.

The PSQ comprised two key themes: the project and the client, covering 12 common measures of success, such as whether the project was completed on time and on budget, project performance, client satisfaction and the project's impact on organizational effectiveness.

Leadership traits on the LDQ included seven emotional competencies, five managerial competencies, and three intellectual competencies. Of these 15 possible leadership factors, the researchers found that eight had an impact on project management success:

Critical analysis
Self-awareness
Sensitivity
Influencing
Motivation
Manage resources
Empowering
Developing

The researchers compared the results of both questionnaires, looking for correlations between satisfactory project outcomes and good leadership.

Interestingly, they discovered that project managers scored higher than the norm for leadership traits related to conscientiousness, sensitivity and self-awareness. The researchers suggest that these high scores may result from the project managers' exposure to leadership activities such as influencing difficult stakeholders and their need to obtain commitment from senior management in order to move their projects forward.

The project managers scored relatively lower on vision, strategic perspective and achieving, with the vision score being statistically significantly lower than the norm. The researchers suggest that the project managers scored poorly in this area because they are never involved in setting an organization's vision but instead focus on implementing projects that fulfill a pre-defined vision.

Overall, the research reveals several leadership dimensions that contribute to successful projects. The most significant dimensions were managing resources, empowering, developing and motivating. For example, project managers who rated highly for ‘solving problems' on the PSQ also demonstrated leadership strengths in empowering and developing their colleagues, were able to manage resources efficiently and effectively and were also highly motivated. Surprisingly, these project managers did not score highly on critical analysis, although the overall survey group did score well in this area when compared to the norm.

There was also a significant correlation between the leadership dimensions that measured the ability to manage resources, empower and bring a project in on budget. "This is not surprising considering the relationship between managing resources and managing the budget," says Geoghegan.

She and Dulewicz say their research clearly demonstrates that leadership dimensions that are directly linked to successful projects should be the focus of project manager training.

"It's important that senior management are aware that leadership competencies do have an impact on the personnel with whom they work and ultimately, on the success of their change programs," says Dulewicz. He suggests that project leaders could be selected based on their leadership profile as measured by a proven questionnaire such as the Leadership Dimensions Questionnaire (LDQ).

Because the research study involved relatively few respondents and just one company, the researchers say further and broader studies must be undertaken before transferring any relationships between leadership dimensions and project success to other industries.

Source: Geoghegan, L. and Dulewicz, V. "Do Project Managers' Leadership Competencies Contribute to Project Success?", Project Management Journal, 39:4, December 2008, pp. 58-67.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser niversity, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

© Reich, Gemino, Sauer (2010)

New Roles for the Consultant Project Manager

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

There's a new trend evolving in external project management and it isn't for the faint-of-heart.

Increasingly, companies are relying on consultant project managers to not only deliver their tougher information technology (IT) projects but to help realize value for money.

A recent study focusing on this trend finds that external project managers are moving beyond their traditional responsibilities to fulfill three additional roles: account manager, surrogate sponsor and profession leader.

Researchers Blaize Horner Reich of the Segal Graduate School of Business at Simon Fraser University, Canada and Chris Sauer of the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, England, interviewed 25 senior consultant project managers in the USA, Canada and the UK who had managed transformational IT projects.

The researchers discovered that external project managers are often asked to take on account management responsibilities because the client develops a stronger relationship with them than with the appointed account manager. They also become surrogate sponsors when the business sponsor is unwilling or unable to support a project. And they assume the role of profession leader because it assists in developing the supplier's reputation in project management. "Ability to juggle these roles over time," notes Reich, "enhances the external project manager's long-term career success."

Traditionally, account managers within a supplier firm act as the principal point of contact for the client: to manage the relationship, develop sales and take responsibility for client satisfaction. Today, says Reich, "external project managers are taking on aspects of this role in four ways: they're winning initial business, maintaining the relationship with the client, selling follow-on business and managing profitability."

To fulfill this role, external project managers must acquire sales skills to create situations in which clients want to buy new projects or follow-on work.

The researchers also learned that as projects become critical to executives' fulfilment of their role, external project managers will often take on client responsibilities including standing in for the sponsor at executive management or board meetings to sell the business case and report progress on the sponsor's behalf. Often the project manager coaches the sponsor on his or her role. In extreme cases, the project manager may take over all of the sponsor's responsibilities.

Fulfilling the surrogate sponsor role, says Reich, requires both generic business knowledge and specific knowledge of the client's business. "The external project manager has to rapidly build a network within the client organization that will keep them apprised of internal information and help them access the power structure so that they can stand in when necessary," she says.

The third role expected of external project managers is that of profession leader. As they become more senior, they are expected to be more visible, produce more knowledge and act as a role model. They need a broader perspective, says Reich, in order to demonstrate thought leadership and to demonstrate the supplier's ability to handle more ambitious challenges.

So how can external project managers cope with these new roles and responsibilities? Reich and Sauer acknowledge that IT project managers, who typically come from a technical background, are not always equipped to play executive and entrepreneurial roles. Still, they say, by crafting a long-term self-development plan, junior project managers should be able to take on increasing responsibility and visibility within the firm, the client and the profession.

Here are their recommendations for education:

Take a sales course. Learn how to influence the client as well as identify and seize opportunities.
Take an MBA or other general business program. If you don't understand topics such as marketing, finance, strategy and human resources, you can't take part in discussions about project benefits.
Take a public-speaking course or join associations such as Toastmasters. Become confident at making compelling points in meetings or as a featured speaker.
Take a negotiation course. Learn to negotiate from interests and create win-win solutions.
Take a coaching course. Learn how to understand and inspire great performance in others.

Reich and Sauer also make recommendations for action:

On long-term projects, take every opportunity to learn more about the strategy, financials and competitive position of the client.
Focus your career on an industry vertical and become deeply knowledgeable about this sector through personal research, attending industry meetings and joining professional associations.
Develop a networking plan within the client organization. Get to know the key individuals and the up-and-comers - their goals and constraints, their history and aspirations.
Establish your leadership within the profession. Reflect on your projects and develop lessons from them. Take opportunities to share these ideas by speaking or writing.

Source: Reich, B.H. and Sauer, C. "Roles of the External IT Project Manager", Communications of the ACM, 53:5, May 2010, pp.126-129.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser niversity, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

© Reich, Gemino, Sauer (2008)

New Research on Effecting Change in the Organization

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist

This quote is equally true in business. The difficulty, however, is in knowing how closely to integrate your change team with your organization to achieve change that works.

While successful change should always be tied to an organization's business strategy, researchers Paivi Lehtonen and Miia Martinsuo of the Helsinki University of Technology wondered about the most effective route to change. Should change programs and projects be closely aligned to the parent organization so that they will be more easily accepted and implemented? Or will this hamper the change team's freedom to effect radical change?

To find out, Lehtonen and Martinsuo studied two major organizational change programs to identify the different ways in which they were integrated into their parent organizations and the different management practices that kept them distinct from these organizations-referred to as boundary-management practices. Their research involved almost two dozen interviews with senior program staff and executives at a public-sector and a private-sector organization.

They discovered that while both organizations used similar integration mechanisms, they differed in their levels of integration. For example, both used boundary-management activities such as information scouting, boundary shaping, and ambassadorial and protecting activities, but they used them to different effect.

Information scouting involves active entry into the parent organization to gather as much information as possible relevant to the change program. This could involve pre-design workshops to understand current practice satisfaction surveys or requests for suggestions for improvement.

Boundary shaping involves choosing areas in which to involve and integrate the parent organization. For example, deciding which parts of a change program will use leaders from the line and which will be the responsibility of the project team. Or deciding when to use planning tools commonly used in the parent organization and when to use project-specific tools.

Ambassadorial and protecting activities are partly in tension. Ambassadorial activities promote the change initiative and its benefits to key stakeholders including sponsors, line managers and the proposed end users. Protecting activities keep the program safe from the parent organization's or stakeholders' premature criticism and attack. For example, the projects may decide to release new ideas and concepts only when they are sufficiently developed and when they will be best received by the parent organization.

The researchers found there are three types of activities required to effectively integrate a change program into the parent organization:

A. Integration activities: These bind the change program and its constituent projects into the parent organization. These activities relate to formal, higher-lever decisions about organizing and managing the organization's connections. The researchers observed four integration mechanisms:

1. Organizational structures and formal control mechanisms. For example, steering groups, management groups and reporting procedures.

2. Human resources mechanisms: strategic decisions related to recruitment, location and work-time.

3. Establishment of links between the program's goals and content and the organization's strategic goals, business processes, supportive functions, daily activities, and other projects. This provides requirements and channels for communication and collaboration.

4. Implementation of the same methods and procedures used in the wider organization. For example, using organizational project-management models as well as existing planning tools, document templates and communication channels.

B. Boundary-management activities: These define and protect the change program's distinct existence and autonomy. These activities include creating legitimacy via ambassadorial activities, defining responsibilities and collaborations, information scouting and negotiating, ensuring continuity, and guarding and isolating the program from external disturbances.

C. Isolation activities: These go further than boundary- management activities and assert the change program's separateness from the parent organization. These necessary activities co-exist with, and complement, integration. They prevent program-related issues from getting out of the program, and block external influences from disrupting the program.

"Learning to use such activities skillfully is a key requirement for change-program managers," says Lehtonen. "For example, change-program managers who are skilled at using isolative activities can protect the emerging program and reserve time for building momentum and readiness for change."

The researchers also found three distinct contextual factors that can affect integration and boundary-management activities:

1. factors related to the organization's unique characteristics,
2. factors stemming from the nature of the change programs, and
3. individual-level factors based on the characteristics of a program's key actors.

The secret to implementing a change program successfully, say the researchers, involves understanding how and when to use integration mechanisms, and how far to exploit integration dynamics, boundary management and isolation. Their research results suggest that integration should not only be examined from the change program's viewpoint, but is also something that the parent organization may enable or prohibit.

While the researchers don't give a definitive answer on how integrated a change program should be, they do feel their research raises issues that executives and program managers should consider as they think about the challenges of integrating or isolating their change program.

SOURCE:

Lehtonen, P. and Martinsuo, M. "Integrating the change program with the parent organization", International Journal of Project Management 27:2, Feb 2009, pp. 154-165.

Paivi Hoverfalt (nee Lehtonen) is project management consultant at Project Institute Finland Ltd. She is finalising her doctoral thesis on the initiation of large-scale change programs. Dr. Miia Martinsuo is professor of industrial management at Tampere University of Technology, Finland.

Sponsors Play a Vital Role in Projects

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Project sponsors don't get much applause-in research literature or on the job. Yet there is convincing evidence that a project's success or failure often relies on top management support.

Researcher Lynn Crawford, of the Lille School of Management in France (ESC Lille) and Bond University, Australia, and her international colleagues recently conducted over 108 interviews relating to 36 projects in five different regions: Australia, China, Europe, North America and South Africa.

The researchers were looking for data that would make sense of-and define-the sponsor's true role. They discovered that project sponsors do play a pivotal role, both in influencing a project's success and overseeing its governance requirements.

"Sponsors are often the critical link between corporate and project governance," says Crawford, "ensuring that governance requirements are met and that projects receive the support they need."

Sponsors act as the bridge between the organization and the project, she says, and must have experience, knowledge, perspective, credibility and authority. They should also be excellent communicators, passionate about their cause and capable of handling ambiguity as well as managing their time and stress levels.

A sponsor's governance role, Crawford and her colleagues say, can be structured around six dimensions:

Governing the project
Taking accountability for business case and benefits
Giving direction and making decisions
Critically reviewing progress
Managing internal and external interfaces
Representing the project to the organization.

The sponsor's support role has four dimensions:

Having credibility and using networking ability
Providing leadership
Maintaining effective relationships
Being available and providing timely support

Some projects, says Crawford, will have a greater emphasis on governance while others will require more support from a sponsor.

Generally, she says, governance will be more important in those projects where there is:

High-risk exposure for the organization if the project fails
Persistent under-performance of the project
Rapidly changing market conditions
Attention drawn to corporate governance(e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley)
Suspected illegal or non-compliant behaviour in the project
Project is mission-critical
Need to realign project to new strategy or organizational context

Projects exhibiting a greater need for support include those where:

The organization fails to provide sufficient resources for the project
Some parts of the parent organization are resisting the project's implementation
Different stakeholders in the parent organization are seeking to impose conflicting requirements on the project
The parent organization is failing to provide the project with decisions necessary to maintain planned progress
The project manager is inexperienced or weak
There are early signs of difficulty within the project, such as a possible shortfall in benefits

The researchers have created a two-by-two model of sponsor roles. This model suggests that:

1) A project with a low need for support or governance can be successful with a guardian sponsor

2) A project with a low need for support and a high need for governance needs a judge

3) A project with a high need for support and a low need for governance needs a mentor

4) A project with high needs for both support and governance needs a Professor Dumbledore - someone wise and powerful.

The bottom line, says Crawford, is that it is a difficult job to be a good project sponsor. As one of her interviewees says:

"You're a bit removed from the detail.... So you have to just spend the time talking to people, trying to understand what they are saying... and that's a real challenge for a sponsor when you've got so many other things to do."

"While the project sponsor role has often been taken for granted, the new emphasis on corporate and project governance is now highlighting the role's importance, as well as its complexity and variability," says Crawford. "We'll continue to examine our data for more information that can synthesize and capture the richness of the sponsor's role and commitment."

Source: Crawford, L., Cooke-Davies, T., Hobbs, B., Labuschagne, L., Remington, K. and Chen, P. "Governance and Support in the Sponsoring of Projects and Programs", proceedings, biennial PMI Research Conference, Warsaw, Poland; July 2008.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser niversity, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

© Reich, Gemino, Sauer (2009)

The Thought-Leader Mindset

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

IT project management is rapidly evolving. Traditional concerns for cost, time and scope are now only one aspect of the job. Corporate expectations are shifting, with a new emphasis on aligning IT project objectives to strategic business benefits.

Suddenly, IT project managers are facing steeper challenges as they scramble to accommodate these new expectations. They have to re-think practice and transform performance. For this, they need a new mindset - and new management practices.

But what kind of a mindset? And what attributes must a project manager have in order to re-think practice and integrate new ideas into a coherent and innovative management approach?

Researcher Chris Sauer from the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, together with Professor Blaize Horner Reich from Simon Fraser University, interviewed 57 experienced and successful project managers from Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and New Zealand. The goal - to understand the mindsets of experienced, senior project managers and distil that information into key principles and personal qualities for advancing IT management practices.

"We focused on how project managers will have to think if they are to adopt an expanded, more sophisticated and ultimately more successful view of project management," explains Sauer.

The interviews, he says, yielded an interesting picture of the industry changes that are driving project managers to re-think practice. These include:

1. Increased emphasis on the strategic and operational importance of IT projects whose success is now directly connected to the success of the business. The result: a greater pressure to focus on value and to continually adapt to keep value in the project cross-hairs.

2. Intensified competition, requiring businesses to respond faster. This implies compressed project schedules to ensure shorter lead times to delivery. Project managers therefore have to innovate to improve project processes.

3. Clients wanting a return on IT investment that is comparable to other investments. They want a better outcome-to-cost performance, which requires project managers to more consciously weigh potential trade-offs in their decisions.

4. Clients recognizing the complexity of IT projects and being more willing to treat project managers as a key player. Project managers therefore have to step up a level.

In short, says Sauer, "project expectations are more ambitious, the job is tougher and delivery requirements are tighter in terms of business value as well as cost and schedule. Together, these drivers require project managers to explore new ways of thinking."

Out of the research data, Sauer noted four key qualities that seem to be guiding thought-leading project managers' approaches to adapting and excelling in a changing environment.

"They all exhibited a clear-sighted realism, an expanded sense of personal responsibility, a long-term perspective extending beyond the limits of their current project and a willingness to let go and trust the professionalism and ability of their team," he says.

From the research data, Sauer identified nine core principles of thought that are shaping advanced thinking among project managers:

Focus on ultimate value. Keep the project focused on what the organization needs to gain when making design and implementation decisions.
Identify at a deep personal level with project goals. There's a new level of personal drive to succeed because the goals are the right ones to pursue.
Invest in trust. Make a significant effort to build trust within the team and across the full range of stakeholders.
Devolve responsibility to the team. Accept that in complex projects, teams and their members are often better placed to make informed decisions.
Adapt continually. Accept that stable project goals and requirements are an unrealistic ideal. Build continual change into project thinking.
Develop people involved in the project. Team members are resources not just for the current project but also for those in the future. Developing their skills can secure their loyalty and future value.
Orient the project to learning. Recognize that the project team rarely knows everything about the project before it starts. Practice building-in and encouraging learning as a normal part of project activity.
Develop creativity and innovation. Increased pressures can make established practices too slow and cumbersome for complex, fast-moving, and adaptive business-critical projects.
Take a pro-active view. Accept no limitations on what must be done to ensure the project progresses.

These nine principles, says Sauer, indicate that IT project management is beginning to evolve.

"It's not easy to apply these principles without running up against established practices," he says. "Project managers have to chart a route that resolves the tensions that exist, for example, between embracing and resisting change; between controlling decisions and empowering the team; and between achieving short-term results and building a solid infrastructure for the future."

Sauer says that businesses need to recruit and develop individuals with both the appropriate mindset and the skills and qualities to fulfill the role even as they re-shape it.

"This new breed will have to find ways of organizing, devolving and discarding work in order to focus where their mindset says they should - on the client, on the big picture and on value," he says.

He recommends using the nine principles for recruiting and selecting forward-thinking IT project managers, as well as for designing training and development programs that can school project managers in the kinds of thinking that will enable them to advance both their own practice and the profession.

Source: Sauer, C. and Reich, B.H. "Rethinking IT Project Management: Evidence of a New Mindset and Its Implications", International Journal of Project Management, 27:2, February 2009, pp. 182-193.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser niversity, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

This article was reposted in 2013 with minor typographic corrections.

IT Projects: Getting Beyond CHAOS

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Over-achieving IT projects? It sounds too good to be true. But new research by Dr. Andrew Gemino of Simon Fraser University completely contradicts those gloomy Standish Group 2006 CHAOS report statistics indicating that two-thirds of IT projects perform poorly or fail and only one-third succeed.

Gemino has just compiled results from a 2003 research survey in which two-thirds of IT projects succeeded and just one-third failed, with several projects actually over-achieving their targets.

The research comprised two independent studies in the U.S. and U.K., in which the researchers examined survey responses from a total of 741 project managers with 15 years or more experience in the IT industry and eight or more years managing projects.

Gemino then used a data-driven clustering method that identified five types of project groups reported in the surveys: abandoned, budget-challenged, schedule-challenged, good performers and star performers.

"The most interesting group we found was the star performers," says Gemino. "These projects over-performed on budget and scope and were present in both studies. We were the first to report this finding."

A new benchmark for success

This new research, says Gemino, suggests that we need a new benchmark for what is reasonably achievable in IT projects. Based on his research, experienced project managers should be able to come within small margins (plus or minus seven per cent) of their budget, schedule and scope targets on at least two out of every three projects.

"IT projects are as likely to over-perform as they are to fail, but we don't seem to hear about over-performing projects" says Gemino. "Failures gather more attention, but our economy's continued investment in IT suggests organizations must be getting good value. The star performers we found provide some justification for this."

Perhaps more importantly, Gemino suggests that some of the attention placed on budget and schedule targets is misplaced. "The Standish Group has focused on hitting scope, schedule and budget targets," explains Gemino. "But how much does this tell us about a project's real performance? We need to place more focus on a project's benefits and business value when we're considering performance. Senior managers need to recognize this and organizations need to focus on creating value through projects."

"Simply hitting budget and target schedules does not mean the project adds value."

Source: Sauer, C., Gemino, A, and Reich, B.H. "Managing Projects for Success: The Impact of Size and Volatility on IT Project Performance", Communications of the ACM, 50:11, Nov. 2007, pp. 79-84.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve project management practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser niversity, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

This article was reposted in 2013 with minor typographic corrections.

Decision-Making in Agile Project Teams

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

In software development project management, it's important to both understand the factors that can negatively influence a project team's decision-making process, and the impact those decisions can have on a project's outcome.

Researchers know that teams using traditional project management methods tend to use a linear decision-making process comprised of:

Problem identification
Solution development
Selection of the best alternative

But researchers Meghann Drury, of Fordham University, New York and Orla McHugh of National University Ireland Galway wondered if teams using the newer agile project management methodology are following the same decision-making practices as teams using traditional project management methods.

Agile teams develop software in short time periods (sprints). There are usually less than 10 members, all of whom make decisions collaboratively. The team structure is flexible and adaptable, with team members interchanging roles to gain new experiences. The project manager is not the decision-maker but more of a facilitator or coordinator.

To investigate how agile project teams make decisions, the researchers conducted 34 interviews and 18 observations across four agile project teams in India, Sweden and Ireland. Two of the teams were co-located, and two were distributed, with members in different countries.

The researchers examined the teams' decision-making during two kinds of agile practices: the Sprint Planning Meeting and the Daily Scrum Meeting:

a) The Sprint Planning Meeting takes place at the start of each ‘sprint' or project segment, during which the team collectively defines and plans tasks to be completed during the next sprint.

b) Daily Scrum Meetings are short, 10- to15-minute daily status meetings, with team members standing. Each member explains what they have accomplished since the previous meeting, what will be completed by the next meeting and any impediments to prevent them from completing current tasks.

Since these agile teams are working to short, tight deadlines, they need to make informed decisions quickly if they are to meet their short-term goals.

Drury and McHugh found that agile teams did not use a rational, linear decision process during the two meetings they studied.

"Decision-making on these agile teams seems a more flexible process that may be akin to naturalistic decision-making where experience drives decision-making," says Drury. "Often, people's experience drives their individual and group decisions and agile teams do not identify and evaluate a series of options, as the linear process outlines."

Drury and McHugh discovered seven factors that prevent agile teams from effectively using the linear decision-making process:

For teams with members in different time zones, timely decision-making is more difficult. As all members are not always available, it is difficult for the team to identify problems and resolve them collaboratively as an agile team.
It's not uncommon for team members to move to different teams mid-sprint, but this affects decision-making since there are not enough full-time members to address the issues and team members cannot complete all tasks determined in the Sprint Planning Meeting. Thus, sprints collapse.
As agile methods recommend customer involvement, when customers are members of the team and attend the Daily Scrum Meetings, they are involved in the decision-making. When the customer is not involved, however, the team must still make quick decisions, which often need to be reversed because they lack initial customer input.
Although agile methods foster team collaboration, when estimating tasks doesn't include input from all team members it is more difficult to arrive at accurate and realistic decisions, which can create delays in delivering the project.
Agile methods aim to motivate individuals in a supported environment, but while agile teams rely on all members to contribute to the decision-making, less experienced members are still less likely to contribute to decisions.
The short but intense two- to three-week sprint cycle increases pressure on teams during both the Sprint Planning Meetings and Daily Scrum Meetings. This can lead to quick and possibly inappropriate decisions that are not made following the linear model, or over- or under-reporting progress on tasks in order to temporarily ease a team member's workload.
Senior developer team members can often dominate decision-making even though agile methods favor daily interaction between developers and business people. Rather than incorporating perspectives from all members, the most experienced member tends to unduly influence the decision.

For all of these reasons, say the researchers, a linear decision-making process seems inappropriate for agile project teams.

One important finding, says McHugh, is that agile project teams are missing key information for decisions because inexperienced members feel their inexperience precludes them from contributing to complex decisions, or because key members have been pulled from a team mid-sprint.

"This suggests that agile methodologies may not be suitable for projects that include a large number of unknown complex tasks," she says. "It's difficult to make informed and accurate decisions in Sprint Planning Meetings when there is a lack of knowledge, because agile teams seem to rely on their knowledge and experience for decisions rather than a linear process."

"We recommend that teams avoid reducing their efforts, as they may have to re-address the issue in the future if solutions aren't properly addressed in sufficient detail," says Drury. "These decisions impact the teams' overall ability to deliver on their goals, especially if over-estimating and under-reporting are regular occurrences. As teams make decisions it is important, from a project manager's perspective, that the team rejects such behaviors and addresses them."

Source: Drury, M. and O. McHugh. "Factors that Influence the Decision-Making Process in Agile Project Teams Using Scrum Practices", Special Interest Group of the Association for Information Systems (SIGIT) for Project Manager, December 2011, I Shanghai, China.

PMPerspectives.org is a website which connects project managers and sponsors with project management researchers. Our mission is to understand and improve projectmanagement practices. The research team comprises Dr. Blaize Horner Reich and Dr. Andrew Gemino from Simon Fraser University, Canada and Dr. Chris Sauer from Oxford University, UK.

This article was reposted in 2013 with minor typographic corrections.

Do Women Perform Better than Men?

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Psst! Have you heard those rumours claiming that women are the best project managers?

It seems there may be some truth to the scuttlebutt. New data examining the impact of gender on project performance, taken from a U.S. survey of experienced project managers, reveals that female PMs significantly outperform their male counterparts in several key areas.

In the survey data, for example, female PMs report abandoning fewer projects and delivering far more projects that perform well or better than expected. They also deliver substantially better results related to delivering projects on budget and on schedule.

On the other hand, male PMs' reports show that they more frequently over-deliver on scope and benefits while female PMs report delivering all and only the benefits expected.

It's important to note that the there was no consistent difference in the size of the projects assigned to males and females (65 weeks' mean duration) according to the survey.

"This means that any difference in performance cannot easily be written off as "women get given easier projects"", says Dr. Chris Sauer, a professor with the Saïd Business School at Oxford University in the U.K. He undertook the survey research with Drs. Blaize Reich and Andrew Gemino of the Segal Graduate School of Business in Vancouver, Canada. Indeed, says Sauer, "the higher average person-month resource effort for female-led projects could be argued to be the most significant indicator of project difficulty, and therefore women not only do better but do so with the tougher projects."

Still, he notes, the differences are not all one way. "The advantage males exhibit in securing business benefits may be more economically significant for their clients than females' lower variances on cost and schedule."

Of course, it's not politically correct to discuss gender differences. But now that the Project Management Perspectives research group has raised the issue, "it is as if this is something the project management community has been subconsciously aware of all along but never talked about."

Anecdotal evidence, for example, seems to support the view that women make better PMs. IBM's award-winning North American project trouble-shooter is female - Sharon Hartung. And Sauer says that whenever his research group discusses gender differences in project outcomes with practitioners, male PMs readily accept the proposition that females may perform better than males. "Almost none argue to the contrary," notes Sauer. "And the women naturally choose not to contradict!"

The research group offers several recommendations based on their survey results:

If you are looking for better all-round project performance against budget, schedule and scope, then appointing an experienced female project manager increases the probability of a good or better outcome.

If minimizing variance against budget and/or schedule is important, then appointing an experienced female increases the probability of achieving this goal.

If maximizing business benefits is more important than considerations of budget and schedule, then appointing an experienced male increases the probability that you will achieve more than was asked for.

This article was reposted in 2013 with minor typographic corrections.

PM Perspectives - Article Listings

Improve your Megaprojects Briefing Process with Collaborative Briefing

Applying Lessons Learned to a Project

Study links good leaders to successful projects

New Roles for the Consultant Project Manager

New Research on Effecting Change in the Organization

Sponsors Play a Vital Role in Projects

The Thought-Leader Mindset

IT Projects: Getting Beyond CHAOS

Decision-Making in Agile Project Teams

Do Women Perform Better than Men?

Improve your Megaprojects Briefing Process with Collaborative Briefing