PM Stories: High-Risk Advocating

I was managing a project to produce a web-based application for use during a scheduled training event at a client’s site. On one side was my sponsor that was extremely eager to launch. On the other side were developers trying to create code for complex business rules. As my team struggled to get the application to behave as required, they became concerned about their ability to complete and test in time for the event. My sponsor and team were at odds over the project schedule and became adamant that their respective interests be accommodated.

As project manager, I needed to address two contradicting positions. First, my team needed to feel that their concern about the deadline was taken seriously. An unheard attitude of “we’re not going to meet the deadline” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn’t want us to subconsciously undermine efforts to succeed in order to prove that our predictions were right. My team needed to be confident that I was communicating the schedule risk appropriately.

Second, I wanted our sponsor to be confident that every effort was being made. If I simply informed them that we were projecting a schedule overrun, the sponsor would likely have implemented their own strategies to meet the date - completely understandable even if it was a long shot. I communicated status using a blend of progress (what we’ve done) with a qualitative assessment of its impact on schedule risk. Next, I laid out our forecast (what we’ll do), again with prediction of risk impact.

In the end, we didn’t launch at the scheduled event (you thought I was going to claim success?). In a way though, we were successful. The development team had flown to the client site, and both sponsor and team felt that all efforts had been made to meet the deadline. The sponsor was not caught by surprise because they had been kept up-to-date concerning risks all along. Eight hours before the event, the sponsor rescheduled the planned launch, perhaps not thrilled, but satisfied with the team’s commitment to the sponsor’s goal. Everyone ended up on the same page.

Moral: A project manager’s ability to advocate for both sponsor and team makes it possible for those with differing interests to work toward a common goal.

PM Views: Chaos in Project HR

Finance, Operations, Strategy, R&D, Marketing & Sales, HR, Technology. These are the functional pillars of organizations. I've wandered through the consulting landscape of these areas in both project and non-project organizations, and I have found HR to be far and away the most broken. The ancillary 'personnel administration' aspects of the discipline are fine - things like records and rules are handled as well as anything else in organizations. But the core value that HR can offer - leadership in the getting and keeping of the right people - is abysmal in the vast majority of organizations I've encountered.
Why would this be? The talent management folks I've met are just like other parts of the organization. There are enough inspiring, capable individuals sprinkled among the discipline that it should be possible to do better. Maybe the size of the failure hints at the complexity of the challenge? Think about this:

• There is reasonable evidence that 'superior' work performance can be predicted (though not perfectly) based on a combination of raw mental horsepower coupled with a set of about 20 competencies (e.g., results orientation, resourcefulness, ...). Personality tests may not predict work performance so well, but can provide clues about related factors such as whether your Einstein will show up or not.
• The overwhelming majority of recruitment and selection processes in organizations focus on education, experience, and technical knowledge. The predictive ability of these factors is much weaker than competencies.

It's amazing how often I hear HR staff claim that they need a project manager with knowledge of 'System X' because they need to be able to talk to the programmers on the team. I may be way off base here, but that sounds like a communication competency, not a technical one. I've managed many a project (successfully) where I didn't understand the ins-and-outs of the technology, but I could pick up on when one of my team was concerned about something. In fact, thinking back to my project management failures, it has been on projects where I understood the content deeply - perhaps to the point where I took my eye off the management ball.

So why is HR talent management so completely focused on the wrong things? Competencies are extremely intricate and challenging to assess. It's also expensive, though not as expensive as making the wrong choice for your organization. Experience and technical knowledge assessment on the other hand can be automated (or as I like to say, 'commoditized'). And during high-supply economies like 2009, the push to emphasize throughput over value is even stronger. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are simply missing the best individual faster ... and it peels dollars you don't see right off your top line.