Manage-Wise

Seven mantras for project managers

This guide is the result of more than two decades of project experience, most of it in the domain of IT services. Over the years, I have had opportunities of leading numerous large projects for Fortune 500 clients as well as small-sized IT projects of different types. Based on my learning, I have put together an approach to deal with challenges in the soft track of project management.

Throughout the world, most project managers would agree that despite established processes on project management, several issues keep recurring as challenges. These challenges arise out of both the hard track and the soft track. However, the established processes largely deal with hard-track issues.

The issues in the soft track are largely unmanaged. The project manager continues to face challenges as the perception of stakeholders keeps changing. Although these issues may appear minor, they snowball into major problems in project delivery and lead to stakeholder dissatisfaction, ultimately affecting the business relationship with the customer.

How should a project manager deal with the challenges in the soft track? What is the solution to these issues arising out of uncontrolled vulnerabilities? How does one steer projects to success amidst uncertainties, when most of the established project managers processes and practices deal largely with certainties? What should project managers do to continually convert uncertainties into certainties, thereby minimising the risks?

These were some of the questions I sought answers for as a project manager. While we have a great deal of shared learning and wisdom available on the process front (e.g. ISO, SEI-CMM), there is indeed a shortage of ready reference to deal with challenges of the soft track in project management.

In this guide, I present an innovative solution for dealing with soft-track issues, abstracted to a level of simplicity that can be applied straight away. The value proposition is encapsulated as ‘Seven Mantras for a Successful Project Manager’. When these seven mantras become a part of the project manager’s thought process, they yield (dynamically) a set of action points that help minimize uncertainties.

The seven mantras for a successful project manager, which form the core of this guide, are as follows:

• Foreseeing the bigger picture
• Investing in customer and team education
• Information seeding
• Perception management
• Learning to say a ‘Positive NO/Conditional YES’
• Steering the comfort levels
• Thinking $ for stakeholders

The seven mantras, when applied iteratively during the project, will help the project manager steer a smoother delivery, leading to a win-win situation and stakeholder delight. My suggestion to project managers would be to dwell upon these mantras and apply the relevant one in context.

Why did I think of seven? I found that in most cases steering could be accomplished if we think through these seven points. Though some of the mantras may appear similar at an initial glance, I have found it useful to refer to them separately.

Roll-out plan in a large organisation

The road to sustained excellence and growth is challenging, especially in IT services organisations that are large. The sheer size, complexity in structure, and human factors pose difficulties in nurturing excellence.

One of the ways of achieving excellence is to equip project managers with hands-on skills and enable them to learn from their colleagues. An important aspect of this is to provide an innovative platform to document and share experiences. Thus began the Fixed Bid Project Management initiative using the ‘Snowballing’ methodology at a leading IT services company.

The initiative set out with a series of workshops for Project Managers (PMs) across various locations. The workshop focused not only on how to manage fixed bid projects but also on how to cultivate relationships through smoother execution of projects using the seven mantras. The aim was to bring about a paradigm shift in project management by ensuring better customer relations and project success.

Under the Snowballing methodology, every PM who underwent training in the workshop was required to disseminate learning to three other PMs/PLs of his choice. Based on their learning and experience, the PM was also required to submit three real-life case studies or illustrations. These were added to the repository of live examples of challenges faced during the execution of Fixed Bid projects. Both these requirements were made mandatory for the certification process and had to be completed within ten days of attending the session.

This initiative made a tremendous positive impact across 22 business unit accounts, 1,000 PMs, four geographies (India, US, UK and the Asia-Pacific region). It also generated more than 1,000 real-life illustrations applying FBPM within six months and was proliferated using the Snowballing methodology, to increase profitability and improve delivery. The advantage with Snowballing was that no single person invested too much time and yet they gained experience and learnt from the noteworthy practices of several hundred project managers. The best 100 illustrations from the lot have been handpicked to cater to project managers in the form of this book.

The illustrations, presented in a short and easy-to-assimilate format, explain how project teams steered projects to success in an entrepreneurial manner while delighting stakeholders. It provides an understanding of how to achieve successful outcomes in a faster, cheaper, larger and consistent manner.

Common vulnerabilities

Every project has its share of challenging situations or vulnerabilities. A project manager or project leader would have faced these vulnerabilities either through multiple instances in the same project, or through a single instance in multiple projects.

Some of the vulnerabilities often faced in projects are as follows:

• Scope creep: The customer adds changes on to the signed-off requirements instead of categorising them as change requests.
• Shared development: This situation arises when the customer and abpmcorp are both working on the same piece of code. Neither of the parties shares the changes that each has incorporated. This causes a lot of confusion and calls for re-work.
• New domain: This challenge arises when the domain in which the project needs to be executed is new, or when abpmcorp does not have enough experience in the new domain.
• New technology: The project that is being executed may be the first of its kind or may involve a new technology. Hence, trained resources may not be available or the metrics or data available may not be adequate.
• Software or hardware infrastructure: This challenge is due to software licenses not being available on time or hardware infrastructure being inadequate. This results in the project team having to work with temporary infrastructure, leading to a sub-optimal solution.
• Resource skills: Often, the rapid growth rates in this industry leads to challenges in availability of the right kind of resources or a balanced team composition, at the right time.
• Incorrect estimates: One of the most common challenges faced by the project team is incorrect proposal estimates. This may arise due to inadequate project experience or error in taking analogous inputs from a similar domain.
• Tight schedules: The project team is most often challenged by the customer schedule being inflexible, due to other dependencies that the customer may need to meet.

Excerpt from ‘Steering Project Success’ by Madhavan S Rao. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
Price: Rs 450. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com