Generalist vs. Specialist

I read a great article in HBR today in which the authors, Wanda T. Wallace and David Creelman, discuss what to do if your leadership role demands dealing with team members who are much greater experts in their domains than you could hope (or have time) to be. The article basically confirms, in a much more elegant way that I would have managed to articulate, my own perspective on how to be a good project manager: A PM should be able to look at the project from a high level perspective, visualize the potential problems that may still be on the horizon, and get together a team of experts in the material to come up with applicable solutions to these problems.

There are four points that the article presents for a generalist project manager:

1. Focus on relationships, not facts,
2. Add value by enabling things to happen, not by doing the work,
3. Practice seeing the detailed picture, not mastering the details, and
4. Rely on "executive presence" to project confidence, not on having all the facts and answers.

In my view, the main objective of good PM should be to be a facilitator for a smooth operation of the project team. Being a facilitator means that you, as a PM, should be able to present a problem to your team of experts in a clear and precise way and have a two way communication going to arrive at the optimum solution. As a PM in your industry you need to be a generalist and be knowledgeable about the broad strokes of what needs to be done so that you may prod holes in your experts' logic and lead them to think about alternative failure modes and scenarios. You do not need to know the ins and outs of the calculations required for finding a solution. You should be able to understand the parameters and limiting conditions that set up the proper execution of, say, a software although its internal runnings, which you may leave to your experts, may be a black box to you. Being a generalist, with an all-encompassing view of the project, is much more important for a PM than being a specialist in a narrow field of application

Being a good facilitator requires a lot of up-front work. This will include a good project execution plan (PEP) so that all stakeholders are clear on the objectives of the project and what will be done (and how) to achieve the stated objectives, a well thought out project schedule to clarify not only the sequence of activities but also the dependencies and conflicts between these activities, and a well defined communication plan so that team members know whom to approach in case conflicts and issues arise.

There are, of course, numerous other issues that a PM will have to take care of in his (or her) day-by-day running of the project but, I am sure, if these three aspects of the project are well taken care of during the planning stages of a project things become much easier to manage during the execution stage of the project, even if the team members are much more of an expert in their areas then he (or she) will ever be!

Parkinson's Law and Scheduling

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British Civil servant, famously said in 1955, "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Or in other words, If you allow for more than enough time for a project the project will still not finish before time. This also happens if  your team is running late and you give them an extension of time - which you might think is more than enough - and they will still feel that there was not enough time for the project.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review tries to explain why this happens. The farther you are from the goal the less important it appears to you, and the less up front effort you expend to get it done. The closer the delivery time comes, the more importance the deadline assumes. Psychologists call it the "the goal looms larger" effect.

In practice this means that if you give your team an extension of time you are just pushing the goal further away, thus once again making it smaller and less important. As the goal recedes, your team loses the motivation to work hard.

How to Plan for the Effects of Parkinson’s Law

The article also suggests a way to minimize the incidence of this effect – (1) don’t ignore the possibility that apparently minor sub tasks may turn into major time sinks, and (2) break up the goal into several smaller sub goals strategically spaced out in time. However, you should keep in mind that there should be consequences for the team if the sub goals are not achieved on time.

Fancy Brain Teasers Do Not Predict Success in a Job

Just ran into this article about Google coming to a conclusion about the [in]famous "brain teasers" method of conducting interviews: Not surprisingly, they found that asking these questions do not show any correlation to the ultimate long term performance of their hires.

I always found the questions to be a bit gimmicky - the most it showed was if the person being interviewed was quick on his feet or not; it didn't say anything about whether the quick thinking was right or not and whether it would lead to the solution. If you look at real life examples you'd find that most successful people are those that keep hammering away at the problem till they achieve a breakthrough. Other than in hand-to-hand combat situations, quick thinking is generally not the most important predictor of future success. Angela Lee Duckworth talked about this in an interesting presentation at TED - her analysis, after years of teaching math to 7th graders, has lead her to believe that it is "grit", and not IQ, that is a more reliable predictor of academic and professional success.

Another finding indicated that a successful hiring is a complete crap shoot! You may interview a person all you want, look at his GPA, talk to people who recommend him - it ultimately comes down what that person wants you, the interviewer, to think of him. You probably need a Master's degree in psychoanalysis to be able to cut through people's presentation to look into their souls and determine whether they'll be successful in your company or not. And even then you'd not be able to predict future circumstances that will influence their performance.

The best way to improve a person's performance depends, to a large extent, on the leader of the group. As I pointed out in another post, an inconsistent leader is a big killer of morale and productivity. Being consistent in your approach to management and instructions will encourage everyone to put their best foot forward, without fearing that you will later change your mind and all their work will come to a naught.
The other, not very surprising, conclusion was the disconnect between performance at school and long term performance in 'real life". Schools, I've believed for a long time, have not been designed to produce risk taking entrepreneurial members of the society. At the graduate school level, in the US at least, this mold is partially broken and people are encouraged think on their own but till you reach that level of schooling you are mostly encouraged to conform with the teacher's expectation - there is only one correct response to a problem and they are the arbiters of what it is!

In any case, I could go on and on on this subject but I'd encourage you to read at least the summarized conclusions and, if you have a bit more time on your hand, the full interview on New Your Times with Laszlo Bock of Google. Let me know your thoughts on the subject in comments either here or on my Google+ page.

Games and Project Management

I have been reading a great book called Game Frame by a young author named Aaron Dignan. Aaron has been a game enthusiast from very early on and his brilliant mind latched on to the fact that real life is not that different from games. After all, all the really effective learning we ever did was while playing games, whether as babies learning to walk, with our parents rewarding us in the form of encouraging praise, as young kids when we learned to share responsibilities in groups of friends, or as grown ups when we learned to channel our energy in sports. So, when we think about  it, it seems to be counter-intuitive how games are viewed by most of us (and our bosses) as almost akin to wasting time and effort when we should be "working".

If you look around yourself carefully you can see how various aspects of your project can be leveraged to take the form of little games that will make it more interesting for your team members as they go about their daily activities. People like to play games because they are fun - use the same techniques at work so that your team members rediscover the fun and joy of performing. Here are a few ways that, I think, you might apply game techniques to your project (some came from the book, some are my own):

• Targets. Human beings are conditioned to go after targets. So, set up a bi-weekly or monthly target (a certain amount of production, a certain number of documents, etc.) and award points based on results. The one who gets the most points in a certain period gets to win a prize.
• Competition. Set up a healthy competition between team members with similar responsibilities. 
• Chance. Most people hate meetings. Include a surprise (snack, small gifts, awards, etc.) at the beginning or at the end of random meetings. You cannot do this on a regular, scheduled basis because the surprises then become something expected and loose their charm.
• Time Pressure. The first one in the door in the morning or the last one out gets to do a fun thing, like exploding a bubble on a bubble calendar.
• Scarcity. Introduce limited number of "time off" tickets that team members may use or trade.
• Puzzles. Break up a picture from the project into a jigsaw and e-mail each member of the team a part of the complete set. Ask them to put the set together into the complete picture. May be use two pictures and create a competition between two teams. May be e-mail the pieces in random bursts to random team members so that a bit of surprise is thrown into the mix.
• Novelty. Try changing the seating plan in the office in a random way every few months. This will introduce new dynamic in the team. Maybe mix up people without regards to seniority. Find the most adequate time frame for doing this!
• Levels. Introduce titles like Apprentice, Maestro and The Grand Poobah of accounting as a person's skill level goes up by dint of practice. Each skill level must be measurable so that people "earn" them as they advance.

There are, according to the book, numerous other aspects of game play that you might like to include in your repertoire to make work a lot more interesting for your team. Let me know what you come up with for each of them. May be I'll write another post on some more ideas I have for these points.

• Social Pressure.
• Teamwork.
• Currency.
• Renewal.
• Forced Decision.
• Data.
• Progress.
• Points.
• Sensation.
• Recognition.
• Status.

While you are thinking about these points, go, get the book from your local library and read through it - I bet you'll be inspired to think up even more applications for your project.

The Gorilla in the Midst

Sometime we, the project managers, get so much into the nitty-gritty of the daily working of our projects that we forget to take the 10,000-feet view of the project.

There is a famous experiment from the seventies that shows what happens when you place too much attention on the details of a project and too little on the big picture view. The experiment goes something like this: There is a group of people tossing balls among themselves. Some of them are wearing white tee shirts and the rest are in black tee shirts. Your job is to count the number of throws that happen between the white tee shirt wearing people only. Go ahead, try it.

So, did you see it?

For some of us, especially for those coming from the roles of supervisors and the executors of the actual activities, getting into the fine details of how each activity should be carried out is almost ingrained in our brains. Whenever we see something that we think is not the right way of doing it, we jump into the fray to correct it. We start giving instructions to the workers on what to do and how to do it. But that, I believe, is not the right way to go about managing your project. Unless you are the only one in the team, you have supervisors and area managers for that level of involvement. Your job is to look at the overall picture and be aware of all the factors that might impact the success of the project.

When you become too involved in the minutiae and the step-by-step details of how tasks should be performed it becomes harder to spot the gorilla (something unexpected) wandering by and either taking advantage of an opportunity or deal with an unforeseen risk.