CHAPTER 8
Future Issues, Career Management, and Thoughts on People Issues

Future trends related to people issues and leadership have important implications for project managers. Within this context, as a project manager you need to make conscious efforts to improve your performance and actively manage your career. Also, paying attention to the basic qualities of what it means to be a person can enrich your role as a project leader as you and your team members grapple with the many people challenges you face in today’s complex world of project management.

FUTURE ISSUES AND CHALLENGES IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The profession of project management continues to grow and change at a rapid pace. Professional organizations like the Project Management Institute (PMI®) are experiencing double-digit growth rates, with new chapters being formed on a regular basis.

The growth and sophistication of project management are also evident in a number of other forms. PMI®’s publication, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), has been approved by the American National Standards Institute as an American National Standard. PMI®’s Project Management Professional Certification Program has attained certification from the International Organization for Standardization.

As the profession of project management grows, so do its challenges. The challenges that face project managers are enormous—do it yesterday, do more, finish faster, and use fewer resources. Rapid change seems to be the only constant on projects. As DeCarlo noted (1997), “If you think you’re stretched thin now, just wait.”

Within this context of rapid growth and change, there are several techniques the project manager can use to improve his or her people skills and thus team performance.

IMPROVING YOUR PERFORMANCE AS A PROJECT MANAGER

The practices of the project manager are at the heart of any successful project. Repeatable, successful projects come from good processes and from project managers who continue to learn and improve their personal practices. O’Neill (1999) noted that people in project management typically spend less than 30 percent of their time on high-priority, value-adding activities. Instead, most of their time is spent coordinating initiatives and working with others—that is, solving people problems. With such a high percentage of time being spent on people issues, it is crucial for every project manager to craft his or her own personal improvement plan.

Crafting a Personal Improvement Plan

In working to create a personal improvement program, the first step is to establish a baseline of your own level of people skills knowledge and competency (Levin 1999).

Assess and document your best and worst performance on projects, with an emphasis on the people skills you used in each case. Note those aspects of your performance that you believed would work well but failed. Also note other situations where you believed that you would not succeed but were in fact successful. These observations will serve as the baseline that will enable you, going forward, to recognize whether your performance is improving or remaining static.

The next step is to define and establish a personal process that you can follow as you perform your project work. The purpose of a process is to describe your intentions, which must meet your needs and help guide your work. Focus on the aspects and areas you can control and influence, as well as on productive activities that add value rather than on circumstances over which you lack control. As DeCarlo (1997) stated, “The next century will put a premium on back to basics… challenging us to redirect our energies to focus on those things that are within our power to change. The fact is that we can’t change the competitive scene, the course of globalization, or projects that will become increasingly complex.”

Establish objective performance criteria for yourself, and compare your own goals with the goals of your manager, your organization, and your customers.

Measure, analyze, and improve your work processes by evaluating the accuracy and effectiveness of your personal plans and processes, making adjustments as necessary. Defining, measuring, and tracking work provide insight into your performance, especially in the area of developing people skills (Humphrey 1995).

However, you should recognize that even with the best intentions, a detailed plan, and a process, some problems will arise. Do not be embarrassed by mistakes you make. Analyze your mistakes and accept responsibility for them. Think proactively and set measurable goals.

Personal improvement can also be viewed from the perspectives of self-mastery and control.

Getting By Is Not Good Enough

Frame (1999) believes that one of the two or three most significant issues facing organizations today is competence. In the past, getting by was acceptable; today, getting by is a prescription for failure. Individuals must strive to be superlative.

Cashman (as quoted in LaBarre 1999) offers a similar point on the need to pursue personal growth when he states, “Too many people separate the act of leadership from the leader. They see leadership as something they do, rather than as an expression of who they are.” To be more effective in our people skills with others, we must be more effective with ourselves. This means making a commitment to your own personal growth.

IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF TEAM MEMBERS

As you work on improving yourself and your own people skills, you will also be assisting your team members in developing their skills. As you mentor team members (see Chapter 2), you will find yourself offering assistance in helping them grow in many subtle and indirect ways.

Become a Guide

The project manager must serve as the team members’ guide in the project world. Individuals on your team should understand the big picture of the project and should have a clear understanding of how project success is defined. As project manager, it is your job to “guide” your team to this understanding, through the application of your people skills.

Create a Team Culture of Success

Success must be central to the team culture (Skulmoski and Levin 2001). One method of building such a culture is to structure activities in a way that makes early successes possible. Early successes will help build a winning attitude and set the direction of the project. This effort can help people overcome their fears that this particular project simply cannot be successful. With the habit of success established early in the project, team members will be motivated to continue toward success.

Foster the habit of success by completing a milestone soon so that you can use it to celebrate success with your project team.

For example, reconfigure a deliverable so that a portion of it can be completed early in your project.

CAREER MANAGEMENT FOR THE PROJECT MANAGER

It’s your career: What are you doing to manage it?

As a project manager, your career may be just beginning, and you may be enjoying the challenges of developing team leadership skills. Or, you may be in the middle of your career, having had some success but not certain what activities you want to experience over the rest of your career. Or, your career may be fully evolved and you may be curious about what professional activities you could assemble for an active retirement.

Regardless of your current career stage, you must take responsibility for the direction of your career; no one else can do that for you. Even if you are currently working under a benevolent mentor, you may come to work one Monday and discover that your mentor has been terminated or has decided to leave the company. Only you can really be responsible for your future.

The following are six rules for career management and an alternative possibility for a project management career path.

Rule #1: Actively Consider What You Want to Do

The significance of this career rule becomes evident when you listen closely to people who are considering career changes. Many times, professionals say that they never really set a direction for their career. Things just happened.

When you do not take the time to create a system to consider what you really want to do, a situation may develop in which:

• You achieve professional success but never attain personal satisfaction and happiness

• Your current path reaches a dead end, with no alternatives in sight

• Organizational change (merger or downsizing) takes place, and you are caught with no strategy for career survival.

The best way to know what to do with your career is to know who you are. Knowing yourself is frequently the result of placing yourself in situations that provide opportunities for formal or informal self-assessment.

Examples of formal self-assessment experiences include career interest and personal style assessments. Consulting psychologists who are skilled in the interface of personality assessment and career planning often use these instruments to help individuals develop their people skills. Traditionally, these consulting psychologists employ tests that measure:

• Personality and personal style

• Work and career values

• Interest and skill measures.

Depending on the size of your company or organization, you may have a consulting psychologist in the organizational development group or the human resources department. Some project managers value the opportunity to undergo the assessment process with a psychologist who is also employed by the company, believing that this person is intimately aware of career issues within that company. Other project managers, however, prefer to consult privately with an outside psychologist, believing this person will bring a more objective view and perspective to the assessment experience.

Informal, more casual, self-assessment experiences can be equally valuable. These methods are also directed at helping you gain clear information about your personality, your interests, and your values, but do not involve taking “tests.”

Rule #2: Network, Network, Network!

A professional network is a group of people who have knowledge of you or the trends within your profession. Creating a vibrant and active professional network before you need it is a major ingredient in active career management.

Most professional jobs come from leads generated through professional networks. When you want to make some type of career change or transition in the future, a professional network can be an invaluable resource.

There are many tangible ways to develop a professional network. Techniques you can use include:

• Call peers on a periodic basis to find out what is occurring in their professional lives.

• Send selected articles to people who have unique interests.

• Set a goal of meeting three new people at the next professional conference you attend.

• When you receive a promotion or take a new position, inform people in your network of your new activities.

• Create your own personal “board of directors,” which is a loose association of people you know who can get together periodically (perhaps over a meal) to advise and guide you through the process of career planning and decision making.

Rule #3: The Higher You Go, the More It Becomes a Matter of Chemistry

As you move to higher and higher levels within an organization, the more that chemistry between people helps further success. You cannot guarantee good chemistry between you and a key executive, but you can work on creating the people skills that give you the capability to experience the chemistry. Good chemistry between people takes place when at least one of the two people has sophisticated people skills.

Closely related to good chemistry is the concept of successfully managing upward toward your functional manager, project sponsor, and other executives. The project manager who can successfully manage upward is able to:

• Understand the needs of his or her manager

• Achieve goals consistent with these needs

• Find appropriate ways to inform the manager about successes and actions in achieving these goals.

For example, if you have a random encounter with an executive or a sponsor, such as in the cafeteria or on the elevator, you should have available a prepared a two-minute summary about your current project. This summary should be in the form of a “sound bite” to discuss rather than simply “small talk.” Search for other opportunities to give presentations about your project that will keep internal stakeholders informed.

Rule #4: Keep Your Résumé Current and Active

Any professional in today’s fluid work environment should have a résumé that is up to date and polished. Even when you are not currently in the job-search mode, having a current résumé keeps you sharp with regard to recording your accomplishments and prepares you to be interviewed should the ideal job come along unexpectedly.

Make your résumé results-oriented, telling the reader not just what you did (such as “served as project manager for software development”) but what you achieved (such as “decreased software turnaround time by an average of 13 percent per project”).

Rule #5: Put Your Personal References in Order

An effort related to creating and maintaining an active, vibrant network is identifying people to serve as your professional references. As with your network, your references should be developed and nurtured well in advance of when you will need them. Do not wait until the interviewer asks you for your list of references; that may be too late.

Once you have a potential job in mind, you need to “qualify” your references. This process involves talking with them about what they expect to say about you regarding the specific job that you are seeking. Tell them what you think the interviewer would want to know about you. Also, tell them something about the specific job and the company that you are pursuing so that they can tailor their comments accordingly.

Rule #6: Create Your Two-Minute Introduction

As you begin to inform the outside world about your interest in finding a new position, you should be able to tell your story concisely, in about two minutes. A two-minute introduction is the “speech” that you would give to someone who meets you at a conference and asks you to tell them who you are and what you want to do.

Allocate your time wisely when presenting your two-minute introduction. A good rule of thumb is to use about one minute to describe your past and your previous accomplishments and the other minute to describe what you want to do in the future.

The two-minute introduction, tailored to the specific interests and needs of the listener, is designed to quickly and forcefully give the listener the picture of you as an achiever and as someone who is excited and competent to pursue the next venture. You need not specify a particular job when giving a two-minute introduction, but you do need to provide as many details as you can about the setting, the duties, and the role that you want to assume in your next position.

Consider a Portfolio Career

Trends in the workplace have led to the creation of a new way of working—the portfolio career. This type of career can be ideally suited for the project management professional.

A portfolio career is a career in which the individual is involved in a number of professional activities at one time, conducted under the banner of self-employment. In essence, the professional manages a “portfolio” holding the various career activities.

Portfolio careers can be exciting for the professional who wants to be involved in a variety of activities and believes that it is not realistic to expect to find a traditional salaried position in which these varied interests will all be satisfied.

Portfolio careers are not for everyone, as they have much more variability than salaried positions. In considering a portfolio career, keep in mind that to be suited for such a career, you should:

• Be able to tolerate a lack of predictable structure

• Be comfortable with periods of intense activity followed by periods of minimal activity

• Feel comfortable in an entrepreneurial environment in which you must constantly be pursuing business development efforts.

Some people find it helpful to move gradually from a salaried career to a portfolio career. This gradual move could start with the salaried person teaching a class in the evenings, followed by a shift to part-time salaried work, and then the garnering of the first consulting contract.

THOUGHTS ABOUT PEOPLE

When all is said and done, your biggest challenge as a project manager is dealing successfully with people—people determine your successes and your failures. To work effectively with people, you need to also consider general changes in society.

Tapsott (1998) writes about what to expect with the upcoming generations that come of age in a digital culture. He describes this digitally based culture as one in which people will:

• Exhibit intellectual independence and the need for free expression

• Desire innovation, inclusion, and diversity

• Be motivated by an immediacy in experiences and the acquisition of knowledge.

As a project manager, you should continue to develop the people skills that will enable you to keep up with these evolutionary changes regarding what it means to be a person in this era dominated by technological advancement. The primary people skills that you should continually hone in the digital age are the abilities to:

• Be a persuasive communicator, leading through influence as opposed to directives

• Embrace intellectual and cultural diversity without feeling threatened

• Find ways to comfortably accept the fact that younger team members may know more than you will in terms of current technology and may even be paid more based on their knowledge and skills.

Change is Taking Place, but Do Not Forget the Constants

We all agree that people are changing as a result of rapid developments in the digital world.

However, as a project manager, you should also consider and be aware of the particular aspects of being human that do not change over time. These conditions of being human are often referred to as the existential components of being alive. Although these components do not surface in an obvious form on a day-to-day basis within a project team, they continually affect team member decisions and behavior.

These components will also affect you as the project manager. Your sensitivity to these aspects of being human can help you:

• Have a broader perspective on what makes up a person, including his or her decisions, actions, and sources of motivation

• Find more enjoyment and satisfaction in your work with people, because you can see your efforts and the efforts of others in a much broader context.

Existential Givens of Being a Person

The basic conditions of being human that are often grouped under the heading “existential givens of living” are the conditions of finding meaning in life, how one comes to grips with the condition of isolation, and the unavoidable finitude of life.

Finding Meaning in Life

One of the basic challenges facing any person is creating a personal meaning or purpose in life. The challenge, as we grow and develop, is to define a personal meaning for our individual existence.

But what does this need to construct our own personal meaning in life have to do with project management?

In today’s world, people are increasingly defining meaning in life as a function of professional and career identity. The concept of “who we are” becomes intricately related to our job description or our profession.

As a project manager, it is important to remember that:

• Each individual strives for his or her own meaning in life, occasionally in ways that may be unacceptable to you.

• You should look closely to find the individual’s contribution; the glass really is half full.

From a purely selfish perspective, remember that the more you can understand about someone’s approach to finding meaning in life and then give them assignments compatible with that approach, the more successful you will be as a project manager.

Coming to Grips with Isolation

Even the most socially active person experiences, on some level, a sense of isolation and aloneness.

What is this aloneness? It is the fact that no one can ever really know what you are feeling or thinking, regardless of how intent you are in communicating with them. You can try to tell them, but words ultimately cannot bridge this aloneness.

What does this aloneness have to do with project management?

For starters, individuals may choose to work as team members as a means of reducing isolation and aloneness. Sharing a common purpose and developing a common identity can contribute to an individual’s interest in working with others on teams. Many find a fundamental comfort in having an identity that reaches beyond their identity as individuals.

As a project manager, do not underestimate the power that the team has in reducing the experience of individual isolation. Treat the formation of “the team” and the ongoing treatment of the team with honor, respect, and care. For both you and your team members, the team is more than simply a vehicle for accomplishing a task. Treat the need for this connectedness with respect and care.

Managing Beginnings and Endings

Projects and people have one basic quality in common: both have a beginning and an ending.

Many of us manage our anxiety about our ultimate demise by becoming very active in our work. This is not necessarily bad. In essence, work becomes a medium through which we can create testimonials to our time on earth, establishing concrete representations of our labors and our achievements that will remain after we are gone.

Work can be an effective means to come to grips with the fact that our life span is limited; this in part explains why people will work outrageous hours or put up with nasty bosses or co-workers. We want to leave this life with some marks of achievement, something that will outlast us.

Because we want to leave testimonials to our lives via our work, we work hard, sometimes too hard. As a project manager, it is important for you to realize that each of your team members wants to leave his or her testimonial through their work; this need surfaces on some level over the course of each project.

PARTING THOUGHTS

The role of project manager is special. It goes beyond the specifics of shepherding a project to completion. You influence the lives of people who are looking to you for guidance, and you affect the vibrancy, level of excellence, and future capabilities of your company or organization.

Try using the tools and approaches presented in this book. Above all, remember that solving people issues requires that you use your people skills as an artist would use his or her skills: practice, experiment, integrate, and trust your intuition. Project management can be a highly rewarding position on both the professional and personal levels.