Matthew Kelly found out he had cancer aged 35 and started re-evaluating what was really important. Off Balance is the result. It’s a book about work-life balance, but it’s not the normal time management stuff.

Kelly frowns on the modern-day culture of individualism, hedonism and minimalism. He proposes instead that you strive to become the best possible version of yourself, live a virtuous life, and exercise self-control. He asks whether we actually want work-life balance.  What is the best way for you to live? Isn’t personal and professional satisfaction a better goal?

Kelly writes:

“The desire to get what we want is usually tied much more to a pleasure principle than it is to any lasting satisfaction. Too often pleasure and satisfaction are confused. Many people approach the work-life balance quest in the same way… Work-life balance, work-life effectiveness, personal and professional satisfaction – or whatever you choose to call it – is not an entitlement or benefit. Your company cannot give it to you. You have to create it for yourself.”

Basically, Kelly’s philosophy is to stop being a victim and sort yourself out.

Prioritise for balance

Kelly did some research for Off Balance and found out that people at work generally knew who were the ‘work-life balance champions’ in the office. It turned out that these people worked 9 hours more per week than the others. But they were also more satisfied. They knew why they came to work every day and it wasn’t for the work itself. It was because of the hopes and dreams they had for themselves in their life beyond work.

Kelly recommends that you identify your priorities and your values, and create your balanced life around those.

“Without clarity around what matters most, without a clear value and priority structure, that we can commit to, our lives tend to get kidnapped by the urgent,” he writes. “By this I simply mean that we give attention and intention to whatever is most urgent.” And as anyone who has ever done a time management course will know, what is urgent is not always important.

Adding courage to leadership

Overall, this book was not was I was expecting and unless you are prepared to seriously rethink your approach to life at a significant level, it will not help you find a better balance. It is not designed for quick fixes; it’s for people who have reached a crossroads. There are no short-term, practical tips. While I know now that the book wasn’t supposed to provide any, I still found it disappointing.

However, it did make one impression on me. I have written before about my four pillars of leadership: openness, honesty, trust, and integrity. Now I think I should add courage to those. Kelly writes:

“If there is one thing that modern managing is lacking in spades, it is managerial courage: the courage to outline your expectations, to regularly inspect what you expect, and to hold people accountable to excellence. The process can be outlined easily enough. Managers will agree how important it is to succeed. But few actually do it with any regularity. Why? It requires real energy to outline what you expect. It takes energy to inspect what you expect… Managerial courage requires energy, and most managers are tired all the time. They are just trying to survive. And fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

How far ahead do you plan?

The final chapter looks at the timeframes we use to plan and guide our experiences. If you have ever written a to do list for a particular day, you are probably like me and over-estimate what you can realistically expect to achieve.

Kelly points out that over-estimating how much we can do in a day happens frequently, but that we underestimate how much we can do in an decade. Think back to ten years ago. Did you ever imagine that this is how your live would be? Kelly believes that we should think more strategically about life, as we do projects and programmes.

I found this book philosophical and I didn’t really enjoy it. Perhaps that’s because I’m not serious about changing my life. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t take time to reflect on the many questions.

I did reflect on one line from the book, though, where Kelly compares slicing and eating cake to creating a balanced life: “The lives we want to live are built one slice at a time,” he writes.

What sort of slices are you preparing for your life?

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

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This short series is looking at coaching in a project management environment. Today, I’m reviewing The Project Management Coaching Workbook by Susanne Madsen (Management Concepts, 2011).

“It is not your ability to manage tasks and resources that will set you apart,” writes Susanne Madsen in her new book, The Project Management Coaching Workbook. “It is your ability to manage relationships and lead the team to success through your vision and engagement. As much as knowledge matters, it is your drive, confidence, and attitude that will really help you get your projects over the finishing line.”

Madsen has written a unique and practical book aimed at project managers who want to perfect their craft and those in the role of coach to project managers. You can use the checklists and exercises to assess yourself and improve your skills. If you work with others in a coaching role, this workbook could form the basis of your coaching interventions.

6 Steps for self-coaching

Madsen outlines six steps for you to work through as part of a self-coaching exercise:

1. Create your vision
2. Benchmark current skills
3. Get feedback
4. Create an action plan
5. Review guiding practices
6. Review progress

The book aims to guide you through these six steps so that you can be your own coach, identifying where you are not as proficient and helping you work on these areas.  A large part of this is establishing where you are starting from, which requires both self-assessment and feedback from your colleagues.

Using feedback for improving skills

It is very much a workbook and there are spider diagrams to fill in about each project management dimension, including time management, quality management and stakeholder management, amongst others. This first exercise will give you a personal rating against 80 project management skill areas, so you can quickly see where your strong and weak points are.

You then repeat the exercise with customers, your manager and team members, so you have a complete picture of perceptions of your performance, all of which can be recorded in the workbook, although you will probably want to photocopy the pages so you can get feedback from multiple people. At this point you can identify where you want to dedicate time for improvement. Or, if you are using Madsen’s book as the basis for coaching one of your project team, you can use this assessment to discuss with them their potential areas for improvement.

Keep going for success

Madsen writes:

“One of the differences between ordinary and successful people is that successful people do not give up when presented with an obstacle or challenge. They pick themselves up, get to the root cause of the issue, and change their approach accordingly. Successful people come across as many roadblocks as everyone else, but instead of giving in and blaming others, they change their approach and do something about the situation. They are proactive and keep trying new ways.”

She suggests forming a support group of project managers to act as a day-to-day sounding board. This could be useful, especially if you do’t have a formal coach or mentor and are using her book to develop yourself. If you don’t have a real-life network in your company, you could join external groups like the APM or the project management organisation in your area. You could also tap in to networks online like LinkedIn groups and Gantthead.

As well as providing the framework and forms for a coaching assessment, Madsen also included hints and tips to help you improve in certain areas. I particularly enjoyed the advice about making sure that you know what red, amber green actually mean, so that your reports are meaningful.

Although I am biased towards books that use the Oxford comma, overall I thought this was a structured, useful book. I would like to see the worksheet pages available as a digital download as once you have written in the boxes and completed the spider diagrams you will find it difficult to use again when you come to reassess you skills in a year or so. In the absence of that, make sure you take a photocopy of the workbook pages before you write on them, so if you want to review your progress and reassess yourself, you can.

That continual reassessment is important. “Keep looking inward, reassess what you really, really want to achieve as a project manager and do’t let anything deter you from reaching your goals,” she writes. “Be the best you can in everything that you do, and you will set a great example for others to follow.”

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2. Focus on Coaching: Susanne Madsen on the power of questions This short series is looking at coaching in a project management environment. Today I’m interviewing Susanne Madsen, author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and...
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I particularly liked the sub-title of this book: The Secret Life of Teams. Leading and Coaching Teams to Success by Phil Hayes is about what happens to teams behind closed doors. It talks about how teams gossip, go off the rails and implode. There’s something cathartic about reading about teams in a worse state than that of your own.

Hayes, whom I interviewed earlier this week, is a team coach. It’s his job to help teams work out where the problems lie before they derail completely. On a more positive note, coaching teams can also help them move from being great performers to excellent performers, so it’s not all about remedial action.

Much of what I know about coaching is about coaching individuals, and the concept of coaching a whole team at a time had never occurred to me. But from the stories in the book, you can, and it works.

Practical coaching advice

It would be hard to pick up this book and suddenly be a great team coach. However, there are stories, examples and exercises here that can help you be a better team leader. For example, Hayes talks about the 3 styles of leadership: authoritarian, laissez-faire and achievement focused/democratic.

All these styles can work in different situations, but it is the leader that sets the tone. Knowing the characteristics of each style and what works in different environments would help you create a project team that is not dysfunctional. In a project

Phil Hayes

environment, I believe that the achievement focused/democratic style would be the best option for the majority of the time.

Good team ‘housekeeping’

“It should be explained clearly to each member of the team that when speak to them individually you will respect confidentiality,” Hayes writes. He has some general guidelines for teams that I consider ‘housekeeping’ and would be good practice for any project team, whether or not you are working with a coach. For example:

• Create a team contract that documents how the team is going to work together. Everyone should agree to it.
• Develop your facilitation skills if you work with teams (although facilitation is different to coaching).
• Respect confidentiality.
• Listen more than talk.

There is also a chapter on how to be a good team member, which I found interesting, especially the bit about how to manage your boss! Top tip: “Demonstrate that your work is helping to achieve the boss’s goals.”

Avoiding ‘why’

Hayes recommends that you stop asking why. He says that it’s counterproductive to put people on the spot like that. He writes:

“It is generally asked mainly to satisfy the curiosity of the questioner and tends to put the client on the defensive, requiring them to explain themselves. It is a useful question for journalists, politicians and scientists but not for coaches. The question ‘Why haven’t you solved this yet?’ will have a very different impact from asking ‘What is getting in the way of a solution here?’”

As project managers, we all work with teams. Coaching a team is a difficult job, and it’s not one that every project manager will be equipped to do. However, it doesn’t hurt to understand a bit more about the secret life of teams. And if your team is going off the rails, this book will help you understand what to look for in a team coach – hiring one might just save your project.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

Related posts:

1. Focus on Coaching: expert team coaching with Phil Hayes Phil Hayes is a coach with over 20 years experience in team development. He’s executive director of London training and coaching company Management Futures. I...
2. Focus on Coaching: The Project Management Coaching Workbook This short series is looking at coaching in a project management environment. Today, I’m reviewing The Project Management Coaching Workbook by Susanne Madsen (Management Concepts,...
3. Focus on Coaching: Susanne Madsen on the power of questions This short series is looking at coaching in a project management environment. Today I’m interviewing Susanne Madsen, author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and...

Project managers have to be project leaders as well, at least some of the time. But what happens when you want to take the next step and lead a PMO?

Peter Taylor’s new book, Leading Successful PMOs, explains. He discusses the PMO that he led at Siemens. It was a three year journey. They began with a focus on 5 Ps:

• People
• Process
• Performance
• Promotion
• Project Management Information System (PMIS)

He started with People and Performance and then added the others as the PMO became more mature. It’s interesting to see the year by year advancement that this PMO had, and Taylor also includes other stories of PMO leaders and their experiences. He shares some top tips including:

• Act like a business leader not a project manager.
• Develop the new processes and tools with the people who will use them.
• Know your customer and provide excellent customer service.
• Don’t underestimate the effort required and organisational change needed to get PMO set up.

Leadership challenges for the PMO

The book includes the results from Taylor’s own survey, including the fact that 78% of respondents had a project management team before a PMO came along. It seems as if PMOs are adopted after the principles of project management are recognised as valuable by the company. This may add to the reason why PMOs are sometimes seem as an administrative function, and can make it even harder for the PMO leader: they are not starting from scratch. Instead, their role is often to bring together what was already there but make it perform better.

Chris Walters says in the foreword, “Although the visible part of the PMO is often operational in nature, the real value of a PMO is when it becomes transformational. This is where leadership becomes much more important than management.”

Taylor summarises this as shown in the picture below.

This is the underlying principle of the book, doing the right things, in the right order, in the right way with the right people. However, there is more to successful PMOs than just having the right people doing the right thing.

“Being part of a PMO team is all about supporting ‘the right stuff’ delivery by best practice and professionalism,” he says.

Characteristics of a successful PMO leader

“Be passionate about projects and project management but act like a business leader,” Taylor says. He lists other characteristics of successful PMO leaders. They are:

• Decisive
• Excellent at communicating
• Great with people
• Able to understand projects
• Able to influence key stakeholders
• Pragmatic
• Able to understand the big picture and communicate the end goal
• Not enforce process for process’ sake.

This final point came through strongly in his research. It highlighted the fact that project managers want the PMO to be flexible enough to adapt to needs of all projects and not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. This is key to getting the unit set up and respected, and, of course, delivering value to the customers.

The right experience for PMO leaders

So while understanding projects was flagged as an important characteristic, Taylor’s research flagged that project management experience is actually way at the bottom of the list for recruiting PMO leaders. Only 12% of job adverts asked for project management experience and none of the sample of he studied asked for programme or portfolio management experience. Are the skills really that different?

Taylor assumes that project management experience was implied in the adverts that he looked at. I would say that if you have to ask for something like good communication skills (which is a prerequisite for most jobs) then you should spell out the need for project management experience as well.

There is a lot of common sense in this book, but it is there because many PMOs are staffed by people who haven’t had lots of PMO experience or need the confidence to be able to sell the ideas of a PMO into their senior executive team. Comments like, “Do things for the right reason,” may seem simple taken out of context but in the construct of the whole book they serve to build strong foundations towards creating a leader out of the reader.

A leader needs something to lead

Chapter 4 covers creating a PMO, because after all what is a leader without something to lead? A PMO is more than just a department or function. It is also a culture and way of working.

I heard the term ‘corporate honesty’ recently, as in “I think we should ask so-and-so for some corporate honesty about this project.” Honesty is one of my 4 pillars of leadership and Taylor also talks about the value of honesty in creating a PMO that is respected, valued and adds something to the project managers and the organisation. He writes:

The one thing that you need from the PMO members, the project managers, is honesty. If they can honestly share the state of play in their projects with you then you can establish yourself as being on their side. And, just as importantly if you know the true state of things then it also means that the PMO can offer the right level of help; conversely, if you don’t know the truth, they you’re in no position to provide help before matters get too critical.

Well said.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

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Projects change things. Some projects change a lot of things, and business transformation is a big, scary subject. How do you get from here to your vision of the future without it just being all about tasks and deliverables? How do you win people over to the new way of working? Melanie Franklin‘s new book, Managing Business Transformation: A Practical Guide, shows you how.

The difficulty of defining how to do change management starts with the fact that there is no single definition of change management. Franklin offers 3 definitions:

• Engagement of individuals and the organisation to enable a smooth transition to a desirable and sustainable changed state
• All the management activities to successfully move from the current state the desired future state.
• Understanding and defining the scope of the change required, including planning and successful implementation of the change.

The 4 step lifecycle

She goes on to present a 4 step business change lifecycle. This covers:

1. Understanding the change: clarifying reasons for the change; motivating and persuading people to change; using PESTLE analysis and creating stories to ‘sell’ the change.
2. Planning and preparation: identifying change activities and who is involved; creating a change plan and communicating it to the relevant people.
3. Implementing: building a team; motivating people to act on the change.
4. Embedding: moving to business as usual; supporting the change; addressing those who won’t change.

“The benefit of this life cycle is that it provides a starting point for change and an idea of all the factors that need to be considered,” she writes. “The downside is that it implies that managing change is a logical, linear set of activities.”

Franklin acknowledges that this is not the case and considers that change management will not be effective with a one-size-fits-all approach. She believes that change is personal. “People are motivated to change because of how it affects their world rather than for corporate reasons,” she says. In order to tap into this and bring them along with you when delivering transformational change projects, you have to translate the reasons for change from business benefits to meaningful statements about how individuals will be affected.

Aligning change plans and project management

Planning and preparation is a large part of getting transformational change right. While Franklin says there is no universally accepted way of planning for change, she uses the common model of pre-transition, transition and post-transition as the three stages of change planning.

If the change is being handled as a project, these phases need to map to the project management methods you are using. Franklin says that this is not always easy and Chapter 5 of her book specifically addresses how project management and change management align. She writes:

“Projects are expected to deliver on time, on budget and to specific quality criteria, but the pace and scope of changes that individuals adopt cannot be constrained in this way… Project activities deliver the potential for change: the new processes, systems, organisational structures, etc; change activities create the persuasion, motivation and leading by example that results in the new business environment.”

She suggests that change comes first, then a project is put in place to do it. I’m of the hybrid approach that project teams can do both, although from past experience that does make it difficult to shut the project down.

Change is all about soft skills

People are important. Franklin shares this interesting view as a quote from someone working in change: “I don’t really care what the stakeholders think about the change – the really important thing is how much effort they are going to put into it. If they hate it, but aren’t going to do anything about it, that’s OK, but if they hate it and are going to make time for everyone to know why they hate it, then that’s a problem.”

The book talks about the psychology of change and there is plenty of discussion about persuading, motivating, influencing and the giving and receiving of favours to increase compliance with change. It also talks about using social proof: showing videos or testimonials of people who have already made that change talking positively about their experiences and the benefits.

For a project manager, the whole change management thing all seems rather fluffy. There is a lot of paperwork, from vision statements to communication matrices tracking support for messages, to a team charter. If you are a good communicator, you may also consider this a bit pointless, thinking you can (or are already) doing this stuff.

However, on big projects which aim to transform the way businesses work, you can’t just do change management as an ad hoc or unstructured activity. This book includes a case study and worked examples, which go some way to showing the value of dealing with change management as a separate workstream on a project.

Managing Business Transformation will give you a framework for change management for big initiatives. It’s not as useful for small projects, especially if you already have an approach for stakeholder management that works well, but if you need a refresher on how to deal with stakeholders who aren’t listening to you then it will give you good tips on getting your message across.

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