Elizabeth Harrin: I’ve come to Victoria in London and I am looking for the Microsoft offices. I’m going to be chairing a round table discussion there today about project management in the collaborative age, and the things that are making our new ways of working, and the ways that we’re doing project management change, like globalization, virtual teams and things like that.

So I think that would be quite interesting to hear what the practitioners who are coming are saying about how their working life is changing, if indeed it is. And also we’ve got some software suppliers who are coming as well, so it will be interesting to see what they think the future of technology and the tools are. So I’m going to go and find where I’m supposed to be now.

This pointy building here is Microsoft office on Victoria Street. So I’m about to go in and meet the people from Project Magazine who are hosting the round table today.

At the round table:

Richard Gordon (Microsoft): …in a few days to a wider audience. And so it’s not necessarily about finding a common format for things. I guess coming back to the point earlier where there are lot of formats and we’re not necessarily sure whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, blogs, it’s this, that and the other, but allowing people to be able to bring whatever it is that they want to do, however this project is going to be managed whether it’s very rigorously or whether it’s much more open and fluid, to bring people together to share information and ideas.

Fredrik Kellerman (ProjectPlace): So I think very much our approach is that we believe in opening up, allowing people to see the overall progress of the whole project. And actually for their customers to invite their stakeholders, because if the stakeholder is involved in the project and they can see the progress then there are no surprises, then you can handle issues before they turn into massive proportions.

Anne (project manager): There is so much information out there. It’s getting the right bit of information with the right contact which is where I think it needs…

James (project manager): …And that’s where face to face can often help, I mean with the number of problems I’ve seen just in the last couple of months with misunderstood emails or any electronic message without that context is…I’ve been bitten too many times…

Elizabeth Harrin: If we’re seeing that the step change… This all comes back to communicating to stakeholders and yes, okay, that does mean they will have to have difficult conversations with sponsors and senior executives in organizations to try and bring these collaboration ideas to the forefront and maybe we’re not empowered enough to be able to make a decision to go out and buy new tools or design new ways of displaying information. But we can at least be aware that it’s happening and ask the right questions.

Benjamin Sarkka (Improlity): Oh we need to do this and it’s really slow as often this kind of integration projects are really expensive and time consuming, and there are so many IT projects that fail and they have bad reputations. So I think there is still lots of work to be done and meanwhile, there needs to be the right tools to enable project managers to go on. We can’t wait for the perfect tool to arrive.

Editor of Project Magazine: That’s a good point. On the question of the right tools I’m just interested in the views from the project managers around the table: What do you think of the tools that are available at the moment? Do you think they’re up to the job? Do you think they are the right tools? And also from the software providers: Are project managers really maximizing those tools? Do they really understand the capability and the potential that’s at their fingertips?

Matt (project manager): Personally, I know and understand technology and things, but listening to you guys, I’ve realized straight away that there are opportunities there that I don’t even know about in terms of collaborative tools. I’ve worked all my career in traditional engineering type organizations, and email now, that’s the de facto standard for written communication. You get the odd person who might want to go into instant messaging with you but virtually everyone wants to email. And the volume of email you have to deal with, that you’re sending and receiving is just ridiculous, we’re at saturation point now.  You need to find better ways to get those messages across.

Paul Major (Program Framework): Yeah! What I’m saying and picking up on the PMO conversation in that context I think is really interesting because PMO’s potentially have the challenge of being perceived as more of an administrative function. I think that is changing.

Two of the organizations I’m working with at the moment we’re designing what does a global or enterprise PMO look like? And it’s actually the antipathy of the admin piece. It’s moving it to something that’s much more value added in strategic space, kind of almost sits as an adjunct to the chief exec’s office and it’s kind of almost that space of the strategic director or the strategy director sat in in the old world way of looking at things. But one of the things that those organizations I see are doing is starting to look at actually what’s the role and career path of the project management professional.

Later…

Elizabeth Harrin: I’m back now from the Project round table that was hosted by Project Magazine and Microsoft. And it was really quite an interesting way to spend the morning. We had suppliers there, software vendors from Improlity, Microsoft and Projectplace and we had practitioners, real project managers who are using these tools, and we talked a lot about collaboration and the problems that project managers have. Some quite interesting topics came out. I’ve just got a few notes here to share with you.

One of the guys said that project management bleeds into a number of different tools which I thought was really quite an important point as we’re trying to match up different types of technology. Complexity then increases with everybody wanting to know what’s going on at the same time and again, technology can help with that.

As part of our collaboration challenge is to work out how we deal with the fact that we need to provide different information to different stakeholders at different moments in time, and that gives us a tension between control and collaboration. So we want to be able to share everything or share what we can, but we also need to apply project controls so there’s a requirement for security. There’s a requirement for audit trail. There’s a requirement to not share confidential information with people who shouldn’t see it. So we talked a lot actually about the tension between collaboration and control and where the project manager’s role was in improving transparency while still managing to keep control of what was going on in the organization.

I think we generally concluded that technology is not the answer to some of the problems that we are facing as a discipline. But that it is there to help us deliver to the challenges that we’ve got and are currently facing like globalization, the requirement to be more green, virtual teams, distributed working and the challenge of having five different generations working together in the workplace for the very first time.

So technology is there to help us but talking to the vendors, what we realized was that the tools are so far advanced and very few project managers are actually using the full functionality of the tool, partly because the tools have become very generic. Oh, that’s not really the right word, they’ve become feature rich. Project managers are perhaps picking and choosing what is relevant to their project and their environment. But from a vendor’s perspective, they have to make a tool that suits all projects and all environments and they’re constantly getting feedback from customers as to what they want to see included in those products. So that was quite an interesting point.

The conclusion we came to really is that technology is there to help us be the next generation of project leaders. We just have to get on and actually do it and step up and we are being pushed in the direction of being able to want to embrace this new technology by a number of different forces including the consumerization of technology, of IT and gadgets and so really, we’ve got a way to go before we are these inspiring project leaders full of innovative ideas really driving through change in our organization.

As a whole, I’m sure some people are already doing that now and the role of the PMO in that is to become a strategic centre of excellence to support project managers in achieving all of those goals. So really, quite a lot of stuff came out. We talked for 2 hours and that’s just the summary really of some of the key points. But yes, quite an interesting day.

No related posts.

Business Life magazine – the one shoved in the seat pockets on British Airways flights – has a column in this month talking about project managers. It’s the light relief, ‘Business Lifer’ column at the back, written by an anonymous ‘executive globetrotter’. During January, Business Lifer has been recruiting as well as considering his own CV in the light of transferable skills. He writes:

I realised with joy that I had the ability to ‘project manage’. I had to be sure so I went through the common attributes of the best project managers I knew. They all maintain a tedious attention to detail, like to call in well before work and command you to do something, strut about as if they are extremely important and have an annoying habit of summarising conversations and emails midflow. It turns out I’m just as pompous and manipulative as the best of them.

Now, I can strut with the best of them, but I hope I’m not pompous and manipulative. In fact, pompous and manipulative is the worst of them – these are exactly traits that project managers should not have.

Project managers serve others through their actions. We deliver a service to our project stakeholders and project customers (both internal and end user). We get things done through other people; we enable others to do their best work in a way that delivers the most value to the organisation.

Pomposity is the enemy of getting things done. Manipulation is the opposite of collaborative teamwork. Both of these may deliver very short term results, but the long term damage to your career and credibility is not worth behaving so badly for.

For another take on what project managers are like, check out this YouTube video: Stuff Project Managers Say. I thought it was funny, and I’m sure you’ll recognise yourself and colleagues. I reckon I’ve said all those things, although I don’t have alcohol in my desk drawer, I have emergency chocolate. What do you have?

And do you think the Business Lifer view or the video is a more accurate description of project managers?

Related posts:

1. Project managers on Twitter Who are the project managers on Twitter?  This video was shot at the PMI Global Congress North America, where I met some of the project...
2. Event: Social Media for Project Managers I’ll be presenting to the APM’s Women in Project Management SIG on 10 June, and you are invited. We’ll be talking about how project managers...
3. Book Review: Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers Firstly, a big SORRY to Anthony Mersino. Anthony sent me his book at the end of last year and it has taken me forever to...

Welcome to the January/February 2012 edition of the Carnival of Project Management. The Carnival is a round up of the best project management articles (according to me) over the last two months.

Brad Egeland presents Watch Out for Warning Signs posted at Project Management Tips, saying, “Four warning signs that things may not be going well with your project and how to tackle them.”

Bruce McGraw presents Cognitive Science Insights into Decision Making posted at Fear No Project Blog, saying, “how you make your decisions? Are you watching for other cognitive clues from staff and stakeholders?”

Luis Seabra Coelho presents Using Mind Maps: how and what for. Luis blogs at ah-ha-moments.net. Mind maps can be a useful tool in project management.

Ty Kiisel presents Crude Confrontation Curtails Collaboration posted at Work Management Blog. “Effective communication is personal,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s face to face, via email, or even in a blog — it’s one person interacting with another.”

Lindsay Scott presents Emphasize “Management” in PM posted at Michael Greer’s PM Resources blog, saying, “Put the emphasis on management back into project management.”

Soma Bhattacharya presents Who’s your boss?, which she’s written on her blog for newbie project managers, Stepping into Project Management. She has presented an interesting take on personality types – recognise anyone?

Finally, I’ve come across a new website called MBA Online which aims to educate people on a number of topics including company culture, productivity and leadership. You can choose your own course and then follow a thread through to learn about the basics and new advances in the subject.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Project Management using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Related posts:

1. Carnival of project management #1 Welcome to the August 14, 2006 edition of carnival of project management, a round-up of PM articles on other blogs. Pawel Brodzinski presents When Everything...
2. Carnival of project management #3 How is it possible to ladder a pair of fishnet tights? They already have holes in. Fishnets are, for the second autumn in a row,...
3. Carnival of Project Management #23 Welcome to the October/November, 2008 edition of the Carnival of Project Management.  Over 90 entries, most of which were dross, so I have sorted out...

Kevin Ciccotti

In the last part of the Focus on Coaching series, I’m interviewing Kevin Ciccotti, CPCC, ACC. Kevin is a coach who has chosen to work specifically with PMPs (although I expect he’d work with any project managers). I asked him why.

Kevin, how did you get into coaching?

I will say my path to coaching was not exactly a straight line. I spent many  years working in different organizations, from hotel-casinos (I grew up and still live in Reno, Nevada), to airlines, and a few others before ‘settling in’ and working for more than 25 years for a world-class manufacturing company that happened to be the world’s largest slot machine manufacturer. The last 16 of those years were spent in management, and that is where I really began to develop my ability to help my team members build upon their strengths, overcome challenges, and create successful careers.

One of my employees told me, “You’re wasting your talents here. Not that what you do for us isn’t appreciated, but you have so much to offer beyond these walls. You need to think about how you can reach more people and help them the way you’ve helped us.” Well, those words both inspired and terrified me. The truth was that I knew I wasn’t playing to my own strengths. So I researched coach training programs, and attended one of the best in the country.

It’s been more than four years now since I left my corporate job and started my coaching business and it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. I haven’t looked back once, or regretted a second. That, for me, is the ultimate definition of success.

Why did you choose to work with project managers?

In my previous job, I was heavily involved in product development – from product concept, to planning and development, to production, and ultimately end of life cycle, or obsolescence. One thing that was a constant was that no matter how well team members knew each other, regardless of skill sets, we struggled to get traction on new projects. For me, it was a fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, study of how complex relationships in the workplace can be. We’re all on the same team, right? Then why is there so much conflict, so little cooperation?

When I became a coach, I honestly thought I’d left all that behind. Then, I began coaching the CEO of a technology company that specializes in ERP implementations and PPM/BPM processes for large corporations. After working with me for a while, he mentioned that what I do as a coach could greatly benefit project managers who struggle with leading teams – especially when they have no direct authority over members.

That sparked something in me, and I investigated further. Over the last four years, we’ve seen an incredible shift in the workplace, and all of us are faced with unprecedented challenges. Companies have dramatically cut staff and asked people to do more with less, and PM’s are under more pressure than ever to get their teams engaged and working together effectively. I’ve since joined PMI, have spoken at multiple events, written articles for a number of publications, hosted webinars, and created a one-day workshop called The Human Factor in Project Management, and I absolutely love working with PM’s!

Well, we are lovely people. One of the things you’ve said is that some of our behaviour is down to brain wiring. Does that mean that there are some behaviours that we cannot change?

While it’s true that many of our behaviours are influenced by the way our brains are wired, that by no means implies that we are automatons who are simply running on programs. Ultimately, we always have the power of choice in any situation.

For example, think of a time when you faced a major change or uncertainty in your work or life. If you’re like the vast majority of people, your initial response was probably one of resistance or fear. That’s because the brain is literally wired to see change as potential threat, it craves certainty.  Anything new and unusual triggers us to make a ‘toward or away from’ decision, based on moving toward a perceived pleasure or reward, or away from potential pain.

The most important thing to be aware of in those times is that you get to decide what the change means. Of course, we all know that not all change is inherently bad, nor is it always good. Our ability to discern the events, study our choices, and then make a conscious decision about how to proceed, gives us the power to make more effective decisions. So, regardless of the situation, we are not slaves to our brain’s default settings.

Hmm, interesting. How does understanding human behaviour help project managers coach their team members?

It’s really all about increasing awareness. We all tend to view and interpret the world around us through the lens of our own experiences. And, what’s ‘true’ for me is not necessarily true for you or anyone else. Without that understanding, we tend to judge others who don’t share our perspectives as ‘different’ or even ‘wrong.’

When Project Managers learn to see the individuality in team members, they’re much less likely to judge them or their behaviours, and they are far more likely to develop a better sense of connection with them. In the end, my belief is that the single most important aspect of leading teams is your relationship with the people on that team. Understanding human behaviour is a gateway to understanding the people around us. Now, I’m not talking about turning PM’s into psychologists, but having a basic
understanding of behaviour is essential to learning not only how others view their world, but also how you view and interpret your world.

What’s your top tip for project managers who want to start better understanding the way that their project team members work?

Wow, it’s so difficult to come up with just one. I’d have to say that if there were only one thing PM’s could do it would be to really work to become a better listener. And when I say that, I mean don’t just hear what’s being said, but really listen for understanding. So many times, we get caught up in the busyness of our day and our projects, and we don’t give our people the attention they may need. When team members don’t feel heard, it can dramatically impact their level of engagement. When we take the time to listen, even if no action results from it, the person feels heard. And it’s a big difference maker.

For the project manager, this can translate into stronger connections with team members, a deeper level of trust, and more effective communication. All of this can absolutely work to the PM’s advantage when it comes to getting the most from their project teams.

Thanks, Kevin!

Kevin Ciccotti has been a student of peak performance, interpersonal communication, and human behavior for more than 25 years. He was trained at The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), the world’s largest in-person coach training organization. He is certified by both CTI and the International Coach Federation, and in 2012 was named President of the Nevada Professional Coaches Association.

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: Book review of Leading and Coaching Teams to Success 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...
3. 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,...

In this video I ask 9 project managers how they deal with a bad day at work.

With thanks to Todd, Samad, Nathaniel, Cindy, Adrienne, Cornelius, Taryn, Dave and Melanie.

Filmed on location at PMI Global Congress North America 2011 in Dallas/Fort Worth.

Related posts:

1. Video Diary: PMI Global Congress North America, 25 October 2011 This episode of my video diary from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, covers my final day at PMI’s Global Congress North America. Thanks to Taryn, Jeff, Satish,...
2. Video Diary: PMI Global Congress North America, 24 October 2011   This episode of my video diary from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, covers Day 2 of PMI’s Global Congress North America. Thanks to Kashif (who is...
3. Video Diary: PMI Global Congress North America, 23 October 2011 This episode of my video diary from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, covers Day 1 of PMI’s Global Congress North America. Thanks to Brenda for taking part...