The Opsimath

Going beyond PRINCE2

"What comes next?"

This is often a question that people ask once they have got to grips with the project management method PRINCE2. Perhaps they have successfully achieved their Practitioner qualification, and been using it for real for a while. They then want to know what else there is 'around' PRINCE2 that can help them become better at what they do.

Here are a few thoughts:

Programme Management
Often something that is not properly understood by many, programme management offers us a different, yet complementary view to project management. Programmes are about the coordination of a set of related projects, and are focused on transformational change, outcome delivery and benefit realisation. The framework called MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) is widely recognised as the best practice method for programme management. There are qualifications in MSP at Foundation, Practitioner and Advanced Practitioner levels.

Change Management
It can be extremely useful (some would argue vital) to the Project or Programme Manager to consider how individuals, teams and organisations go through change. After all, change is what projects and programmes deliver! A qualification in change management enables you to understand some of the key models, approaches and ideas for taking people successfully through change. Foundation and Practitioner qualifications are available in this fascinating subject.

Risk Management
If you would like to specialise a little, perhaps the Management of Risk (MoR) is for you. MoR goes beyond managing risk at project level and also includes programme, strategic and operational risk management too. Qualifications are available in MoR too.

Programme and Project Offices
Many organisations are seeing the benefits of setting up corporate programme and project offices - sometimes called PMOs. Now there is a set of guidance to help with this too. Referred to as P3O, the Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices guide helps organisations to plan, set up and run just such an office. Is this is an area you are involved with then this is a must for you.

Developing specific skills
Taking a 5-day course in PRINCE2 or MSP only gives you chance to touch lightly on some subjects - things like Business Case management, risk management, stakeholder engagement. You may feel that you would like to know more and to go deeper into this subject. At pearcemayfield we have designed a set of specific skills workshops for just such a purpose. Normally delivered in-house for clients these have been incredibly well-received. Other subjects include facilitation skills, product-based planning, presentation skills, estimating and scheduling, decision-making and finance for project managers.

Want to go 'beyond' PRINCE2? There's plenty of choice for you.

Tolerance - it's all or nothing

One of the best practice project management principles that PRINCE2 suggests is that of management by exception. In project terms, an exception is a situation in which it can be forecast with certainty that the project (or stage) tolerance levels will be exceeded.

Tolerance is a far more important concept in project management than some might think. Let's first of all give it its PRINCE2 definition: "...the permissible deviation above and below a plan's target without needing to escalate the deviation to the next level  of management...". This "target" can be expressed in any combination of time, cost, scope, quality, benefits and risk.

What happens if we do not implement the use of tolerances?

Potentially one of two things.

1. If the Project Manager, because of the lack of tolerance, has to escalate every minor deviation to the Project Board, then the Project Manager role is stripped of any authority, unable to take any corrective action. In effect, the real job of project management is being carried out by the Project Board.
2. Alternatively, if the Project Manager carries out corrective action when there are deviations and exceptions, even though no tolerance has been agreed, they are effectively exceeding their authority. The Project Manager is now taking on the role of the Project Board!

Both of these situations are unhelpful at best, as they do not make for good project management.

We need to use tolerance on our project - after all, our plans are simply our best guess at how the project will work out and we can never hope to get that guess 100% correct.

Tolerance - it's all or nothing!

The 10/20/30 rule of presentations

If you give presentations and you use PowerPoint, have you heard of the 10/20/30 rule? Presentation gurus such as Garr Reynolds and Guy Kawasaki swear by it, and this is how they describe it.

Basically, it's this:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting — if you must use more than ten slides to explain your point, you probably don’t have a point!

Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Yes, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if everything goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations have text in something like a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, they read ahead of you because they can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of step.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough, and this is their script; second, they think that more text is more convincing.

Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. It will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, then try this: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

10/20/30

Facilitation - vital skills for a Project Manager

At pearcemayfield we have recently been delivering some really interesting workshops for one of our valued clients around the subject of facilitation skills.

For many project managers (and of course programme and change managers) this is a crucial area. We have to attend many meetings and work with many different groups and teams of people - so how can we ensure that we get the best out of these situations?

During the sessions we looked at many different aspects of facilitation, including a number of do's and don'ts. Here is a list of tips that one group developed. The tips are in no particular order, but I find them very useful and challenging, I hope you do too:

1. Make sure  that no-one feels they are having something done to them
2. Better still - make people in the group feel valued
3. Always begin by establishing the ground rules for the group
4. As a facilitator, always have some stock responses ready to enable you to deal with difficult situations
5. Be aware of the mode in which you are operating and be ready to change it - be self-aware
6. The need for preparation and planning cannot be over-emphasised
7. Keep reading the room and be ready to change the timing and your mode
8. Ensure the right people attend the session
9. Ensure the right person facilitates

Management lessons from the Beautiful Game

Football management is a very visible form of management in action. Because of our obsession with the game in the UK (and increasingly most of the world), we read daily of the exploits of major football clubs. As a result, we can learn a number of lessons from how football clubs are led and managed.

Here are three recent ones.

Managers need time
Chelsea Football Club have an interesting recent history with their managers. Recently they 'parted company' (lovely phrase) with their latest manager Andre Villas-Boas (known fondly as AVB). AVB had managed the club for less than one whole season, and although the club are in the top six of what is considered the top league in the world and they are still in two cup competitions, including the European Champions league, this was not enough.

The most successful club in recent British history is undoubtedly Manchester United. Yet their manager, Alex Ferguson, spent several seasons in charge before winning anything, but the club gave him time. Time to adapt, time to influence, time to build his team. Managers need time.

Managers need to focus
Managers must lead with a  sense of purpose.They must single-mindedly focus on the goal (no pun intended there).

Under Harry Redknapp, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club have enjoyed their most successful spell for a long time. Just recently they were in 3rd place in the Premier League, with a significant points advantage over the team in 4th place. Until a major distraction.

England's national football coach, Fabio Capello recently resigned. Since that event there has been non-stop speculation that Harry Redknapp is the red-hot certainty to replace him. Except that no decision has been made, leaving a very uncertain situation.

The result? Tottenham's form has dipped, their results have been poor and they have just lost their once seemingly unassailable third position in the league.

Distractions are so unhelpful - managers need to focus.

Managers need rational, not reactive, leadership
Wolverhampton Wanderers were having a poor season, and with a 5-1 defeat at home to their local rivals, it did not look like it could get worse. So, in what seems like a 'knee-jerk' response, they dismissed their manager, Mick McCarthy, the day after that embarrassing defeat.

But, worse it has got. The club, in the four games that have followed, have seemed to go into free fall. Conceding goals at an alarming rate, and unable to score a goal in 3 out of the 4 games, their fate - relegation - seems sealed.

Which makes you think - was Mick McCarthy actually doing an impressive job with the team? Before he left they were outside the relegation zone, now they lie in last place in the league.

Was the decision reactive? Should the club ownership have allowed themselves a little more time to rationally assess the situation? After all, they dismissed him with just a few games left in the season, they had no replacement in mind, and they have had to temporarily appoint the assistant manager - a man with no experience of managing, and hardly any time to make a difference.

Managers need rationality not reactivity.

The beautiful game, but sometimes the management and leadership of it is anything but!

What makes an effective leader?

In my previous post I mentioned the demand for more and better leaders and managers that the UK has over the next five years. So what will 'better' look like?

I'd like to suggest three areas:

Skills and Competencies
Isn't it surprising how many managers are put in a position for which they are not trained or prepared? For example, we often come across line managers who are asked to become project managers. Do both of those positions demand the same set of skills - of course not. Little wonder that many people leading projects have problems. Let's give our managers and leaders of the future a fighting chance and let's invest in them with training, coaching, support and anything else that they need to develop the right skills and competencies.

Experience
Less than half the managers in a recent study stated that they get the opportunity and support to try out any new skills that they learn on training courses. This does make you wonder about the reason for their managers approving the attendance on the course in the first place! Let's give them chances to try out new things, and to learn real-life lessons which will give them a great basis for developing and improving.

Emotional Intelligence
The third area is a key one. Effective leaders and managers understand themselves. They have a self-awareness that enables them to understand how they are operating in any given situation. They have the self management and the ability to be able to adapt their leadership style to suit that situation. And they have the social awareness to be able to understand the effect that their performance is having on the people that they are leading.

Better leaders? - we should really start investing in them now!

Wanted - more leaders (better ones too!)

A recent report from the Chartered Management Institute stated that over the next 5 years that will be an increased demand for leaders in the UK. In fact they say that we are going to require an additional 2 million...!

Two million more leaders!

That's a lot of leaders/managers - but it gets worse, because they say that our current ones are not doing that well. Nearly half of existing managers say that their managers are ineffective. They cite:

• not setting clear direction
• failing to manage conflict
• not providing development opportunities
• not asking for feedback

All of this leads to reduce levels of commitment, and that in turn leads to a negative impact on the bottom line for companies.

In high performing organisations, 80% of managers are considered effective, while in low performing organisations that figure drops dramatically to 39%.

So where do we find better managers and more managers?

Where is the preparation? Only one in 5 managers has a relevant qualification - shouldn't we be addressing that right now. I think we should.

Are you developing the next generation of managers and leaders...

BCM? What's a BCM...?

I recently facilitated a programme management workshop, during which we considered some of the key aspects and features of best practice programme management. And if it's best practice programme management our material just had to be based on the guidance known as 'Managing Successful Programmes (MSP).

One of the principles of MSP is that a programme must have a focus on the realisation of benefits, and one of the ways in which MSP helps us to do that is through the role of the Business Change Manager (BCM).

As is often the case on our MSP Practitioner courses, this topic generated a lot of debate. Let me summarise what is often said.

We start with, "Business Change Manager - what is a Business Change Manager", as in many organisations the concept of this role is missing.

Then we move on to discuss why the role is so vital on a programme if we really want to transform the business and deliver real benefits. Delegates in our workshops often get really animated at this point, as they recognise:

1. How essential the role is, because without business involvement we will not see success
2. How we often (wrongly) expect programme managers to carry out the role
3. How, by introducing this role to their programmes, we can take our programmes to a new level of effectiveness.

It is so rewarding to witness the light bulb moments occurring as individuals and teams begin to see what has been missing in their programme organisation structure. The clarity that this discussion often brings is regularly one of the key learning points of this type of workshop.

So, if you are involved in programmes in any way, take a look at your team. Do you have any BCMs?

If not, how's it going?

Knowledge transfer or Wisdom building?

One of the aims of many people working in the field of management consultancy is 'knowledge transfer'. This is the admirable goal of being able to pass on valuable knowledge to the client, so that they are left with added value at the end of an assignment.

Knowledge transfer is an interesting concept, as knowledge can take us one of two ways. With knowledge we can go down the route of arrogance or humility. The collection of knowledge alone can easily lead to arrogance as it can centre on me simply accumulating a number of things that I know - the more I know, the better I am.

The greater route to take is that towards humility. Greater, but not necessarily easier. So how can we take that route?

Wisdom

Wisdom always leads us to humility, because it is born out of real living; real experiences; real pain and real joy. Wisdom comes from the realisation that my knowledge is oh-so-small when put in the context of, and compared to, the knowledge and the wisdom of the whole of humanity.

So I believe that we have to take our knowledge and marry it with real living. The result will be our first step on the road to wisdom building.

And maybe that will become our aim as consultants - to help our clients build wisdom.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes: Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

I hear what you say...

...except that in many conversations that have taken place today, people have not heard what the other person has been saying.

For an awful lot of people, 'listening' is simply the gap between the last thing they said and the next. It is a passive thing, rather than an active experience. If we want to really engage with people, we must work at making our listening far more active. This takes determination, it takes effort and it takes care - no wonder that so many people simply don't bother. 

So what is active listening? Here are a few thoughts:

Observation - giving careful, non-evaluative attention to the person speaking and making appropriate eye contact will enable you to gauge the emotional element of the message that you are receiving. After all, there is always more to the message than the words that are being spoken.

Reflecting Facts - by reflecting back some of the information that you are receiving, perhaps by the use of paraphrases, should help turn listening into hearing.

Summarising - by occasionally summarising what has been said, we can check our understanding and thus gain clarity about the message we are receiving.

Reflecting Feelings - we have heard the words, hopefully understood their meaning and been able to reflect and summarise them back to the speaker. Now we should also consider feeding back the emotional part of the message that we have received.

If we try some of these ideas, it is just possible that we will raise the confidence level of the speaker that they really are being heard by us, and that has got to improve the level of communication that is taking place.

Active listening - give it a try!