Ward Wired

It is nearly impossible these days to read an industry rag from the Human Resources or management fields and not come across the topic of “the millennials”. For the uninitiated, the millennial employee (or Generation Y depending on your bias) was born between 1981 and 1999 thus making them between 32 and 14 years old as of this blog.

Studies have shown that the millennials are characterized by traits of entitlement and narcissism (based on personality surveys), confidence in their abilities that border on hubris, a focus on becoming wealthy (75% of respondents in a University of Michigan study said this was the main goal of employment), and a need for social interaction and team leadership that most managers don’t understand.

They idolize the dot-com entrepreneurs who wore flip flops to work and took the reins of an organization before they hit 30. Conversely, they don’t understand the career trajectory of the industrial CEO who started as a junior engineer and ascended over a 30 year career with the same firm. They learned to network and develop relationships in cyberspace and came to believe that the only measure for the quality of your ideas was how many “likes”, “retweets”, or “trackbacks” you got from the digital masses. They look quizzically at relationships that take time, and substance, to nurture.

In short, the kids who grew up winning trophies for coming in 10^th place and developed social skills in a world connected via Prodigy Chat à Facebook à Blogspot à Twitter are now sitting two cubes down from your office believing that they could run your firm (better than you) if only given the chance.

While there is a tremendous amount of fodder on the millennial conundrum available (including all of the strengths they bring to the table), it is interesting to note that I could find little on the topic of the millennial project manager. I think this is a problem. In so many ways, the discipline of project management seems to be the equivalent of “millennial crack”. Let’s review:

• Millennials want to work in team-based environments – Check
• Millennials want to avoid boredom by working on short-term endeavors – Check
• Millennials want to take on leadership responsibilities without waiting for a promotion to line management – Check
• Millennials want strong structure and metrics that allow them to demonstrate performance and measure accomplishments – Check

This list could go on. The point is that the field of project management offers millennials many of the careers experiences they expect coupled with the “short cut to the top” that they desire. What’s more, millennials equate (given the reduction of insight to 140 characters and a complete lack of all respect for the dewey decimal system) the recitation of jargon with expertise…something the broader field of project management has struggled with for decades. It is one thing to know what the critical path is, it is another thing entirely to identify it, use it correctly, and have the battle scars from all the times it failed you. As such, it is quite likely that the PM field will soon be rife with this category of employee and indeed, in my experience, already is. Meaning, if you have not already had to deal with the millennial PM, you soon will.

Here are the top 5 issues I have seen with millennial PMs…You would do well to keep these in the back of your mind during your next coaching session/status meeting/annual review/awkward hallway discussion.

1. Leadership and power: Millennial PMs tend to rely too heavily on expert and referent power. They believe that if they are the smartest person in the room, and can name drop their boss, people will naturally fall in-line. The millennial has not yet had the experience to understand emotional intelligence, charismatic influence, or the power of organizational politics. They fail to understand influence techniques like exchange, coalition building, or superordinate goals. These power bases (an appreciation for and understanding of) come from experience. As such, while they can recite many theoretical aspects of leadership, they struggle to apply most of them effectively.

2. Follow through: Put simply, millennials love the honeymoon and hate the marriage. Their thirst to “work on new and exciting things” often causes them to be super engaged and excited at the beginning of a project but more distant and distracted as time goes on. Their acculturation of “instant gratification” makes the long slog of project management difficult to deal with. Don’t be surprised if your twenty-something PM is great at project kick-off meetings but rather lax in producing status reports.

3. Respect for the org. chart: As PMs we are constantly negotiating with functional managers. Our ability to thrive relies on our ability to respectfully influence the managers that hold our needed resources. Alas, the millennial believes that titles mean little and that (their over-inflated sense of) expertise reigns supreme. As such, many millennials find themselves in hot water when they sit across from a (real) expert vying for scarce resources using the leadership skills referenced in number one.

4. The (monetary) value of experience: The millennial PM will equate project success with career success at an early stage of their development. Said another way, the millennial believes that if he/she was able to deliver one or two projects on time, then this clearly means that they are ready for fancy titles, large paychecks, and a window office. This is a trait common across all millennials, but is particularly true in the hard-metric world of project management. Do not be surprised that if during the first review cycle after your millennial PM delivers an on-time, on-budget project they are asking for a Director title and assignment to lead your PMO. The concept of “putting in the time” means little to this crowd.

5. Translation: The millennial PM believes that the more corporate jargon and PM lexicon they can insert into a sentence the more impactful that sentence will be. It is not uncommon to hear something like the following in a status meeting: “We are focused on improving the CPI of this initiative in order to create better synergy with the other priorities coming out of the corner office. We expect the next fiscal Q to bring an augmented focus on establishing enterprise awareness of the project’s value prop.” It does not occur to them that saying, “if we want the rest of this place to keep thinking this project is important, we have got to get our costs under control.” Additionally, millennials rarely have the ability to tailor their communication to the appropriate audience. It is seemingly lost to them that the same tone and message you deliver to your lead engineer is not the same one you use when meeting with your executive sponsor (or vice versa). The nuance of communication comes with time and experience which…well…you get the drift.

At this point in the article, you are either, A) Chuckling (if you are an older senior manager) or B) Fuming (if you are a millennial). I concede that these are gross generalizations and not every PM aged 32 and younger suffers from these issues. Alas, as a wise man once said, stereotypes exist for a reason.

If you take anything away from this post (regardless of if you are chuckling or fuming) let it be that the millennial PM is a different-in-kind resource than what corporate America has dealt with before. Their motivators, personalities, value systems, and approaches to work may seem foreign and out of place with the rest of the organization. This, in and of itself, does not make the millennial good or bad. It just makes them someone who will require the time, patience, and coaching of the organization to make the best use of their skills.

Being aware of these 5 issues may make your relationship with the millennial PM not only more productive, but easier to deal with as well. But if you ever DO get frustrated by their seemingly out of place antics and requests, don’t let it bother you too much. Just remember:

One day they’ll be the ones shaking their heads in disbelief while trying to get the Generation Z crowd to understand why it is important to take off their Google Glass when leading status meetings.

What issues with millennial project managers have you seen and how have you overcome them?

Matt Ferguson, PMP, CSM currently serves as Director of Consulting Services for ESI International and is focused on establishing the organizational PM practices that support ESI’s learning programs.

He is also a recovering millennial PM (under the expert tutelage of LeRoy Ward) who both chuckled and fumed as he wrote.

He may be reached directly at mjferguson@esi-intl.com

A couple of weeks ago I raised the following question: Is the lack of project leadership training the reason we are still struggling with projects? Many responded with some very interesting insights. In this post I present data clearly showing that, despite organizations’ complaining about the apparent lack of leadership skills, that investments in soft skills training, and training generally, is on a disturbing decline.

First, a little background. For the past three years, ESI has conducted its annual Global State of the PMO Survey. In year two, we asked the respondents (> 3,000 responded) to tell us where their organization was investing in their development. We categorized respondents into two camps: those that work directly for the PMO, and those who are influenced by the PMO but do not report directly into it.

Here are last year’s results.

As you can see, only 40% of PMO folks and a little more than 30% of non-PMO folks reported that their organization invested in soft skills development.

Below, are the results from this year’s survey (which will be released soon. The numbers are even lower, with 30% of PMO folks, and a mere 20% of non-PMO respondents, reporting that their organization is investing in soft skills.

The message is clear: based on their investments, organizations believe that building a better WBS is more important than building a high performing project team. Yet, when a project fails, it’s rarely because the WBS wasn’t perfect!

You may think that because we are the world’s largest provider of project management training that we “rigged,” or otherwise influenced, our survey to show these results. Well, you would be wrong.

PMI’s Pulse of the Profession surveys show similar declines. For example, in PMI’s Pulse of the Profession of 2012, PMI research (data from 2010 and 2011) shows that in 2010 52% of the organizations surveyed had programs to develop PM competencies, whereas in 2011 47% did. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession Report for 2013 further confirms this trend showing that (data from in 2012) 45% of the organizations reported that they had such programs. From 52% to 45%…..in percentage terms that’s a 13% drop. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but what if your pay was cut 13%? I bet you’d think that was a BIG decrease (I know I would).

Where is this all leading? I don’t know, but one thing I do know, people who aren’t trained to do a job won’t do the job efficiently, productively, or to a high degree of quality. The results will be disappointing, and many surveys continue to show such disappointing project results around the world.

Why do organizations continue to lament, bemoan, and moan and groan about project performance as if some external force is causing their projects to go south? There’s no magic to any of this. It’s all about making sure people have the right skills and the right support. And, that takes investment.

What’s your take on this?

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Need to improve your skills in speaking to execs? Check out ESI’s Communicating Up: Winning Strategies for Successful Executive Conversations

I recently returned from the PMI EMEA Global Congress held in Istanbul where I gave a presentation entitled “Fourteen Project Leadership Skills to Boost Your Career.”  It was very well attended: SRO (standing room only), indicating that project managers are really interesting in improving those highly valued leadership skills.

I presented the results of a research project that Nancy Nee, one of my colleagues at ESI and Agile expert, conducted over the period of roughly 18 months in which we spoke with upwards of 30 of our strategic clients regarding their need for developing leadership skills for their project and program managers.

In my presentation, I spoke about the inexorable trend toward online learning and the rise of the MOOC (massive open online courses) as alternatives to instructor led training. I informed the participants of how Virginia Rometty, CEO of IBM, encouraged her employees to take 40 hours of continuing education in 2013, at their own expense (IBM would pay for books, etc), and how one individual decided to take a MOOC because it was free.

As part of my conversation, I asked the group this question: “Can you really learn project leadership skills online?” Because I had about 200 people in attendance, there wasn’t time for a robust conversation so I just had them vote. I gave them three options: Yes, No, or, Maybe. I asked them to raise their hands for each option. When I asked who thinks “Yes,” one hand, just one hand shot up. When I said “No,” most of the hands went up, and, when I said “Maybe” a sprinkling of hands were raised.

So, there you have it. To be honest, I wasn’t completely surprised. Many project managers, regardless of where they come from, think leadership skills are best learned in the traditional manner: live and in person. However, I did present them with this situation: what if you were taking a course on how to lead a virtual team, wouldn’t it be better to take the course virtually so you could actually see what it was like? A lot of folks smiled!

Regardless of whether you think project leadership skills can be learned online or not, you’d better get used to the idea of online or virtual learning. When such a large and resource rich company like IBM makes a decision not to pay for continuing education for its employees, and the only available “free” options are MOOCs or grainy YouTube videos, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Also, the trend for online learning is crystal clear. It’s not “if” you’re going to have to take courses online; it’s when. And for most companies the “when” is “now.”

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At ESI we have quite a few online courses. We receive many high marks for our approach. However, they’re not free! Check them out at www.esi-intl.com.

Psychologists and learning professionals have an interesting term they use for when things are, in my view, “out of whack.” They call it cognitive dissonance. Here’s an example. You’re in a conversation with your “better half” and say something that angers him or her. You recognize their anger and say ”don’t be mad.” They look you square in the eye and yell “I’M NOT MAD”!  Of course they are but they don’t really see it that way. That’s cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance at work

Organizations are like that when it comes to training project managers. We hear, and read, all the time, that executives, PMO Leaders, and business unit heads complain that their project managers lack critical leadership and business skills. They will point to this deficiency as a key reason why many projects are either in trouble, or fail outright. Yet, ESI surveys have uncovered that there is more money spent on developing hard skills of project management than in leadership development or “soft skills.” In fact, this is so prevalent, that this is the number one Top Ten PM Trends of 2013 as reported by ESI, where I work.  This is cognitive dissonance at the organizational level isn’t it. If organizations need project managers with strong leadership skills, yet fail to invest in this area, a good question to ask is “why?”

One reason becomes relatively clear when you have a conversation with some of these folks who are lamenting about the situation. Seems like every large organization has its own management and leadership development program. They vary, of course, but it’s usually segmented into three areas: supervisory training, management development, and executive leadership. This type of training and development is also the purview of HR which guards its turf quite jealously. PM training, may or may not be handled by HR, but even if it is, it handled by a different group of folks that deal with management and leadership training.

Why are leadership development programs guarded very carefully by its caretakers? It is because many organizations have their own competency models that apply broadly to various levels of management, and they don’t want leadership programs presented to their employees that don’t align with those models. Makes sense.

But oftentimes, the competency model for a general manager is not applicable for a project manager. After all, although there is much overlap in leadership skills, project management is different from general management and as such requires different skills which are often not addressed in general leadership training.

I’ve been told by more than one project executive that what they require is leadership development that is specific to the project and program manager role. The fact that their organization doesn’t have that causes them to concentrate more on the hard skills of PM; that’s an area they can control.

Unless and until HR and the PMO can work together to come up with a program that recognizes the difference between management and project management, we will always see more PMs being trained in building a WBS than building a high-performing team.

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Check out ESI’s Business Skills  program; it was developed specifically for project and program managers.

The next time you’re in a meeting look around and notice how many people are either blatantly, or surreptitiously, checking their smart phones, tablets, or laptops rather than paying attention to what’s going on around them. Chances are it’ll be about 50% or more.

Now, some people pride themselves on their ability to multitask. But we know that’s hogwash. The brain is a linear machine; it can only do one thing at a time. If it’s doing X it can’t be doing Y.

Are your meetings like this?

Some people will say the reason they do it is that the meeting is boring, they’re too many “talking heads” and “blabbermouths” wasting time so why not check email. Hey, fair enough!

But generally speaking, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that when we’re checking email, perusing a dating site, or checking the box scores, we can’t possibly be engaged with what’s going on around us. If you’re a project manager and you need peoples’ attention, you need to have them tune into the meeting, and not their latest gadget. So, what do you do?

Well, you can turn into the “parent” of the group and yell at people, or gently remind them to pay attention. That gets old. I’ve seen this. It’ll work once, maybe twice, but people simply fall back into the same old habits.

One company I recently read about went so far as to ban all tech gadgets from their meetings. They had had enough. The company, Adaptive Path, simply told their employees to leave their toys in their cubes and come to meetings prepared to be engaged. You can read about it here.

I give these folks a lot of credit. They bit the bullet. People weren’t happy but they’ve gotten over it. And, I think they’re better off for it. It’s a well known fact, that Tweeting while driving can kill you and others. And, that a person who is talking on a cell phone hands free while driving a car has the reaction speed of someone who has had a few drinks. Why do we think we can sit in meetings and fiddle around with our devices and actually be very productive? In short, we can’t.

Check your tech at the door. Hide it in your bag. Sit on it. Do everything but use it. You’ll be more engaged and your meeting will be a more productive experience.

What’s the one thing you do to have better project meetings?

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At  ESI International we have a lot of free resources. Check them out.

Ivar Kroghrud of QuestBack

I just read an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Business section dated March 30, 2013. It was an interview with an executive who has a very interesting, and seemingly effective, way for his employees to get to know and interact with him without the need to “figure him out.”

We all know how that goes don’t we? We start a new job, or are assigned to a new team, and then we spend a lot of time trying to figure out who the new boss or project manager is and how we should deal with her. What are her likes, dislikes, quirks, and so forth. What type of communications style does she have? Can I be honest, or do I have to tip toe around issues as if I’m walking on egg shells or dancing on pins and needles?

Well, Ivar Kroghrud, the lead strategist QuestBack, thinks that’s a waste of time. He wants people spending time doing valuable work, not practicing sidewalk psychoanalysis sorting out the best way to deal with him. So, he has written a one page “User Manual” on himself.

Here’s what’s included:

I am patient, even-tempered and easygoing. I appreciate straight, direct communication. Say what you are thinking, and say it without wrapping your message.

I am goal-oriented but have a high tolerance for diversity and openness to different viewpoints. So, again, say what you are thinking and don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo.

I welcome ideas at any time, but I appreciate that you have real ownership of your idea and that you have thought it through in terms of total business impact.

The points are not an exhaustive list, but should save you some time figuring out how I work and behave. Please make me aware of additional points you think I should put on a revised version of this “user’s manual.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. It tells people exactly what you’re like and how you want them to interact with you. It’s fast and direct. There’s no need for some long and involved Myers Briggs analysis, or long, boring, meetings where everyone goes around the table responding to the juvenile question “If I were a tree, what type of a tree would I be”?

And, it has the direct effect of speeding up collaboration as expressed best in Tuckman’s Group Development Model (e.g., Forming, Norming, Storming, and Performing), a model that others took (namely, Blanchard) and did little to it but capitalize on his great thoughts.

My thought is this. As a Project Manager, or a manager generally, we should all write this one page “user manual” on ourselves. But let’s not stop there. Everyone on the team should write one and distribute to everyone else. If people have questions they can call one another directly or discuss at the next team meeting (briefly!).

If we spend more time figuring out the work and less time figuring out one another, we’re bound to make better progress.

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Working on Agile Projects but need additional skills? Check out ESI’s new Agile Practitioner Curriculum.

There’s an old story that goes like this. A man was walking through a stone yard where three men were hammering and breaking large stones into certain shapes. When he asked the first stone cutter what he was doing he replied “I’m busting rocks.” When he asked the second, he said “I’m creating a stone block.” And, when he asked the third, the man said “I’m building a cathedral.”

(By the way, if you were to ask members of your project team, or other key stakeholders, what the purpose of the project was, what would be their reply? I bet you’d receive a range along the lines of the three stone cutters above.)

Here, we have three different perspectives of the same job. Is the third man better off? Is the organization better off because he sees the “bigger picture”? Or to put it another way, sees how his work “aligns with the strategy” of building the cathedral. Maybe, and maybe not according to Australian researchers.

In an interesting survey conducted by Professor Timothy Devinney at University of Technology, Sydney, (more here) 70% of workers in 20 large Australian companies could not identify their company’s strategy. And yet, all 20 corporations are tops in their field and very successful, causing Professor Devinney and his research associates to think that it doesn’t seem to make much difference if a employee understands what the company strategy is so long as they do their work well.

Is this the same for your project? What difference does it really make if your project team members understand the connection between their individual contributions and the corporate strategy? After all, they don’t set strategy, chances are their paychecks and bonuses (if they even have any these days) are not DIRECTLY tied to that strategy, and the strategy is probably expressed in such “motherhood and apple pie”language that no reasonable connection could be made anyway. So long as they do their job, and do it well, isn’t that what really matters?

Look at this way, when we look at the three stone cutters, at the end of the day, they’re all just “busting rocks.”

What do you think? Would your project be more successful if your team members understood how it fit into your corporate strategy?

Duct tape–good in a pinch!

I just read one of the many surveys conducted on the state of Agile development. In this particular study, the respondents were asked about the specific agile tools they used. The number one tool used by the more than 4,000 respondents was, you guessed it, Microsoft Excel. 69% of the participants reported it was their tool of choice followed by Microsoft Project which came in at 48%. Way behind these two Microsoft products were some of the newer suite of  tools developed specifically for the Agile development environment. Seems like old habits die hard.

Excel has been around a long time. People know it, like it, but most importantly they already know how to use it. And, they use it for all sorts of applications. Excel is also widely used in traditional project management (even when folks don’t use MS Project or some other well-known PM software). I’ve even run across project professionals who use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, yes PowerPoint, as project management tools. Again, they know it, they like it, and they know how to use it. So they “make it work” as Tim Gunn would say.

Excel is like duct tape, a form of adhesive tape which has its roots going back to 1910 when it was used on the cables on the iconic (and often sold!) Brooklyn Bridge. It has morphed since then, but what hasn’t changed is the many ways that duct tape is used. You see it everywhere. Covering rips in vinyl seats at your favorite diner, holding a fender in place, or for treating warts!

Here’s what Wikipedia says about duct tape:

The Duct Tape Guys (Jim Berg and Tim Nyberg) as of 2005 have written seven books about selling more than 1.5 million copies and feature real and unusual uses of duct tape. In 1994 they coined the phrase “it ain’t broke, it just lacks duct tape”. Added to that phrase in 1995 with the publication of their book about lubricant WD-40 book was, “Two rules get you through life: If it’s stuck and it’s not supposed to be, WD-40 it. If it’s not stuck and it’s supposed to be, duct tape it”. Their website features thousands of duct tape uses from people around the world ranging from fashions to auto repair. The combination of WD-40 and duct tape is sometimes referred to as “the redneck repair kit.”

But as good and useful as Excel is, is it really the right tool for agile development projects? Just because it works, doesn’t mean something else won’t work better. In fact, participants at three Agile Overview for Executives and Leaders workshops we conducted at ESI told us that the second most important thing they need to better implement Agile is better tools designed specifically for the Agile environment (training came in first).

Organizations are faced with quite a variety of tools for Agile development these days. I suspect they will go, or are going, through the same agonizing and sometimes frustrating process of trying to select the best tool suite for their environment and then ensure that it is used consistently throughout the organization.

Tool selection in many organizations is like being engaged in a “Holy War.” People line up on one side or the other and have endless debates and arguments about the benefits and advantages of this tool over that tool. In the end, either “this” tool or “that” tool would probably work well, and certainly a lot better than the Excel spreadsheets they’re using now.

As we launch off into the Agile realm let’s try to leave the worst of the tool issues, battles, and Holy Wars we had with traditional project management behind. Remember, we need to be “agile” in all aspects of agile development. While Excel, like duct tape, can come in handy in a pinch, we don’t want to work in a “pinch” all the time.

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By the way, I’ll be in India on May 8th and 9th presenting the ROI of Project Management.

It’s all about ROI: The Value of Project Management

http://www.esi-intl.in/eMailers/breakfast-seminar-with-leroy-ward-in-association-with-amcham/Amcham-Mailer-01.htm

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by!

Joe Czarnecki, PMP, MSP

In preparation for the change from PMI’s PMBOK® 4^th to 5^th editions, we at ESI, have released a video that describes all the changes to the PMBOK®, Knowledge Area by Knowledge Area, including a discussion of how the changes will impact practitioners AND those who are studying for the exam.

Joe Czarnecki, my colleague, and long time ESI PMBOK guru and project management specialist, breaks down what has changed and explains the impact of the changes.   The video is about 25 minutes long, and can be found here: http://youtu.be/dPGLtbr4oao

Additionally, we have broken the full video into a series of 12 videos that outline the specific differences between the 4^th and 5^th editions – with one video for each Knowledge Area. All of the videos have been added to our YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ESIIntl.

We hope you find these videos useful. Please pass the links along to anyone who “needs to know.”

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By the way, I’ll be in India on May 8th and 9th presenting the ROI of Project Management.

It’s all about ROI: The Value of Project Management

http://www.esi-intl.in/eMailers/breakfast-seminar-with-leroy-ward-in-association-with-amcham/Amcham-Mailer-01.htm

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by!