Planting a Garden

What in the world has planting a garden have to do with Project Management?

I think a lot.

First my confession: I have always been a gardener of some sort or another. I will pick three oranges off my orange tree this year. Its tough keeping an orange tree in the mountains, even in a green house.

I grew up in a neighborhood where most families kept a vegetable garden (a vestige of the great depression and the war years) so I knew how to plant and pick carrots (my specialty) and pick tomatoes. My grandmother even had an urban garden where she grew the cucumbers to be pickled later. One year a few decades ago, my wife and I shared a quarter acre garden with friends. it was a lot of work but we had lots of vegetables for ourselves and our fiends from June to December.

Mostly over the  last few years I have planted grasses, trees, flowering shrubs and flowering plants. This year we set in an experimental garden with a wide variety of vegetables, in a variety of micro environments. I will report later this summer on what we learned.

But I digress.

A good project manager should be a bit of a gardener.

• Gardeners think and plan ahead.
• What can we plant next week, next year?
• What can we grow this season?
• Gardeners are experimenters.
• What new things can we plant?
• Will they actually grow?
• How can we change the environment for our plants?
• Gardeners are nurturers.
• We water and weed  so our plants can thrive?
• Gardeners are Darwinists.
• Sometimes things just won’t thrive and we pull them out so as not to waste effort on the unfruitful things?
• Gardeners are reapers.
• We will pick our flowers and vegetables in due time.
• Gardeners are opportunists.
• Ever find a “volunteer” plant or tree in your garden? I have, and watched it grow.
• Gardeners are investors.
• We save seeds or buy inexpensive seeds and harvest valuable crops?
• Gardeners should be practical, but we aren’t
• Think about my orange tree!

As a developer/project manager I always thought in terms of planting seeds that would grow into valuable plants to be picked by someone (not necessarily me). I also knew that sometimes those seeds would either not sprout or would wither and die, and there would be nothing I could do about it.

The take away: as a good PM, think of yourself as a gardener. You plant the seeds, add water and light, and the plants do all the work!

 

If you win you loose!

Many, many times in my career I have come across the rotting carcasses of managers who had stood on a high horse and won the battle only to loose the war in ragged retreat.

One of my mantras about entering a fight was: Can we win?, and if we win will it benefit us. Some might feel that was mealy mouthed, soft manager speak, but I disagree.s. I heard many times from employees that leaders should always fight for what was right!, but more often than not the team could never agree to what was righteous. My attitude was, if the team couldn’t define what was right, I sure wasn’t going to lead them into hell for it. I also felt strongly that it was actually a show of strength to not go down a path where teammates and employees wanted you to go, just to show who was the toughest SOB in the place.

Thisissue came up today, in a discussion with a senior construction manager who is leading a project that is going to hell in a hand-basket. The root cause of the projects failure was that the contractor had left $250,000 out of his bid and was low, (every one involved knew he had a bad bid) and the owner thought that they could take advantage of this error in this economy.

Wrong headed thinking. This project will end up in litigation. The bonding company will not make the owner whole (as they believe) financially.

And the proximate reason for guaranteed failure is not the low bid (that's a given restraint). The current reason for guaranteed project failure is that the owner has taken the first error (the low bid) personally and is editorializing project problem rather than stating the facts and working to fix the problem.

The senior manager has tried to caution the owner about making this a “personal” fight rather than a business difficulty. In the owner’s view, the contractor is an agent of the devil who must be overcome. In the real world of bonding companies, courts and juries, personal anger and personality conflicts are disallowed as irrelevant.

Five years from now, this matter will still be in litigation and all the lawyers costs, lost opportunities and anxiety will have been for nothing.

The take away:

Stay off your high horse, and be a business person. Project problems are not personal. When you write letters and record facts, lay off the editorializing about motives. Keep anger and idle threats out of the record and out of your mind. Anger only clouds your reasoning to the best possible solution for the project business problem.

I am pretty sure my health is still good, because I learned early not to assign motivations to people or companies that I had disputes with, but to deal with each problem as an optimization solution basis for everyone involved not just for me. I tried to avoid mutually assured destruction.

Even the best fail to heed their own advice.

I am one to admit mistakes when I make them.

Over the last few weeks I was very busy developing future opportunities. While attending to the future, I lost track of the hired help, and as you would expect, I got jammed up on Friday.

I have someone to cover some of my web work. She moved (without notice to me, and why should she?). However she lost internet for a week, and I wasn’t back checking the status of her projects.

She (or it could have been a he) fell a week behind. My name is on the door, so I fell a week behind.

On this project, we were able to overcome by working over the weekend. (I had to defer some other things). However we had some slightly upset customers, who I now have to “up the service level” to keep them from bolting. This was not a fatal error, but it was an error in judgment on my part. On your part, a similar error could be fatal to the project so:…….

The take away is: When you think things are just going swimmingly well, they probably are not.

PS Its not arrogant to consider yourself one of the best, the best always get up shake it off and move forward, and then analyze how to eliminate the mistake.

PPS. The customers acknowledged, they had recognized that we were falling behind, but didn’t even mention it to me, so I guess they were not that disappointed.

 

First, do no harm! Hire the right people.

The first thing HR or any hiring manager needs to do is hire the right people. Notice I di not say “good” people. I believe to the core of my soul there are very few bad people. Most people who are hired are “good” people. But why are so few “good” people the right hires.
What follows is my tried and true test questions of myself when hiring:

• Does the person fit with our company culture? I am not talking about any external cultural manifestations, I mean core beliefs and actions.
• Will they get along appropriately with others in the firm?
• Will they become bored, or worse, will their ambitions upset the harmony we have achieved. (I know many many firms thrive on dissonance, and I have worked and thrived in them, but MOST companies thrive in accord!
• Will they be satisfied with our company pay, promotion and transfer system?
• Will they criticize or bully others or push to hard for change?
• Will they need constant care (high maintenance) and praise feeding?
• Are they smarter than you, and if so, will they have the grace not to rub that in your face every minute of every day?

After you analyze the above, and you  might make a hire that doesn't exactly fit (be prepared to manage that problem if you judge the reward worth the headache.) then ask?
Do they have the skills, abilities and desires to do the job you ask them to do?
If they don’t, don’t make the hire.

Rule Number 8. Have Fun

Of my rules for Project Management. I think the most important one is Rule 8. Have Fun.

Project management is hard work, and the best project managers who get the scary projects aren’t always assured success. Scary projects have lots of risks, and sometimes the forces arrayed against the project are immense. So its essential to have fun with your work. If it is painful to go to work every day, then get a new job. I left Project Management due to my health and that of my wife. We made a great new life as academics and teachers and I make sure to have fun every day. The pay is less but so is the stress, and I get to consult and teach about something that I have spent forty years studying and practicing.

During a productive part of my youth, I spent a decade taking on broken projects, or first of a kind projects. I happened into it as an assistant project manager, when Ford Motor Company, pushed by Japanese auto makers on quality, decided that they could design and build a full paint shop ($150M, 1980 dollars) in one year. That was tall order enough, and then they forgot to get an EPA permit that put the project start back 14 weeks. When we asked for an extension, they said, sorry Dec 15th is still the deadline. It was great fun with 300 managers and supervisors pushing 3000 workers on a project that went 20 hours per day seven days per week. When we completed the work to deadline (within budget I think), an executive from Ford came to the plant and congratulated “we happy few, we band of brothers”, and then lowered the boom by stating that Ford Motor Company had their doubts about  the possibility of our completing the project on time but they were very happy with the outcome and henceforth all Ford Motor Co major plant construction would be done to similar schedules. Almost thirty years later I am still in contact with a handful of the living team members. My life has been blessed with membership on other fantastic teams.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Shakespeare Henry V

The take away:

If it hurts to go to work, find another job. Project Management skills are vital to dozens of different industries and hundreds of thousands of potential employers. I know that times are tight and a job is a job, but if you work yourself to death with stress what good is that to your family.

A former student and friend returned this year from a military tour in  Iraq.  Here was part of the message he sent me.

Dr. Rogers, I never knew how important home and the family was, until I was taken away from it. 

A good lesson hard learned. So Have Fun with your work and your family.

So you call that a project plan! or my “Eating Project WBS”

One of the fundamental roles of a project manager is putting together a coherent and understandable plan with the buy-in (consensus) of the team.

After you have a good plan, you need to be able to execute. That’s where a solid WBS pays for itself.

The size of the project is irrelevant. Grocery shopping, for me, requires a list. I make the list and then rearrange it into a hierarchy to suit my local supermarket layout. All vegetables together, cereals also together, etc. Its been a long time since I had to write a budget figure on the list, but with the economy as it is, that might happen again soon

I take the grocery list (or what you might call my “EATING PROJECT WBS”) with me to the market and as I complete a task like “lettuce to shopping cart”, it gets checked off. Without my “Eating Project WBS” I would probably return home with about 1% of the required work done, leading to extra costs and re-work, as well as a delayed dinner or two.

I have had this habit for almost my entire adult life. When I was a young man in college I lived about 30 miles from town and the campus without a car, the last bus stopped about a mile from my home at 8:00 pm. (this was in the pre cell phone era and certainly in the pre Internet era. When I went to town in the morning I had my “daily life project WBS” made before I left for town. If I wasn’t organized, I didn’t eat, or maybe even sleep in my own bed, and I certainly didn’t meet up with my friends.

The take away:

No matter how small the project a rudimentary WBS will make successful project execution more likely.

Interviewing for a new job? here is a tip!

If you are looking for a new job, or know someone who is, or if you want to understand your own company, here is a quick tip to set yourself apart.

I have seen reports that say as many as 15% more firms last year instituted formal ethics policies. My guess is that after the next round of business corruption reports and investment failures that the number of firms with open ethics policies will be increasing.

Would you want to do business with an investment firm that did not have a transparent honesty policy? Be on the look out for advertising from firms about how they are dealing with the meltdown and how their ethics policies have improved performance for clients.

So, when you go for your next interview, make sure you have fully checked out the firm that is recruiting you. Study their policy. If they don’t have a written ethics policy, either pass or find out why? I once hired a major construction firm for a project. I was shocked to learn they had no formal safety manual. When I challenged them, they pointed out that safety wasn’t second in their firm, it was first, and that safety was embedded in every policy manual, including ones on the desk of typists for proper posture and chair selection. I guessed they had directions on how to avoid paper cuts, they were that serious about safety.

The take away, know your companies ethics policies and abide by them. If you are looking for a new position check the written policy of the prospective firm. Ask pointed questions of the interviewer, such as: “Can you provide me with an example of where your written ethics policy was crucial in protecting an employee and/or a client from harm.” This might surprise the interviewer and set you apart as a serious person worth a second look.

If they seem clueless then  you can suspect the policy is a sham. if they are proud of their firm they will know at least where to look to find the written policy.

If you don’t agree with what they have written pass. If you get the job, live by the policy, in spite of what you might think you see from others around you. If the policy is a sham, get a new job.