So what DO executives think of us as project managers and what do they value?\u00a0\u00a0 I know from conferences and other interaction with project managers that being valued by their executives is something of a holy grail – and seemingly not nearly\u00a0common enough.\u00a0 Thinking back, I realize that I was about 7 years into my career as an engineer and manager before I got even a first inkling from an exec of how they personally thought about project management.\u00a0\u00a0 And I was 12 years in overall and about 6 years into project management work before I got really good role-modeling of\u00a0true project leadership behavior – what upper-level courageous and business-focused PM role\u00a0looks like – and direct messages from executives that “this is what I’m looking for”.\u00a0\u00a0 (Gad!\u00a0 How can we do these jobs for so long without better clues from the ultimate customer of our work?)<\/p>\n
Well, perhaps controversially to some, I’d maintain it’s at least partly due to the fact that as we are introduced to our PM role, we are taught some about philosophy and a LOT about the mechanics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gotta learn it all – scheduling, estimating, communicating, detailed techniques for doing so.\u00a0 We’re sent to class\u00a0to\u00a0get some starting foundation; we are handed the methodology binder of “how we do things” if our company has one;\u00a0we hear the\u00a0emphasis on professional certification around the right way to do things, and we see our company’s emphasis on corporate compliance through processes and documentation.\u00a0\u00a0Overall, we learn what we’re “supposed to do” as PMs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And\u00a0 a lot of\u00a0what we’re evidently supposed to do is (in my opinion) those\u00a0mechanics of project management.\u00a0\u00a0 If our company is new to project management, and everyone is sufficiently busy, we may get none of the above inputs to start, and\u00a0fly by the seat of our pants WONDERING what we’re “supposed to do” and always being on the lookout for clues.<\/p>\n
What I’ve learned from dealing with executives is that their higher-level view of the world comes in really handy for helping project managers focus on what’s most needed and what is therefore most valuable.\u00a0And it may not be exactly what we feel all those other sources are\u00a0telling us\u00a0we’re\u00a0“supposed to\u00a0do” as PMs!\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
My\u00a0first exposure to an exec’s view of PM came after my start-up had been acquired, and the president of the parent company was going to visit to check us out.\u00a0 Mass preparation around demonstrating competence to the new boss!\u00a0 Especially important to us,\u00a0the managers\u00a0in the old start-up were all in our late 20s, we were concerned that this was an important referendum on our fitness to stay in our positions. \u00a0 I was overseeing a big release at the time as Director of Hardware Engineering and by that time we had been given a project manager by the parent company.\u00a0 \u00a0I was instructed that we needed to\u00a0demonstrate our handle on the release schedule by printing out all our detail, hanging it on the wall, wowing the guy with how much we knew, referring to it when making a status presentation.\u00a0 So\u00a0we did – hours of printing, hanging detailed schedule pieces on the wall to get ready\u00a0(schedules\u00a0I knew would change the next week in places….but oh well).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The exec arrived.\u00a0 Serious meeting began.\u00a0 It was time to present schedule status.\u00a0\u00a0 We gave the milestone overview and waved at the wall detail to cover more detail.\u00a0 He looked around the room briefly at all the detail on the walls.\u00a0 Then he beckoned me to\u00a0one chart and pointed at a milestone and said\u00a0something along the lines of “So tell me how you handle this milestone for transitioning\u00a0from the first phase of the project into full development.\u00a0 How do you know you’re ready enough, so you don’t send 50 programmers off doing work that will be off target and require big changes\u00a0or even totally\u00a0thrown away?”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I briefly mentioned\u00a0our spec reviews,\u00a0how we decided than an area of the spec was good enough to allow\u00a0work to start, how we used our own form of design\u00a0review to keep tabs, and under what circumstances we’d let risky stuff start because we had to do some design and coding before we could even know what we had. \u00a0 And that was it.\u00a0 He said “Good.\u00a0 That’s a place a lot of money can get wasted.” And he\u00a0sat down and was ready to move on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What did I learn from that?\u00a0 To this exec, PM effectiveness wasn’t about pre-set assumptions on the “right” quantity of detail in a schedule,\u00a0or exactly how we worte specs, or any level of mechanics detail.\u00a0 His only “supposed to do” items were at the high level – things that would impact the business decisions on the project, the money spent executing it – and whether we seemed to know how to use our “toolkit” of mechanics (whatever they were for us) to keep on top of the business aspects.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He focused there to judge our competence and credibility.\u00a0 Looking back at my answer,\u00a0\u00a0I actually felt a sense of liberation.\u00a0\u00a0 I really DID think highly of how we made those transition decisions;\u00a0 we had worked them out as part of our functional manager\/project manager dual roles, in a way we felt worked well\u00a0for our technical projects and our teams.\u00a0\u00a0 This President DIDN”T put me through the wringer over a certain “way to do things”.\u00a0 I felt he rewarded our thinking (and our creativity with our own management processes!)\u00a0 with his executive stamp of approval.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
That one experience was pretty eye-opening for me.\u00a0 I realized I truly had had feelings of fear getting ready for that presentation.\u00a0 I was afraid I’d be\u00a0told I was wrong, that I wasn’t doing it the right way, that I wasn’t up to snuff as a manager.\u00a0 Talk about bad for your confidence level!\u00a0\u00a0 His unexpected response\u00a0 –\u00a0validating my using my brain to be the best manager I could be for the situation –\u00a0started me on a path to viewing\u00a0every new\u00a0management challenge with more freedom to think and design and try.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0While I still wanted to learn all I could from classes or books or possible ways to do things and what other people were doing – I felt very free to NOT let those sources get in the way of\u00a0just working with my teams and using our own judgment to make project management and technical management processes work best for us and for the business.\u00a0I came to believe that part of being a great PM is to not be afraid of, limited by, or unduly influenced in your situation by what anyone else has said you’re “supposed to do”.\u00a0\u00a0 It may or may not be a good idea for your company, your team, your project, the situation you’re facing this week.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In short – I believe that one key to being a great PM is to be able and willing to\u00a0work with people, work with the project situation and goals at hand, and do\u00a0our PMing in a way that\u00a0makes sense and gets\u00a0the job done.\u00a0 Thank you Mr. Executive!<\/p>\n
Tomorrow I’m going to take this executive theme further with some direct quotes from executives about what they value in PMs in their organizations (and look at how what they say matches up with what PM job descriptions typically ask for!)<\/p>\n
Cinda Voegtli<\/p>\n
www.ProjectConnections.com<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So what DO executives think of us as project managers and what do they value?\u00a0\u00a0 I know from conferences and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[231,1370,211],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-miscellaneous","tag-career","tag-leadership","tag-project-manager-role"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13858,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/13858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}