The course was going really well. The group was really engaged and we were even ahead on time. Then came the question: What would you say are the 7 deadly sins of project management? It brought a few smiles from the group. I suggested as were near the end of the project management course why not split into 3 groups … Read More >
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The 7 deadly sins of project management
The Project Management Leadership Assessment The pilot we are currently running to look at leadership and how it may be measured for Project Management practitioners has a great by-product in that it also gives us a view on how socially desirable respondents measure when completing the test. The SD score or cheat score as it is known to some, is used to test validity of the result in terms of the individual within the group. So, what is social desirability? According to the web, ** “Social desirability is the tendency of respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others, or in a manner in which they believe the researcher would desire, rather than how they truly feel or believe.” We saw a great example recently where a test taker received their PLQ Result and presumably didn’t like what they saw. Shortly after, the test was retaken and resulted in a considerably different outcome, (presumably one that the test taker was looking to achieve?). However they also moved their social desirability sore to the maximum mark of 25/25 which immediately flagged the result as suspect. This all relates back to the “looking in the mirror” question, which I raised in the last edition of Project Management Tipoffs and how we approach this very difficult task of self-analysis
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Need to be Socially Desirable?
There’s a song titled ‘History Repeating’ . It’s performed by Dame Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads . As noted in the Wikipedia entry on the Propellerheads, “the term ‘propellerhead’ is slang for a nerd”. This will make sense to anyone who’s ever worked on any initiative involving technology. But it’s not the band name or even Dame Shirley Bassey that’s triggered this post; it’s the title of the song and in particular the chorus . and I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again yes I’ve seen it before just little bits of history repeating In our daily work as managers, leaders and change agents we must stop being surprised when we see and experience time and again the same underlying problems, issues, challenges (call them what you will) with projects and change initiatives. We’ve seen it all before and we’ll see it again, it’s just bits of history repeating.
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A Little Bit of History Repeating
Last week I took part in a new venture called PMTV which is run by Bernardo Tirado and Jon Hyde . It was actually run using Google+ functionality Hang Outs which makes it easy to broadcast conversation live and then make them available afterwards via You Tube. The theme for the show was – Why Do PMOs Fail and you can see the whole episode below. At the beginning of the show it was useful to define what a PMO is – and the definitions I gave came from the work of the APM PMO SIG where the committee put its collective head together a while back when working on the new Body of Knowledge guide from the APM. Here are the definitions I gave: Project Office Supports and assists the Project Manager and Project Sponsor in their duties in directing and managing a project. Types of functions: Monitoring and controlling – maintaining plans, collecting and analysing data etc Governance – project audits, healthchecks etc Administrative – planning support, risk, issue reports, quality reviews etc Will depend on maturity of the org, frameworks used, competencies of the staff etc Physically or virtually located, can be permanent or temporary (disbanded once project delivered) For example – a project at a customer site – the project office of 3 people would support the project manager and project team actually on-site. The three people in the Project Office would support different aspects of the project
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PMO – Quick Definitions
There’s a lot of talk these days about execution. One time when I mentioned the word as it related to project management, one guy in the audience yelled out “the only execution they’re talking about is mine if I don’t get the job done!” Is this what your PMs think about when you use the word execution? Well, enough doom and gloom about how no one’s getting any younger, talent is flying out the door, and we have competency gaps the size of the Grand Canyon. In this week’s post I’m going to look at real solutions to the problem so we can begin to actually do something about it. Data shows that establishing even fundamental competencies in project-related skills can have an immediate and measurable impact on the business. Immediate and measurable-two words that C-levels love to hear. It was Aristotle who said, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” Smart guy, Aristotle. Seems like there’s a direct correlation between learned project management skills and measurable improvement in delivery time, cost reduction, customer satisfaction and productivity. There are several proven ways to engender these skills in your project managers
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Creating a Culture of Execution