Why #Goalies make the best Project Managers and Leaders #PMOT

I was driving with my brother back from a family event and we started talking about the upcoming Jets and Flames hockey seasons. After some speculating on free agent signings, we started to talk about the qualities of good Project Manager and Leaders. That balance good leaders have between being persistent and committed and being able to admit a mistake and change course. There is a whole continuum of leaders that give in too quickly and some that never give in at all. What makes once person able to move on quicker than another?

We agreed that while we aren’t sure where those points are for every situation,  but we did agree on one thing. If you have been a goalie, you will find that point easier than other people. Here are the five reasons your next leader or Project Manager should be a goalie.

Goalies know they can’t win by themselves – focus on the project

No matter how good a goalie is, they can’t win games by themselves. This helps immensely to keep egos in check. They know they need forwards to score goals and defenceman to help keep goals out of their own net. More than any other position, you are brutally aware on how the entire team is needed.

In addition, your role as a Goalie is to give the rest of the team confidence as well. The rest of the team should not have to worry about bad goals in our own goal. Our team should have the freedom to challenge and rush when the opportunity arises.

Goalies know that the focus needs to be on the wins and not the goals. It is about the project and not the tasks.

Goalies know you can’t win them all – look forward

Goalies are perfectionists in their craft and in all things except having a good memory. Goalies are also extremely forgiving with their teammates and their mistakes. This provides an interesting dichotomy. I am a perfectionist until that pucks is in the net, then I need to be able to wipe the slate clean and move on. Usually there is a quick re-evaluation process and then you need to move on. This requires a short memory and a good amount of confidence.

Even more, Goalies understand that the games is made up of 20-30 mini-games and they need to be ready for the next one. You can’t get too high or too low.

Bad decisions and mistakes are part of the game. Everyone makes them so it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time on persecuting the guilty. Fish the puck out and move on….

Goalies know about perfect shots or deflections – don’t over plan, over analyze

You can have the perfect angle and sometimes a shot is going to beat you or is going to be deflected. That is just life and it is no ones fault. Good Goalies spend minimal time looking backward and almost all their time looking forward.

This also help Goalies to not over plan. People can over plan or over analyze because their believe it will increase the chances of success. Goalies realize that even if you spend two weeks working on something, a deflection is still likely. Rather than spending all that time planning, spend time on how you will recover because you know a deflection is going to happen.

Goalies realize communication is the key – communicate

For those of you that haven’t been on ice level, Goalies are probably the chattiest players on the ice. Always chirping our information to the defencemen – ‘time’ , ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘point’, ‘DUCK’

Goalies realize the key is rebound control – deal with issues immediately

Goalies and Project Managers and Leaders realize that issues happen. What they all realize is that it doesn’t matter how or why the issue arose, just how can we get it resolved. Having an issue is not a bad thing, booting the issue around in front of the net for 3 or 4 shots is a bad thing and will lead to a goal.

Find the issue, locate the issue, cover the damn thin up a get a whistle.

Goalies guide projects to where they want them to go – minimize risk

When I played a lot, I had a great glove hand. My brother had great lower body reflexes. So what did we do? We showed more or less to influence the shots to go to our strengths.

Similarly, a great Project Manager or leader will guide the project to where he knows the project is prepared. He or she will know the high-risk areas and compensate for those areas. I always used to hug the stick side post.

Summary

But Terry, you say, ‘I’m not a goalie, does that mean I can’t be a Project Manager?’

Not at all. But if you are a good Project Manager, it means you probably would be a good goalie. 🙂

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Everything I know about Project #Risk I learned from Brett #Favre #PMOT

God I loved watching Brett Favre play. Sometimes.

Other times he just frustrated the heck out of me. You really had to admire the man’s commitment and desire though. He was fully bought into the team’s success. He was going to do whatever he could to ensure the team won. Even more, I got the sense that he believed that the team would win. I got the sense that he was surprised each and every time he got to the end of the games and the score on the scoreboard went against the Packers. He had all the traits you absolutely love to have in an athlete. And he had all the traits and habits you hate to have in a Project Manager.

Project Risks

I don’t think I’ve been on a project where we have managed risks well. I don’t think I’ve seen a project where risks are managed well. Everyone understands what needs to be done but for whatever reason, the risk meetings aren’t followed up on after that first risk workshop. I started to wonder again why that would be. Everyone understood the reasons behind the risk workshops and even on projects that weren’t overly busy we didn’t seem to go back and revisit risks. We even created new risk deliverables. We had risk heat maps and risk radars! And then we created them once and never really went back to review them or recreate them.

So the question is why? Why are we so bad at following up on something that most people agree is very valuable?

Just like Brett Favre, we just didn’t feel there was a lot of risk.

Be the Ball

Good project teams ‘become the project’ at some point later in the project schedule. I don’t mean they physically become the project, but they become vested the project’s vision and success. Project team member’s want the project to succeed and want the clients to realize the benefits. In this way team members become the project and lose some of their objectivity. When project team members become the project they first thing that happens is that they believe in the project, the second thing that happens is that they believe in each other. Eventually this can result in decreased formality, diminished reporting of issues and risks as the team doesn’t want to be adversarial and also they believe the issues will sort themselves out. In this way, as your project team gets stronger and becomes the project, they lose their objectivity.

Annnnnnnd before you know it you are chucking up a 70 yard bomb with 2:00 to go instead of just running out the clock.

More and more companies are now resourcing external Project Managers that are only on board for a short period of time. I believe this is trying to address the issues that can be caused by Project Managers becoming too comfortable in the client environment. Similar to the project team, this familiarity can cause issues to not be raised and decreased formality as the project managers believe more in their team mates and the clients.

Question

So the question remains. How can we reap the benefits from increased relationships to the Project Manager without losing objectivity? One way to attempt this is to use consultant Project Managers and only have them to a short period of time. I’m not sure if this is optimal though as new Project Managers have to learn the business domain and organization and just when they are up to speed they need to be swapped out. With every new Project Manager there is ramp up and learning time and with every departing Project Manager we lose valuable project and client knowledge.

Active Project Assurance

What we are implementing is a concept that has been around for a while – Project Assurance. Lately Project Assurance has taken on the form of Project Checkpoints were we get together and sing around the campfire. I jest but the weekly conference call checkpoints without everyone having the knowledge or the context of the project are not very useful.

Usually the call goes like this:

You: Got any issues?

Me: Nope.

You: OK, talk to you next week

What we are proposing here is quite different.

Active Project Assurance involves a third-party facilitating ongoing sessions with the project team to provide that objectivity while encouraging the Project Manager to continue to build relationship with the project team and clients. In our case the Project Management Office participates in the Project Initiation activities and then facilitates the Project Retrospectives and Project Risk workshops. We can then provide Project Assurance to objectively review the project while still allowing the Project Team to be the project. Without the enhanced project team and client relationships, the Project Management Office does not have biases for issues and risks. Both of those still scare the heck out of the PMO.

This allows the Project Management Office to have enough context to actually consult on the project and also allows the project teams to become more informal and build relationships that ultimately benefit the project.

And maybe we can stop the odd pick-6 while we are at it.

Project Manager’s #1 Challenge #PMOT

One thing that has always perplexed me on projects is how poorly we as Project Managers and project teams manage risk. All of us have the initial Risk Management meeting and try to capture the risks and mitigations required. But even in that first meeting, we fall short in identifying and planning how we are going to address the risks on the project.

Why?

At one time I had thought it was just because we as Project Managers got busy with the work on managing the project and forgot about scheduling follow-up Risk sessions. But that wasn’t it, even when the Risk items were incorporated into weekly status reporting, the effort and attention paid to risk management was just ceremonial. There was something else at play.

I was working on another long project and we were discussing the challenges with the issues and risks encountered. In a retrospective we discussed how we managed the issues and risks looser and looser as the project executed. We did this as we became more comfortable with the client and they became more comfortable with us. Unfortunately new players came onto the project later and changed characteristics of the project. This changed the issues and risks but we were not managing them as formally as before as we became comfortable with the issues, risks, client, and the project.

One person summed this situation up perfectly. “On projects it is natural for the project team to become the project. This eventually happens with the Project Manager.”

This is where the lack of formality and process can be a problem for the Project Manager and the project.

Become the Project

“Become the Project” – sounds rather Zen-like doesn’t it?

Become the Project to me means that you have somewhat lost your objectivity and like the rest of the team you are thinking in a positive and trusting manner. You start to expect issues to be resolved very soon, that risks will not happen, and that if things happen we will address them as one homogeneous team. Well it turns out that perspective is valuable and required by some of the team members as they are working through deliverables, the Project Management and leadership need to be careful to not fall into this lack of formality.

So what to do?

What can we do? As much as we say not to do it, it is human nature. Trust will be built up and used after working with the same people for months and years.

This is where your Project Management Office or Deliver Management Team needs to help your project team by providing the independent 3rd party or sober second thought perspective. The Project Management Office or Delivery Management Team’s role is not to own the risks and issues but to facilitate the review and consult on them as an independent 3rd party. In this way, we ensure the review happens and we make decisions based on all the most current data from the project balanced with objectivity and experience.

Ultimately you want your team and Project Manager to be the project, we just need to add a check and balance to ensure issues and risks aren’t overlooked.