Monthly Archives: March 2013

Mosh Pit Portfolio Management

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Should managing a portfolio of projects be like a mosh pit at a heavy metal concert, or like a waltz at the royal ball?  Maybe both.liturgy

This week showed good progress toward setting up portfolio management at my new organization.  But, by Friday afternoon I was really tired.  You know how your thoughts wander a bit when that happens.  Since I’ve been writing this blog, too often thoughts or experiences click on ideas for blog posts.  When we are really into something, our experiences all feed into our own frame of reference.  I was worried that I’m becoming unproductively obsessed.  Fortunately, I found out this week that I’m not unusual.

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Finding Opportunities

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I advocate looking beyond risks to find the opportunities on your projects. Even though I write about it, I’m not always getting there.
This post will help me keep at it. Reposting it today for my readers. Thanks, Dan.

Leadership Freak

Crushed

Opportunity is ugly.

Opportunity is a door that feels like a wall, an open window that feels shut, or a ceiling that feels too low.

Mud disguises, pain exposes, and fear illuminates opportunity.

Distinguish your leadership:

Great leaders face great challenges and solve great problems. Clear the mud. Solve the pain. Face the fear. Rise up and address issues others run from.

Leaders without obstacles are ships without wind.

Run toward rather than away. The giant you slay expands your influence.

Frustration is opportunity.

Enhanced influence and profound results wait beyond frustrations, complications, and disappointments.

Struggle:

Struggle transforms. Success, on the other hand, makes you more of who you were.

Power to seize opportunities comes from understanding and addressing your greatest struggle.

Greatest struggle:

The greatest battles lie within. On the other hand, inner struggle is leadership’s most profound opportunity. All leaders struggle with inner questions like:

  1. Do I…

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Pull is Better Than Push

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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how organizations change.  The bottom line seems to be that successful change comes from people pulling it in.  You can’t push change in.  Do our projects focus on push or pull?

PullI’m part of planning for a project where thousands of people will have to change how they do their work.  The old system is about 30 years old.  The change will require thousands of people to redo 30 years of process and system connections to unplug the old and plug in the new.  How will they get ready to do this?

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Letting Go of Baggage to Find What Can Go Right on Your Project

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Here’s a reblog of Dan Rockwell’s “Leadership Freak.”

“Creating Glorious Space for Reinvention”

baggage dan rockwell

Dan discusses “Leadership and the Art of Struggle” with its author, Stephen Snyder.  Stephen encourages us to create “glorious space” by letting go of baggage of past failures and successes.  On our projects, past failures may cause us to see only what can go wrong and limit our ability to find what can go right.  Opportunities may be missed.  The same may be true for past successes.  Building only on what worked before may also limit finding opportunities for what can go better this time. 

I think that using a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) approach to risk assessment may put us more in touch with the present and what is possible vs. focusing on the past and what worked or didn’t then.  It’s a good thing to think about. 

The photo is from Dan’s post.

Happy Families, Happy Projects

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For the past several years I’ve encouraged all my clients, and now my co-workers, to adopt agile methods on their projects.  I also encourage it for any work, like software maintenance work, that can be organized as well-defined sets of tasks that are completed in a time period.  In my experience, all work groups that use a good agile methodology as it’s meant to be used end up more productive and happier, too.  My inspiration to write about agile today, though, comes from a different place that further proves what a good practice it is.

A new book by Bruce Feiler, “The Secrets of Happy Families,” encourages families to adopt an Agile Family Strategy.  Bruce got this idea talking with a software engineer in Idaho, David Starr, who moved his family from dysfunctional to functional by bringing home his agile software development practices.  Bruce tried the same agile techniques as well as lots of other good ideas for happy families and also had great success.  Both Bruce and David found that what worked for software developers and their clients worked for families with kids, too.  Agile’s simple consistent practices focused the family members on helping each other, being accountable, planning things to do in realistic chunks and getting them done, and involving everyone in setting rules and making decisions.  Everyone was happier, more productive, and appreciated one another.  This is what we want at home and at work.

agile boardThe first chapter of Bruce’s book is the Agile Family Strategy.  Bruce thoughtfully cited a paper published by David and Eleanor Starr – “Agile Practices for Families” – which I found on the Internet.  I read the preview chapters of Bruce’s book on Amazon and ordered it for my son’s family.  Russ and Kellie do a great job with their three young daughters.  I saw this book as affirming and expanding their family practices.  Being a software development person, I especially liked the Starr’s paper.  It clearly linked agile methods (derived from the Toyota Production System or “lean”) to a realistic set of practices to engage family members in a fun way to make the pressures of everyday life with kids a little less stressful.

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Repost – Making Choices

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Sometimes I have a hard time choosing what to do. Things go better after I choose and move ahead. Dan Rockwell’s post spoke profoundly to me today. It’s not just the message for me personally, but another reaffirmation of my project management philosophy.
When I suggest we find what can go right on a project, in a way I’m saying that we need to put more emphasis on what we want to be when we get done with the project. That comes from two perspectives. First, how the project’s outcomes make our organization’s services and capacity more perfect. Second, how can we make our journey to get there more perfect in its contribution to our growth. Both perspectives are more about, as Dan suggests, choosing who we want to become and how we want to become that way (in keeping with who we are) than what we want to do.
Balancing the focus on completing scope with a focus on completing ourselves is finding what can go right on a project. It’s the other side of risk.
Dan, thanks again for helping me consider more deeply what I’m trying to say.

Leadership Freak

choices

Unable to choose is unable to move. Choices enable movement. Unable to choose is another way of saying stuck. Successful leaders make decisions.

Everyone who’s stuck
lives with choices waiting to be made.

Fear of choosing is fear of losing opportunity.

Fear of missing out is the reason you miss out.

The critical first choice:

The choice that informs all others is who to be not what to do.

First choices enable action.

Choosing what do before deciding who to be means you’ve caved to external pressure.

Answer “what to do questions” by clarifying who you want to be. What to do is an event. Who to be guides the journey.

First choices involve who to be.
Second choices explain what to do.

First choices are relatively easy. But, if you’re not sure who to be, ask, “How do I want to be known?”

Benefit:

Identity off-sets external pressure…

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Bring “Wow” to Your Projects

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Reading “Leadership Freak” on Monday was reaffirming. Dan Rockwell wrote about leaders who achieve great success by setting a vision, bringing in good people, and getting out of the way.  His primary example was Tony Hsieh at Zappos.  My ideas about imagining perfect outcomes and defining the perfect journey to get there are in line with this advice.zappos

 

 

 

 

 

 

I use “perfect” on purpose even though people are uncomfortable about it.  The audio clip on Dan’s post brings out the importance of this in how Zappos decides how to “wow” their customers.  On projects, we have to decide what it will be like to “wow” ourselves (everyone involved) with our results, and then define the project around that.  Those who have to get it done and will live with the results are the best ones to do it.  This is a way to find what can go right about a project before we focus on what to do and what can go wrong.

Thanks for the reaffirming post, Dan.  Readers, be sure to listen to the audio clip on this post; and check out Dan’s preceding post on how to establish a culture that enables “Wow.”

Thanks for reading.

Do You Want Your Project Manager To Be Like Bobby Knight?

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I woke up to NPR this morning and listened to an interview with Bobby Knight, the famous college basketball coach.  The interview discussed his new book “The Power of Negative Thinking.”  To sum it up, Coach Knight said that if you want to win it’s more important to focus on what can go wrong and fix it than to let positive thinking pull you through.  Checking out the book preview on Amazon, I picked out this quote:

bobknight“As I looked ahead to every game and every season, my first thought was always: What vulnerabilities do we have and what can we do to minimize them, to get around them, to survive them – and give ourselves a better chance to win?  In effect, how do you eliminate the wasted energy and unnecessary mistakes to build a cohesive and successful team that can play within its strengths?”

Clearly, Bob Knight is a great risk manager.  What I like about his message is that we have to work hard to clearly identify and counteract the risks we face in order to succeed.  We can’t just hope for the best.  When we do risk management, we should really look for risks and take real actions to mitigate them.  We should take specific actions and track specific results to be sure that mitigations are working.  Knight is right about that.

But, I’m having a tough time with the “Power of Negative Thinking” thing. (I have to admit here that I’ve only read 20 pages or so that were available on Amazon’s preview). Maybe it’s how he went about being a great risk manager.  My impression is that Bob Knight was a pretty demanding and uncompromising manager.   In the book, Knight says he had a slogan posted in his locker room saying “This ain’t Burger King.  We’ll do it my way.”    Can we really be successful in endeavors outside of basketball by following the iron willed approach of a coach to win by relentlessly fixing mistakes?  I’m going to ponder this question a bit and see if I learn anything.

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