Content

Your Work Environment

As a manager of project practitioners what is your current approach to make your group(s) productive? Please ponder that question for a moment.

A quick Google search on “manager role and responsibilities” provides the best of what AI captures from the internet as follows.

With “Important Considerations” as follows.

    • Adaptability, Collaboration, Ethical Conduct

The degree to which you, someone else in your company, or those on your team that you choose to share these and perhaps other responsibilities with will vary based on your organization, your industry, your management approach, and the individuals you are managing.

Your environment is the result of what you inherited, what your organization or your manager has mandated it would be, or perhaps what you have shaped it into.

I would simply pose a few more questions for you to consider about your current state.

    • How would you rank your group’s project success rate? Is it where you want it, or are you looking to improve?

    • Do you project practitioners proactively engage with you on project topics? Or is getting information like pulling teeth? Any ideas on why proactive or a toothless approach is the case?

    • How aligned do you feel your project environment is within your group (processes, tools, approaches)?

    • How aligned do you feel your environment is that your project practitioners interface with (other internal groups/roles, other organizations, clients)?

A Fresh Look at Your Environment

I don’t know what your current project environment is or how you answered the above questions. Although we can look at a few elements in project environments that can have big impacts. And you can take what is appropriate for your environment.

The primary point of doing a project is to reap the benefits/deliverables that meet specific needs for the organization, clients, and/or stakeholders. Therefore I would think making this a focus point of your group and setting up your environment to achieve these desired outputs in productive ways may be of interest.

Let’s start with some impact topics that contribute to project success and alignment.

Engaged and knowledgeable project practitioners are a cornerstone for projects requiring more than following a to do checklist.  Alignment in the hiring process, management and organization support of ongoing capability improvements enable better engagement and alignment with management.

A positive and supportive environment for the project group members is important for many reasons. An important driver of this starts with the manager. A few of the associated benefits include the following: 

    • Better and more timely communication of risks and collaboration

    • Provides a backstop and support for project practitioners as they work with other groups and organizations more productively

    • And typically improves project success rates (when combined with other factors here)

Project Portfolios or a means of project selection, prioritization, and alignment with the organizational needs is important for basic project group management. This also helps establish expectations and alignment with the larger organization and can greatly reduce stress on the project group.

Benefits Management is a means of tracking the actual benefits projects against the need and the initial estimates of the benefits. Having this in place over time helps to align estimates to reality, set appropriate expectations and improve resource planning and other project portfolio streamlining.

Continuous Improvement is a very good way to help with alignment. You and your project managers can hold retrospectives and lessons learned sessions at project, program, and portfolio levels. The nature of these meetings is to identify, document, and then take action on improvements for your group and its projects. If action is in fact taken then this becomes an avenue where team members can contribute and feel listened to and part of improving and aligning your group, your processes, your tools.

As you may observe, some of these are very intertwined and could/should be done in collaboration.

Considerations

Here are a couple of other considerations for you as you look at ways to improve the alignment of your project realm.

Thinking about Best Practices:  Each organization is different. Best practices can be very helpful. Some have been proven in your industry, others may be more general principles. Beware of those who preach best practices as THE solution. I have been at multiple organizations that have shelves of books and consultant proposals that may have been tried but have not been successful in the organization… even though they were “best practice.” While this might make you cringe when considering your own situation, please consider how you think about this… 1. The best practice may not be a best practice for your organization. 2. The timing of the proposal and attempt may not have been set up for success. 3. Your organization may find better results in discovering your own best practice through a solid continuous improvement framework.

Centers of Excellence:  In the project realm these centers of excellence can include separate groups for sub-groups that have a core place in projects such as for Project Managers, Business Analysts, Change Managers, and others as needed. These centers of excellence by function can be formal or more casual. The point is to increase capability and maturity of individuals and the 

My Take

I’ve found that getting buy-in early through team member involvement in improvements and defining the culture (in ways that contribute to the desired end) greatly streamline getting participants to build and align it with you. Be open to flexing on templates and tools and norms (that work within the framework for the end goals) to build a collaborative environment.

Set up your environment for success. While there are many cultures and possibilities on how this is done. I would encourage a positive, collaborative, supportive environment that integrates well with other groups/organizations that are involved with project work.

Some choices for alignment in your realm will depend on what the skill and experience level of each of your project practitioners is. 

Centers of Excellence help establish and improve individual functions dramatically in some cases, as well as the capabilities of the individuals in these groups (Project Managers, Analysts, Change Managers, Others Leading Projects that is not their full time job).

In office settings there can be mushy project assumptions that are not as hard as say a construction hard assumptions that it takes x hours to cure cement in x degree temperatures. These soft assumptions may include things like it should take no more than x hours to program x lines of code. If the existing project team has an established run rate then this might be a baseline assumption for scheduling. If it is some guesswork, then be cautious of mandating assumptions on timelines or costs to achieve an outcome. Alignment can take a major hit or require extensive efforts to align to stakeholder assumptions not based in fact.

Next Steps

Your group is your group to manage. The question is what will you do and how will you do it to make your project group successful.

Consider the above and decide what your project environment is and what you want it to become.

Leverage the help of others in your group to come up with improvements and determine a continuous improvement approach and mindset that can help all involved focus on improvement that in the process can help with alignment.

Contact The Project Realm for assistance in improving your project environment.