The roots of project management

Transcription

1 The roots of project management In this session of project management we are going to introduce the nature of project working and introduce some of the basic concepts involved with projects. In particular we are going to illustrate that effective leadership ability is now an important part of the project manager s toolkit. We have already identified that projects usually have three main areas of objectives for which we use the short cut of quality, cost and time. We can expand these as follows. The first issue of quality may be expanded to relate issues about function, performance and specification as well as to the specific quality issues of the project. Specifications may become quite detailed particularly in terms of the performance of say a motor vehicle. Containment of expenditure within budget is the basis of the cost aspect of the triangle. If the development costs for example with a new vehicle design escalate then it could mean that the selling price would have to be increased to recover those costs which could make the new product uncompetitive within the market place. With larger projects with complex financing, cash flow issues sometimes become important in terms of drawing down funds in order to do the work. Timescale is the third factor. Some projects have very well defined milestones and delivery targets, Others tend to be more fluid and it may well be a benefit to take longer over the project, ensuring that costs remain under control and that the latest technology can be used when it becomes available. Study questions: Can you desribe the trade-offs between quality, cost and time in a project in which you are currently engaged? What are the key quality indicators in the project on which you are currently working? Can you reduce cost and increase quality by increasing the time allocated for the project? As well as the internal objectives of the project a number of organisational issues are relevant. It is invariably the case that organisational politics often come into play. Different departments and functional areas may not be supportive of the project as they may see it as a threat to their own budgets. It may also be that individuals in different parts of the organisation may have their own agendas with regards to the success or failure of the project. As well as the internal people and resource issues, there will often be some external issues to consider. Commercial pressures, competition and advances in technology may have an impact on the project and how it is organised. Green issues, sustainability issues and carbon footprint issues may also impact on the project. Finally interactions between the major stakeholders both within the organisation and outside it may have an impact positive or negative on the success or failure of the project. 1

2 Study questions: To what extent do the politics of your organisation impact on your project working and its team? How can you reduce any negative impact of these political issues? What external pressure such as commercial, environmental and advances in technology do you have to consider as regards your project? As we mentioned in the introduction our approach to project planning and project management started in the middle of the 20 th Century with large scale military projects. The initial approach was called PERT which stands for program evaluation and review technique. One of the basic elements of all project management is to identify the tasks and activities which must be undertaken in order for the project to be completed. Assign timescales to these activities and see which ones can be operated in parallel. However, by running several activities in parallel a problem might occur in terms of resourcing and this has to be taken into consideration. In simple projects, this can be explored manually. However, with more complex projects it is usually more effective to use a computer based project management programme such as Microsoft Project. A key issue with project management in terms of planning is the concept of the critical path. This is the minimum time which will be taken for completion of the project. Study questions: Imagine that you are in charge of an office move. What sort of activities would you have on your project management plan? Can you assign estimates of the required time for each activity? One of the simplest ways of creating a project plan is the Gantt Chart which in its simplest form is a bar chart showing the activities and their relationships. As an example imagine you want to build a store at the back of your house. You think a wooden structure would be the best as there are no planning problems. You would first start off collecting brochures of suitable construction kits, then visit suppliers, compare products and then make your decision. The concrete base could be constructed once you have made the decision and have the measurements. You would then have to take into account a delivery time then assemble the tools once you identify the work that needs to be done. The construction phase would be next, followed by painting and then fitting out the insides with shelves and possibly electrical power. Study questions: Can you estimate the approximate times for each of the activities? What would your bar chart look like listing the activities and their durations? Can you choose which activities would need to be completed before the next one is started? Can you construct a simple bar chart to represent your project plan? We can see in this slide one approach to the creation of a Gantt Chart. The first four activities of collecting brochures, visiting suppliers, constructing the base and the delivery process are each estimated at around a week in duration. The tools are assembled during the delivery period so that all is 2

3 ready to start construction at the end of week 4. Two weeks are allowed for the construction which will not be a full time process hence the extended period. The painting can be conducted in parallel with the later stages of the construction. However, the fitting out of the interior and the connection of electrical power cannot take place until the construction is complete. It is a simple matter to record progress by splitting each of the activity boxes into an upper and lower section. The upper section could display the estimated time and the lower section the actual time taken. In this way for a simple project progress can be evaluated. Study questions: Can you draw the network for this project? Can you split the weekly entries into expected time and actual time taken for an activity? What is the critical path duration in terms of weeks One of the benefits of working with Microsoft applications is that Gantt Charts may be easily constructed using the Excel spreadsheet programme. There are many tutorials available on the internet showing how to create a Gantt Chart from and Excel spreadsheet and three links are shown in the slide. Study question: Using one of the links in the slide and in the bibliography, can you create an Excel spreadsheet based Gantt chart for the construction project shown in slides 5 and 6? What would you say are the advantages of using Excel compared to a hand drawn Gantt Chart? In 1997, Hooper and Potter created their seven leadership capabilities of setting direction, setting an example, communicating effectively, bringing out the best in people, creating emotional alignment and handling the crisis. We can apply these seven capabilities to the project leader s role and add three highly relevant specific issues. Those issues are self awareness of the effective you have on your project team both as a group and on individuals, delivering results on time by achieving milestones according to the project plan and handling uncertainty and ambiguity. Taken together these ten project leadership capabilities combined with accurate planning skills and processes will ensure that the project work has the greatest chance of success in terms of its completion and the outcomes which result. Study questions: Take time to give yourself a mark out of ten for each of the capabilities shown in the slide. What is your total mark out of 100? Ask three members of your project team to rate your performance on each of the ten items and compare your results with theirs. What are the capabilities where the ratings differ the most? Leadership style is a complex area with many interpretations of what it means in practice. Three useful approaches are covered in the slide. Firstly one of the first approaches to understanding leadership style was the approach the leader took to communication. This was covered in some depth, albeit in relatively old fashioned language, in the article How to Choose a Leadership Pattern by Tannenbaum and Schmidt in the Harvard Business Review published in Some leaders just tell people what to do and this is termed the autocratic style. Other leaders involve people and take account of their 3

4 comments then make the final decision themselves. This is called the democratic style. A third approach to leadership style is for the leader to bury themselves in the group and steer the group covertly from within without it being obvious that they are the leader in control. This is sometimes called laissez-faire leadership although that term is sometimes associated with sloppy leadership and abdication on the part of the leader. The next approach to leadership is that which emerged from the American research on leadership behaviour in the 1960s. Two types of leader behaviour were identified: task behaviour focusing on achieving objectives and getting the job done and relationship behaviour focusing on maintaining relationships and working with individuals and their needs. Thirdly the approach of John Adair with his functional approach to leadership is a useful way to interpret styles. Does the leader focus on getting the job done, building a team or focusing on individuals within the team. Study questions: How would you describe your leadership style in terms of autocratic, democratic or laissez faire? Do you tend to be task orientated or people orientated as a project leader and manager? Where is your personal focus on the project, on achieving the task, developing the team as a unit or working with and developing individuals within your team. A key issue in modern approaches to leadership is sustainability of the leader s position. No longer can robber barons rely on bullying people into delivering performance. One of the key players in the emotional intelligence arena is Daniel Goleman who identified five issues in emotional intelligence in general terms and reduced this set to four issues in terms of emotionally intelligent leadership. His article Leadership that Gets Results in the Harvard Business Review is an excellent account of the impact of various leadership styles on the climate or atmosphere of the working situation. His set of five emotional intelligence factors include self awareness, self management, motivation, understanding others emotions and effective interpersonal skills. With the leadership style research conducted with Hay McBer he looks at the emotional intelligence aspects as two clusters: the leader and the interaction with the followers. He includes the fifth area of motivation in his original list in both the leader cluster and the follower interaction cluster, making four rather than five aspects for the basis for emotionally intelligent leadership. The study showed that the most effective leadership style was vision based or as Goleman calls it authoritative based on a vision. The other three effective styles are based on coaching, democratic or inclusive and affiliative or promoting relationships across functional boundaries. The two styles which seem to be counterproductive to long term operational effectiveness are the coercive and the pace setting style. In this latter style the interpretation is that the leader is always attempting to prove that she or he is somehow better than the followers and that she or he needs to set the pace of working from the front. Study questions: How would you rate yourself in terms of emotional intelligence on Goleman s five key areas of self awareness, self management, motivation, understanding others emotions and interpersonal skills? How would your people rate you in those areas? Are you prepared to ask them? 4

5 Which of the six main styles in the slide do you use most often and which style is that which you use the least? The book Leadership by Richard L Daft is an excellent up to date compendium on the way thought on leadership has developed over the decades. Daniel Goleman s article What Makes a Leader is an effective link between the issues of emotional intelligence and leadership and his article on Leadership That Gets Results provides a useful account of the impact of various leadership styles on operational climate or atmosphere within the project team. A much older article by Tannenbaum and Schmidt in the Harvard Business Review provides an interesting although somewhat dated approach to decision making in terms of the leadership styles of autocratic, democratic and laissez faire. John Adair s book Effective Leadership is highly relevant to the project leader. The internet based example of creating a Gantt Chart using an Excel spreadsheet returns to the planning aspects of project management and leadership. 5