From the Editor

So you think you have no real authority as a project manager ... so what? This week, Cinda Voegtli challenges the view that line manager authority is essential to project management success, and urges us all to worry about our influence instead. (And she's got lots of ideas about how you should go about it.) Similarly, columnist Kimberly Wiefling is looking for the easy triggers—the catalysts to action that will finally get your team not only doing what's needed, but doing it willingly and consistently. Don't miss an opportunity to find and use every possible iota of project influence you can. Read on ...

Featured Article

Catalyzing Events
by Kimberly Wiefling

A catalytic mechanism is a device, process, policy, or structure that encourages, evokes, or even forces a desired behavior. A simple example is an entrance gate at a parking garage. The gate won't let you drive into the garage until you take the parking ticket. Although you could get a buddy to manually force the gate up, or boldly crash through the gate, it's much easier to just take the ticket, and it'll make your exit far simpler as well. This is an important point about catalytic mechanisms—they make the desired behavior far easier than the undesirable behavior, in this case driving into the parking garage without remembering to take your parking ticket.

The reason I'm so drawn to catalytic mechanisms is because they are effective, self-maintaining, and permanent ways to immediately change behavior, and require little or no further effort once they are in place and operating. The entrance gate is a permanent solution to a recurring problem. Having seen recurring problems on project teams decade upon decade, and growing weary of asking, urging, coaxing, begging, and pleading with people to change their ways, I dream of such remedies to errant behavior!

Executive View

by Cinda Voegtli

I personally don't buy that there is a big issue with managing projects with responsibility but no authority—at least the kind of authority that comes from having people directly report to you as a "line manager." I have managed on both sides and can unequivocally state that having "direct report authority" over someone does not automatically mean they do what you want! Whatever kinds of managers we are, influence skills matter. I personally find the art of genuine well-meaning influence on projects to be effective, fun, and liberating. And if I find myself neglecting my "influence currency," I know that I will surely pay at some point.

I don't believe I'm the only one who thinks developing influence is the place we should all be concentrating. I recently heard several Directors and VPs in product development organizations independently flag this area as the one that project managers, even some senior ones, need to focus on more. There are forms of project manager influence that matter to a frankly stupendous degree, and this article offers some thoughts on those forms of influence, and some tips for finding and fixing any "influence shortfalls" in order to make this responsibility without authority setup a lot easier to work with! Read the rest of this article »

From the Blogs

Cinda and Kimberly apparently aren't the only ones thinking about influence and impact. Our blog entries for the last two weeks ring with tales of influence gone well, or gone awry—or maybe just gone fishing. Check out these entries for some great suggestions on how to get it done anyway, and get out of our own way.

If fishing is "a perpetual series of occasions for hope," then trying to land an executive sponsor for your PMO calls for a lot of line and a really big boat. Lisa DiTullio tackles the parallels between fishing for sport and fishing for sponsors, so you can land a big one. What's on your hook?

Jerry Perrone shares his notes on the intersection of competence and complacency that he commonly sees on troubled projects. Do you find yourself overlooking the fundamentals because you're just sure you've done this often enough that you can skip it this time? According to Jerry, you're not alone. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Sinikka Waugh urges you to be sure you ask Who cares? when considering who your project stakeholders are. Are you sure the impact of your decisions is really so negligible that others will ignore them?

Kent McDonald asks a few leading questions and stumbles across a BA run terribly astray. The picture he paints in Standards Only Go So Far is probably familiar. Does it hit too close to home?

Josh Nankivel confesses his former WBS sins at Project Managers Anonymous, and urges other WBS abusers to consider the road to recovery. Beware the tasks!

Do you know the difference between a commitment and a deadline? It was never more clear to DeAnna Burghart than the day she tried to shift her deadline responsibilities off to someone else, who turned them into a commitment she couldn't possibly ignore. Can you spot the agent of change in this picture?

Developing Your Project Influence

Cinda selected the resources below in order to delve deeper into particular aspects of having influence up, down, and all around on our projects. We hope you find them helpful, and that you'll contact us if you have any questions.

Embrace responsibility as the key part of the equation! – A quick but powerful read on what driven and high-quality responsibility-taking looks like for a project manager.

Hint: Order-takers are not given a seat at the table – Insights into how PMs can and should creatively add value when working with internal or external customers (even if they don't ask us to!), rather than acting as uninformed scribes. Thoughts on the attributes, attitudes, and actions that keep you from getting classified as an order taker and get you that full seat at the table.

Got (Executive) Influence? – From the mouths of a panel of executive sponsors: PM behaviors that yield airtime and influence. What they say about our details, our behavior, our information, and using our brains. Get the full scoop.

NEW – Got (Process) Influence? – Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises – MEMBER
No process is good enough in its own right to be "owed" automatic fealty and adherence. This new presentation from Dean Leffingwell, author of Scaling Software Agility for the Enterprise, covers the what's, why's and how's of going Agile "at scale" for large, multi-system projects. This is great material to influence Agile efforts, including the people you're trying to get to let you try it. Plus, it's a great example in general of how to explain a process and its benefits clearly, and show exactly what it means to a team and to an organization to use it in their environment. Get the presentation »

If they're not listening to us, is the problem what we're saying to them? – In which case, we have a great chance to get out of our own way and bolster our influence dramatically!

• We can speak up strongly in a way that will get acted on - PREMIUM
• We can influence tough decisions - PREMIUM
• We can interact with our teams in a way that keeps us fully relevant - MEMBER

• A Team Roles and Responsibilities List (SPECIAL) makes sure you think through all the people from different groups who should be involved in the project, and thus your "team influence" landscape.
  This Premium resource is free to registered Members until March 4, 2010
  
• A non-traditional form of Responsibility Allocation Matrix (PREMIUM) focuses on information flows between people, across all the cross-functional groups involved on a project, to help everyone understand and buy into each other's needs and make important commitments.
• A Stakeholder/Influencer Assessment (PREMIUM) paves the way for your own influence with executives and other functional groups by helping you truly understand (and act upon) how they may impact your project.

Burning Questions

A: Over-controlling development, or controlling too early, can snuff the creative life out of a project and slow it to a crawl. The flip side, of course, is that if you let the project "go with the flow," without sufficient documentation, you're likely to end up wasting time later trying to figure out how you built something that worked. Read the answer »

A: This is a good question, without a truly definitive answer. What you really want to do is find the sweet spot for planning. On one hand having a great deal of detail helps reduce project risk and define the effort in explicit terms. On the other, too much detail can cloud the real work of the project, missing the forest for the trees. Read the answer »

A: The project manager's job covers a broad range of roles–leader, facilitator, marketer, problem solver, task master and advocate, to name a few. The main focus of the job also shifts some as the project matures from phase to phase. During Initiation and Planning the PM leads the team in defining the project very explicitly, gathering and consolidating information on what the project is supposed to accomplish, identifying the deliverables needed to do so, and creating a plan for the project to get to the end goal. The PM must communicate the plan to executives and stakeholders for their agreement and support, including the resources the plan calls for. Read the rest of the answer »

Where's ProjectConnections?

Randy Englund and Alfonso Bucero will deliver keynote presentations at Project Portfolio Day in Madrid, Spain on March 25-26. Randy will speak on "Creating Excellence through Project Portfolio Management," and Alfonso will share his case study on "The Role of PPM in a Savings Bank."

Kimberly Wiefling is in Japan again this month, running through Kobe this week, to Kokubunji and Tokyo next week. In March she returns to Kyoto University and later to Daiichi Sankyo Pharmaceuticals in Kokubunji to wrap up a six-month Global Leadership Development Program there. We're hopefully she'll be state-side at least a few times this year.

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