PREFACE

The Complete Project Manager integrates key people, organizational, and technical skills. Success in any environment largely depends upon completing successful projects, and successful projects are done by skilled project managers and teams, supported by effective project sponsors. The integration of a spectrum of skills enables certain individuals to make a difference and achieve more optimized outcomes.

The ultimate aim of this book is to help you, the reader, develop a complete set of skills that is the right set for you to excel in today’s competitive environment. Through a storytelling approach, the book explains the necessary skills, uses case studies to model how to implement those skills, and seeks to motivate you to strive for the right mix of soft and hard professional skills that will help you create an environment that supports greater project success. The goal is to equip you and your colleagues to be leaders and managers in the project environment—and beyond.

NEED

While many professionals develop their craft through advanced education and on-the-job experiences, there comes a time when an enhanced skill set and a new perspective on working with people is necessary in order to advance to the next level of performance. How do you move beyond this plateau? This book provides a thorough, holistic approach to open eyes, minds, and doors. You can apply your new thinking to your own organizational environment immediately. We pose an organic analogy from molecular chemistry that suggests myriad combinations of skills for individuals to adopt.

If you want to progress personally and professionally as a project manager, you need to make a plan. Our hope is that this book provides insights to help you make that plan and achieve developmental objectives.

People allow many “enemies of change”—such as “not invented here,” “too busy,” “not enough time,” and cognitive blindness—to inhibit their adopting better leadership and management practices. Some of these enemies might be ingrained beliefs, harbored by people over a lifetime of experiences. We cannot change those beliefs; we can only change the believer. The way to do this is to provide enough evidence and examples that tap into your internal motivational drivers. The next step is for you to implement a complete systems approach that achieves greater results and is simple, yet powerfully—and universally—effective.

One goal for this book was initially articulated by our colleague Dr. Robert Lauridsen, whose purpose in his consulting business is “achieving competitive advantage in the Age of Interaction… improving the way humans interact with others for the sake of achieving common goals.” In addition to this goal, we set out to write a book that we wish we had read when first starting out in our careers. This book covers all those topics not taught in professional curricula but that are necessary for successful careers, such as how to get along with others, manage upwards, negotiate, sell, and handle conflict.

You may not be aware of the need to change your thinking and of how your current mindset can inhibit your performance. This book steps through the means to adopt, adapt, and apply a different approach. A change in thinking and taking action leads to more consistent, timely, and better-quality results. This happens because complete project managers apply necessary leadership, influence, sales, and negotiating skills that they had previously overlooked or underapplied. By consciously applying these skills, you will increase your competencies and gain recognition for achieving business outcomes that had heretofore eluded you, leading to greater levels of personal satisfaction and professional advancement.

A project manager needs this book because it answers the question, “Where can I find real case studies and examples in which soft project management, environmental, leadership, and business skills are explained and illustrated?” In our approach, people matter.

INTENDED AUDIENCES

The primary audience for this book is project, program, and portfolio managers, in all disciplines and industries, commercial, nonprofit, and government. This is a huge audience; note that the Project Management Institute boasts over 350,000 members worldwide.

You may be new to the project, program, or portfolio management profession and seeking a primer to get started in the right direction. You may have a few years of experience and a desire to get on a fast track. You may have lots of experience but have come to realize that a fresh start and changed thinking are on the agenda, perhaps triggered by layoffs, job changes, or other transitions.

The secondary audience is individual contributors, subject matter experts (SMEs), project team members, managers of project managers, project sponsors, and other executives. If you are among them, you may be new to your role and wondering what you are getting into. How can you better understand your people, their roles, and the expectations for the people you work with? Or you may be experienced and looking for leading practices that can accelerate your performance. This audience is even larger than the number of project managers. We hope your experience with this book prompts you to share it with this extended audience.

PURPOSE AND USES

This book steps through the means to adopt, adapt, and apply a more complete approach to leading and managing people, leading to more consistent, timely, and better-quality results. It is designed to accomplish miracles, in a sense. It will help you achieve greater results through changed thinking in a way that is simple and immediately actionable. The concepts are easy to understand, universal, powerful, and immediately applicable. There is no complicated model to understand before applying what you have learned.

You as the reader may already be aware of what you need to do, but for any number of reasons, you are not doing it. This book supplies the why and how. It provides case studies and examples of real people applying the concepts, thereby demonstrating their feasibility. It removes barriers to implementation. These barriers may be environmental, executive, or business-related—anything that has seemed like an obstacle and that has delayed projects, caused cost overruns, lowered quality, or caused deliverables to not meet requirements. These barriers existed because people were not aligned and motivated to perform. To overcome them, you may just need to see a model for how a task or process can be implemented. This book will show you complete ways to look at your situation and see new solutions or apply old solutions in new ways.

Are you seeking the missing ingredients that will help you move from good to great? Are you looking for the next generation of skills, mindsets, and processes to transform your performance as a project manager or sponsor? This book will guide you in developing the leadership, learning, means, and motivation to advance both personally and professionally. Case studies help you learn from personal reflections and from others about successful practices and identify how to apply these practices up, across, and down the organization, especially in politically charged situations. You will discover how soft project management, environmental, leadership, negotiating, and persuasive skills can be creatively applied. The goal is to integrate knowledge and skills that make the difference in achieving optimized outcomes, increased satisfaction, and bottom-line results.

We downplay academic models and prefer a storytelling approach where concepts are grounded in real-life experiences. The book draws from a culturally diverse set of contributors, so it may appeal to people from various professions and different countries coming together to better understand how to work with each other.

The book may be used for self-study; it may be a reference that readers come back to repeatedly to refresh thinking or gain new insights; it may be used by book clubs to trigger sharing of similar or different experiences; it may be used by universities and training companies in courses on management and leadership; and it may be used by the authors and other consultants in seminars they facilitate worldwide.

We find that the response we get from audiences around the world to our presentations, seminars, and blogs is heartily positive and remarkably different from their response to other people and books. People find passion and “the truth” in our writings. Our energy and enthusiasm for managing projects comes through and is motivating and encouraging. A seminar participant remarked that our “insights and style bring the concepts from ‘way up there’ to ‘right down here,’ equip you with the tools, and empower you to act.” (And nobody else can tell the same stories and share the same humorous examples, collected over 70 years of combined experience.)

CONTRIBUTION

While some of the material in this book is not new, the primary innovation we strove for in writing it was to weave skills from a broad spectrum of disciplines together with examples of how the application of these skills leads to greater success in project-based work. Our goal is to provide a refreshing, positive, motivational, and useful guide.

We the authors are adept at providing critical feedback, grounded in practitioner experiences and applied through systematic frameworks, to participants in workshops and courses and consulting engagements. This experiential approach carries over into this book. The book integrates theory and application, humor and passion, and concepts and examples, drawn not only from the authors’ vast experiences but also from other contributors who have shared their case studies. These contributors represent some of the best talent in the world, culled from our close association with them in projects, programs, seminars, and conferences worldwide.

There is a broad base of knowledge and practices to draw from in the project management and management fields in general. Many books do not address the complete set of skills project managers must use for success in today’s environment. They fail to include social and emotional skills that are important for leadership and management. Where can readers turn to make sense of it all? Who can provide stories and experiences to cut through all the noise?

This book combines the technical, behavioral, and systems thinking approach to project management and flavors it with unique examples that have universal appeal. It relates to, builds upon, and extends material from our previous works. Creating an Environment for Successful Projects summarizes the skills of the “Successful Compleat Upper Manager.” Dictionary.com defines com·pleat as “highly skilled and accomplished in all aspects; complete; total: the compleat actor, at home in comedy and tragedy. Origin: 1875–80; earlier spelling of complete, used phrasally in allusion to The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.” We believe that historic definition applies as well to this current work. Elements of change management, upper management support, and attitude are covered in Creating the Project Office, Project Sponsorship, and Today Is a Good Day. This book also complements chapters we contributed to other books, such as Rosemary Hossenlopp’s Organizational Project Management and Lynda Bourne’s Advising Upwards, as well as many papers we have presented at PMI and other professional association conferences. We also expand upon material posted at blog.projectconnections.com and other websites. For additional tools, checklists, tables, practical suggestions, and examples, be sure to consult the companion book The Complete Project Manager: Toolkit of Practices.

In writing this book, we took Good to Great and In Search of Excellence as well as the Soul at Work and Crossing the Chasm as inspiration to show how a broad set of concepts apply specifically to you as a project, program, or portfolio manager in your quest to improve project management and your own performance.

In spite of concerns from our editors, we tend to mix voice and person. We use the first person “we” when covering beliefs we have in common. We switch between “Englund” and “Bucero” and use the first person “I” when sharing personal examples. We talk about complete project managers in the third person when describing ideal characteristics. We use the second person “you” when passing along advice to you, the reader. We ask for your pardon in using this mixture and hope this explanation helps to make it work for you.

Key objectives we anticipate for readers of the book are to:

Change thinking about necessary skills to enhance on-the-job performance

Apply different approaches to leading and managing projects, based upon examples and case studies

Realize what needs to be done to achieve better results and how to do it

Further develop project or program management professional careers.

We make no claims in the following chapters to completely cover the topics we discuss. The content in this book is not an exhaustive representation of a “complete project manager,” nor is our treatment the only way to success. We offer points of view grounded in real-life experiences from our journeys. We welcome you to share learning from your journeys with us.

February 2012