A friend of mine, James Huggins, asked this question about project managers being subject matter experts.

“While they don’t need to be SMEs, how much DO they need to know about the context, culture, processes, technology, etc.?

As an example, can ANYONE be head of FEMA? Or does it need to be someone with a background in disaster recovery?”

What an excellent question! And one I’ve been considering in the context of FEMA leadership.

In my previous posting, I said that a project manager should be leading the FEMA efforts for disaster recovery. I believe that good project managers have all the skills and knowledge necessary to COORDINATE, COMMUNICATE, AND LEAD.

But is that enough? Should a project manager also know the detailed requirements of disaster recovery in order to lead FEMA?

I’ll share one of my earliest project management experiences to answer those questions.

As an engineering co-op student, working my way through college, I worked as a civilian for the US Navy. In our command, we tested aircraft weapons and weapon delivery systems. I was put in charge of testing the side loads for a weapon that was mounted under the wings of Navy aircraft.

I was very pleased to get this assignment. It showed that the engineers I worked with trusted my judgment. I was also very scared. I didn’t know anything about side load or testing it.

I started out my first project meeting by telling the very experienced, active duty personnel that I didn’t know anything about what we were going to do. I also told them that I needed their help – not only to have a successful project, but also to learn. I reminded them that I was a student, and part of my work was learning engineering.

The rest of the meeting went very well. Each SME stepped up to my request and contributed the information I asked for. By the end of that first meeting, we had a work breakdown structure (every task required), a schedule, and action assignments.

Throughout the rest of that project, each of the SMEs would come to me with information that I needed – both on a project level and on a technical level.

So the short answer to my friend’s question is: ANY GOOD PROJECT MANAGER COULD HEAD UP FEMA.

The caveat is: Assuming the SMEs work at FEMA and want to do the best possible job. And are willing to work with a project manager who admits what she/he doesn’t know.

My only example is Elizabeth Dole as head of the American Red Cross. What do you think?

To find out more about James Huggins, visit his websites at:

http://www.JamesSHuggins.com

http://EclecticPower.com

I’m a bit surprised by my reaction to Hurricane Katrina, the category 4 hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast of the US on August 29, 2005.

I am angry.

I’m angry that the evacuation plans did not include everyone. I’m angry that the infrastructure has not been updated and maintained. I’m angry that the most economically active country in the world could not help its own people to survive this disaster.

I was angry even before the hurricane hit land. The mandatory evacuation of towns and cities had been started too late. Highways became parking lots. And there was no sign of public transportation for people who don’t have access to private vehicles.

And where were the shelters for the folks who did evacuate? With over one million people heading inland, were they all supposed to go to family? That’s not even a possibility for a large percentage of folks.

After the hurricane hit land, it seemed that our federal government went into slow motion. How many civil, structural, and dam engineers had to tell them that the levees in New Orleans could not withstand a category 4 or 5 hurricane? And who decided that since the levees were holding on Monday night, there wasn’t a real hurry to get people out of the damaged Superdome? (Who didn’t see that coming with winds of over 150 miles per hour??)

Today our leaders in Homeland Security and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) say that the pictures they saw on television weren’t confirmed by their people in the field.

WHAT???

Do we have people in leadership positions who don’t believe their own eyes? Or do they think that the US media has some ulterior motive in televising the desperation of the survivors – in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama?

Even the president said that it was a terrible disaster after he flew over the Gulf Coast. Didn’t his hand-picked subordinates believe him?

So, to get this rant in perspective, what does all this have to do with project management?

It’s an excellent example of how project managers could have made all the difference between life and death.

• A project manager has the skills to coordinate many different types of efforts.
• A project manager has the skills to communicate effectively with everyone involved.
• A project manager knows how to LEAD so that the team will follow – and make the right decisions about priorities.

But the fact that the leaders of the federal effort after the hurricane hit were not project managers – but had been put in that position – indicates that the top echelons of leadership in the US still do not appoint people for their skills. It’s still a political, back room, good ole’ boy system of political appointments.

After all the dead have been counted, maybe the US leadership – yes, the president – will think twice about appointments to positions that deal with life and death. And maybe we’ll finally get a project manager in charge of FEMA.

© Diana Lindstrom All Rights Reserved

Now that I’ve taken a European-type holiday, I’m back. A lot has happened in the world during the holidays – and since. Joining the billions of people across the globe, I am saddened by the loss of life caused by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Back to project management.

Do project managers have to be technical subject matter experts (SMEs)? Is it better for a project manager to have expertise in managing projects? Or is it better for a project manager to have expertise in the technical requirements of the project product?

This question is often debated in project management circles. It’s also hotly debated at the senior executive level. Each one of us has an answer based on our own experiences and knowledge.

My answer: Project managers do a better job of management if they are NOT technical SMEs.

You may be shocked or stunned with this answer. So let’s look at the reasoning behind it.

When I’m managing an engineering design project, I pay close attention to the electrical requirements of the project. I spend time reviewing the details of the electrical design including the types of drawings, the exact specifications, and the drafting standards. The role I take on is that of final reviewer of the electrical design, or technical SME.

While I’m spending time and energy reviewing the electrical design, I am not spending time planning and executing the project. Now, I’m as fond of 70-hour work weeks as the next person, but there’s no reason for me to spend this additional time as a technical SME. I already have at least one on my project team.

By adding a layer of review, I’m also telling my electrical SME that I don’t trust him/her. Why else would I take the time to review everything he/she’s already reviewed?

And what about those times when my comments are directly opposed to the assigned SME’s comments? The engineer who’s actually producing the design gets frustrated – and rightfully so.

So now I have three people on my project team who are frustrated – the design engineer, the technical SME, and me. And all for no constructive reason. It certainly doesn’t help the project.

When I manage a project where I am NOT the SME in any technical area, I spend my time and energies doing the planning and executing of the project. I interview the technical SMEs in order to plan the project. I spend much more of my time educating stakeholders about the project. My priority becomes communicating with my team. I monitor the project more closely. All of this leads to a more successful project – on time, within budget, all stakeholders happy. So I am the project manager SME.

Now the question becomes, do you want a full-time project manager, or a part-time project manager? If the answer to that question is that you want a part-time project manager who is also a technical SME, then you must not want a successful project.

© 2004 by Diana Lindstrom, PMP

I’m a die-hard Broncos fan. I watch every game. At the beginning of today’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs, Dante Hall ran back the kick off for a touch down for the Chiefs. A 97-yard return for a touch down! And they only used 13 seconds for the touch down and point after.

My husband’s comment was, “The Chiefs aren’t doing a very good job with clock management. They have the ball for only 13 seconds and then have to turn it over to the Broncos!”

After we stopped laughing, it started me thinking about project teams. How do the individual members of the project team perceive the project goal? And what are their parts in reaching the shared goal?

The goal of the football team is to win the game. Simple. Yet when any specialist on the team thinks only about his area of expertise, the whole goal can change. Would any coach, or assistant coach, or player give back the touch down points in favor of holding on to the ball longer? NO, of course not.

Similarly, when the subject matter experts (SMEs) on a project team focus on the project goal, the team uses individuals’ strengths to meet that goal. With multiple people working together, using specialized knowledge and skills, the project manager’s job is to show them the “big picture.”

Like great football coaches, great project managers communicate the vision (goal) of the project at every opportunity. To the project team as a whole. To individual members of the team. To stakeholders. To complete strangers. You get the picture.

Have you taken the time to create a simple statement communicating the project goal? If you haven’t, it would be a good thing to do over this holiday. That one simple statement becomes the project vision. Simple, to the point, and descriptive statements work best. For example, a construction project might have this simple statement:

We’re building the most high-tech office building in the downtown Chicago area.

You might go on to say something like: Chicago has never seen an office building that has such versatile electronic connections. All areas will feature wireless Internet connections and wireless communications. The security system is state of the art – beyond anything Chicago has in place right now.

Perhaps you would describe the luxury office suites. Or anything else that the prospective lessee would be interested in knowing. This could also be called a benefit statement – what benefit(s) the end user gets when the project is completed.

Have fun and be creative with it. When you have the simple statement fully developed and can say it easily, you’ll need to make sure it’s on every piece of paper, or electronic file, that has anything to do with the project. Repetition begets memory. You’ll know you’ve succeeded in keeping the project goal in front of the team when they use the simple statement in their communications with others.

ShipWreckedProject.com – I work with project managers who are struggling toward success.

I hope your holidays are full of joy and cheer!

© 2004 by Diana Lindstrom, PMP

This article is on the long side with 1,033 words. It’s well worth the time!

I just found a wonderful website! All about project management and how to become successful as a project manager. I can’t believe it took so long for me to find it, but I believe that we all find things when the time is right.

The website is http://www.projectcommunity.com and the article is found under Compass Newsletter. The name of the article is Why Schedules Fall Apart. I’m using the following excerpt with permission of the copyright holder, David A. Schmaltz.

“Why Schedules Fall Apart

. . . What can we carry forward . . . to make our future project schedules more effective?

1- Never Mistake The Method For The Mission.The path to your objective is not your objective, and straying from this path will be necessary to reach your objective. Divergence from plan is how the objective is reached.

Work with your sponsors to help them understand that their well-intended attempts to maintain accountability by insisting that the project execute as planned doesn’t help the project achieve its objective. If the project must both execute as planned and achieve its objective, . . . this is a double-binding expectation, one that creates an unmanageable contradiction for the project.

2- Plan early and often.To paraphrase the old adage about voting in Chicago, planning early and often will preserve the possibility for success by allowing you to take advantage the of [sic] learnings and coincidences that so contributed to the success of your retroactive project plan. Managing a schedule is a process of destruction and recreation which refreshes expectations, thereby preserving the possibility for achieving the objective. You will be wiser with each recreation and your project will be better for it.

3- Defer Details.Frame expectations within time boxes, but defer the details for far distant project activities. The likelihood is very high that these activities will never execute as originally expected. I remember (and not that fondly) a project I led early in my career to plan the five-year conversion of a very large application. No task was planned as greater than forty hours, and each estimate was padded within a most likely – least likely weighted average framework. After several months spent producing this plan, the members of the senior management review committee noted the details, turned to the last page, gasped at the bottom line, and canceled the project. I could have made them gasp with a few scribblings on the back of an envelope and not missed the bottom line by an order of magnitude.

4- Stay In Touch.The schedule is not the project and the project is never the schedule. The schedule might provide a useful framework within which to understand what is going on around you as the project unfolds, but it is never, . . . the final arbiter of project success. das

All works published in this newsletter are the property of True North pgs, Inc., and may not be reprinted, used, or otherwise distributed without the expressed, written permission of the publisher. Ask for permission and you’ll get it.

David A. Schmaltz, President

True North pgs, Inc.

PO Box 1532, Walla Walla, WA 99362

TN@ix.netcom.com

So, what does this have to do with my previous article about scheduling? It takes it several levels higher. My previous article talks about the mechanics of scheduling – knowing what’s on the schedule. David’s article talks about the philosophy of scheduling – knowing what it is and how to best use it as a tool.

The project is a living, changing thing. In order to manage it, you have to be able to deal with those changes as they occur. And changes in schedule occur very often, sometimes every few minutes. Understanding that the schedule will change is the first step to successfully managing change.

1. Never Mistake The Method For The Mission – One way to manage the project sponsor and senior executives is to give them the top level of the schedule, i.e. the major milestones. I usually give the title of the milestone and the target date for it – and that’s all. If they request more information, I get exact requirements from each of them. I do not give them more information than I absolutely have to.

This is not an attempt to keep anyone in the dark. It’s more like the philosophy that medical doctors use with patients – why give them more information than they can process?

If one of the stakeholders insists on more details, arrange a one-on-one meeting and enough time to really explain the schedule – especially the fact that the important date is the milestone date. Not the intermediate dates on tasks and subtasks.

2. Plan early and often – On a construction project, schedule reviews happen every week. Along with budget reviews, quality reviews, and risk reviews. I always review every project weekly and include updates from those stakeholders who had some action for that week. Then I incorporate the changes to the tasks and subtasks. After reviewing those changes, I know if I’m going to need to make other changes to the schedule in order to meet those important milestones. (Is that a little redundant? It’s not a milestone if it’s not important, is it?)

3. Defer Details – Don’t even put subtasks into the schedule if they’re more than a few months away. If the scope of the project changes, you’ll have saved yourself and your team a lot of time. And if the project is cancelled, you’ll feel better that you didn’t waste time on it.

4. Stay in Touch – I’ll go a little farther with this one. Continuous communication with the project team and other project stakeholders will keep you on top of the issues. Instead of finding out about an issue after it’s too late to do anything, you’ll be positioned to find out right away.

As a successful project manager, these 4 keys to managing schedules must be incorporated into your daily consciousness. It’s only when you manage the schedule, instead of the schedule managing you, that you can keep your eyes on the prize – the project product.

© 2004 by Diana Lindstrom, PMP

This time of the year, one of the most important aspects of project management becomes magnified – SCHEDULE. Vacation time, holiday time, sick time all become very important factors in any project schedule.

As a project manager, you’re expected to juggle all of this – AND your personal time requirements. Your life has certain scheduling requirements, whether it’s making the time to visit with relatives on Thanksgiving, going to the kid’s Christmas play, taking the family to a special production of The Nutcracker Suite, attending more choir practices for the big concert, or attending both your company’s Christmas party and your spouse’s company’s Christmas party. How are you supposed to keep track of all that PLUS your projects?

I think it means that you have to do more than put it all down on paper. Of course, you have to have all of this time included in any project that will span the holiday season. Have you included enough slack time to cover a bad flu season? Have you negotiated your milestones for after the holiday season? Do you have the holiday time scheduled in? And have the members of your team let you know when they’ll be taking vacation days?

But do you also monitor and manage the schedule every day? By that I mean do you know exactly who should be doing what on any given day in each of your projects? If not, your schedule is danger of being blown. Especially this time of year.

Project managers need to learn how to motivate people to stay on schedule. Some people respond to rewards; other people respond to attention. As a project manager, you need to learn what your team members respond to – and then give it to them.

One of my most validating moments was when a physicist came to me a week before a major milestone in our project – an important client presentation which would determine if the project proceeded or was killed. He asked me why I wasn’t freaking out like the other project managers would be. In response, I asked him if he remembered how I stayed on top of him to meet his schedule for this presentation? After he said yes, I told him that keeping everyone on schedule was my job so that no one – especially me – would have to get really stressed right before the presentation. I suggested that the presentation would go much better because the entire team would be relatively relaxed and completely prepared. He thought about that for several days.On the day of the presentation, the team arrived rested and prepared. We had used the time usually devoted to freaking out to instead get more practice for our respective roles in the presentation. The client was impressed with our presentation, the project was given the green light, and our boss was overjoyed! I didn’t know until that evening that our company’s cash flow was so tight that this project actually would pay our next payroll.

The day after the presentation, the physicist came to me and told me that he’d learned several lessons from this experience. The first lesson was that his schedule actually made a difference in the success of the project. The second lesson was that meeting that schedule would keep the project manager off of his back. And the third lesson was that getting the work done on time allowed him more time to prepare for the next step – in our case it was usually a presentation.

About a month later, this physicist came back to me and said that he’d found one more benefit to meeting the project schedule. He was able to write and publish a paper in the time since the presentation because he wasn’t working overtime to catch up on the schedule for our project.

At the time of that project, I was also managing 6 other projects. All equally important to the bottom line for the company. And all of my projects were completed on time, or a little early. Now you’re probably wondering how I did this.

I kept all of the schedules for all of my projects in front of me every day. Using MicroSoft Project, I built a multi-project schedule. Using that schedule, I put my daily To Do list together every evening before I left work. The first thing I did every morning was review my To Do list for that day.

If you have someone on your team who’s responsible for the schedules, then have that person give you a daily schedule of all your projects. If you don’t have someone like that, then you’ll need to spend time to put all the schedules together into one master schedule. Use whatever project software you normally use – the software is the tool, not the goal.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And yet in the hectic blur of every day, it can become almost overwhelming to do. Try it for a week and see if you experience any of the benefits. If you do, then keep doing it.

For more information, please visit http://www.shipwreckedproject.com .

© 2004 by Diana Lindstrom, PMP

So I find myself joining the great masses in this adventure called blogging. Using the metaphor of a ship on the high seas, full steam ahead!

If you are in the position of leading a project, no matter what your industry is, then you have a real challenge in front of you. The skill sets that are required to successfully manage a project are multiple. Many people argue that you need to be an expert in your field, as well as an expert in dealing with people. Whew! Not very many people have all those skill sets – unless they’ve gone out of their way to develop them.

Are you a natural leader? Are you detail-oriented enough to keep the books? Can you manage people who are experts in their jobs? Do you see the “big picture?” How are your public speaking skills? And can you coordinate people, materials, customers, and products so that they all come together at the exact time and place of your choosing?

It’s enough to make you pull your hair out! And yet, there are many of us who love doing just this. Everyday is a juggling act. There’s never a dull moment!

Stay tuned for more information about what it takes to be a successful project manager. I’m looking forward to our journey!