Project Management

March 17th, 2016

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Defining Project Management

Think about what it means to be a project manager. You probably think of Gantt charts and work-breakdown structures. You might be thinking about budgets or running meetings. But this technical role is only a small piece of what the project manager must do in an organization.
At the most basic level, a project is a work effort designed to produce some type of deliverable. By necessity, a project almost always involves a group of people with diverse needs and skills who are brought together to accomplish a unique array of tasks. This means that managing a project is managing a temporary mini-organization created to produce something unique within a specified time frame and at a defined cost. The job of the project manager is to provide leadership to this effort—to overcome the challenges inherent in ambiguous goals, resource constraints, human diversity, and fallibility. This module explores, among other things, the context in which the project manager must operate.

F.W. Incorporated
Throughout this course, you will follow the progress of Naomi of F.W. Incorporated as she learns to take on the tasks and responsibilities of a project manager. F.W. Incorporated, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of widgets, has announced a new product: the F.W. MicroWidget3000. As part of the plan for rolling out the product, management at F.W. has assembled a cross-functional project team to focus on such areas as design, product testing, technical support, and advertising. It has asked one of their junior engineers, Naomi, to serve as the project manager for the group.
Naomi is very excited about the opportunity. She has been a top-performing member of the F.W. technical team for the last three years. She continually exceeds performance standards and is often praised for her ability to complete her work ahead of schedule. Now she has her opportunity to shine.
Naomi begins by thinking about the project managers she has had in the past and the tools they used to drive their projects. She creates a reasonable timeline for the project and a budget she is sure her team can meet. But two months later, Naomi finds that her project is over budget and several weeks behind schedule.
How did Naomi’s project fall behind? What does she not understand about the role of the project manager?
The Three Frames We use three frames to examine project management:
• The organizational design frame
• The project success frame
• The high-performance leadership frame
What does it mean to be an effective project manager?
The truth is that we have known the basics of how to manage projects for a very long time. All projects, whether large or small, public or private, either involving a tangible product or a service, typically start with some specified need, require careful thought about how the need can be met, and must accommodate time and resource limitations on the work process. Reflecting these commonalities, formal processes have evolved for defining the work to be done in precise terms, for creating time-based sequences of tasks and careful cost estimates for each, and for measuring progress in implementing the work plan. As a consequence, the role of the project manager has become ever more professionalized, its best practices codified in a rigorous and ever-expanding body of knowledge. However, despite such progress in formalizing the role, we’re still confronted with the rather uncomfortable reality that a high percentage of projects led by experienced project managers don’t succeed at some level: they overrun their schedules or their budgets or perhaps fail to deliver the expected results and functionality.
Do they fail because the techniques are inadequate—even in the face of continuous improvement—or is it because the techniques are implemented poorly? Why is it that so many projects do not live up to plans and expectations?
Research has shown that one of the reasons that projects fail is that project managers may not sufficiently take into account the different types of uncertainty that can exist in project environments. Instead, they rather single-mindedly implement project-management processes and techniques as though all projects were fundamentally alike. But some environments short-circuit the effectiveness of certain techniques and require that more attention be devoted to others. And as the aggregate amount of uncertainty facing the project increases, the project manager’s need to attend to the human system both within and around the project becomes acute.
That accounting for uncertainty should be important to project success should not surprise us. The combination of unique people and tasks makes project management the management of mini-organizations—albeit temporary ones focused on a single deliverable—in which people from many different functions are brought together to do a job.

Researchers have paid significant attention to the problem of how to design an effective organization, and the results of their studies point strongly to environmental uncertainty as the key variable influencing the appropriateness of various work structures. Thus, when project managers give thought to how they will knit together the work efforts of their diverse team—to create their little production system—they should be building their capacity to cope with the uncertainty that pervades project life. Doing so, however, can be an exercise in futility, given the diversity of perspectives, values, and motivations that can exist in a multidisciplinary group and given the likelihood of change in the world around the project. This course helps you to understand how to more effectively herd cats through an uncertain environment.
We start our journey to effective project management by exploring what it means to be a project manager from three different perspectives:
• The organizational design frame
• The project success frame
• The high-performance leadership frame

Work-Breakdown Structure
While the concept of differentiation might be new to your project management vocabulary, you may have used it in practice as a project manager in the past. Let’s look at one tool you might be familiar with: the work-breakdown structure, or WBS. This critical project management tool is closely related to issues of organizational design. A work-breakdown structure is, essentially, a document that displays the differentiation of project tasks.
F.W. Incorporated
Let’s return to Naomi and her MiniWidget3000 to provide an example of the work-breakdown structure. First, we ask about the various components that will compose the MiniWidget3000. We know that the product must be packaged in a strong but light box that will contain some electronic components, such as a battery-power supply, sensors, a receiver to pick up a signal from a satellite, and a small computer. The box will also have some displays on the front to tell the user what is going on inside and some knobs and switches so that the user can operate the device. In addition, there must be some computer programs created to control the internal computer and a highly intuitive interface to enable the user to easily communicate with the computer. All of this must be designed and packaged so that the device can be taken out into the field, be capable of being both knocked about a bit and exposed to the weather, and be highly accurate.

Once designed, the MiniWidget3000 will have to be manufactured to a high level of quality. We will need to test it, educate our sales force about it, and be sure that we have the capability to service it. Naomi is simply responsible for the creation of the product, that is, its design, testing, and initial manufacture. Others will be responsible for managing volume manufacturing, distribution, and sales. A work-breakdown-structure diagram for Naomi’s area of responsibility might look something like the following:

This work-breakdown structure provides an example of task differentiation. We may find that tasks are differentiated even further. For example, under task 1.2, systems engineering, we might specify that someone has to clearly and precisely define what the MiniWidget3000 is supposed to do (system requirements), that someone else will define how the various components will function and will integrate with each other, that someone will conduct a human-factors analysis to provide the designers with physical ease-of-use standards, and so on. Or for task 1.9, testing, we will need to define a test plan, to design and build the necessary test fixtures, to conduct prototype tests, and to conduct tests on production models. So we can quickly see that we will need further differentiation and at a minimum a third level of our work-breakdown structure.

Think about the impact this diagram has on the integration function. How does the work-breakdown structure help you to more clearly visualize the role of integration, both in the project and in the organization?
TOOL: WORK-BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE (WBS)

Instructions:
While the concept of differentiation might be new to your project management vocabulary, you may have used it in practice as a project manager in the past. The WBS — critical project management tool — is closely related to issues of organizational design. A work-breakdown structure is, essentially, a document that displays the differentiation of project tasks.

THE INTEGRATION ROLE

• Integrating functional tasks can be done different ways
• There are four traditional ways to integrate functions
Every organization needs someone whose role it is to integrate the varied functional tasks carried out by other members of the organization. But what does that role look like? This topic introduces approaches to integration and explains when each approach is most appropriately employed.
Imagine a “typical” organization. It’s probably broken into parts with people doing specific kinds of work grouped in some fashion, with a requirement for linkages among their various kinds of work. Let’s look in depth at the traditional ways we could integrate these functions.

Create a hierarchy of authority One of the most traditional integration methods is the creation of a hierarchy, or managerial structure. While the specific model differs from one organization to the next, hierarchies create a method for efficiently moving information through an organization, for dealing with unanticipated events, and for resolving conflicts between people under common supervision.

Develop rules, programs, procedures Systems of rules and procedures enable an organization to define ahead of time how it would like to operate in predictable, repetitive situations or how it would like to respond to likely exceptions to everyday practice. These tasks can also include establishing review processes and defining the philosophy and values that should guide behavior in the organization.

Engage in planning and goal-setting activities Instead of defining work precisely through rules and procedures, organizations can develop planning processes to identify the goals, requirements, specifications, and important task interdependencies to be attained, leaving workers to draw on their professional experience to define how the work will be done. A key consideration in conducting such planning is the question of who participates. Buy-in to plans is encouraged when those implementing the plans also contribute to their creation. Increasing the number of people who are part of the planning effort—and who therefore understand what the organization is trying to do— increases the agility of the organization in responding to environmental problems.

Narrow the span of control The logic behind this technique is that there is some upper limit to how much information a given manager can process. Workers in a hierarchy typically interact with their manager most frequently about exceptions to day-to-day routine or about critical decisions. The more uncertainty in the task, the greater the need to touch base with the manager. Should the task environment place too great a burden of uncertainty on workers, their need to interact with their bosses may exceed their bosses’ capacity to cope with new information in a timely fashion. To accommodate, the organization can decrease the number of subordinates reporting to managers. However, this typically results in the need for more managers, with commensurate increases to the financial costs to the organization.
Galbraith, J. (1977). Organizational design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
THE PROJECT IS IN JEOPARDY
Naomi still cannot understand how the MiniWidget3000 project got to the point of being over budget and several weeks behind schedule. She took efforts to create budgets, timelines, work-breakdown structures, and Gantt charts, but now she’s stuck trying to get her project back on target—and trying to figure out what went wrong in the first place.
Naomi thinks back to where her project may have gotten off track and writes down a few notes:
• Management asked a key member of her team to move to a different project
• A competing priority caused the entire organization to shift focus away from her project for a week
• Team members were too busy with their functional priorities to attend project team meetings
Naomi realizes that there were a lot of potential problems she hadn’t considered. How might she have viewed her integration role differently to keep her team on track amid these problems?

ORGANIZATIONAL GROUPING

Grouping offers common supervision, common measurement, mutual adjustment
Grouping builds organizational capacity for interdependence

Consider the list of traditional integration methods. Recall that the first item on this list is the creation of hierarchical managerial structures. So what are the different kinds of managerial roles that can be created in an organization? Or, said another way, what is the basis for deciding who or what a manager manages?
Typically we create managerial roles based on some approach to grouping different types of work. Think about it: if an organization needs engineers and is going to have all of the engineers sitting together in one area doing their technical work, it will probably occur to the people designing the organization that they’re going to need someone to exercise oversight over that work, someone like an engineering manager. Likewise, if they have people doing production work, they have to put somebody in charge of that—so now they have a production manager.
If they are grouping people according to the type of work they do, they are moving toward a functional managerial structure. In other words, most of the people who are managers are in charge of some specific kind of work.
While functional specialty is the most traditional criterion for grouping workers, there are any number of other means by which an organization can create groups. They might choose to group by product output (electric coffee makers or Frisbees®), physical location served (Europe, Latin America, Asia, on so on), or client (banks, automobile manufacturers, or sailboat owners). Shift work, another example, is grouped by time. Your local grocery store may be open 24 hours a day, but the same employees aren’t working 24 hours a day. Some work mornings, some work afternoons, while others work evenings or overnight. Again, there are typically managers who are in charge of these different time shifts.
Whatever form it takes, grouping offers the opportunity to integrate the various work activities of the organization. This offers several benefits:
• Common supervision: grouping allows for direct supervision to be built into the structure of an organization. This allows for the coordination of the work of many by a single supervisor.
• Shared resources: organizations can create resource labs or libraries for resources that are used by multiple members of an organization, but no one person needs to use those resources all the time or to bear their cost.
• Common measurement: grouping creates a means for common performance expectations.
• Mutual adjustment: grouping facilitates casual, informal interaction (like chatting by the coffee pot). Such interaction facilitates information exchange, peer coaching, and coordination between tasks that may be connected in some way.
Grouping, by its nature, builds a capacity for interdependence into an organization. In some organizations, work flow may be the interdependency that is critical to success, while in others it may be an emphasis on process, economies of scale, or social interaction. The criteria chosen for grouping will shape the extent to which each of these interdependencies is addressed.
Galbraith, J. (1977). Organizational design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF FUNCTIONAL APPROACHES
• The functional form works well with defined, stable, routine tasks
• The functional form is hierarchical and rule-based
The four traditional modes of integration often lead to a functional organization structure. The functional organization is the most common form of grouping in organizational life. This kind of structure is designed to honor concerns about how different types of work are done. There is no doubt that in certain circumstances, the functional form is very useful. However, it also has a number of limitations. The chart below summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of using a traditional functional approach. What does this chart tell us about the appropriate use of functional approaches?
Advantages Disadvantages
• Builds a collective identity: promotes feelings of belonging and security because colleagues have similar backgrounds, values, and world-view.
• Opportunity for professional growth: grouping people based on functional task and expertise increases the opportunity for technical oversight by someone who shares expertise and can coach and mentor; increases the likelihood that people will talk to colleagues about the best way to get a job done.
• Quality-control mechanism: people are working in front of their peers, and they want to make a good impression on others they perceive as experts.

• Works best when there is need for high productivity and stable output: works best when there is routinized work that can be documented and easily taught.
• Lacks mechanism for easily coordinating work flow: people live in their functions. They put on blinders and don’t think about what is happening in other functional areas.
• Breeds we/they mentality: groups often create an identity by comparing themselves to others. By promoting unity among the we, there is a strong possibility that other functions will be seen as they, with all the potential adversarial outcomes implicit in we/they relations.
• Relies heavily on rules: when jobs require fewer skills, formalization and bureaucracy can be used to achieve coordination within the function and may be used to facilitate coordination across functions, thus emphasizing rules and procedures to the detriment of people and products.
• Relies heavily on hierarchy: problems between functions must be resolved by moving up the hierarchy to a mutual supervisor. This can take time and may lead to poor decisions, because the common supervisor may be several levels up in the organization and significantly removed from the problem.

• Narrow vision: people are so focused on their functional area’s part of the production process that they lose sight of the big picture of the overall goals of the organization, and possibly of the customer’s needs.
Galbraith, J. (1977). Organizational design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY AND GOAL COMPLEXITY

• Functional organizations are less agile
• Functional organizations are less readily able to handle complexities and rapid changes
There is no doubt that traditional modes of integration, and, by extension, the functional organizations they tend to create, are incredibly useful in stable environments where the overall organizational objective is simple and the tasks required to reach it are fairly routine. But what if we introduce a changing operating environment and production complexity into the mix?
ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY
Environmental uncertainty is a term meant to include both what is happening “out there” and the degree to which we know enough to react to it effectively. For example, we might be concerned about a greatly fluctuating demand for our product. As an organization, we need to be able to respond to this change in demand; if demand drops but our production cannot slow down accordingly, we will lose money on the goods produced that go unpurchased. Likewise, there are costs associated with not being able to quickly ramp up production when demand increases.
What does this tell us? The organization needs to be keenly aware of what is going on in its environment, to thoroughly understand its own production processes (to know what it knows, and what it doesn’t know), and to have a structure that enables it to detect and analyze signals and to react accordingly. In an uncertain environment, how we manage information is critically important to the organization’s success.
GOAL COMPLEXITY
Goal complexity, on the other hand, refers to characteristics such as the number of objectives our organization is trying to accomplish, the number and difficulty of discrete tasks involved in each, the relationships among those tasks, and the level of performance we can accept for each task. As complexity increases, so does the amount of information we must process to reach our objective. So, if we decide to sell several different types of products, instead of just one—or to manufacture snowmobiles instead of toboggans—we must increase our capacity to acquire and use information well.
As with environmental uncertainty, the information-management function becomes increasingly important as goal complexity increases. Both concepts highlight the limitations of traditional approaches to integration. A rapidly changing operating environment limits the usefulness of rules and procedures—for example, since their use requires us to work out in advance how to handle a possible occurrence. But if we don’t know what’s going to happen, how can we develop a procedure to deal with it? Likewise, if the hierarchy exists to deal with exceptions to what we expect to happen, it is likely to become overloaded when the number of tasks interacting with each other increases. When environmental uncertainty and goal complexity increase, we must move beyond the traditional methods of integration. So what might that entail?

PROJECT LEADERSHIP AND INTEGRATION
One of the biggest organizational challenges that integration is intended to address is information overload. Dealing with that challenge can be approached in one of two ways: decrease the need to process information or increase the capacity to process information.
SCOPE OF RESPONSIBILITY
• High authority: assign resources, manage budgets independently, and proactively interface with leaders
• Low authority: work through others to recruit resources, act as an expediter as opposed to a leader
The project manager represents a manifestation of the lateral-relations mode of integration. The rationale for project management is based on the need for effective communication and information management. But not all organizations treat this role the same way, and based on the project manager’s level of authority, the way information is managed will be very different. Let’s look at an example of a project manager with a high degree of authority and then at an example of one with minimal authority.
PROJECT MANAGER WITH HIGH DEGREE OF AUTHORITY
Stan is a project manager in an organization that places a lot of emphasis on project teams. Stan has the authority to select his own project team based on the people he feels would be the best fit for his project and for his particular management style. He works directly with the key customer for his project, is invited to management meetings with the CEO, and works closely with the organization’s leadership to craft a project charter and a reasonable budget and timeline for his projects. When outside events necessitate changes to his project plan, Stan can mandate action and resource reallocation in response, even when such actions may cause difficulties for the functional silos in the organization.
Now, let’s look at the other extreme.
PROJECT MANAGER WITH LOW DEGREE OF AUTHORITY
Miles is a project manager in an organization with a well-developed functional structure. When he starts projects, he goes to the functional managers of the employees he wants on his team. His requests are often met with resistance—in several cases, the functional managers have told him the particular employees he wanted were busy, and he has been instead assigned team members with a skill set or personality unlike what he was looking for. Miles speaks to his key stakeholders only when somebody requests a formal meeting. To employees working on his projects, Miles appears to be a kind of expediter, who strives mightily to remind workers of their accountabilities, but who does not have the formal authority to mandate action—he may be the voice of the project, but he is clearly not their boss.
In your project management experience, which of these scenarios seems more likely? More often than not, your experiences are probably more in line with what Miles deals with as a project manager in his organization. While project managers do sometimes have significant power and authority, they are more often given limited or no formal authority. Recognizing this—and learning to navigate an organization and a project team despite a lack of formal authority—is key to the success of a project manager.

ENTER THE MATRIX
• Functional manager and project manager may have competing concerns
• Project team members try to meet separate demands
Consider our first frame for understanding project management: organizational design. Within an organization operating in a complex and very demanding competitive environment, there are often competing priorities that must be simultaneously honored; in such organizations, members of a project team often find themselves with two bosses (a functional manager and a project manager), each of whom represents an important set of operating concerns. In addition, complex projects bring together representatives from many different functions, each of whom competes to have his or her functional interests honored on the project team. This topic explores how these structural perspectives inform the role of the project manager.
CASE STUDY: LACK OF RESOURCE CONTROL
Naomi considers one of the points where she may have lost control of her project: she remembers all the times her team members claimed to be too busy with functional priorities to attend a meeting. It’s a complaint she heard often from Dale, one of the computer specialists on the team. Naomi decides to confront Dale’s functional manager, Ellen. Ellen, surprisingly, shows little sympathy for Naomi’s concerns.
“Look,” she tells Naomi. “I have unit goals that I have to meet, and I need all of my team members to meet our quarterly objectives.”
“But Dale is on my team, too,” explains Naomi. “And I need all of my team members to meet my objectives as well.”
“I’m sorry,” replies Ellen. “But that’s just not my problem.”
What—if anything—can Naomi do?

NDERSTANDING THE MATRIX

Matrix organization: both processes and deliverables are equally prioritized
Matrix organization is an adversarial system leveraging the tension it produces
Think about how organizational needs and the various integration methods might have an impact on an organization’s structure. Traditional integration methods—such as the creation of hierarchies and the use of rules and procedures—often lead to a functional structure. Such organizations are designed around the idea that better outcomes will follow from attention to work processes within specialties. Other methods, such as the creation of self-contained work groups, may lead to the establishment of a project organization. In pure project organizations, concern for process is replaced with a concern for customer needs and the tailored products that will meet them.
A matrix organization recognizes the fact that sometimes, to be successful, organizations must pay equal attention to both processes and deliverables. When you are establishing a matrix organization, you are effectively layering a project organization on top of a functional organization.
In a matrix organization, there is a dual authority structure. This means that rather than a traditional relationship between one employee and one boss, an employee working in a matrix organization would have two managers—a functional manager and a project manager.
The result is that a matrix organization is inherently a highly adversarial, highly politicized structure. A functional manager is charged with efficiently managing a specific pool of workers, and will naturally be concerned with how the work is done and with its technical quality—with whether workers are being maximally utilized and are developing appropriate skills. Project managers are focused on accomplishing a specific objective, and thus are concerned with accomplishing different types of work in a smooth, coordinated fashion, while meeting customer requirements for speed, product functionality, and cost. Each manager argues for her set of concerns, and, theoretically, the organization emerges the stronger for successfully resolving the tension between the two perspectives. However, as a practical matter, employees in such an organization are likely to be caught between these competing priorities and find that directives from their functional and project supervisors might contradict each other.
What does this mean for the employee? One employee’s experience might be that he is unable to take action on any priorities because of the political pressure. Another employee might find that she enjoys an unusual degree of power as the person who ultimately decides which manager’s priorities she will act upon.
In any case, the employee is, by nature of the tension inherent in the matrix, now forced to pay attention to both sets of priorities. A matrix organization is, by definition, an adversarial system, but it is designed to leverage the tension it produces and to highlight and institutionalize a concern for competing priorities.
Larson, E.W., and Gobeli, D.H. (1987). Matrix management: Contradictions and insights. California Management Review, 29(4), 126-138.
FOR ADDITIONAL READING
While matrix structures have been championed by many successful organizations, others have found them cumbersome, chaotic, and contributors to economic decline. In “Matrix Management,” Larson and Gobeli study some of the inherent contradiction of the matrix (how is it that the very organizations which invented the matrix—technical companies—are the very organizations that have the hardest time operating in these structures) and provide insights about managing within the structure.
LEADING IN THE MATRIX
Depending on the relative interpersonal skills of the two types of managers in the matrix or on the choices we make about how power will be shared between functions and projects, we could have a matrix that is biased toward the function, one biased toward the project, or one that is truly balanced. The table below (Larson and Gobeli, 1987) displays the extent to which advantages and disadvantages are at play within these different forms of matrix environments.
________________________________________
Larson, E.W., and Gobeli, D.H. (1987). Matrix management: Contradictions and insights. California Management Review, 29(4), 126-138.
NAOMI AND ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN

Set the timeline and tone of collaboration for the project
Integrate the varied functions of the team members
Create mechanisms for effective information sharing
Let’s take another look at Naomi and some of her concerns about the life of her project.
• Management asked a key member of her team to move to a different project.
• A competing priority caused the entire organization to shift focus away from her project for a week.
• Team members were too busy with their functional priorities to attend project team meetings.
What has Naomi learned about organizational design that could help her to explain what happened on her team?

First, Naomi should recognize that the role of the project manager is one of integrator. This means that to complete her project, Naomi needs the expertise of differentiated players in her organization, and it is her job to set both the timeline and the tone of collaboration for the project. It is the project manager’s responsibility to integrate the varied functions, so they can meet the complex needs of the organization.
Secondly, she must realize that this integration role takes the form of information manager. Specifically, the project manager performs the lateral-relations task. This means that the successful project manager recognizes who needs what information and creates mechanisms to assure that the right people get that information. In this capacity, the project manager is responsible for communication flow both vertically and horizontally.
Finally, Naomi needs to understand that, at least to some degree, she lives within a matrix. She must see that the diverse members of her team are responsible not only to her, but to functional managers whose objectives and priorities might directly contradict her own. Being effective as a project manager in this type of environment requires significant interpersonal skills.

Let’s look at an example from Naomi’s list: team members were too busy with their functional priorities to attend project team meetings. What if Naomi had understood the need for information management between her team members and their functional supervisors? It is possible that if her team members understood the importance of the project, they might have selected her priorities over those of their functional teams. It is also possible that if their supervisors understood the importance of Naomi’s projects, they might have been willing to excuse team members from their functional duties. And finally, if Naomi had felt more confident about her skills in exercising influence and resolving conflict, she could have met with the relevant functional managers and tried to find a compromise that would have enabled her team members to attend her meetings.

The first step to being an effective project manager is seeing project management through our three frames. Naomi now better understands her role in the context of the first frame, organizational design. She is beginning to get the idea that there is much more to this role than she thought.

Think about how the lessons Naomi learned apply to your organization. Can you see these forces at play in your own project and functional teams?
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES TO PROJECT MANAGERS

Having derived a definition of the project manager, we turn our attention to exploring the project manager’s role. To do this, we will introduce the second and third frames of research, discussing project management at the levels of the project and of the individual. The module ends with the presentation of a generic competency model for project leadership.
Let’s turn our attention to the second frame: the one dealing with success on a project level. This module examines the ways in which the project environment and the degree and type of uncertainty present in that environment alter the potential for project success.
Armed with an understanding of the types of uncertainty surrounding your project, you should turn your attention to the role of the project manager in dealing with this uncertainty. How do you diagnose problems? What do you do once you have a diagnosis? This module focuses on the way the project manager must behave in order to complete tasks in the face of uncertainty.
At last, you come again to the central dilemma: sometimes, as a project manager, you do everything correctly, but your project still fails. You create your project documents, you consider your organizational context, you even account for project uncertainty—but unless you have the capacity to lead your team effectively, your project may still never get off the ground.
THE WHOOPS MOMENT
Naomi is still thinking about the events that occurred while she was trying to manage her project. In one of them, she recalls, a key member of her team was taken from her group to work on another organizational project. She had just gotten to work when she saw the following email.

Should Naomi have foreseen that this type of problem was looming? How should she have responded?
THE PROJECT SUCCESS FRAME

• Looks more closely at individual projects
• Helps explain what types of uncertainty are present
Uses uncertainty to explore various project management styles
Recall that in the context of the organizational frame, you learned about the concept of uncertainty. We looked at the degree of uncertainty to determine the importance of the information management needed in organizational life.
Now, let’s move to a discussion of the second frame—the project success frame. While the first frame looked at project leadership in the context of the entire organization and focused on research on organizational design, the second frame looks more closely at individual projects. Within these projects, you use the project success framework to create a project uncertainty profile that explains what types of uncertainty are present in your project.
ORGANIZATIONAL UNCERTAINTY AND COMPLEXITY
THE IMPORTANCE OF UNCERTAINTY

Embracing uncertainty is a critical leadership competency
Saying you do not know is an act of leadership
“Sensemaking” allows a leader to navigate through uncertainty
In 2001, organizational theorist Karl Weick contributed an important chapter to the Bennis, Spreitzer, and Cummings text, The Future of Leadership: Today’s Top Thinkers on Leadership Speak to the Next Generation. His chapter, “Leadership as the Legitimation of Doubt” posited that embracing uncertainty is a critical leadership competency.
Weick opened his article with a story about one of the book’s editors. Warren Bennis was president of University of Cincinnati when he was giving a lecture at the Harvard School of Education. During a question and answer session, he was asked if he really loved being president at Cincinnati. After a moment’s thought, Bennis answered, “I don’t know.” Not long after, Bennis left his presidency.
Weick used this story as an example of good leadership, noting it was not Bennis deciding to say “yes” or “no” that had confused Bennis. Indeed, “the question of whether he loves being president is not a problem in decision making. It is deeper than that. It is an issue of meaning, direction, and sensemaking” (Weick, 2001, 91).
According to Weick, saying you do not know is an incredibly strong act of leadership that affords you the opportunity to make sense of a situation, sense that will then equip you for the decision making that is so often misrepresented as the true nature of leadership.
This is because the world is unknowable and unpredictable. Shifting patterns of relationships make up our environment, but they cannot be accurately charted because they are ever-changing. Human beings, by nature, want some direction through this unknowable, unpredictable world. This then, becomes the central challenge of leadership: how do you navigate uncharted—and unchartable—environments to give people a sense of direction?
This is the nature of sensemaking. “Sensemaking is about navigating by means of a compass rather than a map” (Weick, 2001, 93). Maps only allow us to navigate known environments. Compasses and compass needles (human values) can help lead and navigate through unknown environments. In addition, Weick explains that “if people find themselves in a world that is only partially charted, and if leaders also admit that they too don’t know, then both are more likely to mobilize resources for direction making rather than for performance” (Weick, 2001, 93).
Accepting uncertainty and seeing leadership as sensemaking creates leaders who ask questions, update frequently, encourage improvisation, challenge assumptions, and help others to make sense of what they are facing. Sensemaking is effective because it does not assume a single right answer. Considering the compass metaphor again, Weick notes that leaders who embrace uncertainty recognize that they are “looking for a direction rather than a location [because] a compass is a more reliable instrument of navigation if locations on the map are changing” (Weick, 2001, 94).
Embracing a new definition of effective leadership means accepting a new understanding of the nature of work leaders perform. According to Weick, the best leaders focus on five areas when faced with uncertainty:
• Animation: The likelihood of sensemaking is enhanced when people update often and converse candidly. This area of focus is indifferent to content—any initiative or mantra that animates people forces people to experiment and converse.
• Improvisation: Weick warns that improvisation is not about creating product from no materials. Rather, it is about using preplanned materials flexibly in reaction to new information or ideas. Leaders can encourage this by not holding their decisions as a final word. As Weick reminds, “it is easier to change directions than to reverse decisions” (Weick, 2001, 98).
• Lightness: When leaders admit that they do not know, they are dropping some of their authority. Dropping expert authority, pretense, or “macho posture” (Weick, 2001, 99) allows leaders—and therefore allows their teams—to be lighter and more agile in response to uncertainty and change.
• Authentication: The phrase “I don’t know” almost necessarily denotes authenticity because it is not what leaders are expected to say. In addition, the phrase usually invites follow-up information that further reinforces the authenticity of doubt, statements such as “but I will look into it,” or “but let’s talk about it and see what we can figure out.”
• Learning: Finally, leadership acts that begin with admissions of not knowing often end with something learned. This leads to growth and development for the individual, for the team, and for the organization.
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Weick, K. (2001). Leadership as the legitimation of doubt. In W. Bennis, G.M. Spreitzer, and T. Cummings (Eds.), The future of leadership: today’s top thinkers on leadership speak to the next generation (pp. 91-102). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
WHAT DOES A PROJECT MANAGER LOOK LIKE?

• Low uncertainty projects: focus on planning/tracking progress and meeting targets
• Higher uncertainty projects: focus on stakeholder relationship management; tracking assumptions; rapid, flexible response
Flexibility in leadership style is the hallmark of effective project managers. According again to the research of Meyer, Loch, and Pich (2002), the project manager’s behavior needs to change in the face of different types of project uncertainty.
VARIATION:
The project manager is a troubleshooter, executing to a set plan and planning extra time into the schedule to cover anticipated deviations. It is important to clearly define performance criteria for work tasks and to monitor actual performance against those criteria.
FORESEEN UNCERTAINTY:
The project manager prevents threats, identifies risks and shares them with key stakeholders, and develops contingency plans and defines criteria for knowing when to use them. Key stakeholders are apprised of what may be required of them if risk-mitigation actions become necessary or if contingency plans are put into effect.
UNFORESEEN UNCERTAINTY:
The project manager must be flexible and willing to develop new plans or try new methods as her existing plan becomes ineffective. The project manager must be very sensitive to assumptions made during planning, must scan the environment for surprise events that negate assumptions or could cause difficulties, must solve emerging problems, and must modify targets and strategies to meet objectives. Stakeholders must be continuously informed and project managers must develop relationships of trust with them.
CHAOS:
The project manager must be able to change direction rapidly, build a capacity to learn from the environment, and completely redefine the project as situations necessitate. Iterative or parallel development processes and rapid prototyping become the order of the day. Environmental scanning is critical to inform decision making on plans, and decisions about whether to continue with an action or to terminate it must be made ruthlessly. Interactions with stakeholders must be driven by a long-term perspective, be characterized by high levels of trust, and be conducted in the service of shared interests and mutual gain.
When thinking about uncertainty, keep in mind that most projects are faced with a mixture of uncertainties. You describe the uncertainty present in the context of a project uncertainty profile, which can range from low predictability (low variance–high chaos) to high predictability (high variance–low chaos).

Consider the uncertainty profiles below.

How do you shape your management style to meet these profiles? Take a look at the profile on the left. The more you know about a project, the more you are able to fulfill the tasks that you typically think of when you hear the words project management. In projects with limited amounts of uncertainty, you are focused on planning and tracking progress and meeting targets.

However, the more you move to profiles like the one on the right, the more you must be concerned with managing the uncertainty to complete the project. Here, you focus on stakeholder-relationship management, tracking assumptions, building a capacity to rapidly respond with flexibility, and continuously learning from your environment.

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De Meyer, A., Loch, C.A., & Pich, M.T. (2002). Managing project uncertainty: From variation to chaos. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(2), 60–67.
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT

• Keeping stakeholders informed is critical during uncertainty and chaos
• Managing accurate, efficient information flow is a key skill
Stakeholder management involves establishing and projecting your own credibility
Stakeholder management is a key project manager skill. As the uncertainty profile of a project incorporates more unforeseen uncertainty and chaos, the need to keep one’s stakeholders informed becomes ever more important. Stakeholder management is not just a matter of giving stakeholders information updates; it is also a matter of understanding what each stakeholder knows, wants to know, and needs to know, so that the project manager can take account of their collective interests. In addition, when you are surrounded by the unknown and by great dynamism in the environment, changes in course may make it necessary for you to involve new stakeholders.

Essentially, stakeholder management is an exercise in establishing and projecting your own credibility. Are you on top of things? Do you appreciate what is important to your clients and stakeholders? Are you trying to minimize the burden of uncertainty they may feel about the project?

In planning stakeholder management, consider the following factors:
• How much influence does your stakeholder have? How much influence does an individual have over your project? How much influence does an individual have over other stakeholders?
• What level of support do you need? What do you stand to lose if you lose stakeholder support? Think about this as you craft a message for your stakeholders: what do they need to hear so they will continue the support you need for your project?
• How can you tell them what they need to hear? As you craft action plans, keep in mind the who (stakeholders with influence) and the what (important messages) of managing stakeholders.
Always remember, stakeholder management is a way for you to maintain your credibility in the face of uncertainty. Be sure to keep your management plan updated and to begin your communication efforts as soon as you know a problem is likely.
NAOMI AND PROJECT SUCCESS

• Adapt the management style to the type of uncertainty present
• Variation: build buffers that allow you to stick to the plan
• Chaos: allow greater flexibility
Let’s take another look at Naomi and some of her concerns about the life of her project.
• Management asked a key member of her team to move to a different project.
• A competing priority caused the entire organization to shift focus away from her project for a week.
• Team members were too busy with their functional priorities to attend project team meetings.
What has Naomi learned about the project-success framework that could help her to explain what happened on her team?
Naomi learned that not all projects are as simple as “plan” and “execute.” She learned that projects face varying degrees of four different types of uncertainty:
• Variation
• Foreseen uncertainty
• Unforeseen uncertainty
• Chaos
She also learned that she must change her project management style to match the type of uncertainty present in each project. The more the profile of project uncertainty leans toward variation—small road bumps—the more she can focus on building in buffers by sticking to the plan. The more the profile leans towards chaos, on the other hand, the more flexible she needs to be and the more she needs to be able to redefine the project.
Let’s look at an example from Naomi’s list. Recall that Naomi’s project was thrown off track when her principle engineer was taken off of the MiniWidget team to lead the efforts on the highly lucrative WidgetClassico project. What type of uncertainty is this? This is more than a small misstep in the project schedule, but it was foreseen (Naomi had been told the Classico project might be on the horizon). This, then, is an example of foreseen uncertainty. In response, Naomi should have created a contingency plan. Perhaps Naomi should have requested two engineers for the project. This would have enabled her to take advantage of Jamie’s expertise while he could still serve her project. Then, when Jamie was taken off the project, she could have had a replacement who was already familiar with the MiniWidget’s development.
Think about how the lessons Naomi learned apply to your organization. Can you see these forces at play in your own project and functional teams?
PREVENTION AND RESPONSE CONSIDERATIONS

Consider what causes derailment
Causes: lost focus, slow completion rates, changing priorities
Consider better prevention and response measures
Looking back on her project, Naomi realizes that there have been a number of times when she might have been able to have prevented it from going off course. She thinks specifically about one case when competing priorities caused the organization to turn its attention—and therefore its resources—away from her MiniWidget3000.
As the push came to get products out before the holiday season, the organization switched focus to those priorities with the greatest potential payoff. With the MiniWidget not slated for completion until the summer months, Naomi’s team members all took extra time and care to help their colleagues working on other priorities to meet their deadlines—but they were often derelict in finishing their assignments for her team.
Naomi could see it happening, but what should she have done? When confronted with leadership challenges like these, how could she have responded more effectively?
The traditional model of project management is one of satisfying a triple constraint: cost, time, and performance. That is, a successful project is one that is completed to specification on time and within budget. In “Lessons for an Accidental Profession,” Jeffrey Pinto and Om Kharbanda argue that a new paradigm is needed, one that adds a fourth constraint: client satisfaction.
This fourth constraint poses a new challenge for project managers, one which highlights the human aspect of project management. For their article, Pinto and Kharbanda asked senior project managers what information would have made the job of novice project manager easier. The resulting twelve points are discussed in detail in “Lessons.”

EXPLORING THE FINDINGS

• Critical key differentiators between projects and other work
• Projects have production, technical complexity, and constraints
• Multiple stakeholders and uncertainty add to complexity
A great deal of research has gone into the critical roles a project manager must play in an organization. In general, this research has focused on answering the following questions:
• What is unique about projects as compared to other organizational responsibilities?
• What do these traits tell us about what a project manager must do?
When you look at a project, you should notice several critical characteristics that make it definable as a project:
• Projects involve the production of something that is relatively unique
• There is a technical complexity to the product and/or its production process
• The production process must be completed under constrained time and using constrained resources, and the ultimate deliverable must meet specified requirements
• There are multiple stakeholders with an interest in the project
• The production environment is typically dynamic and characterized by high levels of uncertainty

Given these project characteristics, several skills are required of project managers. The following list represents a consolidation of major research on the necessary skill set for project managers:
• Project managers must be aware of the triple constraint. In other words, project managers must be working to maximize cost efficiency, schedule efficiency, and product performance. Rosenau (1992) created the representation of the triple constraint shown below. Notice that the surface labeled budget intersects with the cost axis to give us an overall budget constraint; that theschedule surface intersects with the time axis to give us an overall schedule constraint; and that the attributes surface intersects with the performance axis to give us an overall performance constraint. Together, these three constraints create standards for the project. The project manager must be aware of all three and must be adept at trading off among them in ways that honor stakeholder interests and keep stakeholders happy. As a result of this last point, Pinto and Kharbanda (1995) have added a fourth constraint: client satisfaction.
• Project managers must be concerned with bounding the uncertainty faced by all stakeholders. In order to maintain personal credibility and ensure continued buy-in, the project manager must be able to demonstrate an understanding of and an ability to navigate within the dynamic and uncertain environment. They must also assure that actions taken by the project team in response to that environment make sense; that is, that they are understood by all stakeholders and do not unnecessarily contribute to the burden of uncertainty that surrounds the project.
• They must be able to influence others without necessarily having the authority to mandate action. More often than not, project managers must share authority over project personnel with functional managers. In addition, they must frequently obtain rapid buy-in by key stakeholders when deviations from plans are required. When project success requires agility of response, the ability to galvanize the actions of others becomes an essential skill.
• Project managers must display empathy, interest-based conflict resolution, and self-management. These skills enable the project manager—and the project team—to deal with the stress and emotionality of project life, in addition to contributing mightily to the project manager’s ability to efficiently overcome the barriers to performance that naturally arise when something difficult is being accomplished in the face of stringent constraints.
• They must build highly cohesive, collaborative work groups. In the face of uniqueness of product, complexity, and environmental chaos, there is nothing so reassuring and helpful as a highly committed, cohesive group of colleagues. Such a team is a sensing system—providing data and insight in the face of uncertainty—and a creative problem-solving resource. Taking a diverse group of experts and helping it to become more than the sum of its parts—creating a collective intelligence—may be the most essential of all project management skills.
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Pinto, J.K. and Kharbanda, O.M. (1995). Lessons for an accidental profession. Business Horizons, 38(2), 41-50.
Rosenau, M.D. (1992). The triple constraint. In M. Rosenau & G. Gigthens, Successful project management (pp 15-21). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
READING THE MODEL

• Competency model: clusters, competencies, and behaviors
• Competency behaviors can be described as the “people dimension” of organizational life
Click here (Links to an external site.) to download a detailed reading of the 18 competencies
The competency model presented in this course contains four clusters broken into 18 competencies, each of which is broken into a series of behaviors. Read more about each cluster below, along with the competencies associated with it. There is also a downloadable document included in this page, with detailed information on the clusters, competencies, and behaviors.

Cluster Description

The Goal and Action Management Cluster
Management success is centered on the ability to move a project, team, or organization toward a common goal. To this end, managers must be able to help others to understand desired outcomes, to confront risks, and to enable the actions needed to achieve these goals.
The competencies in this cluster are:
• Efficiency orientation
• Proactivity
• Concern with impact
• Diagnostic use of concepts

The Human Resource Management Cluster
Managers rely on people resources to meet business objectives. At its core, this is a cluster about how managers relate to those who work for and with them. It deals with how leaders can manage themselves as a resource; with the management of others in groups and networks; and with the things a leader can do to help others to both believe in themselves and be understood.
The competencies in this cluster are:
• Accurate self-assessment
• Self-control
• Stamina and adaptability
• Perpetual objectivity
• Positive regard
• Managing group process
• Use of socialized power

The Directing SubordinatesCluster
This cluster deals with the way successful managers coach, guide, and control their employees. The competencies listed below help managers get the most from their subordinates through effective feedback and motivation tactics.
The competencies in this cluster are:
• Use of unilateral power
• Developing others
• Spontaneity

The Leadership Cluster
The manager is responsible for communicating the long- and short-term goals of the organization. But in addition, the manager is also responsible for motivating and inspiring employees to reach those goals. This cluster contains competencies needed to transform managers into leaders.
The competencies in this cluster are:
• Self-confidence
• Conceptualization
• Logical thought
• Use of oral communication
Click here (Links to an external site.) to download a full copy of the clusters, competencies, and behaviors in the McBer Competency Map. When you do so, notice how many of the competency behaviors are about the people dimension of organizational life. Yes, there are behaviors about goal setting, planning, organizing activities, and the efficient use of resources, but these are all associated with a single competency: efficiency orientation. The other 17 deal with such issues as how we manage ourselves while in the managerial role, how we help others to understand goals and to see and believe in themselves, how we exercise power and influence action around us, and how we help others to build loyalty to the task and to coordinate their actions with their coworkers. Take a moment to connect these generic competencies to the challenges of the matrix we spoke about earlier, or to the need to carefully manage stakeholders when operating in a chaotic project environment. Do you see why dealing with the human dimension is so critical to project management success?
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Boyatzis, R.E. (1982). The competent manager: a model for effective performance. New York: Wiley & Sons.
NAOMI AND THE LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES

• Project managers must pay attention to issues of uncertainty and human-resource management
• Project managers must make sure that they have the capacity and competency to be seen as a trusted leader
Let’s take one final look at Naomi and some of her concerns about the life of her project.
• Management asked a key member of her team to move to a different project.
• A competing priority caused the entire organization to shift focus away from her project for a week.
• Team members were too busy with their functional priorities to attend project team meetings.
What has Naomi learned about high-performance leadership that could help her to explain what happened on her team?
Naomi learned that the triple-constraint method of project management (cost, time, and performance) is not in itself the only thing to which a project manager must attend. Project managers must also pay attention to issues of uncertainty and human-resource management. To that end, they must make sure that they have the capacity and competency to be seen as a trusted leader in the organization.
Let’s look at an example from Naomi’s list. When her team and organization turned their attention to the holiday roll-out, Naomi was unable to steer resources back to her project. Looking through the competency model, there are a number of areas in which Naomi may need to grow in order to be effective the next time she faces a similar situation.

The human-resource cluster, for example, is all about group coordination. From this cluster, Naomi did not demonstrate the ability to manage group process (stimulating others to work together in a group setting), nor did she demonstrate the use of socialized power (using forms of influence to build alliances). These skills might have helped her to gather her people resources to complete her projects. Naomi also did not exercise the use of unilateral power (from the directing-subordinates cluster), and it is not clear whether she displayed any self-confidence (from the leadership cluster). Naomi’s project might have gone differently had she exercised these critical competencies.

As Naomi takes stock of her skills and competencies, think about how the lessons she learned apply to your organization. What do you need to do in order to be a more effective leader for your projects?
THE COMPETENCY ACQUISITION PROCESS

• Six-step process for adopting any new behavior
• Identify the steps of the process here
This module introduced a complex model of personal leadership. So now what? What should you be trying to do with the tools this course provided you with? You may have a profoundly well-developed capacity for each of these competencies, yet if you never talk about these competencies or display the skills associated with them, to others it will appear that you do not actually have those capacities.
The competency acquisition process has been outlined for you below, so that you can learn the behaviors and adopt them yourself.

Competency Acquisition Process Description
1. Recognition In this step, you build a capacity for identifying a competency when you see one.
2. Understanding In the second step of the process, you see how the competencies work for managers.
3. Assessment In the third step, you measure yourself to discover which of the competencies are underdeveloped in you and which you have already mastered.
4. Experimentation In this step, you try out the competencies you haven’t used before.
5. Practice In the “Practice” step, you consciously practice putting the new competencies to work for you when dealing with your superiors, subordinates, and peers.
6. Application In the final step of the competency acquisition process, you apply the competency or competencies consistently and appropriately to the context.

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