What is the Future of Project Management? Part 4: Andre Kaminski on the move from Project Management to Project Leadership
Andre Kaminski has more than twenty-five years experience across project management, program management and product management. He works primarily on large and complex projects, generally involving software development and implementation, with all of the culture change issues that this implies.
He was kind enough to join our round table with project managers in April and shared many insights. We followed up with a one-on-one conversation.
Project Management è Project Leadership
His most important point is that project management needs to become project leadership. Project has management become more of a skill that could be learned by business professionals rather than a lifetime profession. What is more important for project success is the understanding of the business domain and ability to feel, lead and motivate the team. Focus on administration aspects of the projects, by applying processes and tools often provided by project management office, is not sufficient.
Project administration does not equal project leadership. Leadership includes the clarification of goals and their alignment. There are generally several levels of alignment that a project leader needs to be concerned with. Between the individuals and the team, between the team and the organization, and when the project is for a client, between the client, the organization and the team. This takes a lot of experience and a good judge of character.
Project Management U Product Management
Project management and product management are often seen as completely distinct disciplines. Project managers are responsible for delivering projects that generally have a beginning and an end date, clear (one hopes) goals and resources. The project manager identifies and manages risks and keeps everything moving forward to a successful conclusion. A product manager is concerned with creating a product, or a solution, that satisfies a market need and that can be sold and delivered profitably. But more and more we can see overlap in these two functions. Basically, both roles have to understand the customer’s needs and how to delight the end user. Both roles need to understand the business, market and the participants – including the project team. The difference however is in the depth of the knowledge – while product managers are mainly focused on external aspects of the product, the project managers need to focus on delivery and the team. For many modern projects, especially those that seek to solve real problems, alignment (see above) this has to include alignment with the goals of the end users. As these goals are often poorly described, the project manager needs to work closely with the product manager and the customer to tease them out, clarify them, and turn them into deliverables that the project team can understand and deliver .
First, do no harm
It is a sad truth of human work that people are often most effective when working alone. This is sometimes known as the Ringelmann effect, the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. In 1913 Ringelmann found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone.
The reasons for this suggest the cure. Team members can easily suffer from loss of motivation and loss of co-ordination. So according to Andre, the first goal of a project manager should be to counteract the Ringelmann effect and make sure that the team achieves at least weak synergy – productivity at least equal to the sum of its parts. And to do that requires attention mainly to both motivation and co-ordination but also to several other soft factors. And this is where the real “power project management” aka “project leadership” shows his stuff.
Culture plays a vital role
Project managers leading successful teams need to align with both organizational and team cultures. Some organizations foster the project leadership approach. There is a level of trust between the team and the project manager and the project manager and the organization. Communication channels are kept open and are two-way. Project management is not just about reporting, but rather about creating an environment where inventive problem solving happens. In this culture, a good project leader can get beyond weak synergies to achieve strong synergies, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – the team is able to achieve more than contributions of its individual members.
But there are still organizations that remain mired in a top-down control culture, where projects are rigidly defined in terms of requirements and deliverables and where often the original goals for the project get lost. It is in this culture, which occurs at all sizes of organization, where project leadership could start transforming the enterprise slowly and from within to overcome the Ringelmann effect and to achieve synergies. Small successful projects can have ripple effects across the organization, initiating a peaceful transition to a more open and high-performance culture.
Read the other posts in the Future of Project Management Series
What is the Future of Project Management? Part 1: A Conversation with Andrew Netschay
Project Managers Share Opinions – Challenges, Teams, Roles
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