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Monday, 29th September 2008
Patrick and John are authors of two of the most widely respected methods for running programmes and projects (MSP and PRINCE2) and they are strong supporters of the use of these methods; they are educators - training, coaching and mentoring managers; and they believe in a strong focus on competencies and behaviours.
Yet they believe that there is something that is not getting the attention it deserves. Does the way that portfolio, programme and project managers think have an impact on the way that they manage? Do they have this 'Mental Crib Sheet' that shapes the way they allocate their time, make decisions and ultimately deliver?
They think so. So they instigated a small research study amongst practicing Portfolio, Programme and Project Managers (and an assessment from their senior managers) to find out more. This is a summary of our emergent findings.
Patterns of Thinking
Our research, although quite modest in its scope, has shown some intriguing and consistent patterns of thinking among our study group of managers.
We are now beginning to take the view that there are patterns of best thinking that are shared by managers with what we shall call 'alpha' traits. (Alpha-trait managers are those who we suspect are among the highest performers - an assessment that was held by their peers/senior managers.) We have begun to see evidence that ëBest Thinking drives Best Practiceí.
We all want Best Practice; we know that the intelligent use of methods such as PRINCE2 and MSP can only help our drive towards successful delivery; we are convinced of the need to raise the level of competence within our organisations; we have seen the difference that different management behaviours have on our initiatives. But if this is the limit to our focus, then we believe that we are missing something. We are focusing on the wrong areas.
Before we can hope to see Best Practice in practice we need to address our thinking. We need to be thinking about our thinking. We need to understand Best Thinking.
So what is meant by 'Best Thinking'?
Three patterns are emerging from our research:
1. Self-awareness
2. A bias towards Relationships
3. Making Margins
We'll now look at each of these in turn.
Self-Awareness
It quickly became obvious that the people more highly regarded in the independent senior manager assessments (people we dubbed our 'alpha trait managers') had a clearer sense of what they did, and why they did it, and were able to articulate consistent personal rules for decision-making. When we asked them to 'think about your thinking', they seemed to have no difficulty in doing this; in fact, they demonstrated a relative ease in describing their thinking compared to others in the survey.
This attribute is an ability to stand back from their regular apparently-habitual thinking and behaviours, to describe their thinking and to commit to adjusting it as necessary. We were reminded how neuroscientists now describe the functioning of the human brain as 'plastic'. We would say that these people showed a definite plasticity of thinking.
For example, one respondent recorded in one week's journal:
Iíve always been a lists person. I learned this from a boss I had at the time, who had a scoring mechanism... I identify a short, separate list of ëQuick Winsí. Ticking these off helps me motivate myself. Then I work through the important tasks.
This quote illustrates why it might be a mistake to describe this merely as the ability to reflect. To be sure, reflection is at the core of it, but it is intensely practical in orientation, and activistic in expression. The think-act link just seems to be stronger for these people.
An exercise we asked them to do was to list the top five pieces of information they would want to hand at that particular point in their project or programme - their personal dashboard. There was no real pattern the overall results, but we did see a difference in two things:
1. the relative ease the alpha trait managers went through sharing their lists with us and
2. the number of salient features (granularity) they were able to 'home in on' as part of their lists.
We concluded that:
1. There is some evidence that everyone in our survey referenced their own list or personal dashboard - everybody has one;
2. People's dashboards are not the same. (Could this indicate something deeper than formal methodologies at work here?)
3. The clarity people had about their own dashboard - even allowing for the fact that this would change, perhaps in different contexts and different points in the lifecycle - the clarity varied markedly in our interviews. The alpha trait managers were clearer and more articulate about what they would refer to first.
Another way that self-awareness seemed to express itself was the perception of their own time. This seemed a litmus test of whether someone regarded themselves as driven or a driver. Here's a non-alpha quote, this time from a Portfolio Manager:
The study made me think how reactionary I am for most of the time.
In this respondent's case they recorded as little as 15% of their time is spent pro-actively. The rest of the time they tended to be reacting to and solving problems.
Compare this to someone who scored highly on their senior manager's assessment, an interim programme manager:
I made it my business when I arrived here to immerse myself in the business community, to understand who was who, and how they functioned.
Do you see the way this person uses the language of a pro-active shaper? "I made it my business ..."
So, where is the pro-activity that Patrick discussed in his blog being deployed?
A Bias towards Relationships
The second major finding that is emerging from our Mental Crib Sheet research is that alpha-trait managers have a distinct bias towards developing and maintaining relationships. We are seeing a correlation between the pro-active time that is being built into the working week of our managers and the time spent in managing relationships.
The self-aware, pro-active manager seems to believe that relationships are central to success. They are thinking about their mental landscape, and on that landscape they see the vital importance of stakeholders.
This bias towards relationships is seen in the amount of time that is dedicated to communicating with stakeholders. Alpha-trait managers are committing between 60% - 85% of their time to communication. We know that's what the books tell us we should do - but they are doing it!
They are not just 'ticking boxes'. One respondent who, as a result of the study,
recognised that they had not proactively developed relationships described their approach to managing in this way:
"I've just done it in a sort of auto-pilot mode..."
The pro-active managers are thinking about their relationships in a real and active way.
Another point is also emerging here. We are seeing managers who are not just using the formal line structures of their projects and programmes, but instead are looking to understand the political landscape, use the informal structures and develop their extended team. We are calling this the use of the tribal network.
Research from Harvard has indicated that personal performance is actually predicated on being part of a team. Individuals that were performing at a high level (stars) experienced a drop in that performance on joining a new team.
This leads to questions about whether we really understand the role of the manager in extended teams, and again whether we are focusing in the wrong areas.
We can measure the maturity of our organisation; we have the means to carry out health-checks on our projects, programme and portfolio; we give a lot of attention to the individual practitioner's performance. All these are valid areas of focus. But are we missing a vital ingredient, are we forgetting the role of the extended team, the tribal network? It seems our alpha-trait managers are not.
Making Margins
One pattern that other studies of high-performing project managers have identified is their tendency to triage unplanned issues - pre-assess them, qualify them - before committing them to a formal, collaborative process, one that usually involves some sort of Issue Log accessible by other members of the team.
We found this too. One programme manager in a logistics company told us:
"I don't put issues immediately onto the Log ... [this practice] evolved with experience. I found myself spending too much time administering controls and not actually managing ... It may not be what the books say, but it just works for me."
Now this troubles us as authors and trainers of best management approaches. For example, PRINCE2 makes it clear that the first point of control of an unplanned issue is to capture it, that is, to record it onto the Issues Log.
Our higher performers seem to be going against this. They talk about a 'cooling off period' and how many apparently serious issues just evaporate over a day or two; how the simple act of formally recording an issue seems sometimes to add quite unnecessary weight, emphasis or urgency to an issue; and how a burgeoning log ends up mastering the management team, demanding constant attention, to be regularly tilled over and reported upon.
To be quite candid, I think those of us in best practice community needs to reassess what it is advising people on this matter.
Personal Float
In fact, the higher performers, seemed to build into their working schedules what we have come to call personal float, which goes beyond the handling of Issues. Here's another quote from one of our volunteer subjects, a programme manager in a rail company:
"Unplanned events were manageable as I had allocated approximately 6 hours [this week] for various forms of unplanned activity - this was sufficient to cover what came along."
Now, on one level this is simple common sense. Yet why did the higher performers, the alpha-trait managers, have the discipline to do this and the others in our study didn't? The knowing - doing gap seems to involve some mental frame of self-awareness, confidence, and self-actualisation that seemed to be a constant grid against which they assess their working schedule and behaviours.
This appears to relate very closely to Daniel Goleman's constructs of emotional intelligence . We didn't set out to validate Goleman's model, but we seem to be drawn back to it.
So then, personal margin seems to be a priority in the modus operandi of all the higher performers we observed. No doubt there is a link here to their better performance, but under girding this expression of personal margin is some kind of constant care in the minds of these managers to build in margin and a confidence to assert this in the pressured workplace.
The Mental Crib Sheet - a summary
From the initial phase of our study three patterns are emerging. Together the three patterns lead us to some initial conclusions about the way that project, programme and portfolio managers construct their mental landscape. The patterns that have emerged are patterns of thinking, and we have named these three patterns:
1. Self-awareness
2. Bias towards relationships
3. Making Margins
We first presented these initial findings at an event called "The Best Practice Showcase", yet what we consider to be one of the major implications of this study is that if we focus on best practice and best practice alone then we are missing an important piece of the jigsaw. In fact we are suggesting that it is Best Thinking that drives Best Practice.
Encouraged by the feedback we have received both at the presentation and since, we are planning to continue our research to see where this takes us.
Are you interested in being involved? We would like to hear from you if you are a practicing portfolio, programme or project manager and you would be prepared to share your ways of working and thinking with us.
John Edmonds is Head of Training at pearcemayfield and has over 20 years of programme and project management experience in the educational and financial services sectors. He is one of the authors of the next edition of the PRINCE2 manual, due to be published in 2009. John recently launched his blog called ëThe Opsimathí.
Patrick Mayfield is the founding director of pearcemayfield, and has had a career in local government and telecommunications. He was one of the authors of the latest edition of MSP, published in September last year. He regularly writes on the use of best practice methods in his blog, ëLessons of a Learning Leader.í
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