A good part of PMI president and CEO Gergory Balestrero's opening remarks last Sunday afternoon at global congress centered on sustainability--and how project managers and the profession can play a huge part. PMI has started to play its part by announcing a new strategic principle:
PMI shall take actions and make decisions in a socially and environmentally responsible way.
The sustainability effort has been brewing within PMI for a while now. Just take a look at the current issue of PM Network (now and forever on recycled paper), which is completely devoted to the topic.
And for those of us who get to hear Mr. Balestrero speak on a regular basis, you will notice that he often touches on the important role project managers and project management can play in the sustainability effort.
When econsense official Thomas Koenen signed up to serve as the keynoter for the PMI global congress in Malta earlier this year, Mr. Balestrero said, "Social responsibility is no longer the whim of an environmentally sensitive CEO. It has become a mandate for all organizations in every operation. Project managers must recognize and address this mandate now and into the future."
Good sentiments, indeed. Throughout the year, however, I sometimes speak to in-the-trenches project managers who don't share the same point of view. They say social responsibility is nothing more than a "feel good" effort and argue the topic as it relates to the profession is on overkill.
While this group may represent the minority, I wonder what PMI will do to convert these holdouts--and how they will raise the bar for sustainable project management around the world.
Companies around the globe are constantly touting their ability to keep customers satisfied as a competitive advantage and selling point. Google vs. Yahoo, Lexus vs. BMW, Sony vs. Zenith--these battles can be won and lost based on customer satisfaction.
Just think about the last time you were really disappointed with a product or service. Did you go back to the same company or brand the next time around? Face it, most people would say no.
Satisfaction is something that resonates with both companies and consumers. And this is a lesson project professionals can take hold of.
Initial results from PMI's Researching the Value of Project Management study clearly show consistent processes lead to consistent results and greater satisfaction from everyone involved. That covers everyone from the people in the trenches performing the work every day to the end-users who see the final product.
In light of all the possible rewards companies stand to gain from satisfied customers--repeat business, brand loyalty, even evangelism--who says satisfaction isn't a tangible benefit?
We've talked a lot about what the Researching the Value of Project Management study means for executives, but what does it actually mean for the in-the-trenches project manager? How do they benefit?
First of all it re-emphasizes the importance of the work they do.
But
listening to interviews with principal investigators Mark Mullaly, PMP,
and Janice Thomas, Ph.D., I see it goes beyond that. It helps project
managers in a few key ways, including:
1. Understanding what support they need in the organization to be the most effective
2. Implementing the most effective project management practices in their organizations
3. Understanding how project management ties to the strategic direction of their organizations
But
it doesn't end there. Once the full report is available, the library of
65 case studies can be used by project managers for lessons learned. It
will also help the next generation of project leaders. Several of the
academicians I spoke with during and after PMI's Research Conference
have said they will be able to take the study and use it in their
classrooms. In fact, some of them are already doing precisely that.
In the days following the release of the preliminary results from Researching the Value of Project Management, conference-goers weighed in on the importance of the study. Here is a snapshot of some of their thoughts:
"It's a landmark study that we all have been looking forward to. ... The results will be felt for many years to come."
--Frank Anbari, Ph.D., United States
"They've gathered a huge quality of very valuable data, the analysis of which will probably take a couple of years. So the presentation that Janice [Thomas] and Mark [Mullaly] gave just gives us the tip of the iceberg. I think they did a very good job presenting how rich that data is, but one thing became very clear out of it. There's a bit of a paradox here. Companies are asking for ROI, but even when they have the opportunity they're not measuring the cost of the benefits."
--Brian Hobbs, PMP, University of Quebec, Quebec, Montreal, Canada
"It was a huge study. ...I can see some very interesting case study work coming out of that and I'd be very keen to read it."
--Derek Walker, Australia
"One thing that struck me in the results of the Researching the Value of Project Management is that there were no companies that were at the [higher] maturity levels. To me, that might be an indication that companies stop at certain points. They see value in project management and they invest in getting common models, common training for their project managers, common terminology, but after a certain level of maturity they stop. So that's probably something that needs to be further investigated to understand ..."
--Yven Petit, PMP, Canada
Come back for more interviews.
I finally had them right where I wanted them.
After their big reveal last week at PMI's Research Conference in Warsaw, Poland, Janice Thomas, Ph.D., and Mark Mullaly, PMP, sat down for an interview, and I could ask them anything about their Researching the Value of Project Management study. It was a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from selling skeptical executives on project management to the number of motorcycles purchased by researchers during the course of the study. (For the record, the answer to that last one would be three.)
I agree with all the fine points made by my fellow blogger and PMI.org editor Kelley Hunsberger in her earlier post.
But what struck me the most--and what I'm still thinking about nearly a week later--was how often talk around the study still comes down to the deceptively simple issue of fit. It seems so basic, but that doesn't make it any less important. For project management to truly show value, companies have to make it their own--attuned to the culture of their country and their organization.
Like the study itself, the authors were full of information and I'll have much, much more on this interview. And be sure to come back to PMI.org/value in August when parts of the interview will be available for viewing.
Terry Cooke-Davies is a veteran of all five PMI research conferences as well as one of the team leads on Researching the Value of Project Management. And he liked what he has experienced at the conference.
"I'm enjoying it hugely," Terry said. "There hasn't been a timeslot yet where there is nothing I want to go to."
"We're maintaining the high standards we've come to expect of PMI research conferences," he went on. "Project management research has become more self-confident since the first conference." This conference has greater breadth, he thinks, and Terry really appreciates that the meeting includes "engaging with other management disciplines in academic discourse."
Terry also told me that one of the case-study companies from the Value study e-mailed him this morning and said they are now realizing how far they've come in project management over the last two years. To show how much this particular company valued the study and project management, Terry said they made 21 people in two continents available to him for interviews, including some "very senior managers."
Last week, PM Network editor and fellow Voices of Project Management contributor Cyndee Miller interviewed Janice Thomas, Ph.D., and Mark Mullaly, PMP, principal investigators for PMI's Researching the Value of Project Management study. I had the opportunity to sit in on that interview and there were a few points I wanted to share:
1. Project management does actually have value and the study proves it. Mark and Janice reiterated this
point several times during each of their interviews. But Mark was
quick to point out, "there is not one thing that is project
management." Instead, he said it was all about how organizations
"implement project management in their terms."
2. The study wouldn't have been possible without each and every team
member--and there were nearly 50 of them. The team worked across almost every time zone--with researchers in China, Russia, North America, Latin America and
around the globe. Still, Janice attributed "a strong team from the beginning that was committed to
staying with the project through the end," as a key success factor.
3. These researchers have become the humble--and sometimes reluctant--stars of the PMI Research Conference. For example, Mark said during his interview that it took him nearly 40 minutes to get to the restroom after the awards ceremony because there were so many people stopping him to discuss the study.
4. The research doesn't end here. In fact, it seems to just be beginning. "This study generated an amazing database to further research," Janice said.
Another plenary session of that first day of the conference got equally rave reviews as the first from the audience members I spoke with at lunch. Dr. Martin Hoegl, a well-known expert in teaming, talked about optimum team size and how well remote teams do versus localized teams.
Did you know someone did a teaming study using tug-of-war? It turns out in this sport, and in project teams, less is more. After a tug-of-war team gets more than four members, the amount of effort put out by each team member goes down. "It's just human nature," Dr. Hoegl said. "People think there are lots of others on the team, so they can work less."
And stairs make a difference. Dr. Hoegl's research has shown that teams on the same floor do better than those with members separated by even one story in a building!
Dr. Hoegl's study showed dispersed teams have better outcomes (higher quality and more efficiency) than local teams if their quality of teamwork is high, but dispersed teams do much worse than co-located teams if their teamwork quality is low.
The take-aways from this research for organizations: Office layout matters (keep teams on the same floor); and for virutal team members, recruit and develop those who have good intercultural skills, great self-leadership skills, and consistent skills with other team members to enable shared leadership. And try to foster a global culture.
The first plenary presenter at the PMI Research Conference was Dr. Andrew Pettigrew. He is a globally known figure in management academia, the dean of the management school at University of Bath, England. Not project management, just management. But despite this, his stature, topic and talk were all very exciting to the audience. Ed Andrews, in charge of organizing the conference, said it took several attempts to convince Dr. Pettigrew to come.
He talked about seeming conflicts in corporate management that came about in the late 1990s--things like companies both standardizing and customizing at the same time, trends such as centralizing strategy while decentralizing operations. These were among trends that "took some getting use to."
Dr. Pettigrew used 1990s BP as an example for a company making wholesale changes that improved the firm's fortunes in that era of relatively flat oil prices. It cost the head of the CEO who first proposed the changes, he said, but later that CEO (Mr. Horton) got a bonus--posthumously, you might say. The speaker then sidetracked a bit on revolving-door CEOs, saying the average tenure of three years each couldn't be good for companies.
One bit of advice for attendees: Watch out for the J-curve. For non-researchers amongst us like myself, this roughly means things get worse before they get better.
I recently received these comments from Olivier Lazar, Ph.D., student, ESC Lille, France, about the GAC Academic Forum, held prior to the Research Conference and thought they were worth sharing:
The economic situation is putting organizations under high pressure to secure their investments, foster controls and meanwhile be more and more reactive to a constantly changing and more competitive environment.
This is the challenge that has to be undertaken by all the educational programs in project management, by raising the number of degrees, the number of graduates and ensuring their competence between academe and practice.
During the forum, we have seen some very interesting and promising initiatives. Shell, for example, has developed a whole training program with Cranfield University, immersing the academic experts in the pragmatic contrains of the business pace. Their success in this project demonstrates clearly that this is a way where we all should look. This point has also been illustrated by the University of Manchester and the Rolls-Royce Center for Project Management.
The partnership between industry/business and academe is a necessary win-win relationship, feeding the education by the field experience and the real-time connection with business contraints, academe giving the outcome of its research and providing industry with high-level professionals, with a tremendous knowledge of standards and already prepared to the expectation of their future operational practice.
