Results tagged “Mike Sanders” from Voices on Project Management

I really enjoyed Saturday afternoon's Individual Leadership Development topic "If This Was Easy Someone Else Would Be Doing It." Michael Flint and Herman Gonzalez of the Southern Ontario Chapter teamed up for their top 10 reasons why component leadership is not easy. Their management challenges, in order of importance, were:
1. Focus
2. Communications
3. Customer Expectations (Chapter members are customers!)
4. Component Scope
5. Vision
6. External Competition and Collaboration
7. Internal Competition and Collaboration
8. Time Expectations
9. Funding
10. Volunteers
    I had two great takeaways. First, chapter management is really about managing a business and chapters can fall into the trap of being managed like projects. (We are, after all, project managers.)
    Second, consider having dinner meetings earlier, free and "without the dinners." Free, non-dinner chapter meetings could save money, might actually produce a higher turnout because they are free, and could get everyone home in time for Desperate Housewives--just kidding. But early, free, non-dinner meetings might be a great idea heading into these financially troubling times.
    I spoke to Herman, chapter president, after the session and he told me that their free, non-dinner meetings were very successful. They improved attendance and were actually "more profitable."  

I thought the best presentation at this year's Leadership conference was the keynote address by Mark Mullaly. He discussed at great length how to quantify the value of project management from the results of a study he and his team performed on 65 companies. He quantified project management value in terms of satisfaction, alignment to business practices, process improvements, outcomes and ROI.
    The study measured project management value using both tangible and intangible metrics. And although Mark concluded that it was more difficult to show a positive relationship amongst project management levels using tangible value determinants, correlations were more evident when using intangible value as a measurement tool.
    I spoke to Mark immediately after his presentation about the difficulty in convincing stakeholders, particularly executive sponsors, of the value of project management using intangible value. He agreed it was a challenge to address intangible value, but with the caveat that this was true also of tangible value. He suggested to me that higher-level managers were usually more concerned with intangible value because they knew how intangibles offer such tremendous, long-term leverage for a company's success--forward thinking.
    I agree. Executive, leaders, senior stakeholders know deep down inside that it is the intangible value that ultimately drives their projects and company forward. That's why I changed my mind after speaking with Mark. It's really at the lower stakeholder levels that the tangible case needs to be made. And if intangible project management value can be demonstrated at the top, like executive sponsors, their buy-in will help us make the tangible case for project management value well down into the organization.

Editor's Note: Find out more about the study mentioned in this post.