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Angotti
Product Deveopment
Newsletter
Volume 4, No. 2
"Helping
You Accelerate Your High-Tech Development Projects"
Welcome
to the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT e-mail newsletter!
The
goal of this newsletter is to help you accelerate
your development projects by sharing many of the tips, techniques, and
strategies we've honed during two decades of providing high-tech
consulting services.
This
issue discusses the areas of project team support that significantly
help teams to create a speedy and effective execution of the project
plan. Without general management and project level support, a project
is doomed to fail.
A SUPPORTED TEAM
What
does a supported team look like? It is efficient and effective. It gets
things done more quickly, with less effort and less stress on the team
members. For the technical persons reading this article, it can be
likened to: "a well oiled machine", or "elegant code", or a simple,
clean and straightforward circuit design, or an "optimized" system.
WHAT IS SUPPORT?
Support
for project team members is difficult to define. Unlike the other
project strategies, it is very personal in nature. Learning this skill
grows out of the experience of the manager and a few basic concepts.
For a starting general definition, to support is to advocate for,
assist or help someone.
Supporting a person or a team involves mostly the use of "soft" skills.
It requires interacting with the team members and the management on
behalf of the project goals. For engineers, trained mostly in technical
areas, this can be one of the most challenging skills to acquire and
use. My experience is that it is a skill learned much more by doing and
learning, than just by taking classes.
CREATE THE
RIGHT PROJECT ENVIRONMENT
Support
involves
creating the environment in which a project can thrive. It involves
giving encouragement and letting the team learn from experience. This
is in contrast to the use of forceful techniques when projects aren't
on track. It also involves getting the physical space, hardware and
software tools and team resources in place during the life of the
project so the team can move quickly towards the project goals.
Additionally, it involves obtaining, on behalf of the team, the
appropriate assistance from the management sponsors of the project.
A SPORTS ANALOGY
Learning
the skills to support a team is analogous to learning a sport. The
understanding of the game is relatively easy; it is learning to play
the game that is difficult. In both cases, it takes considerable
practise to do well.
If your projects seem to always to be
functioning under par, or late, and the team is always under stress,
then you might be very wise to look into enhancing these skills for
yourself. For myself, this has been a career long endeavor.
WHAT ARE THE PROJECT SUPPORT SKILLS?
A minimal list of project support skills consists of:
- Leadership Skills
- Motivational Skills
- Coaching and Communicating Skills
- - Listening
- - Feedback
- - Asking Good Questions
- Negotiating Skills
This newsletter discusses the first two of these. The other two will be discussed in the next, part 2, newsletter.
LEARNING THE SKILLS
Unless you are especially gifted in
this area, I have found that to be successful in supporting a team, it
is necessary to take formal courses that teach these skills. On the
other hand, just taking such courses, though necessary, is not
sufficient to learn to be a good project leader.
I have found that the most effective
courses in the support area allow for practise and interaction among
the participants instead of just providing lectures on the subject.
Even more powerful training courses combine lectures with "on the job
training". Classroom and real life experience can work together very
effectively to create a superior educational environment via continuous
learning and improvement.
LEADERSHIP SKILLS
A supported project team must be led
by the Project Manager (PM). The PM is the leader of the team that
accomplishes the task at hand. Leadership is described as having
various styles. I believe that the words of the ancient Tao Te Ching
describes some of these various styles in a very concise way. The Tao
defines leaders in this manner:
"When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, "Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!""
(See: http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#17)
This description of the Master
(leader) seems, to me, to illustrate the actions of leaders very
accurately. According to the Tao, the best leaders strive to take no
credit in the accomplishment of the task. Not taking credit can be very
hard for persons with technical backgrounds to learn. They typically
like to be "right" and highly respected by their peers. Anyone that
wishes to take the path to becoming a better leader must do
considerable "self work" to overcome the tendency to drift towards the
less effective styles instead of moving on to the more effective ones.
BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY
From my experience, some of
leadership styles are more effective than others at certain points in
the life cycle of a project. As in many things in life, balance and
flexibility are the keys. For a project leader, it may be appropriate
to use styles ranging from the "military bootcamp" lower styles to the
"higher" level styles. The higher level styles have been described as
those that are non-confrontational, consensus building, and democratic
ones. In practice, higher level styles often produce better results for
high tech teams.
On the other hand, I have found that
the "lower" styles can sometimes be more effective in reaching short
run goals on a project. The PM should use such styles with caution,
since they often run the risk being highly ineffective in the long run.
This is especially true for those styles that operate through
instilling fear by using anger.
THE MOST IMPORTANT CONCEPT
The most important concept for those
striving to move from OK to good to great leadership is that they first
recognize that NO specific style is appropriate for ALL situations and
for dealing with ALL of the team members. It took me some time to learn
the validity of these words in practice.
MOTIVATIONAL SKILLS
Great leaders are often considered to
be great motivators. Like support, motivation is also a very complex
subject. Additionally, it is controversial. When experts comment about
motivational theories, they have expressed a wide range of opinions.
Some have proposed that "there is no such thing as motivation". Others
consider it to be nothing but some form of manipulation (in the
negative sense) of other people. Still, others think there is some
magic formula that works to get individuals and teams to perform at
high levels.
In observing myself and others
attempting to motivate a team, I have noted that, on rare occasions,
some manipulation can be effective to get some specific task
accomplished on a project. At the more common opposite extreme, many
others, including myself, recognize that motivating a high tech project
team can have all of the success of an attempt to "herd" several cats
across a large field.
IMPROVING UNDERSTANDING
For those wishing to improve their
understanding of motivational theory, there is considerable literature
available on the subject. Any serious student of motivation would find
it valuable to become familiar with the various theories about it. Many
of these theories derive from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs,
Hertzberg's motivational theories, and McGregors's Theory X and Theory
Y. They often involve some sort of reward /punishment system. Each
"system" is used to cause team members to focus and take action on
project tasks. There are good discussions of these theories on such
websites as:
http://www.accel-team.com/human_relations/hrels_03_mcgregor.html or
http://choo.fis.utoronto.ca/fis/courses/lis1230/lis1230sharma/motive1.htm or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Herzberg
RESULTS ARE UNPREDICTABLE
There does seems to be some
considerable truth to each of the theories of motivation, but the
results are often much more unpredictable than the theorists would have
us believe. I think this is what leads individuals to conclude that
motivation doesn't really exist. Worse still, many PMs abandon any
attempt to learn motivational principles and instead try to "fly by the
seat of their pants". This will likely produce a team that is highly
ineffective.
PRACTICAL MOTIVATION
Practical motivational techniques
involve taking actions that rely upon the various theories at different
times and in different situations until some set of them produces good
results in that specific situation. This is sort of a "mix and match"
approach that grows out of experience.
As a practical matter though, one of
the best long range and continuously effective methods of motivating a
person, or a team, is the use of praise. It is one of major areas of
Hertzberg's "Theory of Motivators". These motivators influence
satisfaction based on the fulfillment of higher level needs (Maslow's
Theory). Others have written extensively on this subject and believe
that it is very effective. In practice, it produces results.
In short, a project manager that
feeds back only project difficulties and concerns, and not the positive
outcomes of challenges overcome, can slow down a project significantly
due to lower morale.
EFFECTIVE PRAISE
To be effective, giving praise must
go beyond a PM saying "you did a great job". Instead it is far more
effective to speak about specific instances that describe what was done
well and how important that it was to the outcome. In addition, praise
can be done in public or private, and knowing which to do when is an
art in itself.
The best source I have found for
learning the subject of praise is the book "The One Minute Manager" by
Kenneth H. Blanchard, PHD and Spencer Johnson, MD (See www.amazon.com).
It is a simple and straightforward text on basic motivational
management techniques. I have found their approaches to be very
effective in many instances.
GOOD FINDING
Blanchard and Johnson recommend
regular sessions of praise via "good finding" to motivate a person or a
team. In contrast, they have found that many managers do just the
opposite.
To quote Blanchard:
".. most people are still managed by
being basically left alone until they make a mistake that's noticeable
and then their boss criticizes them. I call that a "leavealone zap"
management style or "Sea gull management." Sea gull managers fly in,
make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, and then fly out."
(See http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/old/12268852.htm )
"Good Finding" is finding something
good about each team member each time you interact with them. It takes
a significant change of normal management habits to learn how to
acknowledge the contribution of each team member on a regular basis.
The sum total of this approach can be carried over to the whole team. I
have personally never met a team member that said they received too
much praise. I have met many team members that complain of not
receiving "credit" for the hard work they accomplish. I recommend that
all Project Managers learn this art.
OTHER FORMS OF MOTIVATION
Besides praise, other reward systems
have evolved over time. Many of these involve monetary rewards. There
is a belief among many experts that such rewards are very effective,
but beware of the possibility of creating a system that rewards
dysfunctional behavior, when attempting to motivate a team in this way.
I have experienced numerous types of "unintended negative consequences"
when money was used as a motivator on a project.
One of the worst of these was when
there was a large financial incentive to complete a task on a specific
date, and that date passed without achieving the goal. After this time
the team was severely demotivated.
QUESTIONS REGARDING SUPPORTING TEAMS
The preceding description of
supporting teams is a very short presentation of how to improve team
support on a real project in the areas of Leadership and Motivation. If
you have any questions, or need clarification of the material
presented, please give us a call at 408-739-5046, and we will be happy
to speak with you.
THE
NEXT NEWSLETTER
In
the next issue, I will discuss some of the benefits and tradeoffs in
using Web based tools for project management.
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