Soft Skills For Project Managers and Teams

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Soft Skills For Project Managers and Teams

• Kathy Schwalbe, Ph.D., PMP
• Express Scripts PMUG Meeting
• February 16, 2005
• schwalbe_at_augsburg.edu
• www.kathyschwalbe.com

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Speaker Background

• Associate Professor at Augsburg College, Dept. of
  Business Administration, also teach project
  management at U of M in ME dept.
• Author of Information Technology Project
  Management, Fourth Edition out this March (Note
  Most figures in this presentation are from my
  text)
• 10 years full-time industry experience before
  entering academia in 1991

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Personal Background

• Middle child (3 out of 7)
• Did not speak until 3 years old
• Forced to write a lot in high school
• Rarely spoke in classes (until graduate school)
• Studied and worked in primarily hi-tech jobs, but
  soon learned that
• Communications and other soft skills are what
  help you advance and gain job/life fulfillment

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Presentation Overview

• Project management framework
• Job functions and characteristics of effective
  project managers
• Tool and techniques to help project managers and
  teams (require hard and soft skills)
• Developing soft skills

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Project Management Framework
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Project ManagementJob Functions
Mostly hard skills?

• Define scope of project
• Identify stakeholders, decision-makers, and
  escalation procedures
• Develop detailed task list (work breakdown
  structures)
• Estimate time requirements
• Develop initial project management flow chart
• Identify required resources and budget

• Evaluate project requirements
• Identify and evaluate risks
• Prepare contingency plan
• Identify interdependencies
• Identify and track critical milestones
• Participate in project phase review
• Secure needed resources
• Manage the change control process
• Report project status

"Building a Foundation for Tomorrow Skills
Standards for Information Technology," Northwest
Center for Emerging Technologies, Belleview, WA,
1999
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Characteristics of EffectiveProject Managers

• Leads by example
• Visionary
• Technically competent
• Decisive
• Good communicator
• Good motivator
• Stands up to upper management when necessary
• Supports team members
• Encourages new ideas

Mostly soft skills?
Zimmerer, Thomas W. and Mahmoud M. Yasin, "A
Leadership Profile of American Project
Managers, Project Management Journal, March 1998
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Project ManagementTools and Techniques

• Project management tools and techniques assist
  project managers and their teams in various
  aspects of project management
• Many tools and techniques emphasize hard
  skills, but they require soft skills to get
  people to use them effectively

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Whats the Most Popular Tool Used by Project
Managers?

• The Work Breakdown Structure

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WBS for an ITUpgrade Project
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You Need Good Soft Skills to Develop a Good WBS

• The WBS provides a very logical structure, but
  our minds dont work that way
• The challenge is getting people to provide good
  inputs to help develop the structure
• Suggestions for developing a good WBS?

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Try Using a Mind Map toHelp Create a WBS
Can use pictures and colors, too, in drawing mind
maps
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What Are Some Popular Time Management Tools?

• Gantt charts
• Network diagrams

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Gantt Chart for an Intranet Project
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Network Diagram
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You Need Good Soft Skills to Create and Control
Project Schedules

• Gantt charts and network diagrams are also very
  logical, useful tools, but
• How do you get good estimates, figure out the
  dependencies, and get people to focus on
  completing critical tasks on time?

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Pass the Gorilla?!

• A project team at Apple Computer worked in an
  area with cubicles, and whoever was in charge of
  a task currently on the critical path had a big,
  stuffed gorilla on top of his or her cubicle
• Everyone knew that person was under the most time
  pressure, so they tried not to distract him or
  her
• When a critical task was completed, the person in
  charge of the next critical task received the
  gorilla

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What Cost Control Tool Do Many Experts Say is
Crucial to Project Management?

• Earned Value Management

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Earned Value Chart
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What Do You Need to Implement Earned Value
Management?

• Top management commitment
• Team commitment to develop good estimates and
  enter real actuals
• Culture that permits mistakes
• Strong integration between project budgeting and
  corporate accounting
• Good metrics to create better estimates based on
  actuals from past projects

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Whats a Popular Tool for Clarifying Roles and
Responsibilities for Project Work?

• Responsibility assignment matrices
• RACI charts

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Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)
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Sample RACI Chart
R responsibility, only one R per task A
accountability C consultation I informed
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You Need Soft Skills to Help Clarify Roles and
Responsibilities

• Do you take the time to clearly define roles and
  responsibilities on project tasks?
• Do you need to convince people that its well
  worth the time and effort?

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Do You Know How Your People are Allocated?

• What tool can show you individual and group
  allocations?
• Resource histograms

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Whats Wrong With This Picture?
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Are People Afraid to Let You Know When Theyre
Under Allocated?

• Most people let you know when theyre too busy,
  but are they really too busy?
• Are they working on the right things?
• Is it safe to say you can handle more work or
  that some tasks youre supposed to do arent
  worth doing?

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Which Project Management Knowledge Area is Least
Mature?

• Project Risk Management
• What simple tool can you use to help identify and
  prioritize project risks thats very low tech and
  high touch?
• A probability/impact matrix (using sticky notes
  works fine), and then
• Discussing strategies for managing high and
  medium risks, both positive and negative, and
  documenting them in a risk register

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Sample Probability/Impact Matrix
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Sample Risk Register
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What Are Some Important Project Communications
Management Tools?

• Stakeholder analysis
• Stakeholder analysis for communications
• Status/progress reports

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Sample Stakeholder Analysis
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Sample Stakeholder Analysisfor Project
Communications
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What Do People Write/Say On Status/Project
Reports?

• Are people encouraged to bring up issues?
• Are too many reports done in writing instead of
  verbally?
• Do managers and team members provide helpful
  suggestions during review meetings?

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Individual Versus Organizational Issues

• Every individual can improve his/her soft skills
• Organizations must also strive to provide a
  culture conducive to good project management

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Organizational Culture

• Organizational culture is a set of shared
  assumptions, values, and behaviors that
  characterize the functioning of an organization
• Many experts believe the underlying causes of
  many companies problems are not the structure or
  staff, but the culture

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Ten Characteristics ofOrganizational Culture

• Member identity
• Group emphasis
• People focus
• Unit integration
• Control

• Risk tolerance
• Reward criteria
• Conflict tolerance
• Means-ends orientation
• Open-systems focus

Project work is most successful in an
organizational culture where these items are
strong/high and other items are balanced.
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Developing Soft Skills

• Many tools, techniques, and courses in project
  management emphasize hard skills, and it is
  important to learn them
• It is also crucial to develop soft skills to be
  effective, such as
• following the ABCs of communicating
• building rapport
• listening empathically
• team building, motivating, negotiating, etc.

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ABCs of Communicating

• Aim for a specific result or series of outcomes
  from your communications
• Be positive
• See, hear, and feel sensory data
• Dovetail desires
• Entertain long- and short-term objectives

Laborde, Genie, Influencing with Integrity,
Syntony Publishing, 1987
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Building Rapport

• When rapport is not present, it becomes top
  priority in communication
• A process called mirroring or pacing works well
  to gain rapport
• Many sales people use mirroring, then stroking,
  then go for the sale

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Listening Empathically

• Empathic listening means listening with the
  intent to understand
• Seek first to understand, then to be
  understood, as Covey puts it
• You can learn to put yourself in anothers shoes
  and focus on understanding them before trying to
  get them to understand you

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Team Building, Motivating, Negotiating, etc

• Many soft skills take time and practice to
  develop, but most people are capable of improving
  them
• Role playing is a good technique before testing
  new skills in a real-world setting
• Working with a mentor/expert also helps build
  these skills

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Ideas for Developing Soft Skills at ESI?
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Questions/Comments?
Note You can access lots of great, free PM info
from my Web site at www.kathyschwalbe.com.