Building Leadership Skills: Developing and Leading Projects

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Building Leadership SkillsDeveloping and
Leading Projects

• Instructor
• Pat Wagner
• pat_at_pattern.com
• An Infopeople Workshop
• December 2006

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This Workshop Is Brought to You By the Infopeople
Project

• Infopeople is a federally-funded grant
  project supported by the California State
  Library. It provides a wide variety of training
  to California libraries. Infopeople workshops are
  offered around the state and are open
  registration on a first-come, first-served basis.
  
• For a complete list of workshops, and for
  other information about the project, go to the
  Infopeople website at infopeople.org.

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Introductions

• Name
• Library
• Position
• Your purpose in coming to this class on
  leadership and project management

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Workshop Overview

• Introduction to project leadership
• The organization map
• The project planning model
• Benchmarks for success
• Why projects fail

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Leading Projects
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Workshop Success

• Evolve your skills
• Apply the reasonable test
• Use issues that are real for you today
• Find a buddy at work

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Questions for the Group

• What constitutes a project?
• What constitutes project success?

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What is a Project?

• Personal time management
• Short term projects
• Ongoing projects
• Special projects

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What is Project Success?

• The better future
• for the individual library user (relevance)
• for the community or institution
• for the library employee
• for the profession

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Project Benchmarks

• Achieve strategic goals
• Everyone is treated well
• Parameters are observed
• time
• resources
• quality

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Exercise 1

• What Contributes to Project
• Leadership Success?

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The Organizational Map

• Three points of view roles
• Based on time and scope
• Each role is equally important
• We play all three roles

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Organizational Roles

• Task React
• immediate response
• Management Pause
• coordinate, communicate
• Leadership Anticipate
• risk, influence, and the future

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Blind Spots

• Task Short time horizon
• autonomy bug, project creep
• Management Bureaucratic freeze
• micromanagement, project choke
• Leadership Lone eagle
• loose cannon, elitism

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Typical Tasks

• Professional and technical
• Reference, cataloging
• Tech services, circulation
• Library user interaction
• Hands on, immediate

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Typical Management

• Earn trust and respect
• Resource allocation
• Coordination
• Oversight and supervision
• Bigger picture

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Typical Leadership

• Mission and vision
• The compelling future
• Two years out
• Politics
• Biggest picture

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How Do You Spend Time?

• Using the letters T, M and L,
• please rate the items from the list
• you wrote earlier.

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Question for the Group

• What distracts us from our leadership role
  when we are managing projects?

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Question for the Group

• Why is the leadership role difficult?

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Exercise 2

• Leadership Approaches

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What is Governance?

• Who makes decisions?
• What decisions does that person or group make?
• How do they make decisions?

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Project Governance

• Seek input from everyone.
• Document and communicate decisions.
• Execute the plan.
• Take responsibility and hold ourselves
  accountable.
• Give and take feedback.

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Exercise 3

• How Well Does Your Library Support
• Good Project Governance?

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Planning to Plan

• What are the job descriptions?
• What are the checkpoints?
• How much time do we need?
• How do we coordinate with others?
• How do we manage conflicts?

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Exercise 4

• How Do We Plan for Project Success?

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Benchmarks for Success

• Descriptive Benchmarks
• what we see, hear, do
• Measurable Benchmarks
• what we can count and measure
• Strategic Benchmarks
• how we impact goals, mission, vision

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Descriptive Benchmarks

• Sensory-specific detail
• Physical evidence
• What we can see
• What we can hear
• What we and others do

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Measurable Benchmarks

• Time deadlines, length of time
• Size measure, change (big, small)
• Location specific place
• Number count, change (more, less)

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Strategic Benchmarks

• The hardest to achieve
• Can take years to identify
• Tied to the strategic plan
• Significant change or impact
• Bottom line the library user

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Exercise 5

• How Do We Use Benchmarks to
• Create Criteria for Project Success?

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The Project Triangle

• Do you want it good?
• Do you want it cheap?
• Do you want it fast?

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Question for the Group

• What are examples of things you
• prefer good, cheap, or fast?

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Three Bottom Lines

• Avoid one-bottom-line thinking
• perfectionism
• false economy
• false productivity

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Project Priorities

• Everyone needs to know
• Agreed-upon for every project
• Priorities support consistent choices

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Project Ratios

• Everything cant be a 10
• Shorthand for discussing ratios
• Creates project expectations

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Project Expectations

• What are the goals, sorted by priority?
• What are the parameters?
• Quality, time, resources, legal
• Civility how we treat each other

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Exercise 6

• How Can We Use the Project Triangle
• to Communicate Expectations?

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Exercise 7

• What is Your Project Readiness Score?

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Exercise 8

• How Can You Prevent Project
• Failure?

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Your First Step

• What will you do to apply leadership
• skills to your next project?

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The Early Bird