Re-setting the agenda for project management in 2021

I am currently working with a very talented project manager and seeing her tackle all of her daily challenges reminds me what an amazingly broad skill set is deployed by excellent project managers.

• She is deploying her ability to plan and schedule dynamically in response to changing circumstances, whilst developing strong relationships across her team, suppliers, and stakeholders.
• She is proactively looking ahead to check that the scope of the work is sufficient and is looking for potential problems and finding solutions to maintain progress against time and budget.

Excellence in project manager is something to be admired, but as we enter a new working environment, shaped by the shocks of Covid it is right to reflect on what is required to provide excellence in this different future.

I think the most valuable addition to project management is a widening of the responsibilities of projects as on-time and on-budget creation of tangible deliverables AND their successful implementation and adoption by stakeholders. If something is created but not used, or fully deployed as it was intended, then the benefits expected from its creation cannot be realised.

Great project managers apply their amazing planning and coordinating skills to the implementation tasks as much as to the creation tasks. They are always asking themselves:

• How is this going to be used in practice?
• Have those that are going to be using it started to prepare for its arrival?
• Can we test their preparations with the use of the project deliverables to ensure nothing is missed?

I am not suggesting that project managers are going to have team members working for them who create the new ways of working. This work must be done by those who are impacted by the project. After all, they are the ones doing the work, they need to re-conceive how they work to best take advantage of the project deliverables. BUT Project Managers can support this effort by offering to coordinate the activities, draw together all these stakeholders into an effective team and ensure that the work gets done.

This additional responsibility for overseeing implementation work aligns to another change in perspective for project management. I think it is time to recognise our stakeholders as customers of our service. By creating a customer centric view, we reduce the chances that we try to “do the project” to our stakeholders. This “push” mechanism ignores the other pressures on these stakeholders. Primarily these pressures are two-fold:

1. Pressure to continue running the day-to-day operations which create the revenue for the organisation and satisfy customers
2. Pressure to take part in multiple other projects. There are so many changes taking place, and line managers and staff regarded as subject matter experts are called upon for their input for several initiatives, not just the one we are running.

This customer-centricity means that we need more collaborative planning, where we ask questions about all of the demands on people’s time and try to navigate to a solution which makes sense technically for creating the project deliverables and from an implementation perspective.

To move towards this approach to project management we need to help our project community to understand what is needed in creating the new ways of workstream, triggered by the project deliverables. For example:

Fig 1: Integrated implementation activities

Every session I run with project managers and their teams is treated with enthusiasm because there is a genuine willingness to get the most out of project spend. Everyone wants to know they have made a positive difference, and this can only be achieved if this supporting network of activities is in place.

I am looking towards the future with optimism because I think we have learnt a lot from the pandemic about how valuable a contribution our stakeholders make to project success. We can build on this by understanding more about their priorities and treating them as customers of our project management service.