Podcast episode 067: stop playing games!

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Do you ever get tired of playing games?

No. I’m not talking about Scrabble or poker or even Dungeons and Dragons Online in which incidentally, I am a current fourth level paladin. No, rather I’m speaking about the games that we get to play every day as project managers. What games you ask? Oh, you know the ones like “The Pricing Game,” “Guess the Truth,” and “Grapevine.”

Well, lucky for us, Rick Morris, PMP, provides some strategies on how to win at these games. Rick Morris is the best-selling author of the book Stop Playing Games: A Project Manager’s Guide to Successfully Navigating Organizational Politics. This book, from the author of Project Management That Works and The Everything Project Management Book, dives deep into topics of gaining buy-in from upper management, accurately estimating timing and cost, controlling project communications, managing within a corporate culture, taking care of your team, and more.

The Inspiration Behind the Book

Frustration was one of the factors that inspired Rick to write Stop Playing Games.

Frustration often occurs when project managers are ask to try to beat impossible deadlines with budgets and dates that they didn’t help set and without the authority to be successful.  Then, often we get to take the blame for when it all goes wrong!

Luckily, Rick has worked with a lot of executives, both as a consultant and as a project manager, and has been able to help many see that their team leaders actually share the same goals that they have.

In the end, we’re all people and we all want to be successful. By applying tips from Rick’s book, project managers can help their executives look so much better than they do today. In the long run, together we can stop playing these games and just have an honest relationship and become successful together. So, who’s ready for a hug?

The Current Status of Project Management

Rick contends that the current status of project management is that a lot of people want a “quick fix” to improve corporate efficiency and they think that Project Management might be able to provide that, but they don’t want to put in the needed work to make the process changes to truly get the benefit of doing it the right way.

One of the reasons we try to play “games” is because, just like when “Six Sigma” was new to organizations ten years ago, Project Management is new to a lot of organizations today. If you remember when Six Sigma became so prevalent, you had stories of Motorola and GE getting all these gains and successes from implementing Six Sigma. They had these results that suggested that if you brought a certified “Master Black Belt” in, your organization would suddenly become tremendously more efficient overnight.

Although organizations are starting to recognize that Project Management does bring dividends, they still don’t know exactly how to help project managers do their jobs succesfully. What’s happening is they think “Oh, we just established a Project Managemetn Office (PMO), now we’re finally going to have better project predictability.” Unfortunately, the problem is that organizations don’t want to put in the effort to really change any of their processes.

Perhaps they read some journal article that said, “Hey, if you hire a project manager, you can get results.”

So, they go and hire a PMP. But they don’t provide the time or budget to effectively plan and execute the project. Soon the top floor wants to know “Where are these results we were promised?”

As a result, in many cases project managers simply end up being big paper pushers and additional money gets spent to bring in consultants to figure out that the organization’s processes and expectations never got changed to allow projects to come in under budget, under schedule, and within scope.

When I grow up, I want to be a Project Manager

Most of us really didn’t plan to become a project manager. We didn’t necessarily get a degree in project management or start off as a child wishing to be a project manager. In most cases we just fell into the role or position as a result of being successful in different role or position. Rick refers to this as the “Halo Effect.” It’s like someone decides, “Barb, since you are a great RF engineer, I bet you’ll also be great at leading RF projects!”

There is this mentality that anybody can do Project Management.

Of course, anybody can drive a car if they want to spend time learning how to drive a car. But, the problem is that we often pick the people that don’t necessarily want to do project management to lead projects.

One of Rick’s favorite sayings is “Just because you can add and subtract, does that make you an accountant? Am I going ask you to close my books for the year?” The answer is, of course, “no.” Accounting is a licensed profession. You need to be certified. You got to know stuff about it. You got to have experience and of course it’s not just as simple as adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

Similarly, Rick points out that just because you have Microsoft Project on your desktop and might be able to run a status meeting doesn’t make you a project manager.

So the Halo Effect is thinking that if someone has some spare time and a nicely organized desk they are going to be successful in running multimillion dollar project.

Unfortunately when you see the statistics of project success and failure, Rick contends that you don’t ever see a quantification of “How many of those people are trained project managers who want to be project managers and how many of those projects were run by somebody who just had spare time?”

The Games That We Play

One of Rick’s favorite project management “games” starts with project budgeting. This game begins with the executive stopping you in the hallway and asking “Say, how much would this project cost? Don’t worry – I’m not gonna hold you to it.” Uh-huh, sure they’re not!

You’ll be held to it. Essentially if you say “hmm, I estimate it’s around a hundred-thousand dollars.” And a hundred-thousand dollars into the project, you come back and say “Actually, It’s gonna be closer to $125.” Chances are you’ll be told, “you don’t have a $125,000 for the project. You have $100,000.” So, how is that not holding you to it?

What Rick has learned to do with this game is to deflect that question and buy some time. A lot of his techniques are simple quips back that can help project stakeholders and sponsors “level set.” Rick recommends focusing the conversation by bringing good project management practices back into the mix.  Until you are given the time to truly do the estimation for the project, you can’t truly answer their question because you don’t adequately know the answer. You need to ask for enough time to provide a specific data-driven estimate.

Marco? Polo!

Another game, one that project managers often play, is one that Rick calls “Marco Polo.”

Because you didn’t have time to adequately plan your project, you find that you don’t really have a project schedule. Sound familiar?

So, you as the project manager hold status meetings where you basically query “Marco?” and you wait as hopefully everybody in the room tells you where they are on the project. So, as project managers, we try to navigate the ship from each of the team member responses reactive way.  As a result our project might end up in America or the West Indies when we really thought we were heading for India.

Magic 8-Ball

As illustrated in the previous example, project managers also play games. We push team members for estimates. When they finally reach the “uncle” point of our questioning, they might finally give up and say “I don’t know, maybe forty hours.”

So, what do we do? We write “40 hours” down, we baseline it, and we measure the team member against it. The moment it goes to 41 hours we’re telling the team member they’re late and they’re to blame for the project being late!

Guess what happens the next time when we ask our team member to “Just give an estimate?”

Most project managers will tell you that resources hesitate to give an estimate, or will greatly inflate the estimate. The reason is because in the past we’ve beat them silly over their missed estimate!

What we should do is help resources realize that estimates are actually for their benefit not ours. But, at the same time project managers must set the expectation that these are only estimates, nothing more. Unless you have a team member that happens to have the role of “Team Clairvoyant,” all they can do is provide an estimate. This is one of the reasons why 3-point estimation is so valuable to project managers. It better sets expectations.

By December 31st at 11:59pm

Another game is when teams are given “mandated dates.” In other words, the project team is told that the project or specific tasks must be completed by a particular date.

The key is to ask “What’s the significance of the date?”

Rick asks this every time he’s given a mandated date. In a couple of examples, the executive got mad. But, it’s not a question to goad them. It’s just Rick wants them to quantify the date’s importance so he can understand the significance of the date.

But what Rick often finds is that he uncovers a seed of doubt in the executive’s mind.

“Well there really is no significance. It’s just when I want it.”

This starts to open up a dialogue for Rick as he explains what it will really take to hit that date.

This Week I’m 99.9999% Complete!

One game that Rick presented in Stop Playing Games! is one I often see on my own projects. Rick chuckles as he calls this “the biggest joke out there.”

So this is how this game works. You’re in a status meeting which, as Rick refers to it, “is basically an invitation for an hour for everybody to lie to each other.” But as project manager, you show up to this meeting because it’s the only way you can get the team members to give status on their tasks. So, as project manager, you ask the greatest question in project management, which is “What percent complete are you?”

As the team member fidgets and squirms a bit, they reply “uhhhh,  Forty percent?”

But what really happened is a voice jumped up inside their head and said, “Oh man, I haven’t started but I can’t say that because all my friends are here! I think I could be 80% done by the meeting next week, so I’m just going to go ahead and cut that estimate in half and just say 40%.”

Rick exclaims that this is how projects get to be 96% complete in the first six months and a year later they’re only 97% complete. On projects, we tend to front load the percent complete on our tasks to help us look as if we are making significant progress.

So how do you stop that game? You can get better information as by asking the question just a slightly different way.

What you should ask a team member is “How many hours have you spent on this task and how many hours do you have remaining?”

And, if you use Microsoft Project, you should always be updating status in work hours completed and hours remaining rather than percent complete. Otherwise, you will not appropriately be able to add work while still monitoring the work being completed on a project.

Rick tells the story of a “kid” working for him to develop a data warehouse. As the project manager, Rick asked him how much time he’d spent on a particular task. The kid said 55 hours. Rick asked to see the kid’s work. The kid didn’t have anything to show him. Ultimately Rick had to let the kid go.

It’s difficult to determine exactly percent complete, but what Rick can argue is that this kid got 55 hours into a task and never wrote anything down. That’s a lot of hours without writing anything down.

Using Tools

One of the things that Rick discusses in Stop Playing Games that I found was refreshing was in regards to using scheduling tools like Microsoft Project. There’s a lot of people that feel that Microsoft Project is just a tool. I agree with that. However, a lot of pundits dismiss the tool all together. I usually find those that do have a hard time just turning on their computer in the morning.

Rick in fact states that it’s important to be very competent in Microsoft Project.

Rick gives an example.

Unless you use a true project scheduling tool, you would not be able to clearly see the consequences to the project completion date if three team resources were suddenly put on another project. The fact is that Microsoft Excel may be able to provide a snapshot of current project task dates, but it can’t quickly give an accurate representation of the project’s triple constraint.

Unfortunately, what happens to many project managers that are not competent in using a scheduling tool, is that they get frustrated with the tool and they basically just turn it into a big spreadsheet that they don’t know how to manage and don’t know how to read. When the data doesn’t do what they want it to do, they get more frustrated and try to ignore the tool instead of taking the time to embrace and learn it.

So, Rick recommends going out and buying Microsoft Project for Dummies or taking a full day course. Make an investment in learning the tool.

The point is that good dedicated scheduling software is as an important tool to a project manager as a steering wheel is to a racecar driver.

Data Rules All!

When somebody comes up and says “Say, here’s this new project. When do you think you can be done?”

Rick might respond, “Well, we’ve got project A, B and C going on so it would be after one of those.”

They ponder that for a while.  Then, with a furrowed brow, they respond, “Well, what would it take to do all of them at once?”

That’s when having the right data and information at your fingertips is key to be able to factually explain the risks or tradeoffs of their request.

Rick does this by always making sure that he has a “one-pager” with him. A “one-pager” is a one page summary of important project historical data or information in case he is ever trapped in a hallway by someone with these types of tradeoff questions.

So what information should you have on your “one-pager?” It should contain information on your current project staff assignments, information on the projects that are taking up the most resources right now, and lessons learned from things that have failed in the past. That way you may be able to buy a day to get more details for the executive. It’s basically using risk information in the way that project managers should be using it.

Most executives and project stakeholders will be reasonable if you ask for a day to put together some additional information for them based on the initial data you provided from your “one-pager” sheet.

About Rick A. Morris

Rick A. Morris, PMP, is an ITIL practitioner, consultant, author, mentor and creator of a nonprofit foundation to promote project management in charities and other nonprofits. Rick is an accomplished project manager and public speaker. His appetitive for knowledge and passion for the profession make him a sought after speaker at PMI chapters, various civic organizations and a frequent guest lecturer at local universities.

Rick has worked for organizations such as GE, Xerox, CA and has consulted to numerous clients in a wide variety of industries including financial services, entertainment, construction, nonprofit, hospitality, pharmaceutical, retail and manufacturing. Currently, Rick is the president for the R² Consulting and has released three books to his credit. His blend of real world experience and down-to-earth delivery style makes his passion for the profession contagious.

You can find Stop Playing Games! and Rick Morris’ other books at rmcprojectmanagement.com or at the projectmanagementbookstore.com. They actually sell all three books at a very nice discount.

If you’re interested in autographed copies, you can come to Rick’s website which is rsquaredconsulting.com. There you’ll find links to Rick’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. The website also has some interesting YouTube videos and blog posts.

Rick is also available for giving key note speeches, consulting and helping build PMOs, and working with your executives. So, if you would like to get in touch with Rick, simply contact him through his website or contact Rick’s VP of Sales and Marketing at ghuffman@rsquaredconsulting.com.