Women at Work - The Essentials: Managing Projects

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

What’s a project charter? Why does this one person keep trying to derail our progress? Are our planning meetings effective? How do I actually get people to follow through? Figuring out how to successfully manage a project can make any professional’s head spin. One woman, new to this type of work, shares the challenges she’s already facing, including uncertainty, interpersonal conflict, and lack of responsiveness from the team. And an experienced project manager shares tips for motivating and influencing others, communicating effectively, and solving problems.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at Work. Up until recently, Sarah was a clinical social worker. She'd gotten her master's degree in the subject and then did it for over a decade. After a while, really during the pandemic, I realized I wanted to make a career pivot. So I thought about what positions would I be qualified for? What would I enjoy? I consider myself a pretty organized individual, and I like completing tasks and working with others to achieve a goal. And I decided that project management would be something that I had the skills for and would enjoy.

She took a job at a university where the assignment was to lead a team in setting and achieving specific goals. And the team that I work with hired me, so they knew my background. They knew that I, you know, didn't have lots and lots of experience as a project manager, but, you know, they hired me anyway. A year in, Sarah still feels out of her depth. I feel like I just don't know what I'm doing very often because of that lack of training. The project management waters are surprisingly deep. So it's small wonder that even this highly educated, highly skilled woman is feeling underprepared and insecure. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. So many of us manage projects even if project manager isn't part of our job title.

That's because so much of the work we do has become project-based. People are putting in more and more time on teams tasked with developing a new product or service that has impact. Success, the experts say, typically comes from strategically navigating four phases. The first is planning, when you determine the real problem to solve, identify stakeholders, and define the project's objectives. Next comes build-up, when you assemble your team, plan assignments, and create a schedule. Third is implementation when you monitor the process, report progress, and manage problems. And finally, close out when you evaluate the project's performance and debrief with the team. In learning about the project economy,

one stat has stayed with me. Around two-thirds of the world's projects fail. And while Sarah's project is by no means failing, she still wants to pick up some tips from someone in the know, which is where Tamara McLemore comes in. For about 20 years at different companies, she's been setting priorities, motivating teams, and delivering results. I've been in every industry you can think of, healthcare, airlines, telecom, even in a law firm. She also teaches project management, and she's here to speak with me and Sarah about some of the most common challenges you may face when you manage your own projects and how to handle them.

Sarah, I'd love to start with you. What has been the hardest part of the job? The hardest part of the job for me has been getting used to this whole new career. I'll give you a specific example. Recently, during a lull in the work that I'm doing with my current project, I was asked to help out with another project that needed a project manager. And so I was working with a new group of people that didn't know me. And the supervisor asked me to create a project charter for this project that I was going to help with. And I remember thinking like, oh my gosh, this guy

has no idea that I don't know what I'm doing. And he's asking me to fill out this form, the project charter, that I have never done before. Thankfully, he had an example of a project charter for this actually specific project. And so I ended up using quite a bit of that example charter. But if I hadn't had that example, I would have just floundered. Like, I don't know what bullets you put where and how do you number things and how do you write a charter? I had no idea. Long story short, I find myself not knowing kind of the basics that I feel like perhaps other project managers might know. So let's get into that and let's start with the project charter. We've published a lot about this. And in the HBR Guide to Project Management, we say that every project charter should spell out the nature and scope of the work and management's expectations for results. And the project's sponsor, the project's benefits to the organization, the project's objectives, expected time frame, budget and resources available, project manager's authority, signed off on by the sponsor, you know, a lot of stuff. So, Tamara, is it worth it? Is this really important? You know, is this

reasonable? Absolutely. So a project charter includes everything that you just included. But one thing to remember about a charter, it is short and dirty and to the point. It is not a dissertation. When I ask most people, when they come to me like, oh my God, I got to write this charter, in their mind, they're thinking it's a dissertation, that it needs to be 20 pages, when in fact, it's a one pager, maybe two pages, maybe. But it is just the benefits. It is the high level. It is bullet points.

It is straight to the point. Can it be changed? Is it carved in stone? It is carved in stone because it is objective. We intend in one year, we intend to execute X, Y, Z, and this is the dollar amount. But how you intend to execute and everything in between is for interpretation. That's very, very helpful because I find all of this sort of set up a little bit daunting. And you need so much clarity, even though there are many unknowns.

I'm wondering, Sarah, if you've ever had any problems getting the kind of clarity that Tamara is talking about, you know, from whoever is assigning the projects, the nature and the scope and the expected results. Has that ever been a problem? Absolutely. The one primary project that I'm working on right now is a university-wide initiative. And we are really building the plane as we're flying it. I feel that way every single day. If we have a project charter for this project, it was created before I joined the team, but I'm thinking we don't even have one. It's a very unstructured initiative that we're working on right now as we are designing it and carrying it out in real time. So that is a huge challenge. So Tamara, let me ask you a question from our producer, Amanda Kersey. She's like a lot of us, unofficial, kind of informal project manager. And she told me

that she often underestimates the time it'll take to produce a season, a season of our podcast, Women at Work. And then she has to hustle to meet the deadlines. And in doing the research for this episode, she came across what's called a work breakdown structure. You're nodding your head because you know what we're talking about here. And that's a tool that project managers use to get a realistic estimate of how long a complex activity will take. And it makes you break down the major tasks into subtasks

and then estimate each subtask's length of time and cost. She's thinking about using this tool, but first she wants to know, is this your recommended go-to? Should she be doing this to plan our season? Yes, I would say absolutely, because you have been doing this for a while now. And so you know everything that it takes to build a successful podcast. You have the engineers, you have your guests, you have all the tasks. And now you can put some timelines around that. You can put some costs, you can put risk. So you have all the lessons learned is what we call it. So you never want to start from scratch. That's one thing in project management.

We never want to start from scratch. And so since you have that historical information, you're able to create that work breakdown structure. So Sarah, do you use this work breakdown structure? Maybe informally. It sounds a little familiar. My way of managing my work is sort of Google Docs, making myself lists, using a project management tool called Asana, which I'm relatively new to. I've used other online tools. I just sort of cobble together something that works for me. But I'm always open to learning new ways of managing my time and my tasks. Okay. And before we get on to, you know, getting a project going, anything you want to ask

Tamara about the planning phase, Sarah? Yeah. So Tamara, I'm thinking about the example of my project that I refer to as building the plane as we're flying it. How could we plan better in those kinds of situations? What my team has been doing is having a retreat every few months to talk about what we've done, what work is in the next phase, how we want to achieve our goals, what our goals are, etc. And that's sort of kind of been working for us. But do you have any suggestions about planning the projects that are not clearly set in stone that are evolving as they are being carried out? So the first thing I want to commend you on is that you guys are doing an off-site retreat,

because that's exactly what you should be doing, because you cannot plan by having a 30-minute hour-long meeting. That does not work in project management. And so when we do these major initiatives, we do go off site for maybe a day or two with our whiteboard. So I commend you on that. So back to your question on how could you do that for projects that you're not that clear on? You do this more often. And no, you can't have a retreat every month. But in Agile, we actually do it every two weeks. We have a planning session on what are our next requirements that we want to implement? What is up next?

That bad is what we call it. And we get everybody involved. So that's my question to you, Sarah. When you're having these sessions, do you include everybody? Not just the tech team, not just the business, but the end user, training, making certain that in your planning sessions, you include everybody. You have to invite from the top down and sideways because everybody has input and it is so pertinent

to your project and your requirements that you have everybody's voice in those sessions. That's a great point. We're sort of growing. Our team is changing. Our work is changing a bit. So I think future retreats will include more people, which I think is always good. Very good. So I want to touch on what you're just talking about, because it sounds like what you're doing, Sarah, is aligning your team. And a lot of projects are cross-functional, cross-enterprise. You're pulling in people with different skills, with different work experience, from different parts of the company, used to different cultures within the company.

Tamara, how beyond these sort of setup meetings do you align everyone on goals and priorities and schedules and so forth. Exactly what you said, Amy, bringing everybody to the table with a different outlook really helps enhance what are we trying to achieve in this project. So for instance, if you have sales, they're focused on one thing. Marketing is focused on something else. But guess what? The end goal is to increase revenue. We still all have the end goal. We just have a different lens on how we get there. So you have to have some type of

camaraderie of the group before we get started. Everybody likes to just get down to the requirements. But we have to talk about what do we all have in common. We have to talk about our kids are going to school, to college, our fur babies. Once you have broken down those barriers that we're all here, we're all the same, no matter how long we've been in the organization, everybody just becomes one. No matter what part of the organization you're in, we're all here for a go. And last but not least, do not underestimate good food at a retreat and at a working session, along with a lot of chocolate and a lot of snacks. You're reminding me of a colleague of mine who begins all of her very big meetings

with a photo, a mystery photo that someone in the meeting has sent her, some place they visited. And we take five minutes at the beginning just to guess where that photo was taken. And it's really fun. I love trying to guess. And I love watching the guesses come in in the chat. So I think that she's reading from the same guidebook. But what I'm also hearing is you cannot overstate the importance of the softer side of these meetings, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm telling you, it always makes for a successful project. It just really does, because now I'm not the person that's going in giving that person more work. We're actually having a good time achieving the successful goals of that organization. with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.

With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey, listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business,

hosted by Columbia Business School professor Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Madhupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So managing a project requires you to make a million decisions

and then to communicate constantly about those decisions. It's exhausting. Tamara, how do you manage your energy? That's a funny one. So I make sure I have my liquids, my green juice, and my chocolate. And when I get up in the morning, and I'll take a step back, even before I go to bed the night before, I make sure that I have my priorities for the next day and what I'm going to start my day with? That way I can get a good night's rest. There is nothing worse than waking up exhausted and tired because you've been thinking all day and all night, tossing and turning.

I agree. I think that's really important. And I really appreciated it when I went away for the holiday break, before I left, I made myself a post-it of what I would do today, my first day back from work after a break, in the order that I was going to do tasks. And I've just been crossing things off my post-it this morning. Very good. And as far as communicating, okay, I have a question for you ladies. What percentage of project management do you think communication is? Sarah, cold call. I don't know, 80 to 90 percent.

Hi. Ding, ding, ding. 90 percent. It is extremely high. And so that's a great question, Amy. How do I communicate? I communicate based on how that person likes to be communicated. What does that mean? So when I get a new project, I ask the director, how do you like to be communicated? You know what they mostly will tell me? Tamara, do not send me this long email. I need bullets. And I mean three bullets.

I've had a director tell me they want it color coordinated. Red if the project is off, you know, Hilter. Yellow, if you need more money or time. Green, if your project is on schedule, on budget. And so for everybody that I work with, the stakeholders, I ask them. Some people, it's the email. Some people love IMs. I'm like, oh my God, can we get on email? They refuse to. And if that's how they want to be communicated, I give the people what they want. But more importantly, in the emails and in my communication, I'm very clear and concise on what I need and why I need it.

And I'll give an example. I need this report by the close of business tomorrow. And I put the time zone because we're dealing with people all over, not the country, the world. So you want to be very clear and then go a step further and let them know exactly why you need it. I need this report because this report goes into a director's report and it has to be synthesized and blah, blah, blah. And so when you're that clear and you've built that report, they get it to you ASAP with no back and forth and no problems. So the clearer you can be and the more concise and the least amount of words you can use in an email, the better. So let me ask you another nuts and bolts question, Tamara.

You've pulled together a team. They're probably cross-functional. They may be cross-enterprise. Some of them may not be used to working with the structures and the tools of project management. They may not know what a Gantt chart is or Amanda's favorite tool, the work breakdown structure. So you can't really force all this stuff down their throats. How do you get people to use these tools in a way that allows them to embrace them rather than be annoyed by them? Oh, that's a good question. And so what I do is have these one-on-ones with people and say, for instance, Sarah, what tool in project management do you feel would be very beneficial? You're not that good at, but you want to learn more about.

And you're like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. Giving you some time to think about that and then sending you to a class, giving you time to broaden your horizon, to upskill yourself. No pressure, because it's something that you have identified that you want to get better at. And so that's how I take on each individual person on my team, the way that they can upskill themselves, but at the same time make the project more successful. I can relate to that, Tamara. When I started this project management job, my supervisor introduced me to one online tool. She showed me all the bells and whistles. She showed me what

she liked about it, how she uses it at work, how she uses it in her personal life. And that got me really excited about it. Never once did she say, you have to use this. And here's when you have to use it and why and how. Just like, here's an option. Here's why I like it. And I think that's a really good approach to use with people. So Sarah, you've gotten your project kind of up and moving. Where do you find yourself struggling or needing a little guidance? I find that I struggle around politics and dealing with individuals who might not work in the manner that I work, on the timeframe that I work. For example, I'm working with someone more and more these days where when I make suggestions, she's just not open to my suggestions, my ideas, my wishes and wants. And I just feel steamrolled by her. Like we're just

going to do whatever she wants to do. Tamara, I'm looking at you. How do we help Sarah? This has happened to me. Every project, every organization I go to, this happens. And what I find is it is not even about me. Sometimes it's about that position. They may have wanted my position and I was appointed to this position and they feel like it's not fair. And what qualifications did I have that they didn't have? So once I'm able to assess what is really going on here, then the working relationship, we become best friends, best working buds. But we have to break those those barriers.

And so sometimes a good old fashioned coffee chat will do the job. Another thing, I have a lot of people as a project manager and a manager, people come to me and complain about people all the time. And when I tell them, did you go have a one-on-one with them? Did you take them offline? Did you take them for lunch? Did you take them for coffee before you brought this to me? And they always look at me with the headlights. No. Go talk to that person first and then it's always solved. Nine times out of 10, it is resolved. That's great advice. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.

With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash womenatwork. That's netsuite.com slash womenatwork. So Tamara, I have a question for you. How to reach people when an individual is not responding to email, Slack, maybe even phone? I can't remember the last time I called someone at somebody's not responsive via email or Slack or our regular communication channels, I do pick up the phone. I don't send more than two emails because it's going to get lost. And now you're putting more on their plate for them to clean their inbox. I am literally picking up the phone. I'm not giving them a heads up on IM. I'm calling you. Pick up the phone, old school communication, and say, Tamara, what is going on? Did the dog eat my email?

Like, I'm making a joke about it. But I'm really asking, what is going on? And once again, is it about work? Is it about something that is going on in their personal life? Are they overwhelmed? And so once you're able to pick up the phone, a lot of times they say, oh my God, your email was next in line, but I'm glad you called me because I can go ahead and get clarification because I wasn't really sure on how to respond.

I'm telling you, I get more done by picking up the phone to the point where the feedback that I get from executives, Tamara, we don't know how you got this done. That person never responds. But I always pick up the phone or back in the day when we were in the office, I would do a good old fashioned drive by meaning go to their desk. Maybe with some Krispy Kreme, maybe with a Starbucks coffee, whatever gets the job done. I love that. It sounds as if one of your tactics, Tamara, is to kind of confound their expectations. Because people know when they are giving you the silent treatment, you're probably starting to get a little bit pissed off, right? And you come back with kindness.

I never thought of it that way, but absolutely. And like I said, I execute because of these soft skills that people take for granted. People think project management is all about the Gantt charts, the risk, procurement, quality management, integration. It is about these soft slash power skills and getting grown people that have a whole life, families, kids, grandkids, fur babies, parents, aging parents that have moved in to actually show up to work and execute their project. And how are we going to do that? It's these soft skills. Absolutely. So, Amy, I want to know how you get people to respond.

You send one email, two emails. How do you get them to budge and respond to your emails? I threaten them. No, I don't threaten them. But, you know, I was listening to your answer and there's such a powerful insight in there about coming back with kindness. What I generally do, I have to admit it doesn't happen that much, maybe with authors who aren't responding.

If it's one of those deadline issues, I spell out the consequences. I'll say, if you don't get back to me by Thursday, we're going to have to bump this article from the next issue of the magazine, and I can't guarantee when I will be able to get it into another issue. And that's real. Never make things up. With people who are hesitating to fulfill their commitments on a project team, I want to know why. Something's going on. And I don't want to pry, but I sort of open the conversation. You know, you had promised that you would get us an answer today. I still haven't heard from you. Can you give me an ETA? Or is

there something going on that's preventing you anything I can help with. It's giving people a way to meet their commitments, which is what it all amounts to from my perspective, right? So Tamara, you've done all of this work to set up a project. You've kicked it off. It's moving along. It has taken a tremendous amount of planning and management on your part. And suddenly something happens beyond your control. A budget gets cut. A pandemic hits. Something beyond your control. How do you handle that? How do you respond to changes that you have no control over that happened despite your best efforts? Besides going to my car and having a good old fashioned cry. So after that's over, after I get that good, ugly cry out, I just realized, like you said, this is beyond my control. The budget got cut. And so what we do in this

situation is you have to be transparent to your team. People can sense that something is going on. And the last thing you want to do is to have your team start making up things in their mind. Is the project going to get cut? Are they going to get laid off? What is going to happen? And so what you have to immediately do is not to just like project managers, we love to have a plan and go ahead and execute.

You don't have a plan right now. All you have is a little bit of information that you need to share with your team. So that is the first thing. You share with your team, this is where we're at right now. I will get back to you in the next couple of days on what the next steps are. I don't know right now.

Is this a scary situation? Absolutely, but you know I'm gonna do all that I can and I'm going to be transparent as much as I can along the way. I'm always an open book, always open and honest communication. Sarah, have you ever encountered any bumps that sort of set a project off track? Absolutely. About a month into my current job, the individual that was spearheading the project that I work on, he was fired.

And so we really had to regroup and figure out, is this project going to continue? In what manner? What people? Is the scope going to change, et cetera? And these things happen. Big twists and turns or little, and we just have to roll with it, I suppose. And you roll with it by being transparent.

But the other thing that Tamara said that I think is so important is just, you know, keeping your wits about you. Go have that ugly cry in the car, but come back and be a calm and reassuring presence, right? Before we close out this part of the conversation, Tamara, I want to know whether you have any other tips just for keeping a project on track toward completion. One thing that I make sure that I do within my projects is we try to never implement at the end of the year. That may sound like, well, why not, Tamara? Because guess what? That's Thanksgiving and Christmas and the new year.

People are taking off and they may seem like a no brainer. But how many projects are people trying to complete at the end of the year when it's unrealistic because you have so many people that are out of the office and not just within your organization, externally as well, meaning the business, end users, everybody's out of the office, not just the whole country, the whole world. It's a great point. So you've gotten your project to the goal. You've produced the thing. It's a report.

It's a building, whatever. But that's not the end, is it, Tamara? Absolutely not. You always have to celebrate. People will always say, Tamara, what's next? What are we going to do next? We're going to celebrate. We're going to talk about our lessons learned.

But what we're finding now, which is new to project management, if you wait till the project is over, let's say January, we started this project January, 2023, and we don't end it to December. We don't even know what we wore yesterday and what we ate yesterday. How are we going to remember what we did for the whole year? So now for project management, every time we release or implement or just every 30 days, we're going through those lessons learned. So at the end of that project, we compile all the lessons learned. We bring all the people back to discover what could we have done different? What could we have done better? But more importantly, what is working and what should we do more of? That's what a lot of times people miss.

What is working well and what not should we just implement on this project, but throughout the organization to make things run better, more effectively and more efficiently. So Sarah, have you thought about how you're going to close out the project you're working on now? It's a great question. I don't know if it will ever close. So the project that I'm working on is an initiative for our university. And I think it is going to become its own freestanding office at the university that

will be staffed. And it will just continue to evolve over time. It will never end, I don't think. So with Sarah's project that doesn't actually end, what advice do you have, Tamara? To actually go ahead and close out a phase, close out a certain segment of the project. That way you can do the raw, raw, you can do the lessons learned, the whole ceremony of closing a project out. And then you start the next phase, meaning do you turn it over to operations? Do you do an upgrade? So I would encourage you to go ahead and close it out at some point because the definition of project, it has a beginning and an end. Whether that end is two, three, four, five years, it does have an end. And even in my line of work, people will say, well, Tamara, this is ongoing because this is

in production. At that point, it's operations. It also gives you an opportunity to recalibrate, right? Maybe you need a new charter, for example. Ooh, that's a good one. For this next phase. Ooh. Give me my degree. That's a good one. Sarah, we've now discussed beginnings and middles and ends.

I'm wondering, given where you are with your project and a year into project management, what are you taking away from this conversation? I am taking away more confidence because really I thought to myself, to be the best project manager means to be the most efficient, get all the things done in the shortest amount of time, quick, quick, quick, efficient, efficient, efficient. And of course, that is a component to what we do. But I appreciate so much just as a human being, but also as a mental health professional, that working effectively with people is as essential as crossing things off of our list. And I didn't know that we would be talking so much about that, but I'm just so heartened

by the fact that I can also utilize my interpersonal skills, that all of those skills and that experience that I have is as applicable to my work as a project manager as my organizational and efficiency skills as well. And I just really, really appreciate that so much. Women at Work's editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoke, Tina Tobey-Mack, Rob Eckhart, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Rob and Maure composed this theme music. This episode is part of our series, The Essentials. In it, we bring together management experts and women working in essential industries in order to cover the fundamentals and nuances of key career skills. Scroll through the show's feed to find other Essentials episodes. You'll see ones on giving feedback, managing stress, retaining talent, and being productive. Plus, more are on the way. Thank you. And if you want to go deeper on the topic of managing projects and create a plan to practice what you've learned, check out Harvard Manage Mentor. It's an online, self-directed learning and skill building resource.

Visit hbr.org slash Harvard Manage Mentor to see all the different skills the program can help you build, broaden, and refresh. I'm Amy Bernstein. Thanks for listening. Email us anytime at womenatworkathbr.org.