Even if PSI’s headquarters weren’t in Atlanta, we’d still be fans of the Hawks.

They gave us an exciting season – and gave the Cavs a close call in Game Three despite injuries.  They also brought to life the importance of teamwork. (Earlier this year, the NBA named the Hawks’ entire starting five “Player of the Month.”) In the Eastern Conference finals with the Cavaliers, the contrast could not be starker:  a team playing as a unit, vs. a team with a Superstar – the Superstar – LeBron James.

They were swept by the Cavs, but they succeeded in other respects.  They demonstrated that real teamwork, with no one player bigger than the rest, sharing the ball, communicating, and helping teammates is a powerful strategy.  Injuries and questionable behavior from opponents took a toll, but this is a young team committed to a long-term strategy.

That’s a lesson that project managers trying a new approach might take to heart – institutional success is a long game that requires a long-term commitment.   In project management, that’s a compelling and relevant lesson. A superstar is a phenomenon, but everyone in project management works on a team.

We can’t wait till October.

There are two big creeps in project management that travel in pairs and always cause trouble: the expansion of the project called Scope Creep, and its traveling companion Schedule Creep, the extension of the project deadline.

Both creeps show up in projects with:

• Incomplete project scope development in the charter.
• Vague requirements from clients or management.
• Unauthorized scope and/or schedule changes and additions after the project’s start.
• Poor communication among the teams.
• Poor planning by team members.
• A lack of project control.

Handling both types of creeps calls for vigilance by the project manager. Diligent monitoring can nip some problems early, and requiring that approved scope changes are accompanied by revised estimates in time and budget can be helpful.

Entrenched issues – like an “impossible” new deadline or no budget for additional staff – need a comprehensive solution. PSI prevents both creeps from trashing projects with a ‘compression” technique; and ‘forward pass scheduling.”   As important, PSI helps maintain the team’s commitment to the project – even through additions or changes.

These techniques, taught in our two day training and described with case histories in The Project Success Method book, manages scope, scheduling and more, so you can enjoy the creeps where they belong – while watching a scary movie.

There’s an interesting message hidden in the offerings at the upcoming Project Management Institute’s World Congress.  Classes in Technical Skills comprised only 18 of the 65 classes listed by “content aim;” the largest individual class category was not about Agile, or Change Management – it was “Leadership Skills for Project Managers, Program Managers and Portfolio Managers.”

It affirms our conviction, backed by a survey quoted by PMI, that people skills are a major factor in a project manager’ career.

Trends in leadership theories abound; Googling “Business Management Leadership Theories” yields nearly two million hits.  It’s easy to get tangled up in Theory Overload –

Management By Walking Around, Emotional Intelligence, and others flourish.  Whatever the theory, though, our years of experience confirm that the best project managers:

-Recognize that the most important element in a project is time

-Earn and maintain the trust of the project teams

-Inspire the team members commitment to the project with mutual support and individual accountability.

Those three points work together and will work with just about any theory, yielding successful projects and successful careers.

Looking at lists of ‘epic product fails” it’s easy to wonder how experts in well-established companies could miss such obvious problems – snacks that cause gastrointestinal distress, for instance, or a complete misstep in brand perception (Yogurt shampoo?)

Now, though, product success could also hinge on identifying and satisfying new ‘must haves” in product attributes. Industries today wrestle with benchmarks unheard of twenty or even ten years ago. The ground rules for product – and project – success are changing to include new “must haves” like:

–sustainability in products and processes.  The Global Development Research Center even created a program for Environmental Assessment as a project management tool.

-confidentiality of personal data.  Three out of four Americans say they won’t use Google Glass because of privacy concerns.

For project managers, this means rethinking project charters with a more expansive collection of stakeholders, and a wider description of constraints, assumptions and risks.  We teach an extensive pre-planning effort (we call it the Project Success FirstStep Process^®) that covers forming the team, doing the ‘pre-work,” creating the charter (via an extensive, in-person process), and getting it approved before starting the planning phase. Everyone has a chance to put their arguments on the table.  The result is a charter, and a clear set of marching orders, that is approved by stakeholders and in line with what the customer wants.

That way, their projects or products can stay ahead of the Next Big Thing…instead of getting run over by it.

Although it’s Spring, the No Pants Festival has nothing to do with Spring Break and everything to do with an evolving management trend – the remote management of digital nomads. I call this type of workplace management “Radical Flexibility.”

The newest take on Radical Flexibility is ROWE (Results Only Work Environment).  The ideal ROWE workplace eliminates office norms: no set hours, no required meetings or office hours unless required to do your job.  The only measure of value is the results.

More accountability and less micromanaging are Project Success Method bywords, and some studies suggest positive impacts…but the underlying assumptions are less promising:

• you could get so much more work done if you didn’t have to bother with other people

• structure is a cage

A collaborative environment needs some structure – how can people work as a team without set hours? – and a meaningful team can’t be formed with people only known to each other as an email address.

The Project Success Method offers a better, hybrid alternative.  Our techniques encourage in-person meetings to strengthen mutual support, collaboration and commitment to projects – but individuals are free to decide whatever pace or solutions work best. The Method has worked for small new product launches and large-scale, mission critical, time-sensitive, cross functional projects across an entire enterprise – while combining accountability and freedom for individuals, teams and managers.

Now that’s what I call Radical.  But no, it’s not pants optional.

Suppose your car needs an oil change. You visit two garages on Monday looking for estimates. Garage One quotes $50; Garage Two quotes $50. Both say it takes two hours.

You leave your car at Garage One, go to a movie, and return two hours later to pay and drive away. Three months later you try Garage Two. You return from the movie. There’s an oil pan under your car. The mechanic is working the register.

“I need my car,” you say.

“It took an hour to prep and drain the oil,” the mechanic says as he rings up someone. “Now I’m on the register for the rest of the week. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the remaining hour.”

No one would accept this scheduling for a car. Why accept it in a project?

Relying on resource hours over task duration is one of my project management pet peeves. Methodologies that rely solely on resource hours don’t adequately predict when things will actually get done.

Managers and teams that go through our training get practical experience in the kind of scheduling that tells them when they can take the next step and when the job will be done – ahead of schedule, too. In project management, as in life, knowing how long a task takes – even a simple oil change – is insufficient. You need to know when you can drive your car.   It’s the only way to get anywhere, on the road or in your career.

There are ‘teachable moments” but April presents a teachable month. Tax time makes project managers of everyone who files a return.

Most people procrastinate, then scramble for records and spend days with an accountant or tax software. As April 15 approaches, they cross their fingers, file, and hope. They prove PSI’s philosophy: of the three measures of project success – time, budget and quality – the key element to manage properly is time.

 Busy managers have two common solutions, both wrong:

-Count backwards from the deadline

-Let the software handle it

 Both solutions are cages, not structures. Scheduling backwards is inflexible, unrealistic, and suppresses team commitment…and despite “time management software” and its 320 million Google hits, software alone is not the answer – people are.

We developed an add-in for Microsoft Project that puts people in control of their schedules. Our Project Success Toolkit lets users revise an activity’s duration without impacting resource assignments, and vice versa. This creates a more stable schedule because task duration, resource assignments and status do not change without user input.

We can’t help with IRS schedules, but we can train staff on the Project Success Method in just two day’s time – three with the Project Success Toolkit program. That’s a schedule any project manager could appreciate.

Three letters that alarm many businesses are not IRS but IoT, (AKA the Internet of Things), the Machine to Machine technology that collects and transforms data into information.

IoT could revolutionize business. A new Verizon report details increased efficiencies that could give, by 2025, a ten percent revenue advantage to businesses using IoT applications. Yet the same study estimates just ten percent of enterprises extensively adopted IoT.

These dabblers in IoT for shipping, maintenance (imagine factory equipment issuing service alerts), or security think it’s too intimidating to go ‘all in.” Some 92 percent of banks implementing IoT call “Complexity” the biggest challenge – but instead, “complexity” can bring project, career, and marketplace success…if everyone is on the same page with the right methodology and tools.

Our Project Success Enterprise Solution can get companies from a blank page to a completely organized, customized project management function, built from the ground up, equipped with the right tools and software, with fully trained staff.

Then, enterprises from manufacturing to finance to pharma might find another three letter word handy.

Win.

Connect with me:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/clintpadgett
• Twitter: @clintpadgett

Clint Padgett is the president and CEO of PSI. Since joining the firm in 1994, he has provided consulting, training, and account management to clients in a wide range of industries. His project experience covers many traditional and special applications, including: product development, equipment installation/startup, facility construction/moves, marketing, software/hardware system implementation, and international sporting events. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He also holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is associated with the Project Management Institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Product Development & Management Association, among others. Additionally, Clint is a published author and frequently speaks at conferences on the subject of project management, including the Executive Education program in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is an adjunct professor.

While tech pundits and market seers debate the idea of an Apple car, what fascinates me is the five-year timeframe.  Some call that deadline aggressive; I call it exhilarating.

The notion of a light manufacturing company “turning raw steel into a car” in five years seems audacious, like streamlining geologic history into one calendar year.

But is it impossible? Not necessarily.

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) like this are perfect candidates for our Compression technique.  Thoughtful tradeoffs in how project tasks are performed are the most strategic elements in project planning. It saves our clients the most money and time – especially critical in new product development.

It’s how we helped manage a complex, multigenerational product development program with more than 100 design, development, manufacturing and support teams providing input for Caterpillar for a bold new product.

As technological innovations multiply, many more businesses will need comprehensive solutions to the puzzle of staying competitive with new products but creating them in less time.  We’d better all fasten our seat belts, it’s going to be an exciting ride.

Leaders like Bill Gates worry that Artificial Intelligence will create havoc. Even now, ethicists grapple with the unintended consequences of automated programs – like illegal activity.

The fascination with AI is part popular culture and part business savvy. It’s tempting (in cost and time savings) to automate – to remove or limit the human element and personal interaction.

It’s a false economy.

Several studies prove that nothing beats face to face meetings for transparency, trust, cohesion, and persuasiveness. Leaders of in-person meetings obtain better information. They pick up on cues by individuals and ‘read the room” as a whole to get subtext that no software or AI program can detect.

More important, periodic, in-person meetings of team members makes sure the Worry CurveÒ is shifted. Teams reinforce mutual accountability and support each member.   As they continue to meet and solve problems, their commitment to the project, to each other and to their own role grows in a way no software can duplicate. It’s a lot more satisfying than monitoring via Skype or filling in boxes in a software program.

And of course, with face to face meetings with real people, you can rest assured some AI software isn’t blowing the project budget playing internet poker or doing insider trading.