Projects are the lifeblood of organisations, but many projects fall short of expectations because of poor project management and/or poor project sponsorship. In The Project Book, Colin D Ellis teaches you the skills and behaviours required to make your projects succeed, every time.

The Project Book

Get things done, faster. Learn Agile/Scrum, Project Management, Freelancing and Outsourcing.

Workflow

Project management isn’t rocket science: using the information contained in this section, you’ll deliver projects on time and on budget, again and again.

Project Management

Preface

There are about a million (really, I’ve counted them) blogs and articles that articulate what leadership is. Many great business figures and authors have added their own thoughts on this. From the business world, Peter Drucker proposes, ‘Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations’. For Ken Blanchard, ‘The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority’. Bill Gates predicts, ‘As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others’. ‘It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front,’ wrote the inspirational leader Nelson Mandela, ‘especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership’. My favourite definition of leadership was offered by Maya Angelou: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel’. If you aspire to becoming a project leader, this empathetic approach to people will be the foundation for success in everything you do. To become a leader, you don’t need an MBA or PhD or project management qualification or Nobel Prize. Nor do you automatically become one when you have ‘manager’ or ‘director’ in your job title. To become a leader you need to make a decision. You need to decide whether you want to serve others and be the kind of person they aspire to be. Or not. If you don’t want to serve others and be a role model, that’s totally fine. Being a project leader isn’t for everyone; after all, if everyone in the world was a leader, we’d get nothing done! If you’re still determined, then you’re on the wrong side of a lot of hard, but ultimately rewarding, work on the journey to becoming a more emotionally intelligent version of yourself, starting with changing the way you behave, talk, listen, laugh, deal with poor performance and innovate. It’s possible you’ll have to completely reinvent who you are. You’ll have to identify and learn about the stuff you’re not so great at and spend your weekends cramming, reading books, blogs and magazines, and mapping out new routines to change old habits. For far too long the corporate world has downplayed the importance of emotional intelligence, dismissing it as one of the ‘soft’ skills, which are among the hardest things to change. In his ground-breaking book Emotional Intelligence , published in 1995, Daniel Goleman identified emotional intelligence (EQ) as the key differentiator for leaders. ‘What makes the difference between stars and others is not their intelligent IQ, but their emotional EQ.’ This is every bit as true today as it was 24 years ago, and it will remain so into the future, not just for us but for our children too. A 2017 Harvard Business Review article predicted, ‘Skills like persuasion, social understanding and empathy are going to become differentiators as AI and machine learning take over other tasks’. Not only is it good for continued relevance, but another study found that ‘people who have a high EQ have been proved to be happier in their lives, and more productive in their work, than those with low EQ’. Emotional intelligence is a learnt skill. And like any worthwhile accomplishment, it isn’t always easy. However, developing yourself and inspiring people who put their reputations on the line for you are among the greatest rewards you can get in the corporate world. You will have to unlearn some things and work hard to learn others. You will have to challenge your assumptions and beliefs, and to listen when you’d rather be talking. Mostly, though, you will have to make time for all this and to make becoming the best version of yourself a priority. You need to make the time to understand and work through what it means to be emotionally intelligent, to know how to recognise when you’ve got it right and to celebrate the win! When the projects and programs you have managed are held in high regard, when people want to work with you again, when you’re held up as a role model for others, then you’ll know what it means to be emotionally intelligent and you’ll be halfway to becoming a great project leader.

Leadership: Know Yourself

Empathy is about seeing something from someone else’s perspective and ‘feeling’ it as they do. To be able to do this you need to know who they are, how they view the world and the cultural traditions that are important to them.

Leadership: Practise Empathy

At a retirement function for Steve (not his real name — his real name was Brian!), a project manager in my team at the time, I got the chance to speak with his wife.

Leadership: Be Yourself

In Conscious Capitalism , John Mackey and Raj Sisodia write, ‘The best conscious leaders are merchants of hope and entrepreneurs of meaning. They continually engage their colleagues around questions of identity and purpose’. I love this quote because it sums up the difference between leadership and management. Of course, standing for something (or being ‘passionate’ about something, as you’ll sometimes hear it expressed) is only one part of leadership, but for me it’s a really important part.

Leadership: Stand For Something

Maitland, a financial PR company in the UK, found three words, integrity , respect and innovation , crop up continually in the values of FTSE100 companies. I won’t argue that these are the wrong words (although I’m amazed that agile wasn’t in there!). It’s just that if people are told that these are their values, rather than being engaged in a process to uncover them, it’s very easy for them to disengage. One sure sign of this disengagement is seeing these values pinned up next to their desk as a reminder.

Leadership: Determine Your Values

In 1995, long before the global financial crisis (GFC), one man — Nick Leeson — managed to bankrupt the UK’s oldest merchant bank, Barings.

Leadership: Safeguard The Future

The biggest challenges you’ll have in becoming a project leader are in dropping poor behaviours, adopting those expected of you and helping others to do likewise.

Leadership: Behave In The Right Way

Okay, a quick admission. I’m not a brain specialist. Never have been, never will be. Which means when I start reading about the complexities of the brain — all the neo-cortex and hippocampus stuff — my brain, knowing me as it does, replaces the words with the theme song from Sesame Street , and within seconds I’m lost. I know I have a brain and that it’s really important, and I know I have to feed it periodically so it doesn’t get bored and leave for pastures new. I also know that every now and then it needs a rest and that playing FIFA on PlayStation is a great way to provide it.

Leadership: Give Your Mind A Break

My very first interview for a project management role wasn’t about my attention to detail around planning and controlling a project — thankfully! I don’t recall talking at all about the ‘technical’ side of the job. The bulk of the conversation revolved around my personality and how I would use and change it to suit the situation.

Leadership: Adapt Your Style To Fit The Project

Midway through last year I met with a project manager in his late fifties. I’d been introduced to him following a speech I gave at a conference, and he proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with project management and ‘young people’ today. I reached for my tablet and battered him over the head with it while tweeting ‘This. Is. How. We. Do. Things. Now’. My Instagram of him lying in the gutter got 3476 likes.

Leadership: Embrace The Next Generation

The Standish Group’s 2014 Chaos Report asserts, ‘All success is rooted in either luck or failure. If you begin with luck, you learn nothing but arrogance. Failure begets knowledge. Out of knowledge you gain wisdom, and it is with wisdom that you can become truly successful’. Any project failure should take this into account.

I haven’t got the greatest memory when it comes to my childhood, but I can remember laughing — a lot. It has a lot to do with where I’m from. Liverpool has a worldwide reputation for its comedy and has produced many famous comic performers. Actually, almost every person on the street is a comedian.

Leadership: Bring The Humour

A 2017 Gallup survey found that just 3 in 10 workers in the US feel appreciated by their employers, indicating widespread disengagement. People spend as much time at work as they do at home with the people they love (sometimes more). To spend it in an environment where you don’t feel appreciated for what you do is appalling. Apparently we need a day — the first Friday in March, Employee Appreciation Day — to remind us to do it! It’s like Valentine’s Day but with cheaper flowers.

Leadership: Make Gratitude Your Attitude

As a kid I didn’t much care for playing football in the freezing cold, and Liverpool could get very cold in the winter. Worst of all was when the ball hit you full on the thigh, as it would sting like only a leather missile striking cold flesh can. You would wince in agony, at which point you’d be harangued from the touchline: ‘Don’t stop, keep running, keep running! It’ll feel better in a minute’. The last thing you want to do when your leg is screaming in agony is keep running, yet you know there’s truth in those words, and sure enough a minute or so later there’s only a perfect imprint of the ball on your leg to remind you of the blow.

Leadership: Bouncebackability

Some of us used to dream of managing a geographically dispersed project team. Our job title would begin with ‘Global’; we’d get to fly business class, have a big expense account and return home with a camera full of culture.

Leadership: Lead a Remote Team

Startup CEO Jeremy Bell told Business Insider magazine, ‘I suppose our failure can be summed up quite easily: an inability to show traction’. Entrepreneur Amit Goel recalled to the same publication, ‘Everything was going good. But we always had one issue. We never had enough money ... and this became the cause of our death. We ran out of money’. Over at Medium , entrepreneur Martin Erlic admitted, ‘It turns out that we underestimated the complexity of the project and overestimated our ability to complete it on a limited budget’.

Leadership: Be An Intrepreneur

When I was young, my parents told me I had two ears and one mouth for a reason. Well yes, it would look weird the other way around, but one mouth is enough for anyone. The funny thing is that listening is not something we’re taught to do, it’s something we learn, usually from others who aren’t very good at it either. Think about all the people you interact with in your working life. How many of them are great listeners? The friends we retain tend to be those who listen to us and take an interest in our lives. So while it’s not something we’re taught, we know it’s really important.

Leadership: Switch On Your Ears

As a fan of many sports, the biggest problem I have with the stars we watch on TV is that they’re not role models for the next generation of athletes. We cheer them on in stadiums and living rooms around the world, but we rarely hold them up as examples off the field.

Leadership: Create More Leaders

One project director I worked for back in the UK always bought the first round of drinks. Whether it was coffee or alcohol there was no question, the first round was his. Yet that wasn’t what I liked about him the most. The thing that I liked most is that he would happily give up his time for any of the team at any time of day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner — none was sacrosanct when any of us had an issue.

Leadership: Be Generous

‘The refusal to express regret and to apologise,’ writes Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There , ‘is one of the top 20 transactional flaws performed by one person to another’. A preparedness to say sorry is critical to maintaining the respect of the project team and the stakeholders. It’s your way of admitting that you got something wrong, that you recognise its implications and are prepared to own it. It also demonstrates your humanity.

Leadership: Say Sorry

At the heart of most misunderstandings with my team when I was a project manager was my inability to set expectations in the right way. I was too vague, too trusting. Or worse, I just assumed the person knew what I was thinking! It sounds ridiculous, yet most people in management roles will have found themselves in a similar situation at some stage of their career.

Leadership: Set and Manage Expectations

Possibly the worst part of being a leader is that from time to time you have to manage a poorly performing team member or deal with a behavioural issue. In an ideal world, everyone will turn up for work, buoyed by the culture you’ve co-created, and will perform as agreed. They’ll get the work done, you’ll all get the recognition you deserve and you’ll sail away under clear skies, contentedly watching the sun go down over the horizon. Every now and then, though, an iceberg looms and if you don’t react quickly and appropriately, there’s the risk that your ship could be sunk. No more Leo, no more Kate, no more boat. Just a lot of people out in the cold.

Leadership: Manage Difficult Conversations

With my first project management job I got lucky. I got to work for someone who was prepared to show me the right way to do things. I had no idea what project management was and had been hired on my ability to build relationships, so to say I needed help was an understatement.

Leadership: Get Help

I recently rewatched the excellent movie Bridge of Spies , in which New York insurance lawyer James Donovan (played by Tom Hanks) negotiated the release of both U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and an American student in East Berlin, Frederic Pryor. Reading up on the true story behind the film, I was in awe of the negotiating skills that Donovan deployed.

Leadership: Negotiate Effectively

As a new manager of a project management office back in the early 2000s, I decided that what was required was more consistency, and by that I meant more paperwork. I’d been on a course, grabbed myself some new knowledge and decided to implement the method I’d learned.

Leadership: Tell Stories

Almost every week I hear of senior management facing criticism for their lack of availability or interest, indifferent decision making or disengagement from a project or initiative. Indeed, according to the Standish Group’s Chaos Report , lack of executive sponsorship is still the number one reason for project failure. However, if I’m told you’re not getting the time or decisions you need from a sponsor, my response is always to ask what you’re doing about it. After all, why should it all be down to the senior manager? Why should you be right and they be wrong?

Leadership: Manage Upwards

In my 20 years in the profession, the best projects I’ve worked on and seen have had the best cultures. It’s something you can feel, sense and hear the moment you walk into a room. It’s electric. You know something special is happening, and you want to be part of it. If there’s anything I miss about day-to-day office life it’s that. I love the energy that great cultures generate. I’ve been involved in rubbish cultures too, some of my own making! Cultures exist at every level of an organisation, and the strength of an organisation’s overall culture is created by its subcultures. The four types of cultures illustrated overleaf depend on two things: the emotional intelligence of the team and how interested or engaged they are in the work they’re doing. As discussed in the previous chapter, emotional intelligence, along with the ability to be the best version of yourself (and for others to do likewise), is critical if you’re to be consistently productive and to challenge each other to get the project delivered in line with stakeholder expectations. If you are unable to understand and control your emotions, you run the risk of creating a toxic culture that people don’t want to be part of. Being interested not only in the project but also in your role in it and in what the organisation is looking to achieve overall, is a key motivator for individuals regardless of their role. Without engagement, a crucial source of energy is lost, which can lead to procrastination and in rare cases a ‘don’t care’ attitude that undermines work quality and productivity. Project leaders need to be role models for both of these qualities. This means talking passionately about what the project is to deliver and how it lines up with organisational goals, while being the best version of themselves and creating a team environment in which others can do likewise. Cultures can be situated in one of four quadrants: Stagnant cultures are a bit ‘meh’. No one really cares about the project, there’s no sense of team spirit and no one seems to know what’s happening. Pleasant cultures are too nice. Everyone is pretending that everything is good, but they’re not so sure. Meetings are inefficient: they spend lots of time talking about anything but work. Project cultures that are stagnant or pleasant consistently fail to deliver. Combatant cultures are prevalent where time and cost are especially constrained. Unconstructive arguments proliferate and the team just doesn’t gel. Yet people are engaged in their work, so things do get done, despite the conflict. Vibrant cultures are memorable. The team have each other’s backs and come together in times of crisis. They look forward to work and celebrate every success together. The ultimate goal for project leaders is to create a vibrant culture before any work is started. Some projects suffer from ‘personality disorders’, meaning they may spend time in each of the four quadrants. As leader, it’s important that you recognise where your team are on this chart and ensure that you quickly move them back towards vibrant. Culture, and advice on how to create one, is largely missing from project management textbooks, apart from some very formal advice in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK). Your job as a project leader is to create social harmony and a safe workplace where honesty is valued and people can be the best versions of themselves every day of the working week. Together you can create something to be proud of, something that will be talked about for years to come. None of this happens by chance. Remember, you are the catalyst for culture. The ideas explored in the chapters that follow build on the strategies you’ve implemented from the previous chapters on leadership.

Culture: Build and Care for the Team

In the early 2000s I joined an organisation that was looking to become the biggest online retailer in the UK. At that time, it had little if any online presence and while as a team we were excited by the prospect, it didn’t feel real. The company’s market share was being slowly reeled in by newer online retailers, so action had to be taken.

Culture: Develop A Vision

One of the biggest mistakes that project managers make is treating every person the same when it comes to communication. That’s not to say you don’t need to be consistent with your behaviours, but the language and medium you use should always be tailored to the individual(s).

Culture: Get Your Communication Right

The way we work has changed significantly over the past 10 years. In 2005, email use was prevalent and texting was yet to be accepted as a means of communicating important messages. It was another three years before people stopped phoning in sick, putting on their sick voice, and started texting in the details instead. ‘Got flu. CU tmrw.’ Right.

Culture: Collaborate For Success

No word is more overused or misunderstood in business than innovation (although agile is currently giving it a run for its money). Despite that, one of the greatest innovations has been propping up project management techniques for years.

Culture: Make Time For Innovation

In an informal survey I conducted on a Sydney street this morning, I found that by any measure everyone is different. This was confirmed even by the twins I questioned, which was a relief for my statistical analysis. Some were listening to music, some talking on their phones, some were talking with friends and colleagues, others just scurrying briskly to work. Some seemed to be doing their best to get killed crossing the road.

Culture: Find The Right Space For Work

‘Hiring for cultural fit’ is something I often hear, yet very few projects (or organisations) do it well. You need to know and be able to describe your culture, and you need to understand the people in the project team and the skills they bring. This means not just their subject matter skills, but their values, personality type and potential.

Culture: Hire Cultural Fit

One role I took involved three interviews. The first was with the recruiting agent to assess my suitability for the organisation in terms of skill set. Next came a first interview with the hiring manager and one of his peers to assess my cultural fit and my attitude towards team building, project management excellence and the like. A third interview, over coffee with the hiring manager and one of the team, focused on some of the specific challenges they were facing and how I would deal with them.

Culture: Start As You Mean To Go On

My first job after leaving school was in a bank, and one of my early roles was in the counting house. This was a small, dark room where a group of about eight people counted the money that came in over the counter or via armoured trucks and bagged it up ready for redistribution.

Culture: Soundtrack To Your Success

Recently I was engaged by the head of an IT department who had a problem with ‘the business going around us for their project delivery’ (their words). The first question I asked was, ‘Why are they so dissatisfied with the service you provide that they would do this?’ The answer, disconcertingly, was, ‘They don’t get the way we do projects’.

Culture: Keep Stakeholders Satisfied

We’ve all done it, and even being the best versions of ourselves, we continue to do it. We don’t usually mean to be destructive when we do it, yet it has the capacity to destroy everything, including the way we feel about ourselves. We dress it up in all kinds of ways to justify it to ourselves. We’re venting, getting things off our chest, not wishing to be personal. We even ‘apologise’ before we do it: ‘I’m sorry, but he’s an idiot …’ And after we do it: ‘I shouldn’t have said that, sorry’. Yet we still do it.

Culture: 'GOSSIP' The Culture Killer

Jason Fox, author of The Game Changer , says, ‘If the concept is complicated, no one will understand what it takes to change’. In other words, if your project team is playing buzzword bingo during one of your meetings, then you’ve already lost the dressing room. Oh the irony of my mixed metaphors.

Culture: Keep It Simple

I’ve got to be honest, as soon as someone tells me something is going to be fun, my immediate thought is, ‘No it won’t. It won’t be because you’re telling me it has to be fun. So it’s not spontaneous fun but fun by design, and it’s being designed by you. Mr No Fun’.

Culture: Have Some Fun

We have a problem with meetings. Most of them suck. Like, really badly, and for some reason we seem reticent to do anything about that.

Culture: Run Meetings That Don't Suck

‘The more you praise and celebrate your project,’ Oprah tells us, ‘the more there is in your project to celebrate’. Okay, so she said ‘life’, not ‘project’, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t mind me twisting her words ever so slightly. (If you do mind, Oprah, let me know through the usual channels — that is, the letter from your lawyer.)

Culture: Celebrate Success

Methods, processes and techniques are important in guiding project managers towards the right approach to take to deliver projects to the stakeholders’ expectations. They provide a pathway to completion, show where key decision-points are and help project managers determine the information they need to be successful. These tools are often referred to as the technical side of project management. They are the things you can get certificates in, if you’re that way inclined. You should learn about PMBoK, visual facilitation, mind-mapping, work breakdown structures, Kanban, six-sigma, PRINCE2, Scrum, estimating, investment logic mapping and other techniques. Almost everything about the technical side of project management can be found on the internet or in books, so start by hitting your local library. There’s no need for you to pay thousands of dollars for courses for this stuff — save that for the more important ‘soft skills’ training, although there are some techniques that are best learned from a trained facilitator. Be relentless in your search for techniques that can both liven up your approach to delivery and provide much-needed clarity or speed of resolution on some of the issues you face. Design thinking is a recent example that provides a framework for creativity and innovation. The chapters that follow provide you with an overview of the two main approaches that projects can take, which are styled as waterfall and agile . Each has pros and cons and I’ve done my best to give you insights into these. Neither one is better than the other; their strength lies in how they’re applied and scaled. For any project method to work it has to be tailored to suit your organisation, and your stakeholders need to understand what’s required of them too. We’ll also look at a couple of techniques that are identified time and again in project management surveys as ‘weaknesses’ and yet that I believe all project managers should know, regardless of the method being employed. Too many organisations (including those that provide advice on project management) still think that simply implementing a method or sending everyone on a certification course will guarantee delivery on time and to budget. It won’t. This is like giving everyone a medal for crossing the finish line, regardless of their time or whether they cheated to get there. Great project leaders build cultures that recognise the importance of methods, processes and techniques and therefore never need to be told to use them. These are the people who win the race, and they never stop running. Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t’. When it comes to project management, however, too often there’s only madness in the application of methods. Don’t fall into that trap.

Methods: Waterfall

Agile is the current buzzword in organisations worldwide. If you’re reading this in 2025 (hey, you never know), then you’re probably wondering what all the fuss was about.

Methods: Agile

One of the biggest problems that project management now faces is that it’s losing the art of planning. That’s a worry because if you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a project. It really is that simple. A plan is the foundation for all activity. Whether you’re using a waterfall or an agile method, you still need a plan. For an agile project, you may plan only the next two to four weeks, while for a waterfall project you’ll be looking at the first three months at least.

Methods: No Plan, No Project

Here’s the thing about the benefits of your projects: if your senior managers care — and I mean really care — about them, then their realisation won’t be an issue. You deliver projects, and they have actions in place to get the benefits. Easy. As project leader, you get to see the fruits of your team’s labours and the stakeholders get to reap the rewards. Everyone is happy.

Methods: Why This? Why Now?

‘Despite more than 50 years of history and countless methodologies, advice and books,’ noted the global research firm Gartner in 2015, ‘IT projects keep failing’. I really enjoyed this report because although it talked about the things we haven’t done to improve the profession in the past 50 years (something many commentaries do), it especially drew attention to the fact that organisations continue to make it hard for themselves.

Methods: Scale For Success

How long do you think it will take you to finish this book? I’m talking about actual reading time, eyes on the page. Four hours? Six hours? Two weeks? Some of you may choose to read just one chapter a day, in which case it’ll take you 10 weeks or so. Whatever your calculation, it is likely that your estimates will be based on your:

Methods: Estimating

There isn’t a single project in the world today that isn’t threatened by some level of risk. It’s one of the constant sources of distraction for project managers, and if it isn’t for you, then it should be!

Methods: Manage Risk

Left unchecked, issues (like risks) have the ability to kill your project off quickly. Not only that, but if you don’t have mechanisms in place to control their impact they can give you sleepless nights and even affect you personally.

Methods: Deal With Issues

Let’s get one thing clear: project reporting is not administration. It’s an opportunity to take a step back from what you’re doing, update the controls you have in place and assess what needs to be fixed. It’s your honest assessment of progress to date and it provides you with an opportunity to formally escalate issues for decision.

Methods: Report Honestly

Lessons learned is an expression we hear a lot of in project management. Typically, though, organisations and project managers wait until the end of the project to share them, by which stage it’s too late, as there’s a good chance that those mistakes will already have been repeated.

Methods: Successes Are The Best Lessons

If you have put the time and effort into being the best leader you can be and have developed an inclusive and diverse culture, then the success of your project leadership (not your project) can and should be measured in a number of different ways.

Methods: Measure Your Success

In the navy, the Chief Steward’s job is to supervise the operations and maintenance of the galley and living quarters of both officers and crew while at sea. This is a great metaphor for our projects, because as soon as they’re ‘launched’ it’s the project sponsor’s job, on behalf of the ‘officers’ or executive team, to ensure that the project remains aligned to its business case while ensuring that the ‘crew’, or project team, has everything it needs to keep the ship afloat. Unfortunately, most project stewards resemble characters out of The Love Boat or Carry on Cruising . Well-meaning and nice people, but often ill-equipped to deal with the job in hand and frequently resorting to inappropriate actions or behaviours. Providing project stewardship means more than chairing meetings well and actively listening to what you’re told. It’s about being a role model for others to follow, caring wholeheartedly about what the project is trying to do and recognising the role of every member of the team in their successes. It’s about being clear on what’s important for the organisation, providing others with opportunities for development, keeping it simple, and adding a healthy dose of inspiration and humour when it’s needed most. A sponsor must become a leader to provide effective stewardship of projects. Leadership isn’t a given just because ‘leader’ is included in your title or job description. Taking a leadership course won’t make you a leader either, I’m afraid. In one survey McKinsey estimated that US companies alone spend US$14 billion per year on leadership development, yet only 7 per cent of respondents felt their companies developed leaders effectively enough to generate improved results. All too often, leadership is equated with achieving a particular position within the hierarchy, rather than becoming a role model for change for others. The certificate you got might look nice in a frame, but how many habits or behaviours have you changed since you received it? How have you kept in touch with the changing nature of project and operational delivery? How much more productive are you than before? How much more engaged is your team than they were before? This is what it means to lead. To know when to step up and when to step in, and that includes future-proofing the organisation. Leaders should exist at all levels and be nurtured by those who carry the scars of failure (see chapter 73). These stories and experiences are critical if we’re to develop the next generation of project sponsors who know how to do the job well. Apathy is just not an option. The Ketchum Leadership Communication Monitor listed the top five attributes of leaders as follows: Leading by example Communicating in an open and transparent way Admitting mistakes Bringing out the best in others Handling controversial issues or crises calmly and confidently. If you’re looking for a leadership blueprint, this is a great place to start. Get feedback from your peers and direct reports on how you perform against these attributes and what you can do to improve, then work hard to do just that. You don’t need to go on a leadership retreat, you need to make some hard choices and change some habits. These attributes will stand you in good stead when you take the reins of a project because (you may have noticed) projects — and the governance of them — don’t have a great reputation. In a recent survey undertaken by the Governance Institute of Australia, 73 per cent of its members said that governance is a drain on productivity! That’s like three-quarters of car manufacturers saying cars are bad for the environment! (They are, by the way.) Don’t be one of these people. Governance should help, not hinder, a project and as the sponsor, your job is to demonstrate what great stewardship looks like and be on top of what’s happening, always. What you need to avoid at all costs in your projects is blame — something we see a lot of. In Australia in 2016, there was a project to collect Census information online. For the most part, the project was well communicated, although practitioners like me were secretly hoping it had been tested properly to ensure personal data wouldn’t be lost. To cut a long story short, the system was hacked and personal data compromised. This was a hugely disappointing outcome for everyone involved. What I wanted to hear from the Prime Minister and accountable steward of the project, Malcolm Turnbull, was that he was sorry. I wanted to hear that they’d got it wrong. They’d made mistakes in the governance, project management, supplier management and security aspects of the projects and would seek to rectify them quickly. That despite years of project failure in the public service, this was the project that would change everything, given how critical it is that public servants are seen acting in the best interests of the general public. None of that happened. Instead he blamed the supplier, IBM. Who then blamed the government, and within a few hours the whole project had been reduced to a couple of kids acting tough and pushing each other around in a kindergarten. As soon as the finger of blame is pointed you create factions and lose the ability to act effectively. You create a situation in which you can no longer proactively learn from failure, but instead just try to prove you were right and they were wrong. The irony is that no one wins in this scenario and your role as steward is undermined. L. David Marquet comments in his book Turn the Ship Around! , ‘Focusing on errors is a debilitating approach when adopted as the objective’, while Seth Godin, in his excellent book Tribes , observes, ‘What people are afraid of isn’t fear, it’s blame’. To avoid this failure, you need to fully understand the sponsor role that you’re being asked to undertake and to push back when you have too much on your plate already. Understand that it will take time you may not currently have and that there are many tough decisions to be made. Honesty and humility will be needed in spades in order to do this in the right way. The sponsors I’ve met whose projects have failed did the opposite: they didn’t delegate work; they failed to make decisions at the right times. They saw the role as ‘just another thing to do’, rather than an opportunity to nurture, build, guide and direct. They felt they just needed to show their face at a meeting or register their name on the minutes — and bad-mouth their colleagues behind their backs. Every project an organisation undertakes represents an opportunity to enhance the corporate culture. To try different things. To provide time for innovation. To run meetings how they’re supposed to be run and to be part of a high-performing, fun-loving team that’s talked about for years. It’s not the project manager’s responsibility to make sure you’re doing your job correctly — it’s yours. So if you don’t know where to start, ask for help. Take a training course that focuses less on the process and methods and more on the behaviours and mindset required, that informs you about the different stages of projects and the key deliverables you should expect from each. A course that gives you a full rundown of what the project manager should be doing and how to distinguish the good from the bad, one that leaves you inspired to use a project as a vehicle for organisational good. So in assuming the role of chief steward, this is your opportunity. Turn up, tune in and make sure you don’t drop out. The ongoing steadiness of the ship depends on you.

Stewardship: The Buck Stops With You

I remember my favourite project prioritisation session vividly. I was head of projects for a large government agency and asked each member of the executive team to provide a one-page summary and 30-second speech for each initiative they wanted to undertake the following financial year. Then they took turns to stand up and present these to their peers.

Stewardship: Verify Priorities

The first thing I did as a project sponsor was appoint my steering committee (or project board). I usually did this before selecting my project manager as I wanted the team to have a say in the decision-making process. On more than one occasion we selected a person from one of their departments.

Stewardship: Share The Burden

‘Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously,’ counselled Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude. ’

Stewardship: Say Thank You

‘The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing,’ Groucho Marx declared. ‘If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ Of course, it’s very hard to do that all the time — trust me, I’ve tried!

Stewardship: Build Trust

In his book The 8th Habit , Stephen Covey discusses a poll of 23 000 staff from multiple companies and industries. One of the most surprising statistics to emerge was that only 37 per cent of respondents said they had a clear understanding of what the organisation was trying to achieve and why.

Stewardship: Simple Is Better

Recently, following a project steering committee meeting I’m part of (as an independent adviser) for a large infrastructure program, I had to take an executive director to task for checking his phone throughout the meeting.

Stewardship: Be Present

As the figurehead of the project, it’s your responsibility to share the vision, demonstrate the behaviours, communicate in the right way, and uphold the organisation and project culture principles. If the project is to achieve what it needs to be successful, you have to be a role model for transformation.

Stewardship: Role Model What You Expect Of Others

While your stewardship charts how you behave, lead and communicate, it’s the decisions you make that will ultimately be the key differentiator between success and failure in a project. Writing in the Harvard Business Review , Daniel Goleman notes, ‘A person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on inner turmoil by treading on buried values. The decisions of self-aware people mesh with their values; consequently, they often find work to be energising’. Not just energising, but inspiring too. Self-aware individuals can talk eloquently about the vision of the project and how its deliverables will bring that vision to life. You want to create a feeling in other people that you are passionate and positive about the possibilities the project brings to the organisation. Seth Godin says in his book Tribes , ‘Leaders commit to a vision and make decisions based on that commitment’. It’s important to ensure that the project manager shares this passion and vision and that you both clearly understand who makes what decision and when. This sounds easy, but in practice I consistently see organisations suffer from decision confusion (who makes it and when) or, worse, decision avoidance (that’s not my decision to make). Decision making lies at the heart of good governance, yet when you turn to the textbooks it’s no wonder people get confused. The Project Management Institute, in its Governance of Portfolios, Programs and Projects — A Practice Guide , declares, ‘Governance typically focusses on who makes the decisions (decision rights and authority structures), how the decisions are made (processes/procedures) and collaboration enablers (trust, flexibility and behavioural controls), thereby defining the governance framework within which decisions are made and decision-makers are held accountable’. It goes on to say, ‘Confusion exists in distinguishing the governance needs at different levels of portfolio, program and project management’. Is it any wonder? It’s well-meaning advice, but it uses language that alienates the reader, rather than clarifying the why and how decisions that need to be made to support continual project progress. In my experience, this confusion exists because important conversations between the various leaders (project sponsors and project managers) weren’t held up front; the focus is on following a framework rather than having a conversation in which it’s agreed who will do what. This is neatly summed up in a paper on governance from LexisNexis: ‘One of the benefits of good governance is getting the right decision-making authority and accountabilities at the right points in the organisation. This facilitates faster, better and more transparent decision-making’. By being clear and transparent, those delivering the project can be confident in times of crisis because the important conversations were had before the project started. And make no mistake, each project will have its moment of crisis. The decisions you need to make will come thick and fast, and not just on the important components of a project — budget, time, scope and quality. They start with deciding whether it’s something you should actually do and end with the decision to bring everything to a controlled close. You need to have a say in the selection of the project manager, how to deal with poor performance or behaviours, the culture of the team and which benefits have greatest priority. You’ll also need to work closely with the project manager on the management of suppliers. While the day-to-day responsibility for checking progress against an agreed schedule of work sits with the project manager, you need to be clear on your communication strategy should performance standards dip or milestones be missed. The Victorian Ombudsman’s report into failed IT projects specifically discusses the sponsor’s lack of decision making in this area: ‘Senior officers in agencies were often reluctant to make critical decisions about projects such as placing them on hold or terminating contracts’. This is as true in the private sector as in the public sector. On one project where I was the sponsor, the project manager and I agreed to terminate the contract of a supplier within two weeks of our starting the project as they weren’t able to produce the basic project management artefacts to give us the confidence that they knew what they were doing. This set our project back six weeks, but we got a much better outcome. These are the kinds of decisions you need to make. In that particular instance, the project manager and I drew on a mix of rational and emotional information to make our decision. The rational information included no schedule, no risk register, late for meetings, unanswered phone calls and missed targets; on the emotional side were broken promises, lack of respect, no confidence in their project manager, their inability to ‘speak our language’ and poorly run meetings. While evidence is of course important, not every decision will be a rational one. It’s important to have the emotional conversation too: How does this make you feel? What is the team’s level of confidence? Does it feel right for the organisation to be doing this at this time? Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence , called this ‘feeling vs. thought’: ‘As we all know from experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and actions, feeling counts every bit as much — and often more — than thought’. It’s your job to make decisions, make no mistake about that, but in order to do so, you need to be the best version of yourself, analyse the information, then trust your instincts. If you make the wrong decision, you acknowledge this for what it is, show humility and ensure corrective action is taken to get the project back on track. No one gets fired for making a wrong decision … Actually that’s not true, a fair few people have been fired for just that. What I mean to say is no one gets fired for apologising for making a bad decision … Actually, even that’s probably not true in every case. How can I simplify this … Decisions are important and you need to make them in order to succeed. There. That’s better.

Decisions: The Problem and The Outcome?

As the sponsor, you have to be positive about the project delivering the benefits promised when you said it would. All of the time.

Decisions: Negate The Negativity

Axelos’s Directing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 guide is really, really clear about one thing: ‘One of the most important decisions a newly appointed [sponsor] will make is who to appoint to manage the project’.

Decisions: Hire And Pick Your Project Manager

A former boss of mine, who was also the sponsor of one of the largest transformation programs we were running, got sacked for approving a six-figure contract with a consultancy who’d flown him around the world on a speaking tour. Everyone knew the deal was going to happen — especially the consultancy, who didn’t even submit the correct paperwork.

Decisions: Be Ethical

Victor Vroom and Arthur Jago believe the most effective leaders are able to make prompt decisions in times of crisis and uncertainty. They cite the example of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s decision making ‘under the almost unimaginably difficult and confusing conditions of a sea battle’ (Pocock, 1987). But, they go on, ‘decisiveness is also important under normal conditions. Mintzberg (1973) observed that managers are involved in decision making all day long, and the quality of their decisions accumulates when they act decisively’.

Decisions: Make Quick (Not Hasty) Decisions

At some stage in your project, the project manager will let you down. Hey, we’re all human and we make mistakes; it’s a fact of life and how we grow. Unless they’re provided with feedback, and expectations are reset, however, there’s a good chance they’ll continue to let you down and the project will slowly die.

Decisions: Deal With Poor Performance

Failure is something that happens to us all and it can happen on a daily basis. It needs to become something that we’re comfortable with and learn from because resilience is an important quality required in projects.

Decisions: Fail Quickly

I’ve noted that consistently good project results are hard to come by, yet most organisations continue to think they’re doing a great job. It’s got to the stage where project failure has become so commonplace that we’ve started to see it as success, or we just aren’t seeing clearly at all. To illustrate this disconnect, in a recent KPMG survey of New Zealand businesses, 61 per cent of organisations surveyed believed project success rates were improving, despite the fact that they weren’t! Thinking every project will be successful is the root cause of many project problems; there is simply no data to indicate that will ever be the case. Indeed, IBM found that only 41 per cent of projects ever hit their project plan targets. For the New Zealand businesses surveyed in the KPMG study, the figure was 33 per cent. Today we expect every single project to be successful, but even when they aren’t we convince ourselves they are rather than admitting they failed! The Victorian Ombudsman’s report into failed ICT projects found, ‘Too often, there was muted acceptance that all ICT-enabled projects go wrong’. This needn’t be the case. It’s important to recognise at the start that not every venture will be successful. Maybe it’s time we planned to fail more in order to succeed more? In The New Rules of Management , Peter Cook uses a school analogy to highlight the folly of thinking that every single project will be successful: ‘Failing 50% of your subjects or your exams is not a good strategy for school. So we learn to try not to fail anything. However for life, failing 50% of your projects is a great strategy. Aiming to fail 50% of your projects is the perfect way to embrace the risk inherent in any worthwhile project’. I tend to agree. In my experience, we never delivered 100 per cent of the projects we promised we would at the start of the year. Every quarter the portfolio would be reviewed for ongoing viability and priority, which would often lead to widespread changes to meet the ever-evolving demands of the business. Peter Cook again: ‘Often we don’t commit to serious goals and projects because of the risk of failing. What will it mean about me if I really go for it and don’t get there? What will other people think? What will I think?’ When it comes to results, failing a project may be the best result. The key here is that you gave it everything. You may be unable to make a 100 per cent commitment for a variety of reasons. Here are three: Workload. You simply have too much on your plate, and adding another project — without being clear on your priorities — overwhelms you. Lack of buy-in. The project is the brainchild (or pet!) of someone else within the organisation and you’ve been asked to lead it, even though you’re unconvinced it’s something the organisation should be doing. You don’t know how to. Let’s face it, sponsoring projects is something everyone assumes you can do as soon as you are appointed to a senior management role. In reality, it’s not just another hat for you to wear; it’s a completely different set of clothes, and often there’s no one there to help you choose and dress. To achieve the results expected — both in terms of product delivery during the project and benefit realisation afterwards — it’s absolutely paramount that you commit 100 per cent. Anything less and failure will undoubtedly follow. In First Things First , Stephen Covey suggests that this commitment is key but also observes that ‘basing our happiness on our ability to control everything is futile’. You need to establish what Covey calls a ‘compass’ and a ‘clock’. Both are equally important, though each of us tends to favour one over the other. By compass , he means vision, values, principles, mission, behaviours, conscience direction (what we feel is important and how we’ll work together). By clock , he means commitments, appointments, benefits, schedules, goals, activities (what we need to do and how we manage our time). During the pre-project business case construction phase, organisations expend a lot of words articulating the clock — burning platform , hard and fast deadlines , building capability , increasing capacity and a load of other nauseating jargon to avoid establishing concrete measures around the $10 million in savings promised. Generally, dates and costs have been estimated during strategy development and are based on best-case scenarios that almost never materialise. It’s important to remember that any dates and costs at this early stage are indicative only and can quite easily change by +/– 100 per cent once you get into the project planning detail. The planning phase is where you confirm the clock elements of your project. People (it’s never resources), equipment, deliverables, dates, quality, costs, structures and objectives — these factors form the foundation for the project, but only when paired with the compass elements. Without creating a vision of the future, and agreeing how you’ll behave and work together, delivery will be fraught, fractured and fragile. These projects are liable to break down at any minute, as the only thing holding them together is the paperwork created. While it will be important for your project (and organisation) to ensure that certain forms are filled at certain times, this is no measure of a successful project. As Jim Highsmith reminds us in his book Agile Project Management , ‘Compliance results are different’. Compliance results may be important but are not an effective barometer on whether a project is achieving the expected results. That’s not to say you should mistrust the reporting of project managers, but it should always be married with real-time feedback from those working on the project or involved in the building of its products. As a project sponsor, you must involve yourself not only in regularly assessing the compass and clock results, but also in taking corrective action where there is the slightest deviation. On one project I was sponsor on, I gathered feedback on the performance of the project manager as well as checking the detail of the report. The report indicated that everything was rosy, but feedback on the project manager’s performance was poor. I advised the project manager of what needed to change and set him a goal of a month to make the corrections. Four weeks later, not only had the project manager addressed the behaviours, but he’d also empowered the team to provide monthly feedback on the things he could improve. On a different project, the (contract) project manager didn’t respond to the challenges the team had with his behaviours and I let him go. Our projects are too important to be held back by inefficient individuals or suppliers. This is just one example of where you’ll have to make tough decisions to get the results you expect. Traditionally we have only ever measured the clock elements of a project. McKinsey found that most leadership programs fail because businesses don’t track and manage leadership performance over time. The same is true of projects, though I’m pleased to say that this is changing. In his TED talk ‘Being brilliant every day’ Dr Alan Watkins suggests that ‘in order to change the result or performance, you have to focus on the behaviour’. That will involve people changing how they think, feel and express their emotions. Being a project sponsor means being a role model and helping people to do this, not just approving a project status report. Driving for and achieving results — through successfully delivering or failing projects — is your responsibility and a skill that every senior manager and project sponsor should have. Every decision you make should safeguard these results and support the organisation’s strategic intent. Never forget that you get the results your leadership deserves. Only you can affect that.

Results: Culture Is Key, But So Is Strategy

Having established that culture is the most important element of your project, that’s where you must always start. Resist the temptation to blunder straight into implementation without planning and take stock of what you have to do.

Results: Get Off To A Flyer

The evolution of the project culture starts with the planning of the project, which should follow immediately after the initial culture has been built. The role of a project manager is therefore to:

Results: Every Project Needs A Plan

For many organisations innovation is still something they strive for, something they feel they don’t have, something that will help them achieve the success they know they are capable of. They’ve seen the new kids on the block — Uber, Airbnb, Netflix and the like — come up with ideas that have disrupted entire industries and they want to do the same.

Results: Innovation Needs Mindset And Time

If there’s one thing we’re good at in project management, it’s confusing the hell out of people with terminology about methods. It has become a disease and it needs to be eradicated. Too often I hear (and see on social media) arguments about which one is best, how someone is applying it wrongly or why all projects are doomed if they use or don’t use a particular method.

Results: Methods Need To Be Understood

‘Celebrate every success,’ urges physician and philosopher Debasish Mridha, ‘but don’t forget to enjoy those scars of failure.’

Results: Celebrate Good (And Bad) Times

The Project Management Institute (PMI) found that only 9 per cent of organisations ‘do benefit identification extremely well’ and that ‘35 per cent of project benefits are often overly optimistic’. According to a KPMG study, ‘Only 21 per cent of organisations consistently deliver on their benefits’. A recent McKinsey report discovered that ‘17 per cent of IT projects go so badly that they threaten the very existence of a company’. More than a quarter of the organisations surveyed by KPMG New Zealand ‘do not undertake any form of strategic review to track the benefits realised by the business’.

Results: Outcomes Don't Achieve Themselves

At some stage your project will hit the skids, as we used to say in Liverpool. I’d love to be able to tell you this won’t happen to you and everything will go swimmingly well, but that’s not the nature of projects, I’m afraid. By their nature, they are evolving entities that often generate uncertainty. Your job is to see that this uncertainty is well managed and to course-correct when you spot things are going wrong.

Results: Spot When It's Going Wrong

So there we go. As I said in the introduction for this section, it starts with you. Don’t look to the project manager or the team to take the lead or set the example. Show them how it’s done.

Project Sponsorship: Summary

Every time I give a speech or run a training session on sponsorship with senior managers I’m consistently asked the same six questions, so I thought I’d end by including some answers to them.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

Many books have inspired and informed my thinking and writing during this project (some are old favourites I’ve returned to!). Here’s a list of books I refer to and some others I think might interest you.

Reading List

I love my music. It’s been a constant presence in my life and work, and whenever I can I have it playing as I write (I’m not one for silence). I write best in spaces where there are lots of people — cafés, co-working spaces, parks, libraries, even swimming pools. I love the energy of being around other people.

The Project Book

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Colin D. Ellis

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The Project Book