Why identifying, defining and managing projects is a key leadership skill for us all.
The Industrial Revolution in the 18th century kick-started a seismic shift and era of economic development. Fast-forward 200 years to the turn of the 20th century and economic activity moved into an even higher gear with the revolutionary approach of Ford’s Model T moving assembly line.
Ever since then, business has become increasingly focused on optimising the core areas of operation, on doing things as efficiently as possible. Job roles became increasingly specialised and highly technical.
And yet, in recent years, many organisations have started to recruit for roles without even a specific role title or even a clearly defined job specification. Forward-thinking companies are looking for flexible ‘problem-solvers’ who can put their mind to one problem today, and a completely different one next month, to shift from project role to project role rather than hunkering down in a specific role or functional department. What’s going on?
Part of the answer is that today’s technological advancements are provoking a business transformation every bit as radical as that of the Industrial Revolution. Coupled with uncertainty around issues from the climate crisis to finite resources to global instability, and businesses are being forced to adapt and evolve faster than ever.
And the need to respond more rapidly is causing increasing numbers of organisations in industries big and small, across all regions around the globe, to view projects as the optimal drivers of delivery.
For project management expert Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, it’s a shift that reflects a change in a focus from operations – which is about running organisations – to projects – which are about changing them. Projects are increasingly driving both short-term performance and long-term value, whether that’s about more frequent organisational transformations, the speedier development of new products or the adoption of new tech.
In 2017, the Project Management Institute (PMI) estimated that the value of project-based economic activity around the world would grow from $12tr in 2017 to $20tr in 2027, employing some 88 million people.
Welcome to the project economy.
A broad church, the project economy includes everything from gig work at Unicorns such as Lyft, Uber or TaskRabbit to cross-functional project teams driving large-scale infrastructure projects in more traditional settings. It’s a trend that’s been variously described as the “projectisation” of work and the “project revolution”.
Essentially, a project is a discrete piece of work designed to achieve a particular goal. It has a defined beginning and end and a defined scope, resources and set of operations designed with that goal in mind. Projects are designed to create predetermined forms of value, impact and benefits. We might be building someone’s IKEA furniture for them, working in a software team to build a new app or creating a new workflow for the office canteen. Large or small, they’re all projects.
But why now? Why are we seeing an accelerating shift in work to a more project-based working for both organisations and individuals? The answer lies in the sheer pace and style of change we’re experiencing. The disruptive impact of new technologies has shown previously best-in-class practices – including organisational hierarchies or systematic, linear processes – to be simply too slow and static for the challenges we face today. Once accepted as a price to pay for how things operate at scale, these can now prove fatal to an operation.
As a result, in the past two decades, the ability to initiate, define, manage and deliver projects – known as project management - has gone from a more specialist function to a business-critical, highly sought-after skill as projects of all sizes have assumed a more central role in delivering business innovation and growth.
For leaders, this reorientation to delivery through project work means that selecting the right projects that deliver the most value is a key imperative. The number of projects initiated by organisations and governments has increased exponentially over the past decade. And yet, research suggests that the failure rate for projects is typically around the 65-70% mark.
The successful projects are the ones that are chosen, fully embraced, well-managed and driven by a project team. This requires a change in perception. Leaders need to see projects not as a side hustle to their day-to-day job, but as a key element of what they do. This also means moving away from working in fixed departments or silos because projects are almost always cross-departmental and usually involve pulling in people from different teams.
This is a massive mindset shift for many, but it’s vital. It’s estimated by 2025, senior leaders will spend 60% of their time selecting and driving projects, while project management skills will be a must-have skill for any job in the next decade.
Crucially, that means that we can’t just react to the projects coming our way. Seeing projects as things that happen to us, or merely as a way of simply fixing something that already exists, is only half of the story. It means that we miss out on the opportunities that actively looking for problems to fix and projects to master can bring. In the project economy, finding and initiating projects is how we break down barriers and drive innovation and growth.
Finding the right project takes work – and, sometimes, the courage of our convictions. Business guru Clayton Christensen’s theory of the ‘disruptive innovator’ also brings with it the idea of The Innovator’s Dilemma: the perennially thorny issue of how traditional organisations continue to operate while, at the same time, embracing the agility, future-proofing and boundary-breaking behaviour of the average tech start-up. The business world today requires us to embrace what professors Charles A. O’Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman call ambidexterity: the ability simultaneously to exploit the present and explore the future.
For Nieto-Rodriguez, in project terms, this means striking a balance between running the organisation (operations) and changing it through projects. Efficiency alone is no longer a guarantee of medium- and long-term success. He argues that “projects used to be temporary, and operations permanent, but now the reverse is true: operations keep you afloat temporarily, and change is what’s permanent”. Anticipating, managing and driving change has become a key imperative. And the best way to do that: manage our projects better.
That’s why we need to think tactically about identifying those projects, to go to the outer reaches and think the unthinkable. It might mean challenging established ways of working that are no longer fit for purpose. It might mean lobbying for the resources for those long-term projects that so often fall prey to the operational day-to-day. It will almost certainly involve talking to our stakeholders and learning from our colleagues, customers and clients how we might improve our products, services or processes.
To identify priorities, we also need to take a long, hard look at our organisations to see how we can tackle weaknesses and build on strengths, and to assess the competitive and business environment in which we operate. We also need to have an eye to timing: figuring out when to invest scarce resources in a project is another key strategic decision.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Nieto-Rodriguez and Whitney Johnson suggest that we ask ourselves six key questions to test whether there is really an opportunity in a project - or not:
Has the project been done before?
Is there a market (external or internal) for a proposed product, service or process change? What problem would it solve for its target customers?
Is the project part of our core business and will it leverage our strengths? Or, will we be venturing into a completely new arena/technology/industry?
The further from the core business, the more time we’ll need to spend exploring its potential.
Can we clearly define the scope? Do we know what the project will produce and look like when completed?
Scoping, as we’ll see below, is a key phase of the project-management process. If it’s hard to identify more than 50% of what the project will deliver at the outset, we may need to do more work before pressing ahead. We should aim to have 80-90% of the requirements defined before moving to a full-blown project stage.
What is the investment cost?
What resources would the project need – financial, human, expertise, leadership time – and where might we source them (in house/ externally?).
Do we have buy-in from key leaders and the wider organisation?
Even the best ideas and brilliant projects can founder without the right levels of support and buy-in from key stakeholders.
What is the timeline?
Can we identify a clear timeline that builds momentum while also being realistic and taking the time we need to set the project up properly in the first place?
What of the other side of the equation: the people we need to make these projects work? Individuals and organisations alike need to develop the competencies required to transform and thrive in the new project-driven economy.
We tend to think of the gig economy as a less-than-positive experience for workers, and it can be. But there’s also evidence that, for a range of knowledge workers, working on a variety of fulfilling and engaging assignments where they can learn new skills and experiences that they can take elsewhere can be more satisfying than employment in a single organisation.
At the same time, organisations are increasingly hiring workers and grouping and regrouping them according to the knowledge, experience and capabilities they bring to the specific projects that will deliver the most value to an organisation’s stakeholders. They’re realising the greater flexibility they have in hiring, training, assigning, engaging and retaining a capable, high-performing workforce. And this neatly dovetails with how many people want to work and what some leading thinkers are proposing.
Entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, chief operating officer of PayPal in its early days, and then co-founder of LinkedIn, encourages employers and employees to look at work through the lens of a task, not a title. He believes workers are increasingly signing on at an organisation for what he calls a tour of duty. Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify, a global enterprise that’s redefined an industry, places this concept at the heart of his company.
Ek doesn’t hire people to fill titles or for an undefined tenure. He hires those that can best address specific missions, missions that usually have a limited duration – generally two years. Employees may move to further missions afterwards but, by choice, they rarely stay for more than two or three. Ek has cultivated an impressive culture of high performance and high transparency with this approach.
When it comes to hiring, the focus now for many organisations needs to be more on recruiting adaptable problem-solvers who can move between projects smoothly and be less tied to the notion of a fixed job specification and tenure.
So, we’re all project managers now, even if it’s not part of our job title or description. This makes it more important than ever that we understand what project management is and how to do it right. The skills are nothing new. We’ve scoped, planned, delivered and evaluated defined tasks or pieces of work that fall outside business as usual for millennia.
The seismic shift is in the significance and importance of projects. With projects increasingly seen as an essential model to deliver change and create value, we’re firmly in the era where cross-functional collaboration on project-based work is often the lifeblood of innovation, growth and sustainability.
It’s also important to understand that projects take many different shapes and forms. Their size, complexity, requirements, stakeholders, time frames and dependencies are unique. Sometimes, a project can be something as simple as organising a team day out; at the other end of the spectrum, we might be tasked with launching a new product, restructuring a department or masterminding an office move.
Project management involves a range of skills to help us define, plan and implement projects to achieve their stated goals. Whatever the project looks like, though, and no matter how fluid and dynamic we need to be, its success depends on it being managed through a series of basic, defined phases.
The team at Harvard Business Review has identified four key stages that we need to master to create, manage and deliver on projects, bringing others with us along the way:
Initiation and mapping (scoping)
Build-up and planning
Implementation and monitoring
This stage is all about the project’s scope. It’s a crucial stage because it sets the parameters and boundaries for what we’re looking to achieve. Mapping the scope early on also helps to avoid the notorious ‘scope creep’, where stakeholders have an unhelpful tendency to add in last-minute requirements and objectives, running the risk of turning a beautiful piece of art into a Frankenstein’s monster.
Scoping involves five key activities:
Clearly determining the problem to be solved.
Identifying the people (known as stakeholders because they have a ‘stake’ in the outcomes) who will be involved and affected.
Defining project objectives and turning them into manageable goals.
Detailing the scope, resources and major tasks and sub-dividing these into manageable pieces of work.
assembling the project team, with an eye to securing the right mix of skills and making sure that everyone is clear about roles and responsibilities.
allocating tasks and assignments.
creating full project budgets.
putting together a realistic and workable schedule.
This is also the time to identify the risks associated with the project and to plan to mitigate or manage them along the way.
The planning stage usually ends with a kick-off meeting, where project team members can get together to review and test the plan and look ahead to the next phase: implementation.
The best laid plans will be for nothing if the project isn’t implemented well. There may also be some outstanding tasks or activities which need to be handed over to another team.
It may not all have been plain sailing, but this is the time to recognise the team’s work and accomplishments, evaluating the project together and making sure their input and feedback is taken into account.
Understanding the project management process is just the beginning. Following this structured approach means developing and deploying a whole host of leadership skills. We’ll need to master techniques such as objective setting, creating project plans, budgeting, risk assessments and leading cross-functional teams.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) identifies 10 core knowledge areas in its Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). Although this is aimed primarily at professional project managers, it’s also a useful guide to the kinds of skills any form of project management requires of us. It reminds us that we need to become familiar with everything from scoping and quality management to managing stakeholders and risk if we are to run projects successfully.
We’ll be looking in detail at each of these four phases, and the skills we’ll need for effective project management, in the rest of this module.
Welcome to the project economy. It’s going to be quite a ride.
Identify two reasons why project management is now a core leadership skill.
Outline the four core phases of project management.
Reflect on the work you’ve been engaged in for, say, the past two months? How much of your time is dedicated to identifying or managing discrete projects? Would more project work be a positive for your team and organisation?