Beneficial behaviour

The individual behaviour of project players and the behaviour of groups or teams (their engagement) lie at the heart of managing projects, says Martin Price.

I recall a recent project meeting where the group allowed conflicting views and interests to bring negotiations to a halt. There was frustration and resentment in abundance. Fortunately, someone was able to introduce a new way to look at the issue. He helped to save face all-round. That contribution was crucial to the survival and eventually to the success of an important meeting. His questions did the trick, bringing very welcome humour and candour to the proceedings. Single-handedly, he brought rapid recovery and a positive mood and purpose to the meeting. When I heard him speak I sensed courageous intent, a clear insight into the dynamics at work, well developed social skills and respect for the group.

In my experience, this kind of brave and insightful contribution, where someone expresses appreciation or shares a different way of thinking is a crucial factor for enabling projects to find their best way forward. The individual behaviour of project players and the behaviour of groups or teams (their engagement) lie at the heart of managing projects.

The prevailing culture is of course an important factor. As I heard Adrian Dooley from The Projects Group say recently, project management is simple, but not easy. There can be no greater goal for a project organisation than for its leaders to encourage and inspire beneficial behaviour. This way, success does get a whole lot easier.

An absence of beneficial behaviour

Of course the opposite of these behaviours will easily bring damage and delay. The unwillingness to listen, the absence of personal recognition and the failure to inform are behaviours too commonly seen in many organisations. On 28 January 1986 Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off. Remember the O-rings?

The official enquiry attributed the disaster to human failure. It reported the root cause as the engineering groups feelings of invulnerability, the pressure from Congress and the group think pattern of social conformity by which they failed to properly examine and act upon the risks attached to their decisions.

Project players are continually presented with opportunities to grow pace, productivity, innovation and agility to own the ball and to soar. But too few opportunities are grasped. Instead, projects are often slow-moving, synergy is asleep, and people give well-short of their best and fail to inspire the rest.

Lose-lose can easily prevail, with leadership lacking and vision obscure. All this brings a heavy price; limiting the vitality and collaboration on which projects depend. The days become long, satisfaction short and opportunities lost.

A project acquires extra value only from human and social endeavour. Peoples imagination, both individually and when working in groups, their will, communication, clear-headedness and social interaction are the engines to make it all happen as delivered by a team and the whole organisation. Projects depend on these engines for their success. They amount to the venture capital needed to fuel the enterprise of a project.

Projects vary immensely in the range and extent of the challenges that are presented and the style of management varies accordingly. (See Figure 1) At one end, (labelled low venture) a project can be tackled as a straight-forward exercise providing a practical response to well-known and understood requirements and circumstances. The projects purpose and the stakeholders expectations are both clear and can be safely expected to sustain. In such projects, that we might describe as traditional, plans are a reliable prediction of what is to happen. Process prescriptions and methods define what is to be done and when, to achieve a successful execution.

At the opposite end of the range, projects are quite different and usually much more demanding. Here, what is to be achieved and how are to an extent unknown (and sometimes unknowable until the project is under-way). The challenges of ambiguity, controversy, innovation, systems complications, adaptation, risk and often a shifting external environment, tend to predominate and structured methods alone are self evidently not enough. All sectors of our economy now show increasing dependence on high venture projects and programmes.

As shown in Figure 1, moving along this range, away from the traditional, the project organisations adaptability becomes increasingly important and its predictability and dependence on prescription, falls away. The level of venture steadily grows and at some point along the continuum a paradigm shift occurs. At this point the project begins to be driven more by what is learned from the todays emergent events and fresh insights than by plans and formulae set in the past. This is high venture territory. The variety of perspectives required and the need to secure connectivity with stakeholders as project players means that challenges become predominantly human and organisational.

All players contributing to the project need to be able to respond. The capability of groups has to be systemic, relying more on players competence and capability than on prescriptions. Well-developed human and organisational behaviours need to be common-place and responsibilities widely devolved. In a high venture environment, the projects venture capital grows with competent professionals, closely and purposefully engaged with all the stakeholders.

Sponsoring a project as well as contributing to it directly, involves players in endeavour that draws heavily on their social, political as well as systematic abilities. In this way, project players are engaged in work that is amongst the most demanding and on which community, security and wealth-generation now increasingly depend. Their quality of thinking and dialogue, sense of discovery and the capacity for organisational agility carries more leverage than can any prescription for process or method. What is to be done and how and the way that the organisation needs to adapt to the needs of a project, has to be orchestrated by the project players themselves those who recognise each other as the group carrying primary responsibility for a successful outcome.

• Martin Price is the founder and CEO of EngagementWorks, a consultancy assisting project organisations to become more agile, innovative and reliable. He is director of professional development for the UK Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).