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March 9, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Leadership, People Issues, Project Management Best Practices, Project Stakeholder Management

Get Visible
By Elizabeth Harrin

You are a highly competent, technically excellent project manager who delivers results time after time, so why are your efforts being ignored? Unfortunately, it is often not enough to do a good job, but you also have to make sure you are seen by project sponsors to be doing a good job. And not only are project sponsors frequently uninterested in your activities, they also have a very different idea to you as to what constitutes a job well done.

Lynn Crawford, a Sydney-based researcher, studied the gap between how good project managers were at doing their job and how good their supervisors thought they were*. She tested over 200 project managers against both their knowledge of techniques and their practical ability to do the job, using the Australian National Competency Standards for project management. Then she asked their supervisors to rate them on four criteria: their value to their clients and to their organization, the ability to motivate others and their ability to work with colleagues to deliver a project. The results were surprising. There was no statistical correlation between doing well on the tests and receiving a good supervisor score. Crawford concluded that ‘the knowledge and practices valued by project management practitioners, and embodied in their professional standards, are not the same as the knowledge and practices valued by senior managers.’ When she looked deeper into the results, she found that if project managers wanted to be perceived as excellent at work by their supervisors they should concentrate on:

  • working on projects with high level of ambiguity in either scope or methodology;
  • working on projects that differ greatly from each other;
  • developing an excellent knowledge of cost, time, procurement and HR management and using these skills to control their projects, and;
  • not becoming too involved with general management activities, to avoid being seen as interfering.

In an organization where projects are allocated to you without the opportunity to choose or express a preference for your work, the first two recommendations may be difficult to achieve. Concentrate on trying to influence those people that make the decisions about the projects on which you work. If they see you starting to operate at a more senior level, there is more chance of them giving you the challenging projects you need, which will in turn raise your profile elsewhere in the organization.

Following Crawford’s last two recommendations will improve your skills and how others perceive you, but you will still need to attract the attention of senior managers in order for them to form a perception of your abilities. These senior managers may not be directly involved in your work and will therefore pay less attention to your successes. Try to raise your profile subtly with a few of these ideas:

  • Circulate useful articles to your project management colleagues or occasionally mention titbits of knowledge you have acquired: ‘When I was at the marketing meeting this week Karen told me she was leaving – I thought you might like to know as it could affect the mailing you are planning’. Subscribe to magazines relevant to project management or your industry, many of which are free to qualifying applicants. Display them prominently on your desk so your team mates can see you are the sort of person who keeps your knowledge up-to-date. Starting to raise your profile in your team will have a knock-on effect in other departments, as your colleagues start to mention your name for the right reasons.
  • Make sure people know of your achievements. Find opportunities to mention your successes, but remember no one likes a braggart. Slip your self-publicity statement in around another message or story: ‘I was out at the weekend with a friend who told me her company has just lost five weeks of client records when their database crashed. It’s a good thing I made sure we’ve got proper back-ups on the project I’m working on, at least that can’t happen to the sales database here.’
  • Ask to tag along with someone who is attending a meeting with influential people. Either approach it as a work shadowing opportunity or create a reason why it might be relevant to your project.
  • Never turn down an opportunity for internal networking: staff briefings, lunches, management question and answer sessions (have an intelligent question to ask).
  • Be prepared for your encounters. Plan a thirty second (interesting) summary of your current activity so if you are asked what you’re working on you sound intelligent and articulate. You can use this kind of ‘elevator’ speech at conferences too.
  • People like to think they form their own opinions, but in reality they are easily influenced by the opinions of others. If other people think highly of you, let it be known: ‘The editor of XYZ Journal liked the article on risk management I submitted and is going to publish it next month.’ It doesn’t have to be the opinions of high-flyers or even named individuals either: ‘I was chosen to do the analysis on the Project Lambda business case.’ But say it in a positive tone: self-deprecation can make even a compliment sound like you were picked because everyone else was working on more exciting and important projects.
  • Become indispensable to your programme manager. Stay in the loop about what is happening at programme level and then offer to take the reins when they are away. Do a good job, but hand them back gracefully, with an excellent briefing of what happened. Programme managers will have more confidence in you if you do not become precious about your time in their chair.
  • Don’t be too modest. Project sponsors want to know that everything is under control, but if you sort out every issue and just reassure them that things are on track, they will just see the smooth progress and not your gargantuan efforts to stay on schedule. In your meetings, explain your difficulty but still add the assurance that you have fixed it: ‘We had an issue with our new database servers; there was no space to connect them up in the warehouse. It was a bit frantic, but I finally managed to find the space by getting the team to reorganize what was already in there. They got it all connected in time for the sales team to start testing the new system.’ No longer will your hard work be transparent.
  • Never talk yourself down, even outside of work. Never use the phrase, ‘It’s not that interesting.’ Someone found your project interesting or they wouldn’t have asked you to do it. Even if it is too complicated to explain in detail, you should always remain positive and upbeat about what you do.

You don’t actually have to be the best performing project manager in your company to do a good job of promoting yourself. Take the opportunities that are offered, create your own opportunities and build on your self-promotion skills. The trick is making sure that the people who matter think that you are doing a good job regardless of how confident you feel in your own ability.

In order to become recognized for your project management skills make sure you firstly give your senior stakeholders what they want and secondly work on your profile within your organization.

* Crawford, L. (2005) Senior management perceptions of project management competence. International Journal of Project Management, 23, pp 7-16.

The above article is an excerpt from Elizabeth Harrin’s excellent book: Project Management in the Real World

Elizabeth Harrin is a business project manager and author of Project Management in the Real World (BCS Books, 2006). She is on the editorial board of US-based PM magazine Projects@Work. Elizabeth lives in London, England, where she writes the blog A Girl’s Guide to Managing Projects and grows plants that usually die. She can be reached through http://www.pm4girls.co.uk.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 and is filed under Leadership, People Issues, Project Management Best Practices, Project Stakeholder Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

Hi,
This is a good companion to the article by by Cinda Voegtli, “The Medal-Worthy PMs Executives Are Desperate To Hire”.

Find out the key attributes that are important to the senior managers. Two that are always valuable are business focused and action oriented. The Great PM does not just report the data (looking backward). They put it into the business context and present the information with impacts and recommendations. They are viewed are someone that looks ahead and, in addition to telling the manger where the project is headed, also tell them how to get back on course.

A good book to help a PM understand how project and portfolio management fits into the framework of a business is “Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done ” by Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek. Projects are how a business executes strategies. Understanding the relationship and being able to see and discuss the interfaces with the other parts will move you ahead of the PMs that just report the data and nag people.
Mike
Department of Doing

mike crocker wrote on March 11, 2008 - 11:02 am | Visit Link

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