Hospital Authority Luncheon Seminar

The PM SIG of the Hospital Authority IT Division invited me to give a luncheon seminar last week. The topic was “Five Golden Rules for Managing Project Risks”. Risk is a topic that I am immensely interested in. Readers of this blog probably know I published a Risk paper here based on another seminar I delivered before.The PM SIG is organized by the PMO of the HA ITD, comprising several senior managers with rich and deep experience in project management. I really admire their enthusiasm and professionalism in promoting better management of their IT projects. It is appropriate to have many formal processes while at the same time elevating skills of individuals when delivering projects, as hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake there.

Given it was a luncheon seminar I did not want to burden the audience with heavy stuff so I focused more on the lighter side of risk management. One analogy that came out of the seminar is definitely similarities between managing risks in road traffic and projects. Both rely on a methodology – in the case of road traffic it is a set of stringent rules and regulations, as well as skills of individuals – drivers or project managers.

The funniest discussion probably is some drivers pretend to follow an important procedure when changing lane, namely check the blind spot, but do not really check. They merely turn their heads because their driving teachers trained them to just simulate this action to get past the exam. This is similar to some project managers in the real world pretend to follow an important risk process such as updating a risk log, but not really evaluating risks at hand. They do it for the sake of satisfying requests from senior management.

I look forward to another luncheon seminar at HA this month. This time the same topic will be delivered to a group of medical doctors, physicians and clinical staff.

WOW - Worst of the Worst Scenario analysis is an important concept in risk management.

Dr. Wing Nam Wong is a key driver of the HA IT PMO.

Although it was a luncheon seminar, projector and powerpoint slides were still essential.

A Few Cultural Observations

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘title inflation’. Title inflation means the title shown on a person’s business card does not match his/her job responsibility, and the power that comes with it. In Asia you can easily come across people with the title “Project Manager” which is quite senior in Western countries (i.e. North America, Europe or Australia). They look so young that you can hardly believe that they have the experience required to be called a “Project Manager”. Well, a “Project Manager” title is in fact a junior title in Asia. People in the IT sector, after the first few years as “Programmer” and “System Analyst”, will be generously given the title “Project Manager”, even though in Western business community this title more likely carries more than 10 years of project experience with it.

Other examples of inflated titles include “Assistant Vice President” (this title contracts itself – how can one be both assistant and vice something?), “Vice President”, “Director”, “Managing Director”, and “Project Director”, especially in the banking and IT sector. I’ve once visited an investment bank for a presentation. When I entered the meeting room, a lady handed me her name card. Her title is “Director” which, accompanied with the Chinese translation (董事) led me to think that she is a very senior person within the bank. Then her boss came into the room and his title is “Managing Director”. I was confused. Then again the boss of this “Managing Director” came in and handed me his business card. He was an “Executive Director”. It is only then I understood this investment bank was quite generous with titles.

Another observation in Asia is people likes academic and professional titles too. Some people in Hong Kong have so many professional titles such as PMP, CPMC, CSOXP, CISA, CEng and so on, and they feel the need to show them all to the others. I've met a few people before and one side of their name cards just enlists all their 20+ titles – so pathetic. Needless to say they show all their academic titles such as PhD, DBA, MSc, MBA and even BSc as well. In US, Canada or Europe, I've never come across a name card that shows more than 2 titles, many cards show none - and they don't like to be addressed Dr. Bloke, just Joe.

In my opinion this only shows their lack of confidence on themselves that they need some grand titles to support them. My hypothesis is Asian (mainly Chinese) education system does not aim at building up students’ self-image and confidence. On top of that Asia is under the influence of Chinese culture which emphasizes on: Formal education with stringent structure; Conformance to collective behavior; Authority and obedience over individual differences; and tangible measurement of success such as high social status and material possession.

Next time when you are in China or Hong Kong, remember to address every manager as “zong” (总) which means general manager.

PMI Leadership Institute Meeting 2009 - Orlando

Just back from Orlando after attending this year's LIM meeting. As usual, there were a lot of useful experience sharing and learning from other PMI volunteers. I'm most impressed by the session led by the San Diego chapter which is about volunteer development. These guys really apply management practices well, even their subjects are not paid workers. Motivation and skill development techniques still work here.

Bravo Management!

The keynote speaker, Dr. Gary Bradt, is a inspirational speaker with wonderful talents. All delegates have been inspired by his 'The Ring in the Rubble' and 'Golden Legacy' stories.

Both the opening and closing sessions drew a crowd of 700+ attendees, a record for LIM meeting.

Big news for Asia is Seo-san, Past President of PMI Japan Chapter, being awarded the 2009 PMI Component Award - Volunteer of the Year. (Left: PMI's CEO Greg Balestrero; Centre: Seo Megumu; Right: PMI's Chair Ricardo Vargas)

Me pictured with Seo-san and Kamba-san (President of PMI Japan Chapter).

Me pictured with delegates from the Hong Kong Chapter (Centre: Rossana Ho, Executive Vice President; Right: Patty Wong, Past President)

25-Minute Rule: The Art of Using Stretched Targets

I deliver more than 40 workshops each year. Almost all these workshops have time slots for group discussion or activities and a final presentation from each group. When the time for group exercise comes, I often tell them they have 25 minutes for discussion. They’d usually think 25 minutes are more than sufficient, until about 3 or 5 minutes before the presentation time they suddenly realize that they need more time. They will then plead with me for more time. So we enter into a negotiation, or more likely a bargaining. “We need 10 more minutes.” No you can only have 3 more.” How about 5 minutes.” Okay, deal. Each group has 5 more minutes.” This almost happens in every workshop, even in every group exercise.

I call this the 25-minute rule. In the end, there will be effectively 30 minutes for each group, but I always start with a stretch target of 25 minutes. Does this sound familiar to you? In real-life projects, don’t most managers use this technique to squeeze the most out of their project teams? I do this all the time when I run projects. When activities are defined and leaders identified, there goes the difficult task of time estimation.

As a project manager I have to let them state their opening bid, i.e. how much time they think they need. They are the experts in their own tasks so I cannot enforce some timeline to them unless in the case that there is an externally imposed deadline for that task (for example the insurance product has to be submitted to a government agency for compliance review.) When the leader tells me he needs 6 weeks, I will start negotiating based on my experience about the task from previous projects, opinions from other experts, or some external factors we cannot control (such as dependency of the following tasks which the responsible organization has resource constraints after a certain date), we will eventually settle at a duration say 4 weeks that both of us are comfortable. So lesson number one is never accept the opening position as-is, because people tend to overstate what they need.

So how does this 4-week duration agreeable to both parties sound to you? Is this an optimal duration, taking into consideration of the interests of both the performing team and you, the project manager? The short answer is no. This is actually a duration that is more comfortable to you than the performing team. In project management it’s called a stretched target. In fact you may have 5 weeks in your pocket but you push for 4-week duration. Chances are the performing team feels that 4 weeks are not sufficient, and they have to work extremely hard to meet the deadline. You may probably ask, “Isn’t mutual trust, open communication, and fairness important to a project? Why don’t you use a target that’s comfortable and ‘fair’ to both sides? “The answer is pretty simple. If you use a target that’s comfortable to the performing team, say 5 weeks, they would eventually finish the task later than 5 weeks. That is not acceptable to you. You are the project manager, and you have to ensure the overall project is on time. So you push for 4 weeks and have a one week cushion that is kept only to you.

There are theories behind stretched target. The first is Student Syndrome as observed by Profession William Goldratt. Just like students, when a team knows that they have more time that is needed to perform task, they will relax in the beginning. So in a corporate environment they will probably work on some other urgent things first. Not until a time when they start feeling there is probably not sufficient time left, they won’t start working on your task.

The second theory is Parkinson Principle - People will expand work scope to suit the time given to them. If you give them 5 weeks which is more than what they need, and assuming they have nothing else to do except your project, they will still deliver the task late because they would keep adding new things to the original task. And most of the time these added things are not useful to your project (for example, more beautiful fonts and formatting for a Functional Specification document.)

So, is stretched target always ‘stretched’? Or since the work team knows that you are going to try squeezing on a stretched target, they would probably open a negotiation with a position that offers them more margins (say opening with 7 weeks instead of 6)? This is possible. And this happens in the real world all the time. Remember this is an art. Nobody knows exactly what the ‘right’ duration for a task is. Depending on your trust level with the working team, imposing a stretched target may harm relationship, or end up in a corporate bargaining game (for example, I heard some managers always cut duration estimation from the work teams by 50%, leading to the work teams increasing their opening position in the next round, and managers cutting by 60%, and so on.) Your ability to master this art of stretched target (and all these negotiations and politics) demonstrates your calibre as a successful project manager.

Next time when you attend my workshop, you probably won’t be surprised that when I say 25 minutes, I actually have 30 minutes in my pocket. :)

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.

Crisis Management vs. Project Management Part 3 (Final)

For team composition, a project should have a team defined in the very beginning. Some may argue that in the real world this may not be possible all the time, particularly in this state of economy when resources in most organizations remain tight. Having said that, it’s fair to say for most projects cannot proceed without a team structure in place and a large portion of the team members (say 80%) defined before the project starts.

A crisis team, on the other hand, will change depending on the work at hand. Handling a crisis requires a series of actions, usually in the form of projects. During different stages of the crisis, various teams will be formed. Back in May this year, Hong Kong still tried to prevent the first case of H1N1 from happening. The Control Centre kept track of any possible outbreak cases that would be ‘imported’ from other countries. When the first instance of H1N1 was spotted, they quarantined a hotel. That required the support of the Police and Immigration. During the second stage when the virus was clearly spreading within Hong Kong, the Control Centre worked with the Education Department and their own clinical staff to try containing the spread of the epidemic.

Finally it is really hard to give a designated end date for a crisis. Human knowledge is limited and it is really hard to give an end date to a crisis. Even it’s quite clear a crisis has ended, most of the time a small team will still be in alert mode carefully watching for any sign the crisis may re-emerge. A project, in contrast, always has a well-defined end date. This concludes our analysis of differences and commonalities between project management and crisis management.

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.

Crisis Management vs. Project Management Part 2

PM best practices demand that any projects should have well defined mission and objectives. In fact during project initiation stage the main task is to clarify and lay out clearly what the project wants to achieve in the end. For companies in the commercial sector, the objectives are usually tied to financial performance, customer satisfaction or company reputation. An example is a bank revamping its customer service center to improve customer experience, which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction and hopefully more business. So revamping customer service center is a well-defined objective, and the mission is better customer satisfaction.

For public or non-profit organizations, a project’s mission is usually related to some social needs. For example a social enterprise organization in Hong Kong launches a project to help under-privileged youth establish their business that is self-sustainable. This is the project’s mission. The objective of the project may be to launch a barber shop or a car maintenance service. Regardless of what it is, it has to be defined clearly in the beginning.

To handle a crisis, however, the key objectives may not be always well defined, though its mission is clear. Take the recent H1N1 pandemic as an example. The mission is quite simple – To minimize its impact to public health. The objectives and their implied course of action may change from time to time. In Hong Kong, for instance, the original objective was to prevent H1N1 from coming into the city. With this objective came those high-handed strategies like locking up a hotel for 7 days, or mandatory isolation for patients who were tested positive for the flu. Later when signs showed that the flu was spreading domestically, the objective shifted to ensuring sufficient clinical facilities for treating patients, and preventing massive outbreak among the most vulnerable groups such as young students. This demonstrates the elusive nature of a crisis. A crisis is simply too complicated for any crisis team to define clear objectives in the very beginning.

The next major differences between managing a project and a crisis is the tradeoffs among key constraints, namely, scope, schedule, cost, risk, resources and quality. For projects, best practices dictate that a balance should be achieved among them. It may depend on project stakeholders but few would tell a project manager “you have to meet the original schedule at all cost.” Some projects may favour on-time delivery, some on the exact features and functions to be delivered, and some on controlling cost budget. But the job of a project manager is really to balance these constraints so that the objectives of the project can be met, to the satisfaction of customers and stakeholders.

On the other hand, the key mission of tackling a crisis has to be accomplished regardless of costs or resources involved. Think about how the Obama government dealt with the bank crisis last year, the Hong Kong government currently handles H1N1, you begin the understand what we mean here. A crisis simply has to be resolved within a particular time frame, usually at the expenses of cost, resources and risk.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.

Crisis Management vs. Project Management

Due to my recent involvement with the medical community in Hong Kong, I had the chance to speak to clinical and nursing staff of several hospitals. One frequent question raised during those occasions is whether project management skills can be applied to crisis situation, such as that they are facing right now in the form of H1N1.

My short answer is no. It is true crisis management is closer to project management than to operation management, and some attributes of a good project manager are directly applicable to the situation of a crisis. However there are some characteristics of a crisis that are substantially different from those of a project.

Let’s look at the following table:

Crisis	Project	Operation
Unique mission but key objectives may change	Unique and well defined mission and objectives	Well defined objectives that are slow changing, if at all
Accomplish key objectives at all costs	Trade-off among scope, cost, time, quality & risk	Cost is usually the no. 1 objective
Dynamic team structure and resources	Heterogeneous & well defined team structure	Homogeneous and steady team
No definite end date – sometimes fluid schedule	Definite start and end dates – well defined time schedule	Ongoing with no specific end date

A lot have been said about the differences between project and operation so we are not going to repeat here. Let’s just focus on crisis management and project management.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.