Articles Kerstin Lehmann Partners

Project Inefficiencies – or how to improve project management by improving leadership

Project Inefficiencies – or how to improve project management by improving leadership

The general definition of leadership “is the ability to get things done through others, focusing the efforts of a group of people toward a common goal and enabling them to work as a team”. After more than 20 years in project management, many as the leader of large, international projects and teams of up to 350 people – I strongly believe that leadership skills are a key success factor. Or vice versa, make the project inefficient if there is a lack thereof. It is indeed the project managers job to focus the project team towards a common goal and enable his team to work together - and to deliver the project.

Overall I think it is safe to say that after so many years on the job, I have seen lots of project managers purely administrating a project. I saw a couple actually managing their projects and just every now and then I experienced a project manager actually leading a project.

I would like to share some main challenges most project managers – not only, but especially when working in IT – experience:

  1. Many times, projects are reporting GREEN as the overall status towards senior management, whereas the project team members strongly believe the actual status is RED.
  2. Decisions that are taken from senior management are often not fully transparent for a project team and therefore not understandable and as a consequence often not implemented.
  3. Decisions that are not taken by senior management – but that would be crucial for the project team – raise questions and insecurities within the project team.
  4. Everyone working in IT knows this: It is business as usual that projects get postponed, postponed and postponed. Sometimes a project eventually ends with a happy ending, with “only” a one-year delay. But it happens to the best of us that sometimes a project simply gets canceled in the end, after we have invested our heart, sweat and a lot of work in it (due to reasons such as scope changes, costs or just senior leadership change).
  5. Once a project is canceled, everyone involved tries to understand the reasons behind it: “Business requirements not clear enough”, “IT has not delivered in time”, “Business has not executed test cases fast enough” or just “Project has been too complex and was underestimated” are reasons that are often all true but at the same time just symptoms of a much more fundamental leadership problem. In German, we have a saying: “the fish stinks from the head”...  

So what can a project manager do to handle these challenges?

  • A project manager must have a clear vision of how a project should be executed to achieve the expected business benefits. This vision must include an answer to the question which IT implementation methodology should be used – including waterfall, agile or a special mixture of both. But this vision must also include more, to be successful. It should include all factors from project governance and organization, reporting and progress tracking, to communication and alignment with the business.
  • Another key element is then the translation of the project vision into a clear project structure including roles and responsibilities for each and everyone involved, a master plan and a deliverables list as well as a resource plan. This logical flow structures how the different components fit together and lead to the overall target (realization of business benefits). It is very important that all key project members and stakeholders understand this structure.
  • The execution of the project is the execution of the project vision with a reporting structure and cycles based on defined targets. From bottom to top requesting each project member to participate, as well as transparent and open communication from top to bottom, for example by regularly distributing steering committee reports to all team members.
  • The biggest challenge within each project and of each project manager is to translate the project status into immediate actions which require a good understanding of the status including the root cause of accumulated delays and its implications plus the underlying issues of the delays. The phrasing of the corrective action and its acceptance by all project stakeholders is, therefore, the key to success.    

I strongly believe that successful project leaders have a clear project vision, manage to translate the vision into an execution organization and to execute the vision with clear messages and actions in case of issues and risks for project team members and steering members alike.