Strengths, Skills and Project Managers

A talent or an ability is a strength if you can find yourself doing it happily, repeatedly, successfully. These kind of strengths are transferable from situation to situation but is limited to the person.

Skills enable people to avoid trial and error and incorporate discoveries from best performers in the industry. Skill is transferable from person to person but is limited to specific situations

Project Managers find themselves to be the at the intersection of the senior managements search for value and an individual team members search for identity.
Project Managers add value to their team and their sponsors, when they build relationships upward, downward and sideward.
Project Managers can hold up the mirror to their team members as individuals to discover their skills and strengths.

People are wired to need attention of some kind. Project Managers are wired to give attention, feedback, encouragement and support. The Project manager's role is not to teach strengths but to match strength to roles and activities. It is to understand subtle differences in people and match the task to the right person.
One of the signs of a good project managers are that they can understand the unique strengths of their team members and utilize it for the Sponsors search for value. Human Resources is the last vast reserve of value left on planet earth and Project Managers have it in them to extract it and utilize it.

TIME Management - A key ingredient in innovation

PROJECTS help in piloting innovation in organisations to increase productivity, quality and make an impact to the bottom line. Two of the most important ingredients in innovation and creative thinking are PEOPLE and TIME

The Japanese believe in four types of Managerial TIME
Operational time - time necessary to correct yesterdays errors
Strategic time - time needed to plan for future
Innovative time - time needed to become more competitive tomorrow
Kaizen time - time needed for continuous improvements

Aspiring innovators more than anything else, need the innovative time and use it for thinking, planning, collaborating, piloting and experimenting. Google and 3M are two organisations who believe in the innovative time for managers and team members.

Project Managers would take the step in the right direction, if they allocate more TIME for creative thinking in projects for themselves and their team members.

PM Benefits - Success is Repeatable

Project Management framework ensures a REPEATABLE process which makes it easy for an organisation to perform a future project better than a previous project. It also gives confidence to the customer that an organisation can consistently achieve success under various environments and conditions.

1.The REPEATABLE PROCESS ensures that projects are planned and executed CONSISTENTLY across the dimensions of an organisation, location.
Example: In a core banking program consisting of multiple projects that involve the deployment of core banking solution in a global bank that has branches in multiple countries and cities, the projects need to be consistent across the whole bank, across locations.
Two or more project managers in an organisation will follow the same process steps in starting and completing a project, ensuring consistency in the performance of projects across an organisation.
It will also ensure that two different project managers, one representing a customer and another representing a vendor are able to understand each other. This will make sure that one project manager can take over from another in an emergency.

2.The REPEATABLE process will ensure that projects are planned, executed EFFICIENTLY by an organisation across the dimension of time.
The future projects will use the basic standards or core standards of past projects. Innovations will be built on the standard foundation of common processes. This will ensure that the project wheels are not re-invented.
Example: The core banking upgrade projects in a bank involves replacing the old banking system with a new system while retaining the customer and account data already in the system. These kind of projects involve conversion of data from the old system to the new system. This is the common, standard characteristic in all core banking projects. The knowledge of project management process called SCOPE MANAGEMENT helps in providing a boundary around the work that is performed. This helps the organisation to perform future projects with the common patterns of past projects but also adopting new customized, innovative techniques that can make core banking conversions happen faster, with higher quality.