WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURES FOR PROJECTS, PROGRAMS, AND ENTERPRISES

Gregory T. Haugan, PMP

Guerrilla Project Management

CHAPTER 1

A WILLINGNESS TO LEARN FROM THE PAST

The best PMs are always thinking about what’s in front of them in the context of what they’ve learned from the past. And if that past wasn’t always great, they won’t blindly, irrationally assume that things will be better this time, especially when there’s no evidence to support that optimism. Even if (maybe especially if) they hear, “It’s different this time, really.” Here’s what they know: Without a change in thinking and approach, no, it isn’t.

It’s the first question I ask when I’m interviewing PMs: What did you learn from your last project experience? And it’s a bad sign if they take a long time answering.

The best PMs are always asking: What have we learned here? And how can we apply what we’ve learned going forward? More specifically, what have we learned that’ll allow us to:

• Repeat the good outcomes, and
• Make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again?

It’s a key question to ask about any PM or organization that works on projects: has he, she, or it ever made the same project mistakes more than once? If so, they’re not learning—not learning about the critical importance of comprehensive project closeout reports (see Chapter 16) or about the importance of planning for and tracking mandatory performance deliverables (see Chapter 9), for example. The best PMs institutionalize learning; they won’t compromise on the need to do project closeout reports on every project, and you’ll see them run reviews at the end of every phase of a project to ensure their team gets better, every step of the way.

CHAPTER 2

A NEED TO KNOW WHY

As far as I can tell, there are two inviolable truths about people and projects:

1. There’s a reason behind everything that everyone does on, to, for, with, or against a project. No one does anything without a reason.
2. In a stakeholder’s mind, no matter what they are doing on, to, for, with, or against a project, it makes complete sense to them.

The key skill for a PM then, is figuring out: where are these project stakeholders coming from, and most important, why are they acting the way they are? (“Because he’s an idiot!” is never the right answer.) The thinking PM asks “Why?” all the time, guided by two principles:

1. He never allows himself to think that someone is doing something “just because he’s stupid.”
2. He never treats anyone as an “enemy” of the project but, rather, as a potential ally he just hasn’t figured out yet.

This approach makes a broad assumption about the intent of the project stakeholder community: It’s very rare that a stakeholder is really out to kill a project, even if it feels that way sometimes.

Asking “Why?”—over and over and over again—should take the PM back to root causes. Without an understanding of the root causes of a stakeholder’s behavior and their attitude toward a project, the PM probably won’t be able to put an effective stakeholder management plan in place.

Note

1. Wikipedia, “5 Whys,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys (accessed August 9, 2010).