In part three we will examine a very interesting root cause which will make a lot of people scratch their heads, it is Project Manager, yes the project manager is one of the root causes why projects fail, while from the first look this may seem awkward as so many people will simply say that projects fail when there is no project manager, however in my humble opinion a considerable percentage of projects fail because of poor project management, let’s see the sub causes.

Under project manager cause there are sub categories and each category has sub root causes as well, I spent some time trying to identify how the project manager can be one of the root causes for project failure, in fact a project manager can be the biggest success reason and ironically he also can the root cause of the project failure!

Lack of Education

It looks like that project management has become a very interesting job for a lot of people these days, I have seen so many people jumping from technical career to project management career, many organizations promote technical experts to project managers to manage projects, while some technical folks can make it with project management and achieve remarkable success, yet there is some kind of Halo Effect around people who shift from technology to project management, especially this transition often happens without receiving professional project management training, even though some people pursue a PMP (Project Management Professional) certificate to solidify their knowledge with project management, that is not enough, I can say that during the last few years the demand on PMP has become very high, I personally have seen a lot of people seeking PMP to just puff up their resumes and add “PMP” next to their names in email signature, so is PMP the cure? of course not, while getting certified helps a lot of project managers understand the standard, however if the standard is not implemented it is simply useless and this is actually what is happening in real world with many project managers, furthermore, project management is a science and art, and PMP is only teaching you the science! On the other hand going by the book is neither practical nor efficient.

Another reason under education is domain knowledge, while the theory tells us that a project manager can manage any kind of project, yet the domain experience is quite important, and the project manager has to spend some effort to learn the industry practices, this can be achieved either by professional training or via SMEs (Subject Matter Experts).

Power & Authority

The project manager needs to have power and authority to move things, ideally the project manager is expected to be the mover and shaker, however the power the project manager has is influenced by different factors such as organization type and culture, will come to this shortly, and support received from sponsor, there are different types of power, the reason why the power may be a failing factor of the project varies depending on the magnitude of power, sometimes the project manager has no power because of the above factors, and some other times the project manager may have power but the type of power the project manager is using is the problem, according to Bertram Raven there are Five Bases of Social Power:

• Referent Power: it is the power to attract and influence the team based on personal traits of the project manager and charisma.
• Expert Power: the project manager is seen as a professional, expert, resourceful, or knowledgeable.
• Reward Power: with this type of power the project manager will influence the team because they expect to be rewarded and they know that the project manager can influence the magnitude of reward, reward could be promotion, bonus, incentive, receiving certificate of appreciation, or any other kind of recognition.
• Positional Power: the project manager only influences the team through his position, “I am the project manager you just do what I am telling you!”, this kind of power can ruin the relationship between the project manager and the team, and usually with this type of power, the team does not believe in the project manager’s skill set
• Coercive Power: This is the worst type of power, it is related to punishment and threatening, obviously the team will always remain stressed with this type of power, and chances of creativity are very minimal.

Organizational Type

It is very important to the project manager to identify the type of organization the project is getting implemented in, basically there are three types:

• Functional Organization: sometimes it is called operational organization, where departments are categorized by function and a line/functional manager is on top of each department
• Matrix Organization: resources are pulled from different functional departments to work on the project, this type of organization varies according to the power the project manager has it can be weak, balanced, or strong matrix, obviously strong is the best for the project manager
• Projectized (Project Based): unlike matrix organization, the projectized type grants the project manager the highest level of power

The failing factor about the organizational type is that the project manager may be working in a pure functional organization or weak matrix where his power will be minimal and hence this will impact the project execution, as the resources will give all the loyalty to the functional manager and the project manager will struggle to get resource commitments, this will definitely impact project delivery, it is sad that some project managers work for years in some organizations without even thinking of the type of the organization they are working in!

Lack of Sponsor’s Support

The project may not have enough support from the sponsor, most of organizations appoint executives only to play sponsor’s role, and most of executives are either busy or absent, it is crucial for the project manager to receive support from the project sponsor, this keeps things going and let the team and stakeholders realize the importance of the project manager, on the other hand, the project sponsor may not have enough understanding of the project and this may develop an adversary attitude from the sponsor’s side. It is the project manager’s responsibility to educate the project sponsor about the project, the more you educate the sponsor the more support you will get from the sponsor.

Lack of People Management Skills

The project team can make or break your project, at the end of the day the project will only get delivered through people, and so the project manager must have people skills to get along with the team and different stakeholders, I can not think of a project manager who has no good people skills, I have identified the following causes under people management skills:

• Conflict Management: where you have people you will have conflicts, people are always different; different cultures, personalities, mentalities, etc., the project manager has to have good conflict resolution skills, while modern management considers the conflict as a positive indicator because it can result in constructive outcome and fruitful ideas, if the conflict is not managed it will turn to be negative and it can impact the project, standard strategies to manage conflicts are:

1. Confronting/Problem Solving/Win-Win: open, honest, direct, and face to face communication, this is the best way to handle conflicts
2. Compromising/Give & Take: deadlock situation where each party has to give away something to get something
3. Smoothing: usually leads to no consensus, this technique focuses on agreements and understates conflict areas
4. Avoiding/Withdrawal: this technique puts the conflict on hold for sometime unless the avoider leaves the conflict with no return, this is used if you want to delay, postpone, or gain time, also it is some kind of “let the problem resolve itself”
5. Forcing/Win-Lose: this is one of the worst techniques to be adopted, it ruins the relationship between conflicting parties, it is sometimes recommend for crisis management, where a life threatening decision has to be made, however if you find yourself taking this style, you have to start on fixing the relationship with the other party immediately!

• Managing Geeks: you have to know how to deal with geeks (Geek is a common term for someone who is obsessed by their computer, and has achieved a high level of expertise in their chosen area) in your team, dealing with geeks require certain aspects to be taken into consideration, geeks are important to your project to be a success, and they add too much value to the team, many project managers do not distinguish between managing geeks and managing non-geeks team members, and so they face a lot of problems, what can motivate a non-geek may not work for a geek, every time a geek is managed in a wrong way, chances of project failure are maximized, one of the best books out there to manage geeks from a pragmatic perspective is Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology

Every morning I think of new ways to lead people and the only thing I am always left with is RESPECT
Kareem Shaker

Management / Leadership Style

One of the most critical success factors for any project, because the management / leadership style that a project manager adopts is very rare to change as it is strongly related to the personal traits of the project manager, ideally the project manager has to know his management and leadership style, if the project manager is just dealing with the team with no strategy that would be a problem by itself, some leadership styles are destructive by themselves, the ones that can really jeopardize, if not kill, your project are:

• Autocratic/Authoritarian: in this style the project manager exerts maximum and all forms of power he has over the team, team members are not getting invited where decisions have to be made, with autocratic style a team member would act as a radio receiver while the project manager is the broadcaster and every team member has to tune to the project manager’s frequency, with this kind of dictatorship, team members start to take a back seat and just act in a very mundane way, without any mark of creativity
• Task Oriented: Task oriented is another style of bad management / leadership styles, and it is a form of the so called Task Oriented Management (TOM not TQM, how different!), a TO style is a subclass of the autocratic style, in this style the project manager plans, monitors,  assigns responsibilities, and possibly micro-manages team members to get the job done, a TO project manager has no time to listen to people and he cares only about the tasks in hand, obviously the team spirit is very low, and team members are very much expected to leave the project, try to work with better project manager who listens, cares, and treats them as humans not robots!
• Laissez-Faire: as you can see this is a French word means in English (Leave Do) or some other variation of that, and this is a style where the project manager leaves the team members work on their own, leaves them alone trying to resolve conflicts and issues, it is some kind of “let the problem solve itself”, while this gives some form of freedom to the team, this will involve a chaotic situation, a project manager can intentionally adopts this style when his power level is minimal, it is very likely that the project will fail if the project manager adopts the Laissez Faire.
• Secretive: While this is not a very bad style, and in fact sometimes it is required and mandated by a board level executive, however people will always fear the unknown, and so it is the responsibility of the project manager to share critical information with the team, simply the project manager should communicate the right information to the right people at the right time.

It is crystal clear that any style of the above four styles may ruin your project and most importantly the relationship with the team, some project managers have those styles by nature and ironically you may meet a project manager who is a task oriented or autocratic but he does not know that he is, it is important for the project manager to monitor his behaviour, a project manager who does not monitor himself can not simply monitor his project, the project manager and each and every one, including me, should always remember the famous adage of Socrates “Know thyself”, there is always a cure for everything but the one should just deeply excavate, first thing for the project manager who has any of the above management / leadership styles is to identify and admit that he has an issue by having such a style.

The project manager should spend some time trying to identify his real style, because he may have a wrong perception of one style, while his real style maybe different, all leadership styles can be summarized by two major aspects task orientation and people orientation. In 1964 Dr. Robert R. Blake and Jane Mouton developed the Managerial Grid Model, it depicts the people orientation versus the production orientation (the framework refers to task as production), the grid has a horizontal which represents production orientation and the vertical axis represents the people orientation, both are scaled from 1 to 9 with step of 1, as you can see from the bubble chart below ( I could not find any attractive representation of the the Managerial Grid Model, most of representations are archaic, and so I spent some time to represent the grid in a bubble chart using Microsoft Excel, did you like it? leave a comment)

• Impoverished: the project manager whose impoverished style is neither productive nor providing care to the team members, this kind of project manager will absolutely end up with a failed project
• Perish / Theory X: this is one form of the autocratic style, a project manager whose perish style is very task oriented and has little care about the team members, in fact all the autocratic style issues are also present in the perish style. The perish style is sometimes referred to as “Theory X” manager, as coined by professor Douglas McGregor, in fact XY theory is one of the most famous classical motivational theories. McGregor classifies managers into two major categories, first one is X where team members are often misjudged and seen as lazy, irresponsible, unprofessional, unproductive, and will only deliver if someone (i.e. project manager) micromanage them, conversely, theory Y assumes that team members are professional, like work, committed, self-motivated, and will deliver if they are given freedom and a room to be creative (Team Leader style)
• Country Club: team members are given high level of freedom and work environment is sort of a country club, while this style may be adopted with good intention by the project manager, ultimately it may results in casual organization which will surely impact productivity
• Team Leader / Theory Y: this is a blueprint of theory Y, where the team members are given too much flexibility and they feel happy, in turn they feel grateful with this freedom and so they deliver (this is obviously the best environment and style to work with, I can think of Google here)
• Middle of the Road: obviously a balanced style, where production and people are both considered to some extent, while this may seem a good option from the first glance, it may lead to dissatisfying both people and project

Emotional Intelligence

For decades, it has been strongly through that IQ is the one and only factor to be successful and it was also thought a manager with high IQ is a great manager who can get the work done through people, however this perception has changed with Emotional Intelligence (EI), in a nutshell EI teaches us how to manage identify and manage our emotions and others’ emotions as well, the project manager should have a good EQ (Emotional Quotient) in order to be able to manage his and team members’ emotions, with good EQ the project manager can influence the team and get the highest productivity whilst keeping people happy and energized. Even best project managers with great project management education and skills can jeopardize the project and have poor relationships with stakeholders if they cannot control and capitalize on their and stakeholders’ emotions, if you have not heard of EI before, I strongly urge you to consider reading Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman, EI plays a key role in applying positive politics

Politics

When you hear the word “politics” what perception you get? if it is a bad thing, and most times it is, then you need to tweak your thinking a little bit, politics has always been seen as a bad thing, however most of people practice it on daily basis in most, if not all, organizations, and one way or another your project will get impacted!

Politics is strongly related to power, people try to get power through politics, while politics can be played in dirty ways (in my viewpoint only incapable and incompetent people take the dirty path), you have to know how to practice politics in a clean way without feeling inner pain and get reprimanded by your conscience, the reason why politics is important is that, you will have many stakeholders in your project, each has his own hidden agenda, and you have to be smart enough to see each stakeholder’s agenda, you will also need to get along with every one to ensure the success of your project, this does not mean that you need to be a doormat to every stakeholders, that is not the case, you need to know how to get stakeholders to your side, and always keep your eyes open to adversary people who can screw your project in an a blink, that involves understanding everyone’s needs and expectations and consequently trying to fulfil those needs, watch for powerful stakeholders they can have a huge impact on your project, and so you always need to keep good relationship with them, when it comes to politics my only advise to you to always keep self respect and avoid dirty ways that you will find a lot of people apply.

Conclusion

Project manager should have robust education, soft skills, and EI in order to ensure the success of the project, sometimes the project manager is considered as the biggest risk or breaking factor of the project, and so project sponsors are highly urged to select a good project manager whose good record of success, professional education and certification (PMP is not the ultimate cure as you can see from the above), good soft skills with reasonable EQ. Second if the project manager is already managing a running project, he has to monitor his behaviour and style, and tweak it accordingly to ensure his and the project success, eventually nobody ever wants to be part of a failure!

Please do share your experience, give your feedback, let me know if I missed something, leave a comment, tweet, digg, rate the post, simply interact! I will be working on upcoming parts and as usual, will tweet as soon as done.

Related Posts:

• 5 Ways to Influence a HIPPO
• First Time Project Manager
• Why Projects Fail – Procurement
• 10 Ways to Avoid Marketecture Trap
• Why Do Projects Really Fail?