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    The Mindset for Creating Project Value
    The Mindset for Creating Project Value
    The Mindset for Creating Project Value
    Ebook129 pages2 hours

    The Mindset for Creating Project Value

    By John C. Byrne, PhD and Thomas G. Lechler, PhD, MSc

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    Using empirical data from their research study, Thomas Lechler and John Byrne demonstrate that the success of a project strongly depends on the specific attitude of the project manager and the project management decision-making process. They also address: • Limiting effects of the Triple Constraints Paradigm • Role of uncertainty in projects. Leaders within organizations will find the results useful to emphasize and encourage entrepreneurial behaviors of project managers in a way that influences project performance beyond the simple application of tools and techniques. The book addresses several stakeholders, including who are responsible for implementing projects, those who suffer the consequences if things go wrong, and those who are responsible for the selection and development of project managers. The Mindset for Creating Project Value provides insight into how a different perspective is necessary to better understand the limitations of project management in order to better explain the many phenomena that are related to the management of projects and, consequently, to improve the practical outcome.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherProject Management Institute
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781628251340
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      Book preview

      The Mindset for Creating Project Value - John C. Byrne, PhD

      (Ph.D.)

      Introduction

      Overview

      The success or failure of projects is a topic that has interested both practitioners and theorists for decades. Several attempts have been made to report in detail what went wrong or well in a project implementation as defined, with the hope that all could learn from it and, as a consequence, projects would be managed with higher success rates in the future. We take a different perspective and approach. Our interest is to look for the exceptional thinker and manager—one who is not fixed on what is given, but seeks out and acts on opportunities to create the maximum value for a project's stakeholders.

      This report addresses a study which was partially funded by Project Management Institute (PMI) in 2008 and 2009, with the objectives of: (1) investigating the basic premises and limiting assumptions of the widely accepted project management paradigm, and (2) offering an alternative perspective to the general conceptual and practical discussion in project management. This study is an attempt to change the thinking about how project managers should address their responsibilities in managing their projects. We did not wish to study team-related behaviors or leadership issues like teamwork quality or conflicts, etc. It is far too easy to drift off in this direction, even though many empirical studies showed that these factors are related to project success. For readers interested in these discussions we refer to the work on organization and interpersonal conflict—e.g., Coser, 1956; Guetzkow and Gyr, 1954; Hearn and Anderson, 2002; Pinkley, 1990; Barki and Hartwick, 2001; Thomas, 1992; and a plethora of others. While all recognize that project management is about getting people to do what needs to be done (Klein, 2006) our focus is on the decision-making process of the project manager.

      As cited by Darmody (2007, pg. PS.15.1), Jim Dodge gave a lecture in London in 1919 titled An Exhaustive Review of the Formation of the Earth and its Oceans, with Some Conclusive Educational Remarks on the Solar System and Prognostications on the Ultimate End of the Universe. Title notwithstanding, a comment made regarding the talk was, What's the use? To which we are told his response was:

      If your ultimate ambition is to roll a ton of rails,

      To build an automobile or make a keg of nails,

      You will find that life's a burden, you will find existence stale,

      If you live by rule and precedent you pretty sure will fail,

      And if you only work and sleep and eat three meals a day

      Why there isn't any answer and it really doesn't pay.

      Not to be outdone, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is also quoted as saying, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them—or to use the lingua franca of shop foremen, If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Related to project management, we propose that a different perspective is necessary to better understand the limitations of our project management. This is in order to better explain the many phenomena that are related to the management of projects and, consequently, to improve the practical outcome. Steele (2003) stated: Radical improvement of project performance is impossible as long as projects are approached in the same way as they have been in the past. Refinements of technique can lead, at best, to incremental gains in project performance and do not solve the systemic and structural problems that plague projects. (Pourdehnad, 2007). We started with the idea that A project's success or failure results from a complex pattern of changing conditions in the internal and external environments of that project. These changes happen because of a concurrence or convergence of conditions that did not exist previously but are now present (Pourdehnad, 2007). We wish to add the comment …or recognized, as hindsight often tells us what didn't exist was merely something overlooked. With this in mind, we attempted in this study to address behavioral issues as well as decision-related issues on a different level of analysis: the mindset of how project managers implement their projects.

      Conducting the research for this study proved the adage that nothing is as simple as it seems. It was quite clear that our research required determining to what extent the mindset of a project manager impacts success, or failure, of a project. The research opened a Pandora's box of issues, the first being, simply, who is a project manager, or what matters in a project? We quickly realized that the discussion needs to be conducted on a different level of abstraction, or a different logic is needed to contribute something innovative. From that point of view, this study is not about the development of a new set of tools that if applied will guarantee a higher success rate. It is more about demonstrating by way of an empirical study that the way of thinking influences project performance beyond the simple application of tools. Thus, this study addresses several stakeholders, in particular those who are responsible for implementing projects, those who will suffer the consequences if things go wrong, and those who are responsible for the selection and development of project managers.

      We do not claim that failure could be prevented if the results of our study are applied. On the contrary, we discuss the role of uncertainty (unknown-unknowns) in projects, and this is related to the notion that it is by nature impossible to always succeed. We show that changing the view on how to conduct the implementation of a project has severe consequences for the performance of a project. Our results show that there are people who question the constraints of a project and who, despite these constraints, achieve extraordinary results because they implement projects with a different mindset. Consequently our results are, for some, not new or surprising at all. But we hope that for those who are not aware of these practices, this study will trigger a new thought process. We do not attempt to define specific recipes for success; rather, we use empirical data to demonstrate that the success of a project strongly depends on the specific mindset of the project manager.

      Limiting Effects of the Triple Constraints Paradigm

      The management of projects is traditionally thought to be concerned with meeting three main requirements : budget, schedule and technical specifications. These fundamental project objectives are known as the triple constraint. These restrictions set and define the fundamental base by which many existing tools and methods are developed and evaluated to support and improve the decisions and the management processes for implementing projects. The combination of these three fundamental objectives and the methods/techniques/tools to allocate and coordinate limited resources to implement complex projects define a specific project management paradigm that is called the Triple Constraint paradigm (TC-paradigm). The TC-paradigm was developed during the implementation of several major defense programs in the early 1950 and later improved for the successful launch of the Apollo missions to the moon.

      The term paradigm became a buzzword often used in the management literature. It is derived from the ancient Greek paradeigma, which means model, framework, pattern, or example.¹ Compared to the natural sciences for which Thomas Kuhn (1970) studied their impact, paradigms in management are far more numerous and often several competing paradigms are available at any one time. In the view of Kuhn, paradigms are guidelines for

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