Agile Ones

The elephant should respect the mouse

Time is one of the three key axes of classic project control, along with financial resources and conformance to requirements.   Project managers appropriately put major emphasis on time as displayed on the wall calendar, and great energy is spent on hitting deadlines measured in days, weeks, and months.  When a project comes in on or before a due date, the PM can be justly proud (assuming no major feathers have been ruffled in the budget and quality domains).

Time on the calendar, master schedule, is a something of the elephant in the room when we talk about time in the project context.  But I want to talk a little about the mouse, time as measured in minutes, and how a project manager can put that mouse to work in service of the greater good.  One mouse in particular is an easy one to tame, with a reward – making sure that scheduled meetings end on or before their planned and published end point.

What’s the big deal with a meeting running late?  Happens every day, right?

The big deal is team cohesion.  One of the major duties of the PM is to ensure good communication, and meetings are a vital technique for getting messages to move well between people on a project team.  This gives the PM the powerbase for calling meetings and helping to guide them to productive results.  But when the PM’s meetings run long (and especially when a reputation develops that the PM’s meetings often run over) a few things happen.

First, the team begins to suspect that the PM has not done an effective job of planning the meeting agenda.  This erodes confidence in the project leadership.  Second, the team begins to sense that the PM may not respect the team members time, because a late meeting will usually result in a cascade of lateness after this meeting for them, which can create subtle or perhaps even not so subtle resentment.  Third, and this is particularly the case of the PM does much of the speaking at his or her meetings, the team may begin to feel like the PM is using power in uncool ways — or perhaps if there are other chatterboxes running off at the mouth, and the PM can’t control it, the PM may be accused of being to weak to use power as it should be used.

So, the PM who builds a reputation for always having meetings that run over gets thought of as not worthy of the team’s confidence, as a target of resentment, or as a serial weakling or a serial abuser of authority.  How much harder is it to lead a team to great overall results when the PM is forced to carry this kind of baggage.

Now imagine for the moment the reciprocal – the PM who’s meetings either end spot on schedule, with the work of meeting done, or even more delightful, the meeting that plows through its agenda and winds up done 10 minutes early.  Do this for a few projects, and then see how easy it can be to attract a talent to your team for future projects.  Excited talent.

Now a perfect set of meetings is not going to make up for project that can’t hit a date on the calendar or manage its budget. But getting the little things right is how we build to the big ones.  Take a look at the Mythbusters clip above, which shows that real world elephants show real respect for the real world mouse.  You ask me, this is no accident of nature – respect the mouse – good things will follow.

Tags: Agile Development, change, change management, Leadership, management, meetings, Project Manager, project planning, project process, time

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Business Drivers, Leadership, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.