1. What is the key lesson this author is sharing?

2. why is it such an important lesson?

3. what are the tangible lessons you can take to incorporate this to your own practice?

Though people have used this quotation to the point of clich about everything from sports to dog whispering, I have come to see how it has specific relevance to our role as project managers. Given that the success and efficiency of a project ultimately reflects on our ability to drive the initiative, we obviously are in a leadership role. Yet, the matrix structure makes this standing tenuous, as there is very little tangibility to our control over the project. We don't have traditional leverage, such as hiring and firing, and we're not even in direct interaction with the day-to-day delivery of the project in a way that allows us to "lead by example." We're not even a permanent presence in the organization! This makes leadership almost a paradox for project managers, so the saying, "Leadership is taken, not given" has a very literal, almost concrete, truth as a project manager.32 The Keys to Our Success Controlling a Project through Rhythm and Cadence In 1992, during my time with IBM, I was involved in a project that was so infamous, it was still used in training more than a decade later as an example of how to deal with a failing project. It has come to be known simply as the Bridge Project. This project was doomed from the beginning with everything from a scope that only allowed 67% of the necessary budget to crucial scheduling problems. But learning comes through experience, and the most valuable lessons come through negative experiences, so it should come as no surprise that I learned much about how to be the leader of a project through the Bridge Project. With the project clearly out of my control, our most senior local executive offered me the "privilege" of regularly meeting with him one on one to discuss how the project was going. In these meetings, this executive taught me about how projects are like tennis matcheswhatever balls are on our side of the net are our responsibility to return to the other side; whatever is on the other side is out of our hands. So, going into the next two or three meetings, I simply made sure that all balls were kept off my side of the net. The specs of the Bridge Project were so generic that even when we satisfied them, there was still an end-of- project mess, full of open issues to be resolved. Before I took leadership of the project, the client dominated the meeting by listing all issues that weren't to their satisfaction. We developed a list of open action items that collated all the disparate loose ends into one master referense sheet. We were clear with the client that whatever was on that comprehensive list of items would be completed; whatever wasn't on it would not be completed. We outlined next steps for each action item, and we made sure that we did all the next steps on our end, assuring that all balls remained in their court.2 - Gus Cicala 33 An amazing thing started to happen in these meetings. Whereas the client previously dominated the meetings with their complaints, we started to dominate the meetings with our questions. Projects are much like negotiations because they're so nebulous up front, but then you flesh things out and find a middle ground as you go. And there's a saying in negotiations that whoever asks the most questions wins. We took leadership of the meeting by listing all balls left on their side of the net that were stalling the project's success. There were several examples of this. We were in charge of an IBM machine that printed tickets for a ferry. The client would say that the customers were dissatisfied with how quickly the tickets were printing. We reprogrammed the computers on the spec that they needed to be printed within five seconds. When the client came back and said they still weren't printing fast enough, we said that they were printing to the spec. We asked for a show of hands of who had test cases showing that it wasn't printing at satisfactory speed, and there was nothing but a room of full pockets. We'd make requested changes and ask them for feedback. We'd ask about reviewing documents still pending their feedback. They'd complain about open issues, so we'd ask about next steps, telling them we couldn't move forward until they told us what to do. In short, we kept the balls in their court, and it was clear to them that we couldn't move forward until they were returned to us. When you aren't taking care of your own issues in an organized fashion, then all you are doing is pushing blame back and forth, which only makes both sides imperceptive to what they could be doing themselves to make the project run smoothly. When you leave no room to be questioned, you can ask the questions, and you'll find that you'll get results. I've found in my twenty years of project management since the Bridge Project that this is the most pain-free way of taking the reins of a project.34 The Keys to Our Success Control: An Objective Measure When you ask a project manager whether he or she has control over a given project, they will generally respond subjectively. They'll say, for example, "I think it's going well." Note, however, that, in the example of the tennis game, control is entirely objective. When we have all the balls off our side of the net, and they are returned regularly, we control the project. More specifically, when the execution processes are on a regular, cyclical basis; when there is a weekly (or monthly) cycle for collecting actuals of cost, labor, and schedule; and when we're analyzing variances to the baseline, we control a project. When we are not accomplishing these things, we are not properly leading the project toward success. One reason people confuse project control as a subjective measure is because some degree of luck goes into every project's success, independent of how much control the project manager has. In other words, being in control of a project does not guarantee perfect execution, and being out of control does not guarantee failure. In this way, project management is much like parenting. We all know someone who turned out OK despite being raised poorly by his or her parents, and we all know someone who faced challenges in their life despite a good upbringing. This does not mean that you should try to get away with being bad parents, and it does not mean that you should test your fate by letting projects get out of control! Tracking actuals does not necessarily preclude the variances from becoming negative, but as long as you know when the variances are at risk of becoming unfavorable and attempt to determine and rectify the causes, you are giving the project the best chance at success. Likewise, not having any idea of what's going on with the project can sometimes turn out OK, but don't confuse good results with effective leadership. Out-of- control projects that succeed do so in spite of their project manager, not because of them.2 - Gus Cicala 35 So even though it is far more nuanced to measure "how" a project is goingand even though this measure is not even necessarily a reflection on the project manager control over a project is cut-and-dried. Fulfill the objective measures of controlling a project, and you give it the best chance at success. Maintaining Control through Front-Ending the Pain Keeping the project in rhythm and under control minimizes the need for any confrontation, and ideally, we will not need to intervene at all. However, the ideal scenario is seldom the case, and problems inevitably arise. Being a leader means being the first to sight these unfavorable signs, and relaying this information will make us unpopular among our clients. This is one of the most difficult aspects of managing a project. This aspect of our job is counter-instinctive. While it is human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, it is the imperative of risk management to seek pain actively. To take it one step further, not only should we actively seek pain, but we should also seek areas of potential pain, acting on problems that aren't even problems yet. We avulse pain from its more comfortable status as a far-off pain that might not come to fruition and force ourselves to experience it in the present. By doing so, we have to play the role of messenger to those likely to be in denial or, worse yet, to blame us for the news. This will feel like the wrong thing to do to all but the most experienced project managers because our intuition will naturally try to persuade us to leave this discomfort for the future. However, it is crucial to front-end this pain as much as possible to maintain the project's rhythm. When we are proactive, we can revise the plan, re-baseline, and so on; when we're reactive, budgets are exceeded, deadlines are missed, and specs aren't met.36 The Keys to Our Success In other words, the earlier you identify potential concerns, the more options you'll have for assuring the project doesn't fall out of cadence. If you procrastinate the pain, then instead of wondering what might go wrong, you'll wonder what did go wrong. Conclusion Though it is common knowledge that leadership is a central pillar of project management, it is less easily expressed how to lead as an outside entity to the organization. As the saying goes, you need to "take" the leadership because it is not given to you organically through the structure of the company. The least controversial way to take leadership is to establish control of the project simply through keeping it in rhythm. When you act on your duties with regularity, those you are working with will naturally tend toward following that rhythm. When there's risk of falling out of rhythm, you need to confront the potential "pain" preemptively and explicitly to have the best chance of delivering the project on time, on budget, and with high quality.2 - Gus Cicala37 Gus Cicala Gus is the president, CEO, and founder of Project Assistants, Inc. He is a Wharton Business School graduate with more than twenty- five years of project management experience and thirty-years' worth of information technology development and consulting expertise. During his time with Project Assistants, he has brought his project and portfolio management expertise to an array of clients across the US and Western Europe. Gus is a popular speaker and writer on project and portfolio management and Microsoft Project as an enterprise project-management technology platform. He has published many popular articles and books on the subject, including contributions to Macmillan's Que book series: Special Edition: Using Microsoft Project. He is also a contributing author to the third edition of Expediting Drug and Biologics Development and a member of Microsoft's product advisory council.