Top 10 traits of successful Project/Program Management

Out of innumerable traits successful business/managers have, I zeroed in top 10 traits exhibited by managers.

1. ORGANIZATION'S FUNDAMENTAL EXPECATION OUT OF A MANAGER:
Understand the expectation of the organization out of a manager. Every organization would have this documented. From my knowledge, the basic expecatation that any organization would have, out of a Manager is to manage the following four crucial parameters - SCOPE, COST, TIME AND QUALITY
As PMP guide says and I have realized it, over years is that - these are like four corners of a table. You touch one, the other three shake.
The biggest challenge is to manage all the four effectively in a well balanced manner that the stakeholders are satisfied.

2. THE POWER OF BEING A MANAGER:
Along with power comes great responsibility.
It is very easy to abuse power. The ratings you give for your team, is almost final, unless until, it is very evident that you have given an extremely bad rating to a very good candidate.
Hence it becomes important for the manager to gauge the strength weaknesses of the candidate before giving his/her opinion about a candidate to HR/Program Manager. It is crucial for the manager - not to be prejudiced/biased towards a specific team member.

3. REWARD/PUNISHING:
Reward the people, who have done the work for you. Be ready to punish the SAME people, if they refuse to work. When rewarding, distinguish between high performers and medium performers.
Be aware that - you would be setting a trend in the team - about 'High performer'. If you reward a medium-medium person as HIGH, remember - you would not get a higher performing candidate since, that is HIGH, for the rest of the team members. Hence the decision what to rate HIGH, is completely in your hands. Remember - HR, Program/Dept Heads, VPs can only guide you.
It is finally your call, as to what you would term as HIGH.

4. THERE IS NO SHRTCT TO SUCCESS:
As each one of us would have realized, there is no shortcut to success. Every person would have loads of stories of hardships he would have gone through, before being considered as valuable to the organization. Discipline and consistency
is the key factor that drives the person towards success. Success does not come to you, if you show flashes of brilliance(Remember Vinod Kambli?)
You have got be consistently brilliant and ought to have think different. There are no fixed strategies in this dynamic world.
You could read hundreds of books about management(including this one), but they can only act as guideline. It is of utmost importance to understand the pain areas of the organization. Every CxO would love to have employee think of the problem and his perspective and provide solution. Similarly every customer or stake holder would like the manager to think from his perspective and provide solution. Hence a manager ought to play a balancing role between all of his stakeholders.

5. DIPLOMACY/POLITICAL RACE:

At any organization, there would always be people, who are at a position higher up than you and you would feel very strong about - You doing the job better than him. Never get into criticising such folks. Remember - They have the power.
Do not spend efforts/time trying to prove yourself, onto such people. You would realize that the amount of energy it takes is vast and your creativity gets killed, in the process.
You have a choice - Either to get into the diplomacy line and get into the rat race, or create your own way of management. There are no predefined ways of successful management. There are only pointers.

Being involved in politics at office is your choice. Understanding office politics is a must.
You need to understand office politics to stay away from it.

6. TECHNICAL ROLE:
As a manager - you have a choice - To what level you would want to be involved from a technical perspective. I believe it is a personal choice. If technology excites you, I suggest be involved atleast to the extent of understanding whats going on. The biggest advantage of being involved in technical aspects is that - you would prove your worth to the team - inturn, you get respect.
But, get the right balance, dont be involved, to the extent that - you would starting solving all the team members problems. It is like making people run on the treadmill. You cannot run for them.
It is good to be involved in problem solving, but make sure that you are not the bottleneck in the process.

7. ROLE MODELS:
It becomes extremely important to have a couple of role models in your organization. It would immensly help you as a developer/manager. You could have multiple role models for a specific job function, or vice versa. BUT - HAVE ONE.


8. APPRAISALS:
This is one of the most important aspects that depicts your management capabilities. On one side, you would have the Senior Management(may be you belong there), and on other side, there are your team members who would always want - MORE(They probably would not know, how much they want/deserve and WHY, but certainly would have a number in mind, which would invariably HIGHER, than your budget considerations)

Unfortunately, the decision on whether to promote a candidate, whether to give a significant raise to a specific candidate lies squarely on his/her manager. Hence it is very important to learn the art of SELLING your candidates to your boss, be it, within the organization or outside.

9. DONT HOLD ON TO RESOURCES:
While it is of utmost importance for the manager to deliver on time with promised quality, it is equally important to cater to individual needs and aspirations. If you have a high performing individual in your team, and that if he wants to move on to another assignment, that interests him, let him go. Dont hold on to the resources. You could always train other people to do things for you. While is more easily said than done, trust me, make a sincere attempt the first few times, you would get the satisfaction of helping the employee play a better job elsewhere.

10. FEEDBACK
Take feedbacks from people regularly. Especially if you have your role models within the organization.
Do not forget to ask three questions to your boss:
a. What are my strengths?
b. What are my weaknesses?
c. Do you think, I make a difference to the organization?

Many a times, you could get very abstract and lengthy answers to these questions. Make sure that you dont get lost in the sugar coated messages. If you are not getting the jist of the feedback, ask him to summarise it in a very simple way.
I have had the luxury of taking feedback from many of my superiors in this industry which have helped me immensly.
But make sure, that the feedback is genuine and is given from a person, who cares for your wellbeing.

Promotions and Incompetencies

I would be nearly correct if I state that - The software industry in India is still in nascent stage.
As a result of which you would have seen people becoming Project Managers in 4-6 years timeframe(I did not: fortunately or unfortunately).
A Software Engineer performing his role to perfection, is promoted to a Senior Software Engineer(SSE). A SSE perfoming good is promoted to a TeamLead/TechLead and then to a Project Lead and then eventually to a Project Manager.
Remember - at each level he/she is expected to play a different role. An extremely good performing Tech Lead, might not make a good manager material at all.

However, there is a need for the organization to recognize him/her, promote him/her. Hence he/she is promoted. The promoted employee is elated and happy at his/her new found designation, salary and hence probably status too. The employee and the organization, fails to see: whether his/her strengths, fit into the new role description(I am sure that the HR in every organization would have taken enough care to make sure that every role description, would be depicted in such a way that - At no point of time, you would confidentally say - I CAN DO IT ALL THE ROLES PERFECTLY!

If by chance you were able to - then either you are too brilliant, OR the HR has not spent enough time and effort in setting the roles and responsibilities, for that particular job profile

Take a case of a Project lead, promoted to a Project Manager(Few organizations, feel this designation is too naive and go ahead with other names like: Development Mgr or an Engineering Manager). Now this new Project Manager is in a dilemna: whether to get involved into the technical stuff OR not. The dilemna partially also crops out because of the fact that - he suddenly starts representing the Management. If the Manager is provided with sufficient resources, then probably, he would not bother to get into technicalities. He has a choice.
So slowly but steadily, he would start getting out of touch with technology. He would start reading about business, management and probably end up with an external MBA degree also(Nothing wrong or right with it).
Eventually, some day a Project Manager has to become a Program Manager, a Division/Unit Head, so on and so forth. Organizations eventually promotes an employee to a level of incompetency: And then states - You are not performing to the level expected, thus, forcing you to leave the organization and move on.

The point here is: There is an urgent need for employees/employers to identify what his strength's are. If a person is good at coding(Let me term it as a talent. You have seen extremely good programmers and you know, there is something extra ordinarily exceptional about them), I believe, he should continue to code, irrespective of the designation. However, every human needs: money, social recognition and hence decides: it does not look good, if he still performes the job that is described by his previous designation. Hence the employee, gets encouraged to get promoted to a role, where he would well in advance know: he might not be able to perform it well, since the joy is missing.
The employee too hence, subconsciously, encourages the organization to eventually promote him out to a level of incompetency.

The challenge each organization faces is: To recognize the strengths(talents and skills) and weaknesses in an individual. There are also organizations, who dont think it is an important activity at all! In areas like Sports, the strengths are apparent. E.g: Sachin Tendulkar came to the team as a batsmen. The key here is: The person has identified that his talent is batting - Unlike in the software industry, where every engineer is expected to be good in coding, irrespective of his strengths.

So, the industry sets a unachievable trend - expect engineers to be good at all the jobs that are to be done on a day-to-day basis. Result - A huge influx of engineers who says that they are good in Architecting, Designing, Coding, Managing and everything.Pick any resume - you would realize this(including mine!)

This further complicates the interviewer/organization's job difficult - to the extent that they are in a dilemna, how to use the resource. Hopefully, the organization, knows what kind of candidate they are looking for and the candidate what kind of job he is looking at. Unless the organizations are forthcoming in the nature of candidates they are looking for and more importantly the candidates are aware and tell their strengths/weaknesses, you would continue to see technical guys being made to manage and eventually - being promoted to a level of incompetency.