Project managers often face tough times when they need to pull the strings that may make others uncomfortable. Those mainly include conducting project reviews for balancing the triple constraints, facilitating the reviews of the deliverables for quality or compliance, and providing constructive criticism to the team members for corrective or preventive actions.

Everyone likes to hear or deliver good news, however good project managers are expected to be the experts at relaying when things don’t go as planned, typically coupled with a pro-active solution.

The following are the most successful approaches good project managers often practice.

I’ve never understood the obsession with “green” status among IT application development project managers, and the intense pressure put on them to “stay green” by the program management offices (PMOs) they report to. We would benefit from a cultural shift away from avoiding yellow status. 

For those not in the field, it is in vogue to express IT project status using a stoplight analogy, where green means things are going well, yellow indicates some quality, schedule, or budget risk, and red means there’s imminent risk of failure.

I recently completed ScrumMaster training ably presented by Lyssa Adkins. Throughout the two-day class we appreciated Lyssa’s Zen-like, enabling, style. If her name is familiar, it’s because Ms. Adkins is the author of the book Coaching Agile Teams, one of the leading texts on the subject.

I’ve participated on agile projects, but so far only in a piggish/chickenish role, once in a three-week stint as a consulting architect and twice as the project manager serving as interface to the non-agile organization. To me Ms. Adkins rocks at making students very introspective and critical of their past project experiences.  These lessons stand out:

Introduction: 

This month’s blog entry explores the complex relationship between project success and project leadership.  Risk of failure is potentially higher for IT projects than commonly acknowledged and, by all accounts, it would appear that success hinges less on strict adherence to methodology than on leadership.  Leadership, of course, assumes manifold forms, but in the context of this discussion I narrow it down to its core:  the moral/ethical responsibility of project managers to "tell it like it is," so that appropriate decision-makers can make effective decisions in a timely manner. 

This entry will be published in 3 parts:

• Part 1 will discusses some of the long-term trends in project management, that have been recorded over the last 15 years.  Given the ever-growing emphasis on rigorous management of IT projects, the interpretation of these findings continues being debated, but the conclusions are unambiguous.
• Part 2 will shine the spotlight on ethics in the context of project success.  Ethics in project management elude rigid definition, particularly as the PM discipline has evolved to encompass truly global projects, but even so, project management success is not synonymous with project success. 
• Part 3 will make the link between success, leadership, and ethics explicit.

I’m curious what experience others have had in this regard.  Are there other aspects of leadership that play a pivotal role in your projects?  Are ethics a primary driver of decision-making in your organization… or an ancillary consideration?  What effect have these played on the successful delivery of your projects? 

Please feel free to comment below.