Emotional Intelligence With Project Management

If you want to do good work, you have to be able to motivate the people doing the work. The web is about people: they make it and they use it. Learning to work with the emotions that drive all people is key to a successful project.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss
■ What emotional intelligence is
■ How to merge emotions and the workplace in a new professionalism
■ Why emotional intelligence is important
■ What emotional intelligence looks like in action
■ Why caring is the bottom line

Emotions affect everything people do: every exchange, every conversation, every task—even in business. Think about it. The stock market rises and falls based on how investors feel about the market’s stability; the consumer confidence index fluctuates based on the way people feel about the economy. These metrics that we think of as business are driven by feelings—some rational and fact-based and some not. Sometimes hard numbers say one thing, but a pervasive mood can override logic. Because emotions drive actions, project managers have to figure out how to work with these emotions, not ignore them. It won’t do much good to focus on a person’s action without looking at the emotions that led him to do it. Emotions are not liabilities; they’re assets. They mean we get excited, remain dedicated and loyal, and have creative ideas. But to effectively leverage these assets, we have to understand and manage them.

It used to be that a lot of the things that make us human—like feelings and personalities—were left at the door when we came to work. Well, they weren’t actually left at the door, but they weren’t acknowledged. We—the collective we—were focused on “professionalism.” This meant not talking about our personal lives, not expressing our moods, and avoiding discussions about feelings or conflicts. (And many organizations still operate this way.) But here’s the truth: Personal issues do affect work. Acknowledging that and reacting with basic human understanding goes a long way in making the whole team more productive. That’s the new professionalism.

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PROJECT PHASES AND THE PROJECT LIFE CYCLE

Because projects are unique undertakings, they involve a degree of uncertainty. Organizations performing projects will usually divide each project into several project phases to provide better management control and appropriate links to the ongoing operations of the performing organization. Collectively, the project phases are known as the project life cycle

 PROJECT PHASES AND THE PROJECT LIFE CYCLE

Characteristics of Project Phases

Each project phase is marked by completion of one or more deliverables. A deliverable is a tangible, verifiable work product such as a feasibility study, a detail design, or a working prototype. The deliverables, and hence the phases, are part of a generally sequential logic designed to ensure proper definition of the product of the project.

The conclusion of a project phase is generally marked by a review of both key deliverables and project performance in order to (a) determine if the project should continue into its next phase and (b) detect and correct errors cost effectively. These phase-end reviews are often called phase exits, stage gates, or kill points.

Each project phase normally includes a set of defined work products designed to establish the desired level of management control. The majority of these items are related to the primary phase deliverable, and the phases typically take their names from these items: requirements, design, build, text, start-up, turnover, and others as appropriate. Several representative project life cycles are described in Section

Characteristics of the Project Life Cycle

The project life cycle serves to define the beginning and the end of a project. For example, when an organization identifies an opportunity that it would like to respond to, it will often authorize a feasibility study to decide if it should undertake a project. The project life cycle definition will determine whether the feasibility study is treated as the first project phase or as a separate, stand-alone project.

The project life cycle definition will also determine which transitional actions at the end of the project are included and which are not. In this manner, the project life cycle definition can be used to link the project to the ongoing operations of the performing organization.

The phase sequence defined by most project life cycles generally involves some form of technology transfer or hand-off such as requirements to design, construction to operations, or design to manufacturing. Deliverables from the preceding phase are usually approved before work starts on the next phase. However, a subsequent phase is sometimes begun prior to approval of the previous phase deliverables when the risks involved are deemed acceptable. This practice of overlapping phases is often called fast tracking.

Project life cycles generally define:
• What technical work should be done in each phase (e.g., is the work of the architect
part of the definition phase or part of the execution phase?).

• Who should be involved in each phase (e.g., concurrent engineering requires that the implementors be involved with requirements and design).
Project life cycle descriptions may be very general or very detailed. Highly detailed descriptions may have numerous forms, charts, and checklists to provide structure and consistency. Such detailed approaches are often called project management methodologies.

Most project life cycle descriptions share a number of common characteristics:
• Cost and staffing levels are low at the start, higher towards the end, and drop rapidly as the project draws to a conclusion. This pattern is illustrated in Figure 2–1.

• The probability of successfully completing the project is lowest, and hence risk and uncertainty are highest, at the start of the project. The probability of successful completion generally gets progressively higher as the project continues.

• The ability of the stakeholders to influence the final characteristics of the project product and the final cost of the project is highest at the start and gets progressively lower as the project continues. A major contributor to this phenomenon is that the cost of changes and error correction generally increases as the project continues.

Care should be taken to distinguish the project life cycle from the product life cycle. For example, a project undertaken to bring a new desktop computer to market is but one phase or stage of the product life cycle.

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WHAT IS A PROJECT?

WHAT IS A PROJECT?
Organizations perform work. Work generally involves either operations or projects, although the two may overlap. Operations and projects share many characteristics; for example, they are:

• Performed by people.
• Constrained by limited resources.
• Planned, executed, and controlled.

Operations and projects differ primarily in that operations are ongoing and repetitive while projects are temporary and unique. A project can thus be defined in terms of its distinctive characteristics—a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. Temporary means that every project has a definite beginning and a definite end. Unique means that the product or service is different in some distinguishing way from all similar products or services.

Projects are undertaken at all levels of the organization. They may involve a single person or many thousands. They may require less than 100 hours to complete or over 10,000,000. Projects may involve a single unit of one organization or may cross organizational boundaries as in joint ventures and partnering. Projects are often critical components of the performing organization’s business strategy. Examples of projects include:

• Developing a new product or service.
• Effecting a change in structure, staffing, or style of an organization.
• Designing a new transportation vehicle.
• Developing or acquiring a new or modified information system.
• Constructing a building or facility.
• Running a campaign for political office.
• Implementing a new business procedure or process.

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