The Complete Project Manager's Toolkit

By Randall Englund MBA, BSEE, NPDP, CBM and Alfonso Bucero CSE, MSc, PMP

Here Are the Tools to Achieve Project Management Success
Buy both The Complete Project Manager and The Complete Project Manager's Toolkit and save $18 at checkout by entering coupon code COMBO1.


This companion to The Complete Project Manager provides the tools you need to integrate key people, organizational, and technical skills. The core book establishes that success in any environment depends largely upon completing successful projects; this book gives you the means and methods to meet that goal. The hands-on, action-oriented tools in this book will help you develop a complete set of skills—the right set for you to excel in today's competitive environment.
The Complete Project Manager's Toolkit will enable you to implement the easy-to-understand, universal, powerful, and immediately applicable concepts presented in The Complete Project Manager. You may already be aware of what you need to do; this book supplies the how through:
• Assessments
• Checklists
• Exercises
• Examples of real people applying the concepts.
Use these tested methods to overcome environmental, personal, social, organizational, and business barriers to successful project management!
Although The Complete Project Manager can be used as a stand-alone book, it is designed to complement The Complete Project Manager: Integrating People, Organizational, and Technical Skills. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781567263824

Randall Englund MBA, BSEE, NPDP, CBM

Randall L. Englund, MBA, BSEE, NPDP, CBM, is an author, speaker, trainer, professional facilitator, and consultant for the Englund Project Management Consultancy ( www.englundpmc.com). Formerly he was a senior project manager at Hewlett-Packard. He facilitates project management seminars for the Project Management Institute and other professional associations and teaches university courses.

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PREFACE

The Complete Project Manager integrates key technical, people, business, and organizational skills. This companion to the core book offers related tools, checklists, tables, and examples.

The core book establishes the premise that success in any environment largely depends on completing successful projects, and successful projects get done by skilled project managers and teams, supported by effective project sponsors. It is the integration across a spectrum of skills that enables certain individuals to make a difference and achieve more optimized outcomes. The ultimate aim of this book is to put action-oriented tools into your hands, allowing you to develop a complete set of skills that is the right set for you to excel in today’s competitive environment. The goal is to equip you and your colleagues to be leaders and managers in the project environment … and beyond.

INTENDED AUDIENCES

As with the core book, the primary audience is project, program, and portfolio managers, in all disciplines and industries, commercial, nonprofit, and government. You may be new to the profession and be seeking a primer to get started in the right direction. You may have a few years of experience and want to get on a fast track. You may have lots of experience but have come to realize that a fresh start and changed thinking are on the agenda, perhaps triggered by layoffs, job changes, or other transitions. This audience is huge—note that there are more than 350,000 members of the Project Management Institute across the globe.

The secondary audience is individual contributors, subject matter experts (SMEs), project team members, managers of project managers, project sponsors, and other executives. They may be new to this role and wonder what they are getting into—how can they better understand the people, roles, and expectations for the people they work with? Or they may be experienced and looking for leading practices that accelerate their performance. This audience is even larger than the number of project managers. We hope your experience with this book prompts you to share it with this extended audience.

PURPOSE AND USES

This Toolkit is designed to put tools in your hands that will help you implement the concepts we cover. The concepts are simple to understand, universal, powerful, and immediately applicable. You may already be aware of what you need to do but, for any number of reasons, you are not doing it. This book supplies the how. It provides checklists, tables, and examples from real people of how to apply the concepts, thereby demonstrating their feasibility. It removes barriers to implementation. These barriers may be environmental, executive, or business-related—anything that has seemed like an obstacle and that has delayed projects, caused cost overruns, lowered quality, or caused deliverables to not meet requirements. These barriers existed because people were not aligned and motivated to perform. To overcome them, you may just need to see a model for how a task or process can be implemented. The Toolkit and the core book will expose you to implementation aids and show you complete ways to look at your situation and see new solutions or apply old solutions in new ways. The goal is to integrate knowledge and skills that make the difference in achieving optimized outcomes, increased satisfaction, and bottom-line results.

By reading this and the core book, you will discover evidence and examples for implementing a complete systems approach to project leadership. You will learn how soft skills applied to project management, environmental, leadership, negotiating, and persuasive skills can be creatively applied. You can achieve greater results through changed thinking and by using the simple, immediately actionable tools we provide. There is no complicated model to understand before applying the ideas and tools in this book.

The core book and this Toolkit may be used as self-study; they may serve as references that you come back to repeatedly to refresh your thinking or find new insights; they may be used by book clubs to trigger sharing of similar or different experiences; they may be used by universities and training companies in the ever-growing number of courses offered on management and leadership; and they may be used by the authors and other consultants in seminars they facilitate worldwide.

Key objectives we anticipate for readers of this Toolkit are to:

Change your thinking about how to learn and apply necessary skills to enhance on-the-job performance

Apply different approaches to leading and managing projects, based upon examples and checklists

Realize what needs to be done to achieve better results…and how to do it

Further develop professional careers in project or program management.

February 2012

INTRODUCTION

Project Management Institute CEO Mark Langley writes, It’s not enough for project and program managers to have technical skills. We need leadership, conflict resolution and negotiation skills. Organizations are telling us, ‘We’re looking for the next business leaders.’ And I say, ‘It’s about time’ (2011, p. 10).

While many professionals develop their craft through advanced education and on-the-job experiences, there comes a time when an enhanced skill set and a new perspective about working with people is necessary in order to advance to the next level of performance. How do you move beyond this plateau?

This Toolkit covers what it takes to be that next leader—a complete project manager. The goal is to integrate technical, people, and organization skills. The way to do this is to identify requisite skill sets and then learn from others about successful ways to develop and apply them. It is the integration of a spectrum of skills that enables certain individuals to make a difference and achieve more optimized outcomes. The ultimate aim is to develop a complete set of skills that is the right set to excel in today’s competitive environment.

Each chapter within The Complete Project Manager Toolkit provides a set of standalone tools regarding a skill that is important in becoming a complete project manager. Of course, the real value is in integrating and using as many of the tools as possible.

Throughout this and the core companion book, we emphasize the importance of the project manager’s having a positive attitude and how that approach helps organizations achieve project success. The key concept is that a variety of skills need to be integrated and applied in order to achieve optimized outcomes.

Use the molecule illustration in Figure I-1 to assess your skills in each of the twelve areas covered by this book. Initially rate yourself on a scale of one to seven, with a rating of one being very poor and seven very extraordinary. Do the assessment again after reading the book to validate your strengths and development opportunities and to reflect on your increased understanding from the journey through this material. Come back to the assessment periodically to monitor progress.

FIGURE I-1: Molecular Assessment

Much as the field of chemistry offers an ever-increasing understanding of molecular structure, a robust set of project, program, and portfolio management skills provides the leadership to fuse disparate groups into new organizations. These new organizations may come about through organic growth or mergers, or by leadership that opens the way to novel or innovative solutions or new markets. Developments in combining molecules into increasingly more dense and complex structures allow for more potent outcomes in small packages, such as in prescription medicines. Likewise, project managers who develop more robust skill sets also become more potent and produce more effective outcomes within their organizations.

Unlimited combinations are possible for the molecules that compose complete project managers. There are many ways to assemble successful outcomes based on additional skill sets. New possibilities will emerge as skills are combined in different ways. The profession of project, program, and portfolio management will truly benefit from new developments among the people inhabiting its space.

Drawing from nature’s bounty, the dragonfly provides apt symbology for the complete project manager. For our purposes, the dragonfly symbolizes change, specifically changes in perspective and self-realization. This kind of change comes from mental and emotional maturity and working toward understanding how people work together in organizations.

The dragonfly’s ability to scurry across water represents going beyond what’s on the surface, exploring deeper implications and aspects of life. It moves with the utmost simplicity, effectiveness, and power, as well as elegance and grace. It can see all 360 degrees around it, symbolizing being able to see beyond the mundane and capture a wider picture of reality (Dragonfly Site n.d.).

This Toolkit opens doors by sharing the means to advance the efficacy of individual, team, and organizational performance. Infinite skill combinations are possible for the complete project manager. Achieving completeness is an unending journey. So let’s get started…

Chapter

1   

LEADERSHIP AND

MANAGEMENT SKILLS

TOOLSET: LEADING YOURSELF CHECKLIST

Nothing will make a better impression on your leader than your ability to manage yourself. If your leader must continually expend energy managing you, then you will be perceived as someone who drains time and energy. If you manage yourself well, however, your boss will see you as someone who maximizes opportunities and leverages personal strengths. That will make you someone your leader turns to when the heat is on.

Table 1-1 suggests ways to lead yourself well.

TABLE 1-1: Leading Yourself

TOOLSET: DELEGATING EFFECTIVELY

Don’t take on tasks that someone else can do as well—or better—than you. Although a project manager cannot delegate everything in a project, delegating can make a project manager’s life easier. But many are hesitant to pass on responsibilities.

Don’t think of delegating as doing the other person a favor. Delegating some of your authority only makes your work easier. You will have more time to manage your project, monitor team members, and handle conflicts. Your organization will benefit, too, as output goes up and project work is completed more efficiently.

Communication is the key to delegating. Without communication, assignments are blurred, deadlines are vague, and results are, predictably, poor. If you want your team to excel as they take on added duties, talk to them, recognize them, and reward them.

To delegate effectively, follow these steps:

To make sure you are delegating to the right person, consider these factors:

Friction: Disagreement between you and the person taking the assignment is healthy while the assignment is being made. It is only a problem if it extends into the execution stage.

Track record: Match the job to the person. Past performance is significant only as it relates to the job you’re delegating.

Location: Don’t delegate just because someone is close by or is not busy and is convenient to ask.

Organization level: If you want to delegate a job to someone several levels down in the organization, first confer with his or her supervisors and explain the situation.

Compatibility: Ideally, your work and communication styles and that of the person to whom you are delegating the work should be complementary.

TOOLSET: 21ST-CENTURY LEADER QUALITIES ASSESSMENT

This tool helps you to assess your qualities