PS Managers require a series of skills that go far beyond anything they might have required while working as a consultant or a project manager. While we have talked about operational cadence in previous newsletters, this month's newsletter is dedicated to some lesser known, more subjective but yet, critical PS Management skills.
In this section, we'll focus specifically on a PS Manager's ability to assess a real-world operating environment accurately. This is important because the PS Manager's job is to ensure that the operating environment under his or her management is indeed running efficiently. The net result, of course, are metrics like margin and utilization, but these can be deceiving both in the moment and as predictors of future performance. Making the quarterly number with 70% utilization doesn't always tell the full story.
Hence, the more refined concept of wanting to finish projects with a customer reference, a profit and not burning out our consultants gives us a purer sense of what we are trying to achieve. But alas, while these are measurable goals, the likelihood of achieving them mid-project is not always easy to identify. Will all of the customers for your current projects act as a reference? We won't really know until the project is well and truly over? So, during the project how do you measure such a thing?
I've worked with plenty of companies that think asking the customer if they like the service they are receiving, is good way to measure a project's chances of eventual success. However, I must caution against it. Mid-project, a customer might be satisfied simply because they aren't as engaged as they should be. Little do they know, that their lack of involvement is about to provide them with a surprise and tragic ending. In a nutshell, the customer's current satisfaction is not always a future indicator of the project's chances of success. More commonly however, is that the team that is leading the customer is given a subpar satisfaction rating because the customer is annoyed at getting exactly what they want. This doesn't mean that the service being provided is bad, especially if the service provider's team is recommending best practices. The reality is that during the project, nobody really knows how anything is going to turn out.
But the project is only one aspect of assessing the portfolio's current health. While the P&L is made up of successful customer projects, it is also enabled through the use of your consultant's time. Hence, listening to their views on workload, methodology, product architecture, clarity of requirements and ease of working with each customer are all measures that have no specific metric but yet, are vitally important to the success of the team and the business.
From a project perspective, PS Managers must remember that they are their project's sponsor. This means that the profitability of each project is their responsibility. We often want to believe that it is the project manager's responsibility, but yet, project managers are proxies. They can't unilaterally change the project's budget without agreement from both the customer and service provider sponsors. I wish delegation was the simple answer, and it can be, provided that delegation again is to someone not inside the project and to someone who remains responsible for the P&L of the portfolio to which the project belongs. Once the decision about project profitability falls to someone who doesn't own the portfolio P&L, trouble ensues.
To help with this, proactive project assessments are a great approach. The hallmarks of a successful project are fairly easy to identify. They have project sponsors that are actively participating and communicating. They hold regular meetings and are flexible with how the unknowns that get discovered are handled within the scope and budget constraints of the project.
Creating a list of these so that PS Managers can "check in" with projects and quickly ascertain the health of a project is a "must do"! If you can't find a way to trigger your spidey-sense then you are stuck trying to make decisions based on hearsay from others and nondescript burn down charts and status reports. Good luck!
From a people perspective, the focus should be to check in with your consultants to see how they are feeling. Yes, simply asking a consultant how they are feeling, will begin to open you up to information you aren't getting from your PSA dashboard. Ideally, you are trying to find out if their current workload is stressful, if the current customer is being a bully, if they are gradually moving towards burn out or worse still, moving on to another company. Our "Engagement Score" concept definitely helps, but the objective of that score is to give you an actionable guidance on what to address with that employee, not necessarily a guide on efficiency.
If your environment is full of people that are frustrated and tired, then you have to start thinking that your current resource assignments, methodology, or even product architecture is not where it needs to be and the only way you are going to find out where the problem lies is to listen. Actively listening to your employees is still the single greatest piece of advice I can give to a manager who wants to understand how efficient the current work environment is operating.
A key point to remember on this, is that just because you listen, you don't have to agree. Just because someone complains of being totally overwhelmed doesn't mean that you have a business efficiency problem. It just means that one person is overwhelmed. But as you talk to others employees you need to keep each conversation in mind so that you can start to identify patterns. This is a skill that makes or breaks a PS Manager.
Overall, the skill of being able to assess the health of your business environment is key to your long-term success. Listen to the right things and you are ahead of the game by being able to respond to the signs of trouble rather than waiting for the trouble itself to appear. Listen to the wrong things and you will find yourself constantly chasing your tail trying to fix problems that are urgent to some people but not necessarily important to your ability to run a successful business.
