Project Management Expert:

Elizabeth Harrin

For many years, Elizabeth Harrin felt that women in project management were under-represented on the lecture circuit, in conference room seminars, and at male-dominated conferences.

And they were.  But thanks to Elizabeth, they now have a strong, intelligent voice who not only represents them well, but also takes those old, boring speakers and turns them on their heads.

Elizabeth is a force to be reckoned with, turning her A Girl's Guide to Project Management blog into a popular gathering place for project managers of both genders, and having authored the critically acclaimed Project Management in the Real World book.  

Her articles are common-sense commentaries that speak of her observations on the job, and you'll be hard pressed to find a project manager as perceptive as she is. 

We asked Elizabeth to sit down with us and let us pick her brain.  Her answers will enlighten you and give you a glimpse into the sharp mind of someone who has seen it all.  Listen, learn, and enjoy!
 

1.  Hi Elizabeth, thank you for sitting down with us today.  Please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us about your blog ("A Girl's Guide to Project Management") and book (Project Management in the Real World).

I’m a project manager with experience in financial services and the healthcare sector.  I’m a PRINCE2 Practitioner, so that’s the approach that I’m most familiar with, although I have recently joined PMI.  I’m really interested in how projects work in real life, because you can have a wall full of certificates and still be rubbish at managing projects, and that is what my book and my blog both talk about.

2.  Perhaps it's because I live in the very progressive Silicon Valley, but most of the PMs I work with now are women (all of whom come from diverse ethnic backgrounds).  However, in my dealings with some male project managers from the UK, I found some of their attitudes toward women to be disrespectful, inappropriate, and in some cases, deserving of legal action. 

Briefly, what is your own opinion of the treatment of female project managers in the UK, and what was it about being a woman in project management that made you devote a blog to the subject?

I’m sorry you found some UK project managers to be so objectionable!  We are not all like that. 

I’ve been writing my blog for just over 4 years and it started partly because I was writing a book, but partly because I was interested in finding the voice of the female project management community, which I didn’t hear when I went to conferences, or see when I read the project management press.  It wasn’t a reaction to my workplace environment.  I have always worked in teams where at least half the project managers have been women, sometimes more. 

What I thought was odd about being a woman in project management was that there were lots of us, doing a great job, but all the conference speakers were men.  And very few of the project management magazines carried articles by women.  Where were we?

3.  Unfortunately, a lot of PMs based in the USA have never had a chance to manage projects using the PRINCE2 methodology.  To a young, American PM, how would you best describe PRINCE2's unique characteristics and qualities?

PRINCE2 is heavy on documentation, although the 2009 version is a bit more pragmatic.  It’s not a membership organisation, so don’t expect to get invites to Chapter meetings or a glossy magazine once a quarter. 

PRINCE2 does offer a start-to-finish way to get a project off the ground, see it through and wrap it up, which is what some new project managers find difficult. It does give you practical detail on the tasks required to run a project which I think is something that studying for the PMP exam alone won’t give you. So where the PMBOK says you need an approach to manage project changes, PRINCE2 will actually tell you how to go about it.

4.  Speaking of PRINCE2, you once wrote something about it that caught my attention: "PRINCE2 is all about managing in a controlled environment, not one where everyone is rushing around panicking to get things done by a date some executive thought up on the golf course." 

However, in most fast paced working environments in the teach savvy parts of the USA, rushing and panicking have become the norm.  For those environments, would you advise against PRINCE2, or do you think PRINCE2 can find success in those instances, as long as it's adapted differently?

I don’t think I have come across a project where you can’t use PRINCE2. 

That statement I made is just as valid about any other project management framework or approach.  The whole frame of thinking around project management is that you work out what you are going to do, do it, then evaluate it. 

General panicking doesn’t much come into our plans, but you only have to manage one project to know that plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.  Rushing around is part of the job – you just need to know how to handle those issues when they arise.

5.  On the subject or rushing and panicking, I've noticed a trend since the summer of 2009. The economic recession has forced companies to fast-track projects that reduce costs or increase sales... yet that same recession is preventing these same companies from hiring new people (and in most cases, laying them off).  In other words, people are doing more work with far, far fewer resources.  This, of course, results in excessive rushing and panicking. 

For PMs facing this challenge, what advice would you give them?

Focus on delivering benefits.  If your project is not going to add any value to the organisation, say so and get it stopped.  Much better that you help your organisation establish what is the best use of their resources and go and work on something else for them that will give them a better return. 

And slow down.  Spend more time planning and communicating, and that will free up time to do the execution properly.  I know, it all sounds easy on paper!

6.  You've written in the past about the need for organizations to aggressively document why certain projects have failed.  The reason for that, I think, is that it would reflect negatively on the people who worked on the project, and thus, embarrassing them.  It may also lay blame on resources who were innocent victims of project mis-management.

Nevertheless, there is lots to learn about project failure.  But you very correctly pointed out that many of the failures are projects that were publicly funded.  Why do you think publicly funded projects have such a comparatively high failure rate?

I don’t think publicly funded projects have a high failure rate – I think they make much better headlines and because it is taxpayers’ money there is more transparency about it.  A private company can cover up its failures, but a public body can’t do that so easily. 

When I was writing my book I discovered the US Government Accountability Office, and the UK equivalent, the National Audit Office.  Fascinating stuff!  Loads of transparency around why big public sector projects are overspent and late.

I don’t think embarrassment is a reason not to do proper post-project reviews.  You can conduct a review in a way which does not apportion blame.  You don’t have to share that information outside your organisation.  The embarrassment question is an issue of corporate culture, but it can be done.

7.  On the heels of the success of your previous book, you're currently writing a new book, focusing on social media in project management.  I've personally observed the use of social media and found that the results were exceedingly disappointing. 

Maybe it's a cultural thing, but do you see social media in project management as a trend on the rise?  If so, do you find that its success or failure can be traced to any particular reason?

I can’t comment on trending data – I don’t think we have enough data to prove a trend.  It is certainly being talked about more.  Social media just facilitates two-way communication; it’s another tool we can use to supplement our existing ‘kit’ of project management techniques.  And it is hardly new technology.  Our use of it in the project management arena may be new. 

My own research shows that companies are open to adopting this type of technology to help them run projects.  In a survey I did, 46% of project managers said they were on LinkedIn.  The most common use for social media tools was to stay in touch with colleagues (85%).  And people also reported that social media tools helped improve communication.

The reasons behind this are several:

The changing demographic of the workforce:

• Net Gen’ers entering the workforce with the expectation that these tools will be available.

• Better infrastructure – we couldn’t do it without speedy broadband.

• An economic shift – there’s a greater move towards outsourcing, off-shoring and slashing travel budgets, all of which mean projects with various partners who can’t all come together in the same room to deliver projects.

8.  Elizabeth, thanks again for allowing us to pick your brain on the subject of project management.  Much as you focus your site on women in project management, we focus on younger, newer PMs just starting out their careers.  To these fresh faced PMs who don't yet have your level of experience, what one or two key pieces of advice would you give them to speed up the PM learning curve?

First, projects are done by people!  It sounds obvious, but however pretty your Gantt chart, Gantt charts don’t deliver projects, people do.

Second, read a lot, network a lot and invest in yourself.  You learn most about project management through doing it (and making mistakes) but you can also gain a lot of second-hand experience through people who have been there and done that, so get a mentor if you can.
 

Thanks again to Elizabeth for her great advice and insight!  Please be sure to check out her A Girl's Guide to Project Management blog, as well as her book, Project Management in the Real World.

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