CHAPTER 8

Leadership and Project Strategy: Driving the Project to Success

FOR MANY PROJECT MANAGERS, running a project is like driving in a blinding winter snowstorm. Hunkered down over the steering wheel, your eyes are focused only a few feet ahead as snow pelts the windshield, and the horizon is only a distant and inconsequential blur. Within such a maelstrom, it is easy to get lost, get out of sync with the organization's purpose, and wander aimlessly down the highway.

Projects have been described as operating within their own little worlds. But what happens when this microcosm fails to connect to its greater universe? Losing sight of top management goals has caused more than a few projects to be canceled before completion. What makes this likely is that the sheer work and detail involved in executing a project allows little time for potential mistakes of omission, changing assumptions, and varying levels of support from upper management.

Many project managers, chosen for their talents in getting things done, are uncomfortable thinking over the wider picture of their projects’ places in their organizations’ plans, much less puzzling over the dynamics involved. If a potential problem arises, it is often easier just to bull your way through it without much consideration for external players and goals.

Unfortunately, all too often projects take on lives of their own. While other project teams start with a well-defined road and detailed maps, circumstances can make even the most dependable of organizational compasses spin wildly. It is the cultivation of your strategic instincts that makes a difference in effective leadership temperament. Project strategy is more than plotting out your route at the beginning of a journey; rather, it is an ongoing process to ensure that project and organizational alignment is more than a mere mirage, but is a reality. This, then, is the strategy challenge faced by project managers: making sure that the project gets where it really should go, rather than where inertia may lead it. To accomplish this, the project manager must link leadership and management strategies, understand critical project assumptions, identify and surmount roadblocks, and get the team to change course, if needed, along the way.

First, we consider why project managers need leadership strategies to drive their projects to a successful end.

LEADING PLUS MANAGING: STRATEGIES DRIVE PROJECTS

Keeping the project on course requires going beyond the usual project management skills and strategies to exercise leadership strategies. For example, in the Human Genome Project, many external and internal forces, support, and specialized resources are crucial at different times in this project. Strategy research helps explain the differences between times when managing and leading are needed. One way to think of this difference in strategies for a project is presented in Figure 18, adapted for project management from Mitroff (1988, 30). It shows that the project manager's role includes both managing and leading strategies for things that are relatively easy, as well as for things that are fairly difficult to change. We can think of project managers needing to maintain or make changes in key systems, thus splitting the figure into four quadrants. Our focus in this chapter is on the leading strategies, those below the line in Quadrants 3 and 4 (see Figure 18), as other chapters provide good management strategy guidelines. Each challenge and its leadership strategy will fit in the lower section of this diagram.

We now will consider ways of identifying when project systems need leadership strategies to keep them on course.

KEEPING THE PROJECT ON COURSE: SOLVE THE RIGHT PROBLEM, UNDERSTAND KEY ASSUMPTIONS, AND USE NEW FRAMEWORKS

Keeping the project on course is particularly important in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. Recent changes in managing organizations—such as downsizing, outsourcing, increased reliance on computers and Internet technology, and globalization of what recently were domestic-only markets—put most projects in this environmental context. Since keeping the project on course is easier, cheaper, and more constructive than canceling it or making revolutionary changes, we will first review research-based strategies to accomplish this. We suggest three leadership strategies: solving the right problem, understanding key assumptions, and thinking in new ways about the project.

Solving the Right Problem

The first challenge in keeping the project on course is solving the right problem. At first, this may seem obvious, as the project was designed to solve some particular problem. In the project development stage, its specifications and guidelines were written with that problem in mind. But, once the project begins, its details often overwhelm its purpose, and the project team loses sight of the problem. For example, a project team developing a new coating to adapt an existing product for new uses has certain specifications in mind. The project is developing porcelain coating for metal tiles to compete against ceramic-tile and marble-tile products in the building trades. The project begins with the team focused on making a durable coating, without realizing that the actual critical problem will be the adherence of the coating to the metal. While it works on the wear-and-tear aspects, it doesn't even consider that the coating will not stay fixed to the metal tiles.

Most projects start out with specifications and guidelines addressing the problem at hand. From this beginning, there are three possible outcomes: correctly solving the problem (which is the intended result of the project), implementing a faulty or misguided solution to the problem, or solving the wrong problem entirely. Kepner and Tregoe understood that solving the wrong problem well is much worse than poorly solving the right problem (Heller 1990). We here adapt their process of concentrating on driving forces to help project managers keep complex interrelated project issues under control.

Applying a driving-forces analysis requires a few relatively simple steps. First, specify the desired outcome of the project. Then, identify what forces affect the successful working of the solution. Finally, ask which force—or forces—is critical. These are the driving forces, and they keep the team traveling toward a successful solution.

An example of a driving-forces analysis is as follows. The coatings project team realized that there were two contrary forces at work in determining the potential success of its metal-tile coating: it had to stand up to outdoor weather, and it had to stick reliably to metal tiles, which are sturdier than ceramic and lighter than marble. Recognizing these driving forces put the team on course to solving the right problem.

Project managers and teams will save themselves much grief if they can keep the driving forces in focus. Considering driving forces is like listening to the weather report, then changing the wipers, filling the windshield washer fluid, or putting on snow tires; you're much better prepared for a safe trip.

Identifying and Understanding Key Assumptions

A second technique for keeping the project on course is to identify the really critical assumptions that support the project. The focus of these assumptions is outside the project, but they may be either outside or inside the organization. Every project relies on key external factors or on organizational resources, which are not under the project team's control; some few of these factors are really critical to the project's success. If these assumptions don't work as supposed, the project will fail. For example, the porcelain glaze project team may solve both its coating problems, but the primary market for its tile products may be small office buildings, which currently are overbuilt. Or its success may rely on tariffs or duties on imported marble to make the tiles’ price competitive. Or it may need critical funds from an obsolete product to pay for the tile firing. It is important to identify and understand these assumptions and their potential impact on the project to keep the project on course.

We recommend a core stakeholders analysis for identifying really key assumptions (Emshoff and Finnell 1979). These key assumptions often are affected by the driving forces just identified. For a project, a stakeholder is a group or actor whose behavior affects the ultimate success of the project. Thus, for each stakeholder, the assumptions are those behaviors of that stakeholder that would most support the eventual success of the project. Figure 19 shows a diagram of possible core stakeholders for the porcelain glaze project; these include senior management, environmentalists, customers, competitors, internal management, R&D or manufacturing, suppliers, and government. Most projects also have special stakeholders unique to the project, which the team can identify. It's worth the time needed for project managers to consider and list a project's stakeholders.

Using their own diagram as a guide, the project manager and key team members reflect which stakeholder behaviors the project's success hinges on most. These become their list of possible key assumptions. They then review each assumption as to its actual likelihood and the potential impact on the project, if that stakeholder's behavior changes. This removes some assumed behaviors, as they are either extremely unlikely or would have no adverse effect if they changed. The team may also consider what other factors or behaviors support that critical behavior's continuance. Sorting out, arranging, and linking the assumptions by their logical connections lets the team build a picture of key assumptions in stakeholder action terms that draws out even the more subtle assumptions. With such a logically linked picture in mind, the team can then target and monitor really critical assumptions and will not be surprised.

For example, when our coatings team began the glaze development, it started chemical analysis, programmed metal supply orders, plus fabrication time and firing facilities. This project's success rested on assumptions about Italian marble resources, continued office expansion, and continuing United States-European trade barriers, among others. These assumptions or stakeholder behaviors relied, themselves, on continued external factors and internal behaviors. If any of these key assumptions turned out to be false, the success of the coatings project might be in jeopardy. The same applies to project leadership. Identifying critical assumptions gives the project manager and team members some critical key issues to monitor to protect the viability and ensure the success of the project. A key assumption that is unsupported can be worse than a spring blizzard or landslide, as the team steers the project to its destination.

Thinking in New Ways

A third way to avoid leaving the road with the project is for the project manager and key members of the project team to develop new ways of thinking about the work and the organization. This is often difficult because the team's focus is on implementing the project as planned. For example, the coatings team had worked two months just developing the specifications for the intended tile product and had been at work on the coating for three months full time. A first suggestion is to review the project in its organizational context regularly. This fits well with the two suggestions above. Taking time to check whether the project, as it is developing, still relates well to the organization's intended purpose (given driving forces and key assumptions) can alert the project manager to potential problems. But, given the project's plan, specifications, and timetable, for many project managers this first tactic would most often involve reapplying enlightened but normal project logic. Research on leadership strategies overwhelmingly suggests changing the framework of reference to get a really new view of the project.

Strategy research points to using frame-breaking techniques and capitalizing on diversity as two useful ways to do this. Mitroff's core stakeholders analysis, applied earlier in the chapter, is a frame-breaking technique; capitalizing on diversity involves establishing and using links to those outside the project team who represent radically different views on the problem and project. Besides their obvious political value, these links are sources of valuable information coming from a very different perspective. The more diverse they are, the more likely that the project team will be able to use these persons and their views to enhance its own thinking about the project, and find out in time about changes in critical issues. The coatings project team linked up with the product team for the supposed obsolete product, and found that their estimate of support and resources might be overoptimistic. It reconsidered and began a campaign for separate, noncontingent funding, which it eventually secured.

As an alternate frame-breaking technique, Ramaprasad and Mitroff present a question-and-answer process that the project manager can adapt to get the whole team thinking differently (1984). Their process begins with data, such as a team member's actual project plan details. It proceeds with questions. The first question is “Why?” for each detail, followed by a second “Why” for each answer, until at least two reasons support each project plan detail. The project team then examines these reasons, checking their likelihood and potential impact.

The design of this method is simple to apply, with only two successive applications of the same question, “Why?” to each key project detail. The coatings project team asked why the coating would stand up to outside weather and why it would adhere to the metal tiles. Asking two sets of whys revealed that the adhesive properties of their coating were much more critical than the wear, at this point, particularly when they checked. Ramaprasad and Mitroff point out that people of certain personality types find it easier to use these techniques (1984). This does not mean that only certain people can benefit from these tools, just that some team members may need more practice than others do. Nurturing, developing, and protecting the team's diversity of persons, backgrounds, and opinions are very important to successfully thinking differently about the project in this way.

Thinking in new ways is comparable to putting glare-free coating on the windshield: you can keep the road in view, no matter the conditions.

Once a project begins, adding leadership strategies, such as solving the right problem, identifying key assumptions, and thinking in new ways, to more normal project management strategies can help keep the project on course while also developing team members’ broader personal skills. Analyzing driving forces and core stakeholders, using critical review and diverse outside linkages, and successively asking why build key conceptual skills. These skills will pay off for the organization in future projects after this project arrives successfully. Keeping the project on course fits into Quadrant 3 of managing and leading strategies (see Figure 18), as it maintains and strengthens key systems. Strategic leadership research also points up ways of identifying and surmounting potential roadblocks to a project.

KEEPING THE PROJECT MOVING: IDENTIFYING ROADBLOCKS

Even if the project stays on course, other factors may interfere with its successful completion. Any project draws important resources in capital, people, and know-how that then become scarce for other managers. It may suffer from the way we always do it syndrome if it tackles real innovative changes. Or it may meet the you can't get there from here resistance that most project managers know so well. For example, when Florida Power and Light built its St. Lucie #2 plant in only six years, it overcame a hurricane, two strikes, and hundreds of federally mandated design detail changes (Winslow 1984). It seemed that roadblocks shot up around every turn. As mentioned in our Chapter 9 on politics, at crucial decision points in the project, others may attempt to block or cancel the project, and even highly committed team members may feel stymied by the extra effort required. There may also be external adjustments or changes needed for the project to succeed, such as zoning changes, special tax benefits, or official participation by elected officials, and these too may seem insurmountable.

Seeing these roadblocks can be difficult for the project manager and team, as they were not apparent when the project was conceived, and the team is full of day-to-day details to consider. However, they now require attention and action. Potential roadblocks affect viability of the project but (perhaps more importantly) also affect the mindset and culture of the project team. Once the team views the project as really threatened, members may feel stymied and give up. So, rather than being beaten by an outside force, they beat themselves. If the project manager and team don't apply leadership strategies identifying these roadblocks and secure appropriate changes, the project will not arrive at all.

Strategy research suggests several ways to identify and combat key roadblocks to a project. We suggest one way, the Merlin Exercise, adapted from Smith, to help the project manager and team to sort out the real roadblocks from all potential roadblocks and apply leadership strategies to take effective action (1994). As legend recalls, Merlin the Magician was a great help to King Arthur because he knew what was going to happen, since Merlin was living his life backwards. This allowed Arthur to take steps in advance to neutralize his enemies’ actions, before the enemies even thought of or took them, thus employing the Merlin factor. To develop the Merlin factor for a project team, the project manager must force the team to think and plan backwards, from the problem solution that the project seeks, to the effective actions needed along the way. The team must try to separate itself from the resources, capabilities, and know-how that it currently has, to open up the opportunities that it needs to capture. This is never easy but can be critical in overcoming the roadblocks and their devastating morale effects. We suggest that the project team follow these simply described but very difficult steps.

First, describe, as carefully as possible, the future state that exists when the project is successfully completed. Then, identify and describe—moving backwards from project completion—each step that successfully occurred to bring about the project's conclusion. Last, for each step and project action, identify any critical resource that's absolutely required. The Merlin Exercise is backward planning with a plus because any and all potential roadblocks to the project are mentally surmounted by the team, and team morale is supported by beginning with success. This is the essence and power of the Merlin factor.

The Merlin factor adapts easily to project leadership, as it makes whatever the project manager and team regard as possible, a potentially achievable target for the project. It reduces potential roadblocks to manageable, rather than gargantuan, size. The Merlin Exercise instills a sense of improvising and adaptation in the team that makes achieving the project's goals doable.

Research by Fulmer and Franklin presents an example of how the Merlin Exercise was used by teams of managers at Hoechst Celanese Corp. (1994). Beginning from the initial vision driving the project, team members wrote statements describing what happens, works, or goes on if the project is successfully concluded. Then, they worked backwards, identifying key milestones that must have occurred, to get to the successful conclusion. The team explored how its strengths and weaknesses will serve it in reaching these milestones and decided how to audit its progress at each milestone. The audit factors may be connected to the driving forces, critical assumptions, and insights identified by core stakeholder analysis.

Adapting a Merlin Exercise to the project team allows for identifying real roadblocks to attaining the milestones, and energizes the team to make changes to surmount them, acting in both Quadrants 3 and 4 of Figure 18. Thus, what might have become a roadblock is leveled and becomes an opportunity.

Applying the Merlin Exercise is like attaching three rearview mirrors to the project so that the driver's field vision is dramatically expanded.

So far, this chapter has considered strategies to keep the project on course by solving the right problem, developing underlying assumptions and logical links, and capitalizing on diversity, plus ways to avoid and surmount roadblocks by thinking backwards. But, even with these protections and precautions taken, the project may still get out of line with external or internal factors of support and finally need revolutionary changes.

CHANGING THE COURSE OF A PROJECT: REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

Even if the project team stays focused on the right problem, monitors key assumptions, thinks of the project in new ways, and surmounts roadblocks through leadership strategies, it can still can get in trouble from either shifting external forces or internal resource challenges. The project manager who has followed the leadership strategies and suggestions covered here will be aware that this is the case. The final challenge becomes changing the course of the project through totally new terrain so it can arrive successfully. This challenge lies in the fourth quadrant of Figure 18, Revolutionary Changes.

The Merlin Exercise will have helped avoid and surmount roadblocks, but eventually it becomes clear that external forces are so strong, or internal resources are so stressed or challenged, that changing the course of the project is essential. These important deep changes become necessary because external conditions or resources no longer will support the project. For example, when Burlington Northern formed its intermodal project team to develop piggyback truck trains, it seriously underestimated the challenge and change necessary. It didn't realize that the team needed to take on Burlington Northern itself to build this new business (Katzenbach and Smith 1994). Its own colleagues’ ideas of railroad transportation were the most serious challenge to this project's success. This kind of change is revolutionary change.

Heifetz and Laurie (1997) suggest that change of this kind is very difficult, for it requires two conflicting project team changes in addition to the external actions: The project manager has been accustomed to providing solutions and must now stop this, plus the project team members must now shift out of their follower roles to change. Thus, changing course for the project requires change on two fronts, external and internal. The project manager must stop providing answers and ask the right tough questions; she must wait through the silence and conflicting emotions for the team to develop its own new answers. And, she must keep the process in motion, making team members sufficiently uncomfortable to make real changes, but not frozen in fear. Team and individual attitudes and expectations must change to find and develop different ways of behaving—a completely different team culture. This process of learning to work differently is the ultimate leadership strategy challenge.

This is the most difficult part of project strategy leadership, the real essence of Quadrant 4 in Figure 18. On the one hand, project managers must relinquish their guiding role, so that the team changes its work; but, on the other hand, they must forcefully demonstrate and push hard for what the new project requires.

Research by Taylor suggests that, even though there may be no imminent crisis yet, the project manager must actively apply four tactics (1995). He must demonstrate that current results are patently unsatisfactory (or will be soon) by carefully choosing competitive benchmarks, dramatize the need for really new behaviors, openly raise performance targets significantly above normal, and visibly and forcefully lead the project changes.

For example, Rebello reports the project changes at Microsoft to deal with the explosion of the Internet as a good example of these revolutionary changes (1996). Microsoft had plans to build an online service and develop an information superhighway hardware after Windows 95, and this project was proceeding according to plan, but twenty million Internet users had other ideas. The Web was exploding the potential of distributing information, developing knowledge, and linking workers. Microsoft's project was so far behind reality that industry experts wondered if it would be erased as computer users flocked to the Web rather than Windows for information. Beginning with an all-day managers program in December 1995, Microsoft took a massive about-face. The project became the Internet Platform and Tools Division, gathered 2,500 employees within two months, developed alliances with other Web-based firms, acquired software developers, and even wrote and sang grim jingles. This example shows the radical changes that a project manager may need to provoke, support, and sustain, changing the course of a project.

The road to success for a project takes many twists and turns and requires applying leadership in addition to managing strategies. Changing course when absolutely required is like mapping out and taking a detour to arrive at the destination; it requires stopping to make a total change in plans, but the end point reached is still the same. By keeping the project on course, keeping it moving, and completely changing course when necessary, the project manager and team can arrive at a successful conclusion.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PROJECT MANAGERS

This review of strategic leadership research provides useful tools and suggests some pragmatic implications for project managers interested in keeping the project on the road to successful completion, by keeping the wider picture of the project in context in mind.

Apply Leadership in Addition to Management Strategies, as Required

All through the project's development, the highest priority is taken by acting according to its plans and specifications. This will move the project to completion as quickly and efficiently as possible. But, since every project relies on organizational resources, commitments, and skills, plus some suppositions about the environmental context, it may be necessary to apply leadership strategies, as well. Keeping critical support and maintaining key systems may require looking beyond project-specific details and exercising leadership. If the project becomes insupportable due to changes in the organization's environment or resources, leadership strategies are the only way to totally revamp the project.

Understand the Driving Forces, Critical Assumptions, and New Ways to Think about Your Project

Understanding the wider context of a project is not part of a project's implementation plan. Day-to-day activities will get the project successfully completed, but only if critical external forces and necessary resources remain supportive of the project. It pays for a project manager to take time to reflect and use the team to explore those factors that might threaten the project or destroy its usefulness. Strategy research provides tools that a project manager can use to develop the team's understanding.

Think Backwards, Building Team Morale to Surmount Roadblocks

The normal course of a project is frontward through time—from idea, through planning, to development, and finally to implementation. Turning this process inside out to think backwards will do more for the project than just identify roadblocks. It will fire up the Merlin factor and creatively energize the team to foresee and tackle the extraordinary and unplanned. It provides the leadership force necessary to bring a threatened project through.

Don't Give Answers but Do Force the Team to Change Course for the Project, if Needed

Despite the tactics above, it may become necessary to change course and restructure the project, due to external forces or critical resource shortages. Doing this effectively requires a project manager to shift roles, stop answering questions, and begin asking and dramatizing the changes needed. Truly active leadership will allow the project team to revolutionize its project and get moving toward successful implementation.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this chapter has been to discuss some important issues in getting a project to a successful conclusion. Leading is most often considered an action-oriented skill, but applying leadership strategies can often require some careful reflection. Taking time to reflect, both as project manager and as a team, is an important and ongoing challenge for project managers because, while taking time from direct work on the task, it may ensure the eventual success of the project. This chapter developed a picture of the special purpose of leadership strategies for projects, and adapted and explained some strategy tools and techniques for the project manager and team to keep the project on course, identify and surmount roadblocks, or revolutionize the project, if necessary. Finally, to offer some useful advice, the chapter concluded with some practical suggestions on combining reflection with action. Project experience, research, and anecdotal evidence have supported the fact that just staying focused on the project plan may not be enough. Many tasks and decisions go into getting a project from its go-ahead to successful implementation. Some of the most important tasks may not be direct project tasks at all but rather acts of considering the context, support, and resources on which the project depends so that the project and team can succeed.