Start Projects with a Foundation for Speed

We must never underestimate the impact of good leadership on the speed of a project. In fact, we must not underestimate the extraordinary difference between good leadership and exceptional leadership. This one decision is setting the foundation for the rest of the project.

A good leader truly sets the pace for the speed of the pack. A bad leader is worse in that they don’t just set a slow pace, they limit the pace of the pack. Bad leaders often have teams that are trying to go faster, but the leader pushes them backward.

I have seen many situations where high-priority projects were assigned to project leaders who were not ready for the complexity and importance they were assigned. They were often good team members; however, they had no experience or training leading people and leading projects. The results were like giving a bicycle to someone who has never seen one and then expecting them to immediately compete in a high-stakes road race.

To make a good decision, the sponsors should consider the following aspects when considering their project leader:

1. What is the priority of this project compared to other projects?

2. What is the context of this project? Is it in a new customer domain? A new technical domain? An area where the organization already has vast experience?

3. Who are the candidates and their experiences that your organization can draw from? Note that I did not say, “Who is available?” If this is truly a top priority project, you should pick whoever the best person for this project is. You then can make tradeoffs to deal with the problems you just created.

Executives are not always able to put their best leaders on the most important projects. However, if this is a conscious decision, they can take the appropriate actions to ensure mentorship is in place for the less-experienced leaders. Less-experienced leaders should get the lower-priority projects to prepare for the more important projects.

After the sponsors select the project leader, the project leader has the responsibility to take the next steps of the guidance system. The project leader must organize for speed.

A Leadership Team for Speed

There is great pressure to start important projects in a hurry. But it’s even more important to get a good start on critical projects rather than begin in a frenzied, undisciplined rush. This sets the foundation for the project leader to start the project with the guidance system for speed fully enabled.

This chapter details the steps that ensure the planning event detailed in the next chapter have the team jumping off the project line with the confidence and plans for full success. This list of preparation steps may seem daunting to those who have not done them in the past. For small projects, these preparation steps typically take less than a week. For a multi-year, very large project, accomplishing these steps took about four weeks.

If you are leading a project with more than a dozen people, it’s a wise idea to establish a project leadership team. I recommend the leadership team comprise a sub-team leader and the most experienced team member. For every six to 12 people on your project, add another leadership team member. This person is responsible for the following key activities:

• Ensuring the features and services developed are clearly defined
• Setting priorities (e.g., which features and services are the top priorities)
• Getting the right resources at the right time
• Setting the pace
• Building the team members to be better team members for now and the future
• Determining how the project team should be organized
• Delivering the complete project

The people on the team are often not your choice. However, I suggest you do work to ensure you have the people who best fit the project need and priority. The best leaders work to put the right people with the right skills in the position to be successful. You are the leader. The fastest way to speed is not to have the biggest group of people; it is relentlessly making sure the most skilled, most focused people are in the right place at the right time. Negotiate to have your people have dedicated time to pursue your clear priorities.

Even if you have the same team of people you had before, you may be undertaking new projects frequently. New projects sometimes have new attributes. They may even move from the quadrant of “get it done” to “gamble wisely.” This type of work calls for a different approach. It may lead you to re-evaluate who belongs on the leadership team.

Enable the right people to put in maximum effort, thinking, and action toward the center goal of the target, speed to value. Thus, you want the people working on this project to be consistently thinking about the smartest, fastest methods to score a bull’s-eye of speed and value. To do this, the project leader must define what winning means and set project priorities to enable this.

Define Winning

To have appropriate urgency and speed on a project, it is critical to start with a clear definition of what winning means. The idea behind creating a leadership team is to get a common mindset and ground rules of how the project will run. I encourage the primary leader of the leadership team to lead discussions with the rest of the team about the mindset. I encourage them to come up with a definition of the project’s success.

The following is an example definition of success one of the leadership teams I worked with developed. This represents the mindset they gelled on. They used these key bullet points to help guide them in their decisions, especially contentious ones:

• We strive to be exceptional leaders with exceptional results.
• We must be experts on our project. The management above our project, the key stakeholders, and our customers should view us as the experts who care more, do more, know more about this project than anyone else can. We must back that statement up with all that we do.
• We will make commitments we keep. We will always know our next milestones and our status against them. We will know if we are ahead or behind. If we are behind, we will turn over every “rock” determining how we can recover.
• We will lead with a focus on the best speed to best project value. We will use the guidance system for speed to run the project well.
• We will deliver high-quality results. We want our customers to say, “Wow!”

The best leadership teams I’ve coached also established ground rules to ensure they worked well together. Establishing just a few simple guidelines for the leadership team can establish a culture for the whole project. They are usually simple and to the point. Here is an example set:

• Keep arguments focused on making ideas better. No attacking the person.
• Meetings have agendas with clear purpose to drive the project.
• Meetings start and end on time.
• We make project date commitments based on data-based planning.
• All quality issues are team issues. Hold the teams responsible.
• Results are our responsibility.

Generally, the lists are short and to the point, like the one above. Also, they are usually fairly obvious and make some think they do not need to be written down. But remember, there is a reason handwashing signs are placed in hospitals and restaurants. The obvious is too often forgotten.

That is what you want to do with your leadership team. Before the project even begins, the leadership team has gelled around what success means. Before the planning workshop, the leadership team should work with project sponsors and other appropriate customer representatives to prioritize the product features and services being created.

Adapted and reprinted with permission from Career Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, “Lead with Speed” by Alan Willett is available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher at http://www.redwheelweiser.com/or 800.423.7087.

Alan Willett is an author, consultant, speaker, and expert at enabling leaders, teams, and organizations to take control of the accelerator of speed. He works with clients around the world, including the UK, Turkey, South Africa, China, India, Canada, and Mexico, and throughout the United States. He’s consulted for HP, Oracle, Microsoft, NASA, General Motors, Intuit, OnStar, Cornell University, Rutgers University, Technological de Monterrey, and many others. Willett’s passionate work has focused on leadership, with a laser focus on the unique challenges of leading in the elevated pressure environments of high-technology development.