Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Cameron, W. Scott.
I have noted during my career that there is a never ending amount of rules and restrictions forced upon project managers under the guise of helping them "be succesful" in managing their projects. It appears to be a one-way street, but few (if any) are removed.
I had been in a technical/project management assignment about two years, when one day my boss asked me to come to his office to 'discuss an opportunity.' When I arrived in his office, he indicated that the project manager of one of our biggest ($10M+) and most important projects had requested to be removed from the job immediately, and the organization was going to grant the request. He felt I was the most experienced person he had and thought I would be a perfect fit for this job.
In analyzing people's careers it should be define and write down one to three things they must have in an assignment, and as many wants as they wish. Compare people's list to the must and wants of potential assignments we can see if there is match. We should discuss career coaching with another manager. Career development by definition is a long journey. As coach help shape the career of other, it does him no good to forget that his own careers will continue to develop.
Since e-mail generates itself on a round-the-clock, daily basis, it's not unusual for me to receive an average of fifty e-mails a day, or more than 300 a week. That s a lot of e-mail. I have spoken with many of my fellow project managers about my relationship with e-mail. In my case, reading and responding to it is a temptation almost too hard to resist. When I receive an e-mail I tend to want to stop everything I m doing, and open and answer it. Indeed, in my life you could say e-mail is a force to be reckoned with. Interestingly, my fascination with mail began a long time ago. I trace it back to my days as a young boy when I started receiving my first letters from friends and family. Walking home from school, I was often filled with curiosity, wondering if I had received any mail that day. In college, I knew the exact time the mail was delivered, and I headed for my mailbox as close to that hour as I could. After that, I served in an Army Reserve Post Office Unit, where I came to realize how important a postal unit was to the military. There were many others like myself, far from home, who relied on the written word to stay connected to the people in their lives. Over the years I have changed in many ways, and so has the mail. But the same sense of connection, and the same urge to respond to someone who has written me, remains. The 24/7 nature of e-mail has compounded the situation. It is relentless in its pursuit of my time and attention-and, as such, e-mail has become something I have had to manage in a variety of situations
As I approach my 55th birthday, the old adage 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks' keeps coming to mind. I'm not sure why, because I don't feel old and I'm still interested in taking on new challenges and learning new tricks. However, as I mentor new project managers, I am also aware that others may consider me an old dog unable to learn new tricks. To the contrary, the people I mentor continue to teach me new tricks and challenge my assumptions about project management.
Project managers are rarely described as being funny. Moreover, a good sense of humor rarely seems to be one of the deciding factors in choosing someone to be a project manager, or something that pops up as a major discussion point at an annual performance review. Perhaps this is because people think you aren't serious about your work if you laugh. I disagree with this assessment, but that's not really my point. As I talk to people either pursuing a career in project management, or broadening their assignment to include project management, I encourage them to consider what tools they need to be successful. I suggest that they consider any strength they have to be part of their Project Management (PM) Tool Kit, and being funny could be one of the tools they need.
I had a boss once who continually asked me what the purpose of my work was, who were my customers, and how was I keeping my customers informed about my team's work. At first I found these questions perplexing, as my customers should have known the answers. I had covered them in my monthly/quarterly reports or in my project meeting notes. Finally, I confronted him about his questions. He acknowledged that my customers had this information, but he was hearing some disturbing comments between when I submitted my reports, comments like, 'What has he done for me lately?' I decided to take this input to heart. My ideas about communications norms needed a major overhaul. The communication norms I was comfortable with were becoming outdated. I realized the written and verbal communications response time was suddenly being measured in days or minutes. People's perception of a project team based on monthly or quarterly meetings was no longer adequate. In the past, once the team's credibility was established it was hard to change. In a rapid-fire communications world, no news causes people to question what the team is doing to move the business/project ahead.
A project manager reflects on the benefits of assigning awards to employees, versus traditional rewards involving money or competition. He includes an anecdote from his own experience to illustrate how employees appreciate official recognition.
I recently took on a new assignment and, as is my norm, I scheduled a series of one-hour, 1:1 join-up meetings with the various lead personnel on the team and their hierarchy. During one of these meetings, the person I was meeting with informed me how pleasantly surprised she was that I had scheduled this meeting as very few individuals took the time anymore to have them. I was shocked. I was taught that establishing a 1:1 relationship with the people on your team is critical to the project's success. This was the first time I'd heard anything like this about join-up meetings. I filed this feedback away. Later I was talking to my project manager-mentor, and he indicated he had finished his join-up meetings with every person in his new organization. He also indicated his predecessor had conducted few, if any, join-up meetings. Again, I was shocked. When I reflected on these two experiences, I realized a very negative trend might be emerging in our fast-paced, schedule-driven, 500-e-mail-per-day, cell-phone -ringing, 24/7 -communication, multi-tasking work lives: NO FACE TIME! Face time is what you spend with people to talk about the project you are working on, their expectations of you, your expectations of them, your hierarchy's expectations about each of you, and/or-last but certainly not least-what each of you plans on achieving during the project. A 1:1, face-to-face, join-up meeting is the only way I know to build solid trust between the project manager and the team members and their hierarchy.
This paper presents an interview with Scott Cameron who is the Capital Systems Manager for the Food and Beverage Global Business Unit of Procter and Gamble. He has been managing capital projects and mentoring other project managers for the past 20 years at Procter and Gamble within its Beauty Care, Health Care, Food and Beverage, and Fabric and Home Care Businesses. Scott also has been an Academy Sharing Knowledge (ASK) feature writer since Volume One.