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3 Summaries of Harvard Business Review Articles on Project Management

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Project Management Articles

Short summaries each, of well selected Harvard Business Review articles

on Project Management.

• Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Embracing Agile. Harvard
Business Review, May 2016. Pages 40 – 50

• Donald L. Laurie and J. Bruce Harreld. Harvard Business Review, July-August 2013. 6
Ways to Sink a Growth Initiative. Pages 82 - 90

o Yves Morieux. Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You.
Harvard Business Review, September 2011. Pages 78 – 86

Embracing Agile
Embracing Agile by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi elaborates
that agile methodologies are radical alternatives to command-and-control style
management and they involve new values, principles, practices benefits, and they are
spreading across a broad range of industries and functions, and even into the C-suite.
Examples of users of Agile include National Public Radio, John Deere, Saab, Intronis,
Mission Bell Winery etc.

The agile approach accelerates profitable growth and also creates a new generation of
skilled general managers. By taking people out of their functional silos and putting them
in self-managed and customer focused multi-disciplinary teams, the agile approach is
not only accelerating profitable growth but also helping to create a new generation of
skilled general managers.

The spread of Agile raises intruiging possibilities. These executives launch countless
initiatives with urgent deadlines rather than assignt he highest priority. They spread
themselves and their best people across too many projects. They schedule meetings
with agile team members, forcing them to skip working sessions or send substitutes.
They talk more than listen. they promote marginal ideas that a team has previously
considered and back burnered. They routinely over turn team decisions and add review
layers and controls to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated. With best intentions they
erode the benefits agile innovations can deliver. But there's need for executives to go
through training so that they can understand the approach, if not they will continue to
manage in ways that run contrary to Agile principles. Innovation is what agile is all
about. From studies six practices leaders can adopt if they want to capitalize on Agile's
potential.

1. Learn how Agile really works: Agile include three main things: Scum (emphasizes
creative teamwork in solving complex problems), Lean development (focuses on
continual elimination of waste), and Kanban (concentrates on reducing lead times and
amount of work in process).

Benefits of Agile include: increase team productivity and employee satisfaction,

minimizes wastes inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive
documentation, quality defects and low value features. It improves customer
engagement and satisfaction, brings most valuable products and features to market
faster and reduces risks. It broadens organizational experience and mutual trust and
respect. It allows senior managers to devote themselves more fully to higher value work.

The fundamentals of scrum are simple. The organization forms and empowers a team,
usually three to five people, assigned to full time. The team is cross functional and
includes all the skills necessary to complete its tasks. It manages itself and is strictly
accountable for every aspect of the work. The team initiative owner delivers value to
customers and to the business. This person works with team and coordinates with
stakeholders. He may use a technique such as design thinking or crowdsourcing to build
opportunities and he doesn't tell the team who should do what or how long tasks should
last rather the team plans this. A process facilitator guides the process by protecting the
team from distractions and puts the team's collective intelligence to work. Team
members hold daily 'stand-up' meetings to review progress and identify roadblocks.

Disagreements are resolved through exprimentations and feedback rather than endless
debates. Small working prototypes are tested with few customers at short period of
time. Agile increases team productivity and emplyee satisfaction, minimizes haste
inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality
defects and low-value product features. It also improves customer engagement and
satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more
predictably and reduces risk. Broadens organizational experience and builds mutual trust
and respect. Also allows senior managers to devote themselves more fully to higher
value work that only they can do.

2. Understand where Agile works or doesn't work: Agile is most effective and easiest to
implement under conditions commonly found in software innovation. Agile innovation
also depends on having a cadre of eager participants. One of it's core principles is 'Build
projects around motivated individuals'. Give them the environment and support they
need and trust them to get the job done. Leaders need to press holdouts to follow suit
when the majority chooses to adopt agile methodologies.

3. Start small and let the word spread: Large companies launch change programs as
massive efforts. But a successful Agile starts small. It begins with IT then spreads to
another function with the original practitioners acting as coaches. Each success seems to
create a group of passionate evangelists who can hardly wait to tell others in the
organization how well agile works.

4. Allow ''Masters'' teams to customize their practices: A person or team will benefit
from practicing the widely used methodologies of agile that have delivered success in
thousands of companies before beginning to customize or modify it. Mastering agile
innovation is similar. To modify or customize agile a team will benefit from the widely
used methodologies that have delivered success in thousands of companies. Over time
experienced practitioners should be permitted to customize agile practices. Teams
should keep their progress and impediments constantly visible.

5. Practice Agile at the top: Some C-suite activities are not suitable to agile
methodologies such as performance assessment, press interviews, visit to plants etc. But
the most important for agile include strategy development and resource allocation,
cultivating breakthrough innovations and improving organizational collaboration. Senior
executives who come as an agile team and learn to apply the discipline to these
activities achieve far-reaching benefits. Their productivity and morale improve, they
speak the language of the teams they are empowering, they experience common
challenges and learn how to overcome them, they recognize and stop behaviors that
impede agile teams. Thus results improve and this leads to increase confidence and
engagement through out the organization.

6. Destroy the barrier to agile behaviors: An agile leadersip team often authorizes a
senior executive to identify the critical issues, design processes for addressing them and
appoint a single owner for each innovative initiative. Other senior leaders must avoid
second guessing the owner's decisions. It's fine to provide guidance and assistance but if
you don't like the results change the initiative owner don't incapacitate him or her. Make
sure you focus on teams not individuals and also lead with questions not orders.

Agile innovation has revolutionalized the software industry but the greatest impediment
is not the need for better methodologies, evidences of significant benefits or proof that
agile can work outside IT but the behaviour of executives. Learning to lead agile's
extension into broader range of business activities will hasten profitable growth.

Six Ways to Sink a Growth Initiative

This article by Donald L. Laurie and J. Bruce Harreld explains that companies with mature
markets must grow if share price is to increase but because acquisitions are expensive
and risky, so CEO launches a slew of initiatives in areas with high growth potentials and
appoints some promising mangers to lead them. To ensure that these new ventures are
not stifled, he get the managers report to special growth committee headed by a trusted
staff executive and locates them a safe distance from the established businesses. CEOs
and their senior teams see managing today's earnings as their main job and don't spend
time on the pursuit of growth and building the kind of learning organization and culture
that growth requires.

They fail to identify specific policies and actions that only they can take to create the
conditions for success and signal to the organization the seriousness of their
committment to growth. The conventional wisdom about how best to pursue growth is a
recipe for failure which explains why most new businesses launched by established
companies die. To improve the odds for your company's latest venture, here are some
traps to avoid.

1. Failing to provide the right kind of oversight: Commonly, CEOs and senior managers
don't take full responsibility for growth as well as earnings. they conduct sporadic
reviews of the ventures' progress and focus on things that can't be known or don't
matter. As a start-up team's collective knowledge advances far beyond theirs, and its
insights deepen and become more nuanced, they have trouble understanding the
conversation and the issue at hand. Thus they can't help the ventures solve problems
and obtain crucial resources and capabilities.

Remedy: CEOs and senior managers should join the team on its voyage of discovery. It
entails spending meaningful time with the team and its customers. CEOs should
constantly ask themselves and initiatives' members, wht serious customer problems can
we solve? what do we need to learn to be effective in this new terrain? what capabilities
must we assemble?, etc. They should leave each meeting with a list of assignments with
their due dates. CEO may not have time to devote to all the many initiatives, he should
appoint a staff executive to assist while he remains the chief growth officer.

2. Not putting the best, most experienced talent in charge: Big companies usually
assign two types of people to lead growth initiatives: Firstly, the smart, ambitious,
recently minted MBAs. Reasons being the ventures are great development
opportunities, if the youngsters fail, it won't have a significant impact on the company's
current performance. And secondly, staff executives who have solid experience in a
particular functional area and in managing projects but have never run an entire
business. The CEO doesn't seriously consider seasoned executives in the mainstay
businesses as candidates. He/She reasons they are needed to deliver quarterly earnings,
they lack the necessary entrepreneurial flair and they may see such an assignment as a
demotion.

Remedy: A company's best, most experienced general managers should lead these
initiatives. These indidviduals have the internal networks and the understanding of the
organization's culture needed to obtain them, they know how to learn what works and
what doesn't and lastly, they have the self confidence required to be decisive and the
skill to change course when necessary.

3. Assembling the wrong team and staffing up prematurely: Senior executives charged
with assembling a team often grab the personnel who happen to be available, more
often than not these people are not company stars. furthermore the team is created
before anyone has determined exactly what needs to be done and what skills will be
required. Remedy: Focus on capabilities not available people and staff of only when the
strategy, business model and value proposition are clear. Scaling the business
prematurely, wastes money. Note that, assembling capabilities is a continual process
especially as the business expands.
4. Taking the wrong approach to performance assessment: Big companies often apply
the same metrics and milestones to running their early-stage businesses that they use in
managing their mature businesses. this is harmful.

Remedy: For every initiative, establish milestones that are relevant for each stage of its
development. Negotiate how much time will be given to achieve a milestone and the
result should be realistic not ambitious. No leapfrogging of any milestones and their
achievement a precondition for the release of funds. This approach will help avoid
premature scaling of the business. Milestones include identify the customer's ''pain
point'', articulate the value proposition, select a method for capturing the value, build a
rapid prototyping capability, conduct an initial market test, demonstrate the existence of
a broad market, develop a business plan and a finacial forecast and create an execution
plan.

5. Not knowing how to fund or govern a start-up: Two mistakes that kill start-ups are
companies forcing their early stage growth initiatives to follow the annual budgeting
cycle of their established businesses and operating executives reallocating fundings
earmarked for those ventures inorder to finance the needs of their mature operations.
Management needs to seperate the funding of early-stage ventures from the
corporation's annual budget cycle, protect that money and create special rules for
allocating it.

Remedy: Establish an independent budget that is distributed when and only when the
kinds milestones described above have been achieved. The CEO or senior staff monitors
performance, distributes money and has access to discretionary capital should
unanticipated needs arise.

6. Failing to leverage the organization's core capabilities: The wrong ideas for the past
two or three decades has been that new ventures within large, mature organization are
to be isolated to prevent the established businesses from stifling them. Independent
start-ups spend critical time and money building these capabilities from scratch while the
existing assets and skills within large organizations can dramatically reduce the risk of
building a new business and the time needed for it to begin generating a positive cash
flow. So very important to structure leadership and governance of new ventures as
described above. Reources of the core businesses must be adapted to serve the needs of
start-ups.

Remedy: CEOs must play a vital role in aiding growth initiatives tap the resources of the
core businesses and use them constructively (challenging for leaders who have risen
through the ranks of the core businesses and have no experience in mobilizing support
for early stage ventures). The CEO will also help the larger organization learn how to
grow by encouraging managers of the core businesses to support start-ups through
sharing resources and capabilities, promoting skills and behaviors such as listening
deeply to customers, experimenting and innovating.

The above approach will challenge the established system and conventional ways of
working. Without appropriate leadership, funding, measurement mechanisms and
governance, growth initiatives will fail. But when they succeed the larger organization
will learn how to balance its endeavors to deliver short term profits and generate long
term growth.

Smart Rules: 6 Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You

Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You by Yves Morieux
explains that globalization and technology have emerged with alot of complexity in the
business world, they have opened up new markets and enabled new competitors with
an abundance of options to choose from, customers are harder to please and are more
fickle than ever. These complexities are also reflected on businesses' goals. These
complexities are not bad, they bring with them opportunities as well as challenges. The
issue is the way companies respond to them. To redesign their many conflicting goals,
managers redesign the organization's structure, performance measure and incentives
trying to align employees' behaviour with shifting external challenges.

Boston Consulting Group created an ''index of complicatedness'', based on surveys of

more than 100 U.S. and European listed companies, which measures how big the
problem is. Companies need a better way to handle complexities. And in their research
and work with clients they found a different and more effective approach which does
not involve attempting to impose formal guidelines and processes on frontline
employees, rather entails creating an environment which employees can work with one
another to develop creative solutions to complex challenges. Thereby leading to
organizations that ably address numerous fluid and contradictory requirements without
structural and procedural complicatedness.

The approach known as 'Smart Rules', helps managers mobilize their subordinates' skills
and intelligence. Smart rules are six in number. The first three involves Enabling ie
providing information needed to understand where the problems are, and empowering
the right people to make good choices. The last three is Impelling - motivating people to
apply all their abilities and to cooperate, thanks to feedback loops that expose them as
directly as possible to the cosequences of their actions (make finding solutions to
complex performance requirements far more attractive than disengagement, ducking
cooperation or finger-pointing). When the right feedback loops are in place employees
find solutions that create more value.

Rule 1 - Improve understanding of what co-workers do: To respond to complexity

wisely, people have to understand each other's work, the goals and challenges others
have to meet, the resources they can draw on, and the constraints under which they
operate. The manager's job is to make sure such learning takes place. If not people will
blame problems on other people's lack of intelligence or skills, not on resources and
contraints of the organization.

Rule 2 - Reinforce the people who are Intergrators: Conflicts between back and front
offices are often inherent. A usual organizational response is to create some sort of
coordinating unit - a middle office. But a better response is to empower line individuals
or groups to play that intergative role. There are managers who interact with multiple
stakeholders, identify them they can act as intergrators, helping teams obtain from
others the cooperation needed to add more value. Reinforce their power by increasing
their responsibilities and giving them a greater say on issues that matters to others.

Rule 3 - Expand the amount of power available: So common, people with the least
power in organizations shoulder most of the burden of cooperation and get the least
credit. When they realize this, they withdraw from cooperation and hide in their silos. To
prevent this and increase cooperation, companies need to give these people more
power so that they can take the risk of moving out of isolation, trusting others, showing
initiative and being transparent about performance. They have to do this without taking
power from others in the system. Possible by creating new power bases, giving
individuals new responsibilities for issues that matter to others and to the firm's
performance.

Rule 4 - Increase the need for reciprocity: To spur productive cooperation expand
resposibilities of integrators beyond activities over which they have direct control. Richer
or more complex goals will drive them to resolve trade-offs rather than avoid them.
Measuring people only on what they can control will cause them to shy away from
helping with many other problems you need their input on. Do this! Drive goals back to
employees who actually have to achieve them so that people who are best positioned to
resolve trade-offs are the ones handling them. As you spread responsibility for achieving
outcomes, don't feel you have to give people more resources to go with it, rather take
resources away.
Rule 5 - Make Employees feel the shadow of the future: More difficult to hold a
decision maker accountable when it takes long for the consequences of a decision to
take effect. Many involved at the launch of a three-year project may not be around when
it's completed, they may have moved to another job, location, or may have been
promoted. They won't be affected by the results of the actions they took, the trade-offs
they made and how well they cooperated. So bring the future closer so that they can
feel the shadow of it. This can be achieved, by assigning managers to downstream work
and also by increasing the frequency of output performance reviews.

Rule 6 - Put the blame on the uncooperative: Some activities involve long time tag
between cause and effect, making it difficult to set up direct feedback loops that expose
people to the consequences of their actions. Also, jobs can be so remote that it becomes
difficult to have a direct feedback loop thus making the people who perform them feel
interdependent with others. Therefore, managers have to close the feedback loop by
explicitly introducing a penalty for any people or units that fail to cooperate on solving
problems, even if the problem does not occur in their area , and increase the payoff for
all when units cooperate in beneficial way.

Smart rules allows companies to manage complexity by creating a context within which
optimal behaviors occur. This approach leads to greater organizational diversity becuse
voluntary frontline breeds creative customized solutions to problems. There's also high
efficiency in terms of resources used becaused problems are solved by leveraging
through cooperation, skills and ingenuity of employees. And also, an increase in
performance due to increase employee satisfaction.

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