1. Command and control
2. Constant monitoring
3. Process over results
4. Risk aversion and mitigation
5. Dependence on Tools (Project Plans, Status Reports, Risk Matrices, etc.)
6. Waterfall methodologies
Tom Peters in his latest book, Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,
uses the example of terrorist cells as the model for the new virtual organization.I like the term "Guerrilla" as it has less negative connotations. If you want to feel patriotic, use the analogy of being in the Special Forces.
Frankly, I think this is going to be a tough sell to most traditional Project Managers as their entire training is based on high amounts of process, change management and tooling to avoid adaptability, gut instinct and autonomy.
So if you are a project manager, ask yourself: can you manage like a terrorist?
1. Could you survive without your trusted Microsoft Project Plan? Can you create a schedule using only a white board, a notepad, or a sticki-note?
2. Could you build a multi-million $ project plan in a day and stick to it? Or would you snivel back to your boss saying, "Uhm I don't have the requirements, deliverables, scope, resource, allocation, etc."
3. Have you built your team so that if you disappeared for a week it could survive?
4. Can you really change on a dime? Can you do it without filling out process forms, change management requests, etc.?
5. Is the goal for your project simple? If you had to explain your project in 10-15 minutes, could you do it?
6. Do you have vertically specialized knowledge or are you just overhead? Could you take over one of your team mates workload? If you're on a software project, do you know how to code? Do you understand the architecture of the project? Could you do a build? If you're running a health care project can you talk HL7? Or is your expertise simply pumping out status reports on a weekly basis?
7. Are you a passionate defender of your project and project team? Are you politically strong enough to jump into the fray for your team? Are you afraid of hierarchy? Can you take out an opponent in your way?
8. Could you make a decision by gut feel in 30 seconds? Can you plan in your head? Can you make decisions with patchy information?
9. Are you a PM that likes to keep everything in control? Do you play it safe? Do you follow the traditional PMP methodology of trying to avoid risks at all costs through mitigation, documentation and forecasting? If you were thrown into a crisis, could you manage?
10. Can you jump into a project that's already in crisis and fix it? Can you do it in days, not months?
11. Can you manage fall-out? Can you live with an imperfect solution in order to make time-to-market targets (I once had a project where we launched an e-commerce application that for the first three months took a room full of temps to do data-entry in the background because we couldn't automate the whole solution)?
If you're designing a building, a space shuttle or a health care application, this isn't the type of management style you want from your project manager. The risks are too high - if you take the risk and someone dies as a result, then you need a formal approach and PMBOK will work quite nicely.
But the vast majority of applications in business are far more slippery, agile and time-to-market sensitive. If as a PM you are not entrepreneurial, agile and a gut feel leader then you're going to be toast if any small crisis hits your project.
When I hire project managers, I tell them the following: I expect you to be a competent project manager with good process. That's a given, but at the end of the day, that's not your real value proposition.
Your real value proposition is this: at some point during your project, you will hit a crisis which requires strength of character, real leadership and the ability to make a judgement call. You're going to have to stand in the middle of that crisis and keep your project together, lead your team and be able to make judgements with little to no support.
Example of what I mean: I was running a project where I was launching a software application. I was working for a program manager who was quite process oriented and very sensitive to "adoption", e.g. how are we going to manage our customers. We were supposed to launch at 3pm, and I was still getting performance test reports at 2pm that said were weren't going to make the target performance requirements. We ran one last test, and at 2:45 I got the last results. We were good to go!
So I had a decision to make - we could rush the launch (which was quite time sensitive) and make the time line or slow down and scrub the launch giving us some more time to prepare documentation, change request orders, deployment guides and communication materials.
My Program Manager freaked and said, "But where are your PowerPoint slides?! How are we going to communicate this to our stakeholders at our 3pm con call?!". Instant panic.
I walked into the CIO's office who had to make the ultimate decision to launch or not and this Program Manager actually started apologizing for not being prepared and started trying to paraphrase what I had just told her to the CIO! Knowing that this wasn't instilling confidence, I quickly interupted her and simply said, "Look, here's the deal. We just got off the floor and we're ready to go. We can either scrub this launch or you can go ahead. I can tell you that from my perspective we're ready to launch, but if you would like to review it further we can delay the launch date."
The CIO took one look at me, trusted me and said, "Ok let's go."
But this just opened up another "adoption" problem - we had a conference call scheduled with all the customers and typically agenda items and materials were send 24 hours before the meeting. I was typically not involved in these calls as I was too far down the hierarchy (command and control!) to be talking directly to customers. The program manager was anxious, "How am I supposed to communicate this to our stakeholders?"
I suggested a simple solution - I got on the con call myself and simply talked to all the stakeholders. I got on the call, told the group what the status of the project was and without hesitation told them that we were ready to launch and that I had 100% confidence that we were ready to go.
At the end of day, we launched on that day. It was a bit messy on the back-end and we had lots of people in IT nervously monitoring the system for any hiccups, but we made the date and launched successfully. That's what happens in the real world...
Could you do that? Do you have the guts as a PM to walk into a meeting without materials, communicate to your stakeholders about a launch that you just verified could work 15 minutes ago, and then with confidence and poise communicate that to your stakeholders in a way that gives them confidence that you know what you're talking about?
That's what a Guerrilla PM does...
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