BKPM’s Three-Sided Table reveals the true role of the project manager, even in Agile projects

Of all of the concepts presented in Bare Knuckled Project Management; how to succeed at every project (Gruebl, Welch, and Dobson, 2013, Gameplan Press) the concept of managing a project as if the BKPM is sitting at a three-sided table is one of the most fundamental.  Almost everything else is designed to maintain this relationship between project owners and fulfillment teams.

Of course, no project manager, not even the most highly skilled, can do it alone. And, no Agile team can substitute for what the Project Manager provides. Executive leadership sets the tone and provides the support; project sponsors establish the goals; the solutions team partners to do the work in either a waterfall, Agile, or blended way; and the project manager runs the plan and process. Establishing clear goals, roles, and expectations for the different project players is a necessary precondition for the BKPM.

The Broken Two-Sided Table

In traditional project management, the PM/customer/team relationship can be described as a two-sided table: the project manager and team on one side, and the customer or client on the other. In my previous life as a software implementer, this was always the case, and it made perfect sense. The project manager, after all, leads the team, and is accountable for delivering results to the customer. That makes the project manager the advocate and architect of the team’s solution. When the team succeeds, the project manager succeeds. When the team fails, the project manager fails.

The customer, on the other hand, is independent. The job of the customer is to articulate what he or she wants, and ultimately to pay for it. That means the customer’s role is to put pressure on the project manager and team to deliver the right solution on the right timetable at the right price.

But in the BKPM approach, that’s absolutely wrong. The BKPM approach makes some changes to conventional project management. One of these is to change how we view the relationship of the BKPM to the team and to the customer or sponsor. We call it the Three-Sided Table, and it’s a powerful tool to reframe the role of project manager in the process of getting the work done.

The Three-Sided Table View

In the three-sided table approach, every project has three “seats” that must be filled:

• The customer or executive sponsor owns the outcome, not the process. This is absolutely critical. If the executive sponsor cannot clearly articulate the desired project outcome in terms of business impact, then there is little chance that it will be reached.
• The project manager owns the process, not the outcome. Again, this is critical. This position of purity is exactly what enables consistent project success.
• The partners and team align with the direction of the project manager to achieve the technical objectives of the project. They are the primary consumers of time and budget and, in the end, render products or services. This may be done as a traditional method such as SDLC, or as an Agile effort.

Project managers traditionally manage the “triple constraint:” on time, on budget, and to spec. But that’s not how the executive sponsor should look at it. The value of a project to you is how it impacts your business. If a job’s not worth doing in the first place, it hardly matters if it’s on time and on budget; if the project is valuable enough to your business objectives, over budget or behind schedule may not be that important.

Some executive sponsors link the project outcome to the project manager and team, giving them a handy way to spread the blame when things go wrong, but that turns a project into a death spiral. You can’t afford to do that.

As an executive, you have a different perspective than that of the project manager and fulfillment team. They may not be aware of how all the business’s moving parts fit together — and it has to be that way. That’s why you must never make the project manager or fulfillment team responsible for a single project’s outcome.

When you violate this rule, you end up with a two-sided table, with the PM and team on one side and the customer/executive sponsor on the other. Because you have a perspective and critical knowledge that the PM/team does not, the PM/team focuses on achieving whatever outcome you told them in the most direct way possible.

Because you as an executive sponsor can’t — and shouldn’t — spend your day micromanaging the project manager and team, you need someone who can keep both sides (you and the implementation team) working to achieve the right kind of success. By using the three-sided table approach, the organization, the project team, and the customer realize important benefits, including:

• The BKPM finds out the truth and shares it. There are no secrets with the BKPM; he or she is the honest broker to both sides.
• The BKPM holds everyone’s feet to the fire. This means not only being accountable, but constantly moving the ball forward.
• The BKPM determines if risk is within acceptable boundaries.
• The BKPM challenges the proposed technical solutions and approaches.
• The BKPM has profit and loss (P&L) accountability for the project.
• The BKPM keeps unnecessary escalations away from senior executives — and lets them sleep at night.

In conventional project management models the project manager and the team are considered to be on the same side — a two-sided table. But in the BKPM method, we extract the project manager from the team, and thereby move the BKPM away from a defensive position in the relationship.

In other words, the BKPM doesn’t represent the solutions team any more than he or she represents the sponsor. That frees the BKPM to focus on the plan and the process of project execution in line with overall business objectives.

So what do you think? There is a growing body of evidence that this approach and its corresponding toolsets (BKPM Pocket Guide) substantially removes risk from all projects, including ones where Agile or a hybrid is used as the primary development methodology.  This article written by Jeff Welch, Agile engineers have done it… They’ve figured out how to make “stuff” roll uphill, explains more about BKPM’s role within Agile projects.

[This was largely excerpted from Bare Knuckled Project Management; how to succeed at every project available for download from Smashwords or Amazon. Feel free to call Jeff Welch or me at Think at 410.235.3600 to schedule a short presentation of BKPM.]