Which Kind of Project Manager do you trust with your most critical projects? Experienced or Effective?

In our line of work - - as operational support and project management consultants - - we frequently watch our clients give their most important projects to people whose claim to success is that they sat through training courses or got a PMP? (Project Management Professional) certificate from the Project Management Institute (PMI). Unfortunately, that certification is not an indicator of an effective project manager.

As a company executive, is this really what you want? Or, do you want your opportunities for organizational greatness to be in the hands of people who can lead, facilitate, negotiate, navigate, and above all, execute? Personally, I want John L. Sullivan, a champion bare-knuckled boxer, in the modern form of a Bare Knuckled Project Manager (BKPM). 

The idea of bare-knuckled project management derives from the sport known as bare-knuckle boxing. In bare-knuckle fighting, the fighters don’t wear gloves or padding. Unlike a street fight, however, there are rules. In England, bare-knuckle fighting became a recognized sport with a champion in the early 1700s.

Sidetrack... The first English champion, James Figg, gained the title in 1719 and held it until 1730. Bare-knuckle bouts lasted much longer than modern boxing matches. One, in 1855, lasted for six hours and fifteen minutes. Bare knuckled boxers can go the distance.  The last sanctioned match took place in 1899 between John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain, with Sullivan victorious. After the Marquis of Queensberry developed modern boxing rules in 1867, bare-knuckle fighting slowly gave way to modern boxing. Some fighters adapted to the new system, including John Sullivan, who lost the battle to become the first heavyweight champion to Gentleman Jim Corbett in 1892. Want more, go to Eyewitness to History.com (credit for the photo above, goes to the same).

It’s not enough to be an experienced project manager. You have to be an effective project manager. That takes the willingness to push hard and do what it takes — skills that aren’t always welcome in a corporate environment. Can your project manager go six hours and fifteen minutes in the equivalent of a project street fight for your most critical project?

Pushing hard isn’t necessarily the same as being a hard-ass. There are any number of hard-ass project managers that drive their projects — right into the ground. There are also project managers who consistently make their deliverables — at the cost of long-term team effectiveness. They’re like the kid who makes breakfast for Mother’s Day and leaves the kitchen a wreck. Great on paper; horrible in practice. The right kind of effective blends the needs of the project with the needs and well-being of the operational teams that support them. That means not only success today, but also the capability for success tomorrow as well.

Projects, you see, have two defining characteristics. They are temporary and they are unique. The normal organization, by contrast, is designed for operational work — the regular and consistent activities we need to perform to keep the doors open.

Operational work has a number of advantages. You can design your organization to do it efficiently. You can train people in the processes and methods of handling the work. You can improve those processes and make them better. Just about every management system from TQM to Lean Six Sigma tells you how to improve your operational work.

But projects, by their very nature, break the mold. If you’re lucky, the projects don’t break the mold so much that they break down the operational efficiencies you have developed. But when you are trying to evolve your business or take risks in attempting to leverage new technologies, methods, or processes, conflict between projects and operations is simply going to be a fact of life.

Projects are always about change. They deliver new systems and tools to improve the organization. They respond to challenges and crises. They force people outside their comfort zones and require new ways of thinking. And at the end of every project, the people and resources have to be folded back into the organization or sent on to new project challenges.

Whether your organization admits it or not, this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. A big project is like going off the high dive into uncharted water. You don’t ever know what you’re going to find. A big project forces change on departments and whole organizations. Everybody resists change to some extent; it’s just human nature.

We all know about inertia — the tendency of a body at rest to stay at rest, and the tendency of a body once in motion to stay in motion. It’s one of the fundamental principles of physics. It’s also one of the fundamental rules of people and organizations. Whenever you try to push any part of the organization to move and change, inertia kicks in. It takes force — energy — to make it happen. 

That’s where the bare-knuckled project manager comes in. 

The difference between a BKPM and a conventional project manager lies in the areas of attitude and skill. A conventional project manager knows the business of organizing and managing a project — but as we’ve seen, that’s not enough to get the job done. A project manager needs to be a fighter as well as a planner. That’s the core BKPM difference. 

The word “fighter” may raise a few eyebrows or set off some alarms, but we can’t afford to be politically correct when we talk about the reality of what a project manager faces. At the same time, we don’t want to give you the wrong idea. A BKPM isn’t a brawler, or somebody who looks for trouble. Instead, a BKPM is the one who settles a problem - a John Sullivan, willing, trained, and tough enough to go the distance.

This was excerpted from Bare Knuckled Project Management; how to succeed at every project (Gruebl, Welch & Dobson, Gameplan Press, 2013) available for download - Smashwords or Amazon. 

Feel free to call Jeff Welch or me at Think at 410.235.3600 to talk about how you can use BKPM to succeed in every project.  There's a lot to making BKPM's and we're happy to show you how we do it.