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Got it? Heres your one-question quiz: Was the Chevron project a success? (Take your time answering. No ones looking over your shoulder.) By now, you may have suspected that the question contains some hidden trick. Youre right. The fact is, you havent been given enough information to evaluate the success or failure of the Chevron project. A correct answer in this case would have been to ask for more information about the larger organizational context or to inquire about what happened next. Okay, so the above exercise was a little manipulative. But it illustrates a common trend in project management: the tendency to evaluate project success too quickly, too narrowly or with shortsighted criteria. The traditional measurements criteria of schedule, budget and quality, on their own may no longer be sufficient.

Case in point: Lets return to Chevron for the rest of the story. Very soon after its glorious opening, the Chevron manufacturing plant failed and was sold. As it turned out, the market for the high demand, high-market product was a volatile one, prone to change quickly. And change it did. Had the project team considered the possibility of this market change, they surely would have explored the option of shelving the project altogether.

Now which criteria would you use to determine success? If you were to consider only the traditional criteria of budget and schedule, you would have concluded that the project was a smashing success. But if the criterion is value added to the business, the project failed abysmally. And its here that we can observe the need for project team members to begin thinking about their work in different ways. But isnt such market forecasting the responsibility of leadership? Isnt it unrealistic to expect that kind of strategic thinking from our already-stressed, neophyte project team members? Perhaps that was once true. But the world has changed.

A New Way to Think about Projects

In the new world of work, the familiar project has become a very different entity.

Carl Pritchard, PMP and principal of Pritchard Management Associates, has lectured and written extensively on the subject of project management. He sees many new trends in project management, not the least of which is the changing profile of the people who are being called upon to lead projects. "What I see in the classroom is interesting," he says. "Its an amalgam of old timer project managers who have been doing it for years without any formal processes in there with a lot of new folks who are just entering the practice. In many instances, these new people are joining project management on the heels of success they had in some other part of the organization. They were pulled off some organizational effort, and management is now looking for a new home for them. Poof! Theyre expected to be project managers."

Whats behind this new trend of putting more and more people on a rapidly growing number of projects? Pritchard suggests that one major cause is the near obsessive customer focus that has become the focal point of organizing for so many businesses. This intense customer focus requires a special touch in fostering new processes and relationships. And that touch must come from individuals who can marshal and control resources and who can recognize when a project is faring well and when it needs more intense time and attention.

One would be hard-pressed to complain about a customer-service orientation. But the new sense of urgency is thrusting onto project teams a lot of people who are not fully equipped. Many still are learning "the hard way" - let em learn it on the fly and hope they dont foul it up. At the very least, many are being trained in the basic principles and tools in the Project Managers Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). But how many are being trained to ask the kinds of questions that could have prevented the painful Chevron fiasco? If youre thinking PMBOK is enough grounding, think again. Those are implementation techniques - a great place to start, but hardly a full tool box. More is needed.

"We should be training our project teams to be more," Pritchard agrees. "They need to be entrepreneurs. Consultants. Even agents of change. We need to build the confidence of these individuals to serve the organization with a willingness to effect change without apology and to implement change with an understanding of all those it will affect." The profile of successful project teams is changing. Success will now require the people on those teams to take on new skills and responsibilities. These include:

• Strategic, big-picture thinking
• Continual reassessment of the risk and opportunities throughout the project
• Sensitivity to all critical stakeholders and sponsors
• An environment of openness and trust

Strategic, Big-Picture Thinking

As the Chevron project team members painfully learned, projects dont exist in a vacuum. In the end, the project teams that deliver value to the organization will be the ones who are keenly attuned to the organizational strategies and objectives. Lynne Hambleton, manager of learning systems at Xerox, agrees. "Im aware that many organizations measure project success using the traditional criteria - such as time, cost, scope," she says. "But that just doesnt fly in our culture, where quality is important, and our Malcolm Baldrige award continues to set a legacy for excellence. Those traditional criteria just dont get us there. Thats why, at Xerox, our projects must always speak to value provided, whether thats value to Xerox or to the client. We make it clear that project teams must offer solutions that support strategy. Thats a lot more complex than the old way of thinking."

Continual Reassessment of Risk and Opportunities

The project team may be doing things the right way - but are they still doing the right thing? Thats the kind of question that characterizes todays new breed of project managers. At Xerox, project team members are trained to continually assess both risks and opportunities from the inception to the completion of the project.

"Just about everyone involved in the project is asking questions like, Whats going on in the larger context? What could derail our efforts?," says Hambleton. "Project team members certainly ask those questions. And the operations side of the team is definitely asking those questions a lot because theyll be the ones running the effort after the project is done. They are constantly held accountable because theyre going to be living with it."

A Sensitivity to Critical Stakeholders and Sponsors

Nothing scintillating here; its in all the basic texts. Yet the critical process of managing stakeholders continues to be ignored. Its the oldest story in the book: The project was delivered skillfully, but a key stakeholder was left out of the process... and the project choked. Its sobering to realize that these stakeholder interests are almost never hidden. In fact, they are often quite overt. But if the project team members dont ask, stakeholders interests wont be spelled out in the statement of work or the contract. The make-it-or-break-it criteria never even show up on the project teams radar screen.

Pritchard offers this example: "I met with my contractor just this morning to talk about the addition were putting on our home. He hammered me with all the right questions. "Who will I talk to?" "Who might I talk to?" "Who will sign the changes?" "Who will be around the day they place the Porta-John?" They were great questions! The barrage was almost too much for me. I started thinking about the many project managers who would rather put off those difficult discussions until later, after the relationship develops. But my contractor is building our relationship now. Hes not wasting time. As a result, hes going to have a very clear understanding of my expectations - just as I will have a clear understanding of his."

Trust and Openness

Perhaps its the many technical tools of project management - the risk assessment grids, the Gantt charts, the budget sheets - that lull well-intentioned project teams into the mistaken belief that their role is itself technical. But success isnt built exclusively on deadlines, budget and quality. Remember, there are people involved here. And the wheels of relationships are greased by those old nonquantifiables of trust and openness. Pritchard agrees. "Project management has long been a somewhat furtive practice where we (the practitioners) take it upon ourselves to hide extra money and time without letting the customer know were doing it and why," he says. "Honest project management is going to be the successful project management over the long term. Some organizations cannot support overt communication about risk, time and cost slippage, and team relationships. Those organizations should be out of the project management business in the not-too-distant future."

Ripples of Change

The skill-building approach to project management is giving way to a new paradigm: the culture creation approach, in which project management is a holistic process, nurtured by the organizations shared beliefs, attitudes and infrastructure. But cultures can be slippery things. How does one create a culture where project team members enthusiastically embrace the new attitudes, beliefs and skills that lead to success? At Xerox, its a matter of education. And not just the dry flip-chart-and-lecture kind of education; Hambleton immerses people in the subject in the most compelling way of all: experientially. Using a discovery learning simulation, Xeroxs Hambleton equips project team members in a low-risk, high-involvement learning environment. The participants become instant project managers and are quickly connected to the models of Gantt charts, resource allocation grids and critical-path diagrams.

As more and more companies are beginning to embrace this strategic partner approach to project management, success stories are already emerging and offering a tantalizing glimpse of the possibilities. At AT&T, project team members from many divisions are brought in at the earliest conceptual planning stages of an effort. Schneider National formalized its tracking and status reporting and introduced common project management language across lines of business. And at NCR, team members begin assessing opportunity and risk on day one... and continue until completion.

To be sure, at each of these organizations the traditional tools of PMBOK are still firmly in place. So what distinguishes them from others? Look a little deeper and youll find some new assumptions at work: project work teams are most enabled when members see themselves as leaders, strategic partners and entrepreneurs. And leaders, partners and entrepreneurs are developed only when organizations embrace employees as whole people. As is often the case with success stories, the victory arises not from the tools but from human beings. Now theres an assumption worth embracing.

The Learning Connection

So how does one communicate new principles about project management in a way that leads to a culture shift? Based on her own experience with a discovery learning simulation, Xeroxs Lynne Hambleton offers some suggestions:

• Make it active. Theres still a place for flip charts and PowerPoint presentations in classrooms of corporate America. But adult learning theory confirms time and again that people learn by doing. At some point, put away the flip chart and get people on their feet.
• Make it fun. "Lets face it. Project management is a pretty dry subject," confides Hambleton. "I have the most success engaging learners when theyre having fun. That was one big reason the Countdown® simulation worked so great at Xerox. It was fun."
• Make it practical. After engaging people in the fictional world of the learning simulation, Hambletons work is only half done. The next critical piece is connecting the experience back to the reality of daily work. How can we actually practice what weve learned? How do we actually do this in our work? If you dont tie it back, people wont ever own it.