Fearless project leader

Oh-darnTaking risks seems to be an endangered species in corporate America. But that shouldn’t stop the fearless project leader.
Following are three tips to help you rise to the occasion when all hell is breaking loose.
1. Assure that the team has overturned every stone in the planning phase. This means explicitly including risk and uncertainty into the plan, especially into the budget and schedule if those items are critical to the project success.

2. Create a sound bite plan. The plan should be instantly understood by people far outside your inner ring. Try a one page simplified flow chart of the high-level project critical-chain. Forget programs like MS Project: execs won’t take the time to deal with them. Try a nice Visio diagram showing the critical-path. It’s easier to follow and worth it’s weight in gold when having a dialogue with executives.
SCRAPPY TIP: Ornament the biggest risk areas to the project with clip art such as a skull and cross bones, an ambulance or a ticking time bomb. Dramatic, yes: but these visuals help draw attention to areas of greatest risk to the project.
3. NEVER say NO. I make it a practice always to say “YES, that’s possible if . . .” and explain the interdependencies and impacts. For example, if an executive insists that a project must be completed two months earlier than the high-confidence estimated completion date, I might say something like, “Sure, that’s totally possible if you can tolerate a 70% chance of missing that date, or if you add an additional QA shift during the testing phase.”
Works every time.
When All Else Fails . . .
When everything else fails, pack it up. Put another way, when the horse is dead: get off! Some projects aren’t worthy of your fearless leadership. Move on to your next great opportunity!

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4 thoughts on “Fearless project leader”

  1. User Avatar
    Tamba Julia Zoneh

    We define leadership as the ability to motivate oneself and others to take positive action toward a goal. Fearless leaders are able to embrace their own failures, weaknesses, and imperfections without using them as excuses. It is fearlessness that allows leaders to embrace failure, learn from it, and try again, rather than being paralyzed by uncertainty, afraid of making a bad decision, or unwilling to admit mistakes and learn from them. However, Agile represents leadership as giving effective feedback that is open, honest, and respectful. Agile Leaders focus on building and sharing a common understanding and purpose. With Agile leaders,there is a vision of change that is meaningful and applicable to the organization.

    1. Two words that comes to mind is Growth and Action!!!
      Fearlessness definitely allows leaders to embrace failure, learn from it, and try again, rather than being paralyzed by uncertainty, also afraid of making a bad decision, or unwilling to admit mistakes and learn from them.

  2. User Avatar

    To emphasize, fearlessness does not mean the absence of fear; it means that we as project managers take a brave stance in all instances to keep our projects moving without procrastination. We need to run directly at all impediments without hesitation, correctly define them, drill down to identify the root cause, and then collaborate to solve them. We use this same tenacity to avoid scope creep, keep cost under/within budget, deliver per the end users’ specifications, and per the timeline.

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