Tagged with: andrew filev • bottom up • Collaboration • control • enterprise 2.0 • Freestyling • pm 2.0 • project management 2.0 • project potion • Social Media • top down • web 2.0 • wrike
This is a guest post by Andrew Filev, CEO at Wrike.com. This article originally appeared on his blog Project Management 2.0.
Significant changes are taking place in management and especially project management today. We hear that organizations, like the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young switched from the so-called top-down management style to bottom-up management. Others, including some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, implemented bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. The popularity of the bottom-up approach to management is growing. In spite of this fact, the discussions about the two major approaches are still hot. Why have organizations become so anxious about changing their management style? If we compare the two management approaches, the answer to this question will be clear.
Managing projects top-down
The top-down approach remains extremely popular in contemporary project management. The phrase “top-down” means that all the directions come from the top. Project objectives are established by the top management. Top managers provide guidelines, information, plans and fund processes. All of the project manager’s expectations are clearly communicated to each project participant. Following this approach, ambiguity opens the door for potential failure, and the managers should be as specific as possible when communicating their expectations. Process formality is very important for this approach.
Examples of the top-down approach applications can be found in many organizations. One of such example is the New York Times, a leader in the newspaper industry. Several years ago, American Journalism Review (www.ajr.com) reported that The Times’ executive management felt that they were far from what was necessary for creation of a vibrant workplace and a successful organization. Power was centralized and masthead editors experienced overall control. Editors introduced the same management pattern in the projects for which they were responsible. One person’s emotions and opinions influenced all the project decisions, and this person was the project manager. What was the result? Team members felt that they weren’t listened to, that their voices didn’t count. There was no effective collaboration between the journalists. They were not morally motivated to do their jobs. The managing executives then realized that they needed to give more freedom to the teams and change their management style. It took quite a while to introduce bottom-up management to the organization. But, obviously, it was worth the time and effort, as New York Times employees say that collaboration became much more efficient, and team members now work together more productively.
Similar problems caused by utilizing the top-down approach can be observed in many organizations with a traditional management style. Experience shows that this top-down management often results in reduced productivity and causes bottlenecks or so-called lockdowns. A lockdown gives the project manager total control over his team. Such lockdowns can lead to unnecessary pain and significantly slow down a project’s completion.
Bottom-up project management options
The factors mentioned above may play a vital role in a project’s failure, and this is the reason why numerous organizations have turned to a bottom-up management style or at least some of its elements. The New York Times is one of the good examples. The bottom-up approach implies proactive team input in the project executing process. Team members are invited to participate in every step of the management process. The decision on a course of action is taken by the whole team. Bottom-up style allows managers to communicate goals and value, e.g. through milestone planning. Then team members are encouraged to develop personal to-do lists with the steps necessary to reach the milestones on their own. The choice of methods and ways to perform their tasks is up to the team. The advantage of this approach is that it empowers team members to think more creatively. They feel involved into the project development and know that their initiatives are appreciated. The team members’ motivation to work and make the project a success is doubled. Individual members of the team get an opportunity to come up with project solutions that are focused more on practical requirements than on abstract notions. The planning process is facilitated by a number of people, which makes it flow significantly faster. The to-do lists of all the team members are collected into the detailed general project plan. Schedules, budgets and results are transparent. Issues are made clear by the project manager to avoid as many surprises as possible. Bottom-up project management can also be viewed as a way of coping with the increasing gap between the information necessary to manage knowledge workers and the ability of managers to acquire and apply this information.
However, despite all its the advantages, the bottom-up style alone will not make your projects flourish. According to many experts, the bottom-up approach is not the perfect solution, as sometimes it lacks clarity and control. The best way is to find a balance between the two opposite approaches and take the best practices from both of them.
Perfect balance
If you have tried introducing the best bottom-up practices to your organization, you have probably found it difficult to do that while utilizing traditional tools for project management. Traditional project management software, like Microsoft Project, was mostly designed to fit the use of the top-down approach and is not meant for the bottom-up management style. This software is focused on the project manager and places him or her in the center of the project communications. Team members very often have read-only access to the project plan and cannot make any contributions or changes. The employees send their updates to the project manager in disconnected files via e-mail. The project manager then has to collect all the data and put the information manually into the project plan. After that, he or she has to communicate the changes to the corporate executives. All these routine procedures lead to a situation where the project manager’s talents often are buried by the routine work. The huge amount of mechanical control/synchronization work often leaves little very time for leadership from the project manager.
The good news is the situation is changing thanks to the transformations going on in how people share and receive information. More methods for the successful implementation of the bottom-up management best practices have emerged. These methods include are Enterprise 2.0 technologies – wikis, blogs, social networks, collaboration tools, etc. They come into organizations and change the original way of executing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work of his team and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from the individual employees.
Thus, the role the project manager plays in the project changes. Project Management 2.0 software facilitates delegation. It means that people become less dependent on the manager as a to-do generator. The project manager turns from a taskmaster into a project leader. His role is to facilitate the team communications, provide a creative working environment and guide the team. He or she becomes a visionary able to leverage the team strengths and weaknesses and adjust the project development, based on various external changes. Individual team members still have the freedom and responsibility to find their way to the next milestone.
With the help of the second-generation project management tools, managers can merge the advantages of the two management approaches. These tools help them to combine control and collaboration, clarity of project goals and visibility of internal organizational processes.
Thousands of companies, such as Bell Canada, Sun and Yahoo now confirm that bottom-up project management, implemented with the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, improved their business performance. Some companies created corporate blogs to streamline project communications; others introduced wikis to get their customers’ feedback. Even giants, such as IBM, realize the benefits of allowing contributors to have a more active hand in how collaborative work is organized.
My conclusion will be that democratizing project management is never an end in itself. The primary goal is always to find ways to make project management and project collaboration more efficient. New technologies applied to projects offer us the ability to make projects more successful and teams more productive. At the end of the day, projects are delivered faster, and this is to everyone’s benefit.
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About the author: Andrew Filev has been managing software teams since 2001 with the help of new-generation collaboration and management applications. His best practices are based on implementation of Enterprise 2.0 software in project management. Now Andrew is an expert in project management, a successful software entrepreneur and the CEO at Wrike.com, online project management software.
Andrew is the author of some influential project management articles, including works for Cutter IT Journal, Web 2.0 Journal and Agile Journal. Andrew is often invited to speak at conferences, symposiums and seminars. Andrew has given speeches on new trends in project management and on implementing Enterprise 2.0 strategies. He spoke at such events as the PMI Silicon Valley Tools and Techniques Forum, Office 2.0 Conference, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Project Management Symposium and others. Andrew’s ideas about improving traditional project management are reflected in his popular Project Management 2.0 blog. |
Good article.
Obviously sharing your project team in the planning process will improve your result and will create the right atmosphere. Although it is important not to lose control over the project.
Do you see any difference between projects type (software, construction…) and the mode of operation?
Gilad
Great article! I’m circulating it to our Software Development Management team. I see a place for top down ( from the PM’s perspective) in assigning strategic priorities to the projects, & a place for bottom up in the actual management of the projects.
With co-located team members, is the social media as important? Isn’t it easier to just talk face to face? Or is the possibility of recording the chatter in a central location important enough to introduce social media as part of the collaboration? Should the tweets be limited to matters pertaining to the project? I find myself wondering about the effects of less human interaction & more interaction at a distance via social media, & whether or not this is a good thing.
I really wish people woudl stop making diagrams like the one shown here.
The inverse would be agile PM is chaos, no documentation, no plans, everyone is in charge, and the developers run the asylum.
What possible value can come from stating that Top Down management is inflexible, bureaucratic, no moral motivation.
This is a disservice the all those programs where senior leadership provides inspiration and guidance – flying to moon, decommissioning nuclear power plants, and other programs i have direct experience with.
It is also a deservice to those trying to join top down and bottom up into 2.0 – it simply make you look naive and arrogant at the same time.
you can do better than this Bas
The whole premise you have setup about ‘traditional’ project management is a strawman that you have created so that you can knock it down. “Top-Down” project management as you describe it occurs nowhere I have been in my 11 years of working with 100s or organizations on their PM processes. Im not saying such an organization does not exsist but they are not as common as some in the Agile community would seem to believe.
The ‘Perfect Balance” that you bring up here has been going on for 20 years (without the wikis, blogs and social networks). Before Agile ‘discoverd’ these ideas we had a different name for it: good project management. Managers that did what you describe as traditional were called ‘bad project managers’. Wikis, blogs and social networks were then called “talking to your team” and “getting team input”.
Your describtion of How Microsoft Project works in the team context is a classic example of a bad project manager using Microsoft Project.
you seem to have mistaken the fact that Microsft Project was designed before the ‘advent’ of Agile with the idea that it was designed only for ‘Traditional PM’. The desktop application called Project is a scheduling tool. How the items called tasks get into the application and how the estimates and dependancies between tasks get into the schedule are up to the PM. If they want to invent them out of their own head then they are a bad PM. Good PMs speak to their teams.
Hey Andrew and Bas – a controversial post! Well done.
In combination with Microsoft’s Project Server 2007 (based on SharePoint Services) this is no longer an issue – it’s a huge improvement to collaborate with your project team and to give them the possibility to contribute to the project. (Plus it provides tons of other improvements to lead projects)
As based on my expereience, you cannot count on everybody in your project team to “be good” in planning for themselves. Up to some point, it may be possible for single individuals or teams to do it how they think it should be done. But where I work, you simply need to control the stuff the people do – it’s even better to provide them all the “templates” (to-do lists, etc.), because if not, they won’t be in time and not bring the quality you probably expected.
Don’t understand me wrong, I am not a control freak. I would be stunned if I had a few people to work with, that know what and how to do it right – and even keep it in time. But here this is simply not reality.
So, what’s the cause of that? In our projects we work with serveral IT technicians- who do an excellent job in their areas (network, support, etc.) – but who have barely an idea of project management or structured planning. They are too much into “doing” than “planning” (which is good for their daily job, but not for the projects). Please correct me, but in such circumstances I think you should stick to the top-down approach to get the best results for your project.
Best regards,
Oliver
Brian, I have to object here:
“How the items called tasks get into the application and how the estimates and dependencies between tasks get into the schedule are up to the PM. If they want to invent them out of their own head then they are a bad PM. Good PMs speak to their teams.”
I’m currently managing a team of 10 that is distributed over 5 timezones. We do have web-meetings daily, but most of the time our working hours do not overlap, meaning I cannot talk to them all the time. Very often, it’s just easier for me when we discuss the stuff to be done and they create their own tasks in the system (and yes we are using a the web-based one. I’m working with a great people, who know what they are doing, why don’t give them the freedom to create their tasks? After all, they have more field data on these tasks. I’m always in control anyway, as I see the whole schedule in real time and can always change it, if I see any conflicts.
As far as I can tell from Andrew’s post, he does not want everybody to forget about top-down and control altogether. He offers to take the best from top-down and bottom-up and some how unite control and collaboration. I guess some of the readers really miss this point.
Perhaps the diagram could have included “Strategic alignment”, “Goal setting”, “Leadership”.
What I love about the article that it tries to combine both worlds (top and bottom) and makes the link with tech (something needed for running projects in a virtual and global environment).
@Ray: I am the kind of person that loves face to face communication. In a co-located setting I wouldn’t think of using the digital channels. However, I have/had developers in my projects (20somethings mostly) that put on headphones for music and messengers for chats with their colleagues on the other end of the world.
They preferred my communication also over messenger, because it’s the same flow. So I was chatting digitally with people 2 meters away
Thanks everybody for great feedback!
I’m glad that most readers liked the post. It was also interesting to analyze critical comments: I’ll come up with a follow-up post soon to address some misconceptions.
Answering some questions:
-I’ve seen the ideas that I highlighted in the post applied across different industries ranging from construction to marketing as the core elements of this approach are facilitating team collaboration and gaining transparency of project operations. That said, running a creative marketing campaign and decommissioning nuclear power plant is not quite the same. There’re areas where the focus is on creativity and productivity, and there are areas where other factors are more important.
-Location of employees plays a role in selecting tools and processes, but it’s not the most critical factor. Blogs, wikis, twitter will never replace face-to-face meetings, but they make it easier for people to share and store information, and they certainly become critical piece in cases where people don’t have a luxury of daily personal communications.
I also recommend to all the commenters to take a look at Gary Hamel’s article called Management 2.0: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hamel/management-20_b_75676.html . It addresses many of raised issues. It’s also a good reminder from a person who studies and consults many organizations and has been doing so for quite a while, that it’s not all been said, done and learnt by everybody 20 years ago as some commenters say.
I also would like to highlight the fact that I’m not claiming all the good work done by many successful project managers lately as something that I invented or own. Call it good management, if you find PM2.0 term offensive.
I’m a board member or advisor in 5 companies, CEO of one of them, and throughout the year I share experience with peers and customers from hundreds of companies. Besides I love digging through a lot of management cases from all over the world, which I also try to map on what I write about. Some readers find my perspective interesting, so I’m sharing what I see working. If it’s all common sense to you, it’s great! It means more work is being done in this world in a more effective way.
By the way, in my management career there have been times when an idea was common sense one day, and then sometime later revisiting the same idea and applying it to an area which was out of radar before was an “a-ha” moment.
Best regards to all who took time to comment!
For everyone interested, Andy posted an additional explanation on his own blog:
What Project Management 2.0 IS and what it IS NOT
http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/10/06/2009/What-Project-Management-2-0-IS-and-what-it-IS-NOT-Part-1
http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/10/07/2009/What-Project-Management-2-0-IS-and-What-it-IS-NOT-Part-2
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thank you for clarifying some of mis conceptions about project management