Page 55 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Mutual mentorship. The secret IT project management ‘trade deal’ for greater success?

At the time that I’m writing this, the news is full of talk
of trade deals. In the UK we are a couple of weeks away
from Brexit – but it’s OK this is not about Brexit – you
can carry on reading!

I’ve just watched a news article about the brokering of
trade deals, what they are, why countries need them,
the benefits of them and how difficult life can be
without them. It got me thinking.

What they were describing, on a geopolitical level,
shared so many characteristics with a struggling IT
Project that I’d been asked to cast a casual eye over.

The Project team is a mixed group. Twenty-somethings
with their freshly minted Project Management qualifications working side by side with more, er,
shall we say more seasoned, more mature practitioners (who have years of experience). The biggest
issue is that the individuals in the project team don’t have a lot in common, largely because of their
age gaps, backgrounds and experiences!

In fact, the individual members of the team are like separate countries on a continent. Each has their
own agenda; each has their own “way”; each has their own proud history. You can see why the news
report on trade deals resonated.
Added to the mix, the project team is a prolific user of Project Management as a Service resources.
Whenever they have a resource issue, I get a call and hook them up with brilliant talent from the
PMaaS universe who can parachute in and ‘save the day’. This adds an extra variable that can skew
the team older or younger, etc, at any given time.

Trade Deals Within IT Project Teams

Each of us working on an IT Project has a CV, it’s how we got the gig! Each entry on those CVs is a
unique data point that can be mined for the benefit of everyone on your team, not just your current
team but every team you will ever work on.

Think of the exponential knowledge bank that is literally sitting in the room with you when you work
on an IT project. How many people on your team? Multiply that by how many projects they have
worked on. Then, multiply that by the number of people that would have been on each of these
projects, and this new number by all of the projects on their CVs. Imagine that each point is like an
entry in an IT Project Management encyclopaedia. It’s like that legend about the grains of rice and
the chessboard where the guy asks the emperor for a grain of rice on the first square, doubled on
each square thereafter.

Why wouldn’t you want to enter into a “quid pro quo” trade deal with everyone you meet with
access to this kind of knowledge bank?!
Let’s consider the project that I’d asked to take a casual look at. Take two of the team members, I’ve
changed some of the details to respect privacy but imagine these two: