Dinner and Project Management
Have you ever wondered what cooking a dinner has to do with project management? A lot, actually. Before dinner is served, we need to firstly decide what will be offered (setting the scope, which often requires discussions and negotiations with many stakeholders representing conflicting interests – the child wants bread with Nutella, the husband wants pork chops with potatoes, and the wife dreams of casserole in béchamel).
Having agreed what we will eat, we need to choose the ingredients. We check which of them we have readily at home and which should be bought and who will buy them (creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) , and managing supplies). Next, we decide what actions to take, in which order they should be performed, their duration, and we also involve the husband and kids to help (creating a schedule, building a team). While we boil the pasta, we need to make sure the pork chops on the frying pan are not burning (monitoring progress) and taste the salad to see if there is not too much salt in it (quality control). Obviously, after the dinner (or while it is being eaten), we receive a number of comments, such as: “Dear, perhaps next time you could use more breadcrumbs”, which are remembered (lessons learned). At the end, we wash the dishes and put them away (project closure). Well? Does anyone doubt it is a project in which most processes mentioned in PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge – a set of best practices developed by the Project Management Institute) are run?
This awareness will not necessarily help us in preparing for PMP certification (Project Management Professional) or another related to project management, but surely it helps one to believe that some skills, necessary for project management, are acquired subconsciously when performing normal, everyday activities. The quality of project management depends largely on competencies and the experience of the project manager. Judging from that perspective, women have huge experience, supported by theoretical knowledge. This creates a really strong potential which is worth utilising.
Project management is like driving a car. Some, when they drive, prefer to turn on the radio so as not to hear, while others only listen and hear, and sometimes they even understand. The gender of the leader is completely insignificant in project work. What is significant is the ability to listen and express opinion with verification of the understanding in the interlocutor.
It is easier to lead a project if the scope and subject of the project is within the subject-matter competencies of the manager. I still think this is not the most important driver of the efficient and effective management of projects, e.g. in the IT area. The manager acts as a leader and also dictates the style of work organization and communication in the environment of the people involved.
The project manager’s experience and knowledge are important and helpful in delivery of the tasks assigned, but a much stronger asset is the soft competencies related to the ability to establish a partner-like relationship and communication based on mutual respect. Those features do not depend on the gender, but on a person’s character because, finally and thankfully, a project manager is a human being in the first place…
Aleksandra Skotarczak, HR Development Team Leader, Project Manager, All for One Poland
Women’s Natural Potential as Project Managers
A project manager decides independently what tools to use to manage a project or communicate with the team. The selection of the tools is decided by the size of the project or the method of working (a team working in one site or many). To do that, women not only use hard knowledge and experience, but also emotions and intuition (e.g. they also take into account the personal character of team members). This helps in solving conflicts and building an atmosphere of cooperation, which in turn translates into good performance from the team; it is difficult to work with a person who maintains a poker face all the time and makes decisions solely based on the analysis of facts.
Another element, helpful in solving conflicts, is responsibility for the community. We all know the story in which a prehistoric woman stayed in the cave, taking care of the children and fire, while her prehistoric man waged a fierce battle against a mammoth to provide food for the family. Patience, responsibility, the ability to build a safe environment; these are features that are very helpful for a female project manager in creating a tight-knit team and overcoming day-to-day difficulties in project delivery.
A significant element brought to the project management world by women is the need to share experiences. Having a natural tendency for talking about what they experience, they discuss problems, ways of solving and various project situations, including those difficult ones. This builds an atmosphere of support and trust among people who are busy working on current project tasks and who often have an impression that no one else has similar problems. By speaking openly of difficulties, women show we all struggle with similar situations.
It is not the gender, but the competencies which should be the key factor when selecting a project manager. A project manager is like a conductor of an orchestra, who is responsible for the music being either pleasant or unbearable. They have to know what skills the members of the orchestra have, to have absolute pitch, to hear even the slightest false note, and have a good feel to be able to present relevant arguments to each of the team members. And we, women, have such features.
When I take up managing a project, I try to know the scope of the project and the team members well. It is important that my competencies should match the subject of the project. Sometimes, though, I work with a sceptic who feels that a female PM must first prove her worth. Would a man have to do that too? It is not an easy life for a female PM in a predominantly male team, but thankfully not all men judge by sex and appearance instead of competencies and involvement. And it is very pleasant to work with such wise men indeed.
Karolina Dombrowska, IT Specialist, Volkswagen Poznań
Is Gender Important in IT Departments?
How does that potential relate to practice in IT? In over ten years of managing projects, in only 20% of them I had a female partner from the other side. I still remember my first implementation project: my partner on the client’s side was a woman. She acted not only as a Project Manager, but also as the manager of the IT department. Maybe that was why the proportion of women to men in the IT department was equal and these were women that were responsible for, for example, the maintenance of IT systems. Back in 1998, this situation was not common. I think that, thanks to this experience, I am still convinced that it is competence, rather than gender, that make a good project manager. I think this conclusion holds true for more than just the IT industry.
I met an age-old opinion that women are usually assigned projects in which accuracy and order is required rather than those where one needs innovativeness. Most of all, however, I think the individual features of the manager and team members are important rather than their gender. It is, however, better and more interesting to work in mixed teams.
Justyna Kicyło, SAP IT Manager, Ringier Axel Springer Polska
What about Stereotypes?
I would often hear of women usually managing projects related to accounting and HR. I analysed the structure of teams in the projects I delivered to, to find that, in 60% of cases, the finance teams were managed by men. In 25% of cases, women managed sales and logistics teams. In HR-payroll areas, in only 1 case was the team managed by a man.
From my experience, in projects managed by a woman there is a higher number of women among the project team members. A question arises as to whether the gender of team members makes project management easier; would it be better for a man to manage projects with only men, and for a woman with only women? Experience shows that knowledge, experience and a good attitude towards the project are more important than gender, while in mixed teams there is a slightly different culture of communication than in single-gender teams.
A similar question may be asked regarding the cooperation between the supplier’s PM and client’s PM. Here, one of the key factors of good cooperation is the values of the people in question, and mutual trust. If those values are fundamentally different, then, regardless of whether a woman works with a woman, a man with a man or a woman with a man – the cooperation will be difficult, and so the gender is not significant.
The fact that women successfully deliver complex projects is confirmed by experiences in the US, UK, India, and Brazil. I also hope that, in Poland, the number of women performing that role will increase. For all women who ask how a woman feels in this masculine world of IT, I will say very wel,l and I think there should be more of us in it.