A Project Manager is Fair

(Originally Published in PMI Madison/South Central WI Newsletter, Winter 2008)

I remember a night over 25 years ago now at a Boy Scout troop meeting. My friend Andy was on the short end of the stick again with the way a game was being played and he was fed up. He knew the only way to win this battle against the older and bigger boys, and specifically his brother, was to make it perfectly clear to everyone how un-Scout like they were being. He half-shouted That's not fair!!  To which his brother, who was very focused on winning, said so what?   I think Andy had run into this wall before so he quickly went to what had worked in the past. He leveraged the referential and mystical power of Lord Baden Powell  himself as he hurriedly quoted the Scout Law. Now fully shouting he declared A Scout is Fair !

As it turns out, this is not the case and Andy's battle was lost - at least for the moment. According to the Boy Scout Law, a scout is many inspiring things, but Fair was disappointingly for Andy, not one of them. For months after this incident however you could hear Andy and eventually everyone, recite the Law this way:

A scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent ... and FAIR!

Everyone agreed that a Scout should be Fair and that while it might be encompassed in some way in the other words of the Law, for our purposes we needed to spell it out. It often brought a smile, smirk, or giggle to our faces when we said this - it was funny and cute but most importantly this law was ours. Amazingly, the Scout Law has been around since 1910 without any change and yet we determined a need for a change - just for us, just for that moment of time. Making it our own gave us power and allowed us to correct a perceived oversight and we could again really believe in it. We, a bunch of kids really, changed the law, and were confident that our change fit with the original intent. We had no need to promote or sell anyone else on our version - it simply met our needs.

I think this story parallels a reality for Project Managers - that we will always need to adapt to our project environment. Considering that a project is a "unique endeavor" we should be expecting that what we've done before will not be what we need to do now. The Project manager and the team need to determine together the uniqueness of their environment and context of their project, people, skills, constraints, goals etc.... and make appropriate adjustments and adaptations to be as successful as possible.

We have so many tools and templates, methods and methodologies, processes and procedures, slogans and 'Laws' at our disposal but these are not what make our projects successful. They are familiar and make us comfortable but that comfort may come at the expense of a more important understanding. The understanding that this project right now has its own special needs and these comfortable 'helpers' may need to be customized even in some seemingly insignificant way to make it the project teams own. Ignoring these needs may have impacts ranging from unnecessary work to missing details, to a completely non-performing team. I'm not suggesting that there is no need for process and procedure and standards and best practices and tools, but rather that they are means to an end and hopefully not so in-flexible (or un-'Fair') that they can't make accommodations for the needs of the unique endeavor that you are embarking on.

P.S. --

Say what you will about the Boy Scouts - I know they've had their problems as many large organizations have, but relaying this story left me with renewed appreciation for the Scout Law. As I mentioned it's been unchanged for almost 100 years and the first item listed is "Trustworthy". We know that the most important items in a list or story come first - just check any newspaper headline to verify this! So Scouting chose Trustworthy as the first and most important thing for scouts to be.

It seems like there is a resurgence and re-discovery of the importance of trust lately. I've read about it over & over in books and articles on leadership, communications, emotional intelligence, project management as if it is something new. Gaining trust, building trust, maintaining trust, doing what you say you will do... all of these hot/buzz topics. If you search Amazon for 'Gaining Trust' you'll find over 2,800 books on the subject.

As I start to read books and articles on these topics, I get excited about what I might learn and how I might use it. I almost always do learn something from them because of new thoughts, examples, different wording and approaches, but I often experience a small sense of déjà vu as I read them. Now, I think I know why....



Do Great things!  (Fairly)



Ed Sullivan, PMP