Boss & You: Its called management

Management: The Dilbert Way

Image Courtesy: Dilbert

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Is traditional Manager a history?

Today, I happened to pull out historical records of the IT program I am managing for last 3 years at my company. While doing some data churning, a unique observation stuck my mind – Till date over 62 people from different units of my company have directly or indirectly reported to me in this program in multiple capacities and at various intervals of time. About 70% of this workforce was out of sight as a result of globalization or virtualization of workspace. I know all of them by name, did work with them for months, have talked to some of them over phone at least 5 times a week and very well know the competencies for few of them but have never got a face to face opportunity to say ‘hello’ to most of them.

This makes me wonder how little line of sight and direct control I have over the work these team members do today. I still remember my early days when organizations were following military developed hierarchical practices where managing people and work was based on command and control. I had my superiors sitting next door to me and I learnt my management style and leadership on job from them. They use to correct every single mistake of mine at work. There was a personal touch and direct oversight. We use to see every single person in office, greet them with smile on the face every morning and use to go for morning and evening tea together as a group.

Gone are the days when I use to stand up in my cube to see my teams sitting all around the floor churning code. The work is still getting completed and several flawless deliveries go to my overseas client round the year. Teams have become way bigger, global and virtual. Most projects and initiatives have become cross units to take advantage of diverse expertise and skills needed to handle multi technology programs. Does this essentially mean, team members are self managing themselves and time has come when we don’t need managers or need fewer managers?

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Xobni is Inbox - spelled backwards

As a project manager, communications makes up a huge portion of my work and like it or not the bulk of that communications happens through emails.

Considering I am spending quantifiable hours every day working with Microsoft Outlook, I was always looking for optimizing my time spent with MS Outlook and about six months back I came across Xobni. Xobni is email add-in for outlook and one of the latest additions in my project management toolkit. This small plug-in has made Outlook much faster and more useful.

This add-in makes Outlook inbox fun to use, adds instant news ways to how you view people, lets you extract phone numbers, pictures and tells you upfront at what time of day, your mail buddies are more responsive to emails. And guess what? It’s free.

The latest feature addition in social networking space is Xobni’s integration with Yahoo Mail – Now you can search your personal emails in Yahoo mail. If the person has a profile on the business-oriented LinkedIn social-networking service, the Xobni panel can display his or her job title, employer, and a photo from LinkedIn.

Xobni plugin sidebar in Microsoft Outlook has three sections - The first one shows the person's email "network" -- a list of everyone that person has placed in the "To" or "Cc" fields of emails you've exchanged. The next section is called "Conversations" and displays the entire threads of all the email exchanges you've had with the profiled person. Finally, there's a section listing all the files you have exchanged as attachments with the profiled person.

Folks, believe me this program has made managing my emails faster, smoother and simpler.  Check the demo below or go to http://www.xobni.com/ to download the add-in.



If you know more such tools/programs that can make life easy for project management professionals, drop me a note or leave me a comments below.

image courtesy: xobni

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Consultative Leadership

Leadership doesn’t always come easily to project managers because they have little clout. The nature of their work, often as temporary engagements, means project managers have limited authority over their team. They often don’t perform formal reviews of the team so they have to figure out a way to lead and guide people to satisfy customer needs.

Consultative leadership can do that. You can help educate others, help guide and direct them, but you must let them have a say in how work will get done. If I told you what to do, would that motivate you or demotivate you? If you are a highly trained, competent person, it can be a de-motivator. Project teams are fed up with the … hierarchical view of management. These people like to be told the goal but not how to do it. While project managers don’t have the authority to make go or no-go decisions, they do reign supreme when dictating how a project is executed. With this distinction in mind, influencing others to act means inspiring ownership or empowerment in a project through strong direction, advice and even education. Allow everyone to have a stake in the project. Team members can thus be more emotionally committed to the project. They’re empowered to execute project tasks, but the project manager can set a strong direction with the vision that they pass along from the sponsor.

until later …… V

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Boss & You: Our problems are opportunities

All our problems are opportunities

Image courtesy: Dilbert

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