Tapping Into The Power Lines - A 3 Dimension of Project Management
Tapping Into The Power Lines - A 3 Dimension of Project Management,
Beyond Leading and Managing
INTRODUCTION
Tapping into the power lines—the concept of a further set of skills and experience beyond those required to manage and lead the project’s diverse set of stakeholders on major projects in large, complex environments is explored in this paper. Special skills, beyond leadership and management, provide project managers with the wisdom and knowledge to map power and influence grids using their understanding the historical and cultural issues that control the available flow of people’s potential energy. We argue that these special skills focus upon understanding the nature of the power source that drives these large, complex organisations, and knowing how to effectively harness this energy for project success. These skills are largely the ability to make sense out of complex, fragile and often confusing sets of sub-textual alliances of power, influence and resource availability.
The implication of environmental complexity means that to succeed, project managers must establish and maintain relationships with many stakeholders within the project management organisation. They must be able to capitalise upon supportive stakeholder energy sources and anticipate and defuse the power and actions of stakeholders that may be detrimental to the project. This paper will focus on those aspects of a project manager’s skills and knowledge that must be invoked for project success in large, complex organisations. The first task will be to define project management as a mixture of art and craft and how this connects to concepts of management and leadership. One of the themes of this paper will be that a successful project manager must be able to balance the requirements of art and craft, of management and leadership. We will base these arguments on some preliminary research that defined project success in terms of project ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ criteria. However,
Beyond Leading and Managing
INTRODUCTION
Tapping into the power lines—the concept of a further set of skills and experience beyond those required to manage and lead the project’s diverse set of stakeholders on major projects in large, complex environments is explored in this paper. Special skills, beyond leadership and management, provide project managers with the wisdom and knowledge to map power and influence grids using their understanding the historical and cultural issues that control the available flow of people’s potential energy. We argue that these special skills focus upon understanding the nature of the power source that drives these large, complex organisations, and knowing how to effectively harness this energy for project success. These skills are largely the ability to make sense out of complex, fragile and often confusing sets of sub-textual alliances of power, influence and resource availability.
The implication of environmental complexity means that to succeed, project managers must establish and maintain relationships with many stakeholders within the project management organisation. They must be able to capitalise upon supportive stakeholder energy sources and anticipate and defuse the power and actions of stakeholders that may be detrimental to the project. This paper will focus on those aspects of a project manager’s skills and knowledge that must be invoked for project success in large, complex organisations. The first task will be to define project management as a mixture of art and craft and how this connects to concepts of management and leadership. One of the themes of this paper will be that a successful project manager must be able to balance the requirements of art and craft, of management and leadership. We will base these arguments on some preliminary research that defined project success in terms of project ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ criteria. However,