The podcast by project managers for project managers. The number of projects initiated in all sectors has skyrocketed, yet why do project failure rates still remain alarmingly high? Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects, emphasizes the value of senior leaders investing in the pursuit of better project management.

Table of Contents

02:11 … The World Champion in Project Management03:53 … The Project Economy05:46 … Organizational Ambidexterity10:15 … Low Success Rate of Projects13:31 … Choosing Predictive or Adaptive Agile Methods16:05 … Introducing The Project Canvas18:44 … Three Dimensions of the Project Canvas20:07 … 1.Foundation21:05 … 2.People22:02 … 3.Creation23:20 … Senior Executives and Project Success26:15 … Challenge your Sponsors27:57 … Self-Assessment29:15 … Engagement Triple Constraint33:30 … Advice for Younger Project Managers35:32 … Contact Antonio37:33 … Closing

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Senior leaders are not there yet.  They’ve never invested in the importance of project management, building competencies.  Part of what we started here is that they did not appreciate it as a core topic.  They preferred to talk about strategy, innovation, and other things, and rather than project management implementation.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Just a quick thanks to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We always love hearing from you.  We know you’re also looking for opportunities to acquire PDUs, your Professional Development Units, towards recertifications.  And you can still claim PDUs for all our podcast episodes.  Listen up at the end of the show for information on how you can claim those PDUs.

Our guest today is Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez.  He is an author, practitioner, and consultant who teaches strategy and project implementation to senior leaders.  His research has been recognized by Thinkers50, with its prestigious Ideas into Practice award, and he is featured in the 2020 Global Gurus Top 30 List of Management Professionals.  Antonio has served as chairman of the Global Project Management Institute, and in that role he launched the Brightline initiative.  He is also the founder of Projects & Co, cofounder of the Strategy Implementation Institute, and a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches group.

BILL YATES:  Antonio has written several books, as well.  The one that we’re going to focus on today is the new “Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook.”  You may hear Antonio or us refer to this as the HBR, the Harvard Business Review, in our comments.  And Antonio is joining us from Brussels.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Antonio, welcome to Manage This.  We’ve looked forward to our conversation with you today, and so we’re so grateful to you for being with us.

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Thanks to you, Wendy.  I’m really happy to be here with you and look forward to this conversation.

The World Champion in Project Management

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  Before we get started, I do have a quick question for you.  If you look back, when was the moment when you knew project management was your thing?  How did you get into project management?  And you’ve just done so much in the field of project management.  I think I saw in LinkedIn you’re the world champion in project management, and I love that.  So how did you become that?

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Well, it’s a pretty sad story, Wendy.  I recognized that I wanted to work and specialize in project management when I was fired.  I was fired in the sense that I had this big idea in a big consulting firm where I wanted to become partner, and I said, “Let’s develop project management advisory service because everybody’s struggling with projects.”  This is like 20 years.  And they said, “Well, yeah, we like the idea, but it’s not something we can make money out of, project management; right?  It’s very tactical.  It’s kind of boring.  So that kind of – and you’re fired, Antonio, because that’s a bad idea.” 

And it was like a game changer for me, was painful for a few weeks.  And then I say, how come senior leaders don’t understand the value of project management?  Why do we have these bad names, that name of boring, old and complicated, bureaucratic.  So that was the start of a love story.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Wow, very cool. 

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Great idea.  Just you’re out of the company now, go figure it out yourself.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Well, I’m glad it turned out that way because we can gain so much knowledge from you.  And I think you’ve gone on to do better things.

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:   Thank you, Wendy.  I feel like that, too.  So if you ever get fired, take it as something good.

BILL YATES:  That’s right.

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  That’s mine.

The Project Economy

BILL YATES:  That’s right, I have my eyes wide open, thinking, okay, what opportunity is coming?  Antonio, one of the questions we wanted to ask you about, it’s related to the project economy.  You speak about the project economy.  We’ve had projects in the economy since the Industrial Revolution.  What’s changed?

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Well, Bill, good question to start.  I always like to talk at the big picture first, and then deep dive.  I think it helps people to follow on the conversation.  So there are two dimensions of the project economy.  One is the macro level, is what happens around the world, what happens in countries with governments, public spending.  And what I say is that with the pandemic the world will see more projects in the next decade with all these public investments to regenerate economies and infrastructures and healthcare, than we’ve ever seen.  So the amount of project that we’re going to see from a macro level, we’ve never seen before.  This is millions of projects, millions of project managers, billions of investment, or trillions of investment.  So that’s one side.

And I compare figures.  I look at the Marshall Plan, I look at the numbers from the financial crisis in 2008, and this is like 10 times more.  So that’s exciting.  I think that’s great for the profession.  But the bigger challenge or change or disruption is what happens within companies.  This is like what I call the more micro level, where the type of work is moving from operations to project based.  And that’s what is a very radical change because in the past, Bill, companies would have projects that are nice to have.  They would have a few people, a few people just working as project managers, 5% maybe.  What changes now is that most of the employees will work project-based.  So that’s a radical shift, radical disruption I’m talking about.

Organizational Ambidexterity

BILL YATES:  There’s a phrase that you used in the book I thought was quite clever, wish I’d come up with it myself.  It was “organizational ambidexterity.”  And in that you talk about this balance that companies are looking for between running the organization and changing the organization.  Talk a bit further about that.

ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Sure, Bill.  This is a concept which I deep-dived in the past in curiosity about this organizational ambidexterity.  And there’s been quite a lot of academic research, more in the field of strategy implementation.  And then there has been good papers around these exploitation versus exploration.  So a company needs to have these big main areas which is exploiting your current business, your current assets, your operations.  And then on top of that, think about the future, your future, the exploration field, what I call change in projects.

And over the last 50 years what happens is that the primary area of focus of processes, people, competencies, leadership, senior management attention and time has been on that operation, on exploitation.  We’ve become so efficient that we don’t need so many people there anymore; right?  It’s done by machines.  And what happened is that the exploitation part that changed the project has exploded this, where most of the things happening in the life cycle of our projects have gone from maybe five years to one year. 

If you look at some statistics, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton was talking about how many of the revenues of companies come from new products.  And in the past, in 1980s, was about 20%.  So 20% of the revenues would come from new products, new projects.  Over the past 40 years that’s about 50% of the revenues comes from new projects or new products.

So that means that everything is accelerating; right?  And the exploitation versus exploration, the business as usual versus the change has shifted.  And I’m going to be long here, but it’s important.  The key is not eliminating your exploitation; right.  You cannot remove your operations.  And that’s a big challenge because it’s finding the right balance of how much do we do in the operational part, we need to keep that.  But how much do we shift in terms of changing, agility, different culture, different type of organizational structures.  And that’s where I think many companies struggle.

BILL YATES:  That’s good.  And Antonio, it’s interesting to me at a grassroots, at a tactical level.  Those people, the resources that are working on those projects, for some that are doing the ongoing operations, okay, here’s an existing, let’s call this a – this product is our cash cow.  This brings in great revenue for a company, and it’s evolved through the years.  But it’s kind of boring from my standpoint as a contributor.  Now here’s this fun new project that the company’s doing.  I really want to be on that team.