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A Leader’s Guide To Deciding: What, When, and How To Decide

Paul Ritchie is Practice Director and leads the PM College program. Mr. Ritchie has presented on initiative leadership to multiple global audiences, including the PMI Global Congress, the PMI Europe and Asia Regional Congresses, as well as SAP’s SAPPHIRE and ASUG conferences. He also has published a number of articles and is the main author for the award-winning Crossderry Blog. He is on Twitter @crossderry. 

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I liked this Steve Sinovsky (@stevesi) piece and its emphasis on the decision-making role of the CEO. In fact, I liked it so much that I highlighted it during my recent teach of our Strategies for Effective Stakeholder Engagement course.

In PM-speak, Steve fleshes out an alternative responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) framework, but one designed for a leader herself. This approach corrects the deliverables-focused tendency and problematic terminology of most RAMs. A senior leader will likely not drive the definition of his role(s) in standard frameworks — RACI, PARIS, etc. — and may not get the full richness of her role as “accountable, responsible, etc.”

While Sinovsky poses this against the RAM constructs, I propose that they’re complimentary. The traditional RAM is a better fit for work done by the core project team, there’s something different about “leader work” that he’s captured. Perhaps these categories would be useful in building a sponsor assignment matrix for at-risk deliverables, communication events, etc.

This difference in perception is one of the reasons PM for Executives is such a popular course. This half-day overview for an organization’s leaders provide perspectives on advancing project delivery capabilities and implementing a project management culture, but from the executive’s perspective. This course helps to bridge the terminology and perspective gap between project and organizational leaders. The course covers three main components:

  • Roles and responsibilities – both project managers and leadership (“what’s expected of you as leaders”)
  • Quick overview of techniques and practices--which reinforces the bullet above--and emphasizes how early involvement leverages success (“what to expect from your team”)
  • Culture – transforming from an ad hoc / reactive environment to a pro-active organization (“what to expect regarding transforming to a PM culture”)

In fact, we’re expanding this executive focus to the project sponsor. Sponsors are the key stakeholder in nearly every project. Yet project sponsors often go through their careers without knowing what sponsorship means, except perhaps to approve the budget. However, engaged sponsorship is a differentiator between project success and failure.

Stay tuned for PM for Sponsors…coming soon!

Source: A Leader’s Guide To Deciding: What, When, and How To Decide

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