Here’s Something That Could Help you If You Are a Project Manager

I first dipped my hands into Project Management almost a decade ago and in the years since then, it has been a roller coaster ride as a Project Manager.

I worked for three different organisations during this period and each of them was drastically different in its approach to project delivery. Nevertheless, from my experience the role itself is often bittersweet – you feel good when you manage a team to deliver value to a client successfully but when the sailing isn’t smooth, it can get quite stressful.

Project management is an art – not everybody can deftly manage tight budgets, negotiate effectively with a dozen different stakeholders or more, tactfully balance conflicting priorities, and ensure the team delivers scoped deliverables within a stipulated timeline. That’s what a capable Project Manager does.

It is no wonder that large respectable organisations ensure their projects are run by experienced and capable Project Managers.

However, I’m noticing a paradigm shift in the way organisations carry out project delivery over the past decade. Given the breakneck pace at which technology becomes obsolete, there is a need for not just quick delivery but also the ability to respond to change fast. This has resulted in greater adoption of the agile methodology in project delivery. The way things are going, Project Managers who refuse to budge from the traditional way of delivery are likely to meet the fate of dinosaurs sooner or later. This is why Project Management roles are evolving and PMs are now additionally playing the roles of Scrum Masters or Product Owners if their associated teams follow the agile way of delivery.

All that being said, one challenge project managers face today is getting hired by organisations. This is because there are only a limited number of project management openings (since organisations need at most just one PM for one or more projects) and a disproportionate number of applicants for the role. It is not uncommon to see a few hundred applications for every single project management position posted by a large MNC today (especially in India).

How do you even filter out candidates who purportedly have the same skill sets? Given that project management skills are mostly soft skills, it is very hard to evaluate capability by looking at a piece of paper (the candidate’s CV).

For PM candidates, getting an interview call itself can be akin to winning a lottery and they need to make the best of every single opportunity they get to interview with an organisation because such chances are not that abundant.  

The Top 50 Interview Questions for Project Managers

In 2020, I decided to do some research on what organisations look for in Project Management candidates and what questions they would likely encounter in interviews.  This was the idea that led to me commencing my work on my book, ’The 50 Top Interview Questions for Project Managers.’

The book captures some of the most commonly asked questions in project management interviews with guidelines on how to frame a thorough articulate response on the same and thereby stake a strong claim to that role you apply for.

We all faced our fair share of hardships and personal challenges and it was no different for me too. I had to take an impromptu break from writing and my book that was 70% done went on hold for close to 2 years before I resumed work on it.

I’m glad to say that it is now on its way to completion and I am keeping my fingers crossed for a mid-June 2022 release.

If you are a Project Manager, I can assure you that this book will be invaluable to you during the time you decide to start applying for roles with different organisations. So do consider picking up a copy when it is out in the market. I publish exclusively with Amazon so, you will be able to get it through Amazon globally. The book will be available for pre-order in the next week or so.

You can click here to Pre-Order this book on Amazon

Free Evaluation Copies:  I am also giving out a few free evaluation copies (Digital Ebook only). If you are interested in being a beta reader and reviewer for the book, you can drop me an email at author@rojiabraham.com

After 20 Years – Reminiscing Customer Appreciation #1

I climbed the three floors without a pause and walked into the teaching institute at 8.30 a.m. sharp before I stopped to catch my breath. My first batch was scheduled to start in 15 minutes, and many students were already waiting.

I could not afford to be late. As the youngest trainer, who had been hired by the Managing Director on a whim, I was always under scrutiny for slip-ups by peers.

Two weeks after my last B.E. exam, when I had unashamedly walked into that institute and asked for a job, the MD was more amused than surprised. Instead of laughing me off, he asked me to return the next day and conduct a 30-minute demo class.

Benny Sir, as we called him, attended the class along with two other senior trainers. Despite grilling me at the end of the session, the MD still went ahead and hired me. Perhaps he just saw a young man with a lot of fire in his belly he didn’t have the heart to turn down.

Nevertheless, that day, when I walked into the institute, our otherwise rigid receptionist, had a sly smile on her face and told me the big boss wanted to see me before I started work for the day.

When I walked into the MD’s office, he looked up at me and said Krishna had visited him the day before. Krishna (and I may no longer remember his name correctly), the network admin head of a Middle-East company, was notified by his company to get formally certified (the certifications trend had just started), and so he took a month off, travelled to Kochi, and paid a hefty premium to the institute to get exclusive one-on-one tutoring via a fast-track program.

The MD had chosen me for the task, and I can only guess what Krishna thought when he first saw his handpicked tutor who was half his age.

I gave it my all and trained him for 3 weeks for the exam that would determine his career progress, while still teaching regular student batches.

That day in the MD’s office, I shuddered for a moment – perhaps Krishna failed his certification exam and came back to ask for a refund and complain I was a terrible trainer!

I was wrong.

“Krishna came to tell me yesterday that he passed his certification with flying colours and said he did it because he had the best teacher possible! He flew out today, but wanted me to pass on his thanks and also left a gift that he wanted me to hand over to you in person.”

Benny Sir then handed me a small gift-wrapped box with a proud smile. My first-ever “customer appreciation” took the form of a Parker Vector!

20 years ago, in April ’04, I started my career in a little institute in Kochi. Life has come a long way since then, but a lesson I learned all those years ago still applies today – irrespective of where we come from or what our qualifications are, what ultimately matters is the value we give those whom we serve – our customers.

PS: That pen (was the universe giving a hint?) despite having retired from service many years ago remains my little treasure. Yep, it’s what you see in the image of this post.

hashtag#weekendwriting hashtag#20years hashtag#careermilestone hashtag#customerappreciation

Elite Bias – A Self Fulfilling Prophesy Impacting Underperformance

I’m currently reading “Poor Economics”, an incredibly insightful book about global poverty, by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It is here that I first heard about of “Elite Bias”.

So what’s Elite Bias?

A class experiment, conducted by researchers in the book, couldn’t illustrate this better.

Researchers divided a typical classroom into two tracks. Based on prior performance, a student ended up either on the top track or the bottom track. Teachers were then randomly selected by a lottery system to exclusively teach either one of the two tracks.

What followed was interesting to say the least.

Teachers who ‘lost’ the lottery and got assigned to the lower track were distraught and stated they wouldn’t get anything out of teaching such students. Later on, random visits to classrooms showed they spent more time in the break rooms having coffee and were less likely to teach students than teachers in the ‘top track’. The quality of education being imparted by the former visibly dipped.

In conclusion, the teachers’ low expectations from these students turned out to be more damaging than the students being relatively worse off than those in the top track itself.

In hindsight, if there were students in the bottom track who just needed that extra nudge or support to do considerably better, they would have lost out because now they were being given poorer education simply because they were labelled ‘inferior’. Thus, preconceived notions, coupled with the teachers’ actions, became a self-fulfilling prophecy in cementing these students as apparently inferior!

‘Elite Bias’ is not just a classroom phenomenon and studies even show parents pickin a one child to back over onother they think wouldn’t do well.

So what’s its relevance to us here?

If ‘Elite Bias’ is a natural human phenomenon, would it be surprising if we extended this beyond classrooms to corporate offices too?

As leaders, we might naturally tend to subconsciously divide subordinates into top and bottom-trackers (performers and non-performers?) and then provide extra care, encouragement, and that extra push to the former because they will ostensibly get great results!

As for the rest, we might just go through the motions and do the bare minimum. After all, what’s the point in doing extra if they aren’t going to really get anywhere? Consequences of this cognitive bias aren’t difficult to imagine. Top-trackers end up doing even better, and the bottom-trackers end up worse, thus resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy justifying their positioning!

Wonder how many, who could have turned around with a little extra care, missed out by ending in the wrong half!

PS: No assistants, no bot-generated content. Just a pair of eyes that read, a head that learns and two hands that type away on weekends amidst weekend chores. Like what you read? Let me know. Or better still, share this with another soul.

#EliteBias #WeekendWriting #PoorEconomics #Leadership

Fostering the Culture of Appreciation – How a 10th-grade Lesson Shaped a Leadership Journey

More than 25 years ago, I was sitting in my 10th-grade class when Ms Anis (bless her), our wonderful Geography (and General Knowledge) teacher, walked in and proclaimed, “Children, today we’re going to do an interesting exercise.”

She continued when the class fell silent in anticipation.

“I want you all to take a sheet of paper and divide it into rows using a scale. Then you will write each of your classmates’ names against one row.”

She further explained how she would call out each student’s name, and she wanted every other student to write one positive quality of that student in the row they had marked for them on their sheet.

At the end of the class, our teacher collected those narrow strips of paper (cut along the rows) for each student and handed them over one after the other.

“Here you go, son. Compliments of your class!” she smiled lovingly as she handed over a clump of paper strips to me.

For somebody who felt extremely unappreciated and worthless at that time, the warm compliments of my classmates had a profound impact on me. That exercise by my teacher was one of the best things I felt somebody had ever done for me until then.

I held on to those strips of ‘appreciation notes’ for many years before they fell prey to time.

I now directly lead a team of 22 at Boeing. They aren’t 15-year-olds but professionals who range between the ages of 23 to 40+. Yet, when some of the most promising among them one day told me how underappreciated they often felt, I felt a need to develop a culture of mutual appreciation. Remembering this story from my life. I then put my life learning into action.

The spirit of the team exercise I conceived was the same, though this no longer being the 1990s, we used Excel spreadsheets instead of paper, and instead of collecting and distributing paper strips, I improvised and spent a couple of weekends creating a beautiful template that could be printed into physical certificates everybody could hold on to for a long time.

Our team celebrated appreciation week in the last week of November, and appreciation certificates were presented to every team member, much to their delight, from the Senior leader of our division Ajit Singh (who wholeheartedly supported the initiative).

Sharing appreciation is a wonderful thing. The lack of appreciation often detrimentally impacts our morale and self-worth, impacting all aspects of our lives. I hope that the team exercise taught my team a valuable lesson that they will pass on.

Thank you Anis Ms. It took me over a quarter of a century to pass your baton on, but your gesture made a difference to many lives like mine and I hope it does the same for the ones I was fortunate to pass your lesson on to.

Note: If you are an MTRS alumnus, do let me know if this tradition passed down over the years and is still around. 😊

PS: Shared one of the appreciation certificates we made (with due consent) on the cover of this post.

#AppreciationCulture #LeadershipLessons