Balancing Act: The Vital Blend of Experience and Subject Matter Knowledge in Project Management 

Watching ‘The Apprentice,’ you might think you need to be a subject matter expert (SME) in everything from bao buns to app development to manage a project. In the real world, is it a help or a hindrance, and how much does a Project Manager (PM) really need to know to successfully manage a project?

So, what are the advantages of being a PM and SME? 

The most significant and obvious advantage is understanding what is needed to deliver the work and ensuring efficient communication with the involved teams, and potentially stakeholders too.  

• Understanding industry specific terminology can help build trust and respect, particularly with specialist roles. For example, knowing that you want to change lamps not bulbs in your light fixtures will certainly earn a few brownie points with your electrical contractor, and setting out clear agreements and clarification on terminology and acronyms helps to avoid many potential issues.
   
• More than just understanding the conversation, you may also be able to estimate scope and timelines, contribute to solution design discussions, and potentially even take part in the delivery process.
   
• By asking the right questions, you can provide a level of oversight without the need to defer back to expert resources. This can reduce meeting sizes and, ultimately, costs as resources are deployed more directly in delivery. 

All sounds very positive? 

While there are certainly pros, there are also cons.  

• The most obvious drawback is the risk of becoming too involved in detailed solutions and delivery, avoiding the urge to Just do it yourself and neglecting other responsibilities as a result.
   
• This may include overlooking aspects like progress and schedule management, stakeholder engagement, and ultimately, losing sight of developing risks and engaging all parties in your project.
   
• There is also a risk that in becoming too involved, you may knowingly or otherwise, exert a level of influence over the direction and approach, bypassing potentially better ideas. This becomes even more of a risk if your knowledge of current trends or solutions has lapsed. 

An effective project manager will encourage all team members to contribute to the discussion.  

A lack of subject knowledge can stimulate thought and discussion, enabling the asking of questions and avoiding an unspoken consensus. This challenges the we’ve always done it this way approach, ensuring that the pros and cons are discussed with a risk-benefit analysis of other options duly considered.  

Ultimately, a level of subject knowledge will always be beneficial for a project manager. The optimal amount is best determined by a combination of the specific project requirements and the project manager’s experience. As a project manager gains more experience, the need for initial subject matter knowledge diminishes. They can learn what they need as the project progresses, especially in the early stages. The knowledge acquired can then be applied to create a set of deliverables and success criteria, serving as a guide for reviewing progress on tasks and ensuring successful project delivery.  

For an SME turned PM, remembering to take that step back requires a degree of self-awareness and the use of experience to question and challenge ideas rather than provide the solution directly.  

Releasing control and delegating ownership builds trust and confidence in the team to deliver and is vital to successfully delivering a rounded project and not just a targeted solution. 

Alan Greep, Project Manager

Military Leadership

It is Armed Forces Day on the 24^th June and many people’s thoughts turn to our military community. I don’t dwell on the past but at this time of the year I do think a little bit more about my own military service. I left the Royal Navy 4 years ago and since then have been lucky enough to be working for Delt Shared Services as their Chief Projects Officer. Delt’s staple diet is the provision of IT managed services to Plymouth City Council, Devon NHS Integrated Care Board, Devon NHS Partnership Trust, and Transforming Futures Multi Academy Trust. We also provide a range of other services such as soft and hard facilities management, print & mail, procurement, finance, payroll and pensions, and, of course, project management. To deliver this wide range of shared services we need staff with various skills, including leadership.

A key skill of being a successful military operator is leadership. In my head, leadership is not a title or a job description it is a state of mind. The young sailor planning their part of ship maintenance, the chef conjuring up another amazing meal for 200 (and there are many other examples) and then working with their team to deliver are just as important leadership roles as the Commanding Officer of a ship, a squadron or a regiment. Young people serving in our military are exposed to leadership and leading from day 1 of their time in uniform.

As an Armed Forces Covenant signatory Delt is proud to support our military community. We hire veterans and use their leadership skills in our business. As we go through our annual performance management reviews, we select staff to attend one of our leadership training courses. In April this year our leadership training culminated with a graduation ceremony at Devonport Hall. Nine staff members completed the course, 4 of them were ex-military and covered all 3 Services. On that day I was immensely proud of all our brilliant Delt staff. Everyone delivered excellent presentations summing up their own personal leadership journey. There were some amazing leadership lessons, a great deal of emotional intelligence displayed and a few tears! It was especially rewarding to see 4 ex Royal Navy, Royal Airforce and Army men and women show how the experience they gained in the military and the lessons they learned during training and on operations allowed them to operate with confidence in a different environment.

Thank you from Delt to all our Armed Forces for your amazing work, and a special shout out to all the veterans working at Delt for your contribution to our success.

Gary Pettitt, Chief Projects Officer

Send Three and Four Pence…

Proper and effective communications is often cited as fundamental to success. So how do we ensure we hit the target when it comes to efficient project communications? How can we avoid the message, send reinforcements we are going to advance, being received as, send three and four pence we are going to a dance!?

An effective project leader needs to be a good communicator and like leadership the way we deliver our message needs to work for the situation we find ourselves in. We also need to think carefully about our desired outcome, our audience, the methods of communication that are available to us and the timing of our messaging. I once found myself being asked to send a letter rather than an email!! My instinct was to push back, but that was a battle I couldn’t win. Best to accept that this person required information to be communicated in a particular way. I conformed and reaped the rewards with a relationship that delivered results. You need to adapt to your customers’ needs, a telephone call, an MS Teams / Zoom / Google Meet… call (camera off or on?) or do they prefer an email or a DM? They might even want you to come to their office and meet in person! Understanding the how of communications is an important step to effective dialogue.

What about the when? You are on the train merrily chugging down the track for your weekend away and the train slows to a halt unexpectedly. To start with you are fine, after all your risk analysis showed that only 89% of UK trains arrive on time (made up statistic!) so your mitigation measure is to arrive 30 mins before you really need to. All good. Naturally you want to know what has happened, something has changed so your plan needs updating. Five, 10, 15 minutes pass and no announcement, you start getting agitated. You need input, your plan needs updating. An early acknowledgement of the delay and commitment to update soon would have sufficed. The timing of customer communications needs careful consideration and experience can be a factor. It is, however, just as simple as asking. Talk to your customer, what do they need / want to know and when. What events need an immediate call? Most importantly don’t leave anyone you work with in the dark, if you haven’t been in contact with your customer for a couple of weeks then you ought to do that now.

I wouldn’t advocate style over substance but the way you package your customer communications will serve as an important indicator to your professional persona. The situation will largely dictate your style, a dynamic young AI start-up will arguably need a different style from a global ‘blue chip’ behemoth. Judge the situation, your audience, the output you desire and craft your message carefully using an appropriate style. And at the risk of being branded a pedant, or even worse having this blog returned to me with all the spelling and grammar errors highlighted, getting spelling and grammar correct and eradicating typing errors is important. The Amstrad PCW 9512 that I had in the late 80’s had a fabulous spelling and grammar checker, so there are no excuses!

Given the considerable reduction in face-to-face meetings there is one aspect of communication style that is now increasingly important and that is how we say things. Google tells me that 10% of conflict is due to a difference of opinion and 90% is due to delivery and tone of voice. Example (stern voice), ‘I need you to get the PID for the Network project sorted today, no excuses just get it done!’ or (calm soothing voice), ‘we need to have a chat about the Network project PID, it needs to be done today. I know you are busy so let’s talk about how we can prioritise your work to give you the best chance of finishing today.’

In summary, communicate with your customers never leave them in the dark, even saying that nothing has changed is valuable. In doing so you need to consider the situation you are in, the desired output, what you need to say, when to say it and how you will deliver the message. Remember the well-worn, but still relevant, George Bernard Shaw quote, ‘the single biggest issue with communications is the illusion that it has taken place’ So always check understanding, you need reinforcements not 3 and 4 pence!

Gary Pettitt, Chief Projects Officer

Questions vs Answers

In case you don’t know about Alex the parrot, let me introduce you to him.  Alex is/was (unfortunately he is no longer with us) considered one of the most articulate animals to interact with humans.  Alex developed a considerable vocabulary and was, amongst other things, able to answer questions about the name and colour of objects.  This is pretty impressive, but perhaps not out of the ordinary given there are monkeys, dogs, seals and other mammals that have similarly mastered language skills.  What makes Alex more interesting is that he was the first known animal that formed his own question.

Once he had mastered the primary colours, he was shown his reflection in a mirror and asked what colour he was.  That’s quite a breakthrough, no longer is he showing willingness to “talk” for a food reward, this was a parrot wanting to use language to enquire and learn more.

The point is that one of the key attributes of the best staff is their interest in development and learning.  In other words they are ceaselessly asking questions.  Alex stands out amongst all the other talking animals in that he wanted to use his language skills to understand what the name of his colour was.   (Makes you wonder if he wasn’t a bit disappointed to be grey given the wide pallet of colours that other parrots enjoy?).

Since the arrival of AI chat bots – with Chat GPT that wrote a previous blog for us – the end game appears in sight for those of us who thought that we were employed on the basis of being able to answer questions.  Whilst at times we are expected to know the answers to do our jobs, the arrival of software with the power to understand natural language questions and provide uniquely crafted and increasingly better responses is going to reduce the premium given to roles requiring expertise or analysis.  One of the vital skills in a post AI chat bot world has to be knowing what the right questions to ask are.  This like any other skill, is one that requires practise.  Making time to consciously reflect on the situation we find ourselves in and find the right questions to ask in order to resolve problems or exploit opportunities will be what we need in a modern workforce.   Anyone with these skills might also be the more interesting people to share time with too!  So, returning to the issue posed by the headline on this article and asking whether which is better: questions or answers, I would contend that whilst we can’t ignore the power of knowing the answer, in the long term those who understand the power of asking a question will be more successful.

If you don’t believe me about Alex you can find out more about him here: https://www.bl.uk/the-language-of-birds/articles/alex-the-african-grey-parrot

Peter Honeywell, Non-Executive Director