WIMMING YOUR WAY THROUGH A HARD JOB

Music for Moving The Team to “do or die” on that “MUST DELIVER” project

I have had the great pleasure in the last year to meet both online, and in person, some of the great people who participate on The IT Job Board’s discussion group on LinkedIn and learn about how they are coping with the challenges of finding work as well as what the recruitment supply chain is (or is not) doing to support them.

I have also had the pleasure of meeting people at several events, such as ones held Kevin Hunt and the Dorset branch of British Computer Society (BCS) and “the guy in the corner” that I met at Ecademy’s London Christmas party, where I have learned about the rigours on how to manage or do work – as well as what you can do to cope with simply surviving if life is not going well for you personally.

These are things not found in a textbook – nor necessarily told to you in a classroom (perhaps sadly).

From reflecting on what was learned at events I attended with these people, including what was presented at the BCS event in particular on “lazy project manager”, I think have now found a unique formula of 8 things for helping to be emotionally prepared and stay positive on that “MUST-succeed” project.

OK, I must admit that part of discovering these things comes from help received from Anna Morrison at the IT Job Board in not only re-reading what was initially meant to be a whimsical blog for people to read after Christmas but from how now, with her adding a set of headings to help it along, I suddenly saw more potential in it and so thought I would see how it works for these being a set of lessons learned from life – and often hard experiences – that we are not likely to find mentioned in the PRINCE2 or PMI textbooks.

So besides preparing PIDs and other project management documents, following standard operating process or otherwise implementation or installation procedures, try any or all of 8 MAGIC mental and emotional things to help get you through THAT hard-won and now must-succeed project:

1. Stay Positive, in general
2. Have A GSOH Handy
3. Find Some Music To Suit Your Ears
4. Don’t be afraid to use an inspiration from past success (even a folk hero?)
5. Find Music for The Whole Team’s Ears – and A United Front
6. Suit Your Style to The Local Culture
7. Don’t Give Up When Things Get Lost in Translation
8. Sing When You’re Winning

OK, so don’t you believe any of it? Then perhaps you might when you know where discovery of these came from. So here’s the story (sorry, blog) on that (and be sure to click on the links in red font to get the idea or read the original discussions):

Stay Positive
It was two occurrences in quick succession that have reminded me about the power of music for not only helping to keep you positive when times are hard and you are seeking work, but also for when you are “on the job” and needing to get the team working together effectively for delivering that “must win” project against the odds. The first was from an IT Job Board LinkedIn discussion where a lot of people were great in sharing their views on how to stay positive when seeking work and the other was an event that I attended on what I took to be the emotional intelligence needed by a Project Manager for success in delivery (but was entitled, perhaps detracting a little from the value of it, The Art of Productive Laziness and on how a lazy project manager is more likely to deliver than an overly process-driven diligent one)

Have A GSOH handy
Of course, it is not just music that can help keep the spirits up, but also having a few good friends who you can talk things through with – as well as see the funny side of the situation, even if it is using what is termed “dark humour”. Britain is famous – or ought that be infamous? – for both its great music AND its dark sense of humour, as well as those who are happy to talk about things (and, yes, in homage to that great Monty Python sketch about “The Four Yorkshiremen” – about how much tougher THEY have had it than anything YOU may have experienced or be experiencing!!). So if you are going to have to get through some hard times, be you a “lad” or a “lass” (or, alas!), then you might as well “cheer up and whistle” – and rather than simply “chewin’ on life’s gristle”

However, while it might seem tough trying to get just yourself to stay positive and into gear with the bad way that the actual or the economic weather might be, spare a thought for that embattled project manager who is forced to deliver a project in double-quick time with resources that are a lot less skilled than what he/she might otherwise have liked them to be. What should he/she do to get the team feeling that they can achieve the impossible dream, let alone deliver this project that they have all been told “MUST BE DELIVERED” (and with ominous tones of what might happen if not!)??.

Music to suit my ears
Well, if my experience is anything to go by, music that is connected with some iconic historical event – or even some legendary one – can have an effect that you might not expect for getting the team to take those first few steps to believing that they can deliver. Indeed, feel almost like they have already achieved it – or otherwise feel HOW it will feel WHEN they have achieved it (and apart from just relieved!).

For instance, try out the following song for not giving up on achieving what you want for someone else – or a community – like a few of us have found an affinity with in recent times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFD2gu007dc

Connect A Legend Up with Your Team of Merry Men
The hook, as you may realise, is the connection with a great folk hero – namely the one known as Robin Hood, a protector of all things that are fair and right in the absence of “good King Richard” who has gone off to The Crusades and – supposedly – leaving his lacklustre, money-grubbing brother in charge of the kingdom, along with his evil henchman, the Sheriff of Nottingham, to help him in doing dirty deeds of collecting taxes from the poor and helpless while the rich get off scot-free. Actual reading up on the history does, ironically, imply that it may have been otherwise – but let’s not let that get in the way of a good tale which has the power to get people to focus, not only on the good and positive aspects of a project, but also the power to deliver it against all odds.

Certainly Robin Hood, as he is portrayed by Kevin Costner in the movie “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves”, has an almost superhero ability – but it is also the fact that he needs his team, and especially his feisty Maid Marian (who fortunately is equally handy with a sword and other medieval weaponry) to help him win through against the adversity stacked against them by the extremely evil Sheriff of Nottingham (who is VERY ably played by Alan Rickman at his best).

Music for All Our Ears – and A United Front
So, with this movie theme to go with the song, it may just be that the team can empathise with the challenges that they face as a team – along with identifying their leader like a latter day Robin Hood – but also relishing the prospect themselves of achieving the goals as a band of merry underdogs of the establishment. Boldly going, where no team has gone before – or certainly not a team that has as little armour-plating and weaponry as this one may (unfortunately) need to have!! Still, that’s where inciting the ingenuity of the group to counter-act the superior odds can make all the difference between a game won and a game lost.

As such, maybe we need to have a few iconic songs up our sleeve that will help us get through this difficult period?

Certainly, to be a little like the Pythonesque Yorkshireman about it, it would not be the first time that a song has been highly relevant to helping me deliver a project at a time of economic crisis. Wanna hear the story? Too bad, I am going to tell it anyway – so stop reading now if you don’t want to hear it.

Suit Your Style to The Local Culture
The things is, I DID have to achieve the impossible back in late 1997. At the time I was working in Seoul, South Korea,with a dozen or so “foreign consultants” on what was intended to be the pilot for a large global roll-out project.

Unfortunately that was also when the Asian Financial Crisis hit – and the Korean currency, called “the won”, went from 800 won to the U.S. dollar at the start of November to around 2500 won to the dollar by Christmas. The cost of the foreign consultants – who were all on a very healthy day rate – suddenly became prohibitive to the business. So something desperately needed to be done to avoid the project failing completely due to lack of suitably skilled resources available under the now severely limited budget.

Fortunately I had had enough time on the project before the crisis fully bit so that I was able to realise a way to do quite a few technical things quicker if we could have a flat project organisation structure – as then there would be less layers of management to deal with in getting approval to task teams and get them working. So, after managing to convince the CFO, who was the project’s sponsor, I suddenly found myself working with an all-Korean team of eight – who I called my “Magic 8” (as 8 is considered a lucky number in Korea and other parts of South-East Asia).

Don’t Give Up When Things Get Lost in Translation
However I found that they were a little intimidated at first due to not having worked directly with the Westerners who had been brought on board. They were seen by them as “high-powered” and not people you normally talked directly to in the office environment unless you were a manager. However I took a chance by ignoring that cultural perspective, and trying to be as friendly as I possibly could be. Surprisingly, I found that many of the team were able to speak better English than they had otherwise let on at first. All they needed was a little encouragement which they had not had up to that point.

The first thing was to make them feel that it was not going to “be the end” for them if a few things were “lost in translation” – as they invariably were – but to learn to feel comfortable to ask questions and check that they had understood fully. The key to making them feel OK was by me trying to speak a little Korean myself – which I found they loved. There were some obvious limits due to me having to start from scratch – and with some humorous circumstances when I didn’t get the pronunciation quite right (or used terms that were “not good for talking with a manager in the office”).

The big problem, however, was that they were not used to passing on work directly with one another – and so kept referring it back to me rather than having confidence to do it direct. Due to how much we had scheduled to achieve in a VERY tight timeframe, I realised that this was not going to work if I was the go-between (and especially because I could not talk readily and directly with them like they could with each other).

Sing when you’re winning
So when I was almost at my wit’s end, one morning – and fortunately not too far into the team having come together – I picked up on how they loved to sing from one of the team coming in and humming a rather curious tune that I just happened to recognize as something I had sung in my primary school days back in New Zealand. Fortunately, and forgetting my respectful team leader status for a moment, I decided to join in on the hum – and lo, and behold, the whole team broke into song!!

It was then I discovered that, after work, they had a passion for going to these tiny rooms – that they call Norebang – and singing along to songs on a karaoke machine. What’s more, it was on machines that scored the quality of singing too!!

Even to this day I am not really sure why that made a difference – but, pretty much shortly thereafter, they began to work happily together in consulting one another on work that they each had to do that fitted together according to the work packages that I had defined for us to deliver – and taking with me along with them as their “half-Korean” technical team leader in checking “the quality of their songsheet” as we called it, whenever we had progress meetings or reached a need to finally approve a deliverable for sign-off!!

So, for me, this just highlighted the under-rated power of music to bring people together – but to motivate them to work together too.

But do you want to know what the song was that the girl hummed that first morning? Check it out at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afn0J0GrL_U

POSTSCRIPT:

So, after six weeks of working 6.5 days per week, this was the song we sang whenever we needed to get ourselves going again on the project. By the end, I think I was half crazy!! That said, we did deliver “on time” (despite the original schedule being twice the duration we ended up with and an expectation of a lot of expert foreign consultants involved).

Indeed, with how good that team was and how much we went through back then, I found that I was suddenly very emotional when the North and South Korean teams came out together at the Sydney Olympics only 2.5 years later!!

So, if you think you had it tough? Luxury, when I was in Seoul, South Korea….