1.4 PMI – Standards for Project Management and Project Performance Domains

PMI PMBOK 7th edition introduced a number of new concepts including the value delivery system, project delivery principles, performance domains and tailoring. The PMI Standards for project management identifies 12 principles of project management which are aligned with the values identified in the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

A principle is a norm, rule, value or fundamental truth which serve as a guide for behaviour or action. Principles serve as foundational guidelines for strategy, decision making and problem solving. Principles are not prescriptive and they do not tell you how to do something. Principles are intended to guide the behaviour of people involved in projects. They are not specific to any methodologies and will work regardless of the delivery approaches. Below are the principles:

Project Performance Domains

Successful project leaders know how to uniquely apply the knowledge and skills they have learned to each project by tailoring the tools and techniques they use. The complexity of a project has a big impact on the tools and techniques required throughout the project lifecycle. PMI has identified eight performance domains that form an integrated system to enable successful delivery of project and intended outcomes. The performance domains are applicable for both agile and predictive development approaches.

A Project Performance Domain is defined as “a group of related activities that are critical for the effective delivery of project outcomes.” Each performance domain has a set of measurable outcomes.

The PMBOK 7th edition offers the following definitions and discussions:

1.4.1 Stakeholder Performance Domain

Stakeholder is an individual, group, or organization that may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project, program, or portfolio. A project may have a small group of stakeholders or potentially millions, however, there may be different stakeholders in different phases of the project, and the influence, power, or interests of stakeholders may change as the project unfolds. Some stakeholders can be internal and external to organization, some may be supportive or neutral and therefore developing interpersonal skills to engage stakeholders is essential.

Exhibit 1.10: Types of Stakeholders

Stakeholder engagement is a critical success factor in project management since if stakeholders are not satisfied with the outcomes of a project, the project will not be successful so effective stakeholder interaction contributes to successful project outcomes.

Achieving a project’s objectives requires a focused, well-organized project leader who can engage with a committed project team and gain the support of all stakeholders. Building strong, trusting relationships with interested parties can make the difference between project success and failure.

Stakeholder engagement includes implementing strategies and actions to promote productive involvement of stakeholders in project decision making and implementation. Navigating effective stakeholder engagement requires effective communication. Note that various activities may start before or when the project starts and continue throughout the project and may start with:

• Identify stakeholders
• Understand and analyze stakeholders
• Prioritize stakeholders
• Engage stakeholders
• Monitor stakeholders

Understanding a stakeholder’s interest is about understanding “what is in it for them?” In addition, asking stakeholders how they define project success is a powerful way of identifying their expectations. Knowing what each stakeholder needs or wants from the project will enable the project leader to anticipate the stakeholder’s level of support and identify any potential conflicts that may arise. Conflicts are common and often healthy for projects. When managed effectively, conflicts lead to good decisions that optimize the value of the project. At the outset, conflicts often arise when prioritizing project constraints.

For instance, one stakeholder may believe it is more important to complete the project with an aggressive timeline while another may feel minimizing project cost is the priority. Another common example is in defining solution requirements. Project leaders need to ensure the voice of their stakeholders is continuously heard during solution design and development. This may lead to differences of opinion and these differences need to be resolved in a respectful, timely fashion. Depending on the development methodology chosen, resolving these differences may be part of the product owner, business subject matter expert, scrum master, business analyst, and/or project leader’s accountabilities.

When project leaders are accountable for resolving these differences, interpersonal skills are key. Active listening and a clear willingness to facilitate relationship-building between stakeholders are important. In addition, staying ‘passionately neutral’ in the eyes of stakeholders is important. As a project leader, it is not about what is best for you, it is about identifying what is best for the project and the organization, and passionately pursuing that with stakeholders. Resolving conflicts in respectful ways is a skill that can be developed over time.

In some cases, project leaders will be working with stakeholders that are not supportive of the project. They may feel the project is not going to benefit them and their team in the ways it should. They may also resist making the changes that are necessary to support the project’s outcomes. Some stakeholders are very upfront about their resistance and others are not. In these situations, the project Sponsor may be integral to winning these stakeholders over. Knowing when to tactfully involve others in stakeholder management is another key success factor for effective project management.

Building trust and maintaining an open line of communication is critical in working with all stakeholders. Keeping stakeholders involved is essential and it requires more than simply sharing information. The project leader must ask for their input and demonstrate an understanding of a stakeholder’s unique business challenges. This level of understanding is often done through simple and regular check-ins with stakeholders. Lastly, project leaders who are successful in relationship building understand each stakeholder’s capacity to participate and honour their time constraints.

The stakeholder register is an effective tool for project leaders to use throughout the project. It allows the project team to keep track of all the stakeholders and ensure their needs are represented in the communications plan. When communicating with stakeholders different types of communication may be used – written/verbal, formal/informal, push/pull, synchronous/asynchronous.

Every stakeholder has different requirements and expectations so it’s important to identify, classify and analyze stakeholders. Stakeholders analyzing is a method of systematically gathering and analyzing quantitative and qualitative information to determine whose interest should be taken into account throughout the project. In analyzing stakeholders consider power, impact, attitude, belief, expectation, degree of influence, proximity to the project, interest in the project and other aspects surrounding stakeholder’s interactions with the project. After analyzing stakeholders a stakeholder’s engagement strategy will be developed.

Four models below can be used to classify stakeholders:

1. Power/interest grid
2. Power/influence grid
3. Influence/impact grid
4. Salience model

The first three models use two attributes. The fourth model uses three attributes.

The stakeholder Salience Model was proposed by Ronald K. Mitchell, Bradley R. Agle, & Donna J. Wood in 1997. The authors denoted a stakeholder identification based on three variables:

Here, a stakeholder has three attributes:

1. Power to influence
2. Legitimacy of the stakeholder’s relationships with the project
3. Urgency of the stakeholders claim on the project for stakeholder engagement.

Project teams will choose appropriate models for their specific environment and context.

Working with Indigenous populations

As project leaders, managers and team members, it is our responsibility to ensure that we develop the knowledge and skills necessary to work with and build relationships with Indigenous Peoples and communities. Forging close ties with diverse Indigenous peoples requires an understanding of their protocols, a deep respect for their unique cultures, customs, languages, and environment. Building trust is an important ingredient in building relations with indigenous communities. Bob Joseph, a Gwawaenuk Nation member, owner of Indigenous Corporate Training, and former associate professor at Royal Roads University, provides 7 Tips on Building Relationships with Indigenous Peoples. Source

On-going training is required to ensure that project team leaders and members are provided with the appropriate cultural awareness training as we engage with indigenous stakeholders.

You may have heard the term protocol in relation to working with Indigenous people. The term protocol includes many things, but overall it refers to ways of interacting with Indigenous people in a manner that respects traditional ways of being. Protocols are not just manners or rules – they are a representation of a culture’s deeply held ethical system. They also have highly practical applications that may have arisen in a pre-contact context but still apply today. Protocols differ vastly from one Indigenous culture or community to another, and they can be highly complex and multi-layered.

Coming to understand and practice protocols appropriately is a lifelong learning process even for Indigenous people growing up within their culture. Following protocols is a significant sign of respect and awareness. It shows that you are taking the time to learn about Indigenous cultures and are challenging the often-unconscious bias that everyone should interact in the way that mainstream settler culture dictates. Through following protocols, you can build stronger relationships with Indigenous communities and learn about diverse ways of interacting

Watch this video of Bradley Dick – TedX Talk and the First Nations Projects Coalition. In this video, pay close attention to how Bradley Dick (Lekwungen First Nation) follows traditional protocols, explains his own learning process, and reflects on the meaning and importance of those protocols.

1.4.2 Team Performance Domain

We have all had the experience of working on teams either in our volunteer roles or in our organizations and have probably suffered the pain of working on a team lacking in complementary skills, with no clear common purpose, and plagued by uncommitted members who refuse to hold themselves accountable. As a project manager, you need to work with the team you have, not with the team you wish you had, leading your team through the uncertainty inherent in project work, and encouraging collaboration at every turn.

The most powerful sources of uncertainty in any project are the people charged with carrying it out. What’s more, because a project is, by definition, a temporary endeavor, the team that completes it is usually temporary as well, and often must come together very quickly. These facts can exacerbate leadership challenges that are not an issue in more stable situations. Some organizations maintain standing teams that tackle a variety of projects as they arise. But even in those cases, individual team members come and go. These minor changes in personnel can hugely affect the team’s overall cohesion and effectiveness.

As a project leader, your ultimate goal is to encourage an overall sense of psychological safety, which is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” Teams that do their work under the umbrella of psychological safety are more effective, in part because they are willing to take the risks required to learn and innovate (Edmondson 1999).

According to PMBOK 7th edition, the project team is a set of individuals performing the work of the project to achieve its objectives. An environment can be established to support the team in evolving into a high performance team.

Team performance domain according to PPMBOK 7th edition entails establishing activities and functions associated with the people who are responsible for producing project deliverables that realize business outcomes. This performance domain focuses on all actions and processes about the project team, including managing conflicts, encouraging leadership behaviors from all project team members and sharing ownership for the outcomes, developing teams, and monitoring their interactions.

The essential elements for team effectiveness include—clear objectives, well-defined roles and responsibilities with matching capabilities, effective communications, respect for diversity, conscious relationship management, and commitment to working together to get the job done within pre-established, agreed-upon rational constraints.

Each project team must develop rules and processes which they can build an effective working team environment. This can be in the form of creating a team charter for example. Each project team then develop its own team culture however, the project team culture operates within the organization’s culture and reflects the project team’s individual ways of working and interacting. Individuals in any type of leadership role are significant in inspiring others to maintain appropriate behavior and effective working environments. The project manager is instrumental in establishing a safe, respectful, nonjudgmental environment to allow the team to communicate openly. Some desired ways of modelling this includes:

• Transparency
• Integrity
• Respect
• Positive discourse
• Support
• Courage
• Celebrating success

Self-Organizing Agile Teams

Agile software development was founded as a way to help team members work together more efficiently and companionably. In fact, three of the twelve founding principles of the methodology focus on building better teams:

1. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
2. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
3. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly (Beedle et al. 2001).

The term ‘self-organizing teams’ is especially important to Agile. Nitin Mittal (2013), writing for Scrum Alliance, describes a self-organizing team as “a group of motivated individuals, who work together toward a goal, have the ability and authority to take decisions, and readily adapt to changing demands.”

The Power of Diversity

The rationale for putting together a team is to combine different people, personalities, and perspectives to solve a problem. Difference is the whole point. Diverse teams are more effective than homogenous teams because they are better at processing information and using it to come up with new ideas. According to David Rock and Heidi Grant, diverse teams tend to focus more on facts, process those facts more carefully, and are more innovative (2016).

What’s more, researchers investigating creativity and innovation have consistently demonstrated “the value of exposing individuals to experiences with multiple perspectives and worldviews. It is the combination of these various perspectives in novel ways that results in new ideas ‘popping up.’ Creative ‘aha’ moments do not happen by themselves” (Viki 2016). In his book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Scott Page (2007) puts it like this:

As individuals we can accomplish only so much. We are limited in our abilities. Our heads contain only so many neurons and axons. Collectively, we face no such constraint. We possess incredible capacity to think differently. These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.

Within the team it is important to recognize and support diversity by including members who are qualified and have appropriate skills such as:

• Visible minorities
• Ethnic minorities
• Women
• Indigenous peoples
• People with disabilities.

Project Leadership skills

Leadership is about using one’s interpersonal skills in order to guide, motivate and direct a team.

In the sixth edition of the PMBOK Guide, PMI identified a very comprehensive list of the skills and attributes needed by project leaders. All the skills and attributes are important. For purposes of this text, the following key skills and attributes will be highlighted:

This is by no means a complete list of all the skills and attributes required to be a successful project leader. Moreover, the nature and complexity of a project can help identify which of these skills will be more instrumental to project success than others.

In PMBOK 7th edition, it is assumed that, if we successfully perform all tasks of the team performance domain then the outcome will be a high-performing team, shared ownership, and interpersonal skills.

Leadership behaviours that is important for project team leaders to develop include:

1. Critical thinking skills
2. Motivation
3. Interpersonal skills – Emotional intelligent, Decision making and Conflict management

To be effective in leadership the project leader also needs to develop a servant leadership style of leadership. Servant leadership focuses on understanding and addressing the needs and development of project team members in order to enable the highest possible project team performance. Servant leaders place emphasis on developing project team members to their highest potential. They allow project teams to self-organize when possible and increase levels of autonomy. Servant leadership behaviours include:

• Maximizing delivery by removing obstacles and impediments hampering the project team
• Projects project team from internal and external diversions that redirect the project team from the current objectives.
• Provides tools and encouragement to keep the project team satisfied and productive. This requires learning what motives individual team members and finding ways to reward them for good work.

Leading and managing virtual teams are challenging and require discipline yet flexible approaches. Due to globalization, impact of the pandemic, outsourcing, the use of the most talented people wherever they are based, flexible working etc. the virtual project teams are on the rise. (Pullan & Prokopi, 2016).

There are several models that describes the stages of project team formation, growth and development. However, the common aspects of project team development that are relevant for most project teams include:

• Everyone is aware of the project vision and objectives
• Setting clear roles and responsibilities
• Facilitating project team communication, problem solving and the process of coming to a consensus.
• Guiding the team in the right direction, including guidance on tasks or deliverables
• Working collaboratively to improve project team performance by growing to strengthen and deepen each individual skills and experiences in certain areas.

Core Considerations of Leadership

Good teamwork depends, ultimately, on a leader with a clear understanding of what it means to lead. To judge by the countless books on the topic, you’d think the essential nature of leadership was widely understood. However, few people really understand the meaning of ‘leadership’.

In his book, Leadership Theory: Cultivating Critical Perspectives, John P. Dugan examines “core considerations of leadership,” zeroing in on misunderstood terms and also false dichotomies that are nevertheless widely accepted as accurate explanations of the nature of leadership. Dugan argues that a confused understanding of these essential ideas makes becoming a leader seem like a far-off dream, which only a select few can attain (Dugan 2017). But in fact, he argues, anyone can learn how to be a better leader.

Here’s what Dugan has to say about core considerations of leadership:

• Born Versus Made: This is one of the most pernicious false dichotomies regarding leadership. Dugan explains, “that there is even a need to address a consideration about whether leaders are born or made in this day and age is mind-numbingly frustrating. Ample empirical research illustrates that leadership is unequivocally learnable when defined according to most contemporary theoretical parameters.”
• Leader Versus Leadership: People tend to conflate the terms leader and leadership, but, according to Dugan, “Leader refers to an individual and is often, but not always, tied to the enactment of a particular role. This role typically flows from some form of formal or informal authority (e.g., a supervisor, teacher, coach). When not tied to a particular role, the term leader reflects individual actions within a larger group, the process of individual leader development, or individual enactments attempting to leverage movement on an issue or goal. Leadership, on the other hand, reflects a focus on collective processes of people working together toward common goals or collective leadership development efforts.”
• Leader Versus Follower: “The conflation of leader and leadership makes it easier to create an additional false dichotomy around the terms leader and follower,” with follower considered a lesser role. “The label of leader/follower, then, is tied solely to positional authority rather than the contributions of individuals within the organization. If we flip the example to one from social movements, I often see an interesting shift in labeling. In the Civil Rights Movement in the United States there are multiple identified leaders (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin) along with many followers. However, the followers are often concurrently characterized as being leaders in their own right in the process. In social movements it seems we are more willing to simultaneously extend labels of leader and follower to a person.”
• Leadership Versus Management: “Also tied up in leader/leadership and leader/follower dichotomies are arguments about whether leadership and management represent the same or unique phenomena. Once again, the role of authority gets tied up in the understanding of this. Many scholars define management as bound to authority and focused on efficiency, maintenance of the status quo, and tactics for goal accomplishment. An exceptional manager keeps systems functioning through the social coordination of people and tasks. Leadership, on the other hand, is less concerned with the status quo and more attentive to issues of growth, change, and adaptation.”

Psychologically Safe Leadership

The National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (the Standard) requires leaders to be competent to manage, lead and supervise employees in a way that is psychologically safe.

Example 2: Predictive Life Cycle