Mentoring Benefits, Up and Down
Once upon a time mentorship meant an informal relationship where the organization’s emeninces gris might take under their wings someone more junior in whom they saw talent or potential. They would provide guidance, connections and some wisdom at key points in a career. The only thing the mentor might get out of it, other than the satisfaction of watering a career and watching it grow, was the expansion of his (or less frequently, her) political influence in the organization.
These days that certainly still happens but there are many more formal arrangements for establishing these relationships in all kinds of enterprises. The more experienced members are paired with those less so for a structured exchange of corporate information and culture. Companies sponsor these programs to encourage the maturation of skills, technical and soft, and to indoctrinate people into the corporate culture. I’ve seen this done at Deloitte, for instance, where I participated in a program that helped members from other firms on exchanges from around the globe, ostensibly to upgrade their language skills for the local environment, but of course it did much more.
Traditional mentoring is a tool of an organization’s knowledge management strategy, but many organizations nowadays take it much further. Mentoring programs to help women in management are now commonplace. Recently the BLM movement has renewed focus on diversity mentoring, which places a minority in contact with an executive helping them to identify systemic bias in an organization. And there are programs for reverse mentoring, that help us old fuddy-duddies with innovation and change by giving us a millennial to frustrate (like when your mother calls for help with her email, only at work).
Currently I am mentoring a pair of project management students at Humber College, a local Toronto community college. Participation in this kind of program is generally pitched as giving back, an altruistic contribution to the professional community, with an added inducement of PDUs (Professional Development Units, which project managers need to maintain their professional credential). What I’ve recently learned is there is a lot more in it for the mentor than PDUs. I think I’m getting as much out of it as my mentees.
My Humber College’s students are in the Project Management Certificate program, working on their capstone research assignment in which they analyze a project and report on how it was performed with reference to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) authoritative Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). In addition to being a project that they execute themselves, the work teaches them how the real world differs from the text book. My role is to present for them a recently completed waterfall project which they analyze through the lens of each of the knowledge areas of the PMBOK.
My mentees have been making lots of notes as we delve into each chapter of the book; but I’ve been making notes of my own. Among other things, I now have a list of the benefits this process confers on a seasoned PM such as myself. Here are my thoughts so far:
PMBOK Editions
I studied for the PMP back in 2005, when they were still using the second edition of the PMBOK. It was less than 200 pages. The sixth edition they’re using now is over 750 pages. Some of that expansion is due to a more readable format, but clearly a lot has been added since the last time I took a close look at it. Professional PMs need to keep up with the changes. Reviewing the foundational text is worth doing from time to time.
Retrospectives
Reflecting on a project’s outcomes in some kind of “lessons learned” analysis is doctrine. Agile has enshrined it in the sprint retrospectives. These exercises are typically done quickly at the end of a project, or phase (or sprint), when the team is still assembled and things are fresh in their minds. This makes sense, but doing a deep dive later on yields different lessons:
Strategy Versus Tactics – Retrospectives are reactive and rarely bring up big holes in the planning. They will naturally focus on tactics; going through the project with reference to the PMBOK could expose major oversights or weaknesses in the strategy. For example, I’ve found PMs are rarely brought in as early as they should be. The things that one would typically put in a charter at inception are often presented fait accompli. When you’re handed a product with a vendor for an integration project, one is unlikely to hear in the retrospective that we should have done proper procurement planning and selected the vendor more carefully. Even if you wanted to say that, at that point the vendor’s team is probably sitting in the lessons learned meeting with you. But strategic mistakes like this are the kinds of things an organization will do over and over again.
Let Politics Evaporate – Once a little time has passed it will become clearer how well the project succeeded, and in what respects. This and the objectivity granted by distance allows for some meaningful reflection. Immediately following even a successful project, people tend to be cautious about where the fingers are pointed and who gets the credit. Once some time has passed, the project politics becomes less a factor.
Contrast Theory To Practice
Real world lessons may help the students; but reflecting on why something that’s part of the doctrine wasn’t deemed practical in reality provides lessons to the PM. Perhaps it exposes a weakness in the organization’s culture, a management failure (so often our champions seem less than 100% committed), or even one’s own blind spots. To return to my vendor selection example, if you find you skipped procurement planning it’s worth reflecting on why. Perhaps there’s another part of the organization that has standard procedures and conducts procurement for the whole organization, in which case you might consider it to have been done, just by someone else; but perhaps there’s inadequate governance of procurement within the organization, and managers simply accept it because a loose process means they have more spending authority. Either way, you’ve learned something.
I have learned other things during this exercise, and we’re only half complete. For instance, there are a number of PMBOK processes that strike me as intuitive or secondary, in that they are done almost automatically in the course of other work. It’s not that they shouldn’t be in the PMBOK, but I think it’s worth thinking about what you really need to plan for and manage, as opposed to simply verify their performance as you go. It’s sort of an active versus passive management dichotomy. But that’s a topic for another day.
Mature project managers should view a mentorship invitation as a chance to gain personal and organizational learning, and not just as an appeal to their altruism on behalf of inexperienced professionals who are learning the ropes. In the normal press of work, it’s hard enough to find time for the usual “lessons learned” discussion. It’s typically impossible to go back months later and engage in a formal reflection on a project’s successes and failures. An opportunity to do so is worth seizing.
