The editors of the book introduce Fernando Sanabria who is a Computer Engineer and Program Director with broad experience in managing complex global projects. He has held senior management positions in the global consultancy and insurance industries, working with IBM and Zurich Insurance Company, with a special focus on delivery, especially in scenarios with high organizational complexity.
Foreword
In current volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) businesses, it is well-known that data and information need to flow faster and broader through the different company departments and teams. Systems need to be increasingly connected, and the level of process automation needs to rise considerably in the coming years, which is a matter of life or death for many big companies. Companies are pushed continuously to be “faster” and more “agile.” In addition, every change in the company, bringing in a new level of systems connectivity, information flow, and responsiveness can be made possible, thanks to the execution of projects that involve and require the active participation of different departments and teams.
As a general reference, International Data Corporation stated some years back that almost 25% of IT projects experience outright failure, 50% of projects require material rework, and 20–25% of them do not provide the return on investment (ROI) expected. We are convinced that one of the key reasons for those failures is the inability to manage people connectivity professionally.
Thus, we should find different pragmatic ways to develop the three fundamental pillars proposed in this book, in order to gain much more agility, responsiveness, and fluency in the complex organizations we deal with these days. Reality shows that, in the future, companies will drive every change as projects, at a much faster pace than before. But a key prerequisite is that the sponsors and the leaders of those teams and organizations are able to set the right context. This is their main responsibility: setting the context and the identity for the team. Why is it so important for teams to have a joint and sustainable purpose and for each individual to find out how she/he is delivering meaningful work? This is very important in this mass information environment as it makes everyone feel their work has meaning and that they are part of a true travelling organization.
In projects, there is a start and a destination that has to be reached (target state), which is sometimes not finally fixed before part of the project journey has been travelled. Resources have to be administered efficiently to reach this target. There are plenty of well-known and unknown risks to be managed. Uncertainty is the rule in many cases, and there are different stakeholders with different expectations to be managed. Experience tells us that the correct management of expectations is a fundamental part of every project. The management of expectations requires that aforementioned joint belief in the sustainable purpose of the project and the acceptance of a flexible journey. The project becomes a travelling organization in itself rather than a sequenced set of activities, where everything to be reached at the end is clear and transparent at the start.
Connecting resources, with people at the center, is required as a success factor in current global organizations. After all, in the end, all these facts and challenges are managed by people. People who have different nationalities, cultures, beliefs, and experiences (good and bad that have left a mark in them), and who work in different departments of the company and, last but not least, have slightly or totally different mind-sets and personal agendas. A systemic advantage of connecting across the whole organization is that it provides a brilliant vehicle to make different interests transparent, to discuss and agree with them to create a convergent view.
The main question that arises, which is by no means simple, is: How can we manage the “connectivity” between people running projects that aim to have better connected systems and information flow, in an era of digitalization?
Introduction to the Problem
As can be inferred from the foreword, achieving better connectivity between systems is not the key challenge. The real challenge is to achieve the right connectivity across people in practice that, when executing the projects, will enable the changes required to make companies’ systems better connected.
In this chapter, we will focus on how to deal with people connectivity in complex projects, as a way of managing change in future organizations (travelling organizations). We will also consider the ubiquitous ambition/objective of these projects, which is business sustainability.
We have discovered a fundamental problem that needs to be solved before we can have better systems connectivity. The problem is about how to approach “people connectivity” in a correct and sustainable way, to deliver better projects. Again, we are convinced that the future of any company is driven by projects and their successful execution (in all senses).
Taking some previous experience with projects, you will probably remember cases where something as simple as a good chat, between two people sharing an “informal” coffee in the office, did actually alter the direction of the project and, in so doing, considerably changed the destiny of a company department or even the company itself. All projects start with people and of course ultimately come back to people.
Various different aspects may play a key role in people connectivity (to be covered in this chapter). However, it is important to understand that there are no secret formulae for success or infallible approaches that will ensure people connectivity in every project.
This chapter aims to elaborate some specific approaches (conceptual, but at the same time, pragmatic), for dealing with the problem described above. It deals with the issue of how to enhance connectivity between people in projects, which will enable better connectivity between systems in the “Digital Era.”
Key Concepts and Proposed Approaches to Address Different Aspects of People Connectivity in Projects
Here we will elaborate various different, albeit related, concepts and factors to contextualize the possible approaches to the problem covered in this chapter. All of them have much broader implications in the context of projects, but we want to develop them here with a specific focus on the problem of people connectivity. By reading and reflecting on all of them from a high-level view, we can start to observe the need to consider people connectivity in projects as a key success factor.
- 1.
The natural gift of some people to create rapport with others (the connectivity skill)
- 2.
The trusted advisor curve
- 3.
People first react and think on the basis of emotions rather than doing so rationally
- 4.
Storytelling: impacting on people’s need to identify
- 5.
Fail faster to succeed sooner
- 6.
The project as a “complex adaptive system”
Aspect 1: The Natural Gift of Some People to Create Rapport with Others (the Connectivity Skill)
The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. Theodore Roosevelt.
You will almost certainly have had the experience that, sometimes, you feel comfortable talking with someone who you have just met and you cannot identify why this happens. It is very common. It is a “gift” that some people possess naturally. We could develop some ideas as to why this happens, for example, these people care about the feelings of others without any specific personal interest of their own, or that they are, in general, very positive and empathetic or even that they feel very authentic and confident. But as it is not the purpose of this chapter to develop this, we can try to simply summarize it as being a natural gift that some people have.
It is common to find people with this “gift” in activities and roles related to sales, business development, or any other responsibility that requires one to start commercial relationships, business engagements, etc. They are the door openers. They are also very good at connecting and aligning people for a common purpose.
The relevance of soft skills for working well with people tops the list for common skills and habits of highly successful people. Research done by the Carnegie Foundation and Harvard University showed that as much as 85% of your job and life success depends on your ability to get along with people. These studies also concluded that only 15% of employment and management success is due to technical training, while the other 85% is due to personality factors.
And here is when this “soft,” and shall we say “natural,” skill becomes very relevant, in the context of projects and how to promote and trigger people connectivity across teams and areas that share a common objective. When project teams are designed, this critical skill set is often not considered carefully, as in general it is not seen as a formal skill requirement. This applies, to give just one example, when it comes to the people who will oversee the interfacing between areas in tasks such as eliciting business requirements, change management, or tool rollouts. These are just some examples of responsibilities that have the need to connect people as an underlying requirement, in addition to the obvious technical skills that the people responsible also need to have.
We can refer to some real cases, where putting certain individuals in specific roles in a project, which required a strong interfacing between areas, teams, or locations, had a considerable positive impact on how the work evolved. We can also refer to cases where the individuals with the wrong set of “connectivity” skills destroyed the possibility of successful collaboration inside the project team, ultimately leading to the failure of the project. When this connectivity skill is insufficient or lacking, also in the project leadership, the project is certain to fail. It is simply a matter of time.
I was once given the responsibility of taking over an existing global program, and the journey started without knowing my internal customers and with almost no team in charge. What is more, the program was very strategic and highly relevant in the company, with a truly global footprint. There were many parallel workstreams that were not particularly under control. In short, I was soon in a difficult situation as, with no team in place yet, I was faced with more and more demands from a wide variety of stakeholders who were not prepared to wait for their needs to be addressed and not prepared to wait until I had the “ideal” team in place to cope with all their demands. They simply wanted their own demands attended to and solved, which was fair enough. After sorting out some crucial topics on my own, I immediately focused on filling the first customer-facing and management roles, under some time pressure of course. When it came to the first person I hired, I set great store by his technical skills and background, which seemed more than suitable for the requirements of the role. But because I was recruiting under time pressure and had not considered the “connectivity skill” carefully enough, I didn’t get the results I expected. Very soon my “mistake” became clear, and the “noise” in the different project interfaces for this role started to rise considerably. This immediately gave me two issues to solve: firstly, to manage the original demand and then to decide what to do with the new hire. The real mistake would have been to not react quickly enough and allow the lack of people connectivity in that specific context to develop to such an extent that it became a real problem. The solution was to start a new recruitment process and this time to consider carefully the need for connectivity skills. Finally, I hired two good talents who, in addition to their technical skills, were very good at dealing with business partners. All the project interfaces started to evolve with a very positive dynamic, and, after some time, the person I had initially recruited decided to pursue other opportunities outside the project. He had realized by himself that the role was not an ideal match for his profile and skill set.
Aspect 2: The Trusted Advisor Curve
Trust is, in general, one of the key success and efficiency factors for organizations. In the project context, the trusted advisor curve is an especially important subfactor. It is not only about enabling or fostering the possibility to establish good connectivity between parties, it is even more about how to make them sustainable and evolving with time in a value and virtuous circle.
There are many articles and essays that analyze and elaborate the concept that having a higher degree of trust between people in a population or corporate environment should result in greater cooperation (e.g., Putnam 1993, or La Porta et al. 1996). Another article develops a theoretical basis that aims to measure the link between trust and company performance, showing the relevance and link with which trust and performance can operate in organizations (Brown et al. 2015).
One much desired “soft skill,” to foster the interaction between the parties in a project, is the capability to become a trusted advisor of your business partner. This is a skill that can be developed, but you need to make sure it is a priority for all the team members to develop it continuously. As in every interaction, you sometimes provide value and sometimes receive value; it is evident that every team member will have some counterpart to whom they need to become a trusted advisor, and this is the lens which needs to be always present, as a perspective to assess the project’s health.
Journeys of organization and advisor, closely connected in adaptive project systems (figure: Frank Kühn)
We refer here to the “trusted advisor curve” development, which defines a set of proceedings necessary to achieve this trusted advisor status. Once this trusted relation is achieved between parties receiving and providing some kind of service, everything becomes much more efficient, productive, and sustainable, with higher levels of innovation as well. One of the key proceedings in this trusted advisor curve development is for the service provider to focus on understanding the real needs of the party receiving their service (the service recipient). As part of this process, the service provider also helps the service recipient to define and detail better those objectives to be achieved.
Taking this concept to the extreme, for a moment, implies that the “technical skills” (in a very broad sense) are only secondary when it comes to developing trust-based relationships with business partners. Where possible, avoid putting technical discussions in the wrong order. In a project, this is one of the key sources of risk and damage for the overall objective to be achieved.
Once we received a call from a communications department, as they were in charge of the company intranet and they were having some issues to manage the content as they wanted, due to technical limitations. We quickly discovered that they were dealing with a small and local IT company that had reached its limits. The first interesting aspect was understanding why they were working directly with an external IT provider and not requesting this from their own internal IT department. But, as you can imagine from your own previous experiences with IT departments, they had various very valid reasons for not doing so up to that point.
We were quickly able to identify a suitable solution for them, as it was not really complex from a technical point of view. The challenge was more about starting the trusted advisor curve as, at that point, even we had a very clear solution to their problem, we just didn’t anticipate their being willing to follow our guidance on those IT topics. Thus, we followed the basic rule of starting by adding value. We firstly managed to become the “interlocutors” between the company and the external IT provider. Then we reached an agreed exit of that “proprietary” and not scalable solution, on very good terms with that provider. Simply by doing this we started to show our genuine interest in becoming their trusted advisor, and we started by delivering, for them, concrete value-added. Just after this first value exchange, they were more prepared to listen to us in terms of the solution we had to provide. In the end, we ran a very successful project together, the capabilities of the communication team to manage internal content for the company were considerably extended, and we kept a strong relationship where they started to see us as trusted advisors, essentially counting on us to provide our point of view whenever they had new IT requirements.
I remember many other different concrete experiences in my professional career as an IT consultant and IT manager, when I was extremely frustrated because my business partner was not able to “see” and/or “perceive” clearly the relevant perspectives I was providing for a very concrete IT problem to be solved. Because not all of them were IT people and hence not able to identify those IT aspects by themselves, I thought I was in a clear position to help them, “technically” from the beginning. But the reason was that, even I was in a clear position to help them, they were not yet ready to listen to me. Because I was not yet a trusted counterpart at that stage of the relationship. This meant that, even though my advice or proposals were appropriate from a technical point of view, they were not yet ready to consider them. They were still not open to that fluent, efficient, productive, and even innovative relationship.
This means that we need to abandon the idea that, to be great technical people, with mastery of a specific area of knowledge, we are then ready to start providing guidance, input, or recommendations to business partners. Because this will not always be the case, we need more than just technical skills; we need the required soft skills to listen actively and identify as accurately as possible where we can delivery concrete value in order to start developing the relationship. To begin indicating to them how things should be done, or what their problem is, is definitely not the right way to go. One should listen actively, not talk too much, and come back to your new business partner with concrete value for their current reality. Once you have overcome the first threshold and your business partner starts to be ready to listen to your points of view, you should become a real fan of their needs, to fully understand them, and, on that shared journey, you can help them to better define the understanding of those problems. This comes before you are also able to start defining together the possible objectives to be pursued. To talk about possible solutions or even products comes right at the end of that journey.
This is a relevant perspective to the problem of people connectivity in the context of projects. The focus and active attitude to become a trusted advisor of your business partner is an essential element to success, fostering fluent collaboration between the different areas and parties in a project. This needs to be regarded as a curve: it is incremental and exists in all the relationships and interactions around the project if the relationship between and with the different parties is to be sustained.
Aspect 3: People First React and Think Emotionally Rather than Rationally as One Would Assume
As briefly developed above in the description of the trusted advisor curve, it could be a misconception and incorrect assumption that people connectivity will be sparked by an interaction that offers all the facts, perfectly structured, from a purely technical perspective. This could still easily fail after all that effort has been made. The reason is because this intended people connectivity could initially rely much more on the “how” than on the “what.” It is about how we can spark and sustain that people connectivity.
Considering that the brain is divided into three parts with the first and deepest part driven mainly by raw emotion, we should assume that initial connectivity between people involves a lot of information that is filtered emotionally and instinctually. As developed by Oren Klaff in his book Pitch Anything (2011), how we initially present ideas to proceed with a solution is fundamentally different from how people receive them. To keep the connectivity between areas active and profitable, you must attract your business partner’s attention and interest by making the most of the initial momentum created in that connectivity. To reach the decision-making part of your counterpart, you must first overcome the conditioning applied by the brain’s first emotional filter.
People with the “gift” mentioned above in this chapter can prepare the scenario and their opposite numbers in a much better way to receive the new ideas (the change) that the project will bring. The reason? Only if you spark the people connectivity first will your counterpart be ready to receive the “more rational” information. So, if you start totally rationally and not consider the role of the initial connectivity factors, then you will not be able to make your ideas flow to the other person. This is perhaps why, as Maya Angelou said, people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
When working in consultancy and business development, we ran many customer presentations for services and projects we were intending to engage on with those current customers or prospects. The results of those meetings and presentations were only successful if we had spent enough time and focus preparing the dynamic of the sessions rather than merely the content. Considering that those engagement processes were taking place in Latin America, that was also an additional cultural aspect to be regarded. Based on those experiences we can state that, only by applying different techniques for capturing attention, taking emotional aspects and mind-sets into consideration, did we have sufficient attention from those audiences to move onto through the more rational and technical topics. This needs to be regarded and monitored continuously and not only at the opening of the presentation or even relationship, as there will be always ups and downs in that more emotional or primitive connection.
Aspect 4: Storytelling: Impacting on People’s Need to Identify
We know and understand that human beings follow some pattern behaviors. Let’s say a set of behaviors that, one way or another, will always appear in a different context, cultures, and realities, as those that are related to the human being as a species. Just to give one very simple but representative example of pattern behaviors, everyone will take always a compliment positively. Even if one is aware that the compliment is not meant genuinely, or that it is being used to influence or even manipulate, a person cannot avoid feeling some kind of happiness and closeness to the person who gave the compliment because, deep down, that compliment is received positively. It goes without saying. Now, how can this happen? Perhaps because everything is directly connected to our ego, the ubiquitous and strong ego that every human being has. This needs to be carefully considered for communication across the project. Storytelling is one effective technique.
When it comes to storytelling, the natural effect that involves the other person is related to giving the audience or counterpart the possibility to somehow identify with the story being told. This again relates directly to our ego and is then inevitable. As social animals we always want to feel that we form part of something and we always want to feel identified with and understood. So any possibility to make us feel identified with, firstly (by affecting our ego) and also bringing that sense of belonging as social animals, will give us the opportunity to bring those individuals we are speaking to closer to the idea or concept we are trying to get across.
Considering the above as a possible valid reflection, it is always important to apply the storytelling technique to have more effective communications in specific project contexts and to achieve the required levels of engagement around the different topics involved. This concept needs to be considered when it comes to people connectivity in global programs with a varied set of nationalities and cultures.
One additional factor that is also essential to foster the correct use of storytelling in projects, as an enabler in different interactions, is the business acumen that every team member should already have and continue to develop. Sound business acumen on the part of every project team member, concerning the main topics of the project, is required to craft storytelling that can really reach other people. Every team member must develop this business acumen, thus making them able to use the storytelling technique to make project development safer in challenging business scenarios and complex organizations.
With my teams, we used to go through some critical sessions related to sponsor engagement, new business stakeholders’ engagement, onboarding of new key team members, and budget planning discussions. As is normally the case in challenging and transformational programs and projects, the right team preparation and alignment on how to pitch the projects and solutions, with a great deal of business acumen (not just IT-related content) and carefully applying the storytelling technique, delivered excellent results in line with our expectations. So, this is a technique that I would highly recommend to teach, practice, and spread in teams so that it becomes a crucial part of the team’s everyday work.
Aspect 5: Fail Faster to Succeed Sooner
How can we find the positive trend, the virtuous incremental iterations, in a timely manner and in a pragmatic way? And how can we continuously calibrate our direction accordingly? These are questions that need to be asked continuously and communicated to the whole team until the end of the project. The project leadership must play a very determined and consistent role, to ensure that these questions are focused on. This aims to find continuously those “forces” that will sustain the positive impact while progressing to the objective.
Fail faster to succeed sooner is one of the most prominent features of agile organizations navigating the VUCA world. It assumes that leadership is understood as a task and not as a position (figure: Frank Kühn)
In this chapter, we want to focus attention on project leadership and governance in terms of the relevance of people connectivity. In software development, agile methodologies involve releasing new versions of the product in shorter periods so that customers can check and validate the direction. Here we extrapolate that idea to the context of connecting through the different resources in projects with the aim of identifying faster those connections that are not going as expected so that they become transparent and can be corrected.
It is a sad fact of project management that wrong connections across team members and involved areas will arise. If these bad connections are not considered in a timely manner they will, over time, be very detrimental for the feasibility of the project, eventually resulting in a clear risky situation for the overall project objective. Managing these interferences to connectivity carefully in a timely manner means making them transparent in a proactive, prudential, and positive way as soon as possible. The next step is to promote a new way of reconnecting the parties. This is essential and needs to be based on the concrete experiences of the project, as there are no two teams or projects that behave in the same way. Each project represents a specific reality and needs a specific procedure that should be continuously developed based on active monitoring and constant realignment. As previously stated, it is inevitable in every project that people connectivity will not always flow as expected, so the issue is less about this issue per se but about how fast we can identify the “failing connections” and enable them to succeed sooner. It is about measuring and acting to change the trend actively and continuously. This is perhaps one of the key activities and responsibilities of the project management team. Remain agile, measure constantly so as to adjust if necessary. Maintain the virtuous iterative/incremental proceeding (I/I).
Try to remember cases where people connectivity did not work well and you didn’t realize this or didn’t act in time. What were the main issues or consequences? By reflecting on this, you can identify why it is so essential to tackle these kinds of issues in projects in a timely manner. But what is even more rewarding is to identify cases where you were able to manage such issues and fix them. In those cases, how did you proceed? What you can try next time based on these experiences? Focusing on value-driven interactions is a good way to manage such scenarios. In general, when there is no clear value contribution from each party in a specific project interaction, then this starts to become an increasingly serious issue that requires the management team to act as soon as possible to correct the undesirable dynamic. By reorganizing the work or roles, slightly or radically depending on the situation, you try to facilitate again interactions driven by clear value contributions. You need to consider that, in some cases, correcting this means changing roles or even removing certain people from the project. Always bear in mind the relevance of different cultures, mind-sets, backgrounds, and personal agendas. By approaching them in a positive and pragmatic way you, will be in a good position to rearrange the setups by reorganizing the work or roles as mentioned above.
Aspect 6: The Project as a “Complex Adaptive System”
It is essential to manage projects as a whole, organically, regardless of size, complexity, geographical scope, etc. The idea is to invest the required focus and effort to acquire the general view of the project. In this sense, it is fundamental, too, to manage all the “interfaces” and people connectivity involved, inside and outside.
Projects can be seen as a complex adaptive system, in which people connectivity plays a key role in that adaptability to different circumstances. As elaborated in the book Aspects of Complexity (Cooke-Davies et al. 2011), complex projects are known for nonlinearity, irreversibility, and general disconnection between cause and effect. As an analogy to help understand the nature of complex adaptive systems, think of the weather or human body, which both involve dynamic shifts, extreme internal interdependence, and high connectivity.
Try using this comparison and practice this perspective when running projects, understanding them also as “complex adaptive systems.” Guided by general project management practices, you have to follow the plans, you have to tackle the outstanding and unexpected events that could jeopardize the plans, but you should also take a look at evidence of anomalies in people interfaces that are not even related to the mainstream or key activities. These anomalies could contain much more information about the project health than you would initially think. Even though they might appear minimal, you should keep an expert eye on them.
When leading projects, you are in charge of setting the context for the different parties involved. As projects keep moving forward and some workstreams are more predictable than others, by paying specific attention to as much “resource connectivity” as possible, you are managing the whole thing from a holistic point of view. Not having the right project leaders performing this role carefully is one of the main root causes of project failures or of the project not reaching its given objectives.
I remember one important regional project in Latin America, where all the indicators were apparently “green” and both sponsors and top management were very proud of the overall progress so far. The formal communications about the overall project progress were always very positive and that was, in general, the perception in the company too. I had some responsibility over one of the delivery teams, and we were also “on green” and on schedule. But suddenly I observed that some specific aspects of the test phase preparation and the interactions of the teams in those preparatory activities didn’t look as they should have done. Surprisingly, when it came to preparing the schedules to have the business users prepare and execute the initial tests, together with the project team, the preparation activities didn’t work as expected. This was particularly surprising for me, in such a well-performing project and with, apparently and based on ongoing formal communications, project deliverables that were so desired by the business representatives. This key touch point and poorly performing activity was, for me, a critical people connectivity issue, which showed something much more serious than just an anecdotal misunderstanding. There were strong root causes for the lack of coordination and readiness, and these facts provided me with important information for the whole context.
As I did not have responsibility for the whole project, I tried to highlight this finding to the overall project management, but unfortunately, this was not taken into consideration at that time; the project management were confident that the main key performance indicators (KPIs) were looking okay, for the main phase at that moment. To cut a longer story short, the project was cancelled just few months after going live. It became clear that, finally, the business was not so convinced about the value of the project. This is why, perhaps, at that more “lateral” stage of preparing the testing activities, the business users were not as ready as one could expect. Massive investment was more or less wasted, and blunt frustration overtook many of the professionals who had been involved in the project. All their effort, dedication, and delivery were suddenly, and unexpectedly, discarded, and they couldn’t understand why. Some postmortem reviews finally brought a lot of clarity about the main reasons for that failure, and this confirmed a direct relation to the anomalies I had observed at a much earlier stage. Much of the failure was to do with wrong management of people connectivity and failing to observe the project as a complex adaptive system. Remember that projects sometimes provide key alerts from areas that we are not observing as the naturally relevant ones for that project stage.
Attempt for an Initial Overall Conclusion on People Connectivity in Projects
Through the development of this chapter, we have found that a first key factor and prerequisite for people connectivity is the “sustainable purpose.” The teams require a context setting to find the “why” concerning what they are doing and need to feel that, to create meaning, there is a journey ahead, full of uncertainties and changes that will need to be faced together as a travelling organization. The sustainable purpose is thus a source of energy and ensures that project teams have the required resilience for very demanding journeys.
The sense of control and stability is an illusion in today’s organizations. Unfortunately, or not, we cannot think any more like: “Oops! another change”; change is continuous, and we need self-driven and empowered teams. We need holistic approaches (behavior, systems, processes) to develop travelling organizations, understanding that the organization is continuously on a journey towards best possible results. We also tried to write with a view to the near future for organizations, where we still have top and middle management keeping the illusion of Taylorism in the context of complex global projects with lots of people connectivity involved. We are no longer in control; connections appear distributed and dynamic. No longer vertical or top-down. No longer one person who changes the reality of so many so simply. Any professional, taking a leading role in projects, must understand that this “VUCA”-driven world requires strong focus in setting the context for each and every team member, so they have the right environment and understanding to do their best. In this dynamic, our aim is to have reflexive and self-empowered teams. It is time to understand the real role of the leader.
To develop organizational knowledge, a key focus is connectivity. We focused on the “connecting resources” factor to avoid the compartmental thinking of the company’s resources in terms of structural silos, boxed competencies, etc. The six aspects covered in this chapter, around people connectivity in projects, tried to trace a thread of related topics that can be regarded to achieve better executed projects, by developing people connectivity capabilities. Better people connectivity increases efficiencies and sparks more innovative environments. All this is due to the progressive confidence in all the professional relationships across the teams involved, and we need to regard this as essential in every project we embark in.
A project is a lot about personal relationships, building trust, acting consistently in different situations, etc. We have tried to highlight that it is not only about having the right technical skills, it is not even about developing perfect project plans, fully detailed requirements, or exhaustive risk management. These elements and good practices are of course very necessary, but if you don’t have the right individuals who can generate and foster the required connections between team members and stakeholders, with the minimum required shared trust developed, the project will fail sooner or later (ideally sooner to prevent much higher investment being wasted). Aim to find professionals with the required technical skills for the role but place special focus on understanding how much this role would become relevant in building the required relationships in the project context, i.e., developing people connectivity. Once you identify that the role could have some influence or key responsibility in relationships between areas, team members, etc., then you need to consider carefully, and as a mandatory requirement, the “connectivity skills” of the professionals taking on those roles. They need to be able to build up engagement, good relationships, and trust between all parties involved.
We would really like to leave the reader to reflect on the above topics and try to reach some meaningful conclusions that could become tools for their own current or future challenges.