CHAPTER 16
Closing Out the Project
There is a tendency to think that when all project work has been completed, the job is finished. You
will note that in my model, I don’t consider a project complete until a final lessons-learned review
has been conducted and documented. This should become a habit, part of an organization’s culture.
The army calls lessons-learned reviews “after-action” reviews. Their policy is, after anything
significant takes place, to pause and learn whatever lessons they can from that event. In the case of
military personnel, learning lessons has life-or-death significance. In a way, the same can be said of
organizations. You live or die by constant improvement. As has been said, there are two kinds of
organizations—those that are getting better and those that are dying. If you’re standing still, you’re
dying, because your competition is certain to pass you eventually.
Conducting lessons-learned reviews was covered in Chapter 13, so I will not repeat the discussion
here. I simply want to reinforce what was said in that chapter about the importance of these reviews.
In addition, I want to stress that the final lessons-learned review should be documented, and the
report sent to everyone who can benefit from what the team learned. Otherwise, you may find that
your team learned valuable lessons about mistakes that are being made by other teams in your
organization.
ADMINISTRATIVE CLOSURE
PMI defines administrative closure of a project as the “process of documenting the results of your
work to ensure that you have met all of the requirements and specifications” (Lewis & Dudley, 2005,
p. 223; PMBOK® GUIDE, 2008). While we are primarily discussing final project closeout,
administrative closure should be performed at completion of each phase of a project. As was
pointed out in Chapter 13, lessons-learned reviews (and documentation) should not be restricted to
the end of the project. They should be done at the end of each phase or stage gate in the project.
The final closeout documentation should be a summary of all preceding reports.
Following are some of the issues that should be addressed before the project is considered complete:
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The collection and archiving of all project documents. This includes final cost and schedule
data.
Updating records and product specifications to reflect what was actually achieved, so that
this can be compared to the original plan.
Revising employee records to reflect newly developed skills and anticipate future training
needs.
Preparation of a final project report that summarizes the history of the project. The product
produced by the project should also be considered. The project may have been kept on
track, but produced a bad product. Conversely, a good product may have been produced by
a troubled project. I have heard it said that a project can be late, overspent, and end with
reduced scope, but if the product is successful, you will be forgiven. The opposite is not
true.
As already noted, a final lessons-learned review should be conducted with all stakeholders.
THE FINAL LESSONS-LEARNED REVIEW
Unfortunately, in many projects, by the time of the final lessons-learned review, team members have
already been reassigned to other projects and are unavailable to participate in this review. However,
this review should be considered important enough that provisions should be made to bring team
members together one last time to participate in it, in spite of their new assignments. The data from
lessons-learned reviews should be viewed as one of the most important resources that an
organization can acquire. It is similar to what Edison said when someone asked if he was
discouraged after 1,800 unsuccessful attempts to make a lightbulb filament. “No,” he said. “I know
1,800 things I don’t have to try.”
Equally important is knowing what has worked. Lessons learned are not restricted to negative events
only. When something worked really well, we want to know about that, too.
PERSONNEL ISSUES IN PROJECT CLOSING
As projects near completion, team members sometimes become very apprehensive about their
future with the organization. Will there be work for them once this project is finished? This
apprehension can depress performance, and project managers should do whatever they can to
protect the jobs of team members and let them know that their jobs are secure. Of course, in matrix
organizations, there is a limit to what a project manager can do, but whatever the case, failing to
attend to these concerns can result in incomplete closure—which will certainly lead to problems in
the future.
There can also be strong feelings associated with disbanding project teams. In a project that has
lasted for a prolonged period, the project team becomes like a family to some individuals, and losing
that family can arouse considerable sadness. Some psychologists specialize in helping members of
such teams go through the “grieving” process of losing their “families.” This is another of those
“touchy-feely” dimensions of human nature that managers often do not understand with the
consequence being that performance deficits accrue. It is important to remember that human beings
have an attribute called emotion, which differentiates them from computers and machines and
actually gives them an advantage over those devices. The root of the words emotion and motive is
the same. People are motivated. Machines are not.
And since people are the primary resource in any project, emotion should be considered data to be
managed, just like any other information. Failure to do so may result in people not wanting future
project assignments.
CHAPTER 18
Improving Your Effectiveness
The very fact that you are reading this book—and especially this chapter—indicates that you want to
succeed in your career, and no doubt in your life overall. It is very clear that some few individuals are
highly successful, while the majority of people are not. Why is this? What differentiates those who
are successful from those who are not?
This has been the subject of extensive research, and the answers have been known for at least 20
years, yet not nearly enough people take advantage of this knowledge. Strangely, an understanding of
how human beings function, which is the domain of psychology, is not widely held, although it is
not difficult to comprehend and requires no formal training to acquire. Books, tapes, CDs, and noncredit courses that provide this knowledge abound.
We know that to get maximum benefit from a computer or a tool, we need to thoroughly
understand how to use it, and it helps a lot to understand how it works. Yet, many managers seem
uninterested in learning how this most important and prevalent resource—this human resource—
works, even though we say that people are “our most valuable resource.” Clearly, unless we know
how to get the best out of people, we will not do so.
How can you get the best performance from people if you don’t know what makes them tick?
Over the years, I have taught thousands of people how to deal with others more effectively. In
particular, the question asked by most managers is how to motivate their followers. Again, this
knowledge has existed for about 50 years, but many managers have a total misconception of what
works and what does not. In fact, surveys repeatedly find that managers believe that what motivates
them personally is different from what motivates their followers. Certainly we all differ in what
motivates us individually, but we are all more alike than we are different, so it seems reasonable that
managers and employees would not be that different in terms of what “turns them on,” and indeed,
the research confirms that this is true.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ACHIEVEMENT
The desire to achieve is essentially a desire to succeed. As a project manager, you want to complete
your projects on time, on budget, with proper scope and performance outcomes. To do this, you
have to get your team members to perform at acceptable levels. If you can do this, you will most
likely consider yourself a success at managing projects. But how do you define success in general?
Brian Tracy (2010) says that five conditions must exist if you are to be successful. These are
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You must have peace of mind. This condition requires freedom from fear, anger, and guilt.
You must also have good health and high energy.
You should have loving relationships with people.
Financial freedom is also necessary; you can’t have peace of mind if you are always worried
about how you will pay next month’s rent.
Finally, you need a sense of fulfillment, or what is called self-actualization.
THE LAWS THAT GOVERN OUR LIVES
As I have said, you need to know the laws that govern your performance in order to achieve.
The first of these is the law of control, a sense of being in control of your life. Many people
feel that they have no such control, that life is just a series of random events, some good and
some bad. This is called having an external locus of control. An internal locus of control is
having a sense that you control your destiny and the events in your life. I like to call this selfdetermination.
The Law of Belief
One of the most important laws is the law of belief. This law states that our deeply held
beliefs become our life’s reality. Another way to state this is: what we believe, we make real.
For those who have an external locus of control, this law seems difficult to accept. They feel
that factors outside their control govern their lives, not realizing that what happens to them
is actually the result of what they believe. Furthermore, it is sometimes true that people claim
to believe something opposite to what they actually believe deep down inside. We don’t
always know what we truly believe. However, we can be sure that our behavior is a guide to
what we truly believe, because the two will always be consistent.
What we believe, we make real.
As an example of how beliefs govern our lives, there was a time when uneducated people
believed that the world was flat, and that if you sailed far enough away from land, you would
eventually come to the edge of the earth and fall into an abyss (the well-educated people
knew that the world was round). Because this belief was so strong, few ventured very far
from land, and so they never learned that the belief was false.
Most important, once we hold a belief, we filter information in such a way that we maintain
that belief. As an example, if employees believe that management has no concern for their
welfare, any gesture to the contrary on the part of management will be seen as simply a ploy
or an attempt to manipulate them. There are two psychological processes that help people
filter information. One is called deletion, and the other is called distortion. If evidence is
presented that might disconfirm a person’s belief about something, that information may not
become conscious; the person simply deletes it from his or her awareness. If the person does
notice the information, then its meaning will be changed to make it consistent with the
belief. An example of this is an employee believing that management is trying to manipulate
her.
An example of deletion is that prejudiced individuals don’t notice that members of the group
against which they are biased actually aren’t anything like what they believe these individuals
to be. Members of the “out” group are often believed to be stupid or ignorant—to have
lower IQs than the members of the “in” group. Actual IQ test scores may prove that this is
untrue, but the prejudiced person believes it anyway.
The Law of Expectation
The beliefs that we hold create in us expectations for how things will be in the world. These
expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) conducted a
study that demonstrated how this worked. They administered aptitude tests to grade-school
children. They then paired the children by race, sex, and score; selected them at random; and
assigned them to two groups. Their teachers were told that one group was average, ordinary
children. The other group, however, was labeled late bloomers. Their teachers were told that
these students could be expected to blossom during the school year, to really achieve high
academic performance.
At the end of the school year, when performance was measured, the group of late bloomers
was doing significantly better than the “average” kids (using statistical significance as the
measure—that is, the difference could not be due to chance alone). The result indicated that
the teachers brought about the expected result, since there should have been no difference.
In a later experiment, the same expectation was created for teachers, but classroom activity
was observed through a one-way mirror. The students and teacher could not see the
observers; rather, they saw their own reflections.
The observers learned that teachers spent more time with the late-blooming children than
they did with the “average” children. They encouraged and helped them more. In doing so,
they brought about the very thing that they expected—one group performed better than the
other. There have been many experiments since then that have demonstrated the validity of
the self-fulfilling prophecy.
The point is that if you believe that your life is governed by outside influences over which
you have no control, that is what you will experience. You will always be tossed around by
forces that seem to be luck or chance. On the other hand, if you have an internal locus of
control, you will experience being in control of your life.
Now, some of you may not believe this. But it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not;
the law works just the same. You may not believe in the law of gravity, but if you jump off a
cliff, the law will work anyway, regardless of your beliefs—and you know what the outcome
will be.
To me, it is empowering to know that I am actually in control, rather than believing that
other forces in the world are controlling me. If you want to demonstrate that the law is true,
then you must act as if it is true, and you will begin to see results. It may take some time for
you to undo old beliefs and replace them with new, more positive ones, but if you are
persistent, you can do this.
SELF-CONCEPT
Perhaps the most important belief that a person has is his or her self-concept. This is what
you believe about yourself. We have a host of beliefs that form our self-concept. We are
smart or dumb, creative or not, strong or weak, assertive or unassertive, good at a sport or a
klutz.
The importance of this is shown by research into the effect of attributions on the
performance of children in school. The researchers found that when a child has difficulty
with a subject, American parents are likely to say that the subject is too difficult for their
child. Korean parents, however, were more likely to say that the child needed to work harder
on the material. That is, the child simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Clearly, you can control
trying, but you can’t do much about incompetence. So, American children simply give up
because there is no use in trying if the subject is too hard for them. Korean children, by
contrast, buckle down and work harder.
Because our expectations tend to become self-fulfilling, this applies to our children and our
team members. If we have high expectations for their performance, we tend to get it.
Conversely, low expectations produce low performance. I personally believe that the most
respectful thing you can do for another person is hold very high expectations for that
person.
Self-concept consists of three components. One is your concept of your ideal self. This is
what you would like to be. The second is your self-image, or what you believe you are
actually like. The third element is self-esteem, or how you feel about yourself. If you don’t
like yourself, you aren’t likely to like others.
In transactional analysis, there are considered to be four existential positions. These are
shown in Figure 18.1. Theoretically, the two positions “I’m not okay; you’re okay” and “I’m
okay; you’re not okay” are possible, but I don’t believe these are actual life positions. Rather,
I believe that they are momentary. It seems to me that the only two permanent positions are
“I’m okay, you’re okay” and “I’m not okay, you’re not okay.”
As you can imagine, the negative position, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay,” creates pretty
low expectations for oneself and others. Individuals who hold this belief tend not to perform
well, and they often drag down others with whom they interact. They are harsh in their
criticism of others as well as of themselves.
Contrasted with this position is the “I’m okay, you’re okay” outlook. Individuals who hold
this belief see themselves and others as essentially okay. They recognize that we all have
defects or flaws, but they don’t dwell on them. Rather, they focus on the positive aspects of
people and overlook the negative. Because of the self-fulfilling nature of such beliefs, the
“I’m okay, you’re okay” person tends to bring out the best both in others and in his or her
own self.
FIGURE 18.1 The Life Positions from Transactional Analysis
Charles Sykes, in his book Dumbing Down Our Kids (1995), has criticized the emphasis on
self-esteem in our schools, saying that no studies have shown that high self-esteem leads to
high performance, but many studies show that high performance leads to high self-esteem. I
think he is wrong in claiming that no studies show the relationship between self-esteem and
performance. However, he is right in saying that it doesn’t take a child very long to realize
that he isn’t special because he can ride a bike. Most children can ride bikes. Nor is he special
because he can color in a coloring book. Most children can do that as well.
I do believe that high regard must begin with parents and teachers, because children develop
their self-concept from the messages that these people send them. When adults convey to
their children that they love them and have high expectations for their performance in
school, then the children are inclined to respond positively. Let’s put it in the opposite vein:
a child who has a very low self-concept is unlikely to ever perform at a high enough level at
anything to enable us to test her true capabilities. Thus, we must begin by helping children
perform well, which will in turn build their self-esteem to ever higher levels.
I must also say that you never want to set an individual or a group a task at which failure is
almost guaranteed the first time out. You should plan small wins for yourself and others.
Begin at a level at which you can perform, even though not superbly, and move up from
there. I learned this in the 1960s when I taught guitar. Most methods teach beginners the C,
F, and G7 chords. The F chord is one of the hardest to make on the guitar, and most
beginning students don’t buy really good instruments (until they see if they can play), so they
have two strikes against them with this approach. I started them with the D, A7, and G
chords, which most beginners find relatively easy. This gave them a success experience the
first week, giving them confidence that they could move up from there, and most did.
PROGRAMMING YOUR MIND FOR SUCCESS
The most important thing you can do to ensure your success in life is to program your mind
for success. You have actually been programming your mind for success or failure all your
life, but you have been doing it unconsciously and haphazardly. The result has been that
there were some things you wanted to do that you found you were unable to do successfully.
If you examine your beliefs carefully, you will find that you had some underlying belief that
you could not succeed at that particular endeavor.
Psychologists have found that we become what we think about. This is inevitable, and if you
don’t like what you are experiencing in your life, you must take charge of your thoughts and
change them to bring about the life you desire. There is no other way. You can’t just change
your behavior, because behavior is always consistent with deeply held beliefs. So if you
believe that you are no good at something—a sport, for example—you will find that you
cannot behave inconsistently with that belief.
BEHAVE AS-IF
Here is a major secret to success: behave as if the thing you want to achieve is already a fact.
If you want to be a successful project manager, behave as if this is already true. Take charge
of your meetings. Interact with your team members as though you are the team leader
(which you are). Do this in a positive way, not in an arrogant, bullying manner.
Observe the behavior of other individuals who are effective, and emulate them. When we
were children, we all learned adult behaviors by imitating the important figures in our lives.
In some cases, these role models were not people that we should have followed, but we were
too young to judge properly. Now, as adults, we can return to this approach. Select
individuals whom you either know or know about as models for your own behavior. Ask
yourself, “How would this person behave in this situation?”
MENTAL REHEARSAL
Before you approach a situation, take the time to imagine yourself in that situation, behaving
the way you want to behave in actuality. Mental rehearsal has been proven to be a very
effective way to ensure your success at any endeavor. It is used widely by athletes, musicians,
and other performers to enhance their success.
Larry Wilson sold a million dollars of insurance when he was only 23 years old. He was
inducted into the millionaire’s club as a result and was asked to tell other members how he
had done this. The audience was to be about 300 individuals. Larry found himself worrying
about his presentation. He had never given a presentation to such a large group. He feared
that they wouldn’t like him or wouldn’t like what he had to say. Fortunately, he caught
himself and realized that he was programming his mind for failure.
He then imagined giving his talk and having the audience give him resounding applause, with
some people coming up and telling him how impressed they were and how much they had
enjoyed his presentation. He practiced this several times a day, up until the time of the event
itself. He said that the outcome was almost like déjà vu, like seeing something repeated that
he had seen before—which he had, of course, in his imagination (Wilson, 1988). He
eventually founded Wilson Learning Systems and taught salespeople throughout the world
that visualizing success in their sales efforts would improve their sales performance.
Take time to visualize yourself actually performing well, and you will greatly improve your
chances of succeeding. If you catch yourself doubting the outcome, immediately reverse this
and imagine success.
AFFIRMATIONS AND GOALS
Because the subconscious creates what the conscious mind tells it to, without argument or
judgment as to whether what you tell it is good or bad, true or false, you must be careful to
obey certain rules. The most important of these is that affirmations and goals should always
be stated in the present tense. If you affirm, “I will earn $50,000 a year,” you are affirming
something that must occur in the future, and the subconscious keeps it in the future. Rather,
you should affirm, “I earn $50,000 a year.
”The question naturally arises, how can you affirm something that isn’t true at the moment?
If you have difficulty with this, the affirmation, “I have the ability to earn $50,000 a year”
may be much more acceptable. Or add to it: “I have the ability to earn $50,000 a year, and I
exercise that ability every day in everything that I do.” Now, if you visualize yourself earning
$50,000 a year, you will find that your mind will create just this outcome for you over time.
If you are still unconvinced, let me ask you: which risk would you rather take—the one that
says it’s true or the one that says it isn’t? It’s like believing or not believing in an afterlife. It’s
too late to change your behavior once you find that hell is a reality.
RELAX
It is important that you work continually at changing your thoughts and behaviors to bring
them into line with your aspirations, but don’t strain at it. The best results are obtained when
you relax and accept that the things you want will come into your life without your forcing it.
There is a mental law at work here, and like the laws of physics, you don’t have to force it to
work. These laws work automatically; if you drop an object, the law of gravity will cause it to
fall to earth. You don’t have to make it happen. The same is true of the laws of mind. Once
you “plant the seeds,” you simply add water and fertilizer and await the harvest. It would be
foolish to keep digging up the seeds to see if they have sprouted; doing so will only destroy
them.
AUTOGENIC CONDITIONING
The most important thing you can do to achieve success is to continually act like the person
you want to be. This means that you must have a clear mental picture of that person—call it
your ideal self-image. If you combine this with autogenic conditioning, you will get
remarkable results.
To practice autogenic conditioning, which is best done first thing in the morning, sit down
and relax. Progressive relaxation, in which you count down slowly from 50 to 1, taking deep
breaths as you count, will set the stage for conditioning yourself. Once you achieve a state of
deep relaxation, form a mental image of yourself with all the qualities that you want to
possess and hold that image for as long as you can.
Set for yourself the task of practicing this for the next 21 days. That is all it takes to build a
completely new self-image. Throughout the day, practice affirmations and concentrate on
behaving consistently with your ideal image. You will find that this will produce amazing
results.
A WORD OF CAUTION
Be careful about which groups you belong to. David McClelland, who spent his professional
life studying achievement, found that individuals who had been programming themselves for
success would soon undo that programming if they participated in groups in which people
had a very negative outlook. If you share your goals with people who have a negative
outlook, they will quickly put you down and tell you how unrealistic you are.
I remember once telling a cousin of mine that I was making $500 a day teaching seminars.
She became indignant and told me that I was aiming too high. I didn’t bother to tell her that
I was actually aiming for $1,000 a day. After all, the $500 a day fee was already a reality and
had been for several years.
From this experience, I learned never to tell anyone what I earned. Those who have not
often have difficulty accepting those who have. As Jesus said, “The poor we always have
with us.” These individuals believe that there is something morally wrong with making
money and being successful. Strangely, they seem to have missed the fact that Jesus also said,
“Herein is your Father glorified—that you bear fruit richly.”
And I believe this very sincerely. There is no merit in failure or poverty. Money is not the
root of all evil—it is an over-love of money that is. Putting money foremost in your mind is
not right. Success can exist only if you place people first and practice the rules laid down by
all of the world’s great religions, the Golden Rule being first among them. In addition, if you
earn a lot of money and hoard it, never contributing to worthy causes, you will eventually
lose it. Everything that you have read in this chapter must be practiced with a spirit of doing
good in the world. If you use any of these principles to cause harm to others, you will find
that they backfire on you and leave you worse off than you were before you began using
them.
Having said that, as long as you focus on doing good in the world, these laws and practices
will support you in achieving more than you ever believed possible before you learned them!
Finally, you may want to read the book by Hyrum Smith, founder of the Franklin Institute,
titled The 10 Natural Laws of Time and Life Management (1994). It helps a lot to get clear
on what is really important to you so that you don’t fall into the delusion that money is
everything.
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