A little tutorial on projects, promotions, and the Peter principle

Seppo Karrila

Special Topics in Industrial Chemistry

February 2015

Executive summary

• Issue– Understand how you get your assignments at work,

and how you are evaluated or promoted.

• Significance– A technically good player with no strategy or

understanding of the big picture is still a loser. Don’t be a loser.

• Approach– Just telling you simple things that people don’t think

about much, but they should.

• Results & Conclusions (Effects)– Be a successful alumnus to PSU Surat !

Background

• Most of the time you work for someone else, they pay you, you do what you are paid for

• Where does the work come from?

• How is it decided?

• When are you “successful”?

– Will you get a payraise, promotion?

– Will you be terminated = kicked out?

• Understanding your environment helps…

You don’t see this, but this is where your job comes from

• Every company plans in this way, at least when it is big enough

The project in which you work goes poorly if…

• It is poorly designed and poorly managed…

• Quickly, try to get into another project.

But what is a “project”?

• It is a temporary managed team effort.

• Schedule, resources, and scope can be traded off with each other.

For example

• Faster schedule = reduce scope (meaning do less or not as well), or get more resources (more men working)– Manager think: you want a baby in one month, just

get nine women to work on it.

• Add more things to the scope = slower schedule to finish, or get more resources

• Save in resources = ?

• Resources = labor, tools and equipment, money to buy things (budget)

Again, the three main things

• Schedule, scope, resources

= deadline, what must be accomplished, budget

• You are a HERO if you– Finish early

– Save money (= below budget)

– But usually nobody appreciates “extra” accomplishments

You may be able to propose a project

• There is always less resources than things that could be done

• Just like you will always have less money than you could spend

• Choices have to be made

Single-page proposal

• You have an idea, you must sell it to others. You need their money, permissions, support.

• Issue, significance, approach, expected results, conclusions (effects of the results)

• In approach, include time, rough magnitude of costs– If possible, point out major risks of failure

If you don’t know what you are doing and why, try to find out

• It is in the project plan, or needs to be in it.

Particularly important are

• Knowing the “success criteria”. If you want to do a good job, you have to know what is “good”.

• Risks. These are opportunities to completely fail. You can actually do something about risks.

Risks: Prevent, or be prepared

• Preventive: vaccination, buy new car tires before the old ones break.

• Contingency plans: ambulance service, spare tire in car

False optimism

• Inventors sometimes fall in love with their own ideas. They will not think about risks.

• In a company you have to think about them.

– If this technique does not work, what alternatives do we have?

– Mitigation: reserve of raw materials, spare parts,…

– Employees trained to do each other’s jobs (when someone is sick, had an accident, quit and left…)

Phases of a project

• Pilot proposal (evaluated, if good work on full proposal)• Proposal (evaluated, if good work on detailed plan)• Planning (evaluated, improved, when good wait for budget)• Initiation (clock starts ticking, time and money in use)• Execution and monitoring

– Roles, responsibilities, communications (alarms or alerts!), authorizations (to command, to spend money),…

• Testing of results• Deliver product to “customer” • Final reporting, evaluation, closing

– In time or late, under or over budget, promises fulfilled, customer happy?

• (Owner of results markets, maintains, upgrades, … each of these can involve new projects that need a budget.)

Project management is an art, not a science

• There are books, consultants, training

– If your employer puts you in such job, ask for some training

• Managing a project on paper or in Excel is one thing, managing people is another

Large organizations suffer from the Peter principle

• People get promoted until they fail

• A good scientist can become a poor manager

• A good manager can become a poor director

Why this happens?

• A vacancy in management – Someone got promoted, or left the company, or a new

department was established

– How do we get the manager or director?

– Take “the best employee” and promote from the next lower level• But that employee was “best” at what (s)he used to do, now

the job is entirely different!

• Every employee wants a career, they want a promotion, or they move out and work for your competitor.

A “non-solution”

• When an organization has become inefficient, demote everyone to the next lower level where they used to do a good job competently.

– In a dictatorship this could be done, not in a normal society. If humans were machines without emotions this would be the perfect solution. They are not, and that is exactly why a good scientist is not necessarily a good manager or director.

About promotions

• Push by employee– Do a really good job, maintain record of it

– Apply for promotion, and next year again

– Kind of works… but not really

• Pull by someone above your boss– Promote my favorite from your employees, as a

favor to me, and I will talk to your boss good words about you

– Of course this works

So when you wonder how

• Some employees have a skyrocketing career

– Came years later than you to the company, at a lower level than you

– Passed by you in a year

– Suddenly became young directors, while you now work for them…

• Truth is, they had someone pulling

Can you do the same, or do you want to?

• Talk only good things about your boss, make him look good– Nobody wants an employee who will always make

the boss look bad

• Find yourself a mentor or friend higher up than your own boss

• You see that someone else has “the pull”, collaborate with that employee to benefit from the pull yourself

Summary

• Work in a company is defined in chunks called projects– They have scope, schedule, resources– Try to do things well, finish before deadline, and spend

under budget

• Your career (promotions) depend more on pull than on push– Who said life is fair, an ugly stray dog can kill your cute

kitten, and the idiot guy who married the owner’s daughter will become your boss

– You have to work with what you got– You will see the Peter principle at work, it is part of reality– You might be happiest doing what you are good at, think

whether you really want a promotion or not…