Leadership in Project Management: Leading People and Projects to Success

465 Pages·2013·24.91 MB·English

by  Mohit Arora

Second Edition
Leadership in

Project Management

Leading People and Projects to Success

Mohit Arora and Haig Baronikian
Leadership in
Project

Mohit Arora
Management , MBA, PMP
Haig Baronikian
, PhD, PMP, PEng
Leading People and

Projects to Success
Second Edition
www.YouAsaLeader.com
Leadership in Project Management

© Copyright 2012 - 2013 by Mohit Arora and Haig Baronikian. Printed and
bound in Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or incorporated
into any information retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, without the written
permission of the copyright owner.
Although the authors have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and
completeness of all information found in this book, we assume no responsibility for
any errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or inconsistencies in material we have
reproduced. Any slights on people, places or organizations are completely
unintentional. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace and to note the
copyright holders of all material reproduced in this publication and apologize to any
copyright holders if permission to publish in this form has not been appropriately
obtained or cited. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged, please
contact us so we may rectify in any future reprint.
“PMI”, “PMP”, and “PMBOK” are certification marks in the United States and
Canada, registered to the Project Management Institute Inc.

Second Edition – August, 2013

ISBN-13: 978-0-9917792-2-2

Leadership Publishing House, Toronto, Canada

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Leadership in Project Management

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to Edward Carson, Sam Mikhail and Bob
Broadbent at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies, for their
kind support and encouragement in the development of this book.

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Leadership in Project Management

DEDICATION

To my loving parents, brother and wife
– Mohit Arora

To my wonderful wife, children, mother and sister, and to the
memory of my father
– Haig Baronikian

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Leadership in Project Management
PREFACE to the Second Edition
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and
don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless
immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Since launching this textbook, we have been gratified by the very positive response from
students and instructors alike. More and more universities and colleges have chosen to
adopt it for their programs. The second edition of the book introduces various additions
and improvements in the content, an expanded set of resources, some research perspectives
and colour illustrations. It has also been updated to be consistent with the Project
Management Institute’s (PMI) Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 5th
Edition. We believe wholeheartedly that this edition represents an even more effective and
practical resource for project leadership.
As practitioners, we have led a wide range of projects for organizations across the private,
public and charitable sectors. As educators, we have developed or co-developed various
programs in project leadership. We have also taught such programs, both in the classroom
and online, to well over a thousand learners from a broad range of backgrounds. We have
ourselves learned a great deal from these experiences and thought the timing was right to
share the insights we have gained in the form of this book.
There is a significant body of knowledge and research on leadership – a topic that has been
of great importance and interest since ancient times. Leadership, whether in the spheres of
politics, business, the military, science or other endeavours, has been intensively explored
and studied. The conclusions drawn from such studies have been applied extensively.
Project management itself can be considered something of an ancient art, one that must
have been used, at least to some extent, to construct the pyramids, run military campaigns
or erect the great cathedrals of Europe. It has, however, been more formally recognized as a
discipline and a topic for research relatively recently. With the development of a body of
knowledge has also come accreditation, such as the Project Management Professional
(PMP) designation from PMI.
Our objective in writing this book, and now the second edition, was to create a course text
to address the fundamentally important intersection of leadership and project management.
While there are a number of books available on project leadership, to our knowledge this is
the first text specifically intended to accompany and support courses on the subject. We
believe this book will facilitate a more comprehensive and robust learning experience.
Why should project leadership be of interest? The simple answer is because projects rely on
people. They are launched to serve people by producing some desired deliverable. Projects
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Leadership in Project Management
are influenced, accomplished, supported and stymied by people (internal or external
stakeholders of various kinds and attitudes). In other words, projects happen with, through
and for people – and people need leadership to work towards a common goal in a sustained
and energetic way. Project leadership is also an essential set of skills because projects have
become such a pervasive way of doing business, whether they are large or small, complex or
relatively simple, risky or straightforward in nature. The volume of project work and the
investment poured into projects has grown so much in numerous organizations that project
leadership is now a highly valuable competence, one recognized as critical to achieving
project and indeed organizational success.
In addition to people leadership, we should highlight a second, key component of project
leadership: ‘idea leadership’. Idea leadership includes having an innovation-oriented mindset
and seeking opportunities which can add value to the project – not simply running through
the project’s mechanics. It also means fostering such an approach with project team
members and other stakeholders. A project leader, wherever appropriate, should capitalize
on opportunities that arise in order to multiply or accelerate project benefits, present the
case for and facilitate changes in project direction, seek to continuously improve how the
project is planned and conducted, and generally behave as an entrepreneur to maximize
returns from the project investment
Altogether, in our view project leadership implies multiple roles: team leader, project
advocate/change agent, cheerleader, entrepreneur, role model and influencer. We discuss
these roles in Chapter 5.
We have observed too many project managers who operate on the basis of only managing
to the triple constraint of scope, cost and schedule. Worse, some project managers treat
projects as an exercise in documentation and reporting, spending much of their time at their
desks updating project plans and preparing reports. While doing so is an essential aspect of
running projects and cannot be ignored, it is hardly sufficient for achieving full project
success. Certainly, it is not about either people or idea leadership.
It is our hope that this book will provide the key concepts, insights and techniques to help
individuals grow from being a competent project manager to an effective, even brilliant
project leader. Various activities and tools are provided at the end of each chapter to deepen
understanding and support application.
Organization and Pedagogy
The book has been divided into three parts:
Part I: Leadership and Organizational Context addresses the organizational setting for
projects, including organizational strategy, organizational structure, organizational culture,
the project management office (PMO) and project management maturity. This is the macro-
level view of projects and project leadership.
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Leadership in Project Management
Part II: Leadership and Project Teams turns to the role(s) of the project leader and their
work in building and supporting project teams. Included also in Part II are chapters on
communications, stakeholder management as well as ethical leadership – an especially
important topic. Largely, this is the micro-level view of projects and project leadership.
Part III: Leadership and Project Execution attends to leadership concerns surrounding
typical project execution: managing change during the project; effectively closing projects;
recovering troubled projects; and, working to ensure appropriate benefits realization. We
can say that this is the meso-level view of projects and project leadership.
Together with various organization snapshots, activities, tools, review quizzes, key terms
and other supports in each chapter, we trust that you will find this book to be of direct
value to your understanding and application of project leadership.
One final note… we fully believe that leadership, whether in terms of project leadership or
more generally, is a lifelong journey. This book may launch you on that journey, or help you
to carry on with a journey you have already begun, but it certainly won’t end here. It can
and should continue on.
We wish you much success on this exciting journey!
Mohit Arora, MBA, PMP
Haig Baronikian, PhD, PMP, PEng
Toronto, Canada
August, 2013

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
John C. Maxwell
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Leadership in Project Management
About the Authors

Mohit Arora, MBA, PMP
Mohit is a recipient of the ‘Excellence in Teaching Award’
from the School of Continuing Studies at the University
of Toronto. He has taught numerous in-class and online
courses in Project Management and Business Analysis and
is an active practitioner of Lean Six Sigma.
He has a wide range of project management experience in
diverse industries, including financial services, healthcare,
manufacturing and food services. For the last ten years, he
has actively worked on a variety of business
transformation programs, aiming to optimize operations
and reduce costs.
He holds a MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University and a Bachelor
of Engineering from Delhi University. He may be contacted at [email protected]

Haig Baronikian, PhD, PMP, PEng
Haig is the founder of eFuel Partners Inc., where he is
President and Senior Consultant. He has over 25 years of
experience in the telecom, information technology,
engineering, eLearning and eHealth fields. He has held
leadership positions in corporate strategy, marketing,
R&D, sales engineering, systems integration and software
development with Bell Canada.
For more than twelve years as a management consultant,
project leader and innovation instigator, Haig has led a
range of eFuel client engagements in the private, public,
educational and charitable sectors. He is also an active
educator and speaker, developing/teaching programs in project management, strategy,
innovation and enterprise analysis, for learners at academic institutions, corporations and
professional associations.
Haig holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto. He also holds
the M.Ed. Degree from the University of Toronto/OISE and Degrees in Engineering from
the University of Waterloo and McGill University. He may be contacted at
[email protected]
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BRIEF CONTENTS
PART I – LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL
CONTEXT
Chapter One Vision, Strategy and Project Management 2
Chapter Two Project Management Maturity and the
Project Management Office 39
Chapter Three Organizational Structure 69
Chapter Four Organizational Culture 101
PART II – LEADERSHIP AND PROJECT TEAMS
Chapter Five You as a Leader 140
Chapter Six Ethical Leadership 183
Chapter Seven Building a High Performance Team 211
Chapter Eight Stakeholder Management 263
Chapter Nine Communication Management 303
PART III – LEADERSHIP AND PROJECT EXECUTION
Chapter Ten Change Management 356
Chapter Eleven Success and Closure 405
Index 446
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