In a new book ‘Leading Complex Projects‘, the IPA founder Edward Merrow and IPA staff Neeraj Nandurdikar share new research on the traits that make project directors of complex projects successful.
The book concentrates on Owners’ Project Directors. The main message is that the skillset to be a successful project director on (large) complex projects is quite different from what makes one project manager successful on simpler projects, and that most organisations don’t get it. Therefore, while successful project directors of complex projects seem to have common traits, nomination of project directors follow some random pattern which could explain why so many fail.
What makes a project director on complex projects successful? According to the book, it is all about leadership capabilities and high emotional intelligence. A Project Director for such projects is forst and foremost a Project Leader. First it is all about openness and being a generalist rather than a specialist; and experiences in other organisations and industries help. Second it is about understanding that the job involves mainly spending time of soft activities like communication and stakeholder management rather than the hard stuff that needs to be done by the team – while the latter may be a comfort zone for the upcoming project manager, and thus source of failure when stepping up into this type of jobs.
This all ties back to what we have always supported: complex projects are first of all a human adventure. And Project Managers should be Project Leaders. It is all about Project Soft Power!
This is a nice short book. The only negative maybe is that it is more like a monography from a research project than a full book on the subject, and practitioners may be a bit frustrated not to find more content on how to be and develop project leaders. Still it provides useful insights for Owners involved in large complex projects and quite worth the read.
Enjoy ‘Leading Complex Projects‘, a good read for the summer for executives in organisations implementing complex projects!
