Posts filed under 'Projects'
Opening day (the commissioning of Barcelona’s Airport Terminal 1)
Unbelievable we’re already here. After six years of dedicating an important part of my professional life to Barcelona’s Airport, today Terminal 1 is officially born. We’ll listen to the politicians’ speeches on how they made this possible. Maybe they did, but we worked all the way through. And this feeling, this pride, this sense of belonging will carry on with us the rest of our (professional) lives.
A huge, unique project can only be done with the commitment of a group of people. A group of people ready to withstand many pressures and surmount uncountable odds. Very diverse people, some very qualified, some able to star and shine without that qualification.
There are some pass-byers as well. The latter will be all in the official celebration today, even publicly displaying their self-attributed mothering. Isn’t it sad that people that have not appeared in the life of the project, and could have done things to support it, they come now for the medal?
We’ve learnt many things here. We’ve lived through many successes, and mistakes too. Fortunately! You can’t learn if you always do everything well. It would give you a false sense of security that would undermine your judgement.
But even if you make mistakes, you can’t learn unless you can reflect on past experiences. Unless you can evolve. That’s our duty today as nucleus of the project that has created the biggest Spanish airport terminal of all times, the biggest infrastructure that has been built in Barcelona for the last decades. We must make this exercise and learn.
Nothing of this would have been possible without the engineers. People think of architects, but they only make a small part of the project: they don’t make things work. Specially star architects that have seldom appeared during the project and have been more of a nuisance than anything. Till now this was the realm of the engineers. It was our time. Not any longer. Now it’s turn for the airlines and for the people that maintain the airport to work. It’s time for the passengers, for Catalans, to make this terminal their own. This terminal will be the first, and last, thing that visitors to Barcelona, and Catalonia, will see. It’s for all of us.
Yes, that was yesterday. And I was there. And from the experience I can tell you that I felt that my commitment for this project for so many years had been worth it. I feel as I have participated in something big, something important for my country. And this, in itself, is a reward as well for me.
2 comments 17 June, 2009
An unexpected impact of the crisis in project management (no, they are not lazy)
As the new terminal in Barcelona’s airport nears its completion and the trials are increasingly successful, we are increasingly dwelling into the depths of this recession / depression. No manager can have the luxury of forgetting the external environment, as it always impact us somehow, somewhere.
Sometimes project managers tend to think that they are insulated from the rest of the world. They have their budget, their plan, their milestones. Of course there’s a great deal of interaction with the customer and the stakeholders, but sensing the environment isn’t usually deemed necessary.
They are wrong.
I’m not talking here of budget cuts, or milestones changing. That could happen anywhere, anytime. I’m here referring back to an old post: Soft and hard human resource management (utilitarian instrumentalism versus developmental humanism) and the concept of the psychological contract.
There are many definitions of the psychological contract. For our purposes, let’s say that the psychological contract is the assumed relationship between employer and employee that includes a lot more than what’s included in the papers: what you’ll do for me, what you expect from me, including the promises I might have made, the way you expect to be treated, and the expectations you have for the future. Those small things you’ve talked with your boss about and the trust you have in him that they’ll be taken care of. If your boss lied to you, for instance, your psychological contract would be shattered, and your attitude with your job would dramatically change… for worse.
So, what’s in it for construction workers here? They are usually contracted through companies that have a working relationship with the companies that have been awarded the construction contract. There may be two, three, even four layers of agreements between them and the project. They may even work for several contracts, always ready to switch between one form of contract or another, everything transparent and irrelevant to the direction of the project, apparently.
But, what used to be the reality for them, that they went from one thing to another always having things to do and always earning money in one form or another, no longer holds true. Their expectations have dropped and, for many, next destination is unemployment. They won’t get bulky severance pays as many other layoffs. They will be simply be no longer required and no longer invited to participate in the next move. They will be have unemployment compensations, of course, but I bet they will be lower, for many reasons, than those of other kinds of workers.
So it’s no wonder they psychological contract has been shattered as well, as they expected to be able to keep living as they had been living. Not anymore.
And when is that going to happen?
The scary thing is that this is going to happen whenever they finish their job.
So, where is the motivation to finish as soon as possible? Do you think their intentions are aligned with the timeframe of the project’s direction? Obviously they are not. If they are not paid lump sums but depending on the days spent working, which is the usual contract as the lump sums are in higher layers, they will take as much time as they can. And with that they will also shatter part of the psychological contract.
I have been observing this effect. And this feeling is dangerously infectious as workers from one contract see workers from others procrastinating as much as they can. Moreover, this has no easy solution, as the usual ways of control are not responding effectively as they were never designed to overcome this threat or to better manage people, but to apportion and divide the value of the contract between several companies.
Sometimes, when we are thinking of leading our team to peak performance, we are forgetting to look around and realise how things are changing. We can name them however we want, but we can’t forget that, layers below, there is not a collection of resources: they are people.
Add comment 9 April, 2009
Listening (a reflection induced by a beacon)
Yesterday I took a few hours away off the hectic drumming of the new terminal to concentrate on a new project that I am leading: a new control system for the runways and taxiways lighting system for Barcelona’s airport, that happens to have the biggest beacon lighting system in Spain, bigger than Madrid’s.
This project has a very important difference to many other things I’m doing. It’s not focused on the big opening day but the completion date is one year later, in 2010. That means we can focus on understanding the problem, building a team, applying a methodology, generating buy-in with the final customer, expliciting the acquired knowledge and incorporating the best practices into the organisation.
We are also going to standardise the application. Coming from a bespoke application, it won’t be easy but my intention is to be able to build an standard that the organisation will be able to use in its 40-something airports. Closed applications are a thing of the past, we all know it but, instead of paying lip-service to it, this time we’re going to do it.
But, what was important is the personal reflection that arose after our working session. Just forgetting fire fighting for a while and listening to somebody that knew a great deal about the system and discussing various proposals of what we could be doing for our initial project viability analysis.
It felt so good. Listening, learning. I’ve been getting these kind of sensations thanks to my Henley MBA, but it was great to have the same sensation coming from an engineer’s discourse. Focusing in the input instead of the output as I’ve grown accustomed to be lately.
We all need to be able to take long perspectives into a project. Be able to plan, and consider alternatives. To flex our creative muscles and deploy our energies into constructing something new, more effective, something built constructively not on the unstable foundations of pressure.
We all need to sit back an listen, as humble as the boy (or girl) we all still carry inside, and learn something from people that know more than us. Be able to capture that elusive gist that will enrich each and everyone of us. Coming humble from humus, or ground in Latin, and humilis from lowly, every manager needs to be humilis habitu humilis et actu, that means humble in dressing (or garments) and in its way of behaving to be able to trascend the manager-administrator role into leading the project’s team to success.
1 comment 12 March, 2009
Blogging from the Opera (blogging with Figaro)
Less than two weeks into an important milestone for the airport’s operational readiness and less than three weeks from my marketing and business environment exam, I find myself blogging from el Liceu, Barcelona’s opera house. Amidst this quagmire that my daily job has been turning into, I still could scape to enjoy Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. It really sounds strange in English instead of Italian’s: Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata.
Yes, the second name for the opera is “the day of madness”. That’s how I live my days at work now. Trying to cope with unmatching requirements, trying to sync reality with political requirements. But, as I like to say, reality is too stubborn for that. And we always end up crashing with a concrete wall which we could have avoided. But that’s second nature to us, humans. Why is it that reality ends up resembling just another opera buffa?
Yet here I am. Everyone needs a place to hide. And that’s mine today. I even could open my computer in the bar in the basement, use my HSDPA connection and write this lines while sipping a coffee. Watch the old ladies ingest huge quantities of sugar and chocolate in different shapes and colours. Isn’t life nice after all?
The thing is that when I began the MBA I promised to reflect. And these latter days have been so amazing. So many different things happening from a global perspective, at work and even a personal perspective. And I don’t want to feel that the many things that flow around me just do that: flow. I need to capture some of them. I need to retain, absorb, think, grow.
They say that experience is everything, that you actually learn by doing. And that is a blatant lie. Well, you learn, true, but only in a mechanical way. As Figaro doesn’t actually learn about Almaviva until he actually sees him fishing in his waters, or Almaviva doesn’t learn about behaving until his infidelity is publicly exposed. The aristocracy depicted, ridiculised here didn’t learn on time to change. Until it was too late. Pierre Beaumarchais saw his play censored in France, only to be played in 1778, with the French Revolution almost at the doors…
You learn when you think about what you live. When you think of improving what you’ve already learnt to do mechanically. When you make it grow inside of you. When you go one step further to accepting what is already established, what is already known. When you apply something more than common sense. When you’re not scared of rethinking something that is already working (apparently).
When I give project management classes, I always stress how important is the “post-mortem” analysis at the end of the project to clarify not only what we have done well but also what we could have done better and what we have learnt from the experience. Now I feel that the end is too far, too late. It must be done now and again, in a continuous process of taking a step back, getting perspective, digesting, and then going in again with regained strengths that will not hold us back from stepping out of the comfort zone. Every manager should take some time to learn now and then.
And now, let’s enjoy this opera 
Add comment 18 November, 2008
From Madrid to Barcelona’s olympic port (and a captain)
Some weeks are so hectic that you simply don’t have time to write. And if you do, it’s not because you’ve had the chance to sit back and reflect about something, but because you have some free time in-between things to be done. That’s the case for today: a few free minutes.
The day began in Madrid, in the Indian embassy, queuing for such a simple and stupid thing as a visa. It’s incredible how certain processes are still done as the last century, or even the previous one. The fact is that if you want to travel to India from Barcelona, first you must go to Madrid to get your visa. The alternative is waiting around three or four weeks to have it.
And if you went there without a warning, you’d be astonished to know that they only issue a limited number of visas, clearly outnumbered by the people that need them. So the queue starts around two hours before they open. By the time they unlock the doors, there’s enough people waiting to fill the entire waiting room. If you arrive at ten, just forget the visa. Come back tomorrow (in Spanish “vuelva usted mañana” although the Indians speak more English than Spanish). And that’s the only way for the 46 million inhabitants of Spain to visit the 1,100-million-people country.
Well. I finally made it. I was sixth on the line. Then, to the airport to take a plane back to Barcelona. And from the airport to one of Barcelona’s marinas: the Olympic port, built for Barcelona’s Olympics 15 years ago.
From air planes to boats: time to sail. That’s why I am here for. I am to renew my sailing licenses and, following legal requirements, I need several navigation hours with a captain instructor. A good way to ensure that people actually know about boats before granting them the right to sail them. That’s what I am here for.
Time for the final comment. Where is management in all this? Well. Ask it to Captain Marcos Rivera. In a ship, there’s only one captain. Such affirmation is something that we tend to forget. Authority is not a very popular value these days. It is still necessary nonetheless. Someone has to decide. There must be someone in charge, asessing the risks, analysing and drawing conclusions, and then, finally, deciding.
That doesn’t mean that he (or she) is the only one to think. That would be a great loss of value, rationality, thinking capacity, a loss of options. Empowerment is still essential (and compatible), as it is dissent. But there’s a limit to it. And when the captain decides, the others must follow.
Have you ever felt that, in a project or a workgroup, the problem was that the decisions were not actually being made? Or being enforced? Have you ever felt that authority was missing? That indecision and ambiguity was undermining the whole execution? That’s when a good methodology for making decisions is needed.
There’s a time when every task becomes critical: just give it enough wandering time and you’ll see. IT comes a time when further procrastination is no longer possible. That’s when a chieftain is needed.
1 comment 9 July, 2008
Mirror, mirror… (Project shadow management)
The average project manager is affected by all sorts of diseases. One of the worst, that could be labelled as project manager’s myopia, in line with other sectoral diseases like manager’s myopia (that is related to perfectly managing something that should not be done at all) or marketeers’ myopia (when we further seek perfection to our product, to an extent that our customers do not demand neither understand or value).
Project manager’s myopia is something similar to paranoia, albeit in a much lesser way. There are some symptoms to be aware of:
- Reality denial, we still are working as if things were like they used to be,
- Reality avoidance, skipping focus on the symptoms of change,
- Deflection, blaming change on others or seeking scapegoats that temporally justify mismatches,
- Projection, attributing one’s feelings to other people, we have this disconnection because of someone else,
- Splitting and radicalism, there are final groupings into good and bad things, good and bad people, good and bad customers… greys tend to converge into black and white only
- Somatisation, in late stages people can even become ill to avoid facing reality
Ok, those are extremes, but what is it that usually happens?
Sometimes we simply focus so much on a project’s completion and success that we tend to forget that projects are not isolated realities but that they are inserted into organisations. With time our big project is able to evolve and change. This is something that we can naturally accept and live with. In fact we need a big dose of flexibility when driving our project through execution, when risks are being faced and decisions being made.
But the project is not the only thing that is about to change through its lifetime. The organisational reality in which it must fit is going to change also. A change that can even be induced or catalysed by means of the project that we are taking care of.
And what do we do in the face of change? First we still keep the serious intention of managing the match, usually following a stakeholder model like this one:
This stakeholder matrix represents the main groups of stakeholders, or people that have a say, that we have to manage. They are divided in four groups related to the power and influence they have and their importance (or stake):
| Stakeholder Management |
Low Importance | High Importance |
| High Influence | Keep Satisfied | Manage Closely |
| Low Influence | Monitor (minimal effort) | Keep Informed |
Those are reasonable and wise words but, in the end, when the project has overcome the frustration and hysteria phases, we are so focused on the final deliveries that we tend to forget about stakeholders at all. And then the mismatch occurs and blows up on our faces. That’s when the aforementioned symptoms start to occur.
There’s another model that I especially like. Made by Holland and Skarke, projects the need for change with an additional dimension: time.
The model is taken from an article focused on IT and organisational alignment, but it’s also applicable in many other contexts. It says clearly that we must be manage two projects at the same time:
- Getting the system ready for the users, our main goal or the project that we are struggling to manage to completion
- Getting the users ready for the system, the often overlooked part.
Getting the users ready for the system will entail much more than the simple stakeholder engagement described with the classical approach. In information systems will be related to the user acceptance processes that we know should be analysed and managed, but in many other contexts, user acceptance must not be taken for granted. The users must be ready for the new infrastructure, and that means that they must not only know about it, but about the benefits it entails for their work processes, the alignment with their own personal and organisational objectives and the motivation to learn to use, and effectively use them.
Only this way we will be able to quickly climb the productivity drop in the adaptation curve, and only this way we will be able to adapt the deliverables to what the organisation expect: actively managing both ends of the final acceptance bargain.
Add comment 30 June, 2008
Under-promise and overachieve (the expectations model)
One of the things that happen to often in program management is that contractors, specifically their project managers, want to be too nice. Yes, of course they must be nice, but not that nice.
I’m not talking of nice presents or sumptuous dinners. I’m talking of making too much promises. Well, it’s understandable when you don’t have the contract but, once you have it, it’s a most annoying practice.
Reality is stubborn, bull-headed, disobedient, especially to the wishes of a project manager. It’s not her but her team who is really doing the hard work and, as they try to please her, they will tell her whatever she wants to hear… until the milestones get closer and the completion gets -or should get- nearer.
Then, nervousness gives way to hysteria and the hidden truth arises and comes out of the closet. The project is not going well. Guess what? Now hard decisions must be made, there’s almost no time and they (we) all go crazy.
Follow my advice: it’s all about managing expectations correctly. Too eager to please, sometimes we are too optimistic and make our projections forgetting risk management, inefficiencies, overheads, limited budgets, mistakes or that people are simply people.
If you are realistic in your predictions, and still take out a small bite allowing for some slack, you’ll be able to actually achieve what you have promised. Even, on the eyes of your benevolent customer, the under-promise might become an overachievement. You won’t lose your face but keep your credibility and increase your perceived efficiency.
Even in the worst case, it’s better to know the truth. Maybe the customer decides not to go ahead with the contract, but that will be better for you because there is no glory in projects that are doomed beforehand. Or maybe you and your customer can discover a better way of doing things, put some safeguards in place or simply make some drastic measures that might increase the probability of success. In any case, honesty is always a good advice.
I’ve tried to describe all this in the following expectations model:
It’s all about aligning expectations and results. The credibility zone is along that line but also tending to the overachievement. In short, people might expect you to do things better as they thought you would, but they won’t forgive if you do worse.
When you go down the credibility zone, there’s only danger: dissatisfied customers are your worst enemy: they may spread the word of a poor job.
Still there’s another danger zone in the upper left hand: giving too high achievements when you’ve managed poor expectations. In this case the problem is the bottom-line: probably you’ve spent more resources than were necessary and your customer would have been satisfied with less. It seems to me you should make a better use of your resources, or handle a few of them back to your organisation: after all they have a cost, although you might not perceive it. But with less capital employed, the profitability grows higher.
Remember: don’t be the one to put the rope around your own neck but do your best to keep it healthy instead. You might have much more leverage than the one you think you have.
2 comments 13 June, 2008
Living with the Terminal 5 syndrome
As the average reader of this blog knows, and wordpress knows such individuals exist to my amazement (THANK-YOU), I do several things in my job, one of them is the integration of the baggagge system in the Terminal South (or Terminal D) in Barcelona’s airport.
Well, it used to be one of them… but it has been growing and growing, absorbing my time and effort, sometimes with complex things, of course, but very often with little and silly things, sometimes simply to overcome the lack of communications between parts in a huge project, sometimes just repeating the same things again and again.
Organisations prepare themselves to manage projects. They start shyly with one and, if they are able to envisage an strategy, they include project management into their capabilities. There are models to describe how project management competencies are integrated into organisational capabilities. Different organisations are at different levels, and thus are able not only to manage projects but also to increasingly learn from them.
But, at the end of the day, panic happens. That’s when they forget everything and start to triple-check everything based on the gut feelings of people, high enough in the ladder, that don’t really know about the systems to be implemented. Trivial things get inflated and strategic things suddenly obviated.
That’s what has happened to me with the Terminal 5 syndrome (to know more about Heathrow’s Terminal 5 click here). It will take some time to settle. In the meantime some issues have been enshrined as the most relevant by the organisation and are draining a lot of resources. Yes, organisations are able to learn a lot about project management but, when panic starts, they sort of regress to a previous state, top level managers want to micromanage what they still don’t know anything about, and reality gets distorted to adapt to the top management expectations.
A hard critique? Fortunately the tide is just a tide and we will be able to focus the existing energies on the real issues… having top management’s attention is very helpful as long you can manage it in the right direction, and to help you instead of interfering.
Add comment 29 May, 2008
From macro to micro (and backwards)
When you think of building a terminal you always think of huge construction works. And yes, that’s the bulk of the budget, and sometimes the most spectacular part. But in a 80/20 rule fashion, that 20% ends up entailing 80% of the work. As I like to say, the devil is in the details.
For example, in Barcelona’s airport, we started 2006 doing something like this:
The horizontal axis is roughly equivalent to one mile. The South Terminal was beginning to take shape. It was still divided into several parts instead of being a single building. That’s the way it was decided in the tendering process: there should be a few smaller cakes instead of a big one. A dilemma between having to co-ordinate or letting more companies participate. It was decided towards the latter… no wonder co-ordinating has been one of the main issues here.
But three years later, with the building almost done, we are focusing on a lot of different and much smaller things. Things like the following:
The white structure you see is inserted to the glass block. The purpose of the structure is to hold a couple of flat screens to be able to inform the passengers for the boarding process. It is thus provided by a different company than the one that is building the green glass block, the one that is providing the energy, the one that is providing the communications (that the screen will surely need in order to work), and the one that is providing things such as the air bridge or the cooling systems.
Yes, it’s all about interference again. In this case, as we get closer to the endgame, the different paths start to converge into one set of critical paths, all interrelated with each other. There’s no more unique critical path, but every single path becomes dependent on the others’ every delay: a web of interdependencies, a critical network instead of a path.
My impression is that this part is much trickier than the other one. Finishing something is much more difficult than just going along with it. Slack has been consumed: the endpoint is not far anymore, pressure is increasing, hysteria is hovering, and we have to go down to every detail.
And studying for the final exam doesn’t help. In fact I sometimes arrive so tired that I don’t have the will to do anything. Still I have to. I strive to find some free time whenever, sometimes eating a quick sandwich and hurrying to imitate the waiting passengers in any available coach. The only difference is that they are waiting for something, just passing the time. I, on the other hand, I’m trying to use it. My macbook comes with me wherever I go, preview -for PDFs- and powerpoint to take notes always ready.
It’s funny how the process here is the other way around. When I studied the people, processes and financial modules, it was a matter of going into detail, of submerging into a wealth of information and trying to find the details, the reflections, the hidden wisdom, sometimes simply the stories behind, the assumptions, the reasoning. In fact that was a mistake because my teachers didn’t want me to prove that in the assignments: they just wanted to test that I knew the basic models. And I paid a price for going too far.
Now I’m going back to the basics. An exam is a place where you have to prove that you understand the basic reasoning, its assumptions, and apply it to some cases. It’s something like the terminal, but backwards, from detail to widely accepted models. That’s what they expect from me, and that’s what I should be giving them… I’ll try to refrain myself from doing otherwise.
Add comment 23 May, 2008
Learning from Terminal 5 (Interviewed for the Times)
I was interviewed by Widget Finn for the Times, and she wrote the following article:
The disastrous debut of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was a nightmare experience for all involved, but for Gabriel Mesquida it has proved a valuable live case study for his MBA dissertation.
Mesquida is a programme manager for Aena, the Spanish equivalent of British Airports Authority, that is in charge of the expansion of Barcelona’s airport. He is responsible for the coordination of projects in the information systems, communications and security programmes. His dissertation for the distance-learning MBA that he is doing at Henley Management College is on managing airports for the future, so he is watching carefully how the Terminal 5 saga unfolds.
He says: “Our terminal is similar in size to Heathrow, which is considered the plane capital of Europe, and I visited T5 several times when it was under construction. I was impressed, at the time, by how much detail they were going into over safety and they were scrupulous about everything.”
But when the terminal opened it became apparent that there would be other useful lessons to be learnt – including how to manage a meltdown. “An MBA has a foundation of theory but it should be practical, so having a live case study means you can watch events as they unfold and draw conclusions from them.”
The conclusions may be different when the case study is current rather than from a textbook comments Dr Richard Barker, director of MBA programmes at Judge Business School. He says: “One of the benefits is that you don’t know the outcome, which simulates the management situation more effectively. With a five-year-old case study there’s a result to the story which is difficult to escape. You can look at different options that management had at the time but knowing what happened influences your ability to assess the case.”
Mesquida is already putting into practice some principles of leadership from his MBA that were highlighted in the Terminal 5 episode. He says: “Resources are important, but people are far more so and leadership is everything when you have a flock of people wandering around a huge new infrastructure. However carefully you prepare, the unexpected can happen, and that is when your staff should have the flexibility to use their initiative. If the company has a blame culture people will be reluctant to take risks or do anything except cover their own backs.”
Durham University Business School uses live case studies in boardroom simulation exercises where students focus on a real company. Dr Julie Hodges, director of MBA programmes, explains: “They look at the strategic data, where the company is now, what challenges and issues it’s facing, then students come up with recommendations based on the information.” But textbook cases also have their value. “These give an historical perspective so that the issues can be put into context. More data is available and we can identify the medium and long-term lessons.”
Textbooks’ case studies are polished, tried and tested so they are easier from a teaching viewpoint. Barker points out that they are also pigeonholed into subject areas. “They may be labelled a strategy or marketing case, which isn’t always obvious when you’ re trying to deal with something in the boardroom.”
He can predict some of the labels that will be put on Terminal 5. “I see it as an operations management case – make sure your operation works before you start overloading it, or a people management case – train your people properly and handle recovery situations effectively.”
Mesquida agrees that more lessons will emerge from Terminal 5 as time goes by, but together with his MBA learning, it is already shaping his decisions for Barcelona airport. He says: “We need performance indicators and a more systemic approach. Stakeholders and users shouldn’t have the impression that you’re out of control or they’ll feel abandoned. They must be kept fully informed of what’s happening and how you plan to remedy the situation.”
Terminal 5’s launch onto the world stage may have been a fiasco but, clearly as a learning resource for business students, it will run and run.
Thank-you Widget
9 comments 15 May, 2008
