I was delighted to have the opportunity recently to speak with Ruth Phillips, the Head of Training Delivery at Parallel Project Training. We talked about her early career, how she discovered that project management was the right career for her, and her thoughts on the people-side of projects, resistance to change, women in project management and much more. Ruth is an enthusiastic advocate of the project profession and I look forward to seeing the impact she has on further developing Parallel’s bespoke training solutions.
Here’s what Ruth had to say…
Early career experiences
I probably didn’t follow a traditional route into project management because I have a Classics degree so I’m a linguist with a penchant for the past, but while still at Durham University I realised I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do as a career. However, during a careers fair while still a student I came upon this wonderful world of management consultancy which would enable me to keep my options open while still working out what it was that I wanted to do.
Management consultancy involved working on site with a particular organisation and participating in a consultancy project or assignment that could be anything from re-engineering processes, to implementing IT systems, to helping organisations with mergers. New graduates would do that for six months in one organisation and then move on to another organisation, another project, another team and so on. And I thought, this sounded wonderful because I could actually get some experience in different types of organisations, different industries, different aspects of work and then maybe work out what it was that I actually wanted to do.
So, I started out in management consultancy with Deloitte on their graduate scheme and I spent three or four very happy years with them working in all sorts of companies such as automotive parts manufacturers, the Ministry of Defence and a major Spanish hotel and leisure company. I was travelling the world and having an absolutely brilliant experience.
I’d been put into an area that was implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. That meant I was working with SAP, Oracle and other big, integrated systems. I soon realised that as I went from project to project that what I liked doing most was the project management work – working in the Project Office, doing project support planning or risk management. The role gave me the opportunity to see the outcomes that we were trying to achieve, but I much preferred planning the tasks and making sure they were getting done.
Deloitte then moved me into what was called the Programme Leadership service line, which was when I started undertaking some project management training for the first time. My first project management training course was an internal course run by two of the senior consultants and it was very much about how Deloitte managed projects so very consultancy focused. It was great because it gave me a guide book of what I needed to be doing. When I then embarked on my next project, I realised that we had followed some project management best practises but needed to do more – it really gave me a defined pathway to follow.
This first training course was part of Deloitte’s internal training programme but it aligned with standard best practises whilst also taking into account some of the systems integration activities for the software that we were working with, such as SAP. In a way this was a project management and implementation method that blended project controls with implementation controls. The course took project management best practice and systems integration best practice to create a robust internal method that helped me better manage the projects I was working on.
After the graduate scheme at Deloitte
I came into project management via systems implementation projects where I found a niche that I liked in the project management aspect of projects. When I moved on from Deloitte to KPMG, I found the opportunity to focus on project management right through the whole lifecycle from beginning to end unlike on the graduate scheme with Deloitte which had six-month rotations on different projects, which meant you never really saw the full life cycle of a project since many of them were significantly longer than 6 months.
Whereas within KPMG I did fewer projects but stuck with them from the beginning to the end, which was really useful because I was involved in the activities at the beginning of the project and saw how important they were in impacting final outcomes. For instance, I had time to develop better relationships with stakeholders operating at more senior level.
I think particularly if you’re in a customer-supplier relationship where you’re not managing projects for the organisation that you work for, it’s really important that you can justify decisions that are made. It was certainly a more personally satisfying route to be able to deliver some longer-term projects.
The people side of projects
My career has very much been in a consultancy project manager role managing teams of people that don’t report to me in a line management structure. There are all sorts of complexities about the people side of projects which has been something that I’ve become more and more interested in as my career has developed, because I’ve seen the issues that can arise first-hand.
Sometimes on non-IT projects such as re-engineering projects, there’d be concern about job losses because of processes being automated or streamlined. So there was often tension, possibly even hostility, certainly suspicion. My ability to engage with people and to listen to their concerns and talk to them about those concerns was an important part of my role. Helping people maintain their engagement in the project was one of the things that I was really keen to do.
Often people were dedicating most of their time to the project tasks, and their line managers were never asking me about people’s individual performance or their development needs. I was used to having my own appraisals and personal development plans back at KPMG but the line managers of the people that I was working with on projects had no idea what any individual strengths or development or training needs were of the people they were managing.
At KPMG I started consciously passing some of that information across to line managers so that people could get the credit for the project work they were doing. Mostly line managers were pleasantly surprised and hadn’t thought to engage in a training and development process with individuals.
Managing resistance to change
I always used to say that resistance to change was a risk on every project and I’ve completely changed my mind because it’s not a risk. It will happen. It’s not something that might happen at some point in the project. It will be there from day one and you’ve got to deal with it. I’ve been working on projects my entire career and resistance to change happens to all of us – it’s a natural reaction.
Resistance to change is not a project risk that might happen – it will happen
Ruth Phillips
Industry experience for project managers
In my career I’ve worked with multiple different organisations on different types of projects and in different industries so people want to know if I feel I can manage any type of project?
The broad answer to that is yes, but there are certain types of projects or certain types of industry where a project manager needs a technical delivery appreciation. For that reason, people do tend to have a preferred industry – even if they are quite generalist project managers. IT is my preferred industry although I have worked on construction projects, but a construction project manager, for example, generally needs a construction background and track record. I think it’s important to come up through the project support team, team leader, team manager roles before becoming a project manager in a particular industry stream, particularly when you’re working on very big complex projects. I think you have to have more depth of background in that particular area.
Levels and depth of training
If I think back to my own initial training in project management versus the on-the-job experience I was gaining, that first two-day introductory course was absolutely pitched at my experience levels at that point in time. I’d worked on a couple of projects, I knew the project environment, I was familiar with roles and responsibilities; but I did not have that formal end to end structure. Once I went on to do my PRINCE2 certification it was a much more structured method so it provided information about some of the deliverables that I should be creating as a project manager. At that time, I was working at that type of level and expected to be responsible for the production of those deliverables.
There was a great quote that I used to use on training courses that a plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy. And I think that’s absolutely true. The project plan is just our current thoughts about how the project is going to proceed.
The project plan is just our current thoughts about how the project is going to proceed
Ruth Phillips
Women in project management
I’ve seen a lot of change in the project management profession within the last five years. When I started off in Deloitte and KPMG, certainly we had very few female project directors. We had very few women on the client side that were in senior management positions. Probably the only time when I had a female project sponsor was when I was involved in an HR project and the HR director was a woman, yet she was the only female board member at that time. So, it was a very male dominated profession.
I’ve never had a particular problem working in a male-dominated profession. Probably it suited me, but I think that actually women bring a lot of other different skills to the workplace. It’s not just about gender balance, but diversity in its wider sense. That is so important for projects because if we go down a very narrow tunnel of thinking, we don’t consider innovative solutions. We don’t think about different ways of doing things and projects are often about problem solving. And we’ve got to try and find the best, most efficient, effective way of solving problems. Just having one similar type of person is not going to provide a rounded perspective. For that reason, I’ve really welcomed more gender balance and wider diversity in the project world.
Ironically though, the last course that I delivered with Parallel was an APM Project Fundamentals course for London Legacy and the entire course of 12 plus me were all female! For those that don’t know, London Legacy is the organisation that deals with the legacy from the London 2012 Olympic Games. It’s a fascinating organisation and they’re doing huge regeneration of areas of East London around the Olympic Park as well as maintaining the Olympic Park. They’ve instrumental in bringing a new Sadlers Wells theatre and the London College of Fashion (part of the University of the Arts) to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as part of the cultural and educational East Bank development.
Communication skills
On the subject of communication skills, I always think if projects got a report card it would always say “could do better”. I often run an exercise about communication skills on courses and ask people to write down a list of 10 of the bugbears of working on projects. And, if communication was not on one of those lists, I’d want to go and work in that organisation! Poor communication is an issue on all projects.
There are problems about communicating in the right way, people sending the right message or not communicating at all. There’s a lack of understanding about the emotional impact of change on people. I think that often project communications are far too transactional and they don’t take into account that there are people whose working practices and procedures are being undermined by what a project is doing. That will have a big emotional impact on those people so we need to be much better at communicating much more holistically. I’m really heartened to see with the new APM PMQ syllabus that there is a much larger section about stakeholder engagement communications and more about team management and leadership. So, the importance of being more people-focused has been recognised.
Bespoke vs standard training programmes
There’s a really key place for both bespoke training programmes and standard training programmes with certifications such as APM, AgilePM, PRINCE2, PMI etc. Standard courses are a really good way for a project manager to develop their knowledge throughout their career, particularly with the APM and all the information contained within the Body of Knowledge (BoK). So many people have contributed to that body of best practice over the years since it was first published in 1991 that, of course, we can all learn from that accumulated knowledge and apply it in a practical sense.
However, bespoke courses are also really important, particularly if you’re working in a large organisation where there will be specific ways of working that have been developed over time. In situations like these valuable best practice contributions can be aligned with generic methods, but adapted to a particular working environment.
For example, I do quite a lot of work with a County Council in West Wales and they have particular relationships with the Welsh government and with Westminster. That sort of stakeholder relationship won’t be in PMI or PRINCE2 because it’s very specific, and so they use bespoke project management courses that absolutely follow best practice guidance and contain all of the information that you would study on a project fundamentals course or PRINCE2 foundation; but it’s very much tailored to the organisation. For example, when we do the business case, we look at their project cost codes, we look at the fact that they’ve got to include English-Welsh translation costs and how that can be charged back which, of course, is way too detailed to be covered in a standard course.
I quite often find people who have a PRINCE2 or PMQ qualification attend bespoke courses, not to relearn project management, but to learn how to tailor what they already know to the new environment that they’re working in.
So bespoke and standard training courses absolutely complement each other.
Getting in front of the microphone and camera
Parallel Project Training has always had a learning system that alongside face-to-face and virtual classroom sessions, includes complementary resources to help people learn in different ways. There are podcasts that can help people who are travelling a lot and e-learning videos for people who prefer to learn that way. For me it’s been really interesting getting involved in creating some of those podcasts and videos. We do 30-minute blocks on each topic and produce a mixture of theory combined with the trainers’ real-world experiences. What’s important to them, some of their examples, some of their hints and tips. It’s been really fun to record the podcasts.
And the Parallel videos are essentially the trainer talking through the slides that we would go through on a face-to-face training course, but they can be used in two different ways. One as a distance learning resource for people who just want to watch the videos. Or as a revision of what they’ve heard in the training room, especially where there are topics which might be new even to some experienced project managers, such as ethics and sustainability.
Future areas of focus
One of the areas that I would like to develop at Parallel is a bespoke course that is a first step for people who aren’t committed to the project profession as a career but just want to find out more about project management. Maybe, for instance, they’ve been invited on to a project team as part of another role.
Another area I’d like to develop is to work with organisations on bespoke project management training using case studies that are specific projects within the organisation and their working environment. In fact, I’m already looking at delivering the APM PMQ with an additional 2 days where delegates are given a project case study that they work on then present to their senior project managers for feedback. They’re getting the gold standard APM PMQ certification alongside the experience of applying that knowledge within their own project environment and getting feedback from their senior project managers. That really is the best of both worlds.
