Eduleadership

My school district has taken an interest in project management (PM) lately, and while principals have not been part of the PM training, I thought I would look into the field and see what I could learn to help in my work.

The book that rose to my attention is Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn’t Report to You: A Project Manager’s Guide, by Tom Kendrick of Hewlett-Packard. This book is written from squarely within the corporate world, and while Kendrick’s examples focus on the types of project work that you might expect to take place in a company like HP, I found it easy to make connections with the world of education.

I resonated with Kendrick’s experience of leading a cross-functional team, with many members from other departments. I have at least 7 employees in my building who don’t report to me, but to a central office supervisor. We must work together on numerous aspects of school operations, from student support programs to coordinating evening family events. While principals naturally have a certain amount of authority even over employees they do not directly supervise, the strategies Kendrick uses are very helpful for avoiding the overuse of positional power, which can damage relationships and result in minimal compliance.

Kendrick outlines three primary ways to influence and guide a project to ensure that you get results:

1. Control through process – articulating and gaining agreement on how the work will be done (including how it will be monitored)
2. Control through influence – using vision, relationship-building, rewards, celebration, and other non-coercive means of getting everyone on the team to do their part
3. Control through project metrics – closely monitoring critical indicators of project health, and making adjustments when these indicators reveal a problem

Kendrick has a chapter on each of these aspects of controlling projects; these chapters are probably the most worthwhile for school leaders. There are are also chapters on project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure, but I found that these chapters got into details that don’t apply as directly to school leaders’ work.

However, one benefit of reading widely – beyond the field of education – is that one encounters concepts that are valuable to professionals in other lines of work. Thinking about these concepts from Kendrick’s book may help me better define what needs to be done for a given school initiative. For example:

• Deliverables – clearly defined products or documents that will be the end result of the project, e.g. a piece of software, a written manual, or a physical object that will be manufactured to exact specifications. In education, a deliverable might be a curriculum document, a service delivery model and schedule, or a written plan.
• Control – Kendrick uses the term control not in the sense of power or authority, but in the sense of manageability; to control a project is to keep it from spiraling into an unworkable mess. Making sure the work is realistic (in terms of timeline and budget) is essential for control.
• Metrics – specific measurements that indicate whether a project is trending in the right direction. While schools almost universally focus on “data,” the way Kendrick describes the use of metrics is much more diagnostic and linked to planning rather than judgments of success or failure. Are we on schedule to meet our next deadline? Is something costing much more than we anticipated?
• Sponsorship – in order to succeed with a project that may require more authority than you have, it’s essential that the project have an executive sponsor who can insist that you get the support you need. In a small district, this will likely be the superintendent; in a larger district, it may be another central office executive leader. The sponsor needs to know the purpose and plan for the project, and to needs to be kept in the loop as the project unfolds and changes.

Should you read Results Without Authority? Kendrick’s chapters on process, influence, and metrics are probably worth reading, even if it takes a bit of effort to make the connection between corporate PM and your work as a school leader. The rest may be worth skimming, as the remainder of the text is not particularly easy to get through. Kendrick gives good examples from actual projects, and the book features helpful diagrams, but it’s a fairly technical read.

Here’s another review of Results Without Authority, with detailed summaries of each chapter.

Regardless of whether Results Without Authority makes it onto your bookshelf this year, I highly recommend taking time to read widely within and beyond the field of education. You will doubtless find, as I did, many helpful concepts and insights that you’d never have encountered otherwise.