This shift brings with it quite a lot of ambiguity. What does a Project Lead bring to an agile IT project with its self-managing teams? What is expected of the Project Lead? How do we even define a Project Lead in an organization, where project leadership is spread between various roles none of whom might hold the official title of a Project Manager? These are some of the questions we decided to tackle with a Project Lead Manifesto.
The voice of the community
At Solita we have a culture of community-built manifestos that guide the ways our experts do their work – check out our developer manifesto and cloud manifesto for inspiration. Creating something similar for Project Leads had been bubbling under in different parts of the organization, but there was always the question of who should do it. We have Project Leads scattered in different units and countries, leading projects of all sorts. Do they have enough in common to lean on a shared manifesto?
When we started working on a manifesto at the Project Lead competence community, one of the key motivators was to see if it could work as a unifying factor for all Solita Project Leads. Instead of jumping to conclusions based on shared understanding in the group facilitating the process, we felt that the process in itself is valuable. This was our chance to hear the voices of our community across unit and country borders.
To ensure that everyone gets to contribute, we organized 21 workshops where we invited all Solitans working in a Project Lead role or identifying as a Project Lead to participate. Despite the diverse group of participants, the message from these workshops was strikingly similar: we had found our unified voice, which formed the backbone of our manifesto.
Unified message for the manifesto
The four key themes emerging from most workshops were:
- Taking care of the team,
- Building trust by being honest and transparent,
- Creating value for the customer by finding out and solving their true business needs, and
- Focusing on the big picture instead of micromanaging.
Conversations also revolved around themes such as profitability, continuous improvement, agile ways of working and keeping things under control. However, at the end of the day, when discussing what matters the most, we always got back to people and the four key themes above.
As unified as our community was in their message, the process of putting it into words turned out to be more difficult than expected. Discussions on wordings dragged on for hours and requests for feedback on draft versions sparked little interest. After what felt like a thousand iterations, we published what we thought would be the final version – and that’s when feedback started flowing in from all directions.
Finding a wording that everyone in our community could accept turned out to be the hardest part of the entire process. The debate soon escalated into intense discussions with our management on what Solita values can be and how they are reflected in the everyday life of our projects. As passionate as this might sound (yup, passion is one of our four values), freedom of opinion and courage to discuss also difficult matters is deeply ingrained in our culture.
As frustrating as the process was at times, our values also proved their worth. Intense discussions equipped us with better insights and pushed us to create yet another, improved version.
So here it is: let us proudly present Solita’s brand new Project Lead Manifesto:
