Table of Contents
The 5 Cs of Project Management
5 Cs of Project Management—Complexity, Criticality, Compliance, Culture, and Compassion—guide how often to perform project tasks. There are five, they fit on your hand, and they go in order. The first three, complexity, criticality and compliance, are about the work, and that’s where we begin. From there, we expand our view to Culture and Compassion to tune to the team, the organization, and the day.
Complexity: how intricate is the work?
Complexity is the first dial; more complex projects require more attention to planning details. Simpler projects or familiar teams require less oversight from the PM.
This goes for any method, including how rigorous an Agile team manages ceremonies and how short sprints may have to be to maintain consistent velocity. Complexity can include risk profiles; external factors may require careful monitoring and response plans. In general, higher complexity means higher requirements for focused project management.
When we think about complexity, we’re also thinking about how the work needs to be done. Complexity drives your method, as well. If a complex project allows mistakes and learning, agile methods can be applied.
When you have one time to get it right, you know a more traditional approach of practicing and simulating, then doing it once with a lot of structure and support, calls for a waterfall mindset of more linear progression. The complexity of work defines how we create hybrid project approaches.
Criticality: how important are the outcomes?
Criticality defines how important the project or effort is to its stakeholders. It’s sometimes confused for complexity, but its is very much its own beast.
It relates to how visible a project is to stakeholders and its importance for significant change. In this case, criticality steers the PM effort toward communication, facilitation and making sure that decision-making in the face of risks is in good shape, even if the work itself doesn’t require heavy project management technique.
A gated methodology with clear approval milestones can guide criticality. Analyzing criticality helps refine project complexity and leadership engagement.
Criticality focuses on impact of the project, before, during and after, on participants, the teams that support the project, and the wide range of other stakeholders who are impacting or impacted by it.
Compliance: how externally constrained are we?
Any project must consider compliance, which is not optional, whether in terms of adhering to the right actions or satisfying internal and external stakeholders. From the outside, compliance imposes constraints in methods and scope, prescribing definitions of success.
Whether the project is implementing a new health care product, a credit card, or a financial system, regulatory agencies, industry standards, financial requirements, or even internal policies are part of the job to comply with. Compliance plays a core role in defining scope, requirements, and quality management.
Project managers can bake experts into resource needs to make sure that appropriate compliance benefits outweigh costs.
Wait, that sounded fishy, didn’t it? Well, here’s the hard truth. There ARE times when the cost of non-compliance is LESS than the cost of compliance. Project managers should never sacrifice ethics or morals when managing compliance.
We understand that standards or rules have penalties if we can’t meet the targets. Paying a vendor penalty may be cheaper than replacing internal systems for order management.
As PMs, compliance considerations require us to gain complete agreement on how we will meet requirements and when, taking risks and costs of both compliance and non-compliance into account.
Culture: what are our norms and values?
So, complexity, criticality and compliance are the three Cs about the work itself. But project management is about the concentric circles of the work, the team, the organization, and the environment. We need two more dials to make sure we fit there too, and that’s where Culture and Compassion come in.
A project manager adapts to the inherent culture in how she engages stakeholders, with what level of formality, what level of detail, and what level of structure. How PM standards are used may reflect the organization’s culture more than technical skills.
Do I actually NOT produce a weekly status report on a project at a certain point because I need manage data addiction and establish what slow looks like, so I can leave room to ramp later when we hit a more active phase with tighter milestones? I can use the existing culture as a baseline from which to guide the team on this specific effort.
Elevating from tactical culture adjustments on how I run my project, culture is a fundamental component for defining my project’s organizational change management work, too. The trick is to adjust the project’s culture to align with where the organization is now and where we need to be after implementing the project.
If the project does not introduce significant organizational change, like releasing a new version of a current product line, then the project culture must closely align with the organization.
. If a project changes interactions, it should introduce cross-functional sessions for requirements and solutions.
The project’s collaborative culture enables flexibility for shifting roles and defining a train-the-trainer approach under constraints.
Compassion: what current events are impacting us?
Compassion is about a point in time. A project manager practices with compassion by tuning his project approach to respect the impacts of current events outside the project on the team.
While culture is relatively stable over a several year timespan, events usually introduce change. Current events require a different response, acknowledging the time needed for cultural changes. Even so, operations continue, and initiatives must deliver on their value proposition.
A project manager who understands the basics of compassion knows not to schedule a standing project meeting after a company-wide townhall announcing a significant change in leadership.
A savvy PM knows when to push for motivation after celebrating achievements.
Taking PM skills further, compassion on a project also shows how prepared this team is to do the work at hand. Levels of experience of team members, strategic importance of the project within the enterprise portfolio, perceived value by sponsoring leaders, stakeholder analysis takes all of these into account to define success based on what we can reasonably and respectfully achieve together now, given all the factors this time and place introduce.
Compassion may not always impact project approach, but it can influence actions and tactics.
From recognition programs encouraging positive motivation to increasing the frequency of retrospectives to encourage open communication, compassion-targeted tactics are the team heartbeat that builds strength and project resilience.
Applying the 5Cs toolset
To put it all in context, the 5 Cs are like photo editing tools. When a PM applies the 5Cs to a PM basic, like creating a workplan or capturing a requirement, or even managing a vendor, she adjusts the brightness of detail based on complexity, or the color contrast of communication based on criticality. The 5 Cs help frame and focus the project for maximum impact.
Do you want to get started? Think about your next team work session or workshop you want to conduct.
Now, apply each one of the 5 Cs:
- Complexity: How intricate is the work of this project, this workshop? Moving parts or lots of personalities? Do you need to put a bit more structure in to stay focused on intended outcomes? What tools in the room? How closely are you managing to a defined agenda?
- Visibility: How visible is the project? How many people are impacted by it? Do we need to make sure that oversight of critical components, defined by roles and by processes, is really clear to all participants and subsequently informed stakeholders? Does the agenda leave room for the human elements of awareness and commitment to guide decision making?
- Compliance: Controls or compliance expectations? What elements of the workshop may be impacting or relying on internal or external controls? Is there any education needed on those implications? How can we get advice on details? Does that add new participants or stakeholders?
- Culture: For this worksession, how does our culture drive required behavior norms? Do we pre-socialize agendas with participants? Do we send pre-reads? Are there formalities we need to follow for decisions to stick? Do we need to bridge our norms for this new way of working?
- Compassion: And finally, how does compassion tell us to respond to current events impacting the team? From global events to company happy hours, how do we need to respond differently today, of all days, given who’s in the room and the role they’ll each play to achieve this agenda? What adjustments do we need to make based on current conditions? And of course, in what way do we show gratitude or appreciation for contributions, in context?
Using the 5 Cs as a dashboard to check your PM fit ensures that you’re tuned to the right now, in the right way.
Sean Ciampaglia
Sean has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto. He is the General Manager at Geoscape Contracting, and has been actively managing projects in the land development industry for over 10 years. He realized in 2015 that there must be a better way to do contract administration in order to minimize mistakes and save contractors and consultants time on their paperwork. He's a father, an entrepreneur and habitual crossfitter. He enjoys roasting coffee beans and uses the pour-over method to brew his daily cup.
