This lecture to BS level science students exposes them to how things work in a company, as opposed to in academia. They need to know that projects define their job and tasks, and how they are evaluated or promoted. And I just had to discuss the Peter principle...

1. A little tutorial on projects,
promotions, and the Peter principle
Seppo Karrila
Special Topics in Industrial Chemistry
February 2015

2. Executive summary
• Issue
– Understand how you get your assignments at work,
and how you are evaluated or promoted.
• Significance
– A technically good player with no strategy or
understanding of the big picture is still a loser. Don’t
be a loser.
• Approach
– Just telling you simple things that people don’t think
about much, but they should.
• Results & Conclusions (Effects)
– Be a successful alumnus to PSU Surat !

3. Background
• Most of the time you work for someone else,
they pay you, you do what you are paid for
• Where does the work come from?
• How is it decided?
• When are you “successful”?
– Will you get a payraise, promotion?
– Will you be terminated = kicked out?
• Understanding your environment helps…

4. You don’t see this, but this is where
your job comes from
• Every
company
plans in
this way, at
least when
it is big
enough

5. The project in which you work goes
poorly if…
• It is poorly
designed and
poorly
managed…
• Quickly, try
to get into
another
project.

6. But what is a “project”?
• It is a
temporary
managed
team effort.
• Schedule,
resources,
and scope
can be
traded off
with each
other.

7. For example
• Faster schedule = reduce scope (meaning do less
or not as well), or get more resources (more men
working)
– Manager think: you want a baby in one month, just
get nine women to work on it.
• Add more things to the scope = slower schedule
to finish, or get more resources
• Save in resources = ?
• Resources = labor, tools and equipment, money
to buy things (budget)

8. Again, the three main things
• Schedule, scope, resources
= deadline, what must be accomplished, budget
• You are a HERO if you
– Finish early
– Save money (= below budget)
– But usually nobody appreciates “extra”
accomplishments

9. You may be able to propose a project
• There is
always less
resources
than things
that could be
done
• Just like you
will always
have less
money than
you could
spend
• Choices have
to be made

10. Single-page proposal
• You have an idea, you must sell it to others.
You need their money, permissions, support.
• Issue, significance, approach, expected results,
conclusions (effects of the results)
• In approach, include time, rough magnitude of
costs
– If possible, point out major risks of failure

11. If you don’t know what you are doing
and why, try to find out
• It is in the
project
plan, or
needs to
be in it.

12. Particularly important are
• Knowing the “success criteria”. If you want to
do a good job, you have to know what is
“good”.
• Risks. These are opportunities to completely
fail. You can actually do something about risks.

13. Risks: Prevent, or be prepared
• Preventive:
vaccination,
buy new car
tires before
the old ones
break.
• Contingency
plans:
ambulance
service, spare
tire in car

14. False optimism
• Inventors sometimes fall in love with their
own ideas. They will not think about risks.
• In a company you have to think about them.
– If this technique does not work, what alternatives
do we have?
– Mitigation: reserve of raw materials, spare parts,…
– Employees trained to do each other’s jobs (when
someone is sick, had an accident, quit and left…)

15. Phases of a project
• Pilot proposal (evaluated, if good work on full proposal)
• Proposal (evaluated, if good work on detailed plan)
• Planning (evaluated, improved, when good wait for budget)
• Initiation (clock starts ticking, time and money in use)
• Execution and monitoring
– Roles, responsibilities, communications (alarms or alerts!),
authorizations (to command, to spend money),…
• Testing of results
• Deliver product to “customer”
• Final reporting, evaluation, closing
– In time or late, under or over budget, promises fulfilled,
customer happy?
• (Owner of results markets, maintains, upgrades, … each of
these can involve new projects that need a budget.)

16. Project management is an art, not a
science
• There are books, consultants, training
– If your employer puts you in such job, ask for
some training
• Managing a project on paper or in Excel is one
thing, managing people is another

17. Large organizations suffer from the
Peter principle
• People get
promoted until
they fail
• A good scientist
can become a
poor manager
• A good manager
can become a
poor director

18. Why this happens?
• A vacancy in management
– Someone got promoted, or left the company, or a new
department was established
– How do we get the manager or director?
– Take “the best employee” and promote from the next
lower level
• But that employee was “best” at what (s)he used to do, now
the job is entirely different!
• Every employee wants a career, they want a
promotion, or they move out and work for your
competitor.

19. A “non-solution”
• When an organization has become inefficient,
demote everyone to the next lower level
where they used to do a good job
competently.
– In a dictatorship this could be done, not in a
normal society. If humans were machines without
emotions this would be the perfect solution. They
are not, and that is exactly why a good scientist is
not necessarily a good manager or director.

20. About promotions
• Push by employee
– Do a really good job, maintain record of it
– Apply for promotion, and next year again
– Kind of works… but not really
• Pull by someone above your boss
– Promote my favorite from your employees, as a
favor to me, and I will talk to your boss good
words about you
– Of course this works

21. So when you wonder how
• Some employees have a skyrocketing career
– Came years later than you to the company, at a
lower level than you
– Passed by you in a year
– Suddenly became young directors, while you now
work for them…
• Truth is, they had someone pulling

22. Can you do the same, or do you want
to?
• Talk only good things about your boss, make
him look good
– Nobody wants an employee who will always make
the boss look bad
• Find yourself a mentor or friend higher up
than your own boss
• You see that someone else has “the pull”,
collaborate with that employee to benefit
from the pull yourself

23. Summary
• Work in a company is defined in chunks called projects
– They have scope, schedule, resources
– Try to do things well, finish before deadline, and spend
under budget
• Your career (promotions) depend more on pull than on
push
– Who said life is fair, an ugly stray dog can kill your cute
kitten, and the idiot guy who married the owner’s
daughter will become your boss
– You have to work with what you got
– You will see the Peter principle at work, it is part of reality
– You might be happiest doing what you are good at, think
whether you really want a promotion or not…