A (long) while ago I had a talk about project management with Jan De Schepper. He is the former Telindus Chief executive and Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Nascom and runs the Business Solutions Unit. We get to see a lot more of him on the floor at Nascom HQ these days and I figured that would be the perfect opportunity to learn from someone with loads of experience and ask him a few questions.

Jan De Schepper

This wasn’t a classic kind of interview. No tape-recorder, just pen, paper and a talk. And these are the lessons I learned.

Have you ever had the project manager job title?

No, but I’ve always worked in project mode. Starting Telindus for instance was a project.

You are and have been responsible for so many people and so many things, how do you monitor and control so much stuff?

Good memory, and the the capacity to anticipate. What I do can be summed up in 5 points of control:

1. feedback control, asking the right questions and doing it a lot
2. building memory and anticipating
3. looking at the results
4. looking at how the results came to be
5. working with people, having a good working culture

How do you know what works?

By looking rationally and instinctively at things. Rationally by looking at the numbers, instinctively by building on previous experiences.

There’s a difference between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, touching and feeling, … that’s instinct.

Experience is what you get after you needed it.

My experiences for instance tell me about todays crisis, you have to show what works to companies and how a service will provide that ROI they need today. You have to reassure this, be credible, agile and provide quality at a good price.

Facing a client, which role is the most efficient for a project manager?

A good manager is what I like to call a 3D manager. The formost important thing you need to do is communicate. That is listening to what is going on as well as the interpretation of the things you hear. A PM has to do this facing all directions.

1. A project manager should translate what is told before making an action plan.
2. Think in parallel, be multidisciplinary.
3. You have to be an excellent time manager, for yourself and for others.
4. And you have to be able to use the tools, like PMI, Prince2, etc. whatever methodology you need.
5. A 3D manager is a good leader.
6. There has to be integrity in all you do.

How can you be a good leader?

Well, quality of the people we work with is very important. When there is good talent, a good leader can stimulate talent and keep it. 40% of the talent that is in most people is latent, a coach can help people discover and make use of it. People have to be able to learn form a leader.

Thanks for the advice Jan!

Conclusion

What we notice from the interview with Jan is that there’s a constant emphasis on soft skills (listening, talking, interpreting, building knowledge, leadership, etc.). For us PMs the methodology is a basis, you’ll only start to make a real difference by working on soft skills and emotional intelligence.

This is a conclusion my Program Manager Taki Tsaklanos came up with when he proofread this post, and I couldn’t agree more. I guess I’ll interview him sometime soon Next up is someone else though, so keep a look out, a new interview will be online soon.