Presentation is about stress management in IT projects. It describes basic concepts and approaches when it comes to assessing and identifying stress factors and ways of dealing with them and with stress itself. The full presentation can be found on our youtube channel - https://youtu.be/ZHKyHcJ5HIQ . It was conducted in Visuality by Wiktor De Witte - Project Manager.

1. Fantastic Stresses and
where to find them
Presentation by Wiktor De Witte, Visuality.

2. Work is hard.
● There are multiple factors that influence the outcome of your work.
○ We can try to tweak our processes to a point where we will have faced a limitation of
technology.
○ The trends in the 00’s and 10’s are full of “cutting-edge” work frameworks or methodologies
that are aiming to reduce project management to no-brainers and thus decreasing the risk of
failure to an acceptable minimum.
○ The common problem in the sector ( or even in the global economy? ) are people. It’s hard
enough to manage inanimate objects, let alone living and sentient beings with unique mindsets.
Funny images at top right corner to
keep you focused.

3. Project success factors
● There are multiple factors that influence the outcome of your work
○ Budget
○ Time
○ Quality
○ Scope
And so on so on - tools, people, government, barbeque party, ufo attack etc.

4. Why am I addressing that
● Employing best methodologies and softwares is only half the battle.
● In reality, most of the problems one can encounter during project management
are not related to tools, but to people and their interactions.
If you as a project member or a stakeholder, acknowledge existence of the stress
as a factor, you can proceed to managing it and making sure that people will not
pull their hair out and not sink your project despite best methodologies and other
Gucci-tier bling-blings.

5. Why am I addressing that
Paper presented on PMI Global Congress 2007 states that 32% of failed projects
rooted in problems caused by people.
Source : Discenza, R. & Forman, J. B. (2007). Seven causes of project failure: how to recognize them and how to initiate project recovery. Paper
presented at PMI® Global Congress 2007—North America, Atlanta, GA. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

6. OK, so - STRESS!
What is it?
Stress is a physical, mental or emotional factor that causes tension in the body.
Once under stress, your glands (gruczoły dokrewne ) are injecting your blood system with a
lovely cocktail of adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine. What happens after is pure magic.

7. So what happens when there is stress
introduced?
Depends on a dose of the cocktail you are to drink.
Small doses - bronchospasm (rozkurcz oskrzeli), increased heart capacity.
Medium doses - quicker heart beating, tunnel vision, “the stare” (wytrzeszcz)
Big doses - Bladder muscle relaxation. This is how “ someone sh*tted himself”
came into being.
Of course, there is so much more going on in the organism…

8. Stress triad and why it’s all da-
dangerous.
Long-term exposition to stress will cause following medical conditions.
● Congestion of the organs and adrenal hyperplasia (Przekrwienie narządów i przerost nadnerczy)
● Trapping thymus (Uwiąd grasicy)
● Intestinal ulceration (Owrzodzenie jelit)
Those will cause other problems that are irreversible after some time, including:
● Stomach ulcers (Wrzody żołądka)
● High blood pressure (Podwyższone ciśnienie krwi)
● Heart and respiratory diseases (Choroby serca i układu oddechowego)
● Nervous Disorders (Zaburzenia nerwowe)

9. What’s the takeaway?
Do not stress yourself and avoid future medical conditions to-be and medical
bills for thousands and long queues to a doctor.
“It’s not worth it!”
- Doctor

10. From now on this presentation is
sponsored by the Reclaimer from
Doom.

11. It’s not worth it!
First you must accept that you as an individual are under the influence of stress.
Then, realise that by reducing stress you work and function better. At the end you
learn to control it to adjust your mood as you want. ACCEPT, FIGHT, CONTROL.
Stress Scale

12. Key Points so far:
Stress affects:
- Your effectiveness at work and beyond
- Your health and your life in long term
- The quality of your life

13. What happens with your head when you
get really stressed?
- Organism wants to end the situation ASAP ( meaning solving the problem or
getting out, both would do the trick.)
- Emotional reactions to the situation, focus reduction and multitasking is gone.
THEN:
- Analytical skills perish completely. Decision making - gone.
- Manual skills are reduced.
- Forget about teamwork. Gone.

14. When does it happen? All the time.
- Unrealistic deadlines
- Unspecified expectations in the work
- Hard-going work colleagues vs your efficiency
- Unexpected turmoils in sprints
- Personal life events
- No coffee or water in the office
- Food delivery is late
- Government introduces another tax

16. You want to be
here!

18. Key Points so far:
Stress might be positive if it transmits you to a desired state of focus and
productivity or positive if it makes you mindless and reduced to primal instincts.
You can manage stress to get out from distress and to get into the flow zone.

19. How to decrease stress?
Paper in Brisbane University of Technology can clear some things up.
Survey conducted among project managers in different sectors showed that:
- There are 15 different strategies to cope with stress;
- Some of them are considered effective, some are not, according to surveyed.
Source: Richmond, Arin & Skitmore, Martin (2006) Stress and Coping: A Study of Project Managers in a Larger ICT Organisation. Project Management
Journal, 37(5), pp. 5-16.

20. How to decrease stress?

21. How to decrease stress?
Another approach - Steven Flannes from PMI states that it’d be best if you chosen
your method of coping with stress according to your personality traits from Myers-
Briggs psychotest.
Source : Flannes, S. (2010). Tangible tips for handling the endless stress in project management. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2010—
North America, Washington, DC. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

22. How to decrease stress?

23. How to decrease stress?
Other tips from Flannes (this guy from Myers-Briggs psychotest):
● Detach or dissociate
○ Use detachment or dissociation, allow yourself to mentally “check out” of the meeting as much as is
appropriate, letting your mind wander to a more pleasant image. Obviously, these approaches are used
selectively and discretely. Or are they?
● Monitor “what if?” thinking:
○ In the middle of a stressful event, it is natural to engage in “what if thinking” by asking ourselves, “What if we’d
only done this in the past, then we might not be in this crisis right now?” SAY THIS -> “It’s Friday at 2:30 p.m.,
I’ve just received bad news about the work. What can I do in the next hour to take a small step toward
improving the situation?”

24. How to decrease stress?
Other tips from Flannes:
● Know when enough is enough, and stay away from debating:
○ A natural but often unproductive approach to resolving a stressful situation is to debate another person about
the wisdom of your point of view. This does not mean you should not assert your belief, but you should know
when to stop, often when your message has been heard. At this point in the dialogue, if we continue trying to
be seen as “right,” we are actually increasing our stress. It’s better to stop earlier than later; nurturing the
discussion will only make people entrench in their positions.
● Look for a paradoxical component in the situation:
○ In the middle of a situation that is legitimately stressful, we may find ourselves taking things too seriously.
Cognitive behavioral psychologists would say that we are engaging in “catastrophizing” behavior in which we
take a singular, negative event, cognitively “run with it,” and then find ourselves believing, for example, that the
entire project is probably doomed because of this one serious problem. An antidote to this is to find a
paradoxical cognition that you can hold onto, something that will put your stress and worries into perspective.

25. How to decrease stress?
Other tips from Flannes:
● Get in the “zone”
○ Flannes relates to Csikszentmikhalyi’s work and suggest getting to the zone state, which is described as
follows:
■ “when we are involved in [those], we lose track of time and become less self-conscious. At the end
of such activities, we generally feel refreshed and feel better about ourselves and our place in the
world.”
○ Everyone has such area of interest - taking a walk in the park, kayaking, photography, meditation, etc.

26. Key Points:
Our focus in reducing stress, and therefore in functioning at our highest levels, should be directed toward what we as
individuals contribute to making our work lives stressful and what we can do to make them less stressful.
Best stress reduction strategies:
● Social support - make someone hear and understand your situation.
● Communication - talk to someone who might know the answers.
Best stress reduction techniques:
● Detach/dissociate - do not get stressed during the meetings.
● Monitor “what if?” thinking and reduce - Past is gone, live in the moment.
● Stay away from debating - know when to stop.
● Look for a paradoxical component in the situation - sense of humour works great in tough situations.
● Get in your zone! - Make the stress go away and get back fresh into the action.

27. Thank you.