Essential Power Skills (Part 4): Stop Aiming for 'Perfect' Problem Solving

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Risk Management  

I have never had any experience on a project that didn’t have problems. I’ve had a lot of projects that seemed to stumble from one major crisis to the next, and every now and then I’ve had a few that were reasonably straightforward. But, big or small, there have always been some problems to solve.

If you’re going to be a project manager, you’re going to have to support your team members in identifying, assessing and resolving problems. And you’re going to be faced with a few problems that you have to overcome yourself. That’s the life of a PM.

The vast majority of project managers I have interacted with over the years understand this, and they recognize that the ability to effectively solve problems—with minimal disruption to the rest of the work of the project—is critical to overall success. But the approach that most of us take to solving those problems (and I include myself in that) is wrong, or at least outdated. I think we try to solve problems by aiming at perfection when that’s not what is needed.

“Good enough” is good enough
There’s a saying that “’good enough’ is good enough,” and another that states that “perfect is the enemy of good.” The sentiment is that there comes a point in virtually anything where the incremental improvement simply isn&…

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