Optimism and Vacuums

 

I thought I'd take a moment and think about something other than election coverage.

I'm not sure if it's cause, effect, or altogether something else, but optimism and vacuums seem to go hand in hand.  Think about your last project, for a moment. How accurate were the estimates given in the early stages of the project? If you have even a little experience in project management, you knew they weren't going to be accurate, but you may not have identified all of the reasons why.

The obvious reason is that the earlier it is in a project, the less you know about the project.  A factor that often gets overlooked is everything else going on in your organization.  You can know that it will take six months to complete the project... if that's all anybody did.  How long will it take when you account for everything else going on?  Planning projects in a vacuum happens all too often, and it results in optimism about how much work an organization can complete in a given amount of time.

We're all familiar with the concepts of effort and duration, I hope.  If you want to know when a task can be completed, you need to know how many hours it will take for the assignee to complete the work, but you don't stop there.  Next, you need to determine how many days it will take for the assignee to find the time to perform the work. I'm sure I'm not the only project manager who has seen a task that only required two hours of effort take more than two days to complete, for legitimate reasons.

Tasks are to individuals like projects are to organizations. There can be unknowns that make it difficult to estimate the "organizational effort" of a project. All project managers deal with this. We also need to understand the "organizational duration” of our project, taking into account the other projects and activities (priorities) our organization is pursuing that could affect our schedule.

If you think that this is starting to sound like portfolio management, you might be right. If your company is effectively managing a portfolio of projects, instead of running multiple silos of projects that, surprisingly overlap, you are doing better than many other companies.  This is the vacuum and optimism I'm talking about. When we plan our projects in a vacuum, our estimates are basically blindly optimistic.

What can we do about this situation?

Don't run out and buy portfolio management software. Throwing a tool at a problem, without at least minimal analysis, just creates another way to fail.  There are three aspects of problem solving that need to be addressed, in order. They are:

1) people

2) processes

3) tools

You won't solve the problems associated with optimism and vacuum-based estimates without the right people.  You might be able to deal with this approach internally, but don't ignore the value of a third party facilitator or coach to help guide the change. 

As you're getting the right people involved, make sure you all agree on the problem that you are trying to solve, then start identifying gaps in your current processes. From there, you can identify any additional processes and tools you may need.

Simple, right? Okay, maybe not as simple as I make it sound.  You may not need a robust portfolio management system. Alternatively, you may need one, but not be in a position to implement one.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gather the right people and figure out the best way for your organization to break away from optimism and vacuums.