pmStudent

I work on a complex project.

Lately, one of my most important roles has been to get decisions made and documented.  I've been kicking down doors ( opening them with a polite knock and charming smile), crashing meetings (asking for a walk-on agenda item from the host of a standing meeting I don't normally attend because the right people did attend), and interrogating miscellaneous stakeholders and customers ( friendly conversation expressing my empathy for their needs).

The Curse of Indecision

For one reason or another, many conversations in the life of a project stakeholder tend to end up ambiguous and without clear agreement.  People nod their heads, reserving the questions or objections they have.  Many figure this isn't the last word and they can have their say in another venue, and unfortunately they are usually right.

Get the Right People In One Conversation

In the same room, on the phone, whatever.  Provisional decisions because someone is missing are not decisions at all.  There is enough uncertainty in projects without adding a preventable source like this.  Time and time again, I will engage in conversation with someone and hear something like "so and so said we were going to do A".  Another person says "no, I heard we were going to do B."

There have been a few occasions recently where upon being involved in a conversation like this, I walked over to the person who could settle the question, or said "Hey, there is a meeting going on later today with all the right people.  Let's crash it."

When the decision is made, make it clear to everyone in the room there is no going back.  "This is what we move forward with.  If you have any concerns or comments, now is the time."

As a project manager, some of the most important things you can do for your team are to eliminate unnecessary uncertainty in their work and remove obstacles like "waiting for a decision".

Even better, you can lead by example and show your team how they can do the same for themselves.

Photo by Perfecto Insecto

Thanks go out to Carissa from the USA for this question.  You may also want to check out a post on Project Manager Interview Questions too.

Shim Marom posted an interesting metaphor using the Second Law of Thermodynamics recently to describe how tendency towards disorder is the norm.

I am also reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the moment and am finding some interesting thoughts running both ways through my brain.

One one hand I see the evidence of self-organizing teams as a real phenomenon with the challenge of being able to use these dynamics of a social species to move towards a [predefined] goal.

On the other I am starting to see Taleb's point about how utterly terrible we are at predicting the future and planning for it due to our living at least sometimes in "Extremistan" although all of our models assume only "Mediocristan" exists.  Our expectations mess up project estimates and we are overconfident in our ability to plan.

Taking Shim's metaphorical lead, perhaps it can be said our goal as project managers is not to simply fight disorder by expending energy towards control.  Perhaps it is to find other forces available to us and use the natural order instead.   The curvature of space-time (gravity) and the electromagnetic and strong nuclear force can be used to naturally overthrow entropy, if only for a finite amount of time.

The shared goals and common interests of a team, desire to do good work, and a myriad of other factors common in the psychological makeup of most people of our social species can be facilitated and reinforced through the removing of interference.

By removing interference and leveraging the properties already inherent in a team of individuals, we enable the best qualities to surface and the most extraordinary results to be achieved.

Image by jurvetson via Flickr

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

I have been thinking and writing much about project estimation these days.

It seems to be an area where so much confusion occurs, starting with the guy who is typing right now.

Here are some of the pitfalls of project estimation, several of which I have fallen prey to myself:

Anchoring

This occurs when estimates get biased (deliberately or not) by some influence other than the knowledge and experience to yield a reasonably accurate estimate.  Teams may be asked to give a rough "back of the envelope" estimate just so management can make a decision and then when it comes time to do the real estimates, a bias from a false starting point is already there.  In my experience, these estimates tend to be way off the mark.

Anchoring can also occur by the way you ask for estimates.  I have recently realized that I sometimes prompt team members by venturing a guess myself when I feel fairly confident about the technical aspects of the work.  By doing so, I have been anchoring my teams' estimates unnaturally.

Overconfidence

I was once in the office of a customer discussing my team's estimates and my range estimate was a -5%/+10%.  One person commented that this was way to uncertain, after all, it was for a project only 3 years long working with complexities and lots of unknowns.  In retrospect, I was far too overconfident myself in those estimates.

Another form of overconfidence can come from the tendency to forget about the human factor involved with project estimation and rely too much on tools and fancy math.  If you have lots of well-recorded history then these models can work very well, but plugging in estimates without regard for the human influences (like anchoring) can lead to big deviations and general lack of rigor in your project estimates.

A few of the things I'm working on now include the following:

• Uncovering the best method for acheiving reliable estimates when you are in a dynamic environment with little to no past history to rely on.
• Heading off the anchoring problem, in all it's forms and all the sources where it can be a problem.
• How to accurately reflect the level of confidence and low/high ranges on project estimates.

What are your struggles with project estimation?  Do you have any thoughts to offer by way of extending what I've already said or responding to one or more of the points made?

Image by !!!! scogle via Flickr