The Money Files

Have you ever made a bad decision? I’m sure I have but I don’t think I’ll be owning up to them here! The point I’m making is that people who make decisions aren’t always making the best decisions. And part of that reason is bias. No one is immune to it; the best we can do is call it out and be aware that it is happening.

I was asked to talk about bias in decision making at a university recently so I thought I’d summarise some of my key thoughts on the topic here to share with you.

Biases are cognitive shortcuts, often subconscious, that impact decision-making. And research has shown that there are lots of them. I read a few papers in Project Management Journal that pointed to many biases being identified. The key ones that I wanted to call out are these.

Confirmation Bias

This is where you seeking information that supports pre-existing beliefs. For example, only looking at data that supports your conclusions, or data from successful projects and ignoring data sets from unsuccessful projects. In daily life, this might be looking out for a particular type of car and then seeing it everywhere.

Anchoring Bias

This is where your future thoughts and opinions are anchored around a particular number. For example, if you’re talking about pricing a product and someone says it should retail for £50, you might get suggestions of setting the price at £40 or £60 but it’s unlikely that anyone is going to suggest £300 as the group has been anchored around the first number they heard.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Bent Flyvbjerg calls this escalation of commitment, which is where you justify increased cost in a project even though it isn’t performing to plan. In other words, people talk themselves into continuing a failing project because of the investment that will be ‘wasted’ if they stop now.

Optimism Bias

Haven’t we all been guilty of this? It’s where you underestimate risks and overestimate project success. We all think our estimates are realistic even when past experience shows that we need to add buffer time.

Groupthink

When a group agrees with something, dissenting voices aren’t heard with the same volume. There is pressure to conform to collective opinions, even if you don’t truly agree. Diverse groups tend to make better decisions because they bring diverse experience and opinions.

Status Quo Bias

This is where people prefer familiar approaches over innovative solutions. I think there is also an opposite to this that I have – I’d rather use new tech and explore options and learn a different tool than use the old boring tool I’ve used before. Although this is not a good thing and means I have to spend a lot more time preparing for presentations because I’m trying out new gadgets or software that I haven’t used previously!

Bias contributing to project outcomes

You don’t have to look far to see examples of the sunk cost fallacy or optimism bias in public sector projects.

But there are examples of where bias has contributed to positive outcomes – or rather, structured decision making processes let people regularly challenge assumptions to avoid getting stuck with inappropriate solutions. I asked ChatGPT for examples of bias leading to project success and it could only come up with Toyota’s lean production system actively combating bias through data drive decision making. Maybe you have other examples from your experience – if so, leave them in the chat below please!

Overcoming bias

So what can we do about it?

• Encourage diverse perspectives: keep a focus on structured debate and let the dissenting voices be heard!
• Use data: seek out evidence that will provide impartial inputs
• Externally validate data and solutions: can you use external data reference sets or focus groups to confirm (or reject) your position?
• Consider failure: what does failure look like and what might lead you there? Pre-mortems are worth a go to discuss all that before you get started.
• Reassess the business case: keep the business case under review so you avoid throwing good money after bad.

Bias is inherent in how humans navigate decision making, but it’s manageable if you are open to talking about it and thinking about ways to reduce it. What’s one bias you’ll watch out for in your own decision-making?

I’ve been thinking recently about the role of intuition in project management. We often rely on the data, processes and logical structure of project management, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent more than one afternoon feeling that something just isn’t quite right and wondering how you can define the problem when you just can’t put your finger on it.

It’s a sense that something’s off. Maybe a project is veering off track, or a team member isn’t quite clicking with the rest of the group, but there’s nothing tangible to fully explain why. Maybe a stakeholder seems hesitant to commit, or you sense the team’s morale is low, even if the status reporting is telling you everything is on track. These things might not be much today, but they might cause bigger problems in the future.

That’s where intuition often comes into play. It’s often said that project management is part art and part science, and the intuition part is definitely not science! But the art is where we navigate the complex, human part of the job.

Managing uncertainty

So much of what we do as project managers is working in an uncertain environment. It’s juggling all the facts and then applying what feels right, while sticking to the boundaries and governance structure – just writing that out makes me feel it’s a balancing act. And one we don’t always get right!

A lot of what we do as project managers is solving problems, or helping teams solve problems, and the kinds of problems my teams are faced with today feel stickier and more intertwined than the projects of 10 years ago. No matter how careful the planning, there are unforeseen challenges. And that’s where intuition steps in. It helps connect the dots between facts, previous experience and what we know will work, which is handy if you don’t have lots of time to solutionise.

Experience shapes intuition

How much do gut feelings play when you are faced with an uncertain situation? And how much are those gut feelings influenced by the years of experience and knowledge of corporate strategy and conversations with your sponsor? Probably more than we acknowledge.

We must internalise all the things to do with project context, plus all our lessons learned experience on the way, and so while it feels like we’re making a decision based on gut feeling or intuition, isn’t it really a decision shaped by professional practice and experience? (Or is that the same thing?)

Experience feeds our intuition and guides us when the situation is high-pressure or the decision is woolly. The more experience you have, the better your instincts tend to be – and not just in project management but across all facets of life generally. It’s a deep understanding of your environment and how people and processes play together. You’ve seen it happen before, either on your own project or someone else’s, or you’ve read about it or heard a conference presentation. All these things contribute to your ability to act instinctively. They inform your decision-making, creating a kind of ‘mental database’ that helps you respond more quickly and effectively when things don’t go as planned. Which is quite often, on projects!

Let process lead

We can’t manage everything on feelings, the project management process is there for a reason. However, we can’t help but manage a little bit on instinct and experience as well. The more experience you have, the easier it is to trust your gut. But as we say at work, trust but verify. Once you’ve got a sense of where you feel you should be going, check in with that reluctant stakeholder, or ask the team about how they are feeling. Get tangible data where you can to back up what you instinctively know, and go from there.

While so many of us still use the humble spreadsheet for project management and tracking, there are lots of cool technologies out there that will (eventually) be game-changing for project managers. And I’m not talking about AI, although of course that is huge in our industry at the moment.

Project management tools are often seen as task-based, schedule-based, scenario-based products, but will that change when we bring more elements of gaming into the way that teams and results are managed?

Gamification

Gamified project management systems could incentivise teams to make progress. We could introduce a bit of healthy competition. I know not all teams are going to love the idea of gamified work, but in some teams it could provide a bit of engagement and interest. If your project management software has the option to award stars (for example) for contribution, then take a look at what features you could switch on.

I’m part of a community where likes on posts are rewarded – not for the person doing the liking but for the person being liked. The aim is to encourage thoughtful, helpful comments that the community finds valuable. I think it’s a balance between spending all your time crafting the perfect, likeable comment and doing your work, but I do think we’ll see more gamification coming into project management, and I’ve talked about that at conferences before.

Role-playing

I know, I cringe too when role-playing gets mentioned. However, when I’ve been on training courses and we’ve done some role-playing (for example, having a difficult conversation with a colleague) it has been very helpful in addressing the situation in real life.

If you think about it, you’ve probably used role-playing already in your projects. If you have ever demonstrated a solution to a group of customers, you’ve probably had someone playing the role of a customer placing an order or interacting with your product. Just do more of that! It really helps bring the product to life.

You could also look to incorporate role-playing scenarios in training and change management activities. Work with stakeholders and users to give them first-hand experience of the change in a safe environment, helping them see it from different roles in the journey, for example, what it will be like to interact with the product as a customer.

Virtual reality

Personally, I can’t say I’ve used VR for project delivery (yet) but it is a feature of science-based learning at my children’s school. They use VR headsets for educational purposes to explore science topics. Which is cool.

We could see the same for project deliverables, perhaps a virtual simulation of a building that users could walk around to see what it’s like before the construction is complete, or something like that. Perhaps it will get used for virtual project kick off meetings or simulation-based training. This community has probably seen examples of that in use. If you have, can you drop me a comment below and let us all know how that worked out for you?

How do you feel project management is going to adopt new tech (that may or may not be aligned to AI)? If you’ve seen any of it in practice I’d love to hear how you are using it! Thanks!

I’ve been focusing all month on ways to improve and develop your career as a project manager, and today I wanted to talk about how to expand your knowledge base. Too often, I think project managers get stuck using the same sources time and time again. And we can learn a lot by accessing materials that are available for free, as long as we know where to look. So if you haven’t considered any of these knowledge-sources this year, put some time in your diary to check them out.

YouTube

Not just for funny cat videos! There are lots of quality project management vloggers out there, talking about everything from a day in the life to running projects transparently and reporting back on the results, to PMP® prep videos helping you understand the more complex concepts. 

Subscribe to a few channels and check them out. Look for content producers who have a lot of likes, and who post regularly on the platform, sharing new videos on a regular basis. You don’t have to leave a comment, but you’ll often find that creators will respond to new comments if you post them soon after the video has been shared. If you get alerts from the channel, you’ll get notified when a new video is available and the creator may respond to your comment.

LinkedIn Learning

Similar to YouTube, there are plenty of LinkedIn Learning trainers sharing amazing insights in well-produced training content. Search for the project management topic you are interested in and see what is out there. Your employer might have access to a corporate subscription that you can use. I have access via my university as an alumna.

There are a lot of courses to choose from, so look for topics that are relevant to your current work (or that you would like to learn more about) and providers who have good customer reviews. It feels to me that LinkedIn Learning courses are quality checked, so you should be in good hands whichever one you go for.

Webinars

There are lots of webinars here on projectmanagement.com, taught by experienced trainers and covering a range of cutting edge and established project management ideas. And there are plenty of webinars out there run by other organisations, including PMI Chapters and software companies. Do a search to find out what is coming up in the near future and then regularly make a point of signing up to one webinar a month to expand your horizons.

Podcasts

Podcasts are another way to get real-time, current knowledge and get exposure to people you would never normally get the chance to chat to in real life! Subscribe to a few that sound good and then switch them out if you want a change. There are literally hundreds of relevant podcasts and episodes on all kinds of topics.

Interview-style podcasts are good ones to focus on, and tune into any that promise case studies or sharing research results as these will help you broaden your knowledge and stay current in the market. 

Expanding your knowledge base is a really good way to stay up to date on new methodologies, trends, and technologies which in turn can help you stay competitive. But more than that, it’s a way of helping you stay connected to the profession and continuing to develop your skills so you can add more value to the teams you work with.

Carrying on from my last article about career development opportunities for the coming year, let’s talk about something else you can build into your development plans: enhancing your competencies and key skills.

The first challenge when you come to work on skill development is to work out which ones are worthy of your time. Well, the good news is that many skills overlap. I did a survey recently on important skills for project managers and shared the results on LinkedIn. The comments pointed out that the ‘leadership’ skill was actually a collection of other skills. Other commentators said that it shouldn’t be a skill by itself at all. So truly for project managers, there are so many skills we use every day that it really doesn’t matter which ones you choose to work on. You will get benefit from developing any of them. As long as you aren’t already a super expert in that field with nothing to learn!

Here are some I think that it’s worth leaning into this year.

Problem-solving

Had any problems recently? It seems to be never-ending problems right now, am I right? I don’t know if it’s the time of year or whether it’s simply a sign that work is getting more complex, but there is never a shortage of problems to sort out.

Build your problem solving skills by learning different techniques for group facilitation, conflict resolution, root cause analysis and group decision making. Then you’ll have a toolbox of tactics to draw from whenever you hit a snag in the project.

Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the art of being able to ask AI for something and getting back a good quality result. When it comes to generative AI, it’s really important to be able to get the right kind of output, otherwise the exercise is not worth it – the results are too generic.

Use the PMI course in prompt engineering as a starting point and then if you want to take it further look into other resources and courses to help you develop good skills. Be aware that the AI field is developing really quickly so I would tend to rely on training videos, webinars and online materials over books simply due to the pace of change (and I say that as an author myself).

Communication

Communication is an old favourite skill, but it’s certainly one we can all do more to improve. The type of communication we use these days is also different. For example, it’s a lot more online, asynchronous communication, mediated through technology like messaging apps and collaboration tools. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it is a skill. And if you want to make yourself understood, then this is where I would be putting my time and effort, especially if you work virtually a lot of the time.

These are just three of the many skills you could focus on this year, and of course you could focus on all of them. If you are serious about professional development, you could choose several, or even one a month to give you a broad boost across many areas. Maybe brainstorm a few topics that you’d like to learn more about this year and plan some time across the months to make sure you have focus development time set aside.

We’re project managers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to block out time in the diary for development! However, I know that real life and projects get in the way, which is all the more reason to block out time now so you have it ready when you need it.