Voices on Project Management

By Lynda Bourne

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

We’ve all heard—and have probably uttered—this epigram many times.

The origin of the phrase now known as Murphy’s Law is often attributed to U.S. Air Force colonel and flight surgeon Dr. John Paul Stapp, who directed research Project MX981 in the late 1940s. The objective was to determine the effect of gravitational forces (g-forces) on the human body—and to use this data to work out how to safely eject pilots from high-speed jet aircraft. The experiments involved rapidly accelerating and decelerating rocket sleds carrying varying payloads, including human volunteers. For many of these experiments, Stapp served as the volunteer so he could apply his medical knowledge directly to what he was feeling. Over the years, he collected a catalogue of broken bones and other injuries, but no one was seriously injured or killed in large part due to the application of Murphy’s Law.

To validate the experiments in Project MX981, Stapp required very precise measurements of the stresses being experienced by the volunteers. He became aware that Capt. Edward A. Murphy was working on another project involving centrifuges, which included designing very accurate systems to measure the g-forces exerted on the person in the centrifuge.

From Stapp’s perspective, Murphy’s sensors seemed to be ideal for accurately measuring the forces the person strapped to the rocket sled experienced. Murphy happily agreed to Stapp’s request to modify his sensors and shipped a couple to Stapp for use. However, the first experiment Murphy’s gauges failed completely: No measurements were recorded. When Murphy came out the morning after to investigate the failure, he found the gauges were oriented incorrectly and is reported to recall saying, “If there is more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.” Murphy had made accurate drawings of the gauges and instructed the people who would install them but had not made it clear that the gauges had to be positively oriented in only one direction.

The origins of Murphy’s Law lies in a conversation following this failure. Murphy recalled saying, “Well, I really have made a terrible mistake here, I did not cover every possibility.” Stapp replied: “Well that’s a good candidate for Murphy’s Law,” according to Nick T. Spark’s “A History of Murphy’s Law.”

The experiments continued with the final test run before the project was terminated. With Stapp as the volunteer, the test resulted in the sled accelerating from 0 to 630 miles (1,014 kilometers) per hour—the highest land speed of any human—in 5 seconds, creating a force of 20 Gs. The sled then stopped in 1.4 seconds, imposing 46.2 Gs of force on Stapp.

When asked many years later about the remarkable safety record of Project MX981, Stapp said one of the key factors was the application of Murphy’s Law: “The entire team adhered to Murphy’s Law, they always kept in mind whatever could go wrong would, so they made extreme efforts to think up what could go wrong and fix it before the test.”

While your project is unlikely to have the risk profile of a ride on a rocket sled, designing potential problems and failures out of the overall system pays dividends. Success is designed in, not tested in. To apply Murphy’s Law proactively, you need to think through everything before you start work. Ask yourself: When one part fails, does the system still work? Will it still function as it was supposed to do? What are the single points of failure? What are the processes someone can do incorrectly?

This type of thinking establishes potential critical failure points, where there’s a need to put redundancy into systems. It also pushes teams to ensure the opportunity for human error is eliminated wherever possible. There are formal approaches to applying Murphy’s Law, such as failure modes and effects analysis or reliability engineering used in system engineering and on the design of critical systems. But you probably don’t need to be this sophisticated on your project. Simply ask your team to think through what can go wrong and what can be done about it. This approach may be included in the project’s regular risk reviews or included in the agenda for the daily stand-up or other team meetings.

How will you apply Murphy’s Law with your team?

by Dave Wakeman

Did you get your vaccine yet? In the United States, we’ve done a good job of getting shots into people’s arms—and for the first time in a long time, things are starting to look normal. For project leaders, the ramp up and ramp down of the vaccination program is likely to be a good case study. But I don’t want to talk about that today, even though it’s amazing. Instead, I want to discuss an idea that’s close to the vaccine rollout and the leadership topics that I’ve been hitting on for the last year: the idea of how to lead now. Over the last year, I’ve gone back and taken a few classes so that at the end of the pandemic, I could be in a position to deal with whatever came next. 

One of the ideas I’ve been grappling with during my schoolwork has been the idea of emergent strategy. It’s a branch of strategic thinking that says that you might make a strategic plan, but what comes out the other side might be entirely different because your strategy has to react to the world it exists in. Sounds familiar, right? Isn’t that the world that project managers live in every day? Digging deeper, I realized that we can actually learn a few lessons on leading through the end of the pandemic using emergent strategy:

Flexibility wins: I’m all for planning like I’m sure most of the folks reading this are. But the pandemic has laid bare the idea that we can plan anything with certainty given how chaotic some of the news around the virus, the vaccines and the economy was. The lesson here is that we have to maintain our flexibility. 

This is the heart of emergent strategy. You pick a destination, make a plan, but recognize that you’re going to have to change course throughout the project to achieve success. The big difference I see from normal project thinking is that in an environment like this, the formal change process likely must be managed more tightly. 

Don’t be wed to preconceived ideas: Change is constant—we know that now more than ever. One challenge of leadership in modern times, especially on projects, is that we can’t know everything. The thing about this is that we also tend to hang onto our preconceived view of the project, the plan or the world around us. This “change is happening faster than ever before” narrative is a bit overblown, but what I do know is that our day-to-day reality can be impacted pretty quickly and we need to be able to rethink the context of a project.

Be open to feedback all around you: The key here is to pay attention to what the world is telling you. These “signals” may come in the form of news reports, conversations, premonitions or experience. Be aware of what’s going on around you and try to gain a holistic feeling for the world that your project exists in. 

This can be difficult to do because in the same way that there’s a lot of important information to study and deal with, there’s a lot of noise that can get in the way of good decision making as well. So you need to constantly balance the signals and the noise to keep your project moving forward.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

By Sree Rao, PMP, PgMP, PMI-ACP

The ability to influence is one of the most valuable—and
underrated—leadership traits. It’s particularly important for program
managers, since we must influence cross-functional team members over
whom we may have some positional authority—but not enough to get things
done.

Here are 7 ways to influence:

1. Identify your style

We all have our own ways of trying to impact other people’s thinking and
actions. Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe identified five different
styles:
Rationalizing: Using logic and reason to advocate for a solution
Asserting: Stating ideas confidently to directly drive action
Negotiating: Finding favorable compromises without sacrificing the long-
term goal
Inspiring: Drawing on passion to open people’s eyes to new possibilities
Bridging: Resonating with others by listening and building coalitions

We often try to influence the way we like to be influenced—but that doesn’t
always work. Instead, try to match the style of the person you’re trying to
influence.

2. Establish trust

Influence is based on a foundation of trust and credibility that’s been
solidified over time. We cannot build trust overnight. The best way is to
continually deliver on your promises and be transparent when there are
roadblocks. Encourage others to express their honest opinions, concerns and
doubts, and give open, honest and constructive feedback.

3. Build social capital

Look beyond your role and offer help: Volunteer to pitch in on mentoring or
other company initiatives that you’re passionate about. You’ll get to network
with people across various departments and build social capital. Give help—
and then ask for help.

4. Think like a hotshot

Consider this as a variation of what former Focus Brands COO Kat Cole calls
the hotshot rule: Think of a colleague that you admire for their influencing
skills—aka, a hotshot. Now imagine if that colleague took over your role.
What would they immediately change? How would they interact with the
person you’re trying to influence? This might not be feasible in all situations
because of personality differences, but you can gain some insights from the
hotshot’s style.

5. Influence the influencer

If you’re trying to influence a team, identify the person on that team with
the most sway and influence them. And they will in turn influence the team.

6. Unlearn what you know

Keep an open mind and don’t write anyone off. There might be ways to win
over even the biggest skeptics. Initiate a conversation, acknowledging that
your view is different from the other person’s and have them help you
understand their perspective.

7. Know your value

The Cohen-Bradford influence model recommends that you think of what you
can offer in exchange for what you’re asking for. That can be your technical,
organizational or process knowledge, a tool, an expression of gratitude or
recognition, or help with tasks you have expertise in. Be mindful to do
something the other person values, which may not be what you value. As an
example, some people don’t like public recognition. Knowing that and
respecting that will go a long way.

Let me know your favorite influencing technique in the comments.

By Cyndee Miller

I’m headed back to my office for the first time in six months—taking the train and maybe even collaborating with my team IRL. I’m not going to lie. It feels really, really strange. Like most companies, mine is opting for hybrid: three days in, two days working from home.

It’s looking like the next norm—and it’s not hard to see why. A study from HR consulting firm Mercer found 94 percent of U.S. employers reported productivity was the same as or even higher than it was before the pandemic. And employees—now accustomed to the flexibility—are less likely to compromise. A March Boston Consulting Group survey found that 89 percent of workers from across 190 countries said they’d prefer a job that allows them to work from home at least occasionally. Yet that same study found that only 1 in 4 workers would switch to a completely remote model if they could.

“A lot of companies underestimate the power of workplace,” said Kahn Yoon, director of international projects at global workplace design firm M Moser Associates in Singapore.

“Whilst I’ve enjoyed working from home to a degree, once I started coming back, I also realized how much I missed having collaboration with colleagues and having those innovation moments,” he told Projectified^®.

Okay, so clearly Yoon isn’t alone. Most people want to spend at least some time in the office. But what does that actual physical space look like?

As we wrote about in PM Network, at first the focus was on “pandemic resistant” offices. Salon Alper Derinbogaz, for example, revealed plans for a single-story office building connected by open-air and semi-covered walkways and terraces—perfect for outdoor meetings.

Guallart Architects took pandemic-proofing to the next level with its proposed Self-Sufficient City in Beijing. The project aims to eliminate any disruption to daily life in the case of future lockdowns by designing and building a mixed-use community with supercharged amenities, like a communal greenhouse for food production, solar-paneled roofs to produce energy, an on-site co-working office and 3D printers and rapid prototyping machines to produce everyday goods.

They’re super interesting concepts, but what about the good old offices many people are heading back to right now? To safely transition from the home-office back to the office-office, leaders will have to reboot their thinking about how to work—but also the purpose, role and design of the workspace. And that requires lots of pilot projects, lots of iteration—and probably saying good riddance to the once ubiquitous open office plan. (As someone who did serious time in one of those arrangements, I will not mourn its loss.)

“It’s really time to rethink the open plan,” said Todd Heiser, principal and co-managing director of Gensler’s Chicago office. “For as long as I’ve been doing this, individual workstations have become more open with ever-increasing density, and I think as we return, these spaces really need to flip. Meetings need to happen more in the open, and focused work probably needs to be reconsidered,” he said on Projectified^®.

Even Google is rethinking its famously open offices. The New York Times dubbed one of the concepts as “Ikea meets Lego,” creating team “pods” with chairs, desks, whiteboards and storage units on casters that can be arranged—and rearranged—however the group sees fit. The company is also trying out a new meeting room called Campfire that intersperses in-person attendees with very large displays of virtual participants in a circle. It sounds weirder than it looks and could actually help remote team members feel like they’re part of the action.

For its Working from Home, Working from Work project, architecture firm Woods Bagot proposed keeping employees remote for “solo activities” and saved the office for team activities. That makes sense to me. Because let’s face it, brainstorming on a Zoom call is … rough. For Kahn, that means “more meeting spaces, more open collaboration spaces—because you always rely on serendipitous discussions that spark a bit of that innovation.”

But he also acknowledged that offices are going to have to compete with work from home. So along with boosting collaboration by tricking out the office with the right technology, companies would be wise to invest in biophilia so you “don’t feel like you’re in a big sort of a factory of desks.” Uh, yeah, that just doesn’t seem like an effective way to foster that kind of innovation we all keep saying we need more of.

Will hybrid teams working in hybrid offices be business as usual in the future? How are you help reimagine your office as an incubator for new ideas?

By Yasmina Khelifi, PMP, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA

In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of sharing knowledge. Now it’s time to talk about how you’ll document and maintain that information. And this is where project leaders should turn to their teams for ideas.

A few years ago, I belonged to a very efficient and collaborative project team. We were all responsible for a service deployed across different manufacturers’ models, hence the importance of having up-to-date information. We maintained a spreadsheet file shared on a cloud service and we updated it regularly, as agreed on by the team. Then a new manager decided to implement a different system. The team was told to send all information to two administrators who would handle updates.

You can imagine what happened.

Almost no one sent the information and the system was decommissioned after two years. As a result, all the knowledge our team had built over the years was lost. What was deemed a more professional or advanced tool ended up crippling the knowledge base.

As a project leader, we need to trust our teams and let them define the best ways to share and store information. We’re not talking here about an encyclopedia of knowledge. It’s really just enough documentation to help handover and onboarding.

One of the best ways to ensure knowledge sharing is to record presentations and conference calls. You can also take detailed notes to share with other project team members.

Another major part of closing the information loop within teams is to solicit and give constructive criticism and feedback. Postmortems, retrospectives or lessons learned are an invaluable opportunity to share knowledge and ultimately document it.

How do you let team preferences shape your approach to sharing knowledge?