Easy in theory, difficult in practice

A systemic lack of predictability regarding resource availability threatens to trump unmanaged scope creep, technical complexity and organization change resistance as the primary source of project risks.  Achieving an organization’s strategic objectives gets impacted as transformational projects require specialized skills that are in high demand and in low supply – this was admirably depicted by Scott Adams in an old Dilbert cartoon. 

The obvious solution to this is to either add more resources or take on less work in parallel. The first choice is usually unrealistic and success with the second is not achieved overnight.  Reducing the volume of multitasking is a key to more predictable throughput, but convincing senior management that you can actually do more by doing less is not easy. 

In the interim, here are a few tactical steps that a project manager can take:

• Pity the poor resource manager who has competing demands on his/her resources’ time!  Unless your organization follows an objective project prioritization approach, priorities are likely set by whoever screams loudest.  In this situation, your best chance of improving resource availability predictability is to have a positive relationship with these resource managers so that they will try to be as considerate as possible with your resource needs.  If you are really lucky, they may even be motivated to assess and modify the resources’ operational duties to help you out.
• Reduce the degree of project internal multitasking – it’s bad enough that your team members are likely working on other projects as well as operational activities, but at least try to avoid their having to context switch between tasks on your project.
• Multitasking creates inefficiency as a result of context switching. Reduce the effort wasted in context switching by simplifying the ramp up/ramp down for team members.  One way to do this is to decompose work activities to a low enough level of detail, so individual tasks can be accomplished within one or two context switching cycles at most.
• If your organization does not have a standard PM methodology, work with your peer project managers to define a consistent set of expectations for team member progress and issue management.  If a resource knows that the reporting requirements are consistent across the concurrent projects they are assigned to, that’s one less thing for them to worry about learning (and re-learning!).
• Walk a mile in their shoes. When team members have multiple projects and operational activities to complete, increase the likelihood that they will want to work on yours by ensuring they understand how their tasks (and the success of the project as a whole) will benefit the organization and them.  Remove as many barriers to their being able to efficiently complete their tasks as possible. That means no unnecessary meetings and be sure to streamline project administration and communications as much as possible!  Take a page from agile approaches and embrace the role of a project manager as being responsible for clearing the hurdles from the team’s path.

Resource availability unpredictability is here to stay. You can make like an ostrich, stick your head in the sand and hope the problem goes away. Or you can take some tactical steps to increase the odds of success for your project, while simultaneously evangelizing the merits of reduced multitasking!

Which is it to be?

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in June 2010 on Projecttimes.com)

A semi-annual ritual for many who live in cold climates is swapping all season to winter tires on their cars and back again. This exercise also presents a good opportunity to catch up on any other outstanding preventative maintenance for our vehicles. 

For those of us who live in places which observe daylight savings time, we are reminded to change the batteries in our smoke alarms whenever our clocks spring forward or fall back.

Here are a few questions to consider if its been a while since you've performed preventative maintenance on your projects.

What's the what? It can be too easy to have our heads down and keep executing the project, but what if there have been some shifts in the environment which have eroded the project's benefits? While this isn't a primary responsibility for most project managers, ignoring expected outcomes might be considered negligence.

How's the how? Assuming we are comfortable with the project's objectives, are the solution and delivery approaches still viable? If we chose an adaptive approach, is that still the best choice? Are there any early warning signs that solution design or architecture might be flawed and should be revisited? Is there any waste that's been introduced in our product or project processes which could be eliminated?

Risks revisited? If its been a few weeks since the contents of the risk register have been reviewed chances are some new risks could be identified and the assessment of older ones might need to be refreshed. It's also a good practice to periodically assess the effectiveness of risk responses and see if any key assumptions made to date can be confirmed.

Stakeholders surveyed? Similar to the risk register, if there are cobwebs on your stakeholder register you'd likely want to see if any new stakeholders have emerged and whether the attitude, interest and power of existing stakeholders remains the same. How effective have your stakeholder engagement strategies been to date and do they need to be adjusted?

Team thriving? When's the last time you did a pulse check on the health of your team? Was your last team building activity months ago? Even if no one has joined or left the team, you need to regularly monitor team morale and provide opportunities for individual and team development.

Lessons learned? Has any new knowledge been identified, curated and most important, disseminated and learned? Even on projects following a traditional delivery approach, the team should regularly reflect back on what has been learned to help them and others improve.

Ignoring such good practices won't usually cause immediate issues but paying down project management debt gets costlier the longer you wait!

When Gene Roddenberry staffed the U.S.S. Enterprise with a highly diverse set of races, species & genders, he used Star Trek as his soapbox to challenge pervasive social injustices of the late Sixties. However, by doing so, he also provided another benefit of diversity: improved risk management.

When you consider the Enterprise’s original mission, it meets many of the criteria for a large, highly complex project:

• Scope – to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations.
• Schedule – five years.
• A unique endeavor – its original mission statement “to boldly go where no one has gone before” reinforces how unique the mission was.

In multiple episodes from the original series, and later through some of the movies, we saw instances of where diversity was a key contributor in helping the crew overcome dire situations. One such example comes from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. Of the entire crew, Spock was the only person strong enough to withstand the radiation within the matter/antimatter chamber to jump start the Enterprise’s engines. Anyone other than a Vulcan would likely have been overwhelmed before the process could have been completed.

So how does diversity facilitate more effective risk management?

When identifying risks, use of checklists and historical data can help surface uncertainties which would otherwise have been missed, but they are no substitute for a diverse range of expertise. If team members and stakeholders have similar educational and experiential backgrounds, there is a greater possibility of key risks remaining unidentified.

When analyzing risks or when monitoring early warning signs of risk realization, diversity is a good way to overcome risk biases and groupthink.

Finally, the quality of risk responses is constrained by the creativity and imagination of the team. It is well known that properly harnessed diversity promotes greater creativity.

So the next time you have the opportunity to tackle a challenging project, resist the temptation to staff the project with team members who are just like you by making diversity one of the key criteria for resource selection.

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in September 2014 on my personal blog, kbondale.wordpress.com)

We spend so much effort managing threats to our projects that it can be very easy to forget that uncertainty can also benefit us. Spend any time reading up on project risk management and you'll learn about opportunities and the different was of responding to them.

But how easy is it to put that theory into practice?

I've written before that it can be very challenging for project managers or team members who have been used to looking at the glass as being half empty to re-frame their thinking that it is actually still half full. The more experience they've gained, the more likely they are to focus on what could go wrong instead of being open to what might go better than expected. It wouldn't be a stretch to consider that Murphy could be the patron saint of project managers!

If a team isn't actively looking for opportunities, they are unlikely to recognize them or even if they do, that realization may dawn too late for them to be able to do anything about it.

So can we help teams proactively identify opportunities knowing that they are predisposed to ignore them?

It is very common for companies to create threat identification checklists based on lessons learned from completed projects and other sources of wisdom of the organization. While there might not be as many organizational process assets to provide input into the creation of a checklist, you could structure it with the same categories as a threat identification checklist and brainstorm some common questions for each category.

You could also consider creating one or more fishbone diagrams replacing problems at the head of the fish with common types of opportunities.

Finally, assumptions analysis can help us identify opportunities as effectively as it can threats. For example, if we've assumed that a given activity is particularly challenging and will take many weeks to complete, how might we identify and exploit the reality that it is a lot easier than expected?

"Diligence is the mother of good luck" - Ben Franklin

(Note: this article was originally written and published in August 2015 on my personal blog, kbondale.wordpress.com)

With shifting business priorities caused by internal strategic or external environmental changes, it is not uncommon to find yourself pulled off one project to manage a new, higher priority one. In some cases, the project you had been previously leading is put on hold or could even get cancelled but other times, the previous project is handed over to a different project manager.

Under such circumstances, you are likely going to be under some pressure to start planning and leading your new project, so you might be forgiven for just pointing your replacement in the direction of your project control book and introducing them to the sponsor, key stakeholders and the team.

If you really want to reduce the likelihood of getting pulled back in when things start to go wrong, it would be much better to negotiate with your leadership team for some breathing room to help you complete the following activities.

1. Refresh your project control book. If it has been a few days (or weeks!) since you last reviewed and updated your schedule, RAID log and other living project control knowledge, do it now to save your successor from the frustration of having to bridge gaps between the documented and actual state of the project.
2. Review open risks, actions & issues with the new project manager but also walk them through key decisions which were made over the project’s lifetime and any critical assumptions which haven’t been validated. A detailed review of the stakeholder register, project schedule and financials is also required.
3. Request the new project manager to facilitate a short lessons identification workshop with the team and some stakeholders. This not only gives you the chance to share lessons you’ve identified to date before you leave the project, but it also provides your successor with insights into the personalities of the key players on their new project.
4. Recognize your team members – just because a transition is happening shouldn’t mean that the good work they’ve done so far gets forgotten. Thank your old team members personally, and if your relationship with them supports it, meet with them individually to coach them on any opportunities for development. Send their people managers a brief note highlighting their accomplishments.
5. Reset access. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve taken over the leadership of a project only to find that I’m lacking the appropriate level of access required to work with key systems or documents. Credibility and precious time gets lost in resolving this if the transition has already happened. As part of the transition, the new project manager’s access privileges should be configured and yours should get reduced or removed.

Running for the hills might seem a natural reaction to being handed a new project, but resist this temptation and review the 5 R’s!

(Note: this article was originally written and published by me in February 2016 on my personal blog, kbondale.wordpress.com)