Yes Virginia, There Is A Project Management Plan
Planning is a way of proactively knowing what you are doing, before you do it. However, there is always a plan running – even when you don’t think you have a plan. Knowing this plan and accounting for it in your project management tools can vault you to success.
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. Do you believe this?
I once observed a manger send out a note telling everyone to “stop working, we are going to change our plan and we don’t yet know what the change is!” Is this the way you change a plan?
Planning and changing plans is as much an art as it is a science. I look primarily at three things when I am the new guy in charge of a project or even an organization.
- What is the current plan? Where will we end up if we just keep doing what we are doing?
- What is the official plan? What does everyone (senior management and our customers in particular) think we are doing?
- What should we be doing?
Let’s look at these three areas over the next few articles.
The Current Plan
You don’t think you have a plan? Yes you do. Just stop and look what people are doing. They are doing something – working towards some goal. In even the most dysfunctional organizations, I still find lots of activity with all the associated urgency and stress. Only once did I ever find folks sitting around, reading newspapers (no network access at that time due to security) and not working towards some goal.
You may be able to find the current plan written down somewhere. Usually however it is similar to whatever was done in the past. This is the “normal” process of the organization. This is what people will do in the absence of any other direction. It is also what they will often do in spite of any other direction. This is both a strength and a weakness of any organization.
If you spend time figuring out this plan, you will learn a lot about your organization. Often much more than you currently know, even if you’ve been in the organization for a long time.
For example, I rolled on to a project that was in the final months before delivery of the product to our customers. I spent about three days talking to everyone. I simply asked them what they were doing and what everyone else was doing. This second question was key. Even when I had been told what someone’s role was (usually by their manager), I still asked them and everyone else what is it that this person does.
On this particular project it became quickly clear that there was a huge disconnect between how management saw what was going on and what was actually taking place. The humorous part of this story is that when I highlighted the disconnects, so we could align them, I was told that it was my responsibility to do all the things that were not getting done along with a demand of why they were not yet done! I am not kidding and yes, I was there only a couple of weeks when this happened. This was also a project using the “B” team and was to end up with great quality and be our 2nd best selling product next to our epic selling product that had changed the industry. The fact that management was unaware of the real plan and had neglected the team turned out to be a blessing in disguise (more on that in Project Management Tools “B” Team).
The first takeaway is that the current plan can be critical and not knowing this plan before implementing a plan change, can results in some very unsuccessful planning efforts and can undermine the successes that do exist. In the above example the current plan was far superior to the official plan and I almost wrecked things by highlighting to management the differences. While I don’t recommend not knowing what is going on as a project management tool (but, see Being Slightly Out Of Control Can Be A Good Thing), in this case continuing the benevolent neglect by more senior management turned out to be the best approach.
While most process improvement methodologies suggest determining the “as-is” process or plan before making a change, I use a method which was strongly influenced by my early military intelligence training. I talk to people and look for evidence for what is going on, but I don’t assume any one source or document is definitive. I try to corroborate whatever I hear, read or see with multiple sources of agreement. In the intelligence field we would always look for multiple supporting (and historically reliable) sources to increase the confidence in what we believed was happening. My favorite project management tool is to just have a large whiteboard and add notes to it on people, roles, schedules and plans, as I get information. The purpose is not to know some definitive exact project management plan, but instead to see what is actually going on, including the typical disconnects or disagreements that exist.
Notice that I used interchangeably “process” and “plan.” Let me explain. Most plans, say for a new product development, are really just particular instances of the existing organizational processes. So a plan, in many ways, is nothing more than a summary, at a high level, of how the existing people+processes+tools will proceed. Plans generally use existing processes and don’t try to, and should not try to, tell how something will be done. Knowing the current plan is often nothing more than understanding the real processes of the organization.
The second takeaway is that there is a plan, something people are doing and following, and it is to our advantage to know this plan as well as possible. It often is not the same as the official plan so before making changes to the official plan, we will want to employ project management tools to truly understand this current plan. Next , we will take a look at official plans in light of our new insights on the actual plans.
Filed Under Planning | 6 Comments
Get Out Of The Rut Of Solutions That Don’t Work!
Your project management tools and solutions should fix the problem you are trying to fix. Too many solutions are just patches on the system and come from being an expert in applying patches rather than solving the underlying problem. You can get out of this rut, if you recognize it and are willing to make some tough choices.
The phone rang. I could see that it was a toll free number. Probably a political call or some sales offer I figured. I picked up the phone and said “this is Bruce Benson.” There was a slight pause, then a voice: “We are truly sorry, a representative will be right with you.” I was called and automatically put on hold!
Someone figured this was a good solution. If the automatic dialing got a person before a representative was ready, just tell the person – the potential customer – that they are put on hold. I bet it was considered a technical achievement to put this apology in when the customer answered before the representative could pick up the phone. At no time did the caller robot tell me who was calling or why. Instead, the robot apologized profusely and repeatedly as only a robot caller can do.
What was the problem? The dialer got ahead of the available salesperson (I assume this was a sales call, but I didn’t wait beyond hearing 1.5 apologies). The solution? Make an anonymous apology. Did it keep me on the phone? No. At best they could have used that time to start their sales pitch. That didn’t happen either.
Sometimes we simply pick the wrong solution. Often in these cases we may become experts in the wrong solution. I recall the story of Lee Iaccoca trying to produce the first convertible car any US manufacturer had made in years. His managers and engineers laid out how long it would take to design and manufacture this new car. Reportedly, after listening long enough, Iaccoca’s patience ran out. He told them to just take an existing car and cut the top off!
Setting aside if this produced a quality automobile or not, it highlights how we get stuck in a rut and can’t see another way out. We are very good at working in a rut, even if the rut always results in something that does not work as well as we want. Just like the robot call I got.
When we keep getting the same results, not the results we want, this is a wake up call to try and do something different. In general “something different” should probably scare the wits out of you and possibly your team. If it is not scary, if it does not make you wonder if you are going to keep your job, then it may not be different enough.
I was relatively deep in debt as a young man. I could not pay off my credit cards each month. I had a continuing balance that often went up as fast as it ever went down even as I made payments. I understood the details of the minimum payment, the calculation of interest, the deadlines for payment, and the daily average calculation used for interest computations. I would play a game where I would send in a payment that would result in an exact outstanding balance such as $12,345.67. I knew the algorithms so well that I could produce digits in any order in the resulting balance for next month. I was an expert. But I was an expert at the wrong thing. I was an expert at what the credit card companies wanted me to know, but not in what I needed to know to get out of debt.
Luckily I realized soon enough that if I could afford to pay interest on a credit card then I could afford to pay cash instead of using a credit card. This was one advantage to becoming an expert in the wrong thing. That expertise made me realize the futility of what I was doing. I chopped up my credit cards and learned, really fast, to pay attention to how much cash I had, when I got paid next, what bills I had to pay and how much I needed and when I needed it each month. I became an expert on my needs and income. This was much more useful than knowing credit card agreements inside and out. I never went into consumer debt again (excluding automobiles and houses, all of which I paid off in about a third of the time allotted – for more on this story and on financial management in general see Quicken is a Great Project Management Tool).
I kicked myself out of my comfort zone, my rut, by making a hard change. This is also similar to the notion in The Toyota Way where one gets rid of buffers so that the problems the buffers are meant to cover are exposed (see Project Management Tools Honesty Buffers). This way the underlying problem must be fixed and can’t be avoided. In both these examples the key event was yanking away the safe approach (which while safe, may still be challenging and difficult to do) and exposing the real problems that needed to be dealt with.
In the case of the robot caller, the real problem was to figure out a way for a representative to be on the call as soon as a person answered the phone. Putting in the automatic apology just delayed dealing with the real problem, at least for the moment. It certainly didn’t encourage me to stay on the phone.
Good solutions often require you or your team to be pulled out of your comfort zone. Too many solutions, even while innovative and unique, can simply be the wrong solution and just become another temporary patch on the system. If your past track record of solutions just don’t seem to be making enough of a difference, consider those approaches that put you and your team well outside your comfort zones. These are often the real solutions you are looking for.
Filed Under Change Management | 2 Comments
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