Beaufortes

Project Dogma?

I saw on a blog somewhere a couple of interesting definitions that have been cropping up in my thoughts recently.

Methodology + Mindlessness = Dogma

Methodology + Mindfulness = Excellence

How many project methodology graduates have been taught to use a hammer, and then see nails everywhere? In fact they lose the ability to see anything else!

Do you see your project through the filters of the methodology you are most familiar with? Can you see your project outside of these filters? What fresh insight might this give you?

- Jason Bates (I'm back)

Tags:
methodology, Project+Management, Perception, Dogma

Shift Happens

I don’t know the source of this information, but it’s plausible and thought provoking…if you know where it came from, please leave a comment!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Strategic+Information

Guarantee Project Success 2

I suggested in my previous blog piece the idea that a powerful definition of a project would be:

“A project is the way that an organization takes a risk”.

I think this is powerful for several reasons:

1. It’s universal – it doesn’t matter what type of project you’re running, you invest resources with the intention to capture value.
2. It formally acknowledges uncertainty – every project has it, but most teams are in denial about the extent of it. For instance, enterprise transformation projects are very often a process of discovery, rather than the execution of a set of pre-defined steps – yet I seem them planned-out like concrete projects all the time!
3. When you take risks you continually assess alternative outcomes for merit. These are “real options” and they have positive inherent value.
4. It creates a tacit permission to consider course changes during the project if new outcomes are perceived.  The selection of these outcomes would still be considered success!
5. A thorough consideration of project domain complexity will reveal that we tend to vastly over-simplify our approach to them.  The definition suggests the proper appraisal of the project’s complexity is necessary.
6. It embeds the project within the organization, and the portfolio of changes that are occurring inside it and in its external context.

It’s unusual to discuss risk-taking, rather than risk-management.  Most project management tools are risk management tools, focusing on minimizing risk for a single course of action, a single outcome.  Risk taking is another art entirely.

I’m sure I’ve got more to say about this subject – until next time!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project+success, Project+failure, Risk+management

Guarantee Project Success

One of our successful adwords campaigns has this headline, but I confess it troubles me a bit.  Is it possible to guarantee project success?  I think it is, but it depends on your frame of reference.  If you define a project as something like:

“A project is any outcome you’re committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete.”

Then you’ve set yourself up for a very binary pass/fail criteria, and your next action is going to be running to the Gantt chart.  I’ve been contemplating the experience of leading and running projects, and I’d like to propose what I believe to be a much more powerful definition:

“A project is the way an organisation takes a risk.”

I want to leave this idea with you – to gestate – and I’ll be exploring it over my next few blog pieces to see where it leads me.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project+success, project+failure, risk+management

The above average project team

Reading back through my post on cognitive bias. A couple of items from the list stood out for me as being interesting to consider with respect to how we think and see projects, and project leadership.

The Lake Wobegon effect (You know that you’ll be quoting this later), is apparently named after a fictional US town where everyone is above average. This is quite appropriate for a cognitive bias that’s probably best demonstrated with an example

“The swedish researcher Ola Svenson found that 80% of drivers surveyed rated themselves in the top 30% of all drivers.^[1]”

For a variety of attributes including fairness, virtuosity, luck, and investing ability, most people apparently believe that they are above average.

So my question is this, if this holds for self-assessment of ‘project delivery skills’, how might this affect someone’s ability to budget, and forecast the length of time taken for particular tasks?

… in my experience, many project managers do indeed believe that not only they, but their entire team is better than average, and consequently can shave budget and time off of recommended plans.

(Is there a “Project Wobegon Effect” that people can be prepared for?)

Does this tally with your experience too?

—Jason Bates

Tags: Lake+Wobegon, Project+management, cognitive+bias

Stone Soup

The old fable of “stone soup” is an interesting allegory for project leadership of all types.

Creating a frame for collaboration, the main heroes make something out of nothing, beat the prisoner’s dilemma, and through the power of telling a curious and surprising story, forge an outcome that would not have occurred if they had started with a purely factual explanation of what they were doing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Visual Communications

Indexed is one of my favourite sites for a quick hit of humour. The posts are based on the type of diagrams you find in a traditional business presentation applied to very “non-business” insights.

 

£25.05 At The Petrol Pump...

I stood at the petrol pump, gently squeezing the handle, watching the amount readout slowly increase £24.91… £24.93…. £24.97… £25.05… dang!

Since I learnt to drive, (many years ago) I’ve always had the same ritual at the petrol pump – I buy petrol in round amounts. £15, £20, £25. – No nasty change to find, no walking away with 97 pence in 2’s and 1’s.

But you know this day was different. As I watched the petrol pump hit £25.05 I realized that getting to round figures didn’t really matter to me anymore. I now normally pay for my petrol with my visa card!… there is no change to worry about!

Whether in a high pressure project environment, or at the petrol pump. People rarely question the rituals they’ve spent years practising. Conditions change, and yet we continue to use the same traditions and rituals.

Now I was only losing seconds a week at the petrol pump, but there are companies and projects (Yours?) losing hundreds of thousands of pounds daily because of their adherence to traditional ways of doing things.

So, could some of the bedrock processes that your company undertakes be overdue for a review… you betcha!

You might be surprised, you may find some simple solutions that lead to major results that really get you noticed!

**Did you ever hear that story of someone saving their company millions by moving to envelopes with little plastic windows instead of printing the address on the envelope?

£25.05 …. works for me!

—Jason Bates

Tags: behaviours, ritual, business, project, mindfulness

Reframing - How Perception is "Reality"

A while ago, when I worked for a big consulting firm, there was a phrase that people kept using: “Perception is Reality”.  The mantra was spouted by Subjectivists (people who believe that what they perceive is just one perspective on reality) and irritated the Objectivitists (people who think that what they perceive is Reality – “and there’s no two-ways about it”).  I believe that the Subjectivists have a more powerful approach in the long term.

I was reminded of this difference by my Google Quote of the Day:

“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” – HL Mencken

Which is a classic “reframing”, and reminds me to work with the most powerful “frame” I can create.  And then by a curious coincidence, the Google Buddhist Thought for the Day seems to relate to this subject as well:

“While the Tathagata (Buddha), in his teaching, constantly makes use of conceptions and ideas about them, disciples should keep in mind the unreality of all such conceptions and ideas. They should recall that the Tathagata, in making use of them in explaining the Dharma always uses them in the semblance of a raft that is of use only to cross a river. As the raft is of no further use after the river is crossed, it should be discarded.”  – Buddha

Which reminds me to let go of the frame when it is no longer useful, and find a more powerful one.

P.S. If all this talk about frames and framing is confusing to you – or you’re wondering why I mention it on this Project Leadership Blog, then I’d strongly recommend downloading the “7 Secrets of Project Leadership” document from our web site.

– Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project+Leadership

Over-simplification, polarization, and false dichotomy

" . . . The greatest failings of strategic management have occurred when managers took one point of view too seriously."- Henry Mintzberg et. al.

I was looking for the quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald about first rate intelligences and holding mulitple ideas simultaneously, when Google threw me a Yale commencement speech (included after the jump)… it resonated with me, and provides an interesting backdrop to some of the work I do with business clients, and indeed some of the issues being debated across the world!