PM Dom

I have a friend with a company called Outside the Box Consulting. I joke that my company should be called Inside the Box Consulting. I am completely inside the box when it comes to project management. In fact, I strive to be equidistant from every side of the box. The problems with my clients nearly always stem from outside the box thinking. They think there is some magic wand they can wave for project success. Or they believe they are agile even if they don’t know what that means. They seek to avoid the hard work by seeking outside the box solutions. They usually fail.

My advice is straight from research, knowledge and experience. Project management is hard but it is easier if you follow proven methodologies of scope, schedule and budget management. There are no short cuts to success. Leave innovation for the marketing and design people. Stick with science for project management.

Project saying #22 – the Highlander Rule:

There can be only one.

The name of this saying is from the cult classic, The Highlander.

I use it when assigning action items on a project. Some people like to avoid action items, or responsibility, or work of any kind. One way they do it is by getting multiple people assigned to a task. If it’s Bob and Suzy on a task, that gives Bob an excuse not to do it. Similarly I don’t assign action items to groups such as IT or Accounting. I want to know exactly who is responsible for the work being done. It does not have to be the person doing the work. It is simply the person I am going to ask for status.

So when someone wants more people added to an action item, sorry ” there can be only one!”

Project saying #25:

You can’t start doing something right until you’ve stopped doing it wrong.

As a consultant I am more familiar with dysfunctional IT organizations, ineffective PMOs and failing projects than most people. They wouldn’t call me if everything was ok. I am constantly amazed at how often my clients know they are doing something wrong. It reminds of a famous Bob Newhart skit where he is a psychologist who tells his patients, simply, to “Stop it!” Whatever bad habits or fears they have just “Stop it! Two words, first word S_T_O_P, second word I_T. Stop it.” It really can be that simple.

But I frequently meet resistance. When I see a project not going well and I advise the not-radical idea of clarifying scope, schedule and budget, my clients will complain “can we just let this project go forward?” Umm, no. I say to them:

You can’t start doing something right until you’ve stopped doing it wrong.

Sometimes I also add project saying #19:

The best time to do a task is three weeks ago. The second best time is today.

It is never too late to stop doing things you know are wrong. In fact, it is prerequisite for you to start doing things right.

Project saying #66:

We’d rather do 10 projects 60% correct than six projects 100% correct.

I find that most organizations do the former. When I review an organization’s project portfolio a common finding is they are doing too many projects. Some of the projects don’t align with the strategic goals and should be terminated in any case. But even if every project is worthy on its own, collectively they are too much work for the available resources.

Why does this happen? It’s the fault of management (or managers to make it personal). Too many managers feel their sole job is to get more work out of employees. They resort to adding more pressure to employees by adding more work. The hope is the threat, or actuality, of additional work will motivate employees to work harder. As if employees are a clogged drain and the appropriate amount of force will clear the obstacles and allow a lot more work to get done.

Manager’s also hate to have idle employees, so they assign work to meet 40 hours per week. However, project work is variable. If you aim for 40 hours per week, that ends being the floor, not the ceiling. When additional work is required, during design reviews or testing or launches, to name three examples, employees put in far more than 40 hours per week.

When quantity of work soars over 40 hours per week, quality goes down. Quality goes down because employees don’t have enough time to do it right and testing is inadequate to find the poor quality. (Morale also goes down in this situation as Daniel Pink has explained in motivating knowledge workers.) Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure quality in IT projects during the project (and may be difficult to measure after the project is done). And more unfortunately, many IT project managers are not technical so they would not be able to determine quality in the first place.

Since measuring quality is not an easy thing to do, management reverts to measuring quantity. Perhaps they can measure quantity of requirements, lines of code or user stories accomplished but usually it’s quantity of hours – all too easy to measure and usable by the lazy and unsophisticated. This results in a situation described by 37 Signals founders Jason Fried and David Hansson:

some people “try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them…. This results in inelegant solutions.” Workaholics “aren’t heroes,” they write. “They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.”

Measuring true performance and developing a culture of quality is hard. So most organizations don’t do it. But they have to compensate for their culture of defining quality down, which leads us to the corollary of the saying at the start of this post:

We’d rather do 10 things 60% correct than six things 100% correct. Then we define 60% as an A.

Organizations that have a culture of only rewarding more have to come up with a new definition of quality. Voila!

Don’t fall into this trap. Do more by doing less. Terminate the least valuable projects and dedicate more resources to the most valuable. Both morale and quality will rise when employees have enough time to do things right.

I’ll be presenting Lessons Learned from the U.S. Health Benefit Exchange Projects at the 2014 PMI Global Congress in Phoenix, October 26-28. It’s a summary of the analyses I have done on the state efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act. Collectively, billions of dollars were spent. Even small states such as Maryland and Oregon managed to spend over $100M on failed implementations. Oregon eventually abandoned their effort and will join the federal exchange. Maryland also abandoned their effort and opted to spend another $50M to buy software from Connecticut.

I cataloged the biggest failures here.