“Medium” is another way of saying “Don’t make me choose”

Steve Kay, a Program Manager interviewed in the Closing Credit article of the August 2012 issue of PM Network made an interesting change on his mega-project – he altered the typical 5×5 risk matrix (e.g. very high – very low) to a 4×4 one to remove the “sitting on the fence” option for those participating in the qualitative risk analysis process.

This prompted me to check the risk registers for a few of the historical projects I’d been involved with and I noticed that when there is a three or five rating scale for probability and impact, the medium selection is picked much more often than one of the other choices.  This should not be a surprise since we can draw a reasonable conclusion that probability and impact values follow a normal distribution for projects with an average level of risk.

My concern is that the frequent selection of this rating relates more to indecisiveness or lethargy than to statistics.

The former cause might be tied to the common behavior in some organizations of people being unwilling to take a stand.  With a three point rating scale, providing a low severity for a risk which you had previously identified might incur the wrath of those minimalists who want the focus purely to be on critical threats or opportunities.  Doing the same for someone else’s risk event might put you at loggerheads with them as they might perceive a very different severity for their risk.  On the other end of the scale, assessing a risk event as high might brand you as a “Chicken Little”.

Such behavior might occur if risk analysis participants are lacking knowledge on what the different ratings imply and how to score risks, but more likely it is caused by participants that are uninterested in the process.  I believe that most staff are so focused on their day-to-day operational and project work and the “real” issues that plague them that they wish to minimize their effort spent on risk management which they perceive as being at best, an academic practice.

The recommendation in the PM Network article is a simple way to address the inappropriate use of medium ratings as it forces participants to pick ratings that will be either above or below the point of indecision.  This method could be enhanced by one or more of the following practices:

• Take the time before qualitative risk analysis begins to clearly explain risk rating scales and illustrate their usage with examples.
• Make sure that you effectively communicate the linkage between risk scoring and the responses that would be based on the scores as well as the implications of scores on risk reporting.
• As of a follow up to the analysis session and only if you have sufficient risks to support this, you may wish to construct a graph of the distribution of impacts and probabilities to see if the overall shape of the curve “fits” the team’s perception of the overall project’s risk profile.  If it doesn’t, this could point to inconsistent scoring.

Yoda said “Do or do not, there is no try” – medium might just be the “try” of risk management!

 

 

Stuck between a rock and a hard place – avoiding perceptions of schedule obsession

It feels like a no-win situation – you have a customer demanding that their project be completed by a given date and you’ve got a team that is criticizing you for being schedule obsessed.

This scenario is a good example of the tightrope balancing act that separates a good project manager from alligator bait. To satisfy the customer, the project manager might be tempted to focus on schedule compliance, but this could end up alienating the team.  Taken to the extreme, the team might get so disenchanted that they will conspire to ensure that the project ends up being late in spite of the project manager’s efforts.  On the other hand, if the project manager focuses on ensuring the team is comfortable, the expected end date might slip which could be a career-limiting move.

So what are some ways to avoid either extreme?

1. Confirm that the expected end date is truly critical as early as possible.  The thing about expectations is that resetting them is never pleasant, but it’s best done up front if there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the desired date is unrealistic.  In the case of internal projects, it’s amazing how often customers can be their own worst enemy – by stating an ideal date during project initiation, but not clarifying whether or not there is flexibility on that date, the more senior the executive, the greater the likelihood that their wish will be taken as a command.  One of the quickest methods of losing credibility with your team members is to force them to perform unnatural acts just to meet a “paper date”.

2. Review the priority of the project’s constraints with the team as part of the kickoff meeting (with the customer hopefully present) or as part of the on-boarding process for team members who join mid-stream and in both cases, make sure that the business impact of delays is well communicated.  Give the team an opportunity to voice their concerns, but manage any “venting” to keep it constructive.

3. Work with the customer to prioritize requirements.  Part of this process is asking the customer what would constitute a bare-minimum acceptable outcome.  Assuming that this reduced scope can be completed within expected time frames, leverage agile methods to deliver priority-driven capability within fixed cost and time constraints.  If the minimal scope is unlikely to be delivered when desired, explore options with the team and customer including adding resources or negotiating for a reduction in the minimal scope boundary.

4. Demonstrate a balanced approach when analyzing and communicating decisions – whether it is in formal artifacts such as decision requests or in informal team scrums, don’t get caught in the trap of focusing on schedule impact only.  Even the most date-driven customer will have thresholds below which they would not want scope, quality or cost impacted.  The more your team sees that you are not just beating the “schedule is king” drum, the greater the likelihood that they will embrace the relative importance of all constraints.

5. Foster positive relationships with the team’s resource managers.  If the functional managers understand the importance of the project’s constraints and know that you are taking a balanced approach with decision making, they will be more likely to support you if team members come to them complaining about your apparent schedule obsession.

If being a project manager can sometimes feel like the Kobayashi Maru test from Star Trek, just remember Captain Kirk’s response on how he faced the simulation: “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.“

So your portfolio has multiple number one projects – deal with it!

Previous articles I have written on the topic of portfolio prioritization provided some tips on moving from subjective methods (e.g. lobbying, gut feel) to objective, consistent practices.  However, even when applying these approaches, it may not always be possible to get a 1 – n ranking of your projects.  This is not a problem assuming you have sufficient staff to be able to work on all of the top projects concurrently, but that is a luxury few organizations enjoy.  Instead, you are likely facing a situation where you have multiple shared team members that are working on multiple non-discretionary projects.

In this case, you may have project managers competing with one another to see who gets which team member first, and resource managers getting caught in the no-win scenario of trying to keep everyone happy while honoring the priorities defined by senior management.  This itself is bad enough, but if the resource managers themselves are telling their staff that are stretched that all the projects are all equally important, they have now pushed the decision making about where to focus down to the individual resource which  usually results in the realization of the saying “if all your projects are number one projects, then none of your projects are number one”.

So what can you do?

1. Re-evaluate the active portfolio to ensure that every project that is hitting the shared staff pool is a must-do project that must be active right now.  Depending on the size of your portfolio, you might identify some lampreys that could be temporarily (or permanently) parked.

2. Effectively communicate how critical each of the projects is to project and resource managers and to the staff.  Provide as much transparency as possible regarding the rationale for each project, the timing for the milestones that must be met, and also the impact if one of these projects were to fail or the milestones were not achieved.  If you have a current, objective strategic plan against which you can demonstrate project alignment, so much the better.  But don’t fail to make it clear and understandable to front-line staff why these projects are of importance to your company and to them.

3. Review the timing for the milestones across each of the must-do projects to identify points of contention (aka “Perfect Storms”) – if you can re-plan or negotiate changes to key milestone dates to eliminate such situations, you will help staff that might find themselves in a crunch trying to hit two critical milestones at the same time.

4. Resource and project managers can collaborate to provide staff with personalized cross-project milestone lists to help team members understand the relative importance of activities at any given time.  For example, knowing that two projects that I am contributing to are both number one doesn’t help me prioritize my daily activities, but if I know that I’ve got a milestone for one that is due next week, and another one for the second project that is due the week after, that does provide me with some guidance.  This strategy has to be carefully implemented to avoid “just in time” mentality for team members and even resource managers where they focus purely on near term milestones and ignore the foundation work required to meet future ones.  Taken to the extreme, this myopia can result in a vicious cycle with each milestone becoming a mad dash.

5. Project managers should make sure that team members understand how the work they are doing helps to achieve a significant milestone  and work effectively with resource managers to resolve performance issues such as procrastination or Parkinson’s Law.  The right mental model for the shared staff is that of a relay race runner – their objective should be to complete the work they are doing in a timely, quality fashion so that it can be cleanly handed off to the next person in the race.

If I were to channel George Orwell, I might state: All projects are equally important, but some projects are more important than others (at a given time)!