A retrospective on 2022 – my top five posts on leadership and delivery

As I’ve done in past years, I like to review the articles I’ve written over the year and share the ones which were read the most.

2022 was the first year since I started blogging when I took a hiatus of more than a couple of weeks. While I was able to write a few articles in the late Summer based on my municipal election campaign, the overall number of articles this year was less than in previous years.

Here are the top five articles based on views from my personal blog site.

1. Even though the phenomenon of Quiet Quitting has existed for as long as people have been working (I’m sure there was a caveperson going through the motions of hunting for prehistoric buffalo but whose heart wasn’t really in it!), it joined the unholy triad of the Great Resignation and Quiet Firing to generate a lot of press. Little surprise then that Are your team members “quiet quitting”? was number one on the most read list.
2. After moving to Welland which doesn’t have quite the same sport scene as a major metropolitan city like Toronto, I rekindled my enjoyment in the game of baseball. Our team, the Welland Jackfish, placed very well in the regular season standings but was unfortunately eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. I am hopeful that 2023 will bring the championship to Welland. Watching their games inspired me to write Project management lessons from the old ball game.
3. A chronic challenge faced by project managers in many of the companies I’ve worked for or consulted with is that rather than spending the majority of their time on high value, strategic activities such as effective managing stakeholder engagement or dealing with emerging risks, they are busy filling out forms and reports. So no wonder that Are your PMs drowning in paperwork? was a popular read.
4. Project management theory tells us that a charter or something equivalent is required to authorize a project’s existence. Of course, real world practice varies widely which is why I wrote Are you Batman? If not, get a real charter!
5. When we learn about common techniques to reduce project durations, fast tracking and crashing are often the first two which come to mind. Scope reduction, however, is often a safer and cheaper alternative. While it may not be applicable in all cases, it is worth investigating the option of Do less, finish earlier.

While it was not in my readers’ top five, I’d like to close out 2022’s final article (which will be published in early January 2023) with a challenge for those of you who are making New Year’s resolutions as well as those of you who run retrospectives or similar improvement ideation events: Why hold retrospectives if ideas don’t get implemented?

I hope all of my readers enjoy a peaceful, prosperous, and healthy 2023!

(If you liked this article, why not read my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores).

Six sins with work boards

Regardless of what type of work your team does, work boards can be a helpful tool. But just because they can be helpful doesn’t mean they are always implemented well.

The most common mistake is when teams don’t keep their work boards up to date with the actual status of work that is being done. Increasing transparency is a great way for stakeholders to understand what is going on and to increase their level of trust in teams. But if the information being presented is out of date or inaccurate, it reduces the team’s credibility and increases the likelihood of these stakeholders asking for separate, redundant status updates. When a work item changes status the work board should be updated immediately. For example, if the team has capacity to pull a new work item from their work queue, the item should be moved on the board just before work actually commences on that item.

Another challenge relates to whose responsibility it is to keep the board up to date. The moment it becomes the job of a coordinator or lead to do so, we reintroduce the overhead of having someone chase team members for status updates. I have seen Scrum Masters who will take time out during a daily Scrum/standup event to update the team’s work board after a team member has mentioned that it doesn’t accurately show the status of their work items. Everyone on the team is responsible for updating the work board based on the work they are doing.

If the work board columns are aligned with the roles of team members, that is not ideal. A work board’s columns should reflect the progressive value being added to a work item till it is complete and very rarely would this evolution map cleanly to the team member’s individual roles. The Goldilocks’ principle also applies to the columns. Have too few, and stakeholders may not get sufficient visibility into work item status and work items might stall for longer than desired without impediments being addressed. Set up too many and it encourages silo-thinking on the part of team members and can result in increased work in progress.

Having a dedicated blocked column is also not a good idea. Blocked is not a normal step in the evolution of a work item and by moving partially completed work items over to a separate column it can affect flow as a natural tendency of a team might be to pull more work items from the queue rather than unblocking the stalled work item. A better approach would be to highlight blocked items within their active work columns.

The next sin relates to work item aging. Ideally, once the team has completed a reasonable number of work items, they will be able to determine what is a reasonable amount of time for a work item of a certain size to remain active. If there isn’t some way for the team and stakeholders to see how long a work item has remained in an active column (i.e. something other than Not Started or Done), then it is hard to proactively determine whether it has been aging longer than it should.

Finally, cluttering a work item card with too much information increases the potential for stakeholder confusion and for inaccurate data. At the bare minimum, a work item card should contain the description of the work to be done, key dates (e.g. requested, started), whether it is blocked or not, and which team members are working on it. Anything beyond this can be helpful, but also increases the effort required for team members to keep information current and accurate.

Work boards can be a powerful tool to help a team visualize their work flow, but as always, with great power comes great responsibility.

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)

Do you have a Safety-I or a Safety-II project mindset?

Thanks to the most recent issue of Tom Geraghty’s weekly Psychological Safety newsletter, I learned about a new model for how we consider safety and risk. He shared Eric Hollnagel’s work on resiliency in which two distinct mindsets were identified: Safety-I and Safety-II.

A Safety-I perspective is a glass is half-full one – things go wrong and we can find assignable causes in people, process and tools. People are viewed as a source of risk and liability and when problems occur, the focus is on identifying root causes and addressing those. It also assumes that the system in which we work can be broken down into a discrete set of components which will either work properly or not. It supports practices such as increased governance oversight and reduced autonomy and flexibility for staff.

On the other hand, a Safety-II perspective is optimistic. The focus shifts to understanding why things go right most of the time and ensuring that people are given the flexibility to adapt to changing situations. It is better suited to complex scenarios where a reductive approach isn’t sufficient to identify what could go wrong.

If we consider how project risk management is covered in many books and courses, it clearly aligns more with the Safety-I mindset than its progressive counterpart. We seek to identify and assess as many of the unknown-unknowns as we can and then put controls in place to address those we are the most concerned with. This approach works well when dealing with contexts that are simple and are similar to what we’ve encountered before.

But when we are faced with more challenging situations, we need to also include elements of Safety-II thinking by empowering our teams to think and act on the fly.

As Tom puts it in the newsletter, “Neither approach (I or II) is sufficient alone, but together, the two approaches can enable lower risk together with higher performance and resilience.“

And this is why regardless of the life cycle or practices used to deliver a project, the project manager, team members and key stakeholders should adopt an mindset which does due diligence from a traditional risk management perspective, but also provides opportunities for learning and adaptation to deal with changing situations.

(If you liked this article, why not pick up my book Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice which contains 100 other lessons on project leadership? It’s available on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca as well as a number of other online book stores)