This decisions process can and should apply
to many of our business and project management practices. If your practices are not leading to the desired
results, make a conscious decision to pivot or persevere.
Let’s talk about the project management
practice of project reviews by senior management. Are the reviews leading to better project
execution and performance? Are the reviews
leading to better project selection and planning? Are the reviews leading to better project
portfolio performance in terms of business impact? If the answer is, “No,” and you have been
doing the same types of reviews for years, it is probably time to pivot.
Project Management Reviews
Let me describe the typical project
management review I see when I first visit a new client. Senior management is reviewing project status on a
regular basis – normally tied to the calendar.
For example, one client had a weekly review a summary of all open
projects and a “deep dive” on two or three projects based upon which projects
were perceived to be in the most trouble.
At the deep dive portion of the reviews, the emphasis was upon the status of the problems or issues that had occurred and what the team was doing
about those issues. The project team received
lots of “help” to fix the current problem, but there was seldom any discussion
about extrapolating from the current issue to foresee future issues or to share
lessons learned from this situation with other project teams so that they could
avoid the same problems.
My recommendation for a project management review pivot is to
change from this backwards-looking, reactive project management reviews to a
forward-looking preventive project review.
What do I mean? The project
review should be focused upon all the open and remaining risk threats on the
project (not just the current crisis) and the resources and management actions
needed to reduce or eliminate those threats.
And when you get that working well, add a discussion about the possible
risk opportunities for the remainder of the project and the resources and management
actions that will enable those opportunities to be realized.
Superman
The current approach leads to a “superman”
mentality among project leaders. They
bounce from crisis to crisis, using their superpowers to overcome each
one. They don’t prevent problems, they
just solve them. The leaders get great
credit and often rewards for their effort.
In fact they often take on “rock star” status within the
organization. While they may be good
fire-fighters, I would not call them good project managers.
Let me relate a story from a client of
mine. His high-tech firm had two major
development projects underway. Both were developing new product lines using emerging technology.
Both projects were large be this company’s standards – they were planned
for three to four years in duration, with a budget of over $20 million, and a
large team located in multiple sites.
Both projects were managed by senior project leaders with strong
technical, business and inter-personal skills.
One project leader, we will call him Jack,
was a fire-fighter. His team faced many
problems and challenges and he overcame all of them. Granted it took late nights, weekends, and
some creative solutions but with his charismatic personality he rallied the team and they come through. The project was a major market
success. However, the project finished more than a year late and several million dollars overrun.
The other project leader, we will call him
Dave, was a risk manager. Dave
emphasized proactive risk management. He
had a well-developed plan with risk triggers and options that were used by the
team. His project did have several minor
fires that had to be resolved, but nothing like the problems that occurred on
Jack’s project. Dave also had a major market success.
But Dave’s project was only two months late and came in on budget.
So now it is six months later and the
business is going through a major restructuring due to some problems in a
different division. The business is
downsizing and it only needs one senior project leader. So Dave was laid off. I asked the senior management why they laid off
Dave instead of Jack. Their response
surprised me. In their opinion, Jack was
a superhero who could fix any problem, but they didn’t know if Dave could
handle the stress of a major project in crisis.
I pulled together a summary of the two
projects, including the major challenges that each had to overcome. I identified the proactive risk approaches
that Dave had used and the absence of those in Jack’s project. Several of the senior managers told me they
had never stopped to consider the risk management approach in the project
reviews. They never asked about risk
avoidance and mitigation. They were just focused on the current crisis and what
was being done to fix it.
The Pivot
So if you want to transform your project
performance, I encourage you to consider pivoting your project management
review approach. When reviewing a
project, I recommend the following topics.
- Quick review of the Project Charter. Remind everyone of the project’s purpose and goals.
- Current status with respect to the project plan. Make sure the team is reporting against the plan and don’t just give a list of the things that they have been doing. If they aren’t working the plan find out why.
- Risk issues with their response or mitigation strategies that should be encountered or resolved within the near future. Ensure the team has an adequate strategy and resources to resolve the risks.
- New risk issues that have been discovered since the last review. What changed to create these risk issues and what other impacts could those changes have on the project.
- Critical milestones and decisions that will occur on the project in the near future. These are potential risk points and senior management may want or need to engage with those activities.
Changing your project management reviews
into risk reviews will pivot your project management approach from reactive to proactive. I can assure you the project performance and
business impact will improve. But some
of your superhero project leaders may resist the change. They are fire-fighters and want a fire to
fight. Risk based project reviews will suppress fires and expose these leaders as the arsonists whose poor project management practices are
what started the fires.
