Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 2)

Yesterday I looked at how a ‘just do it’ environment and a culture that rewards heroic behaviour can be addressed on a project. Today, I have three more lessons from Ernest Baker’s presentation at last month’s PMI Global Congress North America.

3. Do more with less

Baker said that the most common symptoms of a workplace where you are asked to do more with less are:

• Resource constraints
• ‘Rules’ around staffing such as only being able to use internal staff, not being able to recruit at all during a hiring freeze or having resources taken off your project and reassigned to other work
• Requests for your project team to work more hours, or at the weekends
• You are asked to use the people that are available, not necessarily the people who are most suitable for the task at hand.

It is not always easy to combat the ‘do more with less’ attitude. There are some streamlining activities you can do to make sure effort is being spent in the right places, but once you have exhausted those options, and are running your team as leanly as possible, you are going to struggle to meet the ‘do more with less’ requirement. In short, you can only do significantly more with more resources – not less. Baker’s top tips for dealing with this were:

• Recognise that doing more requires more: more talented people (not just anyone who happens to be free), more planning and more support
• Get commitments for your resources so they are less likely to be reallocated
• Explain the rationale for your resourcing levels to stakeholders in cause and effect terms e.g. “If you want us to do this, then we require this.”
• Ask hypothetical questions: “If we take this resource away, what do you think the result will be?”

4. Project management is a useless overhead

Not everyone believes that project management is a value-add. This ties in with what I covered yesterday about the ‘just do it’ attitude prevalent in some organisations. Your stakeholders might believe that project management is a useless overhead if you see things like this:

• People saying (or acting as if) project management is an excuse for not getting things done
• Requirements are not defined clearly
• Initiation of a project takes place slowly, but projects are closed down rapidly and messily
• Project managers don’t act in a disciplined way, aren’t held to account, and the management oversight on projects (like a portfolio office) is missing.

However, you can get over this hurdle. Baker provided the following tips in his presentation to combat this attitude:

• Demonstrate the value of project management
• Get assistance from your PMO (or lobby to create one)
• Build a business case for project management activities, making sure that you concentrate on the 80% that provides the most value
• Track how much effort goes into project management activities: be transparent.

5.  Embarking on a 50% confidence-level schedule

I’m sure this has never happened to you – starting a project where you don’t really have confidence in the dates? Unfortunately it happens a lot, especially in organisations where project management isn’t valued. Baker highlighted the following symptoms of this problem:

• A fixed deadline is agreed before the requirements are properly defined
• Initial estimates – which are not based on the full amount of data required – are taken as the final and definitive estimates
• The desire to ‘produce something’ means the business case is ignored
• Management want to be seen as ‘tough’ by fixing the date and holding you to it regardless of the fact it is not achievable.

So how can you combat this? Baker had some ideas to build more confidence in your schedule:

• Agree realistic deadlines (although it might be too late in some cases!)
• Reduce the scope to cope with the imposed date
• Don’t use a waterfall lifecycle: try Agile or an evolutionary lifecycle to shorten delivery times
• Put contingency in your plans
• Manage the schedule risk, for example, always know the critical path.

Tomorrow I’ll be looking at three more of Baker’s troublesome ideas and how to address them!

Related posts:

1. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 3)
2. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 1)
3. Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 4)
4. Project Communication Series: Project Schedule
5. Common Project Issues: Lack of Resources