Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 3)
Posted by ElizabethYesterday I looked at how to overcome the problem of having to do more with less, what happens when you work in an environment where project management is perceived to be a useless overhead and the risks of embarking on a schedule in which you have low confidence. Today, I have three more lessons from Ernest Baker’s presentation at last month’s PMI Global Congress North America, ‘Ten troublesome project management ideas and how to combat them!’
6. Bad multi-tasking
Baker said that multi-tasking is actually a problem on projects – if you do it badly. There’s a risk that if you don’t multi-task effectively you will end up:
- Spreading your resources too thinly
- Suffering from interruptions and constantly starting and stopping
- Making slow progress on all tasks
- Having to use heroic efforts to get the project completed (and see Wednesday’s article for why that’s a bad idea)
- Suffering from quality issues across products, processes and your own quality of life!
Baker recommended that project managers shouldn’t multi-task. He suggested that you schedule ‘focus days’ – where your team gets together and just works solidly on a particular issue with no interruptions. You can do the same thing by blocking out time in your calendar so that you aren’t invited to meetings, for example at the end of each week for status reports, or on a monthly basis to make sure you have time for risk and issue reviews.
Baker also suggested that you focus your efforts on tasks that are important, not the ones that are flagged as urgent. You’ll have to find a balance, and I’ve written about that before.
7. Proximatic Competency
What, you haven’t heard of proximatic competency? Don’t worry, it’s a term that Baker confesses to having made up himself. He defines it as:
Any resource within a certain distance of a discipline or skill has the same level of knowledge, skills and ability as the entire group within that discipline or skill.
Still not clear? What he means is that proximatic competency assumes that everyone in a department has the same skill set. You’ll know from your own experience that this isn’t true. Even people with the same job title and doing the same job tend to have varying skills or knowledge. Managers sometimes make the mistake of forgetting that, and that’s when you end up with:
- Project teams made up of whoever is available
- Estimates that are not accurate as the people making them don’t have the skills
- Proxies being sent to meetings and then being unable to make decisions
- Knowledge gaps
- Information not being passed on to others in the same department
Baker recommends educating your stakeholders regarding the skills that you need on the project. And not letting them get away with giving you people that can’t do the job. He also suggests asking a lot of questions, and using techniques like the ‘5 whys’ to get to the bottom of requirements and estimates.
8. Inaccurate reporting
Finally, for today, Baker’s ninth ‘troublesome idea’ that stakeholders have is that which comes from inaccurate reporting. He summarised this as ‘watermelon projects’: projects that are green on the outside (in the reports) but red on the inside (the team knows that something is going wrong). Reports that don’t cover the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth mean that the senior stakeholders don’t know the whole picture. And therefore they can’t make better decisions. To combat this, Baker recommends:
- Defining project objectives
- Agreeing metrics and tolerances per phase and for the whole project
- Having a communication plan for your project
- Spending time building relationships with stakeholders
Tomorrow I’ll be looking at the final of Baker’s ten troublesome ideas!
Missed the previous articles?
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Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 4) | Project Management Tips || Project Management, Collaboration and Knowledge Management Blog says:
[...] Yesterday I looked at how to overcome the problems of multi-tasking, proximatic competency and inaccurate reporting Today, I have the final two lessons from Ernest Baker’s presentation at last month’s PMI Global Congress North America, ‘Ten troublesome project management ideas and how to combat them!’. [...]