Project Management - When things go wrong.
Or how to adapt successfully.
It hardly seems appropriate to apologise for the delay in writing this follow-up post to Project Management; it’s been far too long. Opportunistically, this is a good segue into the topic of dealing with unforeseen variance or disruption to a planned project, being, as it is, a disruption to my writing practice, which has caused the awkward silence we have found ourselves in.
Firstly, to get this out of the way, the disruption on my side has only been caused by changes in my children’s out-of-school activities, which have nuked my usual blog writing spot and nothing onerous. It was certainly not planned, however, or at least not at the beginning of this project, when I intended to expunge a blog post from my noodle weekly.
At the planning phase of any project, including this blog, we typically outline the assumptions on which we’re basing our thinking and any associated risks. The assumptions must be substantiated, and the risks must be mitigated. Metaphorically, these two things are like a couple of drunk turtles on a tandem bike; in other words, they are weaving all over the place and are highly likely to crash into stuff or simply conduct an unscheduled dismount.
As I mentioned in a previous blog about procrastination, the validity and expansiveness of thinking applied to risks and assumptions are a function of time—a seesaw, if you will, between being prepared for a journey and actually making progress on a journey. One doesn’t want to pack too big a rucksack of stuff, blow a bunch of time repacking, and repacking, and then make ponderous progress because we’re carrying too much baggage (which ultimately isn’t needed). Equally, you don’t want to be that newbie who forgot to pack a change of underwear. So, a pragmatic balance is required.
In short, spend the right(ish) amount of time validating assumptions and detailing risk.
Embarkation of a project is an exciting thing. We’re all gunned up to get down to work on something new and interesting, a clean sheet of paper unsullied by reality. Coffee is brewed, agendas are printed, weekly meetings are scheduled, and so on.
Time passes.
An assumption turns out to be incorrect. The team, for example, can’t just work together in complete harmony because some aspect of the design (a dependency) hasn’t tested well with the executive, end customers, or a focus group, and a rework is necessary.
More coffee is brewed.
A risk has surfaced: the team waiting for the design has been seconded to another task, and the process has taken longer than expected.
Suddenly, the whole project plan has tilted to the right. What now… and it’s not more coffee.
Firstly, it’s not your first rodeo, or you’ve read this blog, so you know variance is inevitable. You’ve included contingency in your plan to account for those “unknown unknowns”. All good.
If contingency isn’t enough, then you’re onto the next rung of the ladder, you’re adapting. Adaptability is the fundamental building block of most good project management or project methodologies. Incremental improvement is shorthand for adapting to a better understanding of how to be successful (or be less unsuccessful).
You can think of adaptability as a toolbox of stuff which can be applied to fix your leaky pipe of a project.
Replanning and resetting expectations based on the revised plan are the simplest of these tools —essentially the sticky-tape solution. This is the Schedule, which is best buddies with Cost and Scope. Revising the schedule is the most painful remedial strategy, as there are likely business dependencies which hang off the back of the completed delivery. Commercial milestones, for example, depend on having the product finished to sell. Altering the schedule monkeys around with predictability, and whilst cost is arguably perceived as “triggering”, in today’s world, where fast beats slow (no longer big beats small), an uplift in cost is back on the table.
If rescheduling is a realistic option, then keeping deliverables within the project discrete and not dependent on each other allows you flexibility to, for example, split a delivery into Phases so an element of business benefit can be felt before the project hits its final milestone. This minimises impact by allowing some, but not all, business benefit to be felt.
All this is starting to sound very familiar and like a beginner’s guide to project management, so let’s gussy it up a bit.
Schedule, Cost, and Scope are the three corners of the triangle for remediation, and you can position the response to change anywhere within the triangle. Tweaking costs a bit, changing the schedule a bit, fiddling with the scope, or simply changing the schedule, or increasing the cost, and so on.
The real challenge isn’t the systematic approach described in project management material. It’s about your ability to read the room, understand the problem’s context, and respond accordingly, accounting for all the implications of the mitigation strategy. The human(s)-in-the-loop, if you will.
This human process is the embodiment of adaptability.
If you lack this muscle memory, you need to develop it intentionally. This isn’t just about your ability to plan for change; it’s about doing so within the dynamic, living fabric of the business you’re part of. Each company is unique and composed of different people, each with their own objectives, perspectives, and tasked outcomes.
Adaptability, like project planning, is about understanding the right amount of effort to deploy to make the right choice, balancing all the factors.
You should collect context through meetings; balancing factors, i.e., finding where to land in the triangle of cost, schedule, and scope, is not a paper exercise and requires input. You should internally socialise compromises, validate the consequences and implications, and repeat back what you have learned from your peers as you orchestrate a response.
Another way to frame this process of adaptability is to think of it as experience and intuition baked into the business. Conferring with different parts of the company taps into the well of intuition. It reduces the ongoing risk that you fail to deliver value, as defined by all those affected by the decisions. The process also fosters collaborative, consensual buy-in.
It’s worth labouring this point because dealing with complex project-related issues can often be painted as a failure, and in doing so, there can be a reluctance to share accountability for the outcome. If an honest, collaborative approach to adaptability cannot be realised, this has a profound effect on the company culture as well as a project’s eventual success.
Incremental improvement is only possible through honest retrospectives and shared, future goals and accountability. Projects are built on “as good as it can get” assumptions, risks and estimates, which are not perfect. Adaptability works because of collective ownership and focused, pragmatic, open management.
There’s a lot more to say about how to handle different situations where things go wrong, but it might be worth focusing on how to deal with culture breakdowns in the next outing of the blog.
Thank you, as always, for joining me, friends. It’s always nice to have you along for the ride. Sorry if this post was a bit “dry”, I promise to add more colour, fireworks and pazazz next time.