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Author: Andrea Brockmeier

Things Known and Unknown

On every project there are things we know and things we don’t know – Knowns and Unknowns.  Organizing your thoughts around those concepts can be a constructive approach to understanding a project as shown in the matrix below:

Knowns Unknowns
Knowns Known Knowns

Things in our plan

Known Unknowns

Things we know we don’t know

Unknowns Unknown Knowns

Assumptions

Unknowns Unknowns

??

The Known Knowns you handle via the plan, but what about those various flavors of Unknowns?  How do you normally account for those things in the project?  Often it’s with padding – estimates that include unidentified amounts of time and/or money just in case

Let’s review how padding works: You ask your tech lead, Renee, for an estimate: “Excuse me, I need an estimate for that activity you’ll be doing.”  Now Renee may be thinking to herself “That will take me about 40 hours.”  But Renee doesn’t tell you that.  She may very likely tell you “Um, that’ll take about 60 hours.”

Why would she do this and, more importantly, so what?  First, she’s doing it to cover her Unknowns. And that is absolutely understandable. Stuff happens – Unknowns!  So what’s the problem?

Padding undermines sound project management practice in three ways:

1.   It undermines trust. The notion that it’s a good idea to under promise and over deliver may work once or twice, but over time padding undermines the trust between the PM and the team and the rest of the stakeholders.  Honest questions should inspire honest answers.  That’s how you foster partnerships.

2.   Have closets, will fill.  If Renee says 60 hours, she may very well take 60 hours and that’s opportunity cost.  She isn’t able to be allocated to other efforts. 

3.   Padding undermines the opportunity to learn from our experience, which in many ways is the essence of why we seek to develop good project management habits.  What you want to be able to do at the end of a project is turn around and look at the journey you took to get there and be able to take something away for next time. 

If you pad estimates and quite possibly end up with nonsense for baselines, what do you learn from that?  Certainly not as much as you could have had you started with meaningful estimates to begin with. 

Let’s say Renee is thinking 40 hours, she tells us 60, and then she comes in at 50.  What do you think?  Renee’s a star!   But what really happened?  She was 25% over!  If you are measuring against meaningless numbers, you don’t get much of a chance to make the PM journey a learning experience. 

Importantly, the intention here is not to highlight Renee’s failures.  Rather, the purpose is to identify and understand the Unknowns that derailed the work and consider how to avert those things in the future or plan for them next time.

This is all well and good, but Renee still has her Unknowns to contend with, so what might you do to partner with her to address those? 

The better project management answer to Unknowns is contingency reserves, an amount of money in the budget or time in the schedule seen and approved by management.  It is documented.  It is measured and therefore managed.  You draw from it where and when you need to and then learn from that, as well. 

The purpose of the contingency reserve is not to 100% cover everyone’s Unknowns, but rather to reduce them to a level that is acceptable to the stakeholders.  So maybe it’s 10% of the project total if stakeholders aren’t too risk averse and you feel bullish about what you know and don’t know.  Or maybe it’s 40% on a project with highly risk adverse stakeholders and a big box of Unknown Unknowns.

Knowns we can plan for.  The Unknowns?  We have two choices for how to deal with those.  Under the table with padding which precludes any discussion, measurement, or management of what contributes to the Unknowns.  Or Contingency Reserve in which  case we talk about them, document them, measure and manage them.  Only one way really enables us to learn from them.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.


Andrea Brockmeier is the Client Solutions Director for Project Management at Watermark Learning.  Andrea is a PMP® as well as Certified ScrumMaster.  She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, including PMP® certification, as well as influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she was a member of the certification team for over eight years. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.

Control Projects, Not People

Controlling projects is a good thing. Controlling people is not. What does it mean to control projects, not people, and when have you crossed the threshold from controlling the project to micromanaging the people?

When you start telling people how to do their jobs instead of focusing on the results they create is usually an indication that you have stepped beyond the bounds of project control and into the realm of people control.

Some team members are quite adept at complicating this tidy distinction. What about, for example, the team member who tells you they will get the work done on time but sees no need to share details regarding the steps involved or how they’re going to get it done?

Even if it’s someone you have previously worked with and have every confidence that they’ll meet their deadline, it’s conceivable that you need more information about what’s involved in accomplishing the work. Perhaps for reporting or tracking purposes, for example, you may need to know about the steps involved or milestones in getting to their end result.

How can you ask for details that may not, in fact, be necessary to the person doing the work without being perceived as trying to micromanage? The most important thing is make sure the team member understands why you need the lower-level information. In the absence of an example or clear explanation of reporting or tracking requirements, many people are going to infer a lack of trust in a request for more detail than what they’re initially interested in providing.

The following three ideas can also help a project manager engage a resistant team member in providing more detail about their project work:

  1. Suggest breaking down the work into smaller chunks to make it easier to share the work load or include others in accomplishing the result. If they decompose the work into smaller level activities or tasks, perhaps there are things that could be done by others.
  2. Present it as an opportunity to teach others. If the team member can break down what it is they do to get their work done, it is easier to show and train others how to do it. Even if it’s not entirely repeatable, knowledge transfer requires some level of decomposition, and teaching others is usually an appealing personal development opportunity as well as valuable to the team and organization overall.
  3. Consider the information in the context of risk. Breaking down the work presents opportunities for identifying risks that might otherwise be missed. Engaging the team member in that discussion may yield ideas that even they hadn’t considered in terms of possible threats.

When project managers have a need for more details than team members are initially willing to provide regarding the work they do, these perspectives can help soften resistance by showing team members how they can contribute to something rather than making them feel like they are being needlessly imposed upon or, worse, not trusted.

So go ahead ask: “Tell me more about what’s involved in getting that done.”

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.


Andrea Brockmeier is the Client Solutions Director for Project Management at Watermark Learning.  Andrea is a PMP® as well as Certified ScrumMaster.  She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, including PMP® certification, as well as influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she was a member of the certification team for over eight years. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.

What’s on Your Sponsorship Short List?

What is it with sponsorship? If I had a nickel for every story I heard in the classroom about poor or completely non-existent sponsorship, I’d be writing this article from somewhere more exotic than my cube. Here are just a few complaints that I have heard:  Stories about sponsors who aren’t available for meetings, Sponsors who don’t have time to read reports, Sponsors the project manager never sees…ever. Who is driving the project train here?

Perhaps the first step to improving your chances of establishing a real partnership with your project sponsor starts with an assessment of what you really need and what is reasonable to expect from them.  The key word here is reasonable. If regular attendance at team meetings isn’t feasible, for example, then let’s not set anyone up for failure.

PMs need to think about their Sponsorship Short List. What are the absolute must haves from this sponsor for this project? Your short list may differ depending not only on the organization, but also the sponsor and the project.

Some Sponsorship Short List options could include:

1. Articulate business and project vision
2. Define and distribute the Project Charter
3. Obtain funding
4. Define project benefits
5. Facilitate definition of requirements and acceptance criteria
6. Assist in acquiring resources
7. Approve deliverables
8. Make scope decisions
9. Resolve cross-functional and external conflicts
10. Champion the project
11. Provide guidance and direction as needed

Clearly, unless your sponsor is experienced and familiar with best practices, it’s probably not going to serve you well to present an 11-item list and announce that you need all of these things from them. Not only will they insist that they don’t have time (which is probably true), but it may be intimidating. If they’ve never done these things, how are they to know how to do them? No one wants to look incompetent, especially if you’re supposed to be the owner of the project.

So it’s up to you, project manager, to think about it and help them do their job.  Create your Sponsorship Short List: Pick three and define what, specifically, they mean.

If you determine that what you need most is a project champion, for example, what does that mean? What do they actually have to do?  Make a presentation at a meeting?  Include project updates on senior management meeting agendas? Come in and be the cheerleader for the team once in a while?  Write it down so you understand it. Use small, simple words so you know you understand. (No leveraging synergies!) Then, and only then, present it to them…and set them up for success. When they look good, chances are you will, too.

So if you are feeling like an unsponsored PM, give some thought as to what you’d really like from a sponsor and come up with your Sponsorship Short List.  Remember: Sponsors are sometimes lousy at sponsoring because they don’t know what’s expected of them.  Help them understand, and make it palatable.  

It’s likely a learning opportunity for both of you.  If you aren’t used to sponsorship, then you will have to explore how to use them in whatever capacity you have suggested, as well.  

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  How do you get the best out of your sponsors?

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.


Andrea Brockmeier is the Client Solutions Director for Project Management at Watermark Learning.  Andrea is a PMP® as well as Certified ScrumMaster.  She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, including PMP® certification, as well as influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she was a member of the certification team for over eight years. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.