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Author: George Pitagorsky

George Pitagorsky, integrates core disciplines and applies people centric systems and process thinking to achieve sustainable optimal performance. He is a coach, teacher and consultant. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict and Managing Expectations and IIL’s PM Fundamentals™. He taught meditation at NY Insight Meditation Center for twenty-plus years and created the Conscious Living/Conscious Working and Wisdom in Relationships courses. Until recently, he worked as a CIO at the NYC Department of Education.

Project Management Education: Cultivating Cognitive Readiness and Optimal Performance

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Project Management Education: Cultivating Cognitive Readiness and Optimal Performance

Many project managers are self-taught, often thrown into the water to sink or swim.

This article addresses the need for PM education to cultivate the cognitive readiness you, your team and your organization need to perform optimally.

The Need for Expertise

For the large number of small projects that are performed in organizations, ‘accidental’ project managers with intuitive skills may be OK. However, when it comes to larger, more complex and mission critical projects, project managers with significant project management (PM) knowledge, skills and experience are needed.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) identifies three dimensions of project management expertise:

  • Technical – the specific skills of scheduling, risk management, cost management, etc. and the use of project management tools that support these skills.
  • Strategic and Business Management – understanding organization structure and the impact of it on projects and projects on it, cost and benefits assessment from a business perspective, business strategy, etc.
  • Leadership – skills related to motivating and managing people, including communication, conflict management and relationship management skills

This has been a major step forward in the PM field, clearly recognizing that it is not sufficient to know how to construct a schedule or WBS to be an effective project manager.

Now, the field is recognizing Project Management education must go beyond the simple transfer of knowledge to the cultivation of the ability to integrate skills to manage in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) situations.

Integrated technical skills, organizational awareness, mindfulness, communication skills, managing change, conflict and expectations, and the application of emotional and social intelligence are needed to ensure that qualified people manage projects in a way that contributes to a consistently high probability of success.

The PM Education Objective: Prepare for Optimal Performance

The key to effective PM education is remembering that the objective is to prepare people for optimal performance, measured by the degree to which project managers add business value and consistently satisfy stakeholder expectations.

Optimal does not mean perfect. It means continuously improving performance that is as good as it can be under prevailing conditions.

PM Education is essential to effective project performance. To be deficient in any PM skills, whether technical or not, increases the risk of project failure. For example, a person playing a PM role who has no knowledge of the use and importance of a WBS will be more likely to develop a task list that is incomplete and difficult to manage. A PM deficient in communication or decision-making skills risks developing poor relationships, causing confusion and making poor decisions. A PM deficient in mindfulness and emotional intelligence is likely to be reactive rather than responsive.

The State of PM Education

PM education is big business. The domain of technical PM education is filled with courses on every aspect of project management performance – task analysis, scheduling, procurement, critical chain and path, risk management, etc. Many of these courses are well done, with participants gaining knowledge that they can apply on the job or use to pass an exam.

When it comes to providing education regarding business management and strategy, the coverage is not as complete. Offerings in this domain tend to be theoretical. Though, they do raise awareness and provide frameworks to apply theory to specific organizations. Ideally, practical education in this area should be specific to the organizational environment.

Leadership courses abound – some are great, some OK and some terrible. For example, one young project manager shared that the course she took on handling difficult conversations left her frustrated because it did not address situations in which the other party was completely oblivious to anything but his own opinions and positions and was verbally abusive. The course assumed that everyone was rational and working toward a win-win outcome. The instructor had never actually worked in any complex project. For leadership courses to be effective they must be anchored in real world experience.

Many courses focus on specific subjects, often without putting the subject in the overall context of projects in organizations. They teach students how to do a risk register without dealing with the political, scheduling and budgeting issues that underlie risks.

Programs that integrate a full range of subjects into a comprehensive education program tailored to the specific culture of an organization are rare and often limited to fundamentals and certification training. Some of these comprehensive courses are nothing more than a string of individual modules on each topic that fail to address the interplay among the topics – for example the way communication and conflict management skills are used in the context of scheduling.

Comprehensive, Integrated PM Learning

No one learns a complex skill without applying it in real-world situations and getting feedback about performance. Integrated courses that center on case study’s and workshop simulations are needed. Though they are not enough.

Coaching and mentoring and opportunities to address questions and issues with subject matter experts and peers are necessary parts of education. This ongoing learning is far less prevalent than standalone courses that have little or no follow up to ensure that learning is applied and makes a difference in performance.

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A comprehensive PM education program is more than a traditional curriculum of courses. It must be fully integrated into the fabric of the organization and the individual’s personal practice. A full program consists of

  • Courses in various media, over time, with multiple levels of skill advancement
  • Integrated workshops
  • Self-paced opportunities to refresh knowledge
  • Coaching and mentoring
  • Regular Q&A sessions
  • Communities of practice
  • Lessons learned events
  • Feedback & Continuous improvement.

The program may be formal and provided by the organization. Whether that is the case or not, it is the individual’s responsibility to make sure he or she is continuously cultivating the readiness to perform.

Cognitive Readiness (CR)

The objective of PM education is to enable optimal performance. Optimal performance relies on cognitive readiness.

In the military “Cognitive readiness is the mental preparation (including skills, knowledge, abilities, motivations, and personal dispositions) an individual needs to establish and sustain competent performance in the complex and unpredictable environment of modern military operations.”1 Change “military operations” to “project operations” and we have a good working definition.

Cognitive readiness, is the readiness of individuals and teams to apply their skills and to explore their faults and deficiencies and make the effort to overcome them. Cognitive readiness implies the courage and candor to objectively assess performance and improve it as needed. It implies the resilience and the capacity to accept uncertainty and paradox. It is enabled by and enables a healthy perspective and the application of knowledge and experience.

Cognitive readiness (CR) is cultivated in an educational program that goes beyond traditional technical, business and leadership skills to include

  • Organizational awareness – Knowing the nature of people in organizations, particularly one’s own,
  • Mindfulness – The ability to step back and objectively observe
  • Emotional and social intelligence – The ability to effectively manage one’s emotions in the context of relationships
  • Wisdom – a perspective that recognizes that
    • service is the ultimate motivation for leaders
    • everything is impermanent in a continuous change process
    • no one has complete control
    • we are responsible for the results of what we say and do, and
    • nothing is without imperfection

Wisdom, informed by mindfulness and education, leads to the personal dispositions (attitudes, beliefs, etc.) that promote optimal performance.

Learning and applying all that is not easy. Learning begins with awareness that, unless they are cognitively ready, individual practitioners are unlikely to be able to perform optimally. The performance of teams and the organizations will suffer along with individual careers.

Cognitive readiness and the cultivation of optimal performance should be a primary objective of any PM Education program. If your organization is not providing the right program, it is up to you to craft your own and to manage your own learning and development.

1 Morrison, John E. and J. D. Fletcher, Cognitive Readiness, Institute for Defense Analyses, 2002. Download at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA417618 , p. I-3

Why Project Management Adds Value – How to Promote PM

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Why Project Management Adds Value – How to Promote PM

Business outcomes are the result of projects and operational processes. When these are managed well, there is greater likelihood of success – lower costs, greater number of projects completed per period, higher quality products and satisfied stakeholders.

Probably, 90+% of the readers of this article in Project Times are convinced that project management is valuable. Project managers know that consciously planning and controlling projects contributes to successful outcomes. So why write an article about the value of PM? The answer is, it is part of the project manager’s job to convince other stakeholders that PM is practical and that it adds value.

The Problem

A recent exchange highlights the issue:

A very senior executive, responsible for an organization with more than ten thousand employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets, initiated the exploration of a business intelligence tool.
She commented that PMO leadership was bureaucratic because they asked the exploration’s point person to create a page-or-so write up about the effort and where it fit in the context of a related ongoing program.

Executives, managers and performers at every level of the organization often view PM as a bureaucratic process that gets in the way of progress. They do not value the conscious decision making, transparency, clarity and planning that are at the foundation of PM.

PMI’s 2016 Pulse of the Profession: The High Cost of Low Performance finds that “Organizations that invest in project management waste 13 times less money because their strategic initiatives are completed more successfully. We know project management is essential for any organization’s success, yet the message is not being realized.”

The study finds that almost fifty percent of companies do not fully understand the value of project management. This leads to an absence of effective project selection and performance so that projects are not fully aligned with organizational strategies. It leads to a lack of standardized practices and insufficient training and development for project managers, and that leads to insufficient planning and poor performance.

Executives initiate projects by expressing a desire to get something done. The people reporting to them all too often plunge ahead to meet a fuzzily defined objective without sufficient planning and control. Some view formal project definition and planning as a waste of time.

The Impact: An Example

A senior executive expresses a strong desire to deliver a customer facing software application within twelve months. If the next levels of lower management, driven by the desire to satisfy the boss, order their staff to dive in and “just get it done.” They may be on the road to failure.

To hit the deadline, performance managers may do a surface job of defining requirements. They may design a solution without engaging architects and designers or assessing alternatives. The delivery team may be pulled off planned tasks and put to work on the project of the hour.

Expectations are likely to be unreasonable and go unmet. As the project becomes delayed or a poor-quality product emerges, there are recriminations and a cycle of increasing lateness, cost increases and growing quality issues caused by a rush to finish and get it right without having a concrete sense about what “right” is.

This can be avoided if the organization respects the power of project management and has made it an integral part of the culture. A healthy, non-bureaucratic, flexible PM process will ensure that everyone pauses to step back sufficiently to assess the situation and make sure everyone is on the same page.

In this example someone would create a brief document that describes the project and a high-level plan for what could be a 6 – 12-month initial project followed by additional projects to iteratively add functionality.

An initial report back to the executive level would provide an expected start time and high-level estimate based on the availability of the resources and experience with similar projects. The impact of resources being reassigned from current projects nearing completion will be assessed and the Executive Sponsor will be informed. A decision to move forward immediately will weigh the loss associated with pulling people out of their current work against the real need of quickly starting the new project.

This – the ability to make informed decisions – is the principle value of project management. A healthy process need not take a huge amount of time. In fact, it can be consciously bypassed, if that is the informed decision of executives.

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How PM Adds Value

Project management adds value in several concrete ways. On the highest level, effective project management brings together three important elements – technical skills in scheduling, estimating, risk analysis and the other competencies specific to project management, leadership skills and business knowledge. According to PMI, when organizations cultivate all three, 40 percent more projects are successful. When you as a manager personally bring these three together you are more likely to succeed in satisfying your stakeholders and yourself.

Project management promotes an approach that recognizes cause and effect relationships and the benefits of thinking out the way an outcome is to be achieved. It manages expectations by confronting stakeholders with the realities of the complex nature of projects, the inability to predict outcomes with 100% accuracy and the need to monitor and adjust as the project unfolds. This adds up to a more realistic approach to getting the work done to satisfy the needs and expectations of stakeholders.

Project resource management makes it clear that because of the learning curves and the effort required to ramp down and up, it is costly to start and stop work on one task to jump to another and then go back to the original. If a project must be stopped to transfer resources to another, then at minimum wait for a place in the project that makes for a smooth transition. If there is a choice between working your tasks serially or in parallel, you will find that doing them serially to minimize multi-tasking is the better way to go.

Projects and tasks of any size are far more likely to be successful if you take the time and effort to define objectives, roles and responsibilities; identify tasks, dependencies, and deliverables and their acceptance criteria; estimate realistically and to manage expectations through transparent communications across project life.

While they may be helpful, don’t rely on academic studies. Look at your own experience. When do you and your team perform better on complex tasks? What happens when you “wing it” as opposed to when you set a foundation for how best to accomplish the work? When will there be less rework? Fewer arguments and frustrating dead ends? Less stress?

Selling PM

As a project manager or team lead you may or may not have the power to influence senior executives to mandate project management professionalism from the top down. You may not even have the power to influence your own boss. But, you do have the power to apply your skills and knowledge in a way that uses project management principles in your work.

If you are working in an environment that does not have PM standards, there is nothing that says you can’t document your project, even if it is in a one-page overview. You don’t have to call it a Project Charter, you just write it and send it around to get feedback?

You can plan and, within your scope of control, engage others in planning and control. Putting things in writing (without over doing it) will influence stakeholders to pay attention and say whether they agree with your assessment of project objectives, roles and responsibilities, constraints, dependencies, estimates, assumptions and risks. If they don’t pay attention, you have a guideline for yourself and your team and are ready to provide guidance and leadership if the opportunity arises.

In general, thinking ahead, recapping and putting things in writing adds value on two levels: 1) it gives you the opportunity to reflect on your own understanding of the work and 2) it promotes accountability.

If you can’t immediately convince others of the value of project management, take advantage of it yourself and in your team or department.

Taking a grass roots approach, you can then influence others by making them aware of the value to be gained by institutionalizing PM in a practical, non-bureaucratic way. Your projects become a proof of concept and an example of effective project management.

Avoid Ambiguity to Improve Performance

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Avoid Ambiguity to Improve Performance

Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) are alive and well in the world of projects. 

These factors magnify the effects of one another to increase the risk of project failure and the need for increased management precision and capability.

Volatility (the frequency of change), uncertainty (the degree to which outcomes are known) and complexity (the number and kinds of relationships) are unavoidable.  They are part of the fabric of every project, to one degree or another.  While they can be moderated, they cannot be eliminated, mainly because they are driven by external factors beyond our control.

This article focuses on ambiguity and what to do to avoid it from making project performance more difficult than it needs to be.  Ambiguity is a quality that we can control.  Ambiguity is inexactness or vagueness; being open to multiple interpretations.  It can be avoided by communicating clearly and precisely.  

Example: ambiguous Target Date

Here is an example of ambiguity and how it effects performance:A policy decision is communicated to a division’s senior management with an effective date of September 1.   The new policy requires changes to back-office application systems, procedures and to customer facing websites and mobile applications. 

Ambiguity came into play because it was unclear as to when full compliance was required. 

The policy decision was made and communicated to division management on August 15, as the division was gearing up for a long-planned initiative that required intensive work by the IT and staff and had a fixed deadline.  The new directive was triggered by a regulatory decision.  The regulators were usually satisfied with compliance within 90 days of the effective date (September 1), if it was requested and justified.  Ambiguity resulted from the lack of clarity from the very top regarding when the policy would go into effect.  Corporate executives said in their directive that compliance was required by September 1.  Division management passed the directive down to business management and business management engaged IT.

IT and business operations management, aware that the regulation had been in the works since April, had obtained information from the regulators that compliance within 90 days was sufficient.  The estimated work required to comply would take about a calendar month.  The work was therefore planned to begin on September 15.  Feedback to division senior management and from them to the corporate executive level went unanswered.  

Was full implementation of the policy compliance required immediately on Sep 1?   Or, was compliance within 90 days acceptable?   

Without a definitive answer, operations and IT assumed that they better get ready with some evidence of compliance by September 1.   They strongly suspected that if they waited, there would likely be no reprieve and if they didn’t wait, they’d probably be let off the hook when the executives realized that 90-day compliance was fine.  

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They knew, as most project managers know, that getting a month’s worth of work done in less than half that time was highly unlikely.  They needed to find a solution that would satisfy the demand in the available time and then buy the time to complete a more complete solution.  In other words, there was a need for a scramble to get a minimally acceptable result done immediately. In this case, the team removed ambiguity by making a tactical decision.  The executive level directive and the ambiguity it caused would result in a sub-optimal solution with high risk of failure and extra cost to move to the ultimate solution.  The staff’s respect for their leadership was eroded.  The schedule for the planned initiative was threatened because resources had to be diverted to the compliance project.  

All this could have been avoided if the senior levels had responded quickly with clarification regarding the due date.  Ambiguity disappears when people take the time and effort to communicate quickly and clearly. 

Example: Ambiguous Role Definition

Here is another example.An employee with good project management and communication skills is assigned to a large complex program without clear understanding of her role.  She thinks that she reports to the CEO who has given her over to the executive to whom the point person responsible for the project reports.  No one clearly lays out their expectations of the role she is to play.  Relatively comfortable with ambiguity, she takes on a project manager role, focusing on communication planning with the intention of helping the program manager succeed by promoting transparency and critiquing written reports and other communications.  

The program manager, less used to and less comfortable with ambiguity, does not share information or engage in role negotiation.  Dysfunction follows.

In this case the participants did not take it upon themselves to remove the ambiguity by acknowledging and addressing it.  The new player made her life less ambiguous by pulling back.  She stopped doing anything but what she was directed to do by the program manager.  The program manager handled the ambiguity by ignoring the assigned person.  

Practical Reality

“Are these examples real?”  You might ask.  Well, it seems that they happen more frequently than one would think.  

People at every level make unfounded assumptions about the degree to which others understand what they say in the way they meant it to be understood.  They fail to take the time to be explicit and complete in their communication.  Others fail to ask for clarification or affirmation, maybe out of fear that they will be seen as slow-witted or because they think they understand.

Ways of avoiding ambiguity include active listening – making sure as the receiver of information you restate it in your own words and ask if you have it right.   Ask questions to clarify anything that might seem fuzzy or ambiguous to you.  As the sender, cultivate the facilitation skill of asking others to restate their understanding to make sure that there has been a meeting of the minds.  Ask them if they have any questions or need any further information before they can move forward.  In project work, putting things like objectives, role assignments and expectations in writing contributes to clarity and avoids ambiguity.  It doesn’t have to be anything like a formal document, a simple confirmation email will work.  As a leader, make sure those who work with you feel comfortable to raise questions and objections.

Recognize that the time and effort you take to avoid ambiguity will avoid rework, frustration and morale issues that lower productivity.  The more volatile, uncertain and complex your situation, the more important it is to minimize ambiguity by communicating clearly and completely.

Note that uncertainty is not the same as ambiguity.  Premature definition can be harmful.  Complex situations like organizational change and the exact nature of a complex product must evolve.  Evolution takes time and the ability to accept and work with uncertainty. One can be unambiguous (clear and explicit) about the fact that there is uncertainty.

The master project manager avoids ambiguity by communicating clearly, listening actively and ensuring that others mutually understand goals, roles and responsibilities.

Making the Right Decision at the Right Time – Don’t Jump to Conclusions

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Making the Right Decision at the Right Time – Don’t Jump to Conclusions

Projects thrive on decisions. They are made by all stakeholders throughout project life, with most being made by individual performers regarding their own work.

All decisions require clear thinking, analysis, information and the participation of the right people. Those decisions that have ripple effects across the project or outside of the project’s boundaries are of particular importance. They often require collaboration by several people, often with one person who will make the final decision.

Avoid BOTH Jumping to Conclusions AND Analysis Paralysis

There is a continuum between making immediate snap decisions (jumping to conclusions) and spending so much time in assessing and communicating about the decision that there is analysis paralysis – spending so much time in the decision process that no decision is made.

Some decisions must be made immediately, to address time critical emergencies – fires. Others can be made over time; how much time depends on the situation. In well-planned projects, the number of decisions that must be made in the blink of an eye are few. Those for which there is time to reflect, analyze and assess multiple options before deciding are the norm. At the same time, analysis paralysis is unacceptable. Closure is needed in decision making. Either there is a decision or a clear statement that there will be no decision.

If you frequently experience emergency decisions, look at the degree to which inadequate planning and short-sighted decisions are a cause of excessive firefighting and snap decisions. If you find that snap decisions made without sufficient analysis are habitual, then break the habit. Decisions made without sufficient information and analysis are likely to lead to rework and unmet expectations.

If on the other hand, analysis paralysis is your norm, look at the fear of making a wrong decision and overcome it by understanding the need for due diligence and the reality that any decision can be wrong no matter how much time you spend analyzing. Monitor the implementation of the decision and be open to change.

Plan for Decision Making

Identify specific decision-making tasks and be aware of the decisions embedded in other tasks. Set time constraints to inform decision makers so they can use the right process and be aware of the impact of delays.

Example

For example, a design task’s duration estimate should include the time required for the team to decide on the issues that arise as alternatives are encountered. Deriving the estimate includes an understanding of the decision-making process. Include the time for making these in process decisions in the design task itself, rather than as separate tasks. The design team must monitor against their target date and assess how decision making is impacting the schedule.

Following the design task is a task for a higher-level decision regarding design alternatives and/or the acceptance of the design proposed by the design team. This task’s duration depends on several factors, among them, the number of decision makers, their bandwidth and the number of decisions they must make, their process, etc. A time box for this task may not fully constrain overly long delays, but it highlights the potential impact of delays and gives the decision makers a sense of what is expected of them. As with any task, the duration should be accepted by the performers and, of course, must be realistic.

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Uncertainty

There is uncertainty about how long it will take to make a decision, particularly when there are multiple decision makers working without a clear decision-making approach. To manage expectations, make this uncertainty explicit in the project plan by establishing risks related to excessive decision-making time. In one example approval of a contract for project critical services took six months rather than the estimated six weeks. The result was a delay in the start of the project and a disruption of funding and resource assignments. Learning from this experience, future planning addressed such delays as risks and sought to reduce their probability and impact.

Considering the impact of the decision and time constraints, managers must decide what degree of due diligence is required for each decision.

For example, the decision to include extra, technically ready, features into the next release of a product can have a big impact on the product’s users when training, marketing, organizational change, support services and data preparation factors are considered. A quick decision, driven by the desire to bring more features and functions into the user community, a prejudice against spending time analyzing multiple scenarios, and the fact that the hardware and software are ready, could lead to costly disruption.

The Decision-Making Process

To better manage decision making in projects, understand decision making as a process. While this is not the place for any in-depth process description, here are some fundamental key points:

  • Balance intuition and analysis. “Blink” or gut feel based snap decisions can be very accurate and correct. They may also be completely wrong.
    Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, gives the example of an art expert who immediately and correctly recognized a fraudulent statue after it went through months of analysis by other experts. He also recounts the story of a policeman who shot an unarmed innocent man based on a snap decision driven by fear and bias.
  • Use formal analytical methods such as weighted scoring to make complex and impactful decisions. These require skill, time and effort.
  • Make sure decision makers understand their objectives. For example, is the decision to validate and accept a proposal or to identify an optimal solution, where the proposal is one alternative? Ambiguous objectives will send the decision makers off on a path that may take unnecessary time and effort and result in unmet expectations.
  • Recognize biases, desires and political issues that impact decision-making.
  • To make informed decisions, step back and assess everyone’s, including your own, abilities to be objective.
  • Accept the reality that a good decision may not be the “right” decision. A good decision is one made in a timely manner as the result of a healthy process that has assessed multiple factors (e.g., costs, risks, duration, quality, pros, cons and alternatives) from multiple perspectives. A right decision is one that works out as expected.
  • Involve the right people at the right time. Promote consensus and mutual ownership of the decision. Make sure the people who will have to act upon the decision and those who will have to live with its outcome have a say.
  • Decisions are subject to change. For example, the decision to perform a project can be reversed as it becomes clear that the project is no longer worth doing – even after spending millions of dollars on the project. Monitor the action the decision sets in motion and adjust accordingly.
  • Document decisions and the criteria used in making them
  • Regularly assess your decision-making process to continuously improve it.

Project Insight: What It Is and How to Get It

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Project Insight: What It Is and How to Get It

Everyone with a stake in a project wants to know what’s going on.

Depending on who they are, they want to know the reason for the project, how it relates to other projects, what progress has been made, what issues or barriers have come up, estimates and the level of confidence to place in them, when the project will be done, how much it has and will cost, what the product will be like, and more.

Project managers need even more than knowledge. They need project insight.

Insight is seeing into or understanding the inner nature of something including the cause and effect relationships that drive it. Insight is associated with intuition and wisdom. Insight often appears in a flash, though it is the result of a synthesis of information and experience. With insight, there is a felt sense of physical sensations. There is an awareness that cannot be completely expressed intellectually.

For example, after reading a status report and finding that project tasks are running late a project manager goes home worried about the project’s success. He or she has dinner, watches some TV, talks to friends and/or spouse about politics, movies or personal finance, and goes to bed. The next morning, in the shower, there is an AHA moment that gives the manager the insight into the cause of the delays and the clear understanding of what to do about it. Worry disappears and is replaced by a sense of confidence. There is still a need to analyze the situation to make sure the insight is real and practical, but there has been a breakthrough.

How do we get the insight needed to manage and perform?

The process that leads to insight relies on structure and hard and soft data. The data is transformed into useful information which is interpreted through the filter of experience to gain insight or deep understanding. Insight can arise when hard and soft data are synthesized into a total picture of the project.

Soft Data

Along with the hard data of dates, deliverables, and dollars, the project manager uses input that comes from observing and listening to project stakeholders and their relationships and knowing his/her own biases and conditioned responses. This requires mindfulness, emotional and social intelligence. It is the ability of a PM to process this data that makes the difference between the adequate and the great performers.

However, subjective evaluations and impressions are not enough. Recognizing that intuition is not always right, we need the hard data that will “prove” its validity.

Hard Data

The plan provides the structure. The tasks, organized hierarchically in a work breakdown structure, are the framework that is fleshed out with duration, effort and cost estimates and associated with resources. The baseline is established. The hard data are the actual results – costs, effort expended, deliverables accomplished, dates, client and stakeholder satisfaction, etc. – that can be reflected against the baseline to get a sense of the way the project is meeting expectations.

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As work is performed, actuals are compared to estimates. The result – early, late, over or under budget – is assessed in the context of task dependencies and resource availability to determine its impact on the project itself and on other projects using common resources.

Trends are analyzed. Are delays, defects and overruns isolated or chronically continuing to increase? Do they indicate that estimates are seriously flawed and that the project baseline needs to be changed? Are delays caused by poor estimates or poor performance?

Understanding the need to measure earned value, the PM compares the value of interim accomplishments to scheduled completion and budgeted cost. This requires estimating and tracking effort and cost. Without such tracking, insight is limited, relying on inference and subjective opinion rather than hard data.

However, the experienced PM will be able to gain insight into project health based on the information at hand. He/she will know that things are going right or wrong based on whether there are concrete deliverables, the nature of relationships and communications and the general “vibe”, among other cues.

As a rule of thumb, if a task slips for two or more reporting periods, it is likely that there is something that requires reassessing the estimate and performance. Chronic, increasing variance between estimates and actual results is a bad sign.

Determine if delays are on the critical path and therefore likely to delay overall project completion or on other paths and therefore less impactful. How do delays on noncritical tasks effect resource allocations? What risks have been identified and how likely to impact your project, with what intensity? How many scope changes are coming up? Are defects being discovered late in the project? Will a non-critical path become critical?

To enhance control and predictability define relatively short tasks (a week or two in duration) identified with well-defined concrete, measurable deliverables. When tasks have long durations with poorly defined deliverables, opinion rather than fact is the basis for saying how much of the task has been accomplished ad when it will be finished.

Well defined deliverables include clear understandings of acceptance criteria. Don’t be misled by performance characterized by on time deliverables that satisfy schedule expectations but are of poor quality. For example, delivering product components that are full of defects so that testing and acceptance activities are long and overly costly.

Beware of percentage completion reporting, particularly when the percentage completion is based on subjective opinion rather than comparing amount completed vs. total amount to be completed. It is common that the last ten percent can take longer to accomplish than the first ninety percent.

While you can’t rely on the numbers alone, without them you are navigating your project without a compass or access to the stars.

Insightfully Going Forward

Processing the hard data in any complex project requires project tools and the skill and discipline to effectively use them create and maintain the plan, capture actual performance data, summarize, assess trends and report. If the tool is part of a wider project portfolio management tool set, so much the better. Then there can be portfolio insight as well as project insight.

Processing the soft data means taking the time and effort to communicate with stakeholders at all levels to get multiple perspectives. Take the pulse of the project using your mindfulness fueled emotional and social intelligences.

Reconcile and merge your knowledge into a unified whole. Relax and let insight appear.