Author: Kiron Bondale

Breaking Bad Serves as a Cautionary Tale for Project Managers

Written by Kiron Bondale on January 15, 2014. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Breaking Bad Serves as a Cautionary Tale for Project Managers

You might assume that a television show which portrays the transformation of Mr. Chips into Scarface would provide more relevance to the logic of paying high school teachers as opposed to being a source of useful lessons for project managers. Hopefully I can correct you of that assumption!

**SPOILER ALERT** This article is published months after the final season aired, so I hope that any reader who has interest in Breaking Bad is already aware of how the show ends, but if not, spoilers are going to be discussed!

In no particular order, here are a few lessons from the story as well as from how the show itself was made.

“Are we in the meth business or the money business?” – Walter White originally started breaking bad as a means to provide for his family after his lung cancer diagnosis, but somewhere along the way, his objectives significantly changed. You might argue with me that there was always a little bad guy within him waiting to get out, but his original intentions were driven by necessity and opportunity. If there is a major shift in a project’s vision, make sure that you work with your project sponsor to help your key stakeholders and team members understand the rationale for the change and what it will mean to them.
“Would you just, for once, stop working me?” – The relationship between Walt and Jesse Pinkman is one of the most fascinating aspects of the show. Walt appears to goes out of his way to protect and promote Jesse, but it is all done to further his agenda. Jesse frequently recognizes that he is being used, but goes along with it to get the recognition and attention from someone whom he considers almost a surrogate father. Project managers often wield a great deal of influence over team members and stakeholders, but there’s a very fine line between influencing someone to do what’s in the best interests of the project, and working them to satisfy your own ego or a personal agenda.
“So, you’re chasing around a fly, and in your world I’m the idiot.” – One of the more amusing episodes of the series takes place during Season 3 when Walt’s chronic insomnia causes him to obsess about the risk of contamination from a single housefly which has entered the meth super lab. His attempts to remove the “contaminant” result in physical injury to him as well as almost maiming Jesse. Tunnel vision can often occur to us on high stress projects – we lose focus on the big picture and begin to obsess on minutiae. This is when having a trusted impartial observer can help to set us straight – so long as we are willing to listen to them!
“We’re just getting started. Nothing stops this train.” – The episode Dead Freight from the final season provides a great example of how a project which appears to be right on track can go horribly wrong if basic expectations for behavior have not been established with team members in advance. After Walt and his crew had successfully pulled off the methylamine heist in almost perfect fashion, Todd Alquist kills an innocent kid who most likely had not even witnessed anything incriminating. Had Walt done a better job of setting his expectations with his team members for handling such unforeseen surprises, things might have gone differently.
“W.W. I mean, who do you figure that is, y’know? Woodrow Wilson? Willy Wonka? Walter White?” “Heh. You got me.” – Midway through the fifth season, Walt learns his cancer has returned, but having achieved his financial goals is ready to live out his remaining days in peace. Unfortunately, his mistake of not disposing the copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which had been personalized by Gale Boetticher gives his brother-in-law, Hank, the final puzzle piece he needs to connect Walt to the meth empire. While I had indicated in an earlier lesson that obsession is dangerous, a lack of attention to detail can also introduce risk into projects.
“Sell off what we have and then…well, then I guess I’m done.” – Vince Gilligan knew he had a hit on his hands with Breaking Bad after the first season aired and he could have tried to keep milking the cash cow well beyond the fifth and final season. However, having spent several years writing for The X-Files, Gilligan was also well aware of the dangers of a show “jumping the shark”. Ignoring or encouraging gold-plating or other attempts to increase scope might appear to be harmless and in the best interests of the project customer, especially when you are ahead of schedule or below budget, but it’s not the project manager’s place to make such a decision.

To use one of Mike Ehrmantraut’s great quotes, if you ignore these lessons, someone may eventually say to you “If you’d done your job, known your place, we’d all be fine right now!”

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Be Careful Which Project Constraint you Measure, as You Might Just Get It

Written by Kiron Bondale on December 4, 2013. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Be Careful Which Project Constraint you Measure, as You Might Just Get It

bondale Dec4 It is a commonly held belief that in the absence of a higher driving need, people will focus on those activities or behaviors for which they are being measured and subsequently either positively or negatively reinforced. Given this premise, it should be no great revelation to leadership teams that if a balanced approach is taken by governance bodies to project oversight, this should result in a correspondingly greater incentive for project teams to consistently perform practices across all key project management knowledge areas.

This is why it never ceases to amaze me that the same senior stakeholders who complain about the lack of practice consistency across their project teams with regards to certain knowledge areas are equally guilty of forcing these same teams to focus on one or two specific constraints.

Please note that I’m not referring to the practice of communicating the priority of project constraints as it relates to the business objectives or key drivers for a project. That is an essential activity which will ensure that project and governance teams make the right types of trade-off decisions. For example, if a particular project is addressing a time-sensitive regulatory requirement, schedule is the primary driver and it is perfectly reasonable for the project team to propose decision recommendations which will protect project deadlines at the cost of other constraints such as scope or cost.

However, should an organization focus exclusively on one or two constraints across all projects in the portfolio, this can result in a culture which colors not only team decision making, but also the degree to which they comply with the company’s project management methodology. While you might feel that a safety measure to guard against this outcome is regular project assurance reviews or audits, non-compliance findings which are unrelated to the supreme constraint are likely to be marginalized.

A common example of this behavior occurs in companies which are under sustained financial pressure or scrutiny. The last decade has not been kind to both public and private sectors, hence it is little surprise that cost is king. You might feel that regulatory projects or product development projects would give time a higher priority, but even on those, it is rare to see governance oversight bestowing financial carte blanche on teams just to hit a date. Budgeting, financial tracking and reporting are usually performed quite diligently as there is significant oversight in that area, but the same is usually not observed across the remaining knowledge areas.

While you might feel that this neglect may apply to practices such as risk or quality management, it might even be identified on the stereotypical project management practices of time or scope management. This is certainly not to say that teams are ignoring milestone delivery dates or customer requirements. Results are still being produced but they might not be delivered following consistent practices.

If you are still skeptical, do a spot check on your own project portfolio:

Identify a sample subset of your active projects which is representative of the overall portfolio in terms of strategic alignment, drivers, and functional representation.
For each of these identified projects, check for the existence of a critical (as per your methodology) artifact which supports each project management knowledge areas. For example, for scope you could look for a work breakdown structure or other type of scope decomposition document. For stakeholder management, check whether there is a detailed, up-to-date stakeholder analysis register.
Review each artifact you are able to locate for both quality and currency of data. You could use a very simple rating as follows:
1. Up-to-date, high-quality content
2. Somewhat out-of-date, or somewhat inaccurate content
3. Completely out-of-date, totally inaccurate, or missing
Once this has been done for all projects and all knowledge areas, analyze the results for a pattern of diligence in one area and poor compliance in others.

If you have identified that there does seem to be an unhealthy focus on one constraint, you will likely want to review the implications of this with your senior management team. If nothing else this gives you the opportunity to conduct a leadership gut check to help you determine whether there is real commitment to establish or improve organizational project management capability.

This might also provide you with a good coaching moment to debunk the myopic view that one can safely neglect certain project management practices without causing an impact to the “chosen ones” – as we all know, there is a very tight dependency between all knowledge areas.

W. Edwards Deming is often erroneously quoted as having said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In fact, he stated that a cardinal sin was trying to run a company based solely on reported measurements. The same could be said of an excessive organizational focus on one constraint.

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Optimize Resource Utilization Through Project Risk Management

Written by Kiron Bondale on November 6, 2013. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Optimize Resource Utilization Through Project Risk Management

FEATURE nov6th Those of us who have drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid don’t need to be sold on the benefits of project risk management. The challenge comes when we need to convince others, especially senior stakeholders such as project sponsors of the criticality of risk management practices.

If you are managing projects in a company which operates at a high degree of organizational project management maturity you might wonder why such marketing might be required. Your senior stakeholders likely possess the foresight and experience to understand the value of risk management, and if so, I envy you.

Unfortunately, most of us work for organizations where the perceived financial and behavioral costs of following consistent risk management practices outweigh the benefits. Usually these perceptions stem from one or more of the following causes:

A fundamental lack of understanding of the rationale behind project management and its benefits. If your leadership team thinks that the triple constraint is a new weight-loss gimmick and scope is something that a doctor uses during their annual physical exams, it’s little wonder that risk would be treated like a four-letter word.
The leadership team wears rose-colored glasses. Implementing risk management practices requires acknowledgement and transparency of uncertainties and their impacts to projects. In many organizations, project sponsors are simply unwilling to hear about what could go wrong. Some of them might be concerned that if negative risks are presented about their projects that it might provide governance committees with the “ammunition” needed to cancel these initiatives.
Fool me once, shame on you. Some organizations lose their appetite for risk management after experiencing the downsides of a poor implementation of risk management practices. As I wrote in a previous article, it is extremely difficult to secure commitment from stakeholders to participate in risk management activities, and it is very easy to lose this trust.
No pain, no gain. Organizations like most people rarely apply good practices until they have experienced the significant pains of not doing so. What’s interesting to note is that even those companies which have experienced catastrophic project failures are prone to search for scapegoats or to focus on short term Band-Aids to avoid similar future outcomes, but as time passes, these tactical measures are pushed aside and the organizations become ripe for more spectacular failures.

Based on these challenges an organizational risk management maturity model could be proposed:

Denial – Not only is risk management not practiced, but those who attempt to practice it are likely to be marginalized or discredited.
Lip service – Risk management practices exist! To clarify, project managers can point to the Managing Project Risks section within their project management methodology guide and might even be able to locate an out of date, highly generic risk register for their projects. Risk responses, when defined, are occasionally executed, but more often than not, project managers are like Cassandra – prophesizing issues with no one wishing to believe.
Light at the end of the tunnel – risk management gets consistently practiced across all projects, and there is an organization-level appreciation for its benefits, however project selection and prioritization decisions continue to be made without incorporating risk into the decision-making process.
Enlightenment – risk management is practiced at portfolio, program & project levels and the organization might even have staffed risk management consultants to help project teams reap the maximum rewards from risk management practices.

I’d previously felt that auto insurance might serve as an appropriate, familiar analogy to educate people on the merits of risk management. Since then I’ve witnessed too many stakeholders who wouldn’t dream of driving their cars without insurance coverage refuse to invest any effort in supporting risk management activities on the projects they are supposed to be championing.

Since most senior stakeholders are also people managers, an alternate approach might be to focus on explaining how risk management practices can reduce the project and operational impacts of reduced resource availability.

Without risk management, team members will spend a significant percentage of their time in troubleshooting and resolving issues which had not been previously identified or responded to as risks. As project estimates for resource utilization rarely include an allowance for issue resolution, time spent in firefighting will correspondingly reduce resource capacity for delivering agreed-to scope. While this results in an increased likelihood of missing timelines, it also reduces overall staff throughput.

Risk management (and project management as a whole) improves predictability of project outcomes, but positioning it as a means of reducing impacts to staff productivity might help to convert your senior stakeholders into believers.

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Go To Where The Puck Is Going, Not Where It Has Been

Written by Kiron Bondale on October 9, 2013. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Go To Where The Puck Is Going, Not Where It Has Been

bondale Oct9 Winter is coming, and in many parts of North America, sports fans thoughts turn to the drop of the puck which signals the start of the hockey season. I am reminded of Walter Gretzky’s advice to his son when considering the challenge companies face when attempting to match internal skills and capacity against future project demand.

With a traditional approach to annual planning, project requests are solicited, reviewed and analyzed. The resource requirements to deliver those projects are estimated at a high level and aggregated. These totals are then mapped against available capacity of required skills to determine how many projects can be completed. Invariably, demand exceeds supply so either resource augmentation is initiated in those companies which can afford to bring on additional staff or (more commonly) the project wish-list is culled through subjective selection and prioritization methods.

In companies which have adopted more dynamic planning approaches, while there is a better ability to shift resources away from projects which are not expected to deliver desired outcomes, there is still likely to be a variance between skills and capacity supply and demand.

Introducing consistent, objective project selection and prioritization practices can partially help to reduce supply-side gaps as low value projects are less likely to be initiated and hence will not consume valuable skills. Furthermore, by improving project tracking, reporting and evaluation processes, project health is likely to be scrutinized regularly which reduces the likelihood of projects metamorphosing into resource-consuming zombies.

Unfortunately, neither of these project portfolio management capability improvements fully addresses the issue as their focus is on modifying demand-side behaviors.

Two of the more common causes of supply-side shortages include:

Professional development investments rarely align with the company’s strategic needs. In most organizations, training decisions are made by employees or their reporting managers. Training budget restrictions will usually result in there being some scrutiny on requests, but rarely is strategic alignment a significant input into this due diligence activity.
Formal training is only one component of a skills development strategy. On-the-job training, job rotation, and job shadowing are other key approaches to developing required skills. Unfortunately, none of these activities are free and while most companies recognize the need to provide junior staff with such development opportunities, rarely will they do the same for more experienced staff, usually because those staff are required to satisfy current project or operational demands.
Fundamentally, supply-side shortages are the outcome of short-term thinking. Unfortunately, in publicly traded companies or those which operate under significant external influence such as public sector agencies, it can be extremely difficult to take a longer term view, but this is crucial to sustainably address skill gaps. Instead the temptation many companies succumb to is to focus on hiring or developing sufficient skills to satisfy current gaps without addressing future needs.

So what needs to change? While this is not an issue which can be resolved overnight, the following steps can position a company well for achieving longer term improvement.
Define strategy and develop a plan to achieve that strategy. As Lewis Carroll said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”. It’s pretty difficult to develop future skills if you don’t know what skills will be required to get you there and to sustain you once you are there. This strategy and supporting plan shouldn’t be carved in stone, but neither should it change each day.
Identify which skills are going to be critical to future success and then formulate and execute a plan to develop these skills through a combination of formal training, on-the-job training and job shadowing or doubling-up staff on aligned projects and activities. While this means that your company may need to initiate less concurrent projects while such skills are being developed, it will also result in greater throughput or reduced project costs in the future.
Include strategic alignment as a key criterion for both demand and supply-side decision making. For example, if your company determines that a particular skill set is critical today but will be unnecessary a couple of years out, reduce ongoing development investments in that skill set and it may even be worth assessing whether it is a good candidate for strategic outsourcing. Skills which are in limited need today, but likely to be crucial a year or two out should be formally added to the development plans for enough staff making allowance for attrition.

Emulate the Great One by implementing strategic supply-side practices and avoid behaving like novice players who chase each other to the puck’s last position without attempting to determine its speed and trajectory.

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Guidance for Good Project Governance

Written by Kiron Bondale on September 11, 2013. Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on Guidance for Good Project Governance

bondale Sept11 Behind every successful project is an effective governance process. On smaller projects, this governance may be primarily driven by the efforts of the project sponsor and project manager, but on larger, more complex projects you may need to have multiple governance teams and processes to properly guide and support the project.

For those of you who have not experienced the pain of managing a project that is lacking appropriate governance, here are just a few of the issues which might be encountered:

Inability to secure the committed allocation of required financial and people resources to deliver the project scope on time
Inability to get those issues, actions and risks addressed which have been escalated beyond the authority level of the project team
Protracted delays, excessive effort and staff frustration in getting key decisions made or, even worse, wasted effort and schedule impacts resulting from reversed or modified decisions
Lack of buy-in from key stakeholders
Insufficient visibility of the project’s importance at executive levels to secure sustained funding and perceived priority

If poor governance can be the cause of such lethal project impacts, wouldn’t you expect to see significant emphasis placed on this critical step?

Reviewing the track sessions for four conferences being held this year across Canada, I was only able to locate one session which specifically referenced governance in its title – while it is likely that a few more also related to subject, having attended a few of the track sessions in the Toronto conference, my experience was that this was not one of the most commonly referenced topics. This is not a criticism of that particular conference – having attended multiple project management conferences across North America over the past fifteen years, I can’t recall one where governance was a focal topic.

Furthermore, over the course of the project management capability improvement work I’ve done with companies, I’ve found that those which include a mandatory “Proposed Governance Structure” section within their project plan templates have usually done so because of lessons they have learned through the school of hard (project) knocks.

It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive guide for defining the right governance structure and process which will meet the needs of all projects as, just as with any other project management practices, these need to be tailored to the specific needs of each project and the culture of the organization in which they are being implemented.

Here are some tips to get you started:

While project complexity as a whole drives the need for greater governance, the following specific factors should be evaluated to assess the extent of governance required:
1. Degree of organization impact – the bigger the change to the organization, the more robust the governance required
2. Number of key, influential stakeholders who have or are likely to have significantly differing agendas – the greater the likelihood of divergence of opinion on project direction and decisions, the more effort will need to be spent on governance
If multiple governance bodies are being considered, make sure that there is a clear definition of the jurisdictional boundaries of each. Without this, you run the risk of getting a frustrated or disengaged sponsor who sees their decisions being overturned or questioned frequently. This also applies to standing governance committees within your organization – your proposed governance structures need to align with those as well.
If you are considering a multi-sponsor model for projects where no single sponsor is capable of or will be perceived to be providing a balanced level of governance, remember that with two or more sponsors, you will need to budget some of your time to facilitating their transition through Tuckman’s standard team development phases. You will also need to budget for the additional effort and costs of having multiple executives directly engaged with your project. Finally, you should prepare yourself for the likelihood of conflict and churn across your team resulting from individual sponsors making decisions without fully consulting their co-sponsors.
Establish clear terms of reference for each governance body detailing the types and level of activities each is responsible for as well as the overall mandate of the group. This process should start with how these bodies are named as an advisory group may be perceived to serve a very different purpose from a steering committee.
Balance the desired project benefits against the administrative costs, effort & potential delays of having an overly onerous governance process. The more gates that a particular decision or action has to pass, the greater the project costs and potential for delays. After a leadership team has experienced issues of inadequate governance on one project, their tendency may be to overcompensate on the next.

The outcome will usually not improve, and governance practices will oscillate from minimal to excessive.

Establishing the right governance structure and process is like the tale of Goldilocks – missing the mark could be “un-bearable”!

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