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PMTimes_Jun27_2023

Evidence Based Decision Making: A Pillar of Optimal Performance

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

Decision making is at the heart of leadership, management, and performance. I write about mindful conflict and expectations management, and the decision making that underlies both. Last month the article on the use of the Evaporating Cloud technique addressed the power of collaborating to face conflict to identify goals, wants, and needs.

 

This article focuses on making decisions based on evidence and rational thinking as opposed to unfounded opinions and emotions. While feelings are important, they are often without a sound basis in reality. Acting upon them without investigating evidence and alternatives is foolish. Not considering the feelings is equally unwise.

 

“When somebody on staff asks what we should do to

address a problem, the first questions I now ask are

‘What does the research say? What is the evidence base?

What information can we gather to determine if it will

fit in different contexts?’ It’s become a way of life.”

– Jim Hmurovich, BA, MS Ed, President & CEO, Prevent Child Abuse America

 

Decisions

Here is a simple example to bring out the practical nature evidence based decision making:

In an apartment building an occupant, Ms. H, objected to the practice of leaving a building provided package cart in the elevator for the next elevator rider to return to the lobby. 

She felt that the “rude behavior of some made it impossible for others to use our very limited elevators.”

Taking a rational look at the issue, it seems that if the person who borrowed the cart took it down in the elevator there would be one less spot on the elevator for other riders.  Further investigation may uncover that Ms. H. doesn’t like to or isn’t able to get on an elevator with a cart. If that is the case, adding the cart’s borrower to the trip will do her no good.

 

Ms. H failed to consider the facts. Her emotions and biases drove her demand. She was reactive. Imagine if she was good at convincing others without providing any foundation in fact and logic, and the decision makers just threw up their hands and created a rule that “borrowers or designated alternatives must return the carts themselves.”

This is a simple example. But how often are projects hampered by reactive behavior? Instead step back to consider evidence and apply analytical thinking along with emotional and social intelligence.

 

The decision gets more serious if it was about whether to purchase a product or create one. Ms. H, now in her capacity as senior executive and project sponsor, insists that buying a product is the way to go. She was convinced that development was too risky and expensive. She had been burned when in an earlier project a decision to build vs. buy led to a project with costly overruns. She was sold by product vendors and external consultants on the idea that the products were easily customized to the unique needs of Ms. H’s organization. And that the organization would be better off changing procedures to accommodate the products.

 

An analytical review of research, the experiences of others, and a clear sense of the nature of the customization required would uncover the risks and expense of adapting to or customizing a product rather than creating one’s own to fit special needs.

The decision could go either way. The point is to combine analysis and intuition to best decisions. “Good” decisions are informed decisions that combine information (facts, feelings, interpretations and opinions, etc.) from multiple perspectives. Good decisions are more likely to successfully solve the problem at hand than decisions made based on limited information.

 

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Evidence Based Decision Making

Evidence Based Decision-Making (EBDM) leads to informed decisions. “Evidence Based Decision-Making is a process for making decisions about a program, practice, or policy that is grounded in the best available research evidence and informed by experiential evidence from the field and relevant contextual evidence.”[1] Not only does it result in optimal decisions, but EBDM also cultivates collaborative action and cuts through unnecessary conflict.

 

Evidence Based Decision Making (EBDM) is described as a 4-part process with 10 steps and 47 sub-steps. The model is shown in Figure 1:[2]

Figure 1: The EDBM

 

Don’t worry, we won’t go into the 10 steps and 47 sub-steps. Though, having a detailed model is useful for training and to promote collective understanding of required tasks, roles, and skills. See the referenced source for the full model.

But let’s be realistic, getting decision makers and stakeholders like Ms. H to buy into a super-analytical process with 47 steps is virtually impossible. Well maybe not impossible, but requiring a mindset transformation, and that takes time.

 

The successful decision maker understands the process and adapts it to the current situation. She avoids analysis paralysis and understands that collaboration among the decision makers is as important as the weighting and scoring of facts and feelings. Based on inquiry the rest of the process is customized to fit the personalities, cultural influences, need for speed, availability of evidence and the capacity of the decision makers.

 

Evidence

EBDM means making decisions using four sources[3]

  • the best available scientific evidence – research studies, experiments, journal articles, etc.
  • organizational evidence – business data, including financial reports and performance, studies, project journals and history, organizational culture, etc.
  • experiential evidence – the collective experience of the decision-makers and outside experts
  • stakeholder evidence – stakeholder expectations, feelings, beliefs, biases, wants, needs, and values.

On the surface all four types of evidence seem objective, where “Objective evidence is evidence that is not subject to bias and is quantifiable and able to be independently confirmed and verified by using analytical or other tools. Simply put, objective evidence is based on facts and is the kind of evidence that can be independently examined, evaluated, and verified.”[4]

 

But go a little deeper and you find that there can be subjectivity in each. For example, there are often many ways to interpret scientific data. The same data can be used to justify any number of opinions, which when written up in a journal article can give the impression of being objective.

Subjective evidence is based on individual interpretations and opinions. It cannot be independently verified. When subjective evidence is valued and evaluated in concert with objective evidence and the multiple subjective experiences, it is often what leads to the most effective solutions. Evidence based decision making makes subjective evidence a valued part of the process.

 

Applying EBDM

EBDM is a process to uncover convincing evidence using objective analysis. Like all approaches to decision making, it is a quest for greater certainty about the outcome of a decision. Use it to go beyond both decision-by-the-numbers and decision-by-feelings. Objectivity and subjectivity are facts of life in any complex decision making, do not ignore either. To be objective a decision maker must acknowledge the presence of subjectivity and incorporate it into the decision making.

If you are fortunate enough to be making decisions optimally, resolving conflicts, setting expectations, experiencing great outcomes, just keep doing what you are doing. If there is room for improvement, bring EBDM into your work, whether it is you alone or the team. Raise it as a topic as you work to continuously improve performance guided by informed decisions.

 

[1] https://vetoviolence.cdc.gov/apps/evidence/docs/ebdm_82412.pdf
[2] https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13690-022-00843-0
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308777/#:~:text=The%20four%20sources%20of%20evidence,expectations%20(1%E2%80%933)
[4] https://www.ocdisabilityattorneys.com/disability-benefits-for-objective-versus-subjective-evidence#:~:text=%E2%80%9CSubjective%E2%80%9D%20evidence%2C%20on%20the,accepted%20on%20faith%2C%20or%20rejected
PMTimes_Jun21_2023

Shake up Your Stand-up

Written by Carmen Kesho on . Posted in Articles.

Standups are a cornerstone of Agile project management. As a Project Manager, conducting stand-ups provides a daily communication touch point with your team that allows you to build rapport while gaining a deeper understanding of each individual team member. However, after you have worked with your team for a while and established a good sprint cadence and team dynamic, the standup may lose its flare and, in some cases, its necessity.

 

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If your stand-ups are getting stale, try a few of these tricks to freshen your stand-ups:

  1. Have a Standup or Two Via Slack. Post-Covid, we are inundated with virtual meetings. While the daily stand-up is meant to align all team members and get the day started with a common goal in mind, that 15 minutes may slow your team down if they are in the zone and want to complete a task. Try having the team write their updates at the start of their day and share them in a slack group chat. Chime in to help remove blockers as needed. Pro tip: Send out a template with the questions and ask for the responses by a certain time daily.
  2. Reduce Frequency. If team members are working on higher pointed tasks with multiple components, there may not be a daily update. Depending on the end of your sprint, try incorporating a no standup Friday.
  3. Celebrate Wins. While the “What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? What blockers are impacting me?” format is riveting, it may get a bit monotonous. Incorporate some time to celebrate wins during the standup. Pro tip: Name someone King/Queen of developers for a day when they complete a complex feature.
  4. Incorporate Team Feedback. A team member may want to pass along some nuggets of wisdom they acquired from working on a feature, another team member might want to share a helpful article or tutorial. Again, to keep to the true nature of the standup, it needs to be concise and contribute to the completion of tasks and the betterment of the team’s performance. Sharing knowledge helps attain both of those goals.
  5. Stand-up and Move. If you are working on-site and can meet with your team in person, have a walking stand-up. Walk with the team to get coffee or around the courtyard at your office space. If walking won’t work, get a stress ball, and pass it around as the team is talking through updates. Movement will help get everyone’s energy flowing and help the momentum for the day.
  6. Finish with a Bang. You could equate the standup for a project team to a huddle before a basketball or football game. It sets the tone for what you are about to accomplish for the day. End the standup with a team chant, special handshake, or a theme song. “Eye of the Tiger” comes to mind. Try whatever gets the people going and sets the day on a positive and motivational tone.

Every person is different, and teams are made of people, so tailor these tips to your team. If you don’t see something that will work for your team, consider this a challenge to motivate you to develop more ideas of how you can shake up your stand-up.

PMTimes_Jun20_2023

15 Project Management Tips for Beginners

Written by Sonika Malviya on . Posted in Articles.

Project managers have to juggle multiple tasks every day, while coordinating with various teams. They are accountable for a project’s output, analyzing its goals, creating workflows, facilitating team collaboration, and ensuring that stakeholders and team members are on the same page. This article explains some of the best project management tips that can help beginners kick-start their careers as project managers.

 

Project Management Tips for Beginners:

 

●     Know All the Minute Details About the Project

Before you kick-start the project, gather all information from the project stakeholders or the clients. This can include project timelines, deliverables, resource requirements, skill sets needed to accomplish the work, etc. Make a list of all the requirements, contingencies or scope creep that might occur during the project. The more detail you get, the better you can initiate and execute the project.

 

●     Choose the Team Wisely

People onboarded for the project with the right skill sets can make a significant difference. You should have the right number of resources on the team so that it does not face a lack of skills gap. However, at the same time, your team should not be large enough to indulge in social loafing. To deal with this, first, you must decide on the skill sets required for the project and the number of people with those skills to make a strong team. Then, onboard them based on their qualifications, certification, and capability.

 

●     Set Clear and Realistic Goals

Make sure to clearly define the goals before embarking on the project. The goals should be precise, clear, and realistic. Project goals help teams complete the project and finish the deliverables in a timely manner. Communicate the project’s goals and objectives to your team clearly, so that there is no ambiguity. Also, make sure to set some milestones throughout the project so that you can estimate the pace of your project.

 

●     Know About Your Team

Put some effort and time into gelling with your team and increase cohesiveness among team members. This way, they would more likely go out of their way to deliver you the best possible output. Moreover, getting to know your team will help you understand each individual’s skills, strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to delegate and distribute tasks in the best possible manner.

 

●     Empower Team Collaboration

Collaboration is crucial for the seamless management and execution of the project. To foster effective collaboration, you can conduct team-building activities, deploy collaborative tools, and leverage digital conferencing and messaging tools so that your team does not feel any challenge while working in unison. The tools must help team members connect with each other instantly, whether to share any files or collectively work on project roadblocks.

 

●     Assess Distractions and Ways to Reduce Them

Distractions can hamper project workflow and delay delivery. Distractions may appear in any form, whether it is gossiping co-workers, a noisy work environment, the need to reply to email threads, or notification pop-ups while working. Project managers can leverage distraction-blocking apps, such as StayFocused, for their teams to block distracting notifications from the background for a stipulated time frame. Moreover, some tools like Desksight.ai can also be deployed to help project managers analyze how much time their team members are spending on which websites or applications.

 

●     Be Prepared for Project Risks and Contingency

Changes and impediments are bound to arise during the project and can appear at any stage. Such changes can derail the project and delay delivery. This is the reason why you should prepare for potential risks and contingencies. To tackle such situations and deal with risks and contingencies, you should moot a risk management plan beforehand. The risk management plan ensures that you are armed with appropriate plans and strategies to mitigate their effects.

 

●     Embrace Automation

Automation can really help you undertake tedious tasks so that, as a project manager, you can zero in on more significant tasks that require your expertise and attention. AI-backed technologies can help you manage everything – from allocating resources and updating task progress to scheduling the calendar as per your availability.

 

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●     Adopting Right Project Management Methodologies

Irrespective of your industry, adopting the right project management methodology that resonates with your requirements can really help you step up your game. Project management methodology is a set of rules and guidelines to efficiently plan, manage, and execute any project. You can pick and implement the methodology that fits your project and apprise the team of its workflow, algorithm, and rules. For example, suppose your project may require frequent, ongoing changes. In that case, Scrum is the best methodology for you. You can opt for the Waterfall approach if the goal is clearly defined and there are no alterations during the project.

 

●     Explain the Tasks to Team Members in Detail

One of the major reasons why output does not meet the client’s expectations is that project managers assign tasks to team members without providing details and information. Instead, they assign tasks assuming that team members will figure out what they need to do, how the result should be, which factors are most important and which ones they can neglect. This assumption is why teams sometimes complete tasks differently from clients’ expectations. Project managers are responsible for comprehending every single detail of the tasks assigned, such as attaching screenshots or adding notes when allocating tasks or even recording a short instruction video in case of complex tasks. Better comprehension will lead to an end product that matches the expectations.

 

●     Manage the Team’s Time

Being a project manager, you are responsible for maintaining your team members’ time to maximum efficiency. You should be able to track how much time your team members utilize to complete respective tasks and assess their bandwidth to delegate tasks. You can leverage a project time tracking tool to track the number of employees working and the number of hours spent on specific projects or tasks.

 

●     Determine Milestones with Stakeholders

Ideally, a project manager should continually update their stakeholders about the project’s progress and inform them of the part or the product developed thus far. Even if you are working on the approved pre-defined plan, chances are that the project may go off track or not meet the client’s expectations; therefore, stakeholders must evaluate the project’s progress regularly. The sooner you find out they are unsatisfied with the work done, the less effort your team will have to put into rectifying deliverables. You can even set milestones in between the project to keep stakeholders abreast of the progress.

 

●     Post-project Evaluation

It is necessary to conduct a post-project assessment, where you can determine what worked well and what did not. You can also evaluate the risk management plan, such as whether or not it worked well. Or could the project be completed on time? Every project you handle can be a learning lesson that helps you gain experience about what can come in handy during critical situations and what can be improved in the near future projects.

 

●     Understanding and Utilizing the Team’s Capacity

One of the biggest mistakes most project managers make is considering that their team will work consistently 8 hours every day. However, it rarely happens as teams need some time to relax and chit-chat, check their phones, reply to emails, etc. In fact, according to one analysis, an average full-time employee works productively only for 5 hours every day. So, if you are continuously missing project deadlines, you need to re-evaluate its schedule and introduce some buffer time. Also, be empathetic toward your team members and don’t be too stringent. This attitude will help build good team relationships and motivate team members to go the extra mile for you.

 

Conclusion:

These effective project management tips can help any beginner initiate and execute the project smoothly, while overcoming the roadblocks arising during the workflow. Equipped with these simple tricks, project managers can analyze complex scenarios and implement the best possible solutions.

PMTimes_Jun14_2023

Project Management for Midsize Companies

Written by Lauren Zinsmeister on . Posted in Articles.

In many ways, Project Management is more art than science. Those of us who have spent years in the field have most likely studied the science of it through classes and certifications.

There are certainly best practices that apply most of the time and a Project Manager would do well to have that foundation. But dare I say, the majority of textbook concepts don’t apply much of the time? Let me share a story of a project I tried to manage “by the book” that taught me a big lesson about adapting the “book” to the needs of the company and the team.

During one of my early roles as a Project Manager I worked hard to be organized and apply all the concepts I learned while studying for my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. I remember one project in particular where I meticulously developed a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and calculated the critical path. I had a Microsoft Project sheet a mile long, as this was a major project that would take more than a year to complete. All my details were in order. Project Schedule – check.

Confident in my plan, I brought the project team together. I had worked with key stakeholders to identify all the departments involved in the project and worked with those department leads to know which people should represent their department. I shared my project documents with the team and talked through roles and responsibilities. Stakeholder Management – check.

I knew part of my job was to clear roadblocks for the team, which included the roadblocks of me being a bottleneck. I thought the best way to keep everyone informed was to democratize project documents and have teams make their updates directly rather than funnel all updates through me. I created automations to remind team representatives to make weekly updates.

I had automations to notify people when one of their predecessor items was updated so they would know right away. I had automations to notify both me and team representatives when an update was overdue. Everyone had access to view, so no one ever had to wait on me to share a document or give a status update. We had weekly status meetings to allow for discussion and broader visibility, as well as ad hoc meetings for specific topics as they arose. Transparency and Collaboration – check.

 

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If you haven’t already guessed, let me tell you how this worked out. Not a single person ever went into the project tracker to make an update. Not a single person ever went into the project tracker to see status. My first pivot was to start collecting updates weekly and input them into the tracker myself. This allowed me to stay closer to the project details and gave me an opportunity to do a weekly assessment of project health with more context.

Those weekly conversations turned out to be so much more valuable than independent updates in the tracker. Every week, I would take this updated tracker and the deeper context I had to give a status update. I would share my screen and show the tracker so everyone could see visually where we were compared to the overall plan.

If you haven’t already guessed, let me tell you why this failed fast. If every team was meeting with me weekly to give me an update, why did they need to sit through a weekly status meeting of me telling them where their items were in the project? They didn’t. I lost the team’s engagement fast. My next pivot was a change that has stuck with me through the years. I did the legwork to meet with teams, understand their status, challenges, dependencies, needs, and projections. I consolidated all the information and culled it to down to what was critical.

Every Monday I sent an email with the week’s game plan, including all work expected to be done with deadlines and names of people responsible for doing the work. Every Friday I sent an email as a Reply All giving an update on what had been completed as expected, what had changed, what was delayed and why. If something meaningful changed and needed discussion or a decision, I would schedule a meeting to discuss it. We now had emails for things that could be emails, and meetings for things that needed to be discussed live.

This raised my credibility with the team when I called a meeting, because they trusted that there was something meeting-worthy to discuss rather than just a status update that could and should be an email instead. My Monday “game plan” emails served as an easy reference for project team members to know exactly what they needed to work on, which increased the rate of project work completion because there was more clarity and it was easily accessible.

Nearly 10 years later, I still rely on this approach. My Monday and Friday templates have evolved as my projects have changed, but this approach has proven successful time and again.

This semi-informal approach to Project Management would likely not succeed at a company with tens of thousands of employees. With larger teams and greater numbers of stakeholders, proper project management tools and formal project communication methods are likely necessary. On the other end of the spectrum, this semi-formal Project Management with meticulous planning and centralized tracking is probably more than is needed at a small company.

When teams are small and work closely together, it’s much easier for everyone to know what everyone is working on without a person dedicated to keeping it all organized. My time at midsize companies has helped me find this Goldilocks approach somewhere in the middle.

PMTimes_Jun13_2023

Managing Uncertainty with Risk Management and Communication

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

“Sticking with … uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos,
learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”  ~ Pema Chodron

 

Spiritual or not, this is the path of the project manager. Accepting uncertainty is a mindset that we want to promote for all stakeholders. It is about accepting and managing change and the uncertainty it brings.

 

This article is a follow up to my February 2023 article Goals Are NOT Expectations[1]

 

I’ve experienced more than one organization that refrains from publishing long term plans, cost and revenue expectations, and budgets out of fear that they will be penalized when predictions are not realized. In other settings, project managers are held accountable for missing deadlines and budgets that seemed realistic when they were created and used to justify project approval. Even when changes out of the control of the project manager were the cause of the project’s schedule slippage, budget overrun, or failure to meet benefits expectations.

 

Paradox

There is a paradox. Everyone likes certainty, and that like, left unchecked, leads to problems.

It is fine to like certainty but expecting it causes dissatisfied stakeholders and project failure. While we try to approach certainty, we recognize that, with few exceptions, it is unattainable.

 

The Best Made Plans

“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” – Robert Burns

Burns got it right. Schedule and budget as best we can, and the next day there can be change, a sickness, storm, strike, or any random event that disrupts the schedule and causes cost overruns. Even if you are clever enough to build in buffers, they can be blown through.

We know we can be certain of some things that, for example, we can be certain that there will be change, we can’t control everything that affects our projects and that things will not always be how we’d like them to be. However, we can never be certain of staff and resource availability, requirements, deliverables, cash flow, the completion of tasks, inspections, tests, and more.

 

Since the certainty of a plan is a pipedream, we are left with two choices, don’t plan or manage uncertainty. Given Benjamin Franklin’s statement, “If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” the first option is not recommended. That leaves us with the need to manage uncertainty.

Doing it means accepting and letting go to manage expectations using risk and communication.

 

Accepting Reality

The first step is to accept that uncertainty is an unavoidable reality in projects. This acceptance is a mindset change from thinking that everything must come out the way we want it to everything will occur as it does, and we can work with it. Acceptance is the key to the “knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos.”

Acceptance does not mean passivity. With acceptance and confidence in your ability to handle anything that happens, acceptance puts you on a solid platform for success. You relax in the midst of chaos. Until you and your stakeholders accept uncertainty you cannot optimize your performance. Acceptance is what enables you to let go and let your own and your team’s skill and experience take care of business.

 

Then manage expectations using risk management, and communication, to get the reality of uncertainty across to all stakeholders and have them accept and let go.

Lets look at expectations to see their role in managing uncertainty and the way risk management and communication are keys to managing them.

 

Managing Expectations

Expectations are beliefs about the way something will come about in the future. When stakeholders have rational expectations, accepting uncertainty, they are more likely to keep calm and carry on, even when faced with chaos. With calm acceptance, the probability of success is high.

It is both the organization’s and project manager’s responsibility to make sure expectations are rational and reasonable. Risk management and communication are the tools for managing expectations.

The bottom-line expectation is to work for the best outcome possible while being ready for anything. It is expected that you as a project manager will plan and work to satisfy stakeholders. When expectations are well managed, stakeholders are more likely to be satisfied. Satisfied stakeholders mean project success.

 

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Communication

Communication is the means to achieve rational and realistic expectations.

Communication uses the results of risk management to inform and lead. Communication includes plan presentation and revisions, and continuous candid dialogue in the form of regular progress reporting and informal conversations.

For example, when presenting a plan stress the planned outcome in terms of a range of possibilities with different likelihoods of occurrence. Include statements like “While we are confident that we will meet our sche3dule and budget expectations, we acknowledge that there may be variance. Our risk assessment and plan goes into the details regarding that possible variance. We will regularly assess risks and performance to manage expectations.”

 

Mindset Training

Mindset training is a form of communication. Its purpose is to enable setting the stage for effective performance. Without mindset training that confronts biases and beliefs about the need for and ability to achieve certainty the project manager’s ability to manage expectations is limited.

 

Training time is limited. That is why mindset training is best done by embedding it in skills training as well as in regular meetings and presentations. For example, when giving a presentation to senior stakeholders take a few minutes to highlight that plans are predictions, and that they do not guarantee the predicted outcome. That is a great introduction to the part of the presentation that addresses risk. Posters and informal dialogues can help. In project management training include a segment on expectations management and the need to accept and manage uncertainty.

 

Risk Management

Risk management is the key part of planning that acknowledges and accepts uncertainty and manages expectations. Risk management seeks to identify and avoid the things that get in the way of success, and to promote the things that enable it

We assess risks and plan to remediate them with effective responses. We acknowledge that there are both known and unknown risks. We monitor and adjust throughout the project.

The degree to which risk management is a formal and regularly performed part of planning is a measure of whether uncertainty is accepted in an organization. Producing a plan that has a single, unqualified completion date, expense cap and benefits expectation is a sign that more mindset training and communication is needed.

 

Action

What do you and your organization need to do to create the mindset that uncertainty is unavoidable?

 

[1] https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/goals-are-not-expectations-change-mindsets-to-avoid-the-suffering-of-disappointed-stakeholders/