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Tag: Best Practices

PMTimes_Oct10_2023

Learn from the Past to Perfect Performance

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

To optimize performance, learn from experience. Set aside time for reflection, learning, and making the intention to perfect the way you live and work.

Hopefully, we are always reflecting and paying attention to intentions, performance, and goals. Though it is skillful to give full attention regularly and intentionally to deep introspection, both as an individual and team.

It might be during a retreat, retrospectives, or lessons learned activities, and performance reviews. It might be for an hour, a day, or longer.

As individuals, we can use meditation and contemplation techniques to cultivate self-awareness, reflect on past errors and successes, and to identify values and commit to positive action going forward. As teams, we can come together to review performance and find ways to improve – candidly and meaningfully.

Acknowledge errors, celebrate successes, and commit to skillful behavior going forward into the next cycle, phase, or project. Keep in mind that imperfections and uncertainty are facts of life. How we handle them makes all the difference.

 

Simple But Not Easy

So simple and logical. Reflect and learn. But we find that it is not that easy. Egos get in the way.

Egos get in the way when there is a criticism-averse mindset. Fear of being fired or disrespected and the need to be perfect lead to avoiding candid feedback from others and even from oneself. Without open self-awareness and intention to continuously improve, to optimize performance, there is a common tendency to avoid criticism, particularly negative feedback.

In a 2016 article on project performance review[1] and in my new book, The Warrior’s Path[2], I refer to warriorship and the need to confront resistance to looking at yourself and your team candidly and compassionately.

 

Warriors

“Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word “warrior” … literally means, “one who is brave.”[3]

A warrior is dedicated to a cause, a struggle. The peaceful warrior is dedicated to the cultivation of clarity and compassion, with the goal of personal wellness, group wellness, effective performance, and being of service.

It takes courage and skill to confront one’s own and one’s team process and behavior, particularly the imperfections. It takes more than a formal performance review procedure.

 

In one case a software development organization “lost” the video recording of a project performance review that became too “negative” with some members of the team “attacking” members of a functional group who “defended” themselves.

This is not the kind of struggle the Peaceful warrior engages in. Seeking optimal performance is not about attacking and defending. It is about bringing issues to light and discovering causes by confronting the issues collaboratively.

Doing that requires disengaging from one’s identification with one’s role to take on the role of an objective assessor.

 

Not Easy

Taking on the role of objective assessor of your own performance is not so easy. Aversion to negative criticism is deeply embedded in culture and psychology.

To first acknowledge and then do something about the resistance to confrontation begins with oneself as an individual.  If you can’t face your own shortfalls, how can you expect others to face theirs? When you identify with your team and its performance you transfer your resistance to criticism to the team. Criticism of the team becomes personal. If you are on the attack or are defensive, you are not being objective.

But not all aversion to criticism is based on mental habits. Much of it comes from organizational cultures that seek to blame rather than understand and improve. It comes from leadership that is conflict averse, often because they don’t know how to handle conflict or have their own personal issues with criticism.

 

Emotional intelligence

Can you simply be present with the uncomfortable emotions you feel when confronted with your shortfalls? Being present with emotions means feeling them fully without reacting to them by trying to throw them off through ignoring, making excuses, blaming others, or disparaging yourself and your own competencies. This is emotional intelligence in action.

You and the team get nowhere without objectively addressing issues and their causes. Unmanaged emotions get in the way.

 

Facilitating Organizational Awareness

Facilitating the quest for optimal performance starts with self-aware individuals who can manage their emotions and who value criticism of any kind to avoid repeating unskillful behavior while promoting effective performance and healthy relationships.

Not everyone is self-aware and motivated. Embedding performance improvement in the organization or the team is enhanced by training individuals to recognize their aversion to criticism and value the opportunity to improve. At the same time, regular anonymous micro-assessments provide objective data to cut through subjective opinions.

Effective facilitation is another vital factor. The facilitator promotes objectivity and awareness of participants’ ability to give and take feedback in a positive, non-attacking and non-defensive way.

 

The facilitator prepares the team by promoting the understanding that:

  • Negative criticism is valuable to the end of improvement
  • It is normal to be averse to it
  • Whether averse to it or not, it is necessary to invite, accept and thrive on criticism
  • In most cases, the process and not the individual performer is at the root of errors and omissions. Take performance seriously but not personally.
  • Blaming and defensiveness are emotional reactions that get in the way of cause analysis and improvement.

 

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Next Steps

Assess where you, your team, and your organization are when it comes to using critical analysis in performance review to improve performance.

At what level of the organization does aversion to criticism exist? Is there lip service but no follow-through? Are training and facilitation needed?

How can you best promote candid useful reviews of team and individual performance so you and your team can learn from experience?

 

Related articles:

https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/the-key-to-performance-improvement-candid-perfromance-assessment/

https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/project-performance-review-the-power-of-recognizing-what-s-going-on/

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/lessons-learned-process-thinking-review-3169

https://www.projecttimes.com/author/george-pitagorsky/page/7/#:~:text=Performance%2C%20Attention%20and%20Focus

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/managing-virtual-teams-high-performance-7310

 

 

[1] Pitagorsky, George, Project Performance Review: The Power of Recognizing What’s Going On https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/project-performance-review-the-power-of-recognizing-what-s-going-on/
[2] Pitagorsky, George, The Peaceful Warrior’s Path: Optimal Wellness through Self-Aware Living, to be available in late October 2023
[3] Trungpa, Chogyam, True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art, Shambhala, November 11, 2008, ISBN 1-59030-588-4 [3]

 

PMTimes_Oct04_2023

A Self-study about the Impact of AI on Project Stakeholder Management

Written by Anju Aggarwal on . Posted in Articles.

I want to know the exact details of how AI can help project managers.

Not much concrete work is done in this area, so it is hard to find scientific papers or case studies about the impact of AI on project management. 

In this situation, I had to rely on the most powerful and trustworthy method, i.e., Self-help.

To understand the influence of AI, I picked one specific knowledge area: Project stakeholder management.

I will try to find out the benefit of using an AI tool or system on the four processes that comes under this knowledge area.

 

These days, I am reading loads of articles related to “AI in Project Management”. Being a PM, I always look for such articles with great curiosity and expectations. I want to understand how AI will impact project management.

 

To my dismay and frustration, most of such articles turn out to be fluff. I can categorize most of these articles into the following three brackets:

  • Some start with an explanation of AI and then get into details about different forms of AI like NLP (Natural Language Processing), ML (Machine Learning), Generative AI, etc.
  • A few articles mention various tools that use AI. Unfortunately, these tools had no relevance whatsoever to project management.
  • Many articles talk about the benefits of using AI in project management, such as automation, cost reductions, time savings, and better decision-making. In my opinion, all these benefits look like a general statement that goes for every other innovation too.

 

First, a refresher on what is project stakeholder management: 

Stakeholder management is the process of managing the expectations of anyone who has an interest in a project or will be affected by it.

 

The four process groups identified in project Stakeholder management are as follows:

  • Identify Stakeholders
  • Plan Stakeholder Management
  • Manage Stakeholder Engagement
  • Control Stakeholder Engagement

 

I will examine these processes and try to inject AI into their ITTO (Inputs, Tools, Techniques & Outputs) to the best of my knowledge.

I am not an expert in AI, so please correct me wherever you think there could be better usage of AI in that specific process.

 

Identify Stakeholders: Identify everyone, be it groups or individuals, affected positively or adversely by the project’s outcomes.

In this process, we check the existing project documents to identify all the stakeholders. These documents can be project charter, project proposal, or any contract created at the project beginning.

I do not think AI will be of any use in this process. Generally, a Project manager checks all these documents and lists all the stakeholders. PMs should also connect with project sponsors and other subject matter experts for their input in the stakeholders list.

 

Every project is unique in nature with its own enterprise environmental factors (EEF). In such a case, it is not possible to develop a ML model that provides predictions for unique projects.

Stakeholder analysis is one of the techniques used in this process. The primary goal of stakeholder analysis is to gather information about these stakeholders and use it to make informed decisions, manage relationships, and mitigate potential conflicts.

Can we use AI here? Can we Develop an ML model to categorize the stakeholders according to their power and influence automatically?

 

A few questions to ask: Is it worth the effort? What could be the maximum number of stakeholders in a project? Let us assume that the project is big and complex, so we have many stakeholders identified. Can we create a machine learning model by mapping different attributes like stakeholder’s interests, concerns, and influence and then classify them based on their level of interest and power or influence? The input data would vary a lot for each project. In such cases, the models would need a large amount of data for training to identify patterns for predictions.

 

Let’s assume we can create an ML model that can define stakeholders’ engagement strategy depending on their power/influence/interest. Will this model add much value to the organization’s productivity?

I feel a project manager could do the stakeholder analysis more quickly and accurately.

The output of this process is a stakeholder register.

 

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Plan Stakeholder Management: comes up with the management strategies required to engage stakeholders effectively.

This process also requires the PM to check project-related documents.

Mind mapping is one of the techniques used in this process. It is a visual tool.

 

Can AI be useful in this technique? We could automatically create a Mind map using the stakeholder register constructed in the previous process. PMs can then develop an engagement strategy or prioritize the engagement efforts based on the mind maps. This automated process saves time and effort for the Project managers.

Is this a good AI use case? No, according to me. The mind mapping tools might already have the feature to import a risk register as an Excel or doc file. So, I don’t think it is justified usage of ML for developing mind maps from Stakeholder risk register.

The output of this process is the Stakeholder Engagement Plan.

 

Manage Stakeholder Engagement: This process outputs effective communication with stakeholders and works with them to meet their needs through meaningful and appropriate involvement in project activities.

This is primarily an execution phase where documents are updated on a need basis. An ML model cannot predict this day-to-day process. So, an AI chatbot cannot replace a project manager here. A PM needs to have active interactions with stakeholders. PM needs to listen to what the stakeholder is saying and try to infer what the stakeholder is not saying.

The tools & Techniques in this process talk about interpersonal and communication skills, which are tough to emulate via an AI chatbot. I feel if a stakeholder gets to know that a bot is doing communication instead of a human PM, they might view it as a communication breach. I cannot imagine a stakeholders’ meeting where an AI bot is giving a status update report, and all the stakeholders are nodding their heads, feeling proud and in awe about this technology feat.

 

Control Stakeholder Engagement: This is the process of monitoring overall project stakeholder relationships and adjusting the strategies and plans for engaging stakeholders accordingly.

One of the techniques in this process is decision-making – Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA)

MCDA is a structured approach for evaluating and comparing multiple criteria or factors when making decisions. It also requires data collection, assessment, monitoring, and readjustments.

We can use some software for decision-making that uses custom-trained ML models. I feel the attributes to train the models would be humongous and human centric. It would not be useful to create custom models for stakeholder engagement.

 

I have covered all four processes involved in the Project Stakeholder Engagement knowledge area.

In this exercise, I tried to put an unbiased perspective where I wanted to incorporate AI consciously in the Project Stakeholder Management knowledge area.

 

My concluding thoughts on how AI would impact Project Management:

The Project management stream requires more behavioral skills than technical skills. It requires human eyes, ears, brain, and heart. It cannot be completely replaced by Artificial Intelligence generated robots or systems.

 

As mentioned earlier, I am a project manager, not an AI expert. I would look forward to constructive input from other AI experts. But for the AI bots generated comments, please stay away!

 

PMTimes_Sep27_2023

Manage Your Opinions for Optimal Decisions

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

If you are ready to improve your team decision making “Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”[1]

When you cease to cherish opinions you avoid unnecessary conflict and achieve optimal decisions by allowing the “truth” to reveal itself through analysis, intuition, and dialog.

There is nothing wrong with opinions. Just don’t cherish them. To cherish them is to be attached to and identified with your opinions. Avoid this because it gets in the way of finding optimal decisions and it fuels unnecessary conflict and division.

 

What are opinions?

Everyone has opinions. They are the result of our experience, beliefs, knowledge, and training. They express our intelligence. They can be useful, and they can also get in the way.

Opinions are beliefs, points of view, assumptions, or judgements. They are not conclusive, not facts.

Often, we do not have the luxury of making fact-based decisions. Our issues may be too complex. Data may not be available. We may act on an opinion and gut feel, but if we do, it is best to do it with objectivity and self-awareness.

 

Objectivity and Self-awareness

Objectivity knows the difference between fact, certainty, and opinion. It values facts and realizes that subjectivity is also valuable. Self-awareness tells you when your attachment to your opinion is causing emotions to surface and you to resist questioning your opinion.

Together these two, objectivity and self-awareness, are key to effective relationships. And effective relationships are critical success factors. They are displayed in decision making, conflict management, planning, problem solving, change management – just about every aspect of project work or any kind of collaborative effort.

 

Managing Opinions

We are living in a time when beliefs and opinions are confused with facts and reality. People have lost the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity.

Are you willing to question and validate your beliefs and assumptions?

 

“When you see …, how belief, prejudice, conclusions, and ideals divide people and therefore breed conflict, you see that such activity is obviously not intelligence.

  Will you drop all your prejudices, all your opinions … so that you have a free, uncluttered mind?

If you say it is impossible, you will never find out for yourself what it is to be intelligent.” — J. Krishnamurti Excerpt from Can Conflict End?

 

Opinions Drive Action

Manage opinions well because they drive action. We hold opinions about team values, what vendor to use, how best to perform some tasks, who to hire, promote, or fire, and more. Opinions directly affect performance because they influence decisions.

Clearly, we want to make sure we understand the need to put opinions under the microscope and see their source and why we have them. Our approach is to balance opinions and fact-based analysis to make decisions that consider opinions and seek optimal results.

 

Attached

Being attached to and identified with opinions gets in the way. What does it mean to be attached to and identified with your opinions?

It means that you are so convinced that your opinion is “right” that you reject or suppress alternative opinions and refuse to question and validate your own. You are cherishing your opinion as if it were a part of your body. When you see it as an idea, a concept, you can value your opinion without being attached to it. This allows you to be open and respectful of other opinions.

Valuing is different than cherishing. You value your opinion because you think it is well founded on a strong belief, experience, data, theory, etc. You value it enough to state it and argue for it. And you also value the learning you get from exploring and validating your opinion.

 

Learning

Learning may strengthen your conviction that your opinion is worthy of being acted upon. Or it may show you that your opinion is not worth holding onto.

Learning comes out of dialog with opinions being shared and supported by the reasoning behind them. Be open to changing opinions to reach win-win outcomes and the actionable decisions that resolve issues most effectively.

 

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Beliefs

When opinions are based on strong beliefs, for example the belief that agile project management is always better than alternatives, there is a need to explore and question the underlying belief.

Fortunately, in project work we are less likely to find strong underlying beliefs driving decisions. When they do present themselves, we can justify confronting them because it is part of our best practices.

With beliefs regarding social and political issues it is not so easy. While these beliefs and the opinions that grow out of them is important, it is best to address them outside of business decision making.

 

Exploring Opinions

Should the sponsor of a project express her opinion, for example, “AI is too immature to waste our time looking at it”? Even if she isn’t convinced about her opinion, it will influence the team. As a leader, it is wise to hold back and open the space for opinions to be shared easily.

Other team members may have the opinion that there is something to be gained and that it won’t take much to explore how an available tool might be used to make the project go more smoothly with less effort and higher quality.

Wise leaders ask questions that lead the team (including the leader) to identify opinions and explore them to find the best outcome.

Are assertions backed by facts? For example, is AI not mature enough? Would it be too costly to explore? What biases are at work? What does ‘too costly’ mean?

 

Decision Making

Managing opinions is one part of decision making — the process that settles conflicts, underpins planning, vendor selection, and every aspect of team performance. It is a mission critical capability, no matter what the mission.

 

In the following articles I have explored decision-making from different perspectives:

 

[1] Seng-ts’an The Third Zen Patriarch,  Hsin Hsin Ming (Verses on Faith in Mind).
PMTimes_Sep26_2023

Embracing AI-driven Project Management: A Guide for PMs

Written by Arunabh Satpathy on . Posted in Articles.

AI project management software is revolutionizing the landscape of products and services. A host of tools are making their way to the market to capitalize on their potential. Given their ability to automate tasks, analyze data, aid insights, and improve the bottom line, AI project management tools will rapidly become part of standard operating procedure within companies, transforming traditional project management.

This rapid transformation has left project managers wondering how their job expectations will change, whether they will be replaced by AI, and how to adapt to the change. This article aims to cover those questions.

 

Table of Contents

AI Project Management Today……………………………………………………….. 1

Analysis………………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Rewriting……………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Summarization………………………………………………………………………… 3

Generating Reports…………………………………………………………………… 3

How to Adapt and Thrive with AI Project Management Tools………………… 4

Embrace the Changes in the Project Management Role……………………. 4

Learn Continuously About New Technologies…………………………………. 4

Think of AI Project Management Tools as “Interns”…………………………. 5

Picking the Best AI Project Management Tools…………………………………… 5

AI Project Management Tools are the Future…………………………………….. 6

 

AI Project Management Today

As industries are becoming more competitive, project managers expect more output from their employees and themselves. AI project management tools assist PMs to select and prioritize projects based on company and stakeholder needs. They help PMs ensure that company resources are allocated to the most impactful projects in the most impactful way.

AI tools help increase the per hour value of work, especially because employees are happier and more productive working with AI. In fact, a McKinsey report found that the productivity gains among junior workers are higher than they are for senior workers.

 

For project managers, AI can perform many productivity boosting tasks including:

Analysis

AI project management tools can analyze and report on work you or your teams do and offer improvements. Some AI tools can spot patterns in historical project data and generate project plans optimized for your company and stakeholder needs. They can also spot areas of improvement in employee work.

For instance, any project manager will tell you how bad requirements can have negative downstream effects like rework. Requirements errors make-up 70 to 85 percent of the cost of rework.

When you write requirements for projects and/or products, AI tools can help you rate the quality of your requirements based on the 6C’s (i.e., clarity, completeness, conciseness, consistency, correctness, and context). The results are rated on a scale of 0% to 100%.

 

Rewriting

Beyond just offering analysis, you can also write and rewrite content and documentation using AI. The rise of ChatGPT has dramatically shifted the landscape of many industries and professions, including project management. You can automate project planning, generate project status reports, summarize meetings, and even develop training materials.

You can also write, and rewrite documents based on drafts and get those results formatted in bullet form or as a paragraph. The best tools also allow you to select and edit the AI’s output to your team’s specifications.

Monitoring Progress

AI project management tools offer PMs the ability to monitor the progress of their projects or sprints. Team members and stakeholders can visually see how the project is progressing against the planned timeline. With AI project management software tools, you can communicate with your team and update project progress. This can help improve team communication and collaboration, leading to more successful project delivery.

 

Summarization

Project managers often must grapple with vast amounts of data in bite-sized pieces to make informed decisions. AI tools can create a brief abstract or reframe requirements in different terms so PMs can make decisions quickly. The ability to reframe requirements also has explanatory power so that team members from different disciplines can better understand their colleagues’ intentions.

 

Generating Reports

Current tools can generate reports from your documentation with one click. An AI project management driven method leaves tools to summarize meeting notes or project updates in seconds with pre-structured headers, tables, and more, these tools ensure that project managers have perfectly formatted content.

While these are some basic tools that project managers can use, AI project management tools can go even further. This includes converting requirements data into user stories, translating requirements from language to language for better collaboration, and even elaborate on existing requirements.

 

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How to Adapt and Thrive with AI Project Management Tools

 

There’s no doubt that AI in project management will be the new paradigm in the near future. A Gartner study said that AI will handle 80% of project management tasks by 2023. The best way to deal with this upcoming change is to adapt to it. Here’s how:

Embrace the Changes in the Project Management Role

A change in the role of project manager is inevitable in many ways. Here are a few ways you can adapt and thrive in the evolving role of PM.

  • Focus on Soft Skills: With automation handling routine tasks, the PM role will focus more on soft skills like leadership, strategy, and building high-performing teams. Organizations will need the leadership skills of PMs to keep their companies competitive by switching to AI tools.
  • Strategic Alignment: While AI will lead to gains in productivity, using this productivity boost in the right way will involve PMs focusing more on aligning projects with strategic goals for results. This includes using other strategic tools like baselining and documentation tools to direct the power of AI in the best possible way.

Learn Continuously About New Technologies

The future is a hybrid of machine speed and human judgment. To keep up with these rapid changes, PMs should stay updated with the latest technologies and tools that can help them in their work. This includes new AI technologies as well as other technologies coming down the pipeline.

A key skill for the future is data literacy. In a recent report, 31% of organizations said data-related skills like data management, analytics and big data, are the highest talent development priorities.

And with AI taking over the manual aspects of the job, the PMs role will become even more human-centric, with soft-skills like critical thinking, conflict resolution, and deal making becoming more important.

A culture of learning within companies is important as almost 30% of employees consider learning as a key factor when considering a new position.

 

Think of AI Project Management Tools as “Interns”

Virtual assistants will gradually shift PM activities towards coaching and stakeholder management. AI tools are best understood as competent interns that need some oversight while doing administrative or manual tasks.

The dominant paradigm will involve PMs dealing with more human-oriented tasks that involve soft skills, deep market research, and making critical decisions on product positioning.

 

Picking the Best AI Project Management Tools

Intelligence: Any artificial intelligence must be powerful enough to tackle the task at hand. When looking for a tool, get one that gives you high quality output when automating tasks, analyzing data, and providing context.

User-friendliness: PMs in competitive industries are often time stressed. An AI project management tool must be easy to use. The best tools give you options both for a prompt-based interface and a button-based interface.

Interaction with other tools: An AI tool in isolation is not useful to project managers. However, an AI tool that is integrated into a larger ecosystem of tools is extremely valuable. The best tools typically come with packaged software that allow PMs to document, test, and review their project management performance.

Collaboration: PMs know that success in any project is a team sport. So, an AI tool that simplifies project requirements will make it easier for developers to understand business analysts and vice-versa. A tool that can translate requirements accurately is even better since distributed teams can perform across the world.

 

AI Project Management Tools are the Future

In conclusion, AI has the potential to significantly enhance project management practices. By embracing AI tools like virtual project assistants, continuously learning about new technologies, using AI for improved decision-making, automating administrative tasks, and using AI for project selection and prioritization, project managers can adapt to this new landscape for improved outcomes and profitability. It’s an exciting time for project management as we explore these new possibilities.

 

 

Source: Futuristic Architect Businessman Industry 40 Engineer Stock Photo 1196903896 | Shutterstock [AS1]
Caption: AI-driven project management increases employee productivity across the board. [AS2]
Source: AI Improves Employee Productivity by 66% (nngroup.com) [AS3]
Caption: Summarizing helps project managers get the gist of long documents to make quick decisions. [AS4]
Caption: AI is best seen as a project management intern. [AS5]
Source: Blue Printer Paper · Free Stock Photo (pexels.com) [AS6]
Caption: Learning and career growth are particularly valued among younger employees. [AS7]
Source: Workplace learners: new workplace expectations | Statista [AS8]
PMTimes_Sep19_2023

‘Delay Thinking’ Is a Project Success Factor

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

Often, it is better to spend more time than it is to speed to meet a deadline. Fast is good but not always. When rushing to get something done the probability of causing damage is high.

 

Delay Thinking

Delay thinking recognizes that there is a delay or lag between an action and its effect. Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline says that “Delays can make you badly overshoot your mark, or they can have a positive effect if you recognize them and work with them.”

Figure 1 below is a diagram that explains the delay phenomena, he gives the example of the delay between the time you adjust the water temperature in the shower and the time the water reaches the desired temperature. If you understand the delay, you will make sure you don’t get doused in cold water or make the mistake of further turning up the hot.

Figure 1: Delayed Results[1]

What Does This Have to Do with Projects?

In both projects and operations, we make and act upon decisions. We set expectations among stakeholders about outcomes. We are expected to fix problems and do it fast.

Faced with problems we may seek quick fixes by applying solutions that worked in the past or in other organizations. We can be pressured into rushing ahead without doing the due diligence of assessing causes, multiple scenarios, and the impact of differences between the current situation and the ones in which a solution worked in the past.

In time bound projects, there is a tendency to overlook likely delays. For example, underestimating the time it takes to perform predecessor tasks when scheduling resources. The result is the cost of resources sitting idle while waiting for the results they need to proceed.

When we take delays into consideration expectations are realistic and problem resolutions end up making things better rather than worse.

 

Learning Curves and Change Management

For example, when a large organization implemented a system to reduce the effort of field managers by applying AI to automate their ordering process, they failed to recognize the delay caused by a combination of learning curves, manager resistance to a perceived loss of authority and autonomy, and the need to fine-tune the algorithm used to make ordering decisions. The result was avoidable chaos, supply chain disruption, and degraded performance. The new system was rejected.

The outcome would have been a far happier one had the project plan included a robust training process, “marketing,” and a calibration period with an incremental system rollout rather than a “big bang” implementation. All of these are “delays” that on the surface cause the project to run longer. Though more often than not, when looking below the surface these so-called delays save time, effort, money and reduce unnecessary stress.

 

Causes

What might cause failure to include delays in plans?

Everything has a cause and when we discover causes, we can better avoid repeating failures and making poor choices.

One predominant cause of this failure to consider delays is rushing to get a project completed in a certain time frame. The pressure to get your project done by a fixed date may be driven by many things – the whim of a senior stakeholder, funding availability, the need for resources on other planned projects, legal restrictions, seasonal weather conditions, etc.

 

When a “get it done by” mandate is in play, pressure, and the anxiety it brings leads decision makers to cut corners, perhaps forgetting that spending more time planning can result in exponentially less time during the rest of the project. Pressure and anxiety also lead to applying quick fixes which overlook long term consequences.

Expediency bias operates even when there is no major pressure to hit a deadline. It is the tendency to prefer quick action over taking the time to make sure there is clarity and understanding about short and longer-term results.

During planning, rushing and expediency bias leads to only looking at one scenario instead of a few. Assessing multiple scenarios opens the decision to useful analysis. But this takes time. When rushing, talk about lags or delays is impatiently squelched. The risk of making a poor decision based on limited information is high.

 

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Quick Fixes – Short Term thinking

Another dimension of delay thinking is the recognition that when resolving a problem, while short-term fixes might remove symptoms there is a delay before the nature of longer-term consequences are experienced.

We are often blind to the long-term effects of short-term decisions and actions. When there is a lag between our action and its effect, we are easily driven by the satisfaction of short-term pleasure and immediate gratification.

Take the decision between eating a bowl of ice cream and a salad. If you are like me, the ice cream is far more pleasing than the salad. And, at the end of the day, you’d look and feel the same regardless of your choice. So why not go for the ice cream.

 

But factor in delay thinking and you get to see that if you repeatedly opt for the ice cream over the salad the delayed longer-term effects start to show – weight gain, digestive issues, increased blood sugar levels, etc.

Looking at the short and long-term effects makes your decision making more effective. You know what you are gaining and giving up when you make your choice. You can opt for ice cream sometimes, but you are more likely to moderate, assuming your goal is good health. You can remove symptoms with a quick fix, but you had better consider the longer term impact and plan for it.

 

Awareness

Awareness is the key.

 

Being aware that delays are normal parts of experience makes it likely that we will consider them when making decisions and planning projects. Knowledge of the specific delays in your project comes from analysis and experience, your own and your institution’s.

Be aware of rushing and expediency bias and the power of spending more time in planning to playout various scenarios, consider delays and delayed effects, and cause removal vs. symptom removal options and their effects.

Think of what happens when you drop a stone into a pond of still water. Be aware that every action you take has a ripple effect and that the ripples appear over time, radiating in all directions.

 

[1] Senge, Peter, The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday, NY, 1990 p. 90