Do you have any questions that I can help you with?
| Why is my project such a mess? |
| Written by Hannes Marais | |||
| Friday, 07 August 2009 00:10 | |||
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If you’ve been a member of a project involving many people and organizations, you probably wondered why some projects can go from doing fine, to doing badly, and then to catastrophe so quickly. For the pessimist, it is like everything is programmed to go wrong and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do about it. For others it is Murphy’s Law, and they let the cards fall where they may without giving it a second thought. Others wonder why? If you’ve given it some thought like us here at Kalexo, you probably came to the same conclusion, that the real problem is actually ourselves – yes, the folks on the project pretty much can doom it right from the start. I am not saying that you or I don’t know how to do our jobs effectively, but only that there are some circumstances that can skew the project to failure.The basic problem is simply this: Everyone must know what to do. Obvious enough that it is not worth talking about, right? Wrong! For everyone to know what to do, decisions have to be made, and people must be informed. Again, this is obvious stuff that we take care of today with meetings, emails, instant messages and a lot of other online collaboration technologies now available. The only problem is that most people are just shockingly bad at doing this properly and consistently with or without the help of software, and information overload quickly sets in, especially with complex projects. You know it just went bad when an embarrassed team member apologizes and promise they will get those forgotten things done “by tomorrow”. For a project to run smoothly and predictably, a large amount of time must be spent communicating ideas and issues, essentially transferring them from “head to head”, so that at any given time everyone “simply knows” what the next thing to do is. This by itself is not that terribly hard, just time consuming and error prone because we are dealing with humans after all. Fortunately, for a given work activity, most of your team members already know how to craft a proper email or have a meeting to resolve an issue – it is mostly just a matter of putting time in focusing on the issue and turning up the heat. This I call “issue management in the small” – it is well understood and most folks have a good handle on it, and there are lots of good software tools to help (the most obvious one being email-based communications and persistence). The tough problems really only start occurring with “issue management in the large” where there are hundreds or even thousands of issues that need to be taken care of. The human brain is simply not designed to process such a huge amount of information, and important things then tend to get forgotten. It’s like juggling a thousand balls at a given time – you invariable have to drop a few to make any progress, and those tend to come back to bite you. Lets take a look at an example. Suppose you are working on a particular issue on a project, for example a manufacturing mistake for a widget you are selling. This one single issue could involve half a dozen professionals all over the world and result in an email trail consisting of dozens of emails and files. The history of the problem is effectively distributed over half a dozen brains and email inboxes. Do you think you will have any luck reconstructing what happened six months from now when you are getting a new colleague Pete up to speed on the issue? Can you even remember it all? In all likelihood you will have to gloss over some details but you probably will get by somehow. But it is unlikely that you will ever be able to capture all the nuances neatly in an “information capsule” to hand over to Pete. Now take this same “in the small” issue, and multiply it by a hundred or a thousand. Can you remember all those things? There is simply no way anyone can without some extra help. Not only do you have each issue “spread out” between many inboxes and emails (with semi-private side-conversations you might not even be aware of), but you have hundreds of issues that need juggling overall. And the two aspects – issue management in the small and issue management in the large are so thoroughly intertwined that you can’t tease them apart. This is the state of complex project delivery today. The information is there, but it is so badly organized that nearly nothing useful can be done with it. The simplest questions you might want to answer become difficult: • What really happened on this issue? • What critical things should I work on next and who needs it? • What else do I need to do after that? • What is the status of my delegated tasks? It is difficult to impossible get answers like this from your email inbox, and that is generally why email is working against project success. The reliable information can only be obtained by directly speaking to other people e.g. more status meetings and phone calls. Generally email is great for communicating issues but a terrible idea to manage priorities, due dates, and status as a project scales up. Email is so unstructured that a dump of your inbox is pretty much useless to anyone else (your successor is likely going to quietly throw away your Outlook PST file when you move on to a saner project). Hence the reason why team members tend to pick up the phone and simply ask, or call yet another meeting. The basic distinction we have to make is between a “resource-oriented” way of communicating and an “activity-oriented” way of getting things done. Resources are things like files, emails, instant messages, and your time – they are the things that get virtually moved around and are used to transfer those issues and ideas from head to head. Grouping resources together in information capsules of “stuff” that logically belong together is the activity-oriented way of looking at work. It is only by gathering together all the stuff related to an activity, and treating it as an information capsule that is accessible to everyone on a project, and that can be routed around to team members, be scheduled, prioritized and archived, that you stand a chance for improvement project delivery. It’s a snapshot that keeps everyone on the same page without having to pick up the phone or call a meeting. In fact, if you take a peek at how highly effective project managers work, you notice that they try to re-create an activity-oriented view from the under lying resources. This often takes the form of filing emails and files into highly organized folder structures so there is hope to “re-construct” the information capsule after the fact. Unfortunately, Outlook was not designed to do this in a project setting. Since Outlook folders are not shared project-wide (across organizations), each person or organization on a project has his/her own personal view, and there is little chance of handing around the full “work capsule” to others. Worse, there is a lot of double work, since you might have the situation where all project members are responsible for correctly filing email, assuming they are all highly motivated. Also, it is hard to answer the high level questions I mentioned before. And Email search only goes that far, and breaks down completely when faced with a query like “today’s priority 1 items for myself”. So what is an forward-thinking project manager to do? If you look beyond Outlook to other project collaboration tools, you keep on running into software that promote the resource-oriented view of work. There are lots of tools that support low-level file sharing, communication, and task management, but these resource-oriented features are typically disjointed and do not provide an activity-oriented view. In fact, if you look at tools like Microsoft Sharepoint and dozens of other collaboration tools, you quickly notice this is pretty much the rule. Kalexo is one of the few companies that are promoting the activity-oriented view of work via something we call “threads” – it is our version of the work capsule. We believe that by adding the notion of context to communication we can make your project-management life much simpler, and also give you the tools to juggle the many more balls that a complex project requires. So who else is promoting this activity-oriented project view? Recently Google also threw their hat into the ring with Google Wave. It’s a combination of email and instant messaging, where each information capsule is a “wave”. At this time Wave seems to be more focused on purely social interaction and not project managing – there is nothing about priorities, due dates, and accountability, but who knows where Google might take it in future. But it definitely has some interesting concepts that are making project managers take notice. At first glance, other collaboration tools like Wikis might also appear to promote an activity-oriented view of project management. However, we believe that is not the case since Wikis are typically used in conjunction with email – what we are really talking about is capturing the natural project communication itself, and archiving it into a neat information capsule. The big question is whether inserting software into our communication processes to establish an activity-oriented view of a project makes it easier to manage effectively, or is there something else that we are missing? If you have thoughts, please talk back to me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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