Focussed Thinking

A just read a blog article by Kimberly Weifling (the author of Scrappy Project Management) about Muddy Thinking on Project Connections.

This is the quote that stuck out.

People work on low priority items while urgent issues languish.

Sounds like Dr. Rogers Rule 3 Focus on product over process and Rule 4 Effective work is doing the right thing. Efficient work is doing the right things well.

In my career, nothing made me crazier than team members focusing on the easy things, or the things they liked to do and doing them extremely well, when what was needed was a focus on issues that effected the project outcomes.

Perfectionism is great when it comes to brain and heart surgery and maybe watch making, but getting a program up and running ready for debugging or a construction project completed rarely requires perfection. What is required is a quality product (defined as what the customers needs). If you have seen the word perfection in any quality manual, let me know where to find it.

I remember a project where the color of the brick was discussed for over a year. The project was heading into the unrecoverable zone, the client said "add 5% more Iron Oxide and make the brick", I don't want to see any more samples until its installed. That's a focused decision. Good enough and necessary now.

Perfection is rarely required in Project Management and even if you subscribe to Six Sigma you know that the [product acceptance rate is not perfection its: Is the product within the acceptable bandwidth. In fact in some industries better than the bandwidth is harmful.

I had an up and coming assistant manager once. He had all the tools: Young, handsome, articulate, a degree from a prestigious university. However he had one "fatal" flaw. he was a perfectionist. We were hardly ever able to get any work product out of him until, the last minute or later. If we needed a piece of his work to check across team boundaries he would never give it up. It was always "not good enough, not ready". We couldn't rely on him in a crunch situation he would hold out for perfection when we needed "good enough" to make a decision or change direction.

Same project, another outstanding young lad would present me with a list of everything he had accomplished on the project, when all I asked for (or needed) was a list of the missing pieces. He hated to have executives ask what he was doing, he only wanted to focus on what he had already done. He actually did his work well, he just wasn't forthcoming with it without some prying (high maintenance person) Does this sound familiar.

Rule 3 Focus on product over process.

I can't make this stuff up: I worked for a company (now out of business) that focused on process over product. The result was that their projects were never done on time or within budget, but they were always able to prove that it wasn't their fault because the processes were flawless.

That's when I added this rule to my tool box. It has always kept me thinking about where we were going, not necessarily worried about how we would get there. Sometime the ride was bumpy but I rarely went into a ditch or off a cliff.

Rule 4 Effective work is doing the right thing. Efficient work is doing the right things well.

As human beings we all have a tendency to want to do things that are both easy and that we do well. Without control this is the kiss of death of a project. Everyone is doing things well and they think they are so efficient. But efficiency requires doing the right things.

Juran's Pareto's Principle tells us that 80% of our actions get 20% of the needed results. Conversely 20% of our actions get 80% of the required results. My Rule 4 makes me focus on the 20% first.

In construction, at the end of the project a list of uncompleted items is compiled by the owner, architect and contractors. This is called the punchlist. I was taught that the most effective way to complete the punchlist was to tackle the most difficult and puzzling issues first and pick up the easy stuff as you went along. Our human tendency would be to start with the easy stuff and put off the hard stuff. For a while we think we are being very effective and efficient., until all the easy stuff is done and we have burnt a lot of daylight.

One of the roles of a good project manager is to be able to get the individual team members to focus on effective activities and efficient work. This is easier said than done and it is usually why PM's with high Emotional Quotient EQ do better than those with high IQ only.

My succinct advice: Always focus on the project activities that are critical to successful completion and don't sweat the small stuff. (and its all small stuff anyway).

If you want to know what middle managers would sound like if they were creatures from a video game. Watch this on You Tube Eat Your Brain.