Knowing When to Re-baseline Your Project

Posted on April 22, 2012 by donmcalister

There is much debate over when, and even if, it’s appropriate to “re-baseline” a project.  For the purpose of this blog, I’ll define re-baselining as actions taken by the Project Manager, with the customer’s concurrence, that result in the elimination of previously accumulated earned value cost and/or schedule variances.  Some Project Managers use re-baselining as a common strategy, while others argue that Projects should never be re-baselined once execution has started.  In this blog I’ll offer my experience and opinions on the pros and cons of project re-baselining and some thoughts on how and when to implement them.

In my experience, the option to re-baseline must be a tool that is available in every Project Managers toolbox.  It is however a tool that must be used wisely and sparingly.  In some ways, it’s like declaring bankruptcy.  It’s an option that people and businesses must have available to them to enable survival in extreme financial situations.  However, the decision to declare bankruptcy has serious and lasting consequences and should not be taken lightly.

Earned value management process cost and schedule variance data provide valuable information to the Project Manager, the business, and the customer on the effectiveness and efficiency of project execution to the baseline plan. Variances can be created by actions, or lack of action by either the contractor, or customer.  Contractors create variances through poor estimating, poor performance, poor risk management, and poor resource management.  Customers can create variances by flowing down incomplete or unstable requirements, by adding new constraints, or through lack of timely decisions, work authorizations or contractual funding.

Poor contractor estimating, performance, risk or resource management is not a justification for earned value (EV) variance re-baselining.  Hiding the consequences of sins of the past may make the short-term metrics look better, but it offers no incentive or help in finding the causes of the variances and fixing them.  I understand that it’s frustrating for Project Managers and their teams to continue to carry and explain variances created by problems long-since fixed.  However, if those variances/problems were caused by the kinds of contractor execution inadequacies described above, then it’s important that that knowledge be carried through the full period of performance of the contract and used to inform others in similar situations.  In addition, the learning/knowledge expressed by the variance reports on the current contract must be captured in the historical databases and considered when planning, estimating and executing future projects.

On the other hand, variances created through the actions or lack of action by customers, should in most cases, be reasonable grounds for Project Managers to propose updates to the contract scope, schedule and cost baselines.  I have planned, proposed, negotiated and implemented such re-baseline proposals on a number of occasions.  In my experience, the customer viewed those proposals as both appropriate and helpful, because the action eliminated irrelevant, distracting and misleading variances that could hide new, real emerging execution issues and risks.

So, if you’re a Project Manager contemplating a contract re-baseline proposal request to your customer I recommend:

  1. Take a hard look at you motivation.  Make sure it’s not for the purposes of a metric makeover that would hide execution failures, even if they were old failures that were found and fixed long ago.  You owe it to yourself, your team, your customer and future Project Managers, to be an honest knowledge broker.
  2. Talk to your boss or internal project sponsor and state your case.  They’ll sometimes be reluctant because they want to hold your “feet to the fire” so to speak to improve performance and close the variance gap.  If you’ve done your homework and can show them case for the variance being customer driven you’ll likely be given the green light to approach the customer.
  3. If you’ve convinced yourself that variances are customer driven, then start a conversation with your counter-part to explore the idea of a contract re-baseline and objectively evaluate the benefits and risks.  If you approach it correctly, they’ll most likely agree that a re-baseline is value-added for both parties.
  4. Once everyone agrees to the idea of a re-baseline, take the time to put together a well-substantiated proposal.  Make it clear to the team that this is not an “earned value get-well” activity.  Clearly separate any execution inadequacy variance and continue to own and address fixing that.
  5. Finally, after the customer has agreed to accept a re-baseline proposal and the guidelines under which it will be prepared, move out swiftly to make it happen.  The longer any real execution variance problems are obscured by the irrelevant variances, the bigger the risk to the project.


Posted in Program & Knowledge Management | Tagged | 5 Comments

Striving for No-Surprise Project Management

Posted on April 16, 2012 by donmcalister

We have a love-hate relationship with surprises. In our personal lives we tend to love surprises. Surprise Parties, surprise call from friends, surprise wedding proposals, and movies with surprise endings. In fact, research shows that when we are pleasantly surprised, like when we hear the surprise punch line in a joke for example, our brains trigger the release of pleasure inducing chemicals. In our professional lives however, surprises are the Bain of our existence. We especially hate surprises in project management. Surprises in projects are unexpected, unfavorable, causes for variance from the plan, which cause cost and schedule overruns and unhappy customers.

The idea of taking a “no surprises project management” approach is not a new one. Many people have written about this and many company’s market project management tools, designed to eliminate the surprise factor. This blog offers my personal take on why  Project Managers must “Strive for No-Surprise,” and how they can approach it using a knowledge management mind-set.

It’s my strong belief that project management is about the planning, control and integration of a process that transforms the knowledge resources of an organization into new knowledge sets that provide value for its customers. Business and project management success relies on adequacy, predictability and consistency in this flow and transformation of knowledge. Surprise then, is an artifact of the gaps that can occur in this knowledge flow process. It’s the job of the Project Manager to anticipate and minimize surprises.  How?…

  • By listening to the customers needs and sources of pain to ensure that there aren’t any gaps in the knowledge of “Why” the project is being initiated
  • By defining the work scope to ensure that there aren’t any gaps in the knowledge of “What” is to be done
  • By laying out a schedule to ensure that there aren’t any gaps in the knowledge of “When” the work is to be done
  • By building a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) to ensure there aren’t any gaps in the knowledge of “Who” will perform the work
  • By preparing a plan that ensures that there aren’t any gaps in “How” the work will be done
  • By using Risk management to chase out potential surprises and mitigate their likelihood of occurring or to build contingency plans that reduce their impact if they should occur.
  • By applying Project performance metrics to give advanced warnings of surprises
  • By establishing Technical, cost and schedule baselines to manage the control the accommodation of surprises
  • By continuously engaging in meaningful communication that keeps the project team aligned, informed, motivated, and “un-surprised.”
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Tactical Application of Project Management Maturity Models

Posted on April 10, 2012 by donmcalister

Project Management Maturity Models (PMMMs), can be powerful tools for improving the performance of project teams and the businesses and customers they serve. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the way that most of the current PMMMs are designed and used, I don’t believe they’ll ever become the kind of day-to-day practical and value-added tool that Project Managers could really use. There are a number of good PMMM products out there, but it seems to me that they focus too much on project management at the institutional level. Certainly businesses must care about, and invest in, improving institutional processes, but in the mean time project teams are struggling in the trenches right now and could use some help.
For those not familiar with Maturity Models, or as they’re sometimes called Capability Maturity Models, check out this CMM overview in Wikipedia.
A typical Maturity Model employs a matrix architecture which identifies selected project management practices or attributes and maps them to a continuum of implementation maturity levels, using a 5-point scale like the one below, as described below in the CMM overview in Wikipedia.
1. Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) – the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.
2. Repeatable – the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.
3. Defined – the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
4. Managed – the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-upon metrics.
5. Optimizing – process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.
This clearly communicates that any attribute that is short of what is defined as fully mature or “optimized,” must be incomplete or inadequate. This prescriptive approach, in which only a score of 5 is acceptable, is both unrealistic and lacks practical value at the project team level. No two projects or the contexts, in which they execute, are the same. Some projects, because of their scale, complexity, criticality to the business, and/or the state of their customer relationship, must strive for the highest level of process maturity. For many other projects though…and I’d suggest maybe even the majority of other projects… going after level 5 maturity is not only unnecessary, but perhaps even counter-productive.

My interest in this blog is to explore some ideas and share some things I’ve learned about using maturity models at the project team tactical level that can improve performance, help solve problems and even support team-building.
• Higher Performance Takes Greater Resources. Each project management practice and tool can be tuned to run at a range of performance levels. Performance drives process complexity, and process complexity drives cost. The PM and project team, in collaboration with the project sponsor and customer must analyze the trade between PM practice performance and agree on the practice performance level that best meets the needs and means of the project. Level 5 might be, but isn’t always “best.”
• Pick the PM Practices and Tools That Are Most Important. There are a number of valuable project management practices and tools available for implementation on any project, but not all of them are equally important for your project and this stage of its life cycle. Again, the project team, collaborating with the sponsor and the customer, should select the minimum number of key practices and tools.
o The PM practice areas and tools usually at the top of my list are: Planning; Scheduling; Baseline Management; EVM; Risk Management; Supplier Management; Communication
• Use the Maturity Modeling Activity as an Alignment and Team-building. In applying whatever PMMM you’re using, it’s been my experience that there is great value in having the Project Manager and key team members each separately score the current and desired future states of maturity (performance) for each practice. Then when you summarize the scores, look for gaps and discuss them in a team meeting. Identifying and resolving gaps in perceived maturity levels between project team members, is often more important than deciding on the absolute value of maturity itself. This is especially true for perception and desirability gaps between the Project Managers and the project team members. Maturity Model gaps may reveal leadership disconnects that must be resolved through better objectives clarity and communication. They may also reveal unique and innovative perspectives that should be shared and leveraged. In either case, the resultant conversation can be critical for team building.
• Use the PMMM to Diagnose Project Performance Problems. Maturity Models can also be used by a project team, or a 3rd party assessor, to help diagnose and correct project performance problems. Missed objectives, poor EVM performance, and unhappy customers are always related to one or more project management practice performance problems. Maturity Models provide a forensic methodology to find the root cause and the enable investigators to separate the facts from the emotions.
So, whether you have an in-house project management maturity model or you’re using on the commercially available models, I encourage you to try and take them down to the project team level to see if the pass a tactical test-drive.

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Found in Translation – My Experiences in Japan, Part 1

Posted on April 2, 2012 by donmcalister

Remember that movie “Lost in Translation”? It was a romantic comedy starring Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson. Bill Murray plays an American movie star (Bob Harris), in the autumn of his career, who reluctantly takes his first trip to Japan. He makes the trip in an attempt to revive his celebrity, and his bank account under a lucrative product endorsement contract with a Japanese liquor company. While staying in a posh Tokyo hotel he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a newlywed who is stuck in the hotel while her husband completes an assignment as a celebrity photographer. The movie portrays the complex relationship formed by these two lonely, jet-lagged, travelers and what they learned about life and themselves as they encountered and experienced Japan. That idea of learning about oneself through simple, but meaningful experiences in another country is what inspired this blog, and another that will follow in a couple weeks.

When the movie came out in 2003, it really interested me, because I’d just completed a five year job assignment requiring a significant amount of travel to Japan. During my travels, I had the good fortune to have many learning experiences resulting from my interactions with the people and culture of Japan. This blog is a collection of some those experiences. Some are funny, and some poignant, but all were learning moments. What I learned, or”Found in Translation” from those experiences gave me new insight into myself and immense respect and appreciation for the wonderful people and culture of Japan.

In the late 1990’s my work in the aerospace industry provided me an opportunity to lead an international engineering project in collaboration with a team from a major Japanese conglomerate or “keiretsu”. During that five year assignment, I travelled to Japan 3 to 4 times a year and hosted visitors from Japan to our business in the California at least as many times.

Here are a few things I “Found in Translation”…

A Fish Story. Nagoya is a large city about 200 miles south-west of Tokyo. Typically I’d fly into Narita Airport just outside Tokyo. Have business meetings in Tokyo and then take the bullet train or “Shinkansen” to Nagoya, where the Japanese company we worked with, had a large engineering and manufacturing facility. My team members and I always stayed at the Nagoya Hilton hotel in the center of the city, and we would take a taxi to the business facility in an industrial area of the city for our meetings. On one of my first trips to Japan, I woke up at about 4:30AM and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to get up and go for a walk. During my walk I discovered, just a few blocks from the hotel, the central fish market which took up an area of several square blocks and was accessed through several surrounding gates.

Walking from the quiet pre-dawn streets of Nagoya through the fish market gate, I entered into what at first seemed a scene of pure chaos. People and small vehicles moving in every direction, carrying the ocean fare of the day. After a few moments of adjustment I realized that rather than chaos, it was more like I’d stepped into the middle of a well-choreographed dance and I needed to be careful not to disrupt the performance. It was clear that the people working in the market weren’t used to having tourists around. I got a few questioning glances from merchants, and probably a few under-the-breath grumbles from the drivers of the small trucks I was dodging, but generally they were quite tolerant of my intrusion, and very polite when I got in the way.

The narrow lanes which divided the market were lined, on either side, by stalls displaying all manner of things from the sea, many of which were still flopping or squirming around in, or trying to climb out of, the various containers in which they were being displayed. During my roaming around, I came across a stall in which a young man wielding a large, five foot knife, was in the process of carving up a very large, probably more than 300 pound, tuna and turning it into sashimi for delivery to the restaurants around the city. I’d been watching him for a few moments, when he stopped and looked up at me and said with a big smile, “Good Morning”, in English. Since he seemed interested in test driving his English skills, and was kind enough to greet me, I thought I’d return the favor by trying out my meager knowledge of Japanese with him. I said “Ohayo Gozaimus” (good morning in Japanese) in response to his greeting. To my surprise, he smiled and said “hello, what do you think of this fish?” Ah, I thought, he speaks English better than I speak Japanese, so the pressure was off and I could reply in English. I then said “Hello, that is a beautiful fish. Is it from the Sea of Japan?” His response floored me when he said, “no, fish is from Boston”. Instantly I recalled seeing a documentary describing how Japanese companies bought up the best tuna brought in by U.S. fishing boats and shipped them in specially configured Boeing 747’s, overnight to Japan. This must be one of those tunas. By now I’m Thinking that this young man’s English skills are quite good, so I decide it’s time to try a bit of humor. I said, “Wow, from Boston…that’s a long swim.” Unfortunately, with that joke I either discovered the limits of his English skills, or the fallibility of my humor, because all I got in response was a confused smile and awkward silence. Both of us then realized that our interaction moment was over. We wished each-other a good day and I moved on.

On Being Different. I had a very sobering and humbling experience during a trip to Aomori, a city at the very northern tip of the main island of Japan. It’s an area that isn’t visited frequently by westerners. Walking through the small airport I passed a young Japanese woman with a toddler. When the young boy saw me, he pointed at me, and obviously scared at the sight of this strange looking person, he started crying hysterically and clung to his mothers’ leg. All through my life I’d lived in places where most people looked like I did and generally exhibited the same kind of behaviors as I did. For the first time in my life I could begin to understand, even in this small way, how it feels like to be feared or rejected because you seem to be different than everyone else. It brought tears to my eyes then, and it still does when I recall the experience today. I won’t ever forget it.

Shopping for an Ego Boost. One morning in Nagoya, a friend and I went shopping for souvenirs at a large downtown department store. The store didn’t open until 10:00AM, and we were a little early, so we waited outside the main entrance. Precisely at 10:00AM, the doors were opened and my friend and I and our fellow shoppers entered the store. As we walked in, and down the main aisle of the store, I was surprised to see uniformed store employees lined up on either side of the aisle. All were smiling, greeting us and thanking us for shopping at their store. As we passed by each employee, they also bowed to us, showing their respect. I found out later this was a common practice at the larger Japanese stores and even some of the smaller stores and restaurants. Because the store employees were smiling and positive, it made me smile and feel positive. Wow, I thought, even if I didn’t need to buy anything I’d come back here just to get an ego boost!

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Project Management in the Matrix Crossfire

Posted on March 19, 2012 by donmcalister

Many businesses have adopted a Project/Functional matrix management organizational model as a way of ensuring enterprise focus on both the near-term execution and long-term process capability. Matrix organization theory says that Functional Managers are responsible for building, deploying and supporting the people, process and tool resources required to execute the business projects, while Project Managers are responsible for planning, directing, monitoring and controlling those resources during project execution. The theory seems fairly straight forward.   So why then, do we continue to see confusion, conflict, and dysfunctional behavior in the implementation of matrix management organizational models? I believe that the reason that matrix management cross-fire has wounded so many businesses, is that they’ve failed to properly address relationship management. In implementing matrix management they may have thought about the macro, or organizational level of relationship management, but they’ve forgotten about the micro or person to person relationship management aspects. Successful implementation of matrix management at the organization level is in fact, the integration of the many successful relationships between the people that make up our organizational systems. Our businesses are fueled by knowledge interactions between people, and trust is the enabler of effective interactions.
One of the most important and lasting things I learned during my more than three decades in field of project management is the criticality of relationship management. I was educated as an Aerospace Engineer, but knowing what I know now, I wished I’d also taken a minor in psychology. A better understanding how people (including myself) think and why they behave the way they do, would have significantly shortened and smoothed my career learning curve. I’ve concluded that Project Management is at least 60% about managing relationships…with customers, management, team members, and peers. The ability to sense their needs and pain, integrate that with your needs and pain, and then act appropriately (Emotional or Social Intelligence), is a skill that will serve you at least as well, perhaps even better, than an advanced degree or a professional certification.
I have several objectives in this blog. One is to help my fellow Project Managers understand the importance of relationship management skills in doing their jobs and, to offer a couple of practical ideas for improving their ability to perform in a matrix organization context. In addition, these ideas are equally relevant to Functional Managers, who are of course, connected to projects through their people. So I hope they may find some value as well. Finally, I can’t forget those who are caught in heaviest of the matrix cross-fire…the people who are deployed from the Functional organizations to the Project Teams. You’re the ones with two bosses (sometimes more).  You have to find a way to make them all happy, keep your career on track and maintain your sanity. You can’t be passive victims in this matrix environment. You have an active and important role in the success of the matrix by facilitating the flow of information between your two bosses. In fact you may be able to make the matrix work, even if one or both of your bosses don’t get it.
So here is my advice for Project Managers to be successful in a matrix organization environment:
• Know and care about your matrix counterparts. I’ve seen matrix organizations in which the Project Manager didn’t even know all of their Functional Manager counterparts. Sure they knew the ones they already had conflicts with, or at least they knew their names, but by then it was too late to build a trusting relationship. Take the time to make a list of all of your Functional Management counterparts and go meet with them before the inevitable crisis occurs. Match faces with names. Learn a little bit about them and their challenges. Communicate your project objectives and give them a context for their functional contributions. Talk to them about the people they’ve shared with your team and how important they are to you and the success of the team. Share your ideas and aspirations and ask about theirs. This may not be easy for you. Building a relationship requires you to open up, to make yourself vulnerable, but that’s what builds trust and trust is the necessary condition for real communication and for resolving problems in the future.
• Maintain communications with your counterparts. Information and knowledge flow through the matrix is the fuel that drives the business engine, and trust built on carefully tended relationships is the lubricant of the business engine. But this isn’t just keeping the Functional Manager informed of your changing needs and priorities on a recurring basis, it’s also asking about, and staying up to date on changes in their world. In this regard, deployed Functional people have an important role to play. They’re an important information conduit for both their Functional Manager and their matrix Project Manager, and they must understand and own that as a job performance expectation.
• Provide on-going employee performance feedback. Functional Managers are responsible for evaluating and developing the people assigned to the project teams, and if those project teams are remotely located, it’s going to make the job difficult. Project Managers in a matrix must carve out enough time out of a seemingly swamped schedule to provide meaningful performance feedback to both the team member and their Functional Manager. This care and consideration is not only an important ingredient in the relationship with all of the matrix parties, it’s also an investment in the future of the business.
• Project Managers are accoubtable for the health of the matrix. The success of the matrix is vital to the success of your project, so if you are accountable for your project, then you must also be accountable for the health of the matrix relationships that support the project.  Your job performance objectives and assements must address the degree to which you built and leveraged your matrix relationships.

It’s unlikely that you will escape the matrix management crossfire unwounded.  But if you pay attention to, and build, trusting relationships with your counterparts you will not only survive the battle, you’ll make everyone involved a winner.

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Red-Eye Flights & Mind Games

Posted on March 8, 2012 by donmcalister

 

 

 

 

Research has shown that our brains are constantly and rapidly constructing predictive models of what we expect to happen in certain situations, using the input from our senses and our experience in similar contexts. The following is a true story that illustrates what can happen when your brain model encounters an unexpected reality.

…Tuesday, 8:15AM

As I walked down the hotel hallway, pulling my small rolling suitcase and a laptop bag, I envisioned myself as just moments away from collapsing on the bed and falling asleep, finally bringing to closure my red-eye flight travel adventure. I inserted the cardkey into the slot and pulled it out, noting with satisfaction that the little green light went on. Almost there, I thought.  As I pushed open the door though, the vision that greeted me was so bizarre, that I stopped dead in my tracks. I blinked my eyes a couple of times in disbelief. There, standing in the middle of what I thought was my room, were two people engaged in an activity that was so unexpected, I just closed my gaping mouth, blinked again, stepped back, and closed the door.

…24 Hours Earlier

It was Monday morning and I was thinking about the decision I’d made the week before, about taking a red-eye flight Monday night, to attend a 5:00pm Tuesday evening business dinner event in Hartford, Connecticut. For some years now I’d had a personal policy against taking red-eye flights because of my inability to sleep on airplanes and the effect they had on my bio-rhythms. However, against my better judgment, I’d decided to book the red-eye in this case. After all I thought, if my younger colleagues could handle it, I’d need to show them that I could still do it. Besides, as a type A personality, it would allow me to work during the day Monday, then just head out to LAX to catch the 10:00PM non-stop flight to Hartford. The flight would get me in at 6:00AM Tuesday morning and I could sleep in to the afternoon, getting up in time to attend the evening event. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

So as planned, I worked all day Monday and then made my way through traffic to LAX that evening. The flight left on time at 10:00pm Monday night and although it seemed endless because of my inability to sleep, it arrived on time about 6:30AM. By the time I’d picked up the rental car, fought the morning rush hour traffic into downtown Hartford, and parked car at the hotel, it was 8:00am and my tail was really dragging. Trying to check in to a hotel at 8:00am, when everyone else at the counter is checking out was a bit chaotic, but I finally got my cardkey and took the elevator up to my floor.

As I walked down the hotel hallway, pulling my small rolling suitcase and a laptop bag, I envisioned myself as just moments away from collapsing on the bed and falling asleep, finally bring to closure my red-eye flight travel adventure. I inserted the cardkey into the slot and pulled it out, noting with satisfaction that the little green light went on. Almost there I thought. As I pushed open the door though, the vision that greeted me was so bizarre, so out of context that I stopped dead in my tracks. I blinked my eyes a couple of times in disbelief. There, standing in the middle of what I thought was my room, were two people engaged in an activity that was so strange and unexpected, that I just closed my gaping mouth, blinked again, stepped back, and closed the door.

I stood in front of the closed door for just a moment, re-playing in my head the scene I’d just witnessed. Standing in a space created by furniture that had been pushed to the sides of the room, two young men were juggling bowling pins back and forth to each other.

I walked back to the elevator, stunned and a bit disoriented. Had I really seen what I thought I saw, or was my red-eye flight fried brain playing mind games on me? I made my way back to the lobby and the front desk. Embarrassed to describe to the hotel clerk what thought I’d seen, I simply told him that I’d erroneously been given a key to a still occupied room. The clerk apologized profusely and gave me a new cardkey to a room on a different floor. Again I made what I hoped would be the final leg of my journey to my room, followed by glorious sleep.  At the same time however, I also feared my brain might have yet another surprise in store for me. I unlocked and cautiously opened the door to my new room, uncertain what to expect.  Fortunately, this time I was greeted by a comfortingly empty room.

I got in to bed as quickly as I could, and fell asleep. Unfortunately, whether because of the events of the morning, or time zone effects, my eyes popped wide open at noon and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I finally gave in, got up, showered and shaved and went down to the hotel restaurant to grab some lunch. I was still thinking about my surreal early morning experience, and I even tried to convince myself that maybe it had all been just a nightmare dreamed during my aborted morning nap. I’d never in my life experienced anything even close to this kind weirdness and wasn’t sure how to process it.

After lunch I decided to walk next door to the Convention Center to see where our business dinner was going to be held.  Walking through the building, I turned a corner and came upon a large sign perched on an easel. It announced in big, boldly colored letters, “Welcome to the U.S. Amateur Juggling Championships!” The door to the room was open, allowing me to see all manner of people juggling, all manner of things. Rings, balls, and yes, even bowling pins (jugglers apparently call them clubs). I even caught a glimpse the two people I’d seen juggling in the hotel room that morning. Suddenly all of the pieces of my brain puzzle fell magically in place…all of the dots were now connected…the brain fog had cleared, and my world was no longer on tilt!

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Gorillas in the Midst

Posted on February 29, 2012 by donmcalister

I’ve been doing a lot of studying recently about the processes that go on in our body sensory systems and our brains as we interact with the world and each-other to learn, create and collaborate. I make no claim of expertise in this area, only compelling personal interest. My hope is that with a deeper understanding of these processes I can gain more insight into why we do what we do in certain business and personal contexts. Perhaps with that insight, I can improve my own cognitive processes and share improvement ideas with others. This blog focuses on just one fascinating aspect of the way our brains interpret and unconsciously filter sensory information, sometimes to the detriment of our best interests.

With apologies to my friends in the Human Resources training field, I’m going to expose the secret behind a classic training video which addresses something I’m going to call “attention blindness.” I’m sure there’s a more scientific name for the phenomenon, but I’ll stick with my term for this blog. Some of you may have already been exposed to this video in a training course, but for those that haven’t been exposed to it, here’s the way it goes.

You and your fellow trainees are asked to demonstrate your attention focus abilities by watching a video of students tossing a basketball back and forth to each-other, and counting the number times the ball changes hands. You’re told that you’ll compete with each-other to see who comes closest to the correct answer.

The instructor now starts the video. As advertised, you see a group of students in a classroom, and they start tossing a basketball to each-other. You and the others in your class begin to count the throws. A moment or two into the video, in the midst of the ball tossing frenzy, in the background, someone dressed in a gorilla suit can be seen, casually walking through the scene from screen right to screen left. None of the students tossing the ball in the fore-ground seem to take any notice of this event and after a few moments of additional ball tosses, the video ends. At this point the instructor asks the trainees not to confer with each-other and to write down on a piece of paper, how many ball exchanges they counted.

The instructor then brings the class back together and asks individuals for their numbers. Several students offer their estimates of the number of exchanges, often with a fairly wide range of variability. At his point the instructor stops the discussion and asks if anyone saw anything unusual during the video. Typically only one or two people have noticed the guy in the gorilla suit and mention it. Also typically, the rest of the class looks puzzled and skeptical. An argument then ensues between those who didn’t see the gorilla and those who did, which is eventually settled by the instructor who replays the video. This is followed by a discussion of “attention blindness” between the “overly pleased with themselves” minority of people who saw the gorilla, or at least claim to have seen it, and the somewhat embarrassed majority who admit that they didn’t see it.

The instructor facilitates the discussion so the class explores the implications of this phenomenon for our businesses and our lives in general.
• We can get so focused on some specific sub-set of activities in our business projects or our personal lives that we’re oblivious to “the gorillas in our midst”?
• We’ve introduced so much complexity and information processing demand into our lives, that no one person can possibly keep track of all of the important things?

Are there better way manage attention blindness? The answer is YES! This is a knowledge uncertainty problem, which makes it risk based on the definition that “risk is uncertainty that matters.” (Dr. David Hillson, the “Risk Doctor”)

Let’s think about this “gorilla in the midst” risk in the context of the knowledge domain. Attention blindness is a “Known-Unknown” (KU), or in other words, something that someone knows about performing a task, that we need to know, but are unaware of at the moment. There are a couple of strategies for dealing with KU’s:
• Awareness that KU’s exist and affect us every day. Be cognizant of the likelihood that there are things you need but don’t know, and that someone else does have that knowledge.
• Have a personal and organizational learning bias that is comprehensive, permanent and aggressive. Curiosity and the motivation to explore ad discover will shine a light into the dark quadrant of this knowledge domain
• Build and nurture a robust network of knowledge resources
• Realize that no one can really multi-task. They may be very good at switching focus from one task to the next, but your brain isn’t wired to perform well on more than one thing at a time. This means delegation and sharing work responsibilities for work.
• Make sure you have the right set metrics and information feeds and that more than one person is assigned to monitor and interpret the information and empowered to share it and make decisions without fear of negative consequences.
• Build cognitive diversity into your organization. It may lead to occasional conflicts, but it’s less likely they’ll miss something, ignore it or experience group think.

Note: No gorillas were harmed in the creation of this blog.

Posted in Humor, Leadership, Personal Development, That's Life | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Knowledge & Risk Management Competence

Posted on February 23, 2012 by donmcalister

Why are we typically so ineffective in performing project risk management? Why, in spite of all of our smart people, great tools and extensive experience are we continually surprised and impacted by things, we realize in retrospect, could have been anticipated and mitigated? These are questions that interest me greatly and have motivated me to learn more, think critically and now blog on this important topic.

There’s been a lot of great work done to help us better understand, and effectively implement risk management into the planning and execution of projects. In particular, Dr. David Hillson, aka “the Risk Doctor” has made huge contributions to our body of knowledge, and methodologies for successfully implementing risk management. His work has been, and continues to be, a source of great insight and inspiration for me and many others. If you’re seeking practical and valuable knowledge, training or advisory services on risk management, I highly recommend that you go to the Risk Doctor web site and check out what he has to offer.

Dr. Hillson talks about “Principles”, “Process” and “People” as the three key elements of risk management. The “Principle”…”Risk is uncertainty that matters” (quote from Dr. Hillson), establishes the foundation for the “Process” which provides an implementation framework, which is executed by “People”. It’s the “People” aspect of risk management implementation that is typically the most variable and problematic on a project, and the area I’d like to explore in this blog.

Dr. Hillson says, and I would certainly agree based on my experience, that the risk management competency of the “People” on a project team is a function of the culture; their understanding of, and effectiveness in, applying the risk management process, and the extent to which they have applied learning from past experience, both good and bad. Where my views and those of Dr Hillson and other risk management experts differ a bit, is in the prominence of the role of knowledge management in project and risk management. Although most experts in this field acknowledge a role for knowledge management within the risk management process, it’s obvious, and I suppose understandable, that they consider it to be supplementary rather than central. I on the other hand believe that project management and risk management are part of a more holistic and central knowledge management process. I also believe, and I’ve stated in past blogs, that thinking of risk in a larger knowledge management context might help project managers and their teams be more effective in handling the “People” element problems that today constrain the effectiveness of project risk management.

My “knowledge centric vs. risk centric” thinking goes like this. If the Project Plan represents the knowledge that must be applied to achieve the project objectives…and if risk is the uncertainty that matters in the knowledge that makes up the Project Plan,…then project and risk management work must be knowledge management activities. I know this is a gross simplification of the overall responsibilities of project and risk management, but I think the fundamental conclusion is valid.

The figure below illustrates my thinking on how project risk management competency and awareness maps across the knowledge domain. A complete project risk management plan must address all of the domain quadrants: Known-Knowns (KK); Known-Unknowns (KU); Unknown-Knowns (UK) and Unkown- Unknowns (UU). For each quadrant I’ve shown a few of the kind of questions that our people should be asking themselves as they build their risk register.

Posted in Program & Knowledge Management | Tagged | 2 Comments

“Sign Guy” Marketing

Posted on February 18, 2012 by donmcalister

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that there’s been a significant proliferation, over the last year or so, of those “Sign Guys” (my term…for convenience only…no pejorative connotation or gender bias intended) you see along the side of the road spinning and waving their signs to get your attention and trying to get you to turn into the mini-mall and buy some product or service from their client. This type of advertising is actually illegal in some places (Arizona for example), because officials are concerned that it may distract drivers and cause them to lose track of a cell phone conversation or mistype a text message.

I know this type of “Human Directional” or “Human Billboard” advertising goes back a long time, but I was relatively oblivious to it until last fall, when, while driving home from work, I happened to notice what I thought was a rather peculiar use of this marketing method. What I saw was one of those “Sign Guys”, doing his thing…spinning, flipping and gyrating a brightly colored sign with an arrow on one end and the name of his client. His objective of course was to attract my attention and that of other passing motorists and prompt us, ideally, to make an impulse buy, or at least to implant a notable memory so that we’d come back later. They advertise for tax preparers, car dealerships, cell phones sellers, gold buyers, real estate brokers, pizza makers and just about anything else you can imagine. This brings me back to what I saw on that day, driving home from work that got my attention and inspired this blog.

The sign this particular Sign Guy was waving around said “DENTIST”. I guess you could say that the Sign Guy was successful in capturing my attention, although not in the way he intended. I did a double-take, but managed to keep my eyes on the road…DENTIST…Really?? My mind raced to comprehend the thinking behind this marketing strategy. Is this really the way you want to brand a highly personal service to a customer? Do I, as a potential customer really want someone who uses this kind of crude advertising method to be messing around in my mouth with their hands and sharp tools? What’s next, Sign Guys advertising “COLONOSCOPY’S”, “CATARACT SURGERY”, or “PROSTATE EXAMS”?

After a few calming moments, the more rational voice in my head reminded me that my business development friends, would counsel me not to make such harsh judgments before considering the advertising thought process that may have taken place. What about 1) target demographics; 2) messaging strategy; and the 3) economic value proposition?

OK, let’s think about that for a moment. 1) What is the target demographic? The only thing I could think of is the impulse buy of someone with a suddenly raging toothache who sees this sign as if it were a life vest thrown to a drowning man. 2) The messaging strategy? Is waving a sign at the street side really any more crude than advertising in the yellow pages, newspapers, and radio or cable TV channels? I guess I have to concede this one to my business development friends. Sign spinning isn’t that much less sophisticated than some relatively crude advertising I’ve seen from Doctors and Lawyers in the print or electronic media. 3) The economic value proposition? I have no personal access to data on this, but an article on Human Billboards cite studies that show that the method costs much less than over advertising media, and brings in a measurable increase in sales to the businesses that use it. However, I have serious doubts about its efficacy for the bottom line of dentistry practices. If someone out there has data to show otherwise I’m open to it. One other thought here is that the Sign Guy for the dentist in question may have been his out of work brother-in-law who just needed a helping hand.

So, harsh or not, I make no apologies for initial “what idiot came up with that idea” response to the dentist who bought into this marketing strategy. I also offer my kudos to the Sign Guy who managed somehow to sell the dentist on the idea and then stayed out there day after day in the heat and wind, doing his Sign Guy thing to earn a living in this tough economy.

Posted in Humor, That's Life | 1 Comment

“Are We There Yet” – Grain Elevators and Learning

Posted on February 11, 2012 by donmcalister

They say all stories have teaching moments. The following is a story from my childhood. Although as you’ll see it made some immediate difference in my life, it took me another 40 years to understand and appreciate the learning.

As a boy growing up in Calgary, Alberta, every summer my parents would take my two younger brothers and me on a road trip to visit our grand-parents, who lived in small, towns in southern Saskatchewan. Although my brothers and I completely enjoyed ourselves once we’d reached our destination, the eight-hour car drive that it took to get there seemed endless to us. The terrain was flat and covered with monochromatic fields of grain. The first part of the trip was on a paved two-lane road, which later gave way to a dusty, one and one-half lane, gravel road, paralleled by an infinite line of telephone poles and railroad tracks. Tracks which inexplicably never seemed to have any train traffic. Every once in a while the road would be punctuated by a rural intersection around which a couple of buildings, a gas station and most prominently, a grain elevator were huddled together for apparent companionship.

My Mom and Dad were in the front seat along with one of us boys. For my brothers and I, the front seat position was of course prized because there was more to see and a reduced likelihood of being carsick. At each rest stop, we’d rotate the front seat opportunity. The two left in the back, either sat on the seat looking out the window in a vain attempt to see anything interesting, or lay on the floorboard somehow conforming their body to accommodate the drive shaft hump.

During the trip, one after the other of us boys would call out, “Are we there yet?” followed seemingly, only moments later with a repeat of the same question, but with more whining. This pattern continued, progressively eroding my Dads patience until he reached his annoyance threshold, at which point he would curtly say “don’t ask me again, I’ll tell you when we get there.” That of course would extend the interval between the whiny question cycles, but it didn’t stop us completely.

During one trip however, having once again reached his limit, my Dad said, “Why don’t you count grain elevators?” He’d already tried having us count telephone poles, but that was too boring. Now, I don’t know about my brothers, but looking back on it, this grain elevator counting thing turned into something of an epiphany and an important learning experience for me.

I’ll insert here, a brief sidebar for those of you unfamiliar with grain elevators. They’re large, multi-story structures located adjacent to main rural roads and train stops. They’re typically painted rusty-brown, red or white and they’re emblazoned with the name of the grain company, or co-op, and the name of the small town or village which was clustered around them. They serve as collection points for the harvested grain from all of the surrounding farms, and as loading points for large trucks or trains that would take the grain to the big city processing centers. On the flat prairie they’re really the only vertical landmarks and they’re as iconic to the towns they anchor as the buildings that produce the skylines of New York and Chicago.

So, with my Dads prompt, I started, somewhat unenthusiastically, paying attention to these grain elevators with their tall, angular shapes, limited color palette and obscure names. After a while though, this grain elevator focus started to grow on me and I realized time was passing more easily. After doing this for a couple of summer trips, I started to recognize and remember, the individual grain elevators, the towns they represented and the sequence in which they appeared during the trip. This gathering of grain elevator visual cues not only gave me a sense of trip progress but strangely enough gave me a feeling of a kind of empowerment over the situation. I was no longer semi-conscious, anxious cargo, I felt like I was part of a transportation project. My brain neurons had constructed a mental map of the trip and I could now realistically envision the coming end-point and had gained some feeling of control over my environment. I never asked the “are we there yet,” question again.

So what’s the teaching moment? It may not seem like much I suppose, but for me it’s like de-coding the whole learning process mystery. It’s about understanding how our brains develop from childhood to adulthood and how we can be further develop them to become to become adults 1.0 and 2.0 so to speak. Our lives are constantly bringing us subtle learning opportunities like these, and we need to pay attention to, and leverage them. We must learn to take the raw data from our senses and apply context that will turn it into information. Information, that with meaningful application can become knowledge. Knowledge re-wires and matures our brains, giving us mental maps of the way the world works. These maps enable us to predict future outcomes, based on our past experience and real-time sensory input. This capability reduces uncertainty and our anxiety over it, and gives us confidence, hope and clarity to make good decisions and allow us to feel like we have some control our lives.

Confident and competent in “knowing what we know”, we can apply and extrapolate it in new contexts, which over time will bring us understanding. And if we’re really lucky, and sufficiently invested in thinking about thinking, we might even develop our understanding into wisdom. And when you become wise, you can tell your kids to count grain elevators when they ask you… “are we there yet.”

Posted in Humor, Personal Development, That's Life | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments