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Competency Coordinates: Accountable for Time

Prioritising and completing tasks in an orderly and efficient way, making realistic time estimates and regularly monitoring whether the work is progressing as agreed, using existing management processes within the organization and supporting organisational change processes to improve social performance, being aware of the commitment limits in a negotiation process, considering available data and reliability, adequacy and sufficiency of evidence for making a decision or taking action.

The 3 deadly sins of project management

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• Resistance to planning. Management failures are among the worst nightmares in project development! From teams in spiraling conflicts to compromised deadlines and budgets, it’s an experience most managers want to avoid. Good planning is a great starting point for good project management. Still, many managers consider difficult to draw and follow plans. Justifications involve the lack of time, having been successful on a similar project, and the preference for more flexible and ad hoc form of navigation. As the saying goes, “we never seem to have time to plan our projects, but we always have time to do them twice”, and in the words of Dwight Eisenhower “plans are worthless, but planning is everything”. Additionally, even motivated managers can fail at planning either because they lack the tools and data need for planning or simply because they are to overconfident and fail to adequately consider bad past experiences and important details about the future. Keep in mind that good planning takes much more than goodwill and motivation!

• Resistance to complexity. Given several possible courses of action a manager screams for a clear and definitive alternative; the manager desperately wants to escape ambiguity, inconsistency and confusion! This is the definition of high Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC). Forcing simplicity at complexity is, to be blunt, bad news! Research shows that people with low NCC are more likely to consider complex information, more careful with the loss of information, more likely to value accuracy than speed in a decision, and more open minded and creative. This to say that, given several possible coursers of actions, embracing complexity and ambiguity is part of successful project management.

• Resistance to change. Given two courses of action, people are more likely to follow the one that minimizes change and keeps the status quo. After choosing a course of action, people are more likely to seek information that confirms the virtue of the choice made than information challenging it. People are also more likely to hold the belief that others will see the virtue of the choice the same way they see it. Finally, your team and your colleagues might be mutually reinforcing each other into believing that your collective point of view is the right one. Status quo bias, confirmation bias, projection bias, and group think, are some of psychological forces that naturally work against change. Promoting change requires understanding and mastering these forces.

We can’t manage what we don’t measure!

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• In a TV show an overweight individual committed himself to go on a diet, lose the extra weight and become healthier. He tried many diets before without success but, he hoped, maybe this time it would be different. The first step of the diet was to record in a food diary everything he ate during a week. The rule was straightforward – “anything you put in your stomach you write down in the diary”. After one week, he was astonished. He explained on TV how the food diary made him discover the number one cause of the excess weight. It was not the French fries because he hates fried food, it was not the cakes and sweets because he quit on those many years ago. Actually, he had a pretty good diet, except for one thing – coffee and tea with sugar. The TV show participant drank up to 10 mugs of day of coffee and tea, and every time he had a mug, he added 3 teaspoons of sugar. If you do the maths, that is 210 teaspoons, 840 grams of sugar, 3300 extra calories each week. The TV show participant had been unable to manage his weight for years, simply because he did not have the right data!

• The world is constantly replenishing with data – raw, uncoded, meaningless events, experiences and phenomena. It can range from birth, death, votes and rainfall to spending, disagreements, and behaviours. But with all this data freely floating around us every day, why is it so hard to listen to it, to use it to build knowledge and wisdom into our decisions? Between data and wisdom, there are 3 key barriers:
  • Relevance. Not everyone understands their needs. With data, people too often fall into extremes –under-evaluating how much data they need and building a limited account of the relevant phenomenon or assuming that the more the merrier and ending up tangled in unnecessary complexity. A needs assessment developed and validated by your team should make the cut for having the relevant data in your hands.
  • Collection. Where can you find the data you need? Is it already in a database somewhere, or do you need to go out into to the world and collect it yourself? Secondary data is good because it requires less resources, often has good quality, is longitudinal and permanent. On the other hand, primary data collection requires substantial expertise but can be customised to your exact needs and overseen for quality and other relevant characteristics. Whatever your choice, never put data quality second. As the saying goes with data analysis, “garbage in, garbage out”!
  • Analysis. The common experience when people look at a database is either to enter into panic or find it overwhelming and freeze with overwhelm. Databases are pretty much like books on the national library shelf – there are there for the taking, you can grab them and read whatever you want, but where should you start? Narrowing your needs into questions offers a powerful lens to your database. One thing is to say that “I need data on team productivity”. Another way, more powerful, is to ask “what is the level of productivity of my team, how does it compare with other teams, and how does it relate with stress, satisfaction and motivation”. Again, data is pretty meaningless. To transform data into information it is necessary to name, partition, and organize data. And to transform information into knowledge and wisdom it is necessary to create models associating different chunks of information, and models associating multiple models! Wisdom payoff is predictability, the same predictability as with weather forecast or biomedical treatments!

Ways to master project management

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1. How “irrational” have you been as a project manager?

Learn more about how irrational we are humans, and you have the answer:

• Dan Ariely is a social psychologist expert on irrationality. What makes us irrational, how predictable irrationality his, how impactful can in be in our lives? Dan answers all these questions in a series of three books: “Irrationality yours”, “The upside of irrationality”, and “Predictably irrational”. Check the books here.

• The Noble prize laureate, Daniel Kahneman, wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” describing two systems of thought and provides many examples of how they work in practice. You can start by listening to Daniel’s interview with Inc. Magazine about his book here and, if that spikes your interest, consider reading the book.

• Develop a growth mindset. Do you have a growth or fixed mindset? Do you know how much a mind rigidity can impact your life? Carol Dweck has more than 30 years of study on the matter and she can tell you that story like no one. Start with her Ted talk here. If you became compelled by Carol’s ideas and by how a growth mindset can impact your life, dive deeper into the topic with her book “Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential” here.

2. Become a quantitative thinker

• People are often frightened with numbers and formulas. But quantitative thinking has much more to do with telling a story with numbers than it has of telling a story about numbers. Unlocking the abstraction and knowledge needed to speak and think in quantitates will bring you close reality and unleash some management super-powers.
  • Alan Smith shows how badly we are with thinking in quantities and how that results in a poor understanding of the world we navigate every day and believe to know! Check his TED talk here.
  • Charles Wheelan talks about serious things in a way that everyone understands and finds inner joy. In his series “naked”, Charles talks like no one else about statistics, economics, and money. Check here.
  • The final recommendation is Scott E. Page book on modelling, “The Model Thinker”. He is the one who neatly describes the wisdom pyramid (data, information, knowledge and wisdom) and shows the many forms that wisdom can take in current statistical modelling. Check his book here.