November 2012

Opening a holiday gift and finding tickets to the big game. Surprise!

Telling your manager the day of the deadline that the deliverable will be late.  Surprise!

Oops. Not all surprises lead to delight and happiness.

This week I spoke at Humber College to students completing a project management program. I shared some tips for success based on real work lessons learned. One of these we call “No Surprises!”

Sometimes project managers are hesitant to tell their managers or the client about problems until they’ve done their best to resolve them. The risk is that you spend hours or days struggling with the problem to no avail. By then you’ve burned through budget and wasted valuable time. What was a small issue when it was discovered has ballooned into a major crisis now that the deadline is looming.

Think about it this way. Your manager has access to resources and information that you don’t have. He or she may be able to tap into an expert from another group who can solve the problem in an hour. Or, he may be able to decide that the affected portion of scope isn’t essential after all, and can be removed from the project. The key is to escalate the issue early – while there’s still time to do something about it.

Keeping stakeholders informed is essential. You don’t always know how your project fits into the bigger company strategy, how your status reports are being incorporated into senior management discussions, or how the outcome from your project is going to be used as an input to another project.

That’s why we say save the surprises for holidays and birthdays.

Storytelling. Pictures. Graphics. All are effective tools for communicating complex information in a clear easy-to-understand way. A good visual can provide the clarity needed to see the reality of the current situation in order to make difficult business decisions.

This reminds me of the story of the Tsunami Chart.  During the early months of a major engineer-procure-construct project involving hundreds of engineering packages, the project hit a bottleneck.  Engineering packages submitted for review piled up in a backlog. This delayed the current schedule and posed a risk to activities weeks, months and years later in the project.  We had a challenge before us. We needed help from senior management outside our organization, and needed to make the reality of the situation as clear as possible.

We needed to figure out a way to get their attention so that they fully understood the size and potential impact of the problem.  How could we help them look ahead to see the cascading impact on future work?

The team created a simple visual to show the towering backlog of work that was building and would come crashing down like a wave to flood the people responsible for the next phase of the work. They named this the Tsunami Chart and printed it in vibrant color on 4-foot-square paper to present at every status meeting until the problem was acknowledged and resolved. The chart displayed a brick for each engineering package, stacked according to its delivery date, with each late package shown in red. It was clearly obvious from the towering stack of red bricks that we faced a huge tidal wave of work that would get worse if action wasn’t taken right away.

The visual worked. It got the attention of the decision makers and they immediately took the action necessary to resolve the issue.  This wasn’t the only graphic we could have used, but it enabled us to present a clear, unequivocal picture of the facts, to speak truth to power.

It’s true: a good picture is worth a thousand words.

I just finished reading Fierce Leadership by Susan Scott, author of the bestselling Fierce Conversations. My team tells me I’ve been talking about this book a lot, so I thought I would share my discovery.

With a direct, down to earth writing style, Scott takes a fresh look at six common best practices that she argues no longer work: anonymous feedback, hiring for intelligence, holding people accountable, employee engagement programs, customer centricity and legislated optimism. At first glance these seem counter-intuitive but Susan deftly makes a case for leaving the old ways behind in favor of a more honest and engaged leadership style.

She describes how to spot the tells that signal a need for change, and presents alternative “fierce” practices that provide better results. While reading, I was inspired to think about the way that I lead, and I highly recommend this book  for anyone wishing to improve their effectiveness as a leader.

In my office in my new condo I have an entire wall coated with whiteboard paint. The designers and builders were skeptical at first when I asked for this, but I knew that I think best with a whiteboard marker in my hand.

Why? Because when I’m faced with a problem or a jumble of ideas, I need to get them out of my head. Once they’re on the wall, I can step back, and look at them as a whole. Almost every time I’ll see a connection – a link between ideas – an opportunity I hadn’t seen before. I’m able to see how everything fits together.

This same concept applies in project management. To be more effective you need to understand how your project or part of the project fits into the bigger picture.

Ask yourself: why are we doing this in the first place? How is what I’m doing moving us toward that goal? This elevates your thinking to gain a broader perspective. Rather than being locked into your own viewpoint, you now see how your work relates to others, and how it relates to larger business objectives.

It’s like the difference between writing on a sticky note … or on an entire wall of whiteboard.