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Is
Your Organization Centered and Grounded?
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How to hold an effective project review
One of the most common "diseases" I witness in leaders, teams, and organizations is failure to act in a centered and grounded way. When we fail to ground our actions in reality, we undermine our chances of being successful and increase our chances of getting stuck.
Here's a common example of not grounding action in reality. Last year, I attended a project review for a team of about ten people who were in the middle or toward the end, we couldn't tell, of a project originally estimated to take nine months. I was asked to give an assessment of what was going and make some recommendations to get the project on track because the project manager had, for the third month in a row, slipped the schedule by one month.
During the review, the project manager presented a list of all the tasks that had been completed since the last review and a newly revised schedule and completion date. There was some discussion of how some tasks were completed and a discussion of the potential negative impact of the slipped schedule. Based on this, the project manager was asked to do some rescheduling, shift people and task asignments around and pull the date in by two weeks. However, no one talked about where the project actually was that day. The decisions that were made in this review weren't centered and grounded in what was actually happening. Instead, they were a response to what had happened, what might happen, and the fear of the impact of what might happen.
After the meeting was over I pulled the project manager aside to ask him some questions. I started by observing, "You presented what happened in the past month and a prediction for what might happen in the months to come. Thank you. That was really helpful context. And it was good to get an update on when you believe the project will finish. However, I still don't know where the project is today and I can't make any sound recommendations." He looked at me with some surprise. "What do you mean? We're 75 days away from completing the project," he said. "Well, last month you where about 75 days away from completing the project too and clearly a lot of work has been done in the last month. You probably aren't in the same place today as you were a month ago. So where are you today?"
What was happening was that he was inferring where the project is today by looking at what's happened in the past and what he predicted will happen in the future. Grounding action in reality means knowing where the project is today and responding to that, not responding to predictions that we don't like. He was making a common mistake of doing planning only for prediction.
A better use of planning is to create a language that is used to discuss where the project is today. Discussing where the project is today grounds action in reality and enables successful management of the project to completion. Planning that creates a language to discuss where the project is today is different than planning that only creates a prediction for completion. Before we example how planning creates a language that helps us coordinate action and create value, let's look at the structure and content of a good project review.
Project reviews are structured events where managing happens. Since managing happens at multiple levels there, multiple levels of review are needed. In general, each higher level of review will have decreasing depth of visibility with increasing breadth of managerial scope. However, any review can reach any level of depth in the service of achieving its purpose. For example, reviews by more senior management will tend toward reviewing exceptions and quality and process effectiveness assessments rather than status about every task on every project.
The purposes of all project reviews, regardless of level, are:
1. To assess where we are today
2. To make decisions about what to do next
3. To create grounded commitments and responsibility assignments
4. To learn
and improve our effectiveness in meeting commitments and responsibilities
This is accomplished by increasing the visibility of commitment assessments, breakdowns, and resolutions and enabling decision-making.
Regardless of level (depth of content discussed), project reviews follow the same basic format.
1. Assess the current state of projects against the plan and process of record
- What has happened since the last review? What is done?
- What is happening now? What is in-process?
- Are we on plan? Are we on process?
- What is our prediction about future milestones?
2. Identify project and process breakdowns (openings for new commitments and actions)
- Where are we not on plan?
- Where are we not on process?
- What commitments have we failed to meet?
- Where are we stuck? Where are we not taking needed action?
3. Learning from our breakdowns (where we are failing to meeting our commitments)
- What was our commitment (including conditions for satisfaction)? Is it still relevant and needed?
- What was our strategy (plan or process) for meeting it?
- What action did we take?
- What happened when we did that? How do we know that that's what happened?
- Do we have all the necessary perspectives on what happened? If not, how can we get them?
- What did we assume that turned our to be false (if anything)?
- What didn't we account for in our plan or process? Where are our blind spots?
- How do our actions and/or strategy need to change, based on what we learned from this breakdown?
4. Taking (new) action
- What new commitments are we establishing (including conditions of satisfaction)?
- What has to happen immediately, if anything? (What fires need to be put out?)
- What new action must take place? What is the new and revised plan?
- Who is responsible for what?
- How will the change in plans be communicated? To whom?
- What do we expect to happen by the next review?
Based on this structure and content of a project review, we can see how central commitment negotiation is to project planning and tracking. Stay tuned to this site for future articles on negotiating commitments.
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