Insights and inspiration for project professionals

Every project starts with an investment opportunity’s perspective with a strong belief that the project will succeed, the objectives will be reached, and the benefits will be delivered. Then, the reality has its own say and things go wrong or at least not as planned. Finally, comes the third part about preparing to be surprised which put a trivial question mark to the statement itself. If we could prepare for something that would surprise us, it would no longer be a surprising matter!

A superficial understanding of this last part of the quote would lead to prepare passively for surprises the future is holding for our projects. That means: to do no predictions, no mitigation, or fallback plans, and even no risk analysis at all. However, a deeper reading would imply to reframe our ways of working, our processes, and our frameworks to suit the infinitely changing world of tomorrow. Then the question is: “how to adapt to a new context when we are in complete ignorance of what it could be?”. The magic answer could be: “time traveling”, but we are not offered this option yet. Furthermore, the future reality of any project is closely linked to our past and current actions, which means even if we have the most accurate prediction techniques, they will always fall short of the absolute real future events. So, before searching to optimally adapt, is it always easy just to adapt in anyway?

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“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” –  (Asimov on Science Fiction 1981)

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Most often, project managers are facing the “Maintain vs Adapt” dilemma. They must maintain a certain framework, perpetuate some good practices, and ensure operating the project processes, and at the same time, stay aware of the environment shifts to adapt these framework, practices, and processes. The perfect way to succeed on it is to create small loops of “maintain and adapt”, a kind of “Plan-Do-Check-Act” iterations, ensuring a continuous improvement packaged on a minimum of framework stability. The only drawback on this approach is that the loop length depends tightly on the environment’s shifts speed. A highly volatile context will push the project manager to adapt rapidly, and maybe he/she will be outrun by the changes. Consequently, his/her efforts would go vain.

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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw  (Man and Superman is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903)

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According to the abovementioned George Bernard Shaw’s quote, and the given extremely shifting world, every project manager must adopt a two-tone approach; one time trying to adapt the project to the context and another time trying to force the context to suit the project. That means being a reasonably unreasonable “schizophrenic” project manager. The easiest way to do it? Start adapting before adaptation becomes a must, or at least, enhance your project’s preparedness against the upcoming shocks. Here below are some hints on which a PM can rely:

• Do not limit your risk perception to the known unknowns only. Open widely your imagination and enlarge the range of possibilities, as well for threats as for opportunities. And remember that the risk prompt lists are just a tool to avoid missing an already identified risk not to constraint the risk environment.
• Stay aware of what happens around you in the world. We are living in a world tightly integrated by the globalization. What happens in the furthest away country could have directly a huge devastating impact on your project objectives.
• History is a magic library of projects’ tales. Do not miss the opportunity to learn what happened and often was forgotten. You can avoid some bad surprises that were a normal well known risk long time ago, that slightly disappeared for a while, and that could make their come back on your own project. Anyway, nowadays, reading History is the only way we are given to time-travel.
• If historical reports are a vertical movement over time, benchmarking is the horizontal one. Nourish your risk awareness with pairs experiences, sector’s trends, and similar projects’ results. And better study the failures before the success stories, it could be the best way to vaccinate the project against most lethal risks.
• Do not forget to listen and to trust your gut feelings about some risky situations. Often, the project team is technically unable to put a number on the likelihood and the impact of a given risk. Furthermore, sometimes, some risks are logically unlikely, but there is this little voice asking us to pay attention from the threat or to grab the opportunity. Just trust it!
• Always have a way-out option. It is not a trait of cowardice to think about escaping a risky situation. Preparing a mitigation plan is good, having fallback plans is better. It helps the project to absorb the shocks and gives the project team the opportunity to readjust itself in regard of the new shift.
• Simulate risky situations to enhance your ability to navigate through the agitation generated by a sudden shift.By training your team to react efficiently to messy contexts, no risk occurrence would outrun you, the team gains in stiffness, and the project resilience is fortified.

All the above-mentioned tips are not an extraordinary formula to any project problems. Again, it is quite insane to think that a one-fit-all solution to immunize completely a project could really exist. I quote here  Mr.Jean-Christophe Hamani who said “A project, by its intrinsic nature, is like a single equation with more than one unknown variable. Project Managers are like magicians; their work is to make the impossible possible and it does take a lot of experience and technique!”. However, the project manager job is to try, relentlessly, to solve this equation. 

To conclude, as Heraclitus said, “change is the only constant in life”, in parallel, for a project the only uniqueness will be the path it takes to its end. Everything else, would be just an option among many others. That said, manage your project having in mind that it will be a unique and special experience for all the stakeholders, so try to optimize the value stream out of it. 

 

 

Biography

ELGUARNI Mehdi is an engineer graduated from Arts & Métiers and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, certified PMP®, Prince2, ISO31000, SMAC and SPOAC and currently Project Manager in the Energy sector. He managed projects for 9 years in construction, maintenance, design-office and digitalization projects. He is also a project management trainer, a volunteer for PMI France and an article writer for PMI Lévis-Québec.

Bibliography

• Project Management Institute, A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge seventh Edition and the Standard for Project Management, 2021
• Project Management Institute. 2017. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). 6th ed. Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
• Project Management Institute, Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide (2013)