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You’re managing a project. What can go wrong?

Well …

Scenario #1: It’s hard to overcome the CEO

A friend managed a business transformation tied to a large software suite (I’m not allowed to be more specific). Her client was a multinational concern that wasn’t wise in the ways of project management. She had a strong team, the right work breakdown structure, a good working relationship with the vendor, and a committed executive sponsor.

But then the CEO happened. All by itself, just one restructuring would have driven quite a bit of re-work into the project. Multiples multiplied the impact.

And that’s before the ritual laying off of several people the project couldn’t do without. As The Mythical Man Month makes clear, replacing these key staff slowed things down even more, as the effort needed to acclimate the project newbies to the project and their responsibilities exceeded any benefit they could provide.

My friend got the project done, but it got done much uglier than it needed to.

Lesson learned: Include a list of specific critical personnel in your project Risks and Issues reporting, and make sure that reporting is visible at least one layer higher than the project’s sponsor. It won’t completely prevent the chaos, but it might reduce it.

Scenario #2: A filter that should be a conduit

So you say your executive sponsor cares deeply about your project’s success. You say he’s assigned the right people to the core team, and has let everyone else know they should support the project when their support is called for.

And … he’s a busy guy, so he’s delegated day-to-day sponsorship to a trusted member of his team, who is to be your primary Point of Contact. His busyness also means he has no time for regular face-to-face updates.

But not to worry. Your PoC meets with him weekly, and will keep him informed.

As the project progresses, unexpected discoveries drive a number of course corrections. Taken one at a time, none seem particularly controversial, so you and your PoC make the decisions and move on.

A couple of months later, though, with a major milestone approaching, you bring the sponsor in for a briefing. That’s when you discover that what seemed minor to you seems less minor to your sponsor, and the decisions you and your PoC to resolve the issues weren’t the solutions the sponsor would have chosen.

This is when you find out your PoC either hasn’t embraced the “bad news doesn’t improve with age” dictum or also didn’t think the issues in question were important enough to mention in his weekly updates.

And, it’s when you first figure out the sponsor defines “handled correctly” as “how I would have handled it,” and “handled wrong” as “all other ways of handling it.”

So now you have an irritated sponsor and a project schedule that’s in recovery mode.

You can’t entirely avoid this. What might at least help is, prior to your PoC’s weekly meetings with the project sponsor, rehearse the topics to be covered in the project update.

Scenario #3: EPMO — enabler or bureaucracy

Congratulations! As a result of your many well-managed projects and the value they delivered, you’ve been promoted to the Enterprise Program Management Office — the EPMO. In your new role you’re responsible for ensuring all project investments are worthwhile, and providing oversight to make sure they’re well-managed by project managers who aren’t you.

And so, guided by “industry best practices,” you establish a governance process to screen out proposals that don’t make the grade.

Then you start to hear those governed by the EPMO use the B-word in your general direction. No, not that B-word. Bureaucrat.

Which, if you think your job is to screen out bad proposals, you’ve become.

First and worst, a bureaucrat evaluates proposals. A leader evaluates the ideas behind the proposals.

Second and almost as worst, if you expect to see dumb ideas you’ll see dumb ideas, because most people, most of the time, see what they expect to see. And anyway, if what you do is screen out dumb ideas you’ll pass the proposals that don’t give you a reason to screen them out, not those that give you a reason to keep them in.

So take the B out of your job. Starting tomorrow, the EPMO’s job is to help good ideas succeed.

Followed by your stretch goal: to help turn good ideas into great ones.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

A popular conspiracy theory has it that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Chinese laboratory.

This idea is, quite plainly, preposterous. The state of the art in genetic engineering is nowhere close to achieving something like this.

It isn’t a stretch to figure out that this finger-pointing exercise is being promoted by people who want to distract us from the obvious true source.

Which is? Check out these three UFO videos recently released by the Department of Defense.

The question we need to ask and answer is why the DoD chose this moment to release them. The answer is, I think, easily discerned. Without these videos, significant portions of the defense budget would be diverted to dealing with the immediate threat the virus poses.

But with these videos, the Pentagon can make a credible case for investing heavily in the advanced weaponry we’ll need to counter an alien attack.

Which is, of course, exactly what the aliens want us to do. Aliens advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances will easily tailor more viruses. The less we invest in pandemic response to instead develop weapons we’ll never have a chance to use, the more the aliens win.

Except that if this were really the Pentagon’s plan it would have released videos that aren’t so grainy and fuzzy. We need to think a few moves ahead to interpret the data.

The cui bono (who benefits?) method of analysis is useful for this analysis.

Who benefits? Zoom benefits! Maybe the virus was designed and produced in its secret laboratories. What, you never heard of these? That just proves they’re secret.

Who, after all, has benefited more than Zoom? Well, Amazon, maybe, but it didn’t need the virus. It’s been taking over the world just fine without it.

But because of social distancing, Zoom’s share price grew from around $70 when the virus first emerged to a recent peak of $170, and that’s in spite of sloppy security practices that otherwise might have caused InfoSec officers around the world to insist on a more hardened alternative.

But, you might object, surely Zoom lacked the financial resources to build and staff a virus engineering lab.

It’s a reasonable objection, but one that’s easily explained: Zoom had co-conspirators. Take, for example, Goody. As a purveyor of products that keep hair under control, Goody must be seeing a dramatic uptick in demand, as people of all genders, with their cutters shuttered, find themselves with too much hair, and in the wrong places.

No, I haven’t been driven to wear a man bun yet, but the handwriting is on the mirror. It’s only a matter of time.

Okay, enough. Fun is fun, but what’s the point?

In spite of their outsized impact on our political dialog, conspiracy theories are promulgated and promoted by only a small minority of our fellow citizens. They’re more loud and irritating than numerous.

What encourages conspiracy theories to thrive is, in contrast, quite common. That’s the desire, whenever anything goes wrong, to find someone or something … no, I was right the first time, to find someone to blame for it.

In our national political dialog the standard of blame is tribalism. Not that many years ago, the standard of blame in IT was Microsoft, and before that IBM.

Now?

Wrong subject. The right one?

Much of the workforce has transitioned to Remote status. In the short term the challenge was ensuring everyone has enough bandwidth and the right access to be productive.

By now, all but the tardiest adopters have made it this far. It’s time to prepare for Stage 2 of the transition to working remotely, which is social dysfunction.

Social distancing is making us safer. It is, however, also making us crabbier, and that’s true even for those of us whose current situation is more inconvenience than serious problem.

With everyone stressed we’re more likely to scrutinize for trivial defects and, having found them, to assign blame. And that’s when things go right. When they go wrong, blamestorming is the entire agenda.

We human beings have a very strong tendency to divide everyone in the world into two groups: Us and Them. We’re the Good Guys; They’re the Bad Guys.

As we increasingly work remotely, the population we each consider to be We will inevitably shrink.

At least it will shrink unless we each, as leaders, adopt active measures to circumvent it.

Because the desire to blame can and will easily overwhelm even the most solid sense of team identity.

Blame the aliens. The ones in the UFOs, that is.

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