Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

People accomplish most of the work on projects. People don’t need to know every tiny detail from me. They are good at filling in the gaps themselves. Rounding off the details is fine in all work where people play a large role.

I am not a mathematician – I am an engineer. I recall in college how myself and my engineering friends would drive our mathematician friend crazy. We would round off numbers after a few decimal places. We would drop everything in a series after the second coefficient because the rest weren’t important. I mean, the math guy would really go crazy about that simplification. Those extra points, those extra coefficients – they didn’t matter to us.

Years later, I moved into managing engineering projects. I saw people using spreadsheets and predicting a one-hour task that was to occur five years into the future with five or six digits of precision. At first, I thought they were joking. They weren’t. They actually copied the six-digit number from the spreadsheet to their briefing. And no one in the briefing room laughed. I didn’t and still don’t understand.

Six-digit precision in projects isn’t worth the effort of typing the numbers. People are involved in projects; people fill in the gaps. Smart people are really good at filling in the gaps. I am not advocating just letting things go wherever they might. I advocate allowing good, smart people to do the jobs for which they were hired and are paid. People can do wonderful things if you let them. Tell them the goal; tell them the budget; tell them what you want, but don’t tell them to report their progress to six decimal places.