Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Several years ago I was working with a troubled project. We had a few days to plan and learn. Here are 14 lessons I learned.

Several years ago,  I spent three full days with a group of people trying to plan their way on a project that was failing. They were doing the right thing: planning, learning precisely where they were and what they had to do to travel to the end.

How did they lose thier way? How did they find themselves with a fuzzy idea of where the were and what they were supposed to do?

One of the things I observed was a senior manager pulling a group of individuals into a (maybe) group. He started with the basics. “I want to look at a task. What are the inputs? What are the outputs? Who sends things to me? Who do I send things to? What resources do I need to do the task?”

Those are basics. They must be too simple to tell people, but if they had realized those little, simple, basic things they wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Lesson one: Nothing is to little, simple, or basic to go unsaid.

Another thought: it seems that small groups of people or little teams could huddle together and do their work. They were solving problems, moving forward, and accomplishing work. They were doing well. The trouble would eventually find them in that they would come to work one day and have nothing to do. What? Nothing to do? Why? Well, their little group never bothered to talk to any other little groups to find out what was next. That must have been someone else’s job. Surely someone else was tying the little groups together.

Lesson two: Occasionally, stand up and look at the other little groups.

The project manager (PM) gave a team leader (TL) three months and five people to accomplish work and deliver a product. The TL should gather the team for one day to plan the work. Start again with simple things.

If we are to have the product on day X, what must have on day X-10? For that to happen, what must happen on day X-20? X-30? X-80?

It seems that none of the TLs did that with their team. They jumped right into the work in big chunks of work and big chunks of time. Along they way, they felt they were doing well. They had smart people; they were working hard, and things were going to come out in the end. Weren’t they?

Contractors create proposals in a combination of top-down and bottom-up work. Their bottom-level tasks are detailed, but they are not really detailed details. They are sort of “not too detailed” details. The detailed details are left up to the TL when they start a three-month stretch of work.

Sometimes, however, the TL and the team don’t work out their details.

Lesson three: Start at the conclusion and work backwards until you know what must be done in small increments of time.

Lesson four: The project manager needs to ensure that the team lead works out the details with the team on day one.

Lesson five: The person paying for the work needs to ensure this happens by drilling down into the detailed details on at least one area.

It seems to me that there are lots of opportunities here for a retired person and consultant to make money on these planning exercises.

A big surprise to me was how much time was spent by one or two people correcting the errors in the schedules of other people. I couldn’t understand what kinds of errors people could have in schedules. Someone tried to explain that to me, but it never made much sense. It was sort of like task A was supposed to connect to task B, but they didn’t connect them on the scheduling tool. Instead they just told someone that the tasks connected.

No one would ever do that. Everyone knows that you have to connect tasks so that they are connected. No one would just pretend they were connected and hope that things worked out. Well, someone – actually several “someones” – did that.

Lesson six: Someone will do what no one would ever do.

I asked some of the people on the project what they thought might have gone wrong. One was that they had worked on projects with three or four programmers. This project involved 25 programmers. What worked before wasn’t working now, but the programmers and their supervisors didn’t realize it or wouldn’t admit it. They needed to change, but they didn’t.

Lesson seven: Weinberg’s Law of the Power of Three. 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, … What works at one level of staffing will not work at the next.

Another person on the project mentioned the trouble that they were having with requirements. This project has requirements – the “what” is being built. The team had the choice of “how” to build the system (design), but did not have a choice of what to build (requirements).

Many people on the project started work in the dot-com era at start up companies. A key to success in that other environment is to create the what, to think of a great product that people would love to buy. They would create the how while they were thinking of the what.

In this project, the persons paying for the work stated the what. The system engineer allocated the what to different teams. The teams were to decide how to build and then do it.

A problem was that many of the team members decided what whats were really good and worthy of their efforts and what whats were dumb ideas. They decided this on their own and didn’t implement the dumb whats.

Eventually, a test team walked in and started testing the whats. Some of the whats weren’t implemented, and the corresponding tests failed. Trouble. Now the team had to fix the unimplemented whats. They argued with all their hearts that those whats were unworthy. The problem was the corporation had a contract that said they had to fullfil all the requirements. The second problem was that at this time in implementation it was really costly and troublesome to put other requirements into the design and implementation.

Oh well, they had to do it.

Lesson eight: Requirements are things that are required not desired.

I kept talking to people about the need for learning and improving. To make this point, I did an exercise on the morning of the third day. The exercise was:

Everyone has two cards and one piece of paper. On card #1, write two or three things that you noticed other people learn, notice, or realize. On card #2, write two or three things that you learned, noticed, or realized. Write these four to six things on your piece of paper.

Stand up, pass your card #1 to the person on the right. Repeat this three or four times. I wanted to ensure that everyone had someone else’s card #1 and not the card from the person sitting next to them. The person next to them probably worked directly with them all week, so they probably had a similar learning experience. I wanted them to have a card from across the room.

Stand up, pass your card #1 to the person on the left. Repeat this three or four times.

Write the four to six things on these two cards on your piece of paper. Now you have eight to 12 learnings on your piece of paper. Please use these learnings during the rest of the project.

Unexpected to me, we had mass confusion while passing cards to the right and then to the left. People were facing all different directions so that their right was someone else’s left.

Lesson nine: It is easier to pass cards to the right when everyone is facing the same direction.

Lesson ten: Start a project by having everyone face the same direction.

Another confusion was that people were passing cards away, but were not receiving them. Some people had three cards while some people had none. These people did not seek out one another without a great deal of prodding from me. What was wrong with these people? Surely they realized what was happening and that they should rectify the situation without prodding. They didn’t.

Lesson eleven: If you have no cards or extra cards, find a person that is in the other situation.

One more unexpected thing happened. At the end someone suggested, “Let’s collect all the cards and pin them to the wall so everyone can see them.” What a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that?

Lesson twelve: Great ideas come from unexpected places at unexpected times.

Lesson thirteen: Keep your senses active so that you can notice and use great ideas.

Lesson fourteen: It is probably worthwhile to have someone on a large project who has no assigned duty other than to wander around and notice things.

There was one side conversation that I overheard. When you are on the critical path, don’t worry about being efficient. The money you waste by slipping the entire project day-for-day is much greater than what you might waste staying on schedule.