Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

Seven Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

Making a Decision - Quick DecisionThinking back to client situations over the past few years, here are seven types of decision making situations across three different categories where too much time often gets spent debating and considering actions.

Non-Strategic Decisions

1. Non-strategic issues – We talk about strategic issues as those that “matter” for an organization. If a decision making outcome won’t matter that much, don’t spend that much time on it.

2. Changes to processes customers won’t experience – For as much as we talk about the need for strategic change, invest more time deciding about changes customers will notice than background processes they won’t ever experience.

3. There’s a track record from previous decision making – Especially in big corporations with lots of administrative functions, it’s possible for employees to spend way too much time on decision making about simple issues primarily important to them. If your organization has a solid history or guidelines to shape decision making, use them and invest your efforts on newer, more speculative decisions.

There Are Multiple Options that Could Suffice

4. You can recover from making a decision that’s off the mark – If your environment is one where it’s relatively easy to try things, learn, and adapt, you’re in a lot better situation to make a quick decision and launch into implementation.

5. You’re making a decision from among multiple choices customers will accept – Don’t waste too much time debating changes to product or service features low on the list of things customers care about or notice. Invest the time saved into stronger implementation.

Limited Resource Are Available

6. You’ll spend more on making a decision than the decision costs – In a meeting-happy organizational culture, you can wind up with multiple meetings to consider and debate even small questions. If you’re spending $5,000 in employee time (yes in a staff role, you still have an hourly rate) to make a $1,000 decision, STOP!

7. You’re trying to decide about things you’ll never be able to do – We definitely encourage thinking big and considering possibilities well beyond today. But when it gets down to prioritization and decision making time, it’s time to decide on things you will be able to implement and not just be able dream about for an extended period.

Strategies for Finishing a Project

One topic was how they finish projects for customers. While this step could be treated as an afterthought, it’s actually a critical stage on multiple dimensions. If it’s done thoroughly and promptly, it leads to greater success and satisfaction for clients and stronger profitability for the company. Done poorly (i.e., dragging on too long), it can trigger client dissatisfaction on an otherwise successful project and deteriorate profitability as project managers rack up uncompensated hours and can’t move to other projects.

Thinking about it later, finalizing a project is an important phase to have end really well for any project-based business, whether you’re serving external or internal clients.

From working with our client and thinking about this strategic, final step, here are questions we’re considering for Brainzooming™ that apply broadly:

Near project’s end, are we revisiting the deliverables and to-do lists, updating and aggressively managing open issues?

Are there clear cues signaling we’re done with the project?

Does the client fully understand its role in working with the output and implementing it successfully after the project is handed over?

What specific questions are we asking to gauge how well we delivered? Are we addressing any points of concern promptly and satisfactorily?

Are we asking for referrals?

Project Management Tips – 8 Signs a Creative Project Is Done

Multiple Ways to Be Done

When you are working intensely on completing a creative project, it is easy to block out anything other than the deadline and the steps you have identified you need to complete to measure your progress.

If that is the case though, you may miss that despite the fact that even though the calendar deadline and the steps for project completion have not synced up, your creative effort is effectively done.

As a recovering perfectionist, I have become particularly attuned to my own and others’ incessant tinkering on a project that could clearly be considered done. It’s the “just can’t leave it alone” syndrome in project management which sometimes leads to improvements on a project, but can just as easily translate into wasted time that you could apply to a new creative effort, if you were just willing to move on to something else.

8 Signs a Creative Project Is Done

The Twitter exchange got me thinking about these eight project management tips to suggest where a project is “done” even though the calendar and your perceptions of the level of completion suggest it isn’t done:

• You bit a creative block and can’t advance the creative effort any further –even if the calendar says it isn’t done yet.
• The strategic direction for the project from management has changed to a new path.
• Your support team has mentally quit on you and/or the effort.
• Your options in continuing to work on the project are worse than your options from stopping work.
• A stakeholder tells you he/she is happy with its completion and outcome.
• Everybody has gone home – physically, mentally, or virtually.
• You have run out of time to complete it and can’t negotiate for any more time.
• Others view the effort as a success, even if you don’t quite yet.

These were the first eight I wrote down; surely there are more than this.

Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

• Figure out what we’re delivering that hasn’t been promised and stop spending time on these things.
• Cut out clear “nice to haves.”
• Eliminate unexpected things whose absence won’t be missed.
• Remove things whose presence just makes the overall project look more incomplete.
• Work with an explicit “better done than perfect” mentality.
• Go with “high-probability” answers (vs. waiting around for “certain” answers).
• Identify things with longer lead times or that someone else still needs to work on, and get them done first.
• Force making decisions (and then not revisiting them any further).
• Check if there are alternative organizational approaches for the project that move it to completion more rapidly.
• Ask for help from incredibly dependable team members (if they haven’t been involved in the effort already).
• Create a new to do list with color coding to make important tasks stand out.
• Start assembling physical elements of the project in an open space (when working with computer files, create a new empty folder of final deliverables so it’s clear what’s done).
• Develop a negotiating strategy if it appears trade-offs will need to be made with the end client.
• Make a short list of things easily addressed or fixed “later than sooner.”
• Think more, talk less, and do – like crazy!

That’s what I came up with trying to think about situations when time has been running down on projects previously.

Checklists – Helping Visualize the Uncertain When Plans Fall Through

During a “major winter weather event” (KC television weather jargon for “snow”), I was monitoring

the weather by looking out the window and watching The Weather Channel. I was unaware that our airport had been closed for hours until my traveling companion called to ask when I was going to the airport and what my alternatives were.

It was suddenly essential to develop a checklist to evaluate viable options so that our trip didn’t fall apart. The resulting checklist works in many instances where a plan looks as if it’s in jeopardy of not succeeding:

Identify critical plan priorities that can’t be compromised. (We had to arrive Sunday night; all else could be adjusted on the road.)

Increase flexibility / options right away to be able to still achieve the priorities. (That meant downsizing my checked bag to a carry-on in 5 minutes and getting to the airport ASAP to have the opportunity to make more flight options.)

Secure access to the necessary information flow. (We determined that on the ground info was our best source – first at the counter, then at the gate.)

Develop likely scenarios and their implications. (Since it was an airport-wide delay, we had to get as early a flight as possible, while being prepared to catch the latest connecting flight possible.)

Secure the resources to operate in the most likely scenarios. (Our important resources were charged phones, water and food to take along, and each other – splitting up & teaming as necessary to get to the front of the customer service line ASAP.)

The end result? We made it on an earlier scheduled flight that left an hour after our original plane was supposed to depart. Our 2-hour Chicago layover was consumed by the delay; we walked off the plane in Chicago and went right to our original connecting flight. We had food because we’d planned ahead, so it wasn’t a big deal to miss eating at Midway. We arrived only 15 minutes late vs. the prospect of arriving 5 hours late. And the checklist made all the difference!

Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

Does you work group repeatedly gravitate toward familiar ideas when innovation possibilities are
considered? If that’s so, here’s an alternative prioritization strategy that could help break the cycle. It’s a typical four box prioritization grid, but with a twist.

Use “ease of implementation” for one axis, with a range of “simple” to “complex” to implement. On the other axis, instead of the more typical “expected benefit,” use the “level of comfort with the idea” and a “very” to “not very” scale (as shown in the diagram). Having your group prioritize ideas in this way opens up new areas of discussion on tendencies you have to prefer familiar, non-innovative ideas.

For simple, but uncomfortable ideas, focus on understanding what creates discomfort about the innovation. For uncomfortable ideas more complex to implement, probe on whether there’s long-term potential that could create competitive advantage (or look for ways to implement the idea with greater ease). The key with both cells is getting to the heart of the innovation discomfort. Is it because there are significant flaws in the idea or is it really because the idea is new, challenging, and unfamiliar? If it’s the latter, that’s often a clear sign that the idea could yield tremendous potential for customers who aren’t part of inertia inside a company that thwarts developing new products and services.
For ideas seen as very comfortable, the vital question is how to inject new features and benefits making them more viable yet potentially increasing internal discomfort.

Twenty-One Project Management Implications of Wanting Things FAST

Saying You Want Something FAST Won’t Make It So
For all the desire to have projects or work processes move REALLY FAST, it seems, especially in
larger organizations, cultural forces work against projects moving FAST despite what project stakeholders expect.

The reason is a desire for FAST doesn’t mean anybody wants the related project management implications:

Rearranging what’s important
Saying what you’re going to do
Doing what you say
Working from a strong to-do list
Giving more effort
Focusing attention
Not depending on people who’ve never been dependable
Motivating /encouraging /cajoling / bribing people who have been dependable before to do even more
Anticipating project management roadblocks
Addressing potential project management roadblocks before they’re reached
Spending money wisely to eliminate other roadblocks
Sharing vital information that allows people to act
Being responsive
Making decisions to not pursue every possible idea
Handling trade-offs
Acting instead of delaying
Hitting deadlines
Speaking now or forever holding your peace
Ignoring “nice to have” opinions but getting all the “must have” opinions
Getting out of the way when you’re not critical
Caring more or caring less – whichever moves things along
FAST is easy to say. Its project management implications are hard (sometimes apparently impossible) to stomach inside an organization.

Major Change Management – Managing Ongoing Performance Gaps

Major Change Management – Managing Ongoing Performance Gaps
Having watched the change management initiative related to this liturgical change play out for nearly a year, it occurred to me there are some additional valuable lessons to share relative to how people actually react to a major change. While it can be easy from a headquarters perspective to implement a major change and assume everyone will follow it exactly as planned, that’s never the case.

In the midst of following up a major change management initiative, it’s vital to realize your audience will have varying degrees of challenge with a major change and how it creates performance gaps. Whether the challenges are intentional or unintentional, performance following a major change has a variety ways of falling short of the complete and clean implementation you might expect.

4 Types of People Who Struggle with Major Change and Performance Gaps
Based on what I’m experiencing in the pews at various Catholic churches, here are 4 struggles people have with major change and related questions to ask about how the change management effort needs to adapt to address these performance gaps:

1. Leaders who ignore aspects of the major change they don’t support
There isn’t supposed to be room for variation in what a priest says during mass, but based on the specific parishes I’ve attended, I’ve seen priests leave out certain new phrases or even use entire sections from the old mass instead of the new wording.

Question: What’s in place to bring leaders who are not on the program back into the fold through monitoring and trying to adjust and correct their performance gaps?

2. People who opt out of participating in the major change
The guy behind me at daily mass refuses to learn the new parts of the mass the congregation is supposed to say. As a result, he told me he has quit saying most of the parts of the mass in which the congregation is called on to participate.

Question: You may praise innovation and celebrate people doing things differently, but what do you handle it when “differently” means ignoring what you’ve asked them to do?

3. People who slip up, potentially repeatedly
Another person who sits right behind me several days a week has a tough time remembering all the new parts for the congregation. Invariably, she has a slip up or two, reverting to older parts, which she’ll then repeat seconds later with the new wording.

Question: Do you have ongoing tools to help people who are struggling with the major change, and have you created an environment that supports people who take a longer time to get their performance up to previous levels?

4. People who are still using the aids distributed when the changes were made
Nine months in, there are many people who use the original aids placed in church pews to help the congregation understand and participate in the wording changes. These aids highlight the modified wording and continue to fill a role as people still get used to the new wording.

Four Strategy Options for Change Management

Incremental Modifications
When both the level of frustration with the status quo and the perceived need for dramatically different results are low, incremental modifications are in order. With no pressing demands for change, intense efforts to innovate and create change are best applied elsewhere.

Experimentation
If there’s high frustration with the status quo yet no compelling push for change (think dissatisfaction with a process that’s more trouble than it’s worth even though the results are okay), it’s an opportunity to experiment, simplify, streamline, and try new things. These situations are ripe for constant tweaking and learning from both successes and failures.

Creating a Burning Platform
Creating a burning platform is the recommended course of action when results are substandard, but there’s an unwillingness, reluctance, or blindness to make dramatic changes within an organization. It usually calls for a well-crafted mix of facts and emotion to create the burning platform to move people to recognize the need for action and the importance of getting started right away.

Transformation
Total transformation is called for when everyone understands results are way off goal and the current course of action will never close the gap. When put that way, it could seem transformation might be the easiest of the quadrants. That’s hardly the case though, since the stakes are greatest and the response will likely be more complex and multi-faceted than any of the other quadrants.

Implementation Problems? 7 Signs You’re Understarting, Not Overthinking

“Don’t overthink it” is one of my least favorite business buzzword phrases. I like implementation, but I also like thinking about things, too. Taking ample time to think before launching into implementation isn’t necessarily overthinking. But that doesn’t stop people from overusing the phrase. In fact, hearing about overthinking from a boss one too many times caused me to launch a business comedy blog as an online venue to vent my frustration several years ago.

For whatever reasons, I’ve had several people say, “Don’t overthink it,” in recent weeks. On Parks and Rec last night, Ron Swanson even told Andy Dwyer, “I never thought I’d say this, but I think you’re overthinking it, son.”

While I understand the sentiment behind not overthinking something, I question whether that is what’s really happening most of the time. Rather than overthinking, my experience suggests the problem is usually “understarting.”

What’s ”understarting”?

From seeing examples of understarting throughout my career, it’s characterized by:

Waiting for more inspiration before starting.

Thinking everything has to be planned out before starting.

Requiring themselves to start at the natural start when that’s the worst place to get started.

Opting to gather more information when they already have enough information to begin.

Sitting tight to wait for someone else to initiate a first step.

Distracting themselves with something less important and less challenging to do.

Avoiding people who will hold them accountable for their lack of progress.

Project Management Techniques – 6 Project Manager Mistakes to Not Repeat

May you benefit from these lessons learned from previous project management technique mistakes!

1. Having a project manager who isn’t a strong visual thinker

For one major program, our project manager was very good at checking things off a list and bugging people when they didn’t get things done. He couldn’t, however, anticipate project steps, potential dependencies within a project, and things that could go wrong. Ultimately, not being a strong visual thinker who could anticipate what the event experience would “look like” became a real problem, especially as we added new elements to the program he couldn’t effectively anticipate.

Lesson learned: It’s nice to have a project manager who is good at bugging people with a to-do checklist, but that skill alone isn’t enough.

2. Letting people sort through and grow into vague project management roles

When a project is starting up in a hurry, it’s easy to assign very loose project roles and tell everyone to get on with things. I’ve done this before in an effort to let people grow into bigger roles and take on responsibilities I might not have assigned to them. It works with a few individuals, but most often it leads to project break downs.

Lesson learned: One of the best investments of time you’ll make before a project starts is creating one paragraph descriptions of project roles for key project management team members so everyone is much clearer on expectations.

3. Forsaking “site” visits to save time and dollars

At various times, we’d forego a pre-event site visit to a property where we were planning events (which would have made us all better anticipatory thinkers) in the interests of saving money or time. Bad idea, because site visits help you anticipate problems and spark new creative ideas to take advantage of the space where you’ll be operating. Not all site visits are physical, however. Mindmapping a proposed process, service blueprinting a new customer experience, or engaging in online user experience testing are all versions of “site” visits.

Lesson learned: The time and dollars you save by not doing a site visit (whether physical or virtual) typically pale in comparison to the headaches and lost opportunities you will face later.

4. Waiting for direct evidence of a project team member’s negative behavior

I’m not a big believer in acting upon hearsay. Instead, I like to see proof with my own eyes of what’s being reported. At one point, a senior member on several project teams we had generated a lot of hearsay comments about his harsh, negative behavior. The thing was, in some very high pressure situations, I never saw him display the bad behaviors which others mentioned. As a result, I was WAY too slow to address it until it became a big personnel issue.

Lesson learned: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” isn’t a misguided old saying.

5. Not asking enough of the right questions

I’ve been told previously by project team members I can be too hands-on when it comes to keeping on top of things. In reaction, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and give people more space to implement their own project management techniques and get the job done. As a result though, I’ve missed heading off issues that could have been identified with a few well-placed questions along the way.

Lesson learned:  When the cues suggest a project team member is dropping the ball on something (and even if the cues are inconclusive), ask the basic questions in a non-threatening way so you’re not trying to recover when it’s too late.

6. Expecting miraculous performance improvements from team members

When you frequently work with the same people on projects you’ll see both strengths and weaknesses emerge individually and among the project management team. If you see a significant weakness displayed by a team member, I’ve learned to figure it’s the person (not the project) and act accordingly. Having been burned multiple times, it’s clear that It’s highly unlikely a different type of future project will suddenly fix (or at least mask) the weakness a project team member has displayed previously.

Lesson learned: If a weakness surfaces twice with a project team member, don’t expect a change of project scenery to fix it; invest the time with the team member to help improve project management technique deficiencies.

5 Basic Phases of Project Management

5 Basic Phases of Project Management
Project Management Institute, Inc. (PMI) defines project management as "the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to a broad range of activities in order to meet the requirements of a particular project." The process of directing and controlling a project from start to finish may be further divided into 5 basic phases:

1. Project conception and initiation
An idea for a project will be carefully examined to determine whether or not it benefits the organization. During this phase, a decision making team will identify if the project can realistically be completed.

2. Project definition and planning
A project plan, project charter and/or project scope may be put in writing, outlining the work to be performed. During this phase, a team should prioritize the project, calculate a budget and schedule, and determine what resources are needed.

3. Project launch or execution
Resources' tasks are distributed and teams are informed of responsibilities. This is a good time to bring up important project related information.

4. Project performance and control
Project managers will compare project status and progress to the actual plan, as resources perform the scheduled work. During this phase, project managers may need to adjust schedules or do what is necessary to keep the project on track.

5. Project close
After project tasks are completed and the client has approved the outcome, an evaluation is necessary to highlight project success and/or learn from project history.

Projects and project management processes vary from industry to industry; however, these are more traditional elements of a project. The overarching goal is typically to offer a product, change a process or to solve a problem in order to benefit the organization.