Genius by Osmosis

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Project Managers: Do your freaking homework!

There are so many people that are either officially designated as “project managers” or at least act in a similar function in business improvement that do NOTHING but manage projects.  While you are thinking in your head, “DUH!” let me explain. PMs get bogged down by the daily routine of managing timelines, budgets, people and tasks that they often forget their added value.  Managing timelines, budgets and tasks is the job of an desk jockey, not a PM.

I know this seems counter-intuitive to to the title, but PMs aren’t there to manage the “stuff”, rather, they are there to manage success.  Though these menial duties are necessary for project success, the value added is in your ability to quickly learn, analyze and implement, regardless of business area.  This means if you want to get out of the desk jockey work and actually make a name for yourself you need to do your homework.

While we all are experts at something, we often manage projects in areas that are foreign to us.  The first thing you should be doing is secondary research.  What are industry best practices?  What are commonly used benchmarks and metrics?  What are school’s of thought on various design strategies?  What modeling tools have been leveraged by other companies?

Once you’ve become a self-made expert in this area you need to go a step further and do some primary research.  Visit with industry experts, trade organizations, partner corporations.  Utilize your network and meet with everyone you can to give yourself broad perspective with little bias.

I get so frustrated at PMs that don’t realize it’s not your ability to organize that qualifies you for your position.  A monkey can be trained to organize.  Your ability to adapt, learn and act at a rapid pace is what qualifies you as a PM.  If you are not doing the proper research and making yourself the “self-made expert” than I can offer you this guarantee – you will miss something, it will eventually be something big, and you will regret it.

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Analysis Paralysis

Many of you have suffered through this and hopefully many of you can avoid this.  I was working on a project optimizing cost and service level of this product (a transactional process).  While I was digging into the model and analysing the data there was something I couldn’t reconcile.  As I looked at the data there was another, somewhat related process, that was negatively impacting what I was looking at.  Ultimately this related process was driving both a shift in mean and variability in my process.

I began working to prove the impact of the related process but in order to get buy-in from those that oversaw that process I needed to be able to explain what part was driving these differences.  The related process had numerous drivers and to identify the one (or more) responsible for the variability to justify a change meant lots and lots of analysis.  I spent days and days looking at numbers doing statistical analysis, working from a variety of hypotheses and proving them right or wrong.  The result:  Even after proving certain hypotheses wrong I still didn’t have my answer.

Every time I’d meet with the necessary people the end result of my meetings would be “what if you looked at it this way?  Maybe that will tell us someting.”  I’ve discovered that any time this is result of a meeting you are stuck in…..analysis paralysis.

To this day, while I know the answer, I still can’t prove it to a satisfactory level despite the insane number of hours I’ve spent looking at it.  As this relates to my last blog post, you need to follow your gut as well and before you start analyzing and pulling in different people you MUST BRAINSTORM what the likely problem is and develop an initial hypothesis.  If you begin with the analysis hoping it will drive you to the answer you are running the risk of paralyzing yourself and end up getting no where.  Learn from those of us that have fallen into this trap…it will save you time and frustration.