July 6th, 2010
Imagine that you’re an IT project manager, and that you’ve just discovered you’ve made a terrible decision. It wasn’t deliberate, and perhaps it wasn’t even conscious; maybe it was a momentary outburst at an uncooperative programmer, caused by all the pressure and exhaustion from overtime. But now your uncooperative programmer has quit in a huff, and you realize that he was the key technical resource you needed in order to finish the project on time.
Or maybe it was something else; maybe something you forgot to do, some budget report you forgot to submit, some paperwork to keep the bureaucrats and bean-counters from making your team even more miserable than they already are. Whatever it is, it’s going to cost your project some precious resources, or add to the bureaucratic burden, or somehow put the project at much greater risk of delay or outright failure.
That being the case, wouldn’t it be great if you could find a quiet confessional booth somewhere, and whisper to a kind old priest inside the booth, “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned…”?
The problem faced by many of today’s IT managers is that they know they’ve made a mistake — but (a) it’s not obvious to them how they can undo, work-around, or rectify that mistake, and (b) there’s nobody they can talk to. For whatever reason, they feel that they can’t talk to their subordinates (after all, they’re the boss!), and they can’t talk to their fellow-manager peers … and most of all, they dare not confess their mistake to their boss. Why not? Because their boss would have a hysterical fit, or fire the errant project-manager on the spot; and his/her peers would sharpen their knives, and begin figuring out how to take advantage of the mistake when it comes time to award promotions, raises, and bonuses.
I don’t want to suggest that it’s like this for all companies; there must be a friendly, supportive IT organization out there somewhere. And it’s not an “all-or-nothing” situation: if you’ve made a mistake but know how to fix it, you can sometimes enlist the cooperation of your subordinates (“we’re in this together, guys, and I’ll really owe you one if you help me out). Indeed, you might be able to make an apologetic confession to your boss, if the mistake isn’t too expensive to fix …
But there are an awful lot of situations where that won’t work… and this series of blog postings is about the formal creation of an “IT Project Confessional” to provide a neutral, objective, confidential, no-risk (well, probably low-risk) mechanism for project managers to seek advice and guidance so they can recover from their mistakes and ultimately succeed with their projects.
As you can imagine, things are a little more difficult in the “real world” of an IT organization than they are in the priest’s confessional booth: you can’t just tell the sinner, “Repent, say three ‘hail Mary’s,’ vow to never commit such a sin again, and you will be forgiven.” Here are some of the topics I’ll be covering in the days ahead:
- Finding sinners – how do you get people to admit they might need help?
- Protecting the confidentiality of project managers discussing their mistakes
- Ethics: what if the project manager has violated a law or government regulation?
- Types of advice – should you tell the sinner to quit, work harder, confess publicly, or something else?
- Categories of project management sins: venal sins and cardinal sins
- Resisting pressure from higher-level executives who say to the confessional priest, “Off the record, no names mentioned, tell me what’s going on…”
- Forgiveness — is it possible? Practical?
- Anticipating a sin – what to do if the project manager says, “I haven’t sinned yet, but I know I’m about to…”
- Measuring results
- Providing follow-up references and resources for ongoing help
- Setting up a “Sinners Anonymous” for project managers who want to network and share their experiences with other sinners
Stay tuned … and if you know any project-management sinners out there, tell them to take a look, and offer their own ideas, experiences, and opinions…
July 11th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Amen! Great idea Ed. And as you indicate, much easier said than done.
What you describe would be characteristic of what Peter Senge @ MIT calls a “learning organization” (and what i like to call an “information age organization”) “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”
Some organization cultures seem capable of embracing this concept and moving in this direction,; sadly, however, most do not. Chris Argyris, who I believe developed the concept of a learning organization and mentored to Senge along with Jay Forrester and his work in “system dynamics”), describes what may be the fundamental difference — a difference in how and how much an organization learns from its mistakes (and successes) — “When the error detected and corrected permits the organization to carry on its present policies or achieve its presents objectives, then that error-and-correction process is single-loop learning. Single-loop learning is like a thermostat that learns when it is too hot or too cold and turns the heat on or off. The thermostat can perform this task because it can receive information (the temperature of the room) and take corrective action. Double-loop learning occurs when error is detected and corrected in ways that involve the modification of an organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives” (Argyris & Schön, 1978).
In my experience as a consultant for many large organizations and an expert witness in several failed IT project cases, single-loop environments punish mistakes (e.g, they fire people, demote them, humiliate them) and thus no one would confess but rather do all they could to hide the error; but double-loop organizations strive to learn and improve (as Senge describes) and thus foster an environment where an “IT Project Confessional” could and would become an important and useful practice. That said, someone repeating the same mistake even in a learning organization points to a much deeper problem and may indicate a need for a personnel change.
Though it’s not likely we’ll ever see “confession booths” in PMOs, practices like TSP, inspections, and the “structured walk-throughs” Ed Yourdon wrote about decades ago, can provide the mechanisms for the practical benefits IT project confessionals. It’s like Mama used to say, “learn from your mistakes, and try not to repeat them.”
August 10th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
After 20 years as a dopey little COBOL programmer, I have to conclude that humans are getting dumber. We know from physics that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and I tend to believe the same about intelligence. However, it is possible there is a death march project out there somewhere which is in fact destroying intelligence.
Current project I am on is something of a mini death march. I have the reputation of being rather outspoken about unrealistic assessments and deadlines. I probably spend more time confessing the sin that projects will not meet deadlines and/or will not deliver needed functionality than anyone else at the company.
I just recently confessed, to the executive leading this current death march, that we will not meet the deadline even though I expect to work the weekends, I expect we will test in production, and at least some of the programming will have to be farmed out to another developer.
The response was that “deadlines are the only way to accomplish something.”
I expect it to get interesting next week. On this death march, we’ve taken the unprecedented step of having all the stakeholders, including this dopey little COBOL programmer, sign a weekly status report including scope, accomplishments, percent complete, and whether or not we’re on schedule. Either I will not sign or I will be including an addendum indicating, “We will not meet the deadline.” I expect then to find out whether this is merely an exercise in checking boxes.
Confession is indeed a good thing. I only wish more stakeholders would practice it.