Sunday, November 30, 2008

Recession in projects

Somehow it is not going that well in the global economy. Some people blame it on the financial institutes. Some groups are referring to shareholders who only want to make profit without accepting the risks. I can imagine that there is also a minority who think this is the result of globalization. And I'm afraid that there are also people who keep asking questions like: Is something wrong? What is happening? What are you afraid of? Did I miss something?

Of course I cannot deny something is happening. Only it happens all the time, everywhere. It also happens in our projects.

We also do have stakeholders who asking for profit and don't accept risks. We also have different groups who are playing different tunes. We also rely on our issue registration tool as it was our personal Wall-street. And if something goes wrong we also spend more time on finding the person to blame instead of working together towards a solution.

On global level in the financial institutes we see combining forces to stop to trend getting worse. Will this workout? I'm not sure. At least some decisions are made.

And I like it when decisions are made. Only then you can judge if they were valid or invalid. In both situations you can continue working on those decisions. We have to keep in mind that beyond every decision a risk is hiding. We either should try to control that risk or accept that risk.

Still there is one risk I think we should not accept. The risk of the voice of strong people who are setting the tone of feeling of a situation.

I might be wrong on this when I saying that there are people who are telling that it can only go bad from this point on. If those voices are too solid, it will go wrong. or what about voices who are claiming it can only goes better. If we ignore the signals it might even go worse then it already is.

The same can happen in projects. It can go well or it can go the other side around. I think if there is a euphoric tone of noise we need people who are judging that feeling. They should not be ignored and blamed for their opposite sound. They should be heard. Or our goal should be a recession in our test process to clear the road for improvements as signals become more obvious.

On the other side related to negative signals should be supported by the benefits of a project.

I can imagine that if we keep relying on metrics which are supporting those feelings and ignore the judgments based on experience we might ignoring risks. Ignoring these risks withhold you from accepting or declining those risks.
Initially this sounds good as a decision is made. And making decisions make the project move to some point. If this is done we should be aware that we are accepting the unknown unknowns. As long as we are aware of this we can adapt the context of our thinking towards the project and improve the next time by monitoring which unknowns become known and what is the impact of it.

I suggest we have to beware of noises in projects, avoid a recession, make decisions even if we don't know which unknown risks there are, stop blaming people of not doing there job right and use that energy to move the project move in a controlled direction.

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