The simple truth is it’s very likely that different parts of your project plan have a higher confidence factor than others at different points in time. It’s important to recognise this and make it part of a robust conversation with stakeholders to ensure any low-confidence elements of the plan are reviewed, worked on and improved.
Consider this scenario
You’re migrating a corporate client from one integrated platform to another. Due to the nature of the shared services over the years, this is a programme of medium-sized projects across different business units to move the core solution and all the additional solutions that have been added over time.
I’m not going to outline the full details but the key issues for this discussion are: –
- The programme as a whole had a hard deadline
- The different business units engaged at different levels with the solution
- Key teams within the client had constrained availability
- The understanding of future state options within the client varied across the projects
When you have this bundle of factors you are going to face starting the project with different levels of confidence in the schedule and those areas are the areas that could become the reason for missing the hard deadline!
So, how do you progress with these low-confidence areas existing?
What not to do
What should not happen is the low confidence areas of the plan remain not addressed as this results in low confidence areas accruing a perception of truth.
Two things tend to happen: –
- The low-confidence areas of the plan come to be perceived with the same level of confidence as the high-confidence parts and the truth is distorted.
- The low confidence parts are not forgotten which reduces faith in the plan so its use as the grammar of the project is eroded.
When either of these things happens literally no one will remember why and thank you for it. You might also be asked to provide an end date which you know is on shaky ground but everyone else ignores this fact.
You want neither of these states to be true as the plan ceases to become a true shared commitment across stakeholders. Instead, you want the low-confidence elements of the project to be part of the grammar of the project informing the ongoing conversation.
The Governance
The first step is to ensure the story of this low confidence is accurately told from a governance perspective. This comes down to reflecting and communicating the low confidence within the plan and also in the RAID log.
Using the elements below you reflect the shared understanding across the stakeholders in the shared tools the stakeholders are using.
Structure the plan
In this case, the different levels of confidence did map to different projects in the programme, this meant that the different sections of the plan, effectively the higher level milestones, could be mapped to a confidence level.
I’m not suggesting you should radically re-model your plan to make the areas of less confidence more visible, as the model of actual execution being reflected in the plan is more important, but anything you can do to spot low confidence areas being hidden in the weeds is well worth doing.
Apply Boundaries
The low confidence areas of the plan can’t literally be like a section of an old map where it basically says ‘Here there be dragons’ and there is literally no sensible boundaries.
Even if what you have is low confidence it has to be defined at a level that allows the rest of the plan to operate. In our example, even if a low-confidence project impacted no other project it still needs some definition as it could push out the hard deadline or become the critical path.
For any low-confidence part of the plan you need to get to: –
- A sense of when it can start
- It’s dependencies
- A representative breakdown of tasks and efforts even if its generic
- If all else fails a start time, dependencies and an it will take X amount of time singular task
This is important so the low-confidence elements of the plan can play their part in the overall plan and dynamic schedule. We know whatever we put in is subject to change but you have to be able to practically discuss the impact of the low confidence areas on the plan and understand when it’s on the critical path and that means they have to be present in the dynamic schedule even if it’s wild-ass guess territory.
Low confidence can never become no confidence.
Explicitly label them
We then explicitly labelled the plan with the levels of confidence. We coded the areas in a Red (low), Amber (medium) and Green (high) fashion. Since we are talking about low-confidence parts of the plan not just individual tasks we utilised the bracketing task that contained the project or the significant area of the plan that was lower confidence.
People may seem to think this is cute and superfluous but it wasn’t. The reason for this you should be constantly be using every tool available to inform the language of the project. This is a step to doing that as the red, amber or green status begins to form that language.
Using the structure of the plan and labelling is about flagged communication, in order to record the implications and narrative we go to the RAID log.
Add it to the RAID log
The low-confidence areas were logged in the RAID log. As stated this moves the governance to one of narrative over time as you can update the status of the entries and how they are being addressed or not addressed. It also allows for expansion of the problem domain caused by the low confidence areas as it’s possible the longer they remain at low confidence the more risks and issues may become associated with them.
Keeping the narrative on the issues and risks current moves us out of governance and into the conversation.
The Conversation
All the governance efforts so far are to facilitate the required level of conversation around these low-confidence areas of the plan. The nature of that conversation does change depending on the relationship between the stakeholders, specifically, if the conversations around the project have moved from agreement to disagreement.
A conversation of agreement
In our example, all stakeholders on the project had a common vision of meeting the date that could not move as a result it was all productive conversations which never evolved into a disagreement. The low confidence areas were constantly being investigated and reviewed as things moved forward even if that meant some stakeholders reducing their aspirations (often temporarily) to bring the confidence level up and deliver.
It’s true making these sacrifices would be pushed further and further out than maybe some stakeholders and the project manager liked but there was a high degree of trust that when it came down to it the sacrifices would be made to meet the deadline.
This is what you want a shared understanding of what success looks like even if you have to make the odd sacrifice.
There is no such thing as luck.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope
I always like this quote, as while I happily accept a dose of luck plays into everything I also believe you make your own luck. So when a project goes this way and productive agreement is maintained across stakeholders don’t just put it to luck it’s a confluence of intentionally strong relationships, trust and governance that secured it.
A conversation of disagreement
There are times when you find yourself in a conversation of disagreement or blame. Let’s be brutally honest, when you have low confidence areas in your plan and a hard deadline you have to accept that things may get stressed and transition to disagreement no matter how well things may have started.
In some ways, all the methods outlined so far might seem like a bit of waste if all goes well. It’s the wrong way of looking at it because the argument is it’s gone well because of that effort, but you’ll be doubly happy of having put in the effort if things start to go slightly south.
At this point, your governance endeavours serve two purposes: –
- Bottle half full: They provide robust arguments to bring things into agreement
- Bottle half empty: They act as robust arguments for the defence
Ideally, you want a bottle half-full scenario. It’s at this point the serious and tense conversations kick in and your governance efforts will give you the knowledge and story to have those robust conversations with confidence and an improved level of comfort despite the tension.
The bottle half-empty scenario is different. What’s the saying: the risk log becomes the I told you so log? Cynical, but true, as you want to make sure your governance artefacts allow you to reconstruct the narrative of conversation regarding these low-confidence areas of the plan.
Look at our example, if the stakeholders had not been so aligned it would have been very easy for it to start to become an argument over whose fault it was the hard deadline was at risk of not being met. At this point being able to accurately reconstruct the sequence of events is what maintains the project.
The Conclusion
While we’d all like to start projects with a project plan fleshed out to the ideal level of detail to deliver things right to the end, numerous factors across stakeholders, resources, constraints, knowledge domains, etc, means you may have to start with areas of the plan that aren’t at a high level of confidence.
The approach to take is to make that an active and ongoing part of the conversation. At the same time, a way needs to be found so they can contribute to the dynamic schedule sufficiently so that the rest of the plan works as an analysis tool of consequences, implications and switching critical paths.
This should allow you to have robust conversations and visible accountability to bring the low-confidence areas of the plan into better shape.