Reduce Uncertainty by Promising Reliably
November 10th, 2002 by HalThe authors of Managing Project Uncertainty suggest the usual practices of risk management on projects fall short of what we need to be doing to deal with uncertainty.
- To deal with such extreme uncertainty, managers need to go beyond traditional risk management, adopting roles and techniques oriented less toward planning and more toward flexibility and learning.
The authors describe four levels of uncertainty and their recommendations for actions at each level. I don't quibble with what they say. (I urge you to read the paper if you haven't done so already.) However they miss an important point. We can do something about the level of uncertainty on projects. We don't have to live with uncertainty like noise (or general randomness) that is present at all times.
In working with many different teams on a variety of projects most of the week-to-week variability is in the control of the project participants. No kidding. The primary source of variability is the tasks are not in a condition to be started and finished as planned. Upon further analysis the cause of that state of 'unreadiness' is a failure of coordination. That failure I call not making a reliable promise.
Promising is in our control. We can say "yes" or "no". (I know some people think they must say "yes" to keep their job.) When we say "yes" but we mean "no" we add uncertainty to the project. When we say "yes" but fail to allocate sufficient capacity to the task (blocking time in our calendar) we add uncertainty. When we say "yes" but don't understand what will satisfy our customer we add uncertainty. Do I need to go on?
We can't know what will happen tomorrow, let alone 14 months from now. What we can do is minimize the stacking effect of uncertainty upon uncertainty by adopting a practice of promising reliably on projects. Perhaps many of the 'complicated' situations described by the authors of Managing Project Uncertainty are just complex projects compounded by sloppiness in promising conversations. Stop adding variability to the uncertainty. Set the standard of securing reliable promises on your projects. You'll have more time for dealing with the remaining variability.
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