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Hi. I’m Alan Mossman, a consultant based in the UK. Hal has invited me to contribute occasional posts to RPM in the areas of design, safety and collaboration.

One of my profs at Uni, Stafford Beer, asserted "A system is what a system does". So why would anyone create a system that in Hal’s words “turns strangers into enemies”.
Will Lichtig addressed this issue in an article for the Fall 07 American Institute of Architects Practice Management Digest. In Projects as Patients, Will suggests a scoring system for project health — should we call it the Lichtig Score? Four of the categories – Collaborative Planning, Reliable Promising, Unaccounted-for Constraints, Safety – have clear criteria.

The questions for the equally important fifth category, Mood, are not so straight-forward to answer:

• To what extent is the team positive?
• To what extent is honesty and trust evident?
• To what extent is the team learning and improving?
• Is morale improving, steady or declining?
• To what extent are team members being open and honest with each other?
• Are there barriers between trades and professions and if so How high are the silo walls?
• How long or short are tempers?
• To what extent are team members collaborating?

This reminded me of a question that David Adamson uses when he visits sites on a Friday afternoon. David was Estates Bursar at Bristol U and then Director of Estates at the University of Cambridge, both in the UK and he needed to know how the projects being delivered for him were going. The question he’d ask was:

Have you enjoyed yourself this week?

A simple affirmative is, he says, a good indicator of project health. Anything less was an indicator of current or imminent crisis. One of the delights of this question, like many of those that Will proposes, is that it is a whole system enquiry.