Improvise in project management? Letting your project team improvise on projects sounds a little unconventional. After all, the point of having a plan and good change control procedure is so that the team knows where it is headed and stays on track.
However, today success is far more about people than processes, and the environment in which projects operate is often ambiguous, flexible and complex. Issues materialize that have not been foreseen and clients change their mind about their requirements as a result of situations beyond the project’s control. Projects are not as predictable as we once thought they were and sometimes sticking to the plan is not the best course of action.
Improvising In Action
Improvising on projects is not about throwing out all the existing plans and making it up as you go along. Instead, it’s about being able to equip the project team with the tools and skills they need to be able to deal with the unplanned in a constructive way. However good your enterprise project management tools, a Gantt chart doesn’t deliver a project: people do. So it’s important to make sure that the people on the project aren’t blindsided when they have to react to the unexpected. If the team can’t think outside the plan, they can’t help get the project back on track.
Improvised work can be the result of unforeseen circumstances, changing requirements, changes in the political or corporate environment, poor planning, poor or no specifications or a lack of leadership and direction for the team. Some of these are good reasons to improvise, some less so.
Improvising in a project environment means shifting the mindset of the project team to thinking about trying new things, within the boundaries of risk management and project control. Improvisation relies on intuition and creativity, which provide the space to develop new routines, and this is usually achieved in a flexible environment.
Managing the project requires stable routines and a controlled environment: great when things are going well, but when the team hits an unexpected issue, the management processes don’t provide the flexibility to work outside of these as required to get the job done.
Encouraging Improvisation in Project Management
You can’t expect the project team to improvise a new plan or a come up with a creative solution to a problem if they haven’t had the opportunity to first practise these skills. Create the time and space for people to try out creative thinking. 3M allows its employees to use 15% of their work time to come up with and work on their own projects, provided they are broadly related the company’s objectives. Google’s employees work on their set tasks for 4 days a week and use their remaining day to work on their own initiatives. That much time might be too much for your project team (it would be too much for many companies).
You could, however, allow the team to come up with a solution for a small problem, or to decide for themselves how best to plan the next section or work, record and track requirements or do quality audits. You can share successful practices and praise people for using their initiative. You can schedule their time at less than 100% so that they have a little bit of slack to think about what they are actually doing instead of working at full pelt throughout the day and never having time to take stock of whether there is a better way to achieve it.
The most important thing to encourage improvisation is a no blame culture. This can be hard to achieve in some companies where apportioning blame is the norm, as going against the prevailing corporate culture can be difficult. Try to create a little enclave of no blame culture that starts at the PMO and spreads through the project teams.
Controlling Project Management Improvisation
Left unchecked, improvisation in a project environment could end up with teams producing no schedules at all and dealing with issues on an ad hoc basis instead of actively carrying out risk mitigation to prevent them from materializing in the first place. Improvisation does require some boundaries.
Improvisation can work well when the tasks are not on the critical path. You can introduce the opportunities to improvise bit by bit as trust is earned by the team. A strong risk management framework will also help, as will being very clear about the boundaries. Using project tolerances and mature methods of tracking work using enterprise project management tools will also help.
Improvisation isn’t suitable in every situation, but when it works it can be very powerful and open access to a wider knowledge base than just the project manager. How have you supported your teams to do the right thing through improvising? We’d love to know!
This article was inspired by Steve Leybourne’s presentation at the PMI Global Congress North America 2011.