Johannesburg, 01 Aug 2011
As a consultant, it is not uncommon to walk into an organisation where IT initiatives suffer from gridlock. All the stakeholders desperately want success, yet the project just doesn't seem to progress past a certain point.
The worst part is that when communicating with participants, they all have very good, valid excuses for why they are stuck, and it is often impossible for anybody to provide simple solutions to the obvious problems given.
Nothing stalls a project like a valid excuse.
One of the most influential essays I have ever read was Joel Spolsky's: “Fire and Motion” (1). Spolsky describes the infantry strategy of fire and motion - the idea is that soldiers fire their weapons while moving across ground - this forces the enemy to duck and prevents them from returning fire. The key is that while you are not firing, the enemy has the opportunity to fire back and pin you down, halting your progress.
I am pretty sure that Spolsky did not try to incite workplace violence (2). Rather, he described the need to gain and keep momentum. The idea that you have to try and move forward every day. Cover fire provides the opportunity to gain momentum. For IT projects, this means doing what can be done, every day, to inch forward.
This is the first objective in a stalled project: gaining momentum - perfection can follow later. Two tools I personally found effective for gaining momentum are documentation and decoupling external dependencies.
Projects start and end with documentation, and rarely do participants in IT feel that documentation helps them deliver the end result. I believe it is important to turn documentation from a static deliverable into a powerful tool in the battle to gain momentum.
The first and easiest salvo to fire is to write things down - whether making unordered tasks lists in Excel or writing requirement haiku poems in Word. Accept that the first documentation will only be cover fire, but that documentation can be reformatted; words can be deleted and replaced with better phrases afterwards. Entire documents can be discarded and new ones can be created. Documentation forces team members to serialise complex mental models and it facilitates communication. Reformatting and rewriting documentation has more than just aesthetic value - it can literally be the act of framing the problem and structuring the solution.
Projects are usually littered with external dependencies, forming a spider's web preventing progress. If this has reached epic proportions, it is important to identify and break the dependencies that stall projects. One technique to break an external dependency is to make a reasonable set of assumptions, document and communicate them, and not to question it again until a pre-determined milestone has been reached. Good project managers do this at a high level as a matter of course, but technical resources should be aware of the strategy, because often only they can identify the technical dependencies and make technical assumptions.
Of course, for technically minded consultants like myself, it is difficult to ignore apparent problems with these external dependencies - it is vital that everybody is constantly reminded to focus on what can be achieved in their sphere of influence, rather than the obstacles outside their sphere of influence. You cannot keep looking back or act uncertain when storming to the next set of trenches. The good news is that often progress of a project will illuminate needs and requirements, allowing other projects and systems to adapt and grow. It is, however, important to revisit assumptions, and to adapt to changes later on.
Fire and motion do have their pitfalls. From a people perspective, it is easy to appear aggressive, rather than assertive, and therefore communication needs to be carefully managed. People are not the enemy. Inevitably, “Fire and Motion” will lead to an iterative process, which at times can seem at odds with traditional waterfall project models. Iterative processes means revisiting aspects of the problem and potential rework. Sometimes a tactical retreat is required. I believe the popularity of newer project management methodologies, like Agile, strongly correlates with the need for momentum in projects.
Measures of IT project success often focus on whether the project went live, whether the initial specifications are met and other criteria. The important question for me is - did the project further the strategic objectives of the organisation?
Every once in a while, a project will fail due circumstances outside team members' control, and it is a heartbreaking event for people working on these projects. The question you have to ask yourself, of course, is taking “fire and motion” concepts to a higher level. Was this project cover fire? Did the organisation gain momentum? Did we lose this battle for the organisation to win the greater war? For the greater good!
(1) Joel Spolsky was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team in the early 90s. He founded Fog Creek Software, launched the Web site Stack Overflow and writes a blog called “Joel on Software”. His famous “Fire and Motion” essay appears on the blog http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html.
(2) Not even on Mondays.
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