The Midas Noogie

It was a typical project management training exercise:  get the participants to understand the importance of defining requirements in order that they will eventually be able to turn it into tasks and activities.  Hence, I divided my class into four teams.  Two of the teams had to plan a wedding for Bridezilla (yeah, yeah, I know pretty typical), and the other two teams had to design the ultimate "man room" (now we're talkin').

Then I threw the curve ball.  For one of the wedding teams, the budget was limitless; for the other only had $10K for the whole shooting match.  For one of the "man room" teams, the sky was also the limit; the other team had to design a man room which was "wife approved."  I gave them the standard amount of time to complete the assignment, and when we started to debrief, there were two teams who were begging for more time.  Can you guess which ones?

If you guessed that the teams with no boundaries had a harder time with the exercise, you would be correct.  In project management, we like to blame our short-comings on the triple constraint (good-fast-cheap... choose two).  In reality, the constraints more often lie within us.  King Midas found that out the hard way when everything he touched turned to gold.  Those project teams that have unlimited constraints generally have the hardest time getting any traction; they zip right past the "Midas touch" and wind up with a Midas "noogie" (for those of you who do not know what a "noogie" is, borrow somebody's older brother to demonstrate the process).

Roger von Oech had an interesting post a few weeks ago about the Planet-formerly-known-as-Pluto.  He then posed an interesting question of his readers:  Since we do not appear to be missing Pluto all that much, what other things can we eliminate?  What are the essentials vs. the nice-to-have's?  Where can you eliminate the fluff that is preventing you from Carpe Factum?

Some Assembly Required... Or Else!

I now know why Santa's elves are so short.  Years of caffeine and alcohol consumption have stunted their growth.  It's the day after Christmas, and I'm just now recovering from playing "Santa's Little Helper" until 2:30 in the morning assembling a kitchen set for my 2-year-old.  (And yes, it was worth it.  This toy has brought her limitless joy the past two days, allowing me to get caught up on sleep.)

The problem was not so much in the assembly as it was in the expectation-setting.  My wife, wonderful saint that she is, did all of the Christmas shopping this year since I was playing road warrior for my last project.  The problem occurred on Christmas Eve, as I was just settling down for a "long winter's nap."

"You do realize you have to assemble Abby's gift, don't you?" (It was not really a rhetorical question as much as it was a direct order.)  "It should be easy.  The picture on the box didn't look that complicated."  So... at 10:30 PM, I settled on the floor with my hammer and my screw driver and my allen wrench and 1,265,497 pieces of the kitchen set in order to "insert Tab A into Slot B, as shown in Figure C" - AAAAAAAAAARRRG.

Unlike the typical male, I do pull out the instructions first... and I read them.  I inventory parts.  I make a list.  I check it twice.  Hmmmm, only 17 steps.  "This shouldn't be too bad," I mused to myself.  By midnight - 90 minutes into it - I was only on step 6.  An hour later I was muttering incoherent ramblings that would certainly have placed me on Santa's naughty list.  And by 2:30, the final screw went in, completing the project.

As a project manager, I tend to be pretty adamant about the importance of a good work breakdown structure (WBS).  For those who aren't into project management lingo, the WBS is simply the inventory of tasks needed to get the project done... your Carpe Factum roadmap, as it were.  For a good read about the "technical academics" behind the WBS, check out this post by Elyse at the Anti-Clue blog.  However, for the reality of a good WBS boils down to two things:  clarity and communication.  If those who have to act on your WBS don't know what you want or can't read it clearly, then you've failed at defining the scope of your project, and your "all is calm, all is bright" suddenly becomes "ho! ho! hopeless"!

As you begin to ramp up your new initiatives for 2007, think long and hard about what you want to accomplish, and plan how you will communicate that scope.  We'll all get a lot more sleep if you do.