Parkinson's Law and Scheduling

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British Civil servant, famously said in 1955, "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Or in other words, If you allow for more than enough time for a project the project will still not finish before time. This also happens if  your team is running late and you give them an extension of time - which you might think is more than enough - and they will still feel that there was not enough time for the project.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review tries to explain why this happens. The farther you are from the goal the less important it appears to you, and the less up front effort you expend to get it done. The closer the delivery time comes, the more importance the deadline assumes. Psychologists call it the "the goal looms larger" effect.

In practice this means that if you give your team an extension of time you are just pushing the goal further away, thus once again making it smaller and less important. As the goal recedes, your team loses the motivation to work hard.

How to Plan for the Effects of Parkinson’s Law

The article also suggests a way to minimize the incidence of this effect – (1) don’t ignore the possibility that apparently minor sub tasks may turn into major time sinks, and (2) break up the goal into several smaller sub goals strategically spaced out in time. However, you should keep in mind that there should be consequences for the team if the sub goals are not achieved on time.

Games and Project Management

I have been reading a great book called Game Frame by a young author named Aaron Dignan. Aaron has been a game enthusiast from very early on and his brilliant mind latched on to the fact that real life is not that different from games. After all, all the really effective learning we ever did was while playing games, whether as babies learning to walk, with our parents rewarding us in the form of encouraging praise, as young kids when we learned to share responsibilities in groups of friends, or as grown ups when we learned to channel our energy in sports. So, when we think about  it, it seems to be counter-intuitive how games are viewed by most of us (and our bosses) as almost akin to wasting time and effort when we should be "working".

If you look around yourself carefully you can see how various aspects of your project can be leveraged to take the form of little games that will make it more interesting for your team members as they go about their daily activities. People like to play games because they are fun - use the same techniques at work so that your team members rediscover the fun and joy of performing. Here are a few ways that, I think, you might apply game techniques to your project (some came from the book, some are my own):

• Targets. Human beings are conditioned to go after targets. So, set up a bi-weekly or monthly target (a certain amount of production, a certain number of documents, etc.) and award points based on results. The one who gets the most points in a certain period gets to win a prize.
• Competition. Set up a healthy competition between team members with similar responsibilities. 
• Chance. Most people hate meetings. Include a surprise (snack, small gifts, awards, etc.) at the beginning or at the end of random meetings. You cannot do this on a regular, scheduled basis because the surprises then become something expected and loose their charm.
• Time Pressure. The first one in the door in the morning or the last one out gets to do a fun thing, like exploding a bubble on a bubble calendar.
• Scarcity. Introduce limited number of "time off" tickets that team members may use or trade.
• Puzzles. Break up a picture from the project into a jigsaw and e-mail each member of the team a part of the complete set. Ask them to put the set together into the complete picture. May be use two pictures and create a competition between two teams. May be e-mail the pieces in random bursts to random team members so that a bit of surprise is thrown into the mix.
• Novelty. Try changing the seating plan in the office in a random way every few months. This will introduce new dynamic in the team. Maybe mix up people without regards to seniority. Find the most adequate time frame for doing this!
• Levels. Introduce titles like Apprentice, Maestro and The Grand Poobah of accounting as a person's skill level goes up by dint of practice. Each skill level must be measurable so that people "earn" them as they advance.

There are, according to the book, numerous other aspects of game play that you might like to include in your repertoire to make work a lot more interesting for your team. Let me know what you come up with for each of them. May be I'll write another post on some more ideas I have for these points.

• Social Pressure.
• Teamwork.
• Currency.
• Renewal.
• Forced Decision.
• Data.
• Progress.
• Points.
• Sensation.
• Recognition.
• Status.

While you are thinking about these points, go, get the book from your local library and read through it - I bet you'll be inspired to think up even more applications for your project.

The Gorilla in the Midst

Sometime we, the project managers, get so much into the nitty-gritty of the daily working of our projects that we forget to take the 10,000-feet view of the project.

There is a famous experiment from the seventies that shows what happens when you place too much attention on the details of a project and too little on the big picture view. The experiment goes something like this: There is a group of people tossing balls among themselves. Some of them are wearing white tee shirts and the rest are in black tee shirts. Your job is to count the number of throws that happen between the white tee shirt wearing people only. Go ahead, try it.

So, did you see it?

For some of us, especially for those coming from the roles of supervisors and the executors of the actual activities, getting into the fine details of how each activity should be carried out is almost ingrained in our brains. Whenever we see something that we think is not the right way of doing it, we jump into the fray to correct it. We start giving instructions to the workers on what to do and how to do it. But that, I believe, is not the right way to go about managing your project. Unless you are the only one in the team, you have supervisors and area managers for that level of involvement. Your job is to look at the overall picture and be aware of all the factors that might impact the success of the project.

When you become too involved in the minutiae and the step-by-step details of how tasks should be performed it becomes harder to spot the gorilla (something unexpected) wandering by and either taking advantage of an opportunity or deal with an unforeseen risk.

15 Ways to Demoralize and Demolish Your Team

1. Be unpredictable. Unpredictability breeds confusion and insecurity in people. 
2. Change responsibilities at random. Not being clear on what you required them to do to perform their job is like applying a powerful brake to productivity. 
3. Make the work environment uncomfortable - windows are overrated, screaming is good. Discomfort in the work environment is a surefire way to make your team lose any desire to do their jobs. 
4. Give instructions and then change them after some time. Make your team members feel that they are idiots for doing what they believe they were told earlier. 
5. Do not communicate the stakeholders' wishes to the team and, later, berate the team members for not divining and producing desired results. 
6. Play favorites. There is nothing like knowing that the boss likes some more than others, especially if the feeling is based on personality more than on knowledge and competence. 
7. Ignore your team members. Ignoring people can be infuriating and disempowering at the same time. 
8. Make people responsible for something but then withhold their power to demand inputs from other team members. You’ll be able to claim incompetence when they find themselves unable to comply with your instructions. 
9. Be stingy with praise. Praise is a valuable commodity; do not waste it on everybody. 
10. Praise someone but then criticize them behind their backs to others. This way people will know that if you praise them you will be plunging your knife in their backs as soon as they turn away. 
11. Earn their fear, not their respect. Fear is one of the greatest demotivators that exist. 
12. Show emotional outbursts and don't follow through on your pronouncements. 
13. Schedule maintenance work on their equipment just when they need it most. 
14. Make sure to let them know that their works are worthless pieces of junk and that their knowledge counts for nothing when compared to your years of vast experience in the industry. 
15. Put a lock on your door - you do not need to talk to all the riffraff working under you. 

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So, How do You Make a Success of Your Meetings?

Management, as they say, is 80% communication. And a key component of communication is meetings held among stakeholders to discuss status, strategies, tactics, problems, and all sorts of other things. Meetings, while being a very important tool, may also turn into unproductive time gobblers if they are not organized and conducted properly. Here are a few tips that PMs all over the world have found useful in getting the most of this useful but much reviled tool.

• Have some snacks for the attendees to munch on. This will make the participants look forward to a meeting rather than having them dread the prospect as a chore. Hopefully a Pavlovian response will kick in after a few such meetings! At that point you might gradually turn the snacks into an optional item although you must be careful in not eliminating them permanently as the "Pavlovian Training" will not last forever in the absence of a stimulus.
• Try unorthodox ideas like using the webcam on your laptop to record a meeting. People may feel self-conscience at first but soon, once the meeting gets into a flow, they'll forget about it. The recording may be condensed later in a meeting minute for distribution.
• Copy the Google way of projecting a countdown timer on the wall. This will subtly force everyone to be aware of how long the meeting has gone and how much time is remaining.
• Try standing room meetings. Anecdotal evidence show that this type of meetings keeps everyone focused on the subject and the durations shorter. These are not everyone's cup of tea so keep the attendance list limited to absolutely the most essential people. If you are calling the department heads to meet do not let them bring their assistants too. If the meeting is for the construction team there is no need to have the administrative people there. Also the meetings should not be scheduled to go beyond 30 minutes. Make sure that everyone attending is actually able to keep on their feet for the duration, so do not try it if you have pregnant women or disabled people in your team.
• Use technology like shared Google Docs to take consolidated meeting notes. The resulting document may be polished later to turn it into a meeting minute. The now defunct Google Wave would have been a great tool but sadly Google killed it a bit too soon.
• No mini-meetings in the room, please! These are too distracting, both for the people indulging in the mini-meets as well as for the others who are interested in the main discussion.
• Do stick to the agenda. If it is a status meeting do not get side tracked into discussing problem solving options. Keep the meetings short and to the point - if you are done in a few minutes, well and good. There is no need to stay longer.
• Do not allow interruptions unless the chairman feels it to be pertinent to the discussion.
• As Google's Marissa Mayer says, discourage politics, encourage sharing of data. This means no editorializing (I like, I don't like, etc), make your point using data - unless you are in a creative team meeting!
• Hold meetings during regular work hours - lunch time meetings create resentment unless you are paying for a nice lunch. Respect other people's personal time.
• Make sure a minute of the meeting is produced shortly after the meeting is finished, summarizing key findings, action items, responsible parties and deadlines. Distribute the minutes among all interested shareholders, whether they participated in the meeting or not.

The most important thing for organizing a successful meeting doesn't happen in the meeting at all... it happens afterwords -- follow up! Follow up, follow up, follow up. Make sure that the action items from the meeting are being taken care of. A meeting is only as successful as the actions taken on the resulting items.