Severity Omega - the It Project Crisis Management Handbook: A Toolbox for Handling Crises in It Projects
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Severity Omega - the It Project Crisis Management Handbook - Christian Schade
have.
1
No plan survives first contact with the enemy
Helmuth von Molkte the Elder
This chapter aims to answer the question: What is a project crisis and what is a disaster?
Since you most probably are a project manager, you will have been through the what is a project
discussion before, but you might not have thought about how you define a crisis.
First let me point out that one person’s crisis can be another person’s tough difficulty – and vice versa. Whether or not the time is right to declare an emergency situation very much depends not just on the state of the technical delivery, the budget or the organization, but also very much on the experience and confidence of the project manager.
Very often senior management might not agree with you that you are in a crisis, since changing the project plan always results in difficulties somewhere else, and frequently also in the loss of face.
The actual nature of a crisis can also be relative to the individual perspective. The same crisis could be described as several different problems, depending on who you are:
The developers are not delivering
The specification for this feature is not making sense
My project manager can’t handle this situation
Every project will run into snags. That is why we have project managers in the first place. Very few projects are smooth sailing from end to end, and very few projects can be planned in detail for their entire duration – even if we pretend that they can.
To put it simply, we don’t know where we are going before we get there. This is a very rough generalization, but it is also a fact. It is of course mitigated by factors such as project management experience, the organization’s general familiarity with the actual subject matter of the project, internal and external conditions etc., but generally it is part of classical project dogma that we make big decisions in the beginning of the project based on very limited knowledge – as you can see the in the diagram.
Such a dilemma is normal, and even if many non-project managers believe that it is possible to completely and fully analyze and scope a project before carrying it out, they are wrong.
This means that the condition of not knowing everything in advance or the appearance of surprises and the need for minor adjustments of the project plan are not crises as such. Plans are meant to be changed, in fact not changing your plan when something unexpected happens, is one of the ways to ferment a crisis – and quite possibly a disaster.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a crisis in several ways, but the one that is relevant to our purposes is this one:
Crisis: An unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending; especially: one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.
Wikipedia has a longer definition:
Any event that is, or is expected to lead to, an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, community, or whole society. Crises are deemed to be negative changes in the security, economic, political, societal, or environmental affairs, especially when they occur abruptly, with little or no warning. More loosely, it is a term meaning ‘a testing time’ or an ‘emergency event’.
So we will define a crisis as something bad and unexpected that might lead to a disaster.
This of course leads us to define the word disaster in relation to IT projects. If we go back to the two sources mentioned above, we get these definitions:
Merriam-Webster:
Something (such as a flood, tornado, fire, plane crash, etc.) that happens suddenly and causes much suffering or loss to many people.
Wikipedia:
A disaster is a natural or man-made (or technological) hazard resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment. …It is a phenomenon that can cause damage to life and property and destroy the economic, social and cultural life of people.
In contemporary academia, disasters are seen as the consequence of inappropriately managed risk. These risks are the product of a combination of both hazard/s and vulnerability.
We will use two different disaster-related terms in this book:
Project disaster
Strategic disaster
Traditionally, we describe the ideally successful project as a temporary organization that delivers the desired product limited to the planned cost and the expected time.
Project management thus normally regards a project as being constrained by the three interrelated and interdependent dimensions time, cost (resources) and scope (deliverables) in the model known as the Project Triangle
or the Iron Triangle
.
It has been argued by several modern project theorists that we should actually look at a project as constrained by four dimensions in order to determine whether or not it is successful.
By adding the dimension Strategic objective
as a corner in an Iron Tetrahedron
we get a new discussion about what is a successful project and what is a failed project.
This book defines a project disaster as a project that ends up with major or critical deviations from the traditional constraints Time, Scope or Cost.
The term strategic disaster is used when the project does not result in the change that motivated it.
From the point of view of the Iron Tetrahedron model, a project can be riddled by crisis, and even overrun on all three classical constraints, but still be regarded as a strategic success.
Depending on what your role is in relation to the project, you might focus on one or the other.
When we look at project crises in this book, we look at bad, unexpected things that might lead to either project disasters or strategic disasters, and in many cases both.
Two historical examples for clarification:
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II
Project success: Excellent planning of resources, time schedules and delivery. Operation Z was a stunning tactical masterpiece that got the entire world’s attention.
Strategic disaster: Quite possibly the greatest strategic blunder in world history. The attack got the Americans into the war and this eventually lead to the firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japanese cities, downfall and defeat.
Allied invasion of Europe in 1945
Project Crisis: Delayed several years. Plagued by political uncertainty, change of plans and terminology. Name changed from Operation Roundup to Sledgehammer (jokingly referred to as Operation Roundhammer
) and eventually replaced by the different Operation Overlord. Many false starts and changes in mid-level management. Open bitter rivalry and contempt between prima donna middle managers. Bad communications and mistrust between allies. Severe cost overruns in terms of equipment and lives. The top manager, general Dwight D. Eisenhower, later described Overlord as a 50% overall success.
Strategic success: Overlord eventually lead to allied triumph, a devastated Germany, the death of Adolf Hitler and saved the world from the scourge of Nazism.
It is always more than a technical problem
Basically, IT project management disasters are mostly management disasters. Technology is a major part of what the projects are about, but most of the reasons why a project goes bad are about the way that things are done.
Many IT project crises are blamed on the underlying technology. It is very easy to point the finger at technical errors
. If that doesn’t cut it, organizations often blame the suppliers or the developers. As a last resort, we can always blame the faceless corporate dynamics.
Be wary of explanations of what lays behind a crisis. Note that very often people who have left your organization are the ones who will be blamed. Your project might be the continuation of a different project and you need access to knowledge to get things going. That might be very difficult if most of your colleagues are interested in forgetting the whole thing and moving on.
Often senior management trying to