For many years now, I have read this book at the behest of my young son (who is a huge fan of the tortoise) and despite numerous attempts on my behalf to change the story /ending on the fly, to add an element of the unexpected, the demand is always there to ensure that tortoise always wins, which of course he/she does every night.
Recently I started to wonder what does this fable offer project management and watching Trump attempting to launch a huge amount of his promised policy decisions in a quick initial burst of activity, the thought came to my mind of the need maybe to adopt an approach that I might term “Slow Project Management” and that maybe by slowing down as a project manager you might actually complete the project faster!
As mentioned in a recent post, the start of a project is the most critical (particularly in terms of requirements and the business analysis role). Taking some time out and slowing down is also just as important to the Project Manager, especially at the start of a project.
One simple way to do this is to treat the project kick-off process with as much care as possible and don’t be afraid to re-run or have a number of phased project kick-off meetings if you are not entirely satisfied with the outcome of the meeting and what you want to get out of it in terms of setting the project up for a good start.
Another effective method that we often use in Aspira as project managers, is running our “Pre-Mortem” workshop in the initiation phase of a project where we imagine the project as a failure and then working backwards to understand how it might have failed and documenting into a RAID or a similar tool that output of that process. This is run separately to kick-off meetings and again, although it does take some extra time, we find the process does help to identify potential future problems and allow mitigations to be planned and hence improve project success.
Taking such time outs along with increased reflection will perhaps protect against the over confidence of the “Hare” project manager and in the long run get you the destination faster.
Good Night, Sleep Tight!
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Created by: Jerry Giltenane
Company: Aspira
Position: Professional Services Director