Project Monitoring, Analytics, and Control
This chapter provides a detailed overview of the processes involved in monitoring and reporting project performance.
Informed Intuition
At some point in your career, you'll find your intuition telling you one thing, while the monitoring data you have so laboriously collected tells you something else. For example, a recently updated schedule and a newly calculated budget-to-completion total might tell you a project is humming along as expected and that everything will finish on time and under budget. But still, you get a feeling that something is amiss. Maybe a customer's tone of voice suggests unhappiness with the scope of the project. Or perhaps a product designer's third sick day in a week makes you think she's about to take a job with a different company, leaving you high and dry. Or maybe the sight of unopened light fixtures stacked in a corner at a building site makes you wonder if the electricians really are working as fast as status reports indicate.
Monitoring Quality, Including Compliance
When it comes to monitoring and control, project managers tend to focus on budget and schedule. But it's also essential to monitor quality. For example, does the concrete used in a building project match the required standards? In an IT project, is the software free of bugs? Sometimes monitoring quality involves ensuring regulatory compliance, including meeting standards on how you conduct your project.
Major corporations spend many millions of dollars each year on compliance programs designed to ensure that they follow the law, including the host of government regulations that apply to a typical organization. The ultimate goal of any compliance program is to prevent employees from breaking the law and, ideally, to encourage ethical behavior.
At times like these, you might be tempted to take action based solely on gut instinct. But as discussed in Lesson 2, that kind of unexamined decision-making leaves you vulnerable to the errors in thinking known as cognitive biases. For instance, suppose you've been working with Vendor A for several months, always with good results. Then, at a conference, you hear about Vendor B, a company many of your colleagues seem to like. You might think you're following a simple gut instinct when you suddenly decide to switch from a Vendor A to Vendor B, when in fact your decision is driven by the groupthink cognitive bias, which causes people to adopt a belief because a significant number of other people already hold that belief.
In an article for the Harvard Business Review, Eric Bonabeau discusses the dangers of relying on pure intuition, or gut instincts:
Intuition has its place in decision making – you should not ignore your instincts any more than you should ignore your conscience – but anyone who thinks that intuition is a substitute for reason is indulging in a risky delusion. Detached from rigorous analysis, intuition is a fickle and undependable guide – it is as likely to lead to disaster as to success. And while some have argued that intuition becomes more valuable in highly complex and changeable environments, the opposite is actually true. The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.
As Bonabeau suggests, you don't want to detach intuition from analysis. Instead, you want your intuition to spur you on to seek more and better information, so you can find out what's really going on. You can then make a decision based on informed intuition – a combination of information and instinctive understanding. You develop it through experience and by constantly learning about your individual projects, your teammates, your organization, and your industry. It can allow you to spot trouble before less experienced and less informed colleagues.
According to cognitive psychologist Gary Klein, this kind of instinctive understanding is really a matter of using past experience to determine if a particular situation is similar to or different from past situations. This analysis occurs so fast it seems to exist outside of rational thought, but is in fact supremely rational. By studying firefighters in do-or-die situations, Klein developed a new understanding of this form of thought:
Over time, as firefighters accumulate a storehouse of experiences, they subconsciously categorize fires according to how they should react to them. They create one mental catalog for fires that call for a search and rescue and another one for fires that require an interior attack. Then they race through their memories in a hyperdrive search to find a prototypical fire that resembles the fire that they are confronting. As soon as they recognize the right match, they swing into action. Thought of this way, intuition is really a matter of learning how to see – of looking for cues or patterns that ultimately show you what to do.
Klein doesn't use the term informed intuition, but that's what he's talking about. Informed intuition is a matter of learning how to see, so you can analyze a situation in an instant and take the necessary action. That's definitely something to aspire to as you proceed through your project management career.