A Project Churn-Fest: when project team members spin wheels, burn time, or simply can’t make a decision
Churn: (verb): to stir or agitate violently, to produce, proceed with, or experience violent motion or agitation.
Fest: (noun): a gathering, event, or show having a specified focus.
Sometimes word definitions provide all that we need to label something clearly, and other times “slang” terms are all we need to understand the specific meaning. When considering all the terminology in the Project Management world, all of the phrases, colloquialisms, adjectives, and buzz words, 2 words come to mind that make me squeamish and anxious like no other: Churn-Fest.
So what is Churn-Fest exactly?
We’ve all attending meetings, been part of email exchanges, or witness a churn-fest real time on a project. You probably are participating in a churn-fest as you read this. The simple fact is when the wrong people come together unprepared, unorganized, or simply lacking the discipline to make decisions, a churn-fest can occur. These dreaded churn-fests start simply with a question, a comment, or maybe a request. Further clarity is needed, more questions are asked, more lines of communication are opened, more people chime in, so forth and so on. Soon, a simple question has exploded into a million fragmented sections and you are getting input from 20 people on topics they may not even have expertise in.
Why does a Churn-Fest occur?
These churn-fests happen when Project Managers or Project Leaders don’t help contr2ve all attending meetings, been part of email exchanges, or witness a churn-fest real time on a project. You probably are participating in a churn-fest as you read this. The simple fact is when the wrong people come together unprepared, unorganized, or simply lacking the discipline to make decisions, a churn-fest can occur. These dreaded churn-fests start simply with a question, a comment, or maybe a request. Further clarity is needed, more questions are asked, more lines of communication are opened, more people chime in, so forth and so on. Soon, a simple question has exploded into a million fragmented sections and you are getting input from 20 people on topics they may not even have expertise in.
Why does a Churn-Fest occur?
These churn-fests happen when Project Managers or Project Leaders don’t help control the flow of information and work to involve the right people to aid in making the right decisions. The key factor is you need the right people present to make the right decisions. You need to present the right information at the right time to speed up the decision. You need to filter out the noise and provide clarity in what you are asking for.
People can also inherently feel they are experts in areas that they are not. Just because you work in Marketing doesn’t make you an expert in copy writing. Just because you are a Quality Assurance Analyst, this doesn’t make you an expert in developing code. Just because you can dress yourself in cool clothing, doesn’t make you an expert in design. Being self aware, and knowing your role is in a project is critical to preventing churn-fests.
Balancing creativity with churn But what about collaboration you ask? Don’t we want an environment that breeds ideas, creativity, and participation? – Of course. But it doesn’t mean ever person on the team need to be part of every project decision. It is critical to understand team strengths and weaknesses, and as individuals be ok without adding input. Strong team members who are self aware should be comfortable adding input, or simply not saying anything at all.
A project leader has to know when churn is happening and work to prevent it from spreading like smooth butter on hot toasted bread. It’s delicate and the ability to know when a decision has veered of course requires practice. Focus on listening to the direction a conversation is going. If the conversation is circular, starting to address non-issues, spinning into other topics, or simply getting off track, jump in and bring it back on course in a constructive way. Get to the root of the question, and bring it back to the surface. Ask: Why are we here? What are the goals of this discussion? What is our purpose or objective?
So how do you prevent churn?
1. Be prepared and set a clear goal and objective. This can be defined by requirements, stories, agendas, problem statements, scope statements, etc.
2. Get the right people involved in the discussion, and kick the wrong people out. If you need a VP to weigh in, bring the VP into the discussion. If someone is there and they aren’t adding value, don’t include them in the discussion.
3. Be organized. Keep all your reference material in a shared collaborative environment for easy access. Use online tools that foster organization and collaboration.
4. Know your roles and responsibilities. Define what everyone’s primary job is on the project. Understand what their strengths and weaknesses are on the project. Be prepared for the team to adapt and change as the project goes on. Your strong silent developer may be leading the team by the end, and that is ok.
5. Foster a creative and productive problem solving environment. Make people comfortable with the idea of solution based thinking. Allow people to express their ideas in constructive ways. Differentiate between brainstorming and decision making. Always help to drive to a resolution when needed.
6. Practice solution based thinking, not problem based thinking. It’s easy to say why something won’t work, but make people say how it can work.
7. Control the spread of information. Don’t CC your message to death. Provide the information to people that need it, don’t blast the world with “noise”.
8. Don’t waste people’s time. Your job is to maximize efficiencies, remove roadblocks, help the team connect and collaborate. If people are churning they cannot execute.
9. Figure out what people need, and get them it! Whether it’s expert judgment from an organizational lead, a sign off to move forward on a project, or to get the Business off the developers’ backs, give the team what they need to be successful.
10. Talk! Yes, actually talk on the phone or face to face to prevent churning. 5 minutes of “face-time” can save you 5 days of churn.
Churn can and will happen, but if you practice these techniques you can eliminate confusion, avoid conflicts, and move your project along to success.
Every great idea starts as the seed of one person or small group of people. The creative process used to come up with the next best thing, always starts small and innocent.
Why can’t we fly like birds?
Why can’t a horse and buggy have a motor?
Why can’t a machine calculate faster than the human brain?
As these seeds begin to bud and grow, the ideas become more visible to other people’s inputs, fears, desires, wishes and influence. Soon enough you’re once innocent plant of creativeness morphs into an angry apple tree from the Wizard of Oz. It is when these ideas turn into uncontrollable monsters that they are hunted down by the concerned misunderstanding towns-people and chased into some castle tower to be forever imprisoned from the world. Picture Frankenstein; a man’s quest to recreate life from death, turns drastically wrong. Like lines of communications and the formula associated with determining how many lines of communication will exist in a project, a similar formula could be created for communicating an idea. As you add more people to a discussion of an idea, the more complex that idea will get, and the harder it will be to communicate and manage that idea. The idea soon morphs into something else, and with the wrong people involved in the discussion, your once great idea can become a bad one.
The core problem: Once an idea reaches the masses, the idea is dissected and reformed to fit the group’s needs. The more limited the group, the less an idea can grow and prosper.
So how does a project manager control the growth of ideas on a project? We all talk about collaboration in the 21st century over control, and we all agree in an Agile world, the group is critical to gather real-time feedback on a project. However, a PM must know who should be part of an ideas discussion and who should not be. Every organization has limited thinkers or the problem-based thinkers who only see issues or hurdles in regards to change. An idea represents change, and to some change is scary and threatening.
The bottom line: Someone who is scared of an idea will question it, devalue it, and try to steer it to mediocrity, whether they mean to or not.
As a PM you have to know who you purveyors of mediocrity are on your teams and in your stakeholder community. You have to know who you can bring into an ideas discussion and who you can’t. You want to help the idea grow into a beautiful flowering tree, not the angry apple tree from the Wizard of Oz. Should you hide things from your team? Of course not, but it is your responsibility to know “who” to include at “what” stage of the development of an idea.
The payoff: When you master the management of ideas as a PM, you may find your ideas flourishing and growing much faster then if you included the masses. Using this technique will hopefully lead to less persecution of “idea monsters” during the project lifecycle.
How does one become more Agile? The question beckons any project manager worth his/her weight in PMP training books. We all ask ourselves how we can better deal with uncertainty. How can we embrace the unknown and move forward? How can we be more predictive, and better to adapt to changes? Is this just a project question, or is this a question that weights on us everyday as human beings?
The mission statement if you will of Project Shrink is “Projects are about humans, we help you deal with that” This is where I begin my blog.
Humans like routine; it’s animalistic in nature to want a repetitive action to fulfill daily. We like the known, the obvious, but we like problem solving. As we problem solve we also like understanding our problems by using empirical data to drive quantitative and qualitative analysis. The bottom line: we want a challenge but want rules to play by. Like a game of Chess, or Risk, we want a challenge but want a framework to work in. We want to know that with every challenge there is a rule book in that game box that we can refer to for “clarification” We ask ourselves “What happens when you roll matching 6s on the dice, does the attacking army win or the defending army?” Without this rulebook this question goes unanswered, and chaos in sues on the game board.
At this point you are asking yourself, “What does this have to do with Project Management in Agile environment?” To answer that question, please turn to page 21 of your Agile rule book. Yes, .and here in-lies the problem. Agile isn’t like PMP, where we have explicit processes laid out in front of us, explaining the 44 processes broken down by 9 process areas, fitting into 5 project management phases. Agile isn’t about rules, or if/then statements, or inputs and outputs. Yes it has a framework, but that framework is based on the ability to take information, process it quickly and make rapid change and action occur. All while doing what is best for the project, and considering the customer needs. Oh, the customer we forgot about them, during our study of the processes of project management.
It is critical in an Agile World to take real time feedback, analyze, and apply it immediately. It is critical to keep the team informed, and allow people to weigh in. Taking all this feedback and using probabilistic schedule approach will allow you to move through your schedule with utmost flexibility and efficiency. Social media is the single greatest asset in an Agile World. Crowd sourcing, micro blogging, customer focus groups, face to face communication, real time collaboration, are all critical to the success of an Agile team.
I ask myself is it indicative of human beings to be truly Agile? I think we have to train ourselves to be OK with uncertainty, to embrace change, to allow the “community” to share feedback, and to break the restrictions of a PMP world. How does one do this? By taking everything you know about project management and rethinking how you handle uncertainty and the “crowd”. If you embrace uncertainty, and work to reduce it through your project lifecycle, you can truly become Agile. If you find the best ways to extract information and feedback from your “crowd” you can harness the team in new ways. Finally, as you move closer to certainty, you have to be discipline to keep the key ingredients, backlog the rest, and toss the left-overs in the garbage. Humans are packrats by nature, so we have re-think how we like to horde our supplies for a famine; we have to be ok with reducing scope, or backlogging functionality and moving forward. We have to give up the surplus.
Agile is a frame of mind, and that frame is not yet clearly laid out in front of us in a manual. I think Agile is a different way of thinking for a different software world. Embrace uncertainty, love your community, and become OK with the unknown: Be truly agile.
It's been a while since I've been working actively on projects, but now that I am back in action I am retooling my project manager tool belt. I realized now that I've spent time in several different organizations that the tools PMs uses can be drastically different from one company to the next. Some companies are advanced, using PM software, resource staffing tools, advanced project schedules, Document repositories, etc. Some are simply uses spreadsheets. I am not sure where or when Excel became the defacto tool to manage projects, but I guess it was the most robust desktop application with a high rate of familiarity.
If I had the perfect application to design I'd create an app that would allow for flexible data input, like a xls file, but have workflow, and import capabilities from MS projects. I'd want to build action and risk registers and have them be associated with user accounts in the system. I'd want a tie into time and entry applications or have that built in. I'd also like a web meeting/document management system/web cam/VOIP ability to manage meetings from inside the application. It be great to see your team on a web cam, while everyone is looking at the same data points and review the current project together. I think what I want is an all inclusive project management tool that give a PM a one stop shop for all his/her needs. Oh I'd like WIKI capabilities, and also social networking as well as well as world clock that could give you the best meeting times based on your stakeholders geographical locations. Oh and this should all be avail Any ideas out there?
I have been given a rare opportunity to return to a more simplistic time before technology revolutionized our lives with the internet. Not by choice, but by circumstance, I’ve been without internet and cable for about 2 weeks as I recently moved into a new apartment in Boston..
Waiting for the cable installation has been an exercise in a recall. I’ve had to tap into my memory banks and ask myself; what did we do before the internet? How did we find information, and answer our questions daily? Enter the phonebook. Yes, that large yellowish book that is dropped off on your doorstep every year for free. You may have one, or a collection of them just sitting idle in your kitchen cabinet. I was never a fan of the phonebook, I felt it was hard to find information as you had to determine what category something would fall under. For example: CAR INSPECTION. Would I find this under Automotive, or Service Stations or Gas Stations? After searching diligently for about a ½ an hour, I resorted to asking a friend. Yes, personal connections and contacts got me the answer I needed.
I’ve subsequently used this magic phone book to map my route to different places around town, verify stops on the subway system, find numbers for the local power and gas companies, and find the number for the cable company. Wow, this book is pretty useful, good thing I have one!
Now onto cable. I have to admit, I bought a pair of rabbit ears for my Flat Panel High Def, LCD TV. Something is amiss when you see the sleek design of a modern appliance attached to 2 metal rods coming out of a plastic box. They ran me 7.99$ and the cashier told me “You know these will be obsolete in a few weeks?” Due to the change over to all HD broadcast, analog singles will no longer be used on Febuary 17th. I explained my dilemma and wish to “just watch the NFL playoff games this weekend.” The main catalyst behind the purchase, I was excited I could at least pick up about 7 stations if I was lucky. Unfortunately there is a reason Cable and Satellite are so popular, as rabbit ears are very unreliable for picking up TV broadcasts. I was fortunate enough to get CBS, so I could watch the AFC Championship, but FOX wouldn’t come in, so no luck watching the NFC Championship. Foiled again! I feel like Inspector Clusoe’ constantly stumbling over the clues in the case of the Pink Panther.
Racking my brain, and not wanted to spend money sitting at a bar drinking and watching the game, I pulled my clock radio alarm into service, as it was proud to offer up the game on AM radio. AM radio! I can’t believe I am listening to AM radio, the choppy broadcast, the fuzzy voices, the bad commercials, it’s all here on my little clock radio.
Interestingly enough I have survived this technology dead zone I’ve exist in for the last few weeks. I honestly had to fill my time with other things then Twitter, Google News, email and random browsing. I am not going to lie, I have been hitting up cafes with free WIFI to go online to check email every couple days, and my phone can access GMAIL, but I can live with out that. I did pay a few bills online, sorry I cannot be a complete throwback.
I guess my experience with this technology dead zone has taught me a few things about the hold technology has on us as a society. I think we are at the crossroads were we may eventually not have phone books in the future, or newspapers for our source of information. (Yes, I did buy and read an entire newspaper on Saturday!) It is almost the night before the dawn where our only way to gather information will be with some device that needs power. I think as a society once technology holds the key to information, whether that be servers, Smart Phones, web browsers, etc we are dangerously dependent on that technology to exist and function as we expect it to. I see that we don’t need the technology as a society, it just makes things “easier” or so we think. Sometimes it feels as technology allows us to hide from ourselves, and become something we are not. It seems to bring the world together but at the same time re-write the way humans interact with each other. Throughout history inventions have revolutionized the way humanity communications and shares information, it is common for something like the internet to re-invent the rules of engagement and the rules of information sourcing and gathering. However, this is the first time an invention has the source of information in bits and bytes, 1s and 0s, or machine language. Without those machines this information is not understandable by us human beings. Perhaps the dependency on the machine to decipher the information for us, will lead to a struggle between us and our technological creations. Now, we can always power these devices on and off, we control their functionality, however someday the machines may have the cognitive ability to shut themselves on an off and determine if they are willing to decipher the 1s and 0s into human readable information. I’ve never heard of a phonebook refusing to open, or a newspaper protesting a bad story by not showing the headline on the page.
We don’t need our technology to live, we just like it too much to give it up. Let’s hope that we will always have control over our information in all forms.
Yes it's true I move bacl to Boston on Jan 7th 2009! It's very exicting and I am thrilled to be moving back to the city I love and missed so much. Now to find the perfect job. I've had 5 interviews and am awaiting an offer from 2, but with x-mas and all it's a slow go. I am still searching for the perfect fit, but you never know what 2009 can bring! I do hope to find the right match and be employed once again by the end of January 2009. I've been busy planning my move the last month and pretty exhausted but I am excited to see what Boston has instore for me this time around :)
I have the opportunity to go to Boston for an interview and I am very excited! Hopefully it will work in my favor, as I am traveling on my own "dime". It will be worth it to get my boots on the ground and meet with as many people as I can. I also will spend some time looking for an apartment, so I will definitely be busy while there. I am hoping to be spending 2009 in Boston, and would like to be back there in January. Cold, blustery, New England weather, I miss you, as crazy as that sounds....I think i'll make a snowman in the street or pelt some friends with snow balls when they aren't looking. How long will this love affair with snow last you ask? Probably about a week. I am sure when I need to shovel my car out of the snow, only to return to see my parking spot taken, will the love with snow end. Snow would be great if we didn't have to drive in it.
As I search for jobs in another city, I am finding distance job hunting is much more challenging than it used to be. I am looking to move back to Boston from Phoenix, and am ready to move except for a job. I know companies like local candidates, as it's easier to coordinate interviews, and potentially less risky than an out of state candidate. So I battle with the notion of moving without a job, and taking my chances on the ground in Boston. Getting my "boots" on the ground so to speak may benefit me in my search. I entertain this idea in my head and try to assess the risks of being there without a job, or being here without a job. What is higher risk? What has the biggest opportunity costs, what has the biggest return on investment? Interestingly this decision is very much like a decision made to change a project scope, or add requirements. You assess the why and how, and who and determine how it may impact your quality, budget and time, and you make a decision that suffices the sponsors and stakeholders, or customer needs.
The difficult part about this decision is logistical. Boston means a 1 year lease, an apartment in area where I may not even have a job. It means fronting costs to move, relocating my life all without the security of a job. Moving is stressful in itself, to fracture your world and detach from a location to start new in another. I've moved many times in my life, and moving doesn't scare me, or worry me, I know I can get through it and get settled quickly. My concern is what if I don't have a job to turn to for stability and that sense of routine? It is very important for human beings to create a routine in there life. All types of earths creatures have routines, and I think it comforts us to know what our week will be like if all goes well. We get up, go to work, do our jobs, come home, and do it all the next day. I guess routine is very important to sanity, and without it a person really questions who they are and what they are doing with their newly found free time.
So as I ponder what to do next, I realize that the decision to move is looming over me, and it may require me to make a complete leap of faith and challenge my natural instincts to Project Manage my life. Perhaps this is the life lesson the universe is throwing at me, to completely let go of the schedule, and plan, and to approach my life in a AGILE sense not a WATERFALL style.
As I read more about AGILE project management and relate it back to my experiences, as I pondering my training and my newly acquired PMP certification, I am learning new ways to approach project management and life.
Perhaps we don't need to have it all figured out up front. We don't need clearly defined requirements all nailed down. We don't have to move sluggishly through a waterfall life, we can become AGILE and run life in iterations, from Analysis to Design, Development, Testing, Deployment. Doing all of these activities at once, with a close knit team can accomplish your goals much faster than the sluggish waterfall approach, where Task A must be done by the start of Task B, and Task D must start after Task C. Sometimes the schedule can freeze you into in-action, the schedule can inhibit you with it's rigidness. At this point I don't want to be frozen by my schedule and I must remain AGILE.
I had an interview this week and I was able to move onto the second round. After a layoff, the waiting game is tough, but I know it's worth it in the end to wait for the right opportunity. I have several things "brewing" right now, but you can never have too many irons in the fire so to speak. I hope to have something locked down by November 1st, in regards to a job. I push myself pretty hard, so being out of work for a month to me, is unacceptable, even if I had no choice in the matter. My goal during this time off is to obtain my PMP certification, work out and continue to improve my physical condition and read a lot.
I just bought this great book from O'reilly, Head First PMP it is written using visual cues and clever "conversation" style explanations. It's core message is: do you remember a lecture better, or a conversation at a dinner party? The style is witty, clever, and used with the exercises, it really does stick in your brain. I think I've finally found a book about PMP that is great! I've read the PMBOK guide, and it is very dry. This book explains to use both books to obtain the knowledge you need to pass the PMP cert test. Let's see how I do ;)
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