When I started managing projects the projects, I led were relatively short in duration, small teams, and fairly simple. Projects of 6 months or less in duration, team size of 10 or less, and relatively small budgets. As my skills developed, the duration of the projects and the size of the teams I have managed or have been engaged in as a program office manager have grown. Most recently the projects I am involved in are over the expanse of multiple years with team sizes of 300 to 500 supported by the appropriate budget. When the projects were simpler, I would be able to plan them out, taking into account any assumptions, constraints, and risks. The accuracy of my planning was in direct correlation to my ability to predict the risks I would face. Projects with a short duration and small team have minimal risk. Additionally, as the projects grew in duration the probability of something going against the plan also grew. The smaller the projects, the more likely the project would be able to go according to plan. That doesn’t mean that things didn’t go awry from time to time, it just means that the probability was lower.
A good example is the risk of a resource leaving during a 3-month
project and a risk that a resource would leave during a 3-year project. The
risk exists for both projects. The probability is lower on a 3-month project
than a 3-year project. However, the impact on a 3-month project has the
potential to be much greater than a resource leaving on a 3-year project. Why discuss
risks? Change causes risk in projects. I would say that, based on my
experience, risks are about the circumstances of a project changing. In the world
of projects, circumstances are defined as everything that can exert pressure on
a project to move in a direction other than that which has been planned. Resources,
clients, weather, disease, technology, laws, and vendors are all examples of potential
areas of impact. In other words, when circumstances change, it can impact a
project. The change that is possible is constant and occurs in all projects.
The question becomes, how do you handle change. To get a sense of how you
handle yourself when faced with change, let’s move away from projects into your
personal life. Let’s look at change, circumstances, and risk and how you handle
those situations. Like it or not, the saying “the way we do one thing is the
way we do everything” is rooted in truth. The way we handle risk, change, and
circumstances in our personal lives will give us a glimpse into the world of
our flexibility, adaptability, ingenuity, perseverance, and integrity when it
comes to project management.
Most of us start our day with a plan of sorts for the day,
some plan more than others, but we do have some sense of what we want to do in
our day. So when you hop in the car to go to the grocery to pick up a quick dinner
and find that the road is closed and a 20 minute round trip is now going to be
longer because you get to take a detour or visit a grocery store on the other
side of town how do you respond? What about when you go online to start work
and your machine isn’t working? In other words, when something disrupts your
day, how do you respond? When you find that your plans are being changed for
you because the circumstances have changed you have a choice on how to respond.
When you embrace change as a potential opportunity, when you see the changes to
circumstances as a way of changing your perspective, and when you embrace
change as a constant, change is no longer something to be feared, mastered, or
avoided. Change becomes the gateway to something different, something unseen or
unexperienced, and possibilities that didn’t exist before.
Sounds easy enough. The magic is in shifting your
perspective from change being a problem to solve to change being an opportunity
to embrace. How to shift? One change at a time. What I mean is, it doesn’t
matter how well I’ve handled a change that has happened in the past, what
really matters is how I handle the change that I am currently facing. The
change that is happening in this moment.
There are two things that I can do to prepare myself for
potential change and to get better at handling change. The first is risk
management or to look for all of the things that can potentially change and
consider what some actions would be to handle that change. This is what risk
management is about, looking for potential changes and thinking through the
potential options or opportunities to mitigate that change. The other is to
review a change that has occurred and review what worked and what didn’t work
about how I reacted to the change. This is looking at how I am being about
change itself. If I view it as a problem, then it will be a problem. If I view
it as an opportunity to learn from, grow from, or to see things from a different
perspective I will have a better opportunity to respond in a way that empowers
others to work together and collaborate to find alternative options.
So, welcome to the world of change. An exciting place to be
seen as a leader, as someone who responds with possibilities when change comes,
to work to see the opportunities that exist when change occurs and to embrace
the change as a vehicle to advance the project rather than as something that
will damage the effort.
