No organisation is perfect; learning how to use these imperfections to help your project is a key part of delivering on time. One common problem I see a lot is stealing from calm and organised projects to throw attention and manpower at troubled projects. However there is a period before a deadline where attention and help can be commanded and, more importantly, maintained without having resources stolen by another project.
This time period effectively the attention span of the company - the amount of time focus can be retained.
Characteristics of the period before a deadline within this attention span:
- People really focus on your project.
- Non-critical issues are bumped 'for the next release'.
- Critical issues are attacked by everyone.
Characteristics of a project start or re-energisation that has a deadline outside the company's attention span:
- People say they are committed to doing it right this time.
- People plan rather than do.
- Everyone feels free to add extra things to the project to do list.
- After a few days or weeks resources are pulled onto another project that has a more imminent deadline.
The length of the attention span varies a lot. In the most process-heavy environments I have worked in it was up to 9 months, but in smaller companies a week seems to be more typical. In my own company the period is about 2 weeks.
This behaviour isn't necessarily bad, it arises from pragmatic management trying to do the best it can with the resources available, but unless you watch out for it you can end up with a project that is starved of the resource it needs to be successful.
What strategies can a project manager use to propel a project forward in this kind of environment?
- Set up lots of God Deadlines (deadlines to an external customer, journalist or some internal stakeholder of huge importance).
- Organise the dates for those deadlines so that about half of the project falls inside the organisational attention span - one major deadline every couple of weeks for example. This will give your teams a nice balance between crunch time and low pressure working.
- Spend the time outside the attention span, when resources are distracted, to get as many building blocks out of the way as you can. This means thoroughly understanding your dependencies (especially external ones, such as acquiring new bank accounts) and ticking off as many as possible so that when you are in the crunch you don't get blocked on anything.
The goal is to create waves of high energy, high pressure working, followed by troughs when you and others can recover enough to be effective in the next peak.
For many organisations this is similar to the way they already work - however by understanding that and manipulating the tempo you have more chance of starting the crunch in time to get the work completed before your deadline arrives, and you can balance the size of the deliverable that must be achieved for the critical date.