Some years ago, a project manager in one of my client companies
called me and said, “I’ve just had a conference call with key
members of my project team, and I realized that we don’t agree
on what the project is supposed to accomplish.”
I assured him that this was common.
“What should I do?” he asked.
I told him that he had no choice but to get the team members
all going in the same direction by clarifying the mission of the project.
He asked me to facilitate a meeting to do this.
At the meeting, I stood in front of a flip chart and began by
saying, “Let’s write a problem statement.” Someone immediately
countered by saying, “We don’t need to do that. We all know
what the problem is.”
I was unmoved by this comment. I said, “Well, if that is true,
it’s just a formality and will only take a few minutes, and it would
help me if we wrote it down, so someone help me get started.”
I’m going to be a little facetious to illustrate what happened
next. Someone said, “The,” and I wrote the word on the chart,
and someone else said, “I don’t agree with that!”
Three hours later, we finally finished writing a problem
statement.
The project manager was right. The team did not agree on
what the problem was, much less how to solve it. This is fundamental—
and is so often true that I begin to think we have a defective
gene in all of us that prohibits us from insisting that we
have a good definition of the problem before we start the work.
Remember, project management is solving a problem on a large
scale, and the way you define a problem determines how you
will solve it. If you have the wrong definition, you may come up
with the right solution—to the wrong problem!
In fact, I have become convinced that projects seldom fail at
the end. Rather, they fail at the definition stage. I call these projects
headless-chicken projects because they are like the chicken
that has had its head chopped off and runs around spewing blood
everywhere before it finally falls over and is “officially” dead. Projects
work the same way. They spew blood all over the place, until
someone finally says, “I think that project is dead,” and indeed it
is. But it was actually dead when we chopped off its head in the
beginning—it just took a while for everyone to realize it.
Once the project is defined, you can plan how to do the work.
There are three components to the plan: strategy, tactics, and logistics.
Strategy is the overall approach or “game plan” that will be
followed to do the work.
