Transparency

One of the things that Margaret Wheatley says in her book “Leadership and the New Science” strikes to the heart of why we preach transparency. The statement:

Everybody needs information to do their work. We are so needy of this resource that if we can’t get the real thing, we make it up.†

On projects, we always used to say – no surprises good or bad. It was a mantra that we used at the PMO level to help project managers feel comfortable coming to us for both reporting and for requesting. The general idea was that if you surfaced a risk, someone who’d been there before could help you work it before it became an issue. Mostly people saw surfacing as an admission of incompetence – and no one liked that – so you can imagine how often we got to help. The unfortunate side effect of this was you never saw real risks, just real problems. At each review, the project managers had plenty of risks and an occasional issue to expose to the group, but on closer inspection, these always turn out to be either trivial issues or fabricated risks. The real ones stayed swimming voraciously like trolling barracuda in the murky shallows by the program’s banks.

Often, the PMs are not overtly hiding anything, they just don’t have the data to really know their own status. Stepping up to an individual and asking them what percent of their task is complete is at best and estimate of an estimate (how much have I really accomplished of what I thought I needed to do). The lack of precision is enough to give the PM a sufficient level of discomfort to the certainty and so causes them to rightly be unable to confidently report progress – in other words, since they don’t have the information in the form they need, they make it up. The quest then, is to find a way such that progress is essentially black and white – to eliminate the ambiguity and ensure that the PMs have the information they need to do their work.

By forcing the programs and projects to be fully transparent and show progress in tangible terms (hey, how about that burndown or burnup chart?), the PMO spends less time wading cautiously through the weeds and more time actually helping. If all the signs are positive, the review can be over in moments. If the signs are not, the program manager becomes responsible for explaining what the data implies and what they have done about the anomalies. Then, when necessary, the help can begin the PMs stop sleeping with the fishes.





† Thanks to Tom Looy (http://conversationswithandrew.blogspot.com/) for this.