From Frameworks to Flexibility: Adapting Project Management in Uncertain Times

In today’s dynamic business environment, project managers often face the challenge of balancing scope, time, and resources while ensuring successful outcomes. How can project managers effectively navigate through dynamic business environments with all the complexities and uncertainties? In this article, we will try to investigate and define project management and discuss different strategies.

What is Project Management?

The simplest definition I could find is “A planned piece of Work’’ from an Oxford material. Nice! what is planned? We can say organized or well thought through in terms of time, resources like funds, man-hours, and a goal.

So, what happens if we start doing a piece of work with a thought-through schedule, funds, and a goal? We have to stop due to running out of time or funds or reaching a goal, even if it is not necessarily the goal we started with.

This goal is a new state, different from the state we started. This can be anything, having something new we produced, or with new information gathered or it can be a state where we lost both funds and time. Hence we can say a Project is a way to change from one state to another state.

So, what is Management?

Based on the well-known phrase “Managers do things right; Leaders do right things”, we can infer that management involves doing things in the right way. It Implies the mantra is to find the “Right way of doing a planned piece of work”.

But right and wrong are subjective, and right ways warry with various aspects of the goal.

For example, if my goal is to travel from point A to point B,

• If I want to go as fast as possible, and both points are on the same highway, using the fastest vehicle available is the right way.
• If I want to carry a minimum load of 500 kg, choosing the fastest vehicle with 500 kg weight, is the right way.
• If we are carrying an extra delicate item, the right way has to accommodate the safety of the cargo.
• If the route is not a highway, we have to travel through farmland for 30% of the distance and on water for 30% of the distance, right way has to accommodate 3 different types of transport and 3 differently skilled drivers and crew.

So what is the right way of managing a project?

We have a lot of methodologies and frameworks like PMP, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, Agile, and Prince 2 each one of them has its own principles, techniques, and practices and is applied in different contexts.

The below charthelps us give a perspective on which methodology/ framework is helpful when complexity and uncertainty are considered.

Efficiency Projects

These projects can help organizations to be more efficient, Projects like continuous improvement, process engineering, IT upgrades, compliance and regulations, etc. In terms of the goal of the project, there is much less uncertainty and complexity. Efficiency projects should have close to a 100% success rate. High costs, low quality, or high bureaucracy usually cause anything less.

Sustaining Projects

These projects are the projects where organizations plan for new products, new services, new sales and distribution channels, and investing in new areas. These projects help in expanding the organization. Uncertainty and complexity are medium to high Project leaders have to have a clear understanding of project requirements and communicate well-defined expectations to all stakeholders. These projects should be around 75% successful. If there is a 100% success ratio in an organization that would mean that the organization is not taking enough risks.

Transformative Projects

These projects are innovative, riskiest, and most challenging. They help organizations to lead the industry and spearhead cutting-edge innovations, An organization should adopt a “fail fast and learn fast” culture to succeed in these projects, and a success rate of more than 40% can indicate that the organization is not taking enough risk.

If we go back to our original search on project management definition “Right way of doing a planned piece of work”, and considering the above reference guide one should have visibility and understanding of things like scope, workflow, dependencies, execution risks, integration risks, novelty, etc, so that one can try to find the right tools and techniques from the right part of the above map to address the problems at hand.

And with the need for fast resolutions, ever-changing scopes, lack of clear roles and responsibilities, missing change management strategies, neglected quality control, lack of team engagement, conflict of interest, delays in decision-making, and inability to leverage past experience make it complicated to bring out the transparency needed to identify complexities and uncertainties.

Then how do we find a “Right way of doing our planned pieces of work”?

Let’s talk about the popular approach Agile and see if it fits our derivation,

Oh! Wait. Agile methodology doesn’t have a project manager role. Why?

Like any other theory irrespective of domain, Agile is also based on some assumptions, one of which is that Agile teams are self-organizing and are positioned in the best way possible to make decisions and manage the work.

Self-organizing? Positioned in the best way possible? It may be possible but not without proper training, discussions, and awareness of different tools and practices.

The fast-changing technology landscape, however, brings along a huge amount of opportunities and threats that demand constant improvement in an individual’s skill set, and the organization is best off having resources constantly nurture their absolute advantage in their own areas of expertise.

Hence we may want to keep project management expectations from other subject matter experts to a minimum.

But we cannot deny the value that various studies suggest adaptability, efficiency, and productivity of Agile credibility and standardization of PMP, measurable improvements, process optimization of lean Six Sigma clear governance and accountability of Prince 2 user centricity, innovation, and creativity of design thinking, and so on.

Therefore, the “Right way of doing their planned piece of work” should accommodate all the benefits of different frameworks and methodologies.

How do we do that, What if we look at individual phases /milestones /requests instead of the whole project? Then we can normalize the map by breaking the boundaries of methodologies/ frameworks and mapping out different tools, techniques, and strategies to address different problems. Visibility and clarity at the objective level are comparatively easy to obtain.

Now we are in the game of problem-solving, If we think of project management as a problem-solving and each milestone or objective or use case as a different problem, let’s imagine we have a wide library of solutions from variety of methods, proven practices, frameworks, templates tools and techniques provided by various program and project management Theories.

I know it may be cumbersome and confusing for the teams, but let’s say we have achieved it with careful planning we were able to isolate and redefine different tools, techniques, and Practices so that they can be implemented independently, and have a Library in our hands.

A seminal paper ”Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the 1970s, categorized problems into three types, Tame problems, Wicked Problems, and critical problems.

Tame Problems — are relatively well defined, have clear objectives, and can be solved using established methods and procedures, they typically have known solutions or a amenable to systematic analysis

Wicked Problems — are complex ill-defined, and involve multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests and values. They often lack clear solutions and may not have a definitive endpoint. They typically are deeply interconnected and resistant to straightforward solutions.

Critical problems — are those with significant importance or urgency and require immediate attention or action, they may be wicked or tame in nature but are distinguished by their high stakes and potential impact.

Most of the business operations or project management problems fall into Tame problems, with clear objectives and scope defined, and we can use our library. If we neglect or delay there are chances that it might escalate to a wicked problem then we have to redefine the problem by breaking it down redefining the scope, and compromising of few things so that we can tailor a solution from our library. If we let the wicked problem sit there without any action, it might evolve into a critical problem, at that point it is better we lock the library away pull all involved decision-makers and the teams, and run it like a war room.

Hence our “Right way of doing that planned piece of work” is to build a system that brings visibility and clarity into all the objectives and facilitates collaborations to choose the right solution for the problems.

Someone who is building the system should keep in mind that

References/ Citation :

1. Harvard Business Review Press — Project Management Handbook.
2. Oxford University Press — Management A Very Short Introduction.
3. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber was published in 1973 in the journal Policy Sciences.