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In This Issue:
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Kimberly Wiefling, Founder and President, Wiefling Consulting, LLC
When it comes to getting things done, I hit the genetic jackpot. For as long as I can remember, everyone in my family has disproved naysayers, those who say, “That’s not realistic.” Those words were not in our vocabulary.
As a kid, I learned to cut down tall trees with a chainsaw and build a dune buggy with a beer keg as a gas tank. Later in life, I inadvertently developed a specialty for tackling impossible projects, starting with getting my masters degree in physics. Through no particular gift of my own, I succeeded beyond most people’s expectations, even my own (although there are a few glorious defeats among the trophy pile).
Last year, I decided to capture what I’ve learned about getting things done in a book, Scrappy Project Management – The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces. If you’re genetically gifted with the ability to get results that other people claim are highly unlikely or darn near impossible, you don’t need to read it. But if you are staring down a “To Do” list the size of Mount Kilimanjaro, here are 12 predictable -- and avoidable -- pitfalls that stand between most people and the goals they hope to achieve.
- Forget about the customer. Henry Ford said that the company doesn’t pay employees a salary, the customer does. The employer is just the middleman. But many businesses operate as though the customer is an afterthought. One trip to a retail service establishment is all it takes to confirm this. If you want to be successful, be completely and unrepentantly obsessed with the customer, whoever that is, whether internal or external.
- Fail to set clear goals. According to a blizzard of studies, and my own observations of businesses over the past 20 years, the number one reason people don’t achieve their goals is that they don’t have goals. Fear of failure helps people avoid clear goal-setting, or makes them settle for fuzzy, ambiguous goals. Double your chances of success just by making sure that you and your co-workers have shared, measurable, challenging and achievable goals, as clear as sunlight.
- Communicate poorly. Even with clear and compelling goals, inadequate communication undermines your chances of achieving those goals. Poor communication is the number two cause of failure, and it’s no wonder. Most people don’t realize that communication involves both talking and listening. Many conversations are like two TVs facing one another. Highly successful people avoid this all too common pitfall by engaging in effective, vociferous and unrelenting communication with all stakeholders.
- Keep roles and responsibilities fuzzy. Fumbled handoffs and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing are common causes of setbacks along the road to success. One of the biggest causes of conflicts in teams is lack of role clarity. Assure that roles ad responsibilities are clearly understood and agreed to by all to avoid this unnecessary pit stop on your journey.
- Plan inadequately and create fictitious schedules. Every hour of planning saves about a day of wasted effort and rework. And yet, given a choice most people will either under-plan or fail to plan at all. Even when you create detailed schedules, they often do little more than document the demise of the people carrying out the plan. Overlooking critical handoffs and interdependencies can add days, weeks or months to the completion date of a mission-critical goal, and what's worse, everyone seems to know from the start the dates will never be met. Savvy professionals create viable plans and schedules that enjoy the team’s hearty commitment.
- Imagine no disaster and see no upside. Many people are so busy just working on the tasks at hand that they fail to look around the next bend for possible potholes that could have a major impact on their results. Even when risks are identified, the most common mistake is to do nothing to avoid them. And when you're up to your butt in alligators, the last thing you want to do is stop to consider how to make the outcome better! Those in the know mitigate big, hairy, abominable risks before they occur, and keep a keen lookout for upside that can accelerate and amplify their success.
- Behave as if everything is the top priority. If everything is number one, nothing is! Of course, we’d love to have it all, avoiding tough tradeoffs between things we hold dear. But choices must inevitably be made. Sometimes costs need to increase in order to obtain a satisfactory level of quality. Sometimes features must be sacrificed in the name of reliability, or to hit a hard deadline in a launch window. No one wants to lose one of their vital organs, but the reality is that sometimes you must prioritize ruthlessly, choosing between heart, lungs and kidneys if necessary.
- Be surprised when change occurs. There isn’t a project on earth that has been accomplished without some kind of change that impacted the project. And yet people continue to let change throw them off balance. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. Only amnesiacs should be surprised by it. The world is changing rapidly, and your projects are too, so anticipate and accommodate necessary and inevitable change.
- Fall victim to self-limiting assumptions. Of all the obstacles we face in life, none are bigger than those of our own making. We fail to consider possibilities outside of our experience or possibilities that, in the past, have been off limits to us for some reason, like because we have self-limiting beliefs about what is possible. And, like fish blind to water, we miss opportunities right in front of our nose because of the filters of our experience. There are plenty of examples where people saying something was impossible were shoved aside by those doing it. Avoid this trap by routinely challenging assumptions and beliefs, especially insidious self-imposed limitations.
- Fail to manage stakeholder expectations. What is a stakeholder? Anyone who cares about what you're doing, and anyone who can either help you or hurt you in your quest to achieve your goals. Most people fail to identify key stakeholders who could dramatically accelerate or undermine their success. A powerful stakeholder analysis tool that clarifies goals is a stakeholder map. After visualizing all stakeholders and their interrelationships, ask, “What will this stakeholder be saying when this project is wildly successful?” Frequently expectations will conflict, forcing to the surface the tough decisions and tradeoffs between things that initially seemed equally important. Managing the expectations of all stakeholders up front increases the likelihood that your delight in accomplishing your goals will be shared by others who are critical to your process.
- Repeat the mistakes of the past. A common practice among professionals is to do what’s called a “retrospective,” where things that went well, and those that went sideways, are reviewed with the intention of avoiding similar problems in the future. However, like a B-grade horror flick, the mistakes look pretty much the same each time through. That’s why I call these reviews “Lessons not learned.” There’s a difference between 10 years of experience and one year of experience 10 times. Learn from experience. Make new and more exciting mistakes each time!
- Skip being grateful for what’s going right. We seem to be conditioned from an early age to notice what’s not working and focus on criticism instead of appreciation for what’s right with the world and other people. And that bias toward critique is reinforced by a society where negative people appear smarter. Recognizing what’s working well is equally important. Appreciating our contributions and those of others provides much needed motivation to continue onward. Even mistakes can open a doorway to new possibilities, especially in the world of creativity and innovation. Post-It Notes were an accident – a failure of stickiness. Practice an attitude of gratitude. If you want to truly achieve your greatest potential, celebrate successes along the way -- and some failures, too!
Feeling lucky? Play the lottery. But if you want to generate positive results predictably and reliably, follow these practical and sensible guidelines for getting things done. Being aware of, and heeding, these land mines on the path to success doesn’t guarantee success, but at least you’ll fail for new, surprising and more exciting reasons.
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Kimberly Wiefling is the author of one of the top project management books in the United States, Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces. She's the founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, a scrappy global consulting enterprise committed to enabling clients to achieve highly unlikely or darn near impossible results, predictably and repeatedly.
Kimberly has worked with companies of all sizes, including one-person ventures and those in the Fortune 50, and she has helped launch and grow more than half dozen startups, a few of which are reaping excellent profits. She spends about half her time working all over the world with Japan-based companies that are committed to developing global leadership. She is the lead blogger for www.SVProjectmanagement.net and a regular contributor to www.ProjectConnections.com.
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