Project Blind Spots

It’s morning, you are late for work, you grab your coffee and hop in the car to get on your way to work on your next

project

.  You check the rear-view mirror to make sure nothing is behind you.  You also check the side mirrors to make sure both sides are clear.  You begin backing out of the garage or driveway and hear feel a crunch and/or metal scraping sound as you roll over your child’s scooter that was left out overnight.  You don’t understand, you checked behind you, in front of you and to the sides.  That should have covered everything, right. Well, in this case the scooter fell into your blind spot.  Not directly visible, but still there nonetheless.

In project management, we run into this scenario as well.  It is not that we don’t know what we are doing, but more like we don’t know what we don’t know.  Situations, circumstances, corporate politics and the ever illusive ‘other’ things may be in our blind spot. We are not made aware of these until the first time we run them over.

Typically, we see these blind spots surface as we take a new job or engagement and sometimes even as we pick up a project already in process.  We have a certain level of “I cannot know everything about this project” that we are allotted. Once that level has been met, we are expected to be up to speed and know everything we need to know in order to give the project a chance, including knowing what is in our blind spots.

A few things that we can do in an effort to eliminate potential blind spots is to:

1) Talk with the Subject Matter Experts – give the key people 30-60 minutes of your time per day.  This time needs to be focused on listening and not giving direction (barking orders) that we love to do.  As the project manager, you need to understand what they do, how they do it, what tools they may use and how they may interact with others (individuals or groups).  You should also understand their concerns.  This knowledge allows you to apply it later on in the process, but also provides a foundation for a strong relationship with your team.

2) Soak up all available knowledge – get hold of any and all documentation directly or indirectly related to the project.  This is especially important if you coming into a project already in process.  You should be able to organize this information to make it easier to digest, so that when you hear a concern, you can read up on that portion quickly to be able to address the concern appropriately.

3) Run it over – probably the least desirable but the most effective way to learn what you don’t know.  Once you have backed over the scooter, you would probably pull forward a bit, inspect the damage, and move the obstacle.  This quickly becomes a “lesson learned” and will be something that you will watch for in future projects and you will most likely not repeat that again. Depending on the environment, you may just continue running over that scooter and call that a lesson learned, however, there are many more potential risks here that make this a bad idea.

Soon, we will move from “I cannot know everything about this project” to at least knowing what you don’t know and the steps you need to take in order to correct that.

How do you handle blind spot elimination in your

project

?