Finding different ways to understand progress
Finding different ways to understand progress
Organisations have long tracked progress through the completion of tasks and projects. When we are outcome-oriented progress is best understood with evidence.
Organisations love projects. Projects act as a container for all the work to get something done. There’s satisfaction in keeping track of all the work we identified and checking off tasks as these are completed. As something else that needs achieving is identified, there’s quickly talk of this work as a new project.
When we are working oriented to outcomes we think about progress differently. We look for evidence we are making progress toward achieving the result. This evidence is often a leading indicator that may be symptomatic of the outcome or conditions that need to be true for the result to be possible.
It’s often a challenging transition because the traditional tracking of progress is often still in place when we begin on the path to working focused on outcomes.
The tracking of progress by checking off tasks we completed is a comforting safety blanket that can feel like they help impose order and control.
The challenge is that the green traffic lights on our project reports start to be in direct conflict with the evidence of the progress we collect and review frequently. Interviews with users might be telling us the solutions we are providing them are missing the mark. The website traffic data might be telling us people are not using what we have provided them.
And yet the project dashboards might tell a different story. Additionally, project plans tend to design based on assumptions which may be actively being challenged. It’s possible for the approaches to coexist but at the very least an adjustment must be made.
First, and most importantly is to think about work as experimentation both for the purpose of value creation and also for learning. Actively defining what is to be measured or will be used as evidence for understanding what is working and what is not. The understanding of the progress.
The next important element is an adaptive planning approach. Agile and lean practices which presume adaptive planning tend to be a more compatible approach but any project management approach can coexist as long as adaption is embraced. Traditional project management will adapt plans based on task completion and consideration of the critical path. Now more important is adapting the plan to what we are constantly learning.
Have you gone through this transition? Did you find the shift difficult? Did it create friction? Was there reluctance to change from the familiar approaches to managing projects? Share your experiences in the comments.