« Types of Risk in Project Management
Top 10 Project Initiation Questions - People Change Management »

Issues Management: The Project Immune System

October 27, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Definitions, Risk Management

Issues Management: The Project Immune System
By Demian Entrekin

Issues Management is not a list of tasks. It is not a list of defects in a product release. Issues management is a discipline for closing major gaps in stakeholder perspectives. These kinds of gaps act like marauding infections for any major initiative or project. There are traditionally two ways to handle these kinds of issues:

  1. Ignore them and hope they go away
  2. Deal with them formally and aggressively

I’ve tried both of these and I can say without hesitation that 1 is a failed approach. If your project has serious stakeholder issues confronting it, then I highly recommend taking them seriously and consciously. This takes skill and an acute awareness of your own skill, power and your own limitations.

An example of a serious issue in a corporate context might look like this: the key executive stakeholders have serious disagreements on the viability of a particular marketing strategy that has already been funded. In other words, the executives are deeply divided.

A concise definition of issues would be the following: “In the context of corporate issues management, issues are controversial inconsistencies caused by gaps between the expectations of corporations and those of their publics. These gaps lead to a contestable point of difference, the resolution of which can have important consequences for an organization” (Heath, 1997; Wartick & Mahon, 1994).

My own view is that Issues Management should work like the immune system within a living body. It detects the attackers, isolates them, and proceeds to keep them under control. It rarely destroys them completely, but the immune system allows the body to keep functioning.

Demian is the CTO of Innotas. As founder and CEO, Entrekin oversaw marketing, product development, sales and services for the company. Today, he focuses on strategic product direction. Prior to Innotas, Entrekin co-founded Convoy Corporation and was Chief Architect of its initial products. In that role, Entrekin helped the company lead the middleware market with an annual growth rate of 670 percent and played an instrumental role in Convoy’s subsequent acquisition by New Era Networks in 1999. A recognized thought leader in Project Portfolio Management, Entrekin has published numerous papers on PPM and his blog (PPM Today) explores current issues related to successful PPM implementation. During his 18 year career, Demian has assumed leadership roles as a consultant and as an entrepreneur, delivering commercial and corporate database applications. Demian holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University.

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 and is filed under Project Management Definitions, Risk Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

The Immune System analogy to Issue Management is very cool! Like it lots!

Issue Management, at its core, is the process of identifying and resolving issues. Why do we do this? To minimize the impact issues have on our project objectives, deliverables, time or costs. ;-)

It’s scary to think that some projects don’t have formal issue management. Just imagine a human body without an immune system!

Shaun Dicker
http://shaundicker.tumblr.com

Shaun Dicker wrote on October 27, 2009 - 1:33 pm | Visit Link

In the context of my current organization, the type of issues you describe are portfolio management issues, rather than project level issues. However the approaches you describe are the same at the project level. As you say, the healthy approach is to manage issues in a structured and transparent way. The alternative demonstrates a lack of trust, which in turn breeds suspicion, infighting, and constant firefighting behavior.

I had the misfortune to be told the following by one of our R&D VP’s in a meeting two days ago (I’m paraphrasing): “R&D project managers are not to log issues in the EPM system or discuss them with their project team until the issue has been discussed with R&D senior management. If you log or discuss project issues, then people from other divisions in the company might find out that there’s an issue and run it up the food chain before I get a chance to put the appropriate spin on the situation.”

While I totally understand the need for responsible handling of project communication in the hands of well trained project managers and teams, I find this VP’s attitude wrong in so many ways I barely know where to start. It’s such a classic, almost cliched, demonstration of a siloed company culture that considers issues not as problems to be solved, but as triggers for witch hunts. And what is even more sad to me is that it doesn’t even occur to these supposedly highly trained and experienced (and highly paid) managers that there’s anything wrong in working this way.

Oh, well.

Greg wrote on October 28, 2009 - 1:46 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories