« What Is a Requirement in Software Projects?
Contract Closeout - Project Closure »

Resilient Projects

November 12, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management, Change Management, Project Management Musings, Risk Management

Resilient Projects
By Christopher Butcher

I think I’ve found the new “Paradigm Shift” for the next decade: Resilience.

Many thinkers are coming to the conclusion that we simply can’t prevent bad things from happening, so let’s focus on making sure that when (not if) they happen, our work can go on. I’ve had a number of conversations with people in a variety of fields that suggest this is an ascendant concept.

An example of a discipline that seem to be embracing resilience as a value would be mental health: Resilience is a trait in individuals that allows them to maintain a positive attitude even during times of stress and change. Resilience is about looking at the “glass half full” and looking forward rather than backward.

For software project and IT governance, resilience is about responding to the inevitable changes that occur in projects. As clear as our vision might be when we start an initiative, we inevitably learn something during the project that causes us to change direction. A resilient project will have the characteristics to embrace change and stay on course to core goals.

Don’t get me wrong: let’s not stop trying to “get it right the first time.” Resilience isn’t about promoting change! Change is always expensive. So the key becomes something like helping the business make the right decisions at the right time. Decisions made too early or too late risk loss of productivity.

How do we make sure good decisions are made at the right time? We have a few tools like Agile methodologies that at least spread out the decisions, but, like any tool, Agile is not an answer in and of itself. Agile just tells us we don’t have to make all of our decisions up front and expect them to be fixed. Instead, iterative processes just force us to recognize that we can’t get everything right the first time, so we might as well change in small increments instead of big ones. I have a few more thoughts coming on “how to decide when to decide,” but you’ll have to wait.

What’s your definition of a “resilient” project?

Christopher Butcher is Principal and Chief Technology Officer at Heuristic Solutions, a software consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia. In addition to leading the technical direction at Heuristic Solutions, Mr. Butcher serves as a virtual chief information officer (vCIO) at a variety of organizations. His focus has been on aligning information technology projects to the strategic objectives of organizations. Mr. Butcher maintains a professional blog about information technology governance, the CIO Code.

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

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 and is filed under Agile Project Management, Change Management, Project Management Musings, 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.

3 people have left comments

Ummm…isn’t this project risk management?

crgpm wrote on November 12, 2009 - 10:54 am | Visit Link

If I understand correctly, this is more than traditional Risk Management which tries to proactively identify, quantify and have planned responses to deal with an event when it happens.

In that context, Risk Management would certainly seem to be a part of Resiliency. Yet there’s more - what about the proverbial “unknown unknowns” - the project gotchas - the events that you didn’t even think to think of. Having a culture to effectively deal with those situations when they arise seems to be appropriate.

This seems more like “adaptation”. ie Resiliency = Risk Management + Adaptation.

For more on adaptation, see Geoffrey Moore’s book “dealing with Darwin”.

JohnD wrote on November 12, 2009 - 2:46 pm | Visit Link

I would say a resilient project is less about the tools you use and more about attitude. Change is not always bad - sometimes a change request in a project makes the end result better. But when change occurs, having the right attitude - whether being humble due to your error, or happy about an opportunity - can be made even better by a positive outlook. When things go wrong, most people are at least frustrated and others very upset. That doesn’t change anything - the only thing that can be changed is the project manager’s attitude.

Laura Bamberg wrote on November 16, 2009 - 10:09 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