Policy, doctrine, and protocols

From time to time, we really do need to write a few things down in a plan, writing actual sentences of all things. One such plan that comes to mind is a risk management plan.

Now, I'm no fan of boilerplate, that generic stuff that planning authors seem determined to impose on the reader (although most of us just skip by), so I propose that most plans can get away with four content categories:

1. Policy--actionable direction.  What is to be done; who (or what) is affected; why are they affected, and who has the responsibility and authority for policy implementation?
2. Doctrine--the principles and beliefs that inform the policy and
3. Protocols--the rules (and could also be the tools) for policy implementation
4. Governance--authorization and escalation rules; decision rules

Let's try one on to see how it might work. How about "risk identification"; what's the plan for that one?

Risk Identification Policy:

It's the policy of Project X that every manager (project, cost account, and work package) will proactively seek risk identification on a continuous basis in order to forestall surprise and enable more predictable forecast of outcomes

Affected managers have a responsibility to ensure identified risks are submitted to the project's risk management process.

Risk Identification Doctrine:

• Anyone can identify a risk
• Everyone has a responsibility to seek risk identification
• Messengers are not at risk for bearing the message
• Every identified risk deserves consideration in the risk management process

Risk Identification Protocol:

• Continuously assess the circumstances of identified risks to ascertain if revisions, modifications, and additions are required
• Maintain a 360-surveillance of the external threat environment; bring new threats to the RM process
• Maintain a current forecast by analysis, simulation, or model to reveal new risks to project completion
• Elicit expert opinion to formulate risk descriptions 
• Formulate a Risk Breakdown Structure to categorize risks as affecting the baseline, or not ('on or off' the baseline project plan). In other words, be a Bayseian.
  
• Relate identified risks to the Risk Breakdown Structure by affected WBS, schedule, budget, performance, quality, or other risk register attributes

Governance

• Impact decisions follow the project's funding and expenditure authority
• Timeliness is of the essence; urgent assessments will be handled within a business day
• Risk assignments in the Risk Breakdown Structure follow the projects WBS assignment protocols

There now! That wasn't so bad. A Risk Identification plan in less than a page. What a concept!

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Governance or error?

Take a look at this:

Is this pilot error or a violation of governance? I'm not the first to ask the question. Our friends at Dark Matter first raised the point.

Could be either, or neither: it could be mechanical.

How to know? And, does it matter the motivation?

Well, actually yes. Governance is in the wind these days, what with agile and all. On the one hand: all hail initiative and daring! On the other hand: who's got the big picture in mind?

Certainly the 'captain in command' is the ultimate team leader. No central authority can intervene, short of shooting him down (I assume a lady is not in command, but she could be, of course).

And, I'll bet he's not reading the flight manual either! Improvisation is the paradigm.

Trust is what it is about at this point. All concerned, especially the two ground observers, are bound to trust the judgment and skill of the captain.

But motivation is still on the table.  The motivation for more agility in governance is to lean out the overhead and concentrate all energy on throughput, that is: governance that actually promotes deliverable output that leads to mission outcomes.  Insofar as our daring captain is motivated for the right reasons, I say: yea verily! 

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Where you stand

Where you stand depends on where you sit

Richard Stengel
Editor, Time Magazine

Amen! When it's not your money, independent action looks pretty good. But, if the the independents are spending your money, governance looks a little different and perhaps a little better!

Actually, Stengel's point is that when you're outside the tent, and don't have responsibility for the consequences of your decisions, it's a lot easier to be a rebel. Inside the tent, things are a little different.

And, if you're an outsider who then finds themselves on the inside and responsible for lives and fortunes, things play a little differently.

It's easy to say "I'm the decider", but it only matters if in the deciding you are also taking responsibility for outcomes and consequences.

Think about it. Where you stand may well depend on where you sit.

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Eliyahu Goldratt

Eliyahu Goldratt, a truly innovative thinker, passed away last month, too early by 20 years at least.

Goldratt gave us "Theory of Constraints" and "Critical Chain", two really good ideas useful everyday in our business.  TOC--as explained in his book, The Goal--gave us a working paradigm for optimization focused on throughput, the stuff that matters and is valuable to customers/users.  He worked hard to convince everyone that optimizing department metrics does not optimize for the business; indeed, it's counter optimization.  From TOC, we have the underpinning for Lean, and "throughput accounting", a good concept for the agilists. 

From Critical Chain we learn that to protect the critical path and avoid 'merge bias' that destroys schedules, including agile schedules, we buffer to make parallel paths look tandem (serial, finish-to-start).  CP uber alles was his mantra.  And, Goldratt recognized the cumulative error of putting reserves at the task manager level; his idea: the PM should control reserves, buffering the whole project.

We should all take a moment and remember Eliyahu Goldratt.

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Quotation: goals

On leaders with staying power:

Most visionaries set a specific goal. When they reach that goal, then they institutionalize it.

Henry Kissinger

What's the point here?

It's a matter of separation: Separating those with staying power and an eye on legacy, and those that are just visionaries who are transitory and not lasting.

Driving a vision into the fabric of the institution is the way to have a real impact. Those who can do it are not just blue-sky thinkers; they are thinkers that make lasting impressions

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Sunk cost and the rear view mirror

Sunk cost: "everyone knows" that decisions are not to be made on the basis of trying to salvage sunk costs. The saying goes: what's done is done; decisions are to be made about options in the future. The past is past.

Well, if humans were robots, following that rule would be no big thing. But of course it's not that way, and what's more, we know it.

Now into the "sunk cost" arena comes another bias to add to the list: "continuation bias". The first I heard about it was in a post last month from our friends at Dark Matter: "flying in the rear view mirror". I quote:

Plan continuation bias is a recognised and subtle cognitive bias that tends to force the continuation of an existing plan or course of action even in the face of changing conditions

Of course there are other variants to this: "Continuing to do the same thing and expect a different result is nonsense", and other formulations.

Even Glen Alleman recently got into the act with a quote of Fitzgerald's First Law of Program Success:

There are only two phases to a big program: Too early to tell and too late to stop.

Program advocates like to keep bad news covered up until they have spent so much money that they can advance the sunk-cost argument;

that it’s too late to cancel the program because we’ve spent too much already.

Buy why?

It's relatively simple: we hate to lose, and most important we had to lose what we had. People who study these things say it's more than just anecdotal that we are very averse to risking what we have: thus, a utility response that is quite non-linear. We weight a loss, particular a loss of from a reference point of achievement, much more so than we favor a gain from the same reference.

Such reference point adjustment is the basis of a utility concept called "prospect theory". Originally formulated in the financial community, it easily extends to project management. It's a cousin of adjustment or anchor bias. Once we reach a pinnacle, the new height becomes the reference for subsequent measurements of loss.

And sunk cost is the cost to reach the pinnacle. If we can go no farther, or if continuing the same plan only gets us regression, we keep hoping things will change and we'll get back to where we were.

Might happen; might not. Continuation bias: beware!

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What is information?

I've been intrigued by a lot of the content in the book "The Information", a tour de force through the history and development of the concept of information as told by author James Gleick.

One intrigue: the definition of information [as posited by Claude Shannon of the Bell System in the WW II era] paraphrased here as:

The number of choices or degree of uncertainty in the possible statements, outcomes, or messages conveyed

Does this bring a frowny face? It should.

First: Shannon puts no attention on the meaning conveyed by the information.  His idea of information more or less ends with the message itself.

Second: I find it a little counter intuitive.  There's more information content in the uncertainty of multiple choices than there is in a single point outcome. 

But Shannon's point is this: information is 'emitted' as uncertainty turns into certainty.  It means there's little information in a single determinant outcome. Indeed Shannon's name for such an outcome is "bit", meaning one binary [yes, no] digit [or symbol] of outcome.

The corollary: more choices means more bits to represent the choices, and a richer set of possibilities.

Two other ideas:

1. To assure delivery of the message with high quality in spite of interference, add redundancy.  This means add patterns and to an extent make the message somewhat predictable
2. Redundancy takes away from the number of independent ideas that can be put across in a given space of time, so keep the number of ideas minimum if quality counts.
   
   Counterpoint: redundancy can be boring!  So, unless you have a lot of competition for your communication, and thus need the power of redundancy to get the message through, back off on repetition.

So, what does this have to do with project management anyway?

Well, consider executive communication, to include communication by means of a proposal.

1.  Maximum information is conveyed by showing the breadth of the choices you've evaluated and the array of dots you've considered in reaching whatever conclusions you present.  Indeed, the narrative that connects the myriad dots is likely rich in information, much more so than the description of just one dot.  Leave that stuff out, and you may still convey the bit of conclusion, but it's certainly not as rich as could be otherwise.
2. If there's lots of competition for the executive's time (buzz word: mind share), then that's tantamount to 'noise' in Shannon's world.  The countermeasure: redundancy (in effect: imaginative repetition) and patterns.  To some extent, establish predictability.  (Take note of this idea in the coming political campaigns!)
3. There's a trade between '1' and '2': richer information may be an advantage; getting your message through may be even a greater advantage

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