Stop digging.

Second rule of hole management, determine the depth.

Third rule of hole management, start filling in the hole.

These rules may seem rather obvious but have a look around…

     – How many people do you see practicing these rules?
     – How do you start practicing these rules?

Teams often get lost and forget that in addition to doing their work they need to practice some simple project management.  But once they have strayed away from the original plan they begin to improvise and create all kinds of work arounds.  Improvisation is so much more fun than structured work.  When improvising you get to be a hero, you get to rescue the project, bring it back from the brink and the people around you reinforce you for your great achievement.  This is hole digging behaviour.

If you don’t  agree with try the following; go find the original plan.  Often you will find that the plan is stale and out of date, the plan was never really a plan, or the plan never existed.  So if the plan really isn’t in good shape then get the team to stop what they are doing and assess the situation.  I often hear people saying, we can’t stop it would cost us too much time.  Hold on, I thought we just realised we were in a hole and needed to find a way out?

To assess the situation we must figure out what we are expected to deliver, then how much of it has been done & which bits are usable.  Now we can figure out how much remains to be done.  The other good bit about this type of exercise is we can determine how much longer we need in order to complete the remaining work.  If you think about it you know how much has been done, how long it took and how many people were involved.  This will give you a pretty good read on productivity.  Use that bit of data to re-baseline the programme.

West Wing – Season 2 Episode 10

This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. 

A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’   And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ 

The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

 

We have seen this approach work time and time again and we have helped teams stop what they are doing, figure out where they are, how to recover and actually recover.  This has been done on projects that cost several hundred thousand of pounds and we have seen it done on multiple billion pound projects.

Slow down before you try to speed up.  If you stop and make the assessment you can find your way out of these holes.  Stopping to make the assessment also lets the team know that something different is possible.

PS.  If you keep digging at some point the hole gets so deep that the walls cave in on top of you.