POSITIVE SIGNS

The following are all indicators that should be regarded as positive signs on a project.

People are having fun

Roland Huntford's account (1993) of Amundsen's return journey makes exhilarating reading. Amundsen knows he has won, all he needs to do now is return his team to safety and announce his achievement to the world. He has food and fuel aplenty and for the last 200 miles marker flags “ that he deployed during his outward journey “ now make the return trip more like an extended ski race. Doing 20 “30 miles per day (three to four times what Scott is doing) his men career into Framheim, their base, on January 26th, 1912. It is a good sign if your project gets to a point where:

• people are strutting around a bit

• their confidence is up

• morale is high, pretty much independent of working conditions on the project

• they feel the worst is behind them

• their belief in their own abilities and those of the team, has increased

• there is less tension and ill-temper

• there are more practical jokes

• people enjoy being in the team environment; in short, people are having fun

• milestones are being met

Amundsen laid out his plan in terms of daily milestones that all his team could understand: each day they would travel 20 miles, a quarter of a degree of latitude, and stop. Thus every four days they were a degree closer to the Pole. Also as soon as they had done their 20 miles, they could stop. Milestones completing and being ticked off is a good sign of progress as well as being a significant morale booster, since it implies that the estimates that were made before the project got under way appear to have been good ones.

Independent feedback

You may receive an early indication from a source independent of the project team that the project is working. Independent is the key word here. This is sometimes called " putting your fingers in the wounds." In the case of a project to develop a product, this could mean a demonstration version, a prototype, an early release, or a partially working system. There was a period in Operation Desert Storm where the general public in the West were receiving little or no such independent feedback from the Allies, with the result that we were very unclear as to how that particular project was progressing. ( Note: (before you write to complain!) I first drafted this particular chapter of the book in mid-February, 1991. At that time the land war in the Gulf had not yet started and it was unclear exactly what was going on.)

People leave the team alone

This one is more from the project team's point of view. If the project is going well, there will appear to be fewer outside interruptions, people sticking their noses in, meetings, and so on.

Life after the project

Again, more from the team's point of view: people start to talk of a life after the project ends. They have been bound up with it for so long but now they can begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Common vision

The goal has stabilized; there is complete accord and no confusion as to what the ultimate objective is.

Few crises

Nothing appears to have been forgotten; there is very little firefighting; everything is calm and efficient.

Negative signs

The following are indicators, any one of which should make a project leader extremely nervous about a project.

Milestones are not being met

Things aren't working out according to plan. Estimates appear to have been whacky. Milestones which were reported as done somehow become undone. The same milestone gets rescheduled several times.

"Everything's under control"

It's a negative sign if somebody, particularly the project leader, uses this phrase!

Low morale

High staff turnover or sickness. People looking dour or moaning a lot. An apparent absence of anything that could be termed team spirit. Nobody appears to be enjoying things very much. A loss of confidence in the team.

Personality clashes

These would be worrying particularly if they occur in the upper echelons of the project's management.

Nobody's having fun

A really extreme instance of this is Scott's return from the Pole which makes appalling reading: it takes colossal effort from his weakened and demoralized men to move what have now become light loads, a few miles. Nerves are racked as meager supplies run low and depots are difficult to find. One of the team, P.O. Evans, dies. Oates, the horse handler, is suffering from an old leg wound he received during the Boer War. He too dies; he walks out of the tent, never to be seen again. Finally, 14 miles short of a supply depot, Scott and his two remaining companions, held up by a blizzard, pitch camp. They are never to set forth again.

Procrastination

You ask about particular jobs several times, and each time you find an excuse why the job hasn't been done. An interesting historical example of this is General George B. McClellan's command of the Army of the Potomac during the early part of the American Civil War, where Lincoln kept asking him to advance on the Confederate Army and McClellan kept finding reasons not to (this earned McClellan the sobriquet The Virginia Creeper !). See Cotton (1960, 1961, 1963).

Goalposts keep shifting

The goal has never stabilized. Each time you thought you had identified it, it got changed or expanded in some way. Note that this can happen through the process of creeping elegance : lots of small changes to the goal are made. Each one in itself is small and can probably be accommodated without too much difficulty. However, the sum of all the changes represents a dramatic change to the goal.

Mistakes are being made

Lots of things seem to have been forgotten; mistakes become more frequent; there's a lot of carelessness about.

Lots of crises

There appears to be a crisis every other day. Panic meetings are commonplace. Firefighting is the order of the day.

No independent feedback

All you have is the project leader's assurances that things are under control. There is nothing you can see and feel for yourself.

The slough of despond

A feeling, either among the team or the customer, that there is no end in sight. A good historical example of this was the Battle of Passchendaele fought between June and November 1917 in Flanders (Macdonald, 1978; Terraine, 1977). In popular memory it has become the classic First World War battle. The summer of 1917 was one of the worst on record, and the rain turned the low-lying Flanders land into a sea of mud in which men literally drowned.

The Battle of Passchendaele actually consisted of a number of smaller battles and the result, from the infantryman's point of view, was that time after time he was asked to cross a churned-up morass in the face of withering machine gun and artillery fire to attack German lines protected by vast belts of barbed wire. Those men who survived one battle were soon thrown into the next one, with the result that men lost hope. The war would go on for ever. They would all die, it was just a question of when “ and better to do it sooner rather than later and avoid the awful suffering of living and fighting in a quagmire. If your project gets to the point where people are repeatedly being asked to work overtime, put in one more effort, come in at weekends, and if they feel that no real progress is being made, then your project is in trouble.

The rumor machine

The normal grapevine that exists in any organization suddenly gets replaced by a rumor machine, and that machine seems to be spewing out wilder and wilder rumors as the days go by.

Things are not as expected

As you have planned your project you will have gone through the process of visualizing every step of the journey. As a result of doing this you will be expecting certain things to be a certain way, that is there will be signs you will be looking out for and expecting to see. If you do not see them or if the signs are not what you expected, this could be a cause for concern. An example of this from history is the Battle of the Somme. Part of the aim of the artillery bombardment (which was discussed in Chapter 5) was to cut the enemy's barbed wire entanglements. It was confidently predicted that these would be cut by firing shrapnel. However, on the eve of the infantry assault, scouting parties were reporting large tracts of barbed wire intact. These reports were ignored by headquarters staff “ being put down to nerves “ with the resulting disaster that we have already described.

"No surprises "

Run your projects on the basis of no surprises. This means that there should only be one real crime: that is, to be aware of some impending problem on a project and not to alert anybody to the fact. This applies to anyone connected with the project: leader, team or customer. Mistakes can and will be made and this is all allowed for, but to keep some time-bomb hidden, for whatever reason, is to cause a major threat to the project and to let down the other people involved in it.