Less than Obvious Tips That Will Boost Your Project Milestone Reviews

Improving milestone reviews involves doing the basics well while avoiding some less obvious aspects that undermine effectiveness.

Four basic things to improve project milestone reviews

Autopsies and Improving the Dreaded Project Milestone Review provides insights and four basic things to improve project milestone reviews:

• Do not do a milestone review on every task.

• Approach the milestone review with a positive attitude.

• Seek an experienced facilitator.

• Allow ample time.

Remember, we want to break the program into parts just like an autopsy, but the participants do not need to feel like they have been on the slab. And no one should call the funeral home when the milestone review is done.

An average autopsy case takes about four hours, including the paperwork. Milestone reviews are similar.

Communication is Important

A milestone review is a facilitated session. Unfortunately, we often approach milestone reviews as just another meeting.

The cause and effect relationships in the FINESSE fishbone diagram apply to effectively communicating at a milestone meeting. The seven bones are Framing, Illustrations, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics. The Five Reasons Being An Effective Communicator Helps Your Technical Career will also help your milestone reviews.

Less than Obvious Tips

1. The Project Charter Consistently Pays Dividends

The benefits of a formal project charter should be obvious to all project managers; however, in practice, this is not the case.

A project charter is a short document that outlines the entirety of the project. It includes the project mission, goals, deliverables, tasks, timelines, roles & responsibilities, performance measures, and stakeholders. The Project Management Institute’s PMBOK Guide (and other best practice standards) describe it as an essential deliverable t and one of the first deliverables in every project.

The primary benefit of a project charter is that it sets the working contract between team members rather than following the legal contract between all parties. Legal contracts should be modified if they are not in alignment with the collective direction of the project.

2. A Synthesis Document Prevents Backsliding

A synthesis document aims to combine a number of different pieces into a whole. The document includes all of the relevant decisions, work products approved by project participants, points of contention, project performance metrics, and supporting information that will facilitate everything into final form. It is more detailed than a decision log and much more concise than a SharePoint site.

In practice, a synthesis document progressively builds into a final form that lets the project team know they are finished.

The synthesis document identifies conflicts early and often. The document also prevents re-opening decisions or backsliding from previous agreement points.

3. Make It Interactive

The typical milestone review centers on a Gantt chart that describes the tasks, their dependencies, and timelines. The project controls function usually brings in reams of papers or crushing PowerPoint slides. Although the official tools to analyze and report on the schedule, budget, and quality are necessary, the entire meeting does not need to be aligned with these energy-sucking elements.

All of this information should be provided to participants in advance. The first ten to fifteen minutes of the milestone meeting should be devoted to quiet time for the participants to read the information. Getting the material in advance and allowing time to review it provides the opportunity for a more interactive review.

There is no need, and it is disrespectful, to read basic information to trained professionals. Use your valuable time together for a more beneficial purpose.

The primary benefit of group interaction is that critical thinking can be applied to issues like quality and risk.

4. Avoid a Beat-Down Session

By their nature, milestone reviews identify gaps. However, the event's primary purpose is to provide the team with project status and frame potential corrective action. Most corrective actions cannot be finalized in the meeting because the actions require some re-allocation of resources that, in turn, require senior management approval.

Remember that an autopsy should not make those participating in it think they were on the slab.

The benefit of avoiding a beat-down session is continued energy for the project, subsequent milestone reviews, and a successful end product.

5. The Follow-Up Is Critical

Most of us are happy when the milestone meeting is over. We wait for the project manager to send us the notes and the updated project control documentation. Then we more or less keep doing things the way we did before the milestone review.

One useful practice is to set multiple meetings related to key tasks over the next two weeks while in the milestone meeting. The big stuff is obvious, but here we are including some of the small stuff, too. For the project manager, success can be described as being busier in the two weeks after the meeting than they were in the two weeks preparing for it.

The benefit is that creative thinking continues. Some things that seemed small in the milestone meeting were actually swamped by the larger issues. Better clarification and improved solutions will be gained in the aftermath.

Three End-of-Year Examples

A recent major infrastructure project had a milestone review that went below average. The session was cold, stale, and limited progress toward getting some milestone activities on track. I attribute it to a project manager and an executive sponsor who continued doing things they always had and did not spend much time making the review more productive. This one gets a ragged C.

Another recent example comes from a multi-year asset management project. The project manager was fully engaged, and the creative executive sponsor was present throughout the milestone review. The participants used the master schedule and project charter as the basis of the meeting but focused the meeting on interactive and avoided any beat-downs (although two were probably in order). The information was provided to participants in advance. The follow-up meetings are aggressive and in progress. This one gets a high B.

A third example is related to a multi-year planning project. The project manager and executive sponsor are fully engaged. Both rely on their team of subject matter experts and facilitators to be creative. A charter and a synthesis document guide the process. All information for the milestone review was provided the week before the session. The session was highly interactive and productive. This one gets a solid A.

Putting It into Practice

Improving milestone reviews involves doing the basics well while avoiding some less obvious aspects that undermine effectiveness. Project managers who seek to excel by practicing these tips will keep their projects on track. Moreover, they will keep their team members coming back and off the autopsy slab.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, facilitation, and asset management at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Contact us if you are looking for more effective approaches to program development and program management services.

Founded by JD Solomon, Communicating with FINESSE is a not-for-profit community of technical professionals dedicated to being better trusted advisors. Join the community for free.

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Three Things To Avoid When Performing An Environmental Root Cause Analysis

Environmental root cause analysis creates some special considerations; however, an RCA is an RCA no matter where you find a failure.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a collective term that describes a wide range of approaches, tools, and techniques used to uncover the causes of problems. The American Society for Quality (ASQ) defines a root cause as a factor that caused a non-conformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement.

The international risk standard, ISO 31000, adds clarification that root cause analysis attempts to identify the root or original causes instead of only the immediately obvious symptoms. RCA is most often applied to the evaluation of major loss but may also be used to analyze losses on a more global basis to determine where improvements can be made.

Typical Environmental Situations

Environmental root cause analysis is relevant to a wide variety of situations. A few that I have evaluated include the following:

• Intermittent dye discharges from an industrial facility into nearby streams

• Algal blooms in lakes and ponds

• Fish kills and aquatic plant damage

• Regulated or emerging contaminates discharged in rivers and waterways

• Sand blockage of a shallow-draft, coastal inlet

• Sedimentation accumulation in streams and ponds from construction activities

• Air quality impacts from commercial and land-clearing operations

• Numerous regulatory violations related to surface water, groundwater, solid waste, hazardous waste, and air quality where a single source of responsibility is not easily identified

Three Things To Avoid

Equipment and business process failures are usually identified in a short time, whereas environmental failures are not realized for months, years, or decades after the first distress is experienced.

Environmental failures are often more related to biological and chemical interactions, whereas physical interactions heavily influence equipment and business process failures. Once failure begins, there is a steady progression and little self-healing in physical systems. In natural systems, there is a greater opportunity for self-healing. The sum effect is that symptoms are usually noticed earlier in physical systems than in natural systems.

The P-F curve used in mechanical systems has similar applications to natural systems. (Source: Aladon)

In reliability engineering, Potential Failure (P-F) is defined as the interval between the point when a potential failure becomes detectable and the point at which it degrades into a functional failure. The P-F curve is conceptually powerful in establishing condition monitoring technologies or predictive tools to detect these potential failures before they occur.

Regardless of how fast a failure occurs or how noticeable it is, a failure analysis is a failure analysis no matter where you find it. Good root cause analysis principles are the same for any type of system.

Three primary mistakes occur with doing environmental root cause analysis.

Too Much “Physics of Failure”

In physical systems, the concept of the physics of failure refers to the use of degradation equations that describe how physical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, or electrical mechanisms evolve over time and eventually induce failure. Underlying the physics of failure are failure mechanisms that essentially describe how something fails (for mechanical systems. corrosion, erosion, fatigue, and overload are the four primary mechanisms of failure).

Failure mechanisms shed light on how things fail but do not provide the causal relationships needed to establish and mitigate the root causes.

In all RCAs, it is easy to dwell too much on studying failure mechanisms. This is especially true when performing environmental RCAs because the environmental sector contains more scientists and researchers than engineers and financial professionals. The applied nature of the latter two types of professionals leads to a “good enough” effect that optimizes resources and time-effectively gets to the end game of reducing future failures.

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is spending too much time studying.

Too Little Structure

Most formally trained RCA professionals are in the manufacturing or healthcare sectors, where the cost of failure is readily noticeable and can be acute. Many seasoned RCA professionals have environmental RCAs in their portfolios, but they are not usually on top of the contact list of scientists and regulators.

Neither formally trained nor having ready access to seasoned RCA professionals, many scientists and regulators use (or develop) their own approaches for doing the failure analysis. The result of not using a proven RCA methodology results in spending too many resources, taking too much time, and, most importantly, not identifying the correct root causes.

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is not usually a proven RCA methodology.

Too Much Focus on a Single Cause

Environmental RCAs are usually driven because of non-compliance with statutes and regulations. Regulators, impacted parties, and their attorneys seek to place blame (and restitution) on a single party.

This leads to erroneous RCAs because, by definition, there are multiple causes of failure when a failure occurs in any system.

The problem is further compounded by environmental failures falling into the domain of regulators and politicians, who naturally seek to assign the blame and move on. The healthcare system is most akin to the environmental sector in this way; however, the healthcare system is more interested in risk mitigation and continual improvement of systems (albeit quietly).

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is not recognizing that there is always more than one root cause.

One Big Solution

The one big solution is to use a formally trained RCA professional with a standardized methodology. The process ultimately will take less time, require fewer resources, and identify the true root causes that lead to better performance and fewer risks.

Moving Forward

The three things that every science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professional should do is:

1. Take a course in root cause analysis

2. Identify an RCA professional you trust (you will need one at some point)

3. Insist on doing a proper RCA when a failure occurs

An RCA is an RCA no matter where you find the failure.

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JD Solomon Inc provides program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Contact us about our FAST (Frame, Analyze, Solve, Transmit) methodology for root cause analysis and our RCA experience in the environmental sector. Visit Communicating with FINESSE for communication approaches for issues involving complexity, uncertainty, and failure.

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Pee Dee River Basin Council Launches Into Phase 2 of Water Planning Effort

Clemson's Tom Walker, Facilitator JD Solomon. and SCDNR's Brooke Czwartacki, Andy Wachob, and Scott Harder are the support team for the Pee Dee RBC

The 25-person Pee Dee River Basin Council (RBC) has moved into Phase 2 of its 24-month program. The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources is the lead agency. Brown and Caldwell (BC) and JD Solomon Inc are teamed to provide facilitation and plan development. JD Solomon is the lead facilitator for the effort.

Phase 2 consists of refining and applying three different models of the basin. SCDNR is developing water demand projections and CDM Smith is performing the surface water modeling. Both models are Excel-based. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is providing the groundwater model of the basin using the finite difference model MODFLOW.

The Pee Dee RBC will review and refine the models over the next few months. The outputs will be the basis of strategies, monitoring, and risk management recommendations developed specifically for this basin. Subsequent phases will include prioritizing and negotiating the different strategies among the different interests and developing the report.

In other recent news, the Pee Dee RBC elected long-time basin resident and businessman Buddy Richardson as chair and Waccamaw Riverkeeper Cara Schildtknecht as Vice-Chair.

Visit the Pee Dee River Basin Council website for more information.

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JD Solomon Inc provides facilitation, asset management, and program development at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the natural environment. Founded by JD Solomon, Communicating with FINESSE is a not-for-profit community of technical professionals committed to being better trusted advisors. Visit the CWF website for guest insights from practitioners on effective ways to communicate with decision makers.