Project management: How to go about the most important skill that we do without knowing about.

You get recruited as a PM for a project (doesn’t matter if it small or big). In the real world, there might not be any charters, project steering committees or official sponsor per-se. You must gather all the information yourself. What is the 1st thing that you would do?

A. Questions: I would say you need to ask a lot of questions. Doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong, but questions will help you move from point A to point B. Some of them are as follows

Outcome	What is the expected outcome of the project?	If you get a crisp & clear answer then we are good. Best e.g. New year resolutions. I will quit smoking and start learning Salsa and the outcome is better health or company
Decision maker	who can take decisions? Especially financial.	There can be multiple people starting from the CEO to team lead. Identify and gather info. E.g. Pakistani army will always be the organization that India must talk to for peace.
Scope signoff	What have the clients agreed on as part of the project deliverables?	Always ask for documents as you need some solid base to talk to them in the future. You can trust in god, but please do ask for the data
Client side Rajnikanth	Who is the Big daddy from the client side? Is it only one person/multiple persons or multiple teams that you need to satisfy as part of the project outcome?	This is important, as the client at head office and the client at regional office would always have different priorities. Last but not the least, the client is always right.
Your team	Who are part of the project team? There are lots and lots of questions, not possible to write everything down. But keep asking.	No!!!! Facebook requests or lame-ass whatsapp joke forwards regularly doesn’t mean you care about your team. You really need to care. Still remember my buddy from army who thought Thai chicken sent to me, was uncooked and he did a tadka on it. (he really cared to check and rectify it)
procurement	PR/PO, TAT for closure of requests, billing process etc	Lot of delay can happen here. Gen Erwin Rommel’s procurement team was one of the main reasons for loss of the battle in Africa.
Technical	What and how is the stuff supposed to work and do?	Remember, one question that could have been asked 7000 yrs back was asked by Newton. Changed the world. Ask away.

You have asked as many questions as you can over a period of 2 weeks and have decent amount of information. The information needs to be processed and you must move on to the next step. That would-be simulation and scenario planning.

B. But remember having information is one thing and not acting on it is another. Once you have info, use it and act on it. There are numerous examples throughout history of the same.

German attack on Soviet Union: During the early days of war, there was a pact between Soviets and Germans called the Ribbentrop-Molotov nonaggression pact to prevent them fighting each other. While Stalin wanted to avert war with Germany at all costs, there were enough and more signs pointing out to Germany wanting to attack Soviet Union. Some of them are

1. Polish women who gathered on the opposite bank of one frontier river on 15 June, cupping their hands around their mouths to shout warnings, in broken Russian, to the Soviet guards facing them “Soviets, Soviets, the war is coming!” they were recorded as saying. “Soviets, the war will start in one week!

2. Only on 18 June did Stalin order aerial reconnaissance missions to be conducted along the USSR's western borders. Flying 400km (250 miles) from south to north, one pilot, Air Maj-Gen Georgy Zakharov, reported seeing “frontier regions west of the state border packed with troops… tanks, armoured cars and guns poorly concealed or not concealed at all… roads criss-crossed by motorcycles and what appeared to be staff cars”

3. Between 1 and 10 June, they captured 108 enemy spies and saboteurs, he told Komsomolskaya Pravda, and a further 200 or so in the final 12 days before the invasion. On 14 June, guards on the Belarusian section of the border relayed back to Moscow the correct date of the planned invasion, learnt from two captured saboteurs. The same date was revealed by saboteurs captured on 18 June.

Imagine!!! Such obvious signs and they get missed!!! So having information is one thing, not being able to use it to move forward is another.

Now that you have all the information at hand, how can you use it?

C. Run a simulation in your head first & document all of it (a series of steps/activities which will lead to closure of project. Please, please, please before you write this off as another psycho bullshit let me give you an example. Arjuna and the birds eye. Dronacharya placed a wooden bird on a tree and asked everyone what they say. Everyone except Arjuna said, they saw the tree, the branches etc. It was only Arjuna who said that he could see the eye of the bird. He was successful in shooting the bird too. Why was he able to do that? He could focus and visualize the entire process of hitting the bird.

Another example is from golf.

Have you ever heard of Jack Nicklaus, he is one of the greatest player of one of the most environmentally damaging, boring to watch and elitism game that is getting played in the world as on date!!! This is what he had to say about the way he plays “Before every shot I go to the movies inside my head. Here is what I see. First, I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then, I see the ball going there; its path and trajectory and even its behaviour on landing. The next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous image into reality. These home movies are a key to my concentration and to my positive approach to every shot”

D. Then once you have something, run it past your team, there will always be that one Hirakani in your team with a valuable insight. Multiple perspectives always work wonders. There will always be that one small thing, which someone will notice, which makes a huge difference.

The story of Hirakani Buruj, a watch tower at the tower of fort Raigad names after a woman selling milk. The fort of Raigad was supposed impregnable and close to impossible to conquer or that is what everyone thought, except a mom decided otherwise. The lady got late and the fort gates got locked in the evening. She had a baby waiting for her and in her desperation, she somehow found a way and scaled down towards her village. Next day to everyone’s shock she again came selling milk again. To honor her a tower was erected to increase the security and it was named after the lady. Imagine if this input would not have been available, then probably Shivaji would have lost!!!

E. Document stuff: A simple book and pen would do the job. Every army officer has one, to ensure nothing gets left out. We are not PARAM or ANUPAM type super computers who can remember everything and anything that gets thrown at us. Infact documentation is so important, that I will claim that Brits were able to rule us for such a long time only because of documentation. Indian history is mostly oral and if there are disruptions things can get lost. They have got lost during invasions in the past.

How many of you have read the history of Rajendra Chola one of the world’s greatest philosopher kings? How many of you know about the various poets, philosophers of our ancient times? If only they could document the stuff, we would have been on a different level.

Now imagine Brits, they documented every damn thing starting from 1600s till Indian independence. The amount of data that was generated and the decisions that they could take because of that!!!

It was because of them, we were able to enjoy Ajanya and Ellora caves!! It was only in 1819, when Jon Smith, who belonged to the 28th Cavalry accidentally chanced upon the horse-shoe shaped rock while hunting a tiger in and around the Deccan Plateau region. The entrance to the cave like structures intrigued the British official enough to make them cross the Waghora River in the vicinity and reach the caves. It took almost 2000 years for us to find out about our history by mistake by an outsider!!!

So, document important things, lessons learnt, decisions taken, approvals needed and given etc. Oh BTW MoM (minutes of the meeting) & its continuity is an important tool as part of the documentation.

F. Scenario planning: Surprise is the best weapon in the arsenal of any army. All armies plan & spend a lot on not getting surprised through war games and exercises, somewhat like a what-if scenario and how to react to them even if surprised. Would like to share 2 interesting facts/stories on these remarkable gentlemen. One a Carthagian general who almost destroyed Rome and the other was a shell consultant who predicted lot of things which was missed by almost all governments and companies in the whole world.

This reminds me of the world’s biggest ambush which involved about close to 80000 to 1 lac soldiers from both sides. I am referring to the battle between Romans and their arch enemy Hannibal Barca at the lake Trasimene. It was a complete surprise and a total victory for Hannibal, the entire army of Romans was killed!!! That my dear friends, is what surprise does to us. Let me repeat, in the modern times an ambush is when a couple of people are killed using modern gadgets, but this was 2000 years back against a much battle-hardened enemy!!! A whole town was slaughtered.

The art of scenario planning was perfected by shell the oil major by a man called Pierre Wack. By the standards of Shell executives, Wack was wacky. He almost invariably had an incense stick burning in his office and his own favourite guru was not Peter Drucker or Douglas McGregor but a bizarre bald Russian called Georges Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff was a spiritual teacher who died in France in 1949. He studied Sufi mysticism in his youth and brought some of its ideas to the West. Wack visited him regularly during the second world war when Gurdjieff was based in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, today the home of INSEAD, one of Europe's leading business schools. After Gurdjieff's death, and while employed by Shell, Wack continued to spend several weeks a year meditating in India with another guru. Gurdjieff taught that with special insight it was possible to “see” the future. But he did not mean literally to see with your eyes. Wack explained this form of seeing by telling the story of a gardener he had once met in Japan. The gardener had pointed to a thick bamboo stem and explained that if a pebble was thrown at it and it hit the trunk slightly off-centre, it would bounce off and make hardly any sound. But if it hit the trunk dead centre, it would make a distinctive “clonk”. He then said that to be sure to hit the stem in this way, it was necessary to hear the distinctive sound in your own mind in advance of throwing the pebble—and then to concentrate intensely on that sound.

According to one of his colleagues, Wack believed that anticipating the future involved a similar discipline. It is, he said, “about being in the right state of focus to put your finger unerringly on the key facts or insights that unlock or open understanding”. That is not to say that Wack was a kind of clairvoyant. He was also well versed in the facts of the real world. He analysed them and the vast range of possible futures that they presented. Then, with the help of a spiritually heightened awareness, he was able to focus on those particular facts that would help him to see, in a metaphorical sense, the future. He once described the future as “the rapids”—traversable terrain that required intense concentration on the task in hand.

While the stories are interesting, how does it help you in the overall project management? How to go about doing scenario planning?

It is simple and not complicated

1. What if: Use this as a prefix and ask lot of questions. What if, the vendor delays or a team member quits his job, if the scope increases, if the product is not performing as per the specs.

2. Then would be closing the loop. What if, then? What if, a vendor delays, then I would do these things to reduce the overall risk.

3. Think about the unthinkable and plan on how to reduce the damage or mitigation.

G. Put a realistic plan in place and ensure “Sweety, I am always ready”: As they say in the movies, we love it when a plan comes together. The best e.g. of an amazing plan put in place that resulted in total victory was the 1971 war and liberation of Bangladesh. The political and military leadership was in tune, aware of the situation and prepared to wait to ensure victory. The urban legend of PM Indira Gandhi asking Field Marshal Manekshaw whether he was ready and his instant reply “Sweety, I am always ready” but he never wanted to attack till all preparations were in place. Time taken to prepare was 7 months, and the operations got completed in 13 days. 13 days to give birth to a new nation with the surrender of close to 95000 troops!!!! It was a complete victory from military, political and diplomatic perspectives.

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