“It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about ‘making the right decision’ and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right” –Sun Microsystems found and former CEO, Scott McNealy, as paraphrased by Ed Batista in “Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision,” HBR OnPoint (Spring 2015)
Before there were good maps of the world and advanced navigation technologies, sailors often used dead reckoning to find their way across the oceans. With dead reckoning, the navigator embraces that there is no omniscient view of his or her position. Rather, the current position (and likely future position) is estimated using the direction and speed calculated since the last positional measurements were made. Such navigation requires constant vigilance — constant attention to day-to-day record keeping, charting of periodic updates, and evaluating the surrounding conditions (e.g. how might wind be impacting the currently set course?).
I’ve long found dead reckoning to be a useful metaphor to help explain what the best project managers actually do for technology innovation projects and creative projects — versus what some people think they do.
The fantasy of the omniscient navigator
Despite years of talk about scrum and agile processes, most company leaders, I believe, actually imagine that “good project management” is still some kind of perfect, omniscient pre-planning and execution.
In this view, it’s like a medieval king believing that his ancient mariner has a god-like GPS and detailed charts of the world. The king blesses his heroic ships as they leave the port, fantasizing that the crew will arrive on time, on budget, and “to spec” through Northwest Passage to the Indies … without even knowing if such a passage exists. They will all return home healthy, famous, and rich.
While it would be right for the king to hope for success with such a voyage, the rational king must know that there is great danger and great unpredictability for his sailing crew. Success, the king knows, really depends on the leadership of the captain and the skill of the navigator to make good decisions, day-by-day, in reaction to the changing conditions and new information that they glean during their voyage.
Projects plans with a high degree of advance predictive power are only those that are based on repetition of a process that has already been done at least twice. I say twice because you should always assume that the first iteration of any project was filled with iteration and exploration that was not necessary for the second iteration. It will be the second iteration (and subsequent iterations) of an identical project plan that will start to yield efficiencies. Indeed, it is during the second and subsequent iterations of a repeated process that the science of process optimization can be applied.
Thus, after the first attempts to find and explore the New World and passages to India variously succeeded and failed, commercial traders and colonizers stepped in and professionalized the Atlantic crossing “process.” Eventually, getting from England to New England became a fairly routine endeavor.
And, as a modern example, I always point out to my teams: Boeing is very good at building predictive plans for how it will ship its 100th plane in a series. But recent years have once again underlined that they are terrible at predicting how long it will take to make the first plane of a new type (see “Boeing 787 Dreamliner: a timeline of problems“).
The reality: the navigator’s dead reckoning
Why? Most creative or technology innovation projects — at least the projects worth doing — chart a wholly new course. Project managers for such projects are like the captain/navigator of those early Renaissance sea voyages.
There are no detailed maps and advanced technology to tell you exactly where you will be at each moment. Like the explorer setting out without a map and without a GPS — and with only a vague knowledge of where the far shore lies — you set off from the “port” and begin a day-to-day process of agile iteration towards the vision you want to create.
So much of good project management is the day-to-day adjustments to the project plan in response to new information and changing conditions. The initial “plan” is only useful as the starting point to navigation.
How to apply dead reckoning: agile
So, don’t fret too much about your plans to start. As Scott McNealy says in the opening quote, don’t spend too much time making your up-front decisions. Make your decisions — and then work like crazy to carry through your decision.
Really, I’m reinforcing why we need to use agile processes for technology innovation projects and creative projects (like games, films). Agile processes rely on getting a framework built to start (user stories, backlog, project team, general timeline, vision) and then applying the “dead reckoning” mindset: constantly evaluating course and speed and readjusting future projections based on the results of each fixed period of time — a sprint.
This dead-reckoning mindset relies on hardcore data collection, though, to be done well. Without collecting data, without conducting retrospectives, without constantly testing your project against your goals for quality and user experience, you are just sailing randomly across the ocean.
What makes for real navigation in a dead-reckoning mindset is constantly engaging the craftsmanship of project management — continuous intra-team communication, acceptance testing, usability studies, velocity metrics, backlog management. Without applying the tools constantly, iteratively, you are just sailing aimlessly according to your original plans — plans that fade more and more into the “there be dragons” territory at the edge of the map.
I especially want to emphasize metrics here. This is why I am not a huge fan of the pure sticky-note based brands of scrum. I always push for stories and tasks to be captured in a database that is collecting historic data. Quality project metrics are the equivalent of introducing inertial navigation technology to the principles of dead reckoning. With inertial navigation, navigators using dead-reckoning principles were able to predict much more accurately their future course.
Similarly, with quality project metrics collected for each project and each team member, you slowly build out a “map” for future projects. With project management research now showing that they best way to scope your next project is by comparing it to past projects (see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow for cases studies), your data is precious. It is the pathway to you becoming a master navigator.
Patrick O'Kelley 