Lesson 5: Managing Your Project: Part 1
Step 3: Evaluation
After developing an idea that responded to and identified and agreed-upon need, and generating different strategies of solving that need, you are now in one of the most interesting steps in the methodology: evaluation.
Based on the Lewis Method, in my experiences, the evaluation step is a very critical step for the project. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Reason #1: Evaluating the project at this point involves a look at potential risks, calculating if the risks are acceptable, calculating possible contingency plans if consequences occur, and performing what Lewis calls a force-field analysis.
A what?
A force-field analysis looks at factors which the project team expects will both assist and resist the project. While this analysis helps identify some of the more obvious risks that a project might face (such as weather risks, economic risks, personnel shortage risks), it also encourages the team to look at the less-obvious social forces, as well. Are there other divisions or units in the organization that might support or hinder the project? How do you expect this to impact the project? Lewis actually suggests that we put a number value on the forces that are supporting the project, and those that are against it, and perform a calculation. In this introductory course I don’t want to go into that kind of detail, but we can say that the result of this analysis will reveal one of the following directives for the project management team:
- Strengthen the positive forces so they can withstand the negative ones (and then some).
- Avoid the negative forces (via some kind of workaround or contingency plan).
- Neutralize the negative forces so that they become weaker.
Lewis advises us that the best option to choose #3, and my experiences support this, too. However, most of us (including yours truly at times…hey, nobody’s perfect) choose option #1, which is the most ineffective, and toughest, route of them all.
Why do we choose #1? Well, it does seem to be the most straightforward of the choices, and the one that in my opinion fits most closely within the North American cultural norm. But it requires the most resources and energy, and may not ultimately take the project where it wants to go. So consider choosing #3 as a viable way to strengthen the health of your project.
Reason #2: You should expect to endure situations where some people do not want to perform an extensive evaluation (just like they did not want to spend a lot of time on looking at different problem statements, either). These people are quite often those that I term, compulsively optimistic folks: they are so single-mindedly optimistic that they cannot endure listening to anything that they perceive as negative.
What adds sadness to this situation is that, really, in my experiences, these people are awfully nice, and their intentions are almost always good. However, these people have an underdeveloped sense of negativity; what an average person considers perhaps slightly negative, they will consider to be unacceptably negative.
Why am I going on and on about this? Well, because these people may be very easy-going, but can offer an alarming resistance to you if, during the evaluation stage, you want the team to focus on potential negative risks, threats, and other things that can negatively impact your project.
So what can you do?
The best response is to refer to the fact that the team doesn’t at least identify and discuss these potential negative forces, then the actual human beings working on the project may suffer because as a result of the team’s negligence in this stage. Since the compulsively optimistic are almost always very people-oriented folks, this usually helps the discussion move forward.
Isn’t project management interesting?
References used in this section (these books are available for order via the Resources link above):
The Project Manager’s Desk Reference, by James P. Lewis. Chapter 2; Chapter 4; Chapter 5.
