The Key to Your Success Is Using a Methodology

What do you do when facing a new problem or challenge?

Have you thought about the actual process you use?

Do you fumble along blindly, changing your direction or approach when you bump into obstacles? Do you try to discover a new path? Do you even know where you are going?

What you need is a road map. Having a map to guide you in an unfamiliar area is essential.

When I pilot an airplane, I use checklists. Checklists give you repeatability, consistency, and safety. Flying is the safest way to travel because of this.

What if your problem or goal is challenging? Then it’s even more important to have a tool you can leverage to complete the job.

Cynical Methodology Overview

A methodology is “a particular procedure or set of procedures.”

Cynical Methodology is not a single methodology; Cynical Methodology is a term I use to refer to a family of methodologies based on Cynical Theory.

I choose a specific methodology, from all those available in the Cynical Methodology toolbox, that is most appropriate for the problem.

Since I view everything as a problem, Cynical Project Management is the first one I pull out of the toolbox.

Cynical Project Management provides a simple framework of the steps required to solve problems. The Pareto Principle proposes “80% of your benefits result from 20% of the effort”. The Cynical Project Management methodology focuses on doing that 20% of tasks well to reap 80% of the benefits.

Even if you have a simple goal (or problem), it can be beneficial to perform each step to ensure you’ve considered every factor.

You don’t have to be a geek to use a methodology. You already use them to accomplish tasks — even if you don’t formally identify them as a methodology.

For example, do you know how to parallel park? If so, you are using a methodology. If you can’t parallel park, then the missing link is a methodology — you don’t thoroughly understand the problem and the step-by-step process to solve it.

When I have a problem or challenge, I use my IT skills to resolve them. I view challenging problems as a project because they have the same characteristics as a project (one-time activity, specific objective, unique, etc.). I use project management processes to guide me to a successful resolution.

Therefore, I will use project management terms to explain the concepts below. Please don’t be intimidated — they are simple, atomic concepts.

There are five steps to the Cynical Project Management methodology. This article provides a high-level overview (subsequent articles will examine each step in depth).

1. GOAL SETTING

Everything starts with a goal. It is the end toward which effort is directed.

If you don’t have a clear and specific goal, you can’t expect to reach it.

You may be familiar with SMART goals. It is a common framework used to develop goals. If it is new to you, start there; for the rest of you, I presume you are familiar with SMART goals and how to use them.

Write down important goals

Writing it down is a clarifying step. If you can’t write your goal clearly, you don’t understand it. If you don’t understand it, how the heck are you going to achieve it?

The act of describing the goal helps clarify the purpose.

Where do people go wrong with SMART goal setting?

A common area of failure is “Measurable.” What is the explicit measure of success? How do you know when you have finished?

Measurements are mandatory when you are tracking progress. They provide feedback and learning opportunities — you make adjustments, based on your measurements, to refine your plan.

The second area of failure is “Time-related.” For big goals, I made the mistake of leaving myself lots of time to accomplish a goal. Unfortunately, other activities (not directed at achieving the goal) filled the time.

Now I set an aggressive timeline based on the amount of work I have identified. I work well under deadline pressure; it is extra motivation for me. That may not work for you — that’s OK.

I often don’t hit my deadline, but I’ve made more progress than if I had started with a looser time boundary. I don’t feel bad when I reassess progress and extend the deadline based on more knowledge.

2. OPTIONS IDENTIFICATION

There are six ways from Sunday to do anything. If a problem is complex, we need to consider all the options.

The last thing you want to do is pick the first option you identify, or do what you’ve always done. It may be correct, but it may be wrong! How do you know which it is if you only have one option?

During this step, you must identify ALL options. Do not make judgments about their viability, practicality, cost, benefits, etc.

Options Identification Barriers

The following lists why people don’t invest time in options identification:

1. Hurry -  external time pressure is a strong influence. So instead of investing time to understand the problem, you feel pressured into doing something.
2. Habit  -  familiarity may breed contempt for other ideas. People often don’t see how their biases (knowledge, experience, assumptions, fears, etc.) influence their decisions. Out-of-the-box thinking or an open mind is required to overcome this.
3. Ignorance  -  people don’t have the knowledge or skills required. This process isn’t taught in school and is often the realm of specialty professions.
4. Bad Advice  -  particularly the “Ready, Fire, Aim” philosophy (Mark Morgan Ford a.k.a. Michael Masterson). I don’t recommend shoddy preparation and believing it will all “work out.”

If you have experienced any of the above, you can still learn options identification skills.

Benefits of Options Identification

There is only one reason to identify options: to make the best decision.

Identifying all the options and considering their impact on the project (whether positive or negative) will improve the chance of successful completion. You can determine the trade-offs that deliver the best outcome when you have a complete picture of the different ways to solve problems.

There are specific skills and methodologies to identify options.

How to Identify Options

There are several methods to identify options.

Brainstorming, mind mapping, expert advice, research, and scenario planning are methodologies to identify options.

Finally, an often overlooked option is the “status quo.” Changing nothing is also a viable option to consider. Just because somebody (usually a manager that may not understand or has had a “magazine idea”) desires a modification, doesn’t mean it’s the right course of action (remember: challenge assumptions).

Unless you’ve identified all the options, you won’t have a good base to perform the analysis task and make a solid decision.

3. ANALYSIS

For each option identified in the previous step, perform an analysis to determine their positive or negative impact on the goal.

Options Identification and Analysis sometimes occur at the same time. When you identify an option, there are often initial ideas about whether there are positive or negative impacts and attributes. It is permissible to capture them at the time it is identified (in the previous step)  - with the caveats that:

• it’s just capturing them for future analysis, and,
• it doesn’t interfere with the actual Options Identification process.

The reverse is also true. When you analyze an option, you may identify an additional option or permutations of another option. That’s great — the more, the merrier!!!

Pros and Cons

The primary goal of the analysis step is to identify the positive and negative consequences of an option. I call them “Pros” and “Cons.”

When you ask questions about an option, attributes associated with a positive or negative impact are identified. Capture those attributes and document how positive or negative they are.

Benefits are on the “pro” side of the ledger. Benefits contribute toward a successful outcome and justify the project effort.

Adverse outcomes appear on the “con” side of the ledger. The cons undermine the success of a project.

The most important aspect of the analysis step is to be as thorough and complete as possible. It is easy to quit too early. To do a good job requires a lot of effort.

The effort spent on analysis will pay dividends in a better outcome.

Evaluation

Once you have captured all the options and quantified their pros and cons, you can evaluate them to determine which option will contribute the most toward a successful outcome and have the least unfavourable impact.

You may have difficulty performing this process. Evaluation is the grunt work that delivers the foundation of a successful outcome.

Evaluation requires critical thinking.

It requires effort. You may not do it in your personal or business life. If you follow the crowd and do what they do, you never exercise your critical thinking muscle.

Once you’ve quantified the attributes for each option, both Pro and Con, you evaluate the options against each other to find the best option.

Order each of the options from best to worst; the best option is the one that delivers the most Pros and the fewest Cons.

This process will improve your understanding of the problem, options, and factors that constitute a good solution.

Make a Decision

The purpose of the evaluation step is to drive a decision.

After identifying, analyzing, and evaluating your options, your decision should be obvious.

The next step is to implement the best option.

4. EXECUTE (Do It)

Everyone excels at doing things. We spend our entire lives doing things. But this is where danger lurks for the undisciplined.

You may jump from step 1 (Goal Setting) to this step if the problem seems simple. You may skip everything in between because it takes effort to think about details. Thinking doesn’t accomplish anything observable and adds more time without visibly contributing to the result.

A headlong rush to start doing something can sabotage the final result.

Some wisdom from the IT industry:

Have you ever experienced “gotchas” when doing something? The root cause is missing something. Could the “gotcha” have been avoided by thinking through all the steps?

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
- Benjamin Franklin

Plan

“Plan” is both a verb and a noun. First, you plan (identify the steps required) to create a plan (documentation of the information).

Again, knowledge and experience come into play. The trap is making assumptions.

I advocate investing the “right” amount of planning effort for the specific project. You must identify the balance between a quality plan and the “perfect plan.” A perfect plan can get mired in minutia.

If you’ve performed the analysis and evaluation tasks for a seemingly simple project, you should know whether the new project differs from others you have done. If it is sufficiently similar, then use the plan that worked before.

If there are some differences from a previous activity, those differences need to be explored and understood. If you don’t understand the differences, that leads to “gotcha” land.

The documentation detailing every significant aspect required to deliver the goal is the Project Plan.

Project Plan

The Project Plan is the umbrella for everything you need to know to execute the project successfully.

Two mandatory artifacts contribute to a solid project plan: a WBS and a Schedule.

i). WBS

First, the professional project manager will create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to identify all the mandatory tasks.

WBS is just a fancy term for a hierarchical structure. Large components are composed of smaller components, which themselves can be composed of smaller components, and so on…

Every task describes an atomic unit of work that creates a deliverable.

The specifications for each deliverable define what to build. The specification must be clear, concise, and accurate to guide the development. Any ambiguity will add confusion and frustration.

- Time Estimates

Next, estimate the time required to complete each task.

The estimates provide a reasonable idea of how much effort is required (for staffing or your personal commitment). Cumulatively, they reveal how big the project is.

Developing accurate estimates is extremely difficult. A project is defined as “doing something that you’ve never done before.” Determining the effort required to complete a task you’ve never done before is primarily a guess.

The project manager must monitor and challenge the estimates to improve their accuracy.

ii). Schedule

Creating a schedule is the most complex part of planning a project.

The WBS identifies all the tasks required. The effort for each task is estimated. Now each of those tasks needs to be scheduled to be worked on by one or more people.

This step identifies the constraints on the task’s performance order. A constraint is a restriction on when a task can be started.

If a task has no constraints, it can be performed at any time. Unconstrained tasks can be put anywhere in the schedule to use free time.

Often, tasks are constrained by dependencies. If one task must be completed before another can start, the first task is called the “predecessor” and the second is called the “successor.” The second task “depends on” the first task’s completion before it can start.

Unconstrained tasks can be done in “parallel,” that is, at the same time as other tasks because they don’t have any dependencies. Constrained tasks are usually done “serially,” that is, one after another in order of their dependencies.

There is one additional component that I always consider: Risk Mitigation.

Risk Mitigation

The purpose of Risk Mitigation is to anticipate problems and take steps to either:

1. ensure they don’t occur, or,
2. reduce the impact on the project if they occur.

Even for small projects, there are always things that can go wrong. Thinking about those issues before you start and planning how to handle them is time well invested.

Take Murphy’s Law into account when planning!!!

Do It!!

When the plans (WBS, Schedule, Risk Mitigation) are in place, your project is ready for launch.

A well-planned project will proceed with less stress and surprises.

5. FEEDBACK

Feedback is a process where you observe results, learn, and drive corrective actions.

Feedback is not the “final” step, nor should it be left to the end.

I advocate for continuous feedback monitoring. You should constantly monitor results in every step and learn as you go. This practice is known as Continuous Improvement.

Practising Continuous Improvement personally and professionally is the foundation of success. Life-long learners understand and practice this as a natural consequence of living.

If you discover something is sub-optimal or failed, you should revisit it and make corrections. Continuously questioning and improving your work will produce a better result.

Although the Cynical Project Management steps are listed serially, the guidance is to monitor and revisit previous work to improve it. Use feedback to evaluate, learn, and improve everything you do.

Conclusion

The steps and sub-steps I have identified are crucial and mandatory for all but the most trivial endeavours. With practice, your judgment will improve, and your experience will guide your use of the individual steps in the methodology.

There will be follow-on articles explaining each of the steps in more detail. I will explore how each step can be leveraged for professional (business), personal (you), and practical (my experience) success.

Be Cynical,

GB

PS:

This article identifies the importance of leveraging a methodology to help you efficiently and effectively reach your goals. But the astute reader will recognize that, hidden between the lines and permeating everything I write, is one thing that is the absolute key to your continued success.

If you think you have figured it out, comment and we can discuss it.

Summary

TL;DR: Cynical Project Management is a framework non-techies can use to overcome problems, reach goals, and be successful.

Wisdom:

• Using a methodology provides a proven road map (process) to accomplish a goal
• Cynical Project Management is a high-level methodology to guide understanding and resolve problems
• The key steps are: Goal Setting, Options Identification, Analysis, Execution, and Feedback
• Feedback drives continuous improvement which is the foundation of personal and professional success

To extract the best value from this article, you should have read this first: Good News - Everything Is a Problem. If this is the first article of mine you have read, you should start at Read This First!.

The next article in this series is: How to Set Breakthrough Goals..