At some point in your project management career, you’ll need to deal with a project crisis. It may come in one of many forms, and arise for any of a huge range of reasons. It may not be the fault of you and your project team. But, equally, it may be.
So, you need to prepare for a project crisis. And your two priorities are to:
- Be able to spot a project crisis coming, and avert it
- Deal with a project crisis, if one occurs
Our Crisis Management Agenda
In this article, I will cover
- The First Skill of Project Crisis Management: Avert The Crisis
- Processes that Create Good Situational Awareness
- Leading Indicators of Project Risk
- Spotting a Crisis: Let’s Hear it for Your Intuition
- Crisis Management: What to Do When the Crisis Comes
So, straight to the first skill…
The First Skill of Project Crisis Management: Avert The Crisis
I study one of the traditional Japanese martial arts. The aim is to use minimal force and effort to subdue your adversary. If you have to compete, you make things difficult, at best, and at worst… you will lose. As practitioners develop their skills, they learn to practice their techniques at three increasing levels of sophistication and subtlety.
These reflect three levels of increasingly ideal identification of an impending crisis.
Level 1: Go no sen (defend after the event)
This represents a defensive counter to an attack. When something happens, you need to respond quickly and effectively. This is equivalent to being ready to respond to events, as soon there is a crisis.
Level 2: Sen no sen (respond in real time)
Before the detail of your opponent’s attack is visible, they become physically committed to their attacking move. A more sophisticated student can anticipate the attack and blend with it simultaneously as it starts. This is called sen no sen and is equivalent to gearing up to respond seamlessly, keeping up with evolving events and tackling each aspect of the crisis as it materialises. The crisis never becomes as bad as it could.
Level 3: Sensen no sen (anticipate and evade)
The most skilled practitioners can read the attack even earlier than this. They respond at the point when their attacker becomes psychologically committed to attacking. This is before their attacker’s body knows how they will attack.
Sensing the intent allows the practitioner to pre-empt the attack and deal with it with minimum effort and maximum control. This is sensen no sen. For us, this is also a gold-standard. We see the signs of crisis coming and, before it hits, we are already taking steps to counter it. We may not be able to avert it completely, but we can minimize its impact.
These levels have analogues in other physical activities. Ice hockey has the phrase ‘skate where the puck’s going, not to where it is.’
So, what are the leading indicators that can forewarn a project professional of a crisis?
A Project Crisis Will Often Happen for Familiar Reasons
There are many familiar reasons and triggers for project crises. Indeed, a lot of them are, to some extent, caused by the project manager, who is either complacent, over-confident, or fails in some way.
Complacency about…
- their predictions and plans
- human error and human weaknesses
- random or unpredictable events, like the weather
Over-confidence in…
- planning
- systems and processes
- people
Failure to…
- Notice outside influences
- Predict the possibility of human error/human weaknesses
- Heed warnings
This leads us to three solutions…
The solution to averting a project crisis lies in a combination:
- Careful planning and preparation
- Solid processes that limit the scope for human error
- And good awareness of what is going on
Processes that Create Good Situational Awareness
As a project manager, your responsibilities include creating processes that help you to:
- Spot the warning signs as early as possible, and
- Assess their meaning and importance objectively.
Often, however, it is not your systems that matter. What is more important is the way you implement them.
Here is an example from my own practice.
System: Project Reporting
Many project managers institute a regular reporting cycle. You gather information from your team leaders and synthesize it into a report. A common approach is to start preparing your formal report with your executive summary of the project status: the headlines. This is, after all, how report-writing courses are often taught.
BEWARE!
This is dangerous in the context of project reporting. It fosters ‘confirmation bias’.
Confirmation bias is our tendency to easily notice events, facts, and other evidence that confirm what we already believe. We do so far more easily than spotting facts that conflict with our expectations. We are often blind to them. And, when we do spot them, we often dismiss those facts as one-off outliers that are either of low significance, or even wrong. This, of course, can lead to you missing the vital indicators of an impending crisis.
Bottom-up Reporting
Instead, you should always assemble your project reports bottom-up. Take all the evidence and data and see what picture it forms. Look for variant data that needs further investigation. More often than not, the big picture matches my expectations (as you’d hope it would). Sometimes not.
Leading Indicators of Project Risk
The other important thing to consider is the metrics you will be monitoring. What are the indicators that might suggest problems ahead? Here is a table I compiled for my book Risk Happens!
| Schedule Risk | – Minor milestones are being missed – Forecasts of late milestone delivery – Unclear answers to direct questions about the schedule – Meetings cancelled or rescheduled – Planned trades union action – Schedule contingencies being used or exceeded |
| Budget Risk | – Rate-of-spend variances against budget – Rate-of-spend variances against completion level or product delivery – Contractor claims for contract variations – Change requests – Unplanned changes in supplier/contractor/consultant staff numbers – Economic indicators turn down, affecting the sponsoring organization – Budget contingencies being used or exceeded |
| Resource Risk | – Staff absence rates – General staff welfare and morale – Staff turnover – Adverse news coverage of a contractor or supplier |
| Scope Risk | – New stakeholders emerging – Novel technology becoming available – New industry trends |
| Quality Risk | – Schedule squeeze with no requests for time extensions – Component failures – Poor quality of interim deliverables |
| Governance Risk | – Absence of sponsor or project board members from scheduled meetings – High-level personnel changes in the sponsoring organization – Project board meetings fail to address material matters – Project board meetings focus is at an inappropriately detailed level – A lack of concern at the senior level, for significant risks |
Spotting a Crisis: Let’s Hear it for Your Intuition
Formal monitoring processes appeal well to your rational, deliberate thinking processes. But often, the warning signs are present, but they are subtle and not easily noticed. However, our unconscious brain is more than capable of extracting tiny signals from a lot of noise. This is your intuition.
The problem is that sitting at a desk in a busy office, poring over charts, reports, and tables is rarely the best time to access your deep unconscious insights. What our brains are good at is working on problems for long periods and finding patterns. Our busy lives, though, are ill-suited to giving us the time to notice the results of our unconscious processing.
Have you ever noticed that you get some of your best ideas and insights when you’re exercising, walking, showering, or daydreaming? Or maybe while you are having your morning coffee? These are not times when your brain is actively working on the problem. Instead, they are times when your brain is quiet, and you are more able to hear the answers that your unconscious has developed over the last few days.
Learn more about Project Management intuition in our article, Project Management Intuition: Why is it Essential and How to Strengthen Yours?
The Next Bend
For this reason, I make it a habit, when working on projects, to apply what I call my weekly ‘Next Bend Process’. This is a simple approach to seeing around the next bend, by deliberately allowing my conscious mind to go into idle mode. It is very simple: I take my notebook and a pen to a café, and order a coffee – and maybe a bun. I don’t take a phone and I don’t take any other distractions. All I task myself with is sitting quietly with my coffee and mulling.
Sometimes ideas come – they usually do. Less often, they are big or momentous ideas that can change the path of part of our project. But they sometimes are. And that makes the whole process worth it.
‘Meeting room 5’
It is also important that there is minimal chance of your getting disturbed. On the project where I first got into this habit, I would list my whereabouts on the team schedule as Meeting Room 5. When I got back one day, it turned out that one of my team had been looking for me and discovered that the offices we were based in had only four meeting rooms. From then on, Meeting Room 5 became code for Do Not Disturb – a status project managers should use sparingly and only with good reason. Being disturbed by team members and stakeholders is mostly what we are there for. It’s how we spot the patterns in the first place!
Learn more about this in our video, Time to Think: The Next Bend Process | Video.
Horizon Scanning
Horizon Scanning is a process you can use for identifying the risks at the start of or during your project. It is also good for reviewing new risks and maybe impending crises.
You can often avert a future crisis by spotting shifts far enough in advance. And for that, I use the SPECTRES framework. It is a way to inventory changes on your project’s horizon in a systematic way.
Create a Risk Awareness Culture
Perhaps the strongest and most systemic approach to foresee a potential project crisis (and also to deliver effective crisis management) is to build a strong risk awareness culture for your project.
More valuable still is a highly risk-aware culture for your organization. This approach embeds risk awareness and risk management processes into every aspect of our work. It does not just see risk management as a separate thread or work-stream within a cluster of project activities, alongside:
- project planning
- schedule monitoring
- stakeholder engagement
- testing
- quality control
- and others.
As project managers, we tend to compartmentalize different aspects of a large project into work streams, as a way of simplifying the complexity. Often, this makes our lives easier, but it can make it harder to synthesize the disparate small indicators into a clear understanding of how small effects can come together to create big impacts.
Risk should best be regarded as a process that suffuses everything you do.
Learn more about this in our article, Turn Risk into Strength: How to Build a Better Project Risk Culture.
The Strategic Role of Project Managers
For this, you need to start seeing your role as a Project Manager as less of an operational manager of people and processes, and more as a strategic leader whose role is to constantly scan your environment and speak with your people, to pull together an holistic assessment of the trends underpinning your project.
Learn more about this in our article, 10 Things Project Managers Need to Know about Strategic Risk Management.
Crisis Management: What to Do When the Crisis Comes
No matter how good you are at averting a crisis, and no matter how early you can spot it, there may come a time when… WHAM! Crisis is upon you.
First, Stay Calm
You can’t do very much – and you certainly won’t lead well – if you are not calm and rational. In this video, I consider how to stay calm when crisis comes.
A Four-Step Crisis Management Approach
In the project context, crisis management is how your team deals with a disruptive event that threatens to harm the organization, the project, its stakeholders, or the general public. Three elements are common to most definitions of crisis: a threat to the organization, the element of surprise, and a short decision time to respond.
Crisis Management focuses on two things:
- Dealing with the crisis itself
- The communications process: what to say, how to say it, and who will say it.
Let’s wrap them together into a simple four-step crisis management process:
- Contain
…the damaging impacts - Stabilize
…the project or the organization, so you can function effectively - Recover
…the project or organization to a strong state - Learn
…lessons from the experience through a reflective process
We’ll look at each of these in turn.
Contain
Before you start work on making things better, and even before figuring out exactly what has happened, your first priority is containment. That is, you must take every step you can, to make sure things don’t get worse.
Communication – Key Message: We are aware and responding. This is what to do (or not do). We’ll give more information when it’s safe to take the time to do so.
Communication – Secondary Message: Please give us the time to work on this. Stopping things from getting worse is our first priority.
Stabilize
Next, you can take some time to get the situation under control. Gather people and resources, assimilate the facts, figure out what’s really going on, and make a plan. You need a stable platform from which to start to recover the situation.
Communication – Key Message: We are stabilizing the situation. Things aren’t getting worse, so this is what we will be doing to make things better.
Communication – Secondary Message: Here’s what we know, and this is what you can do to help.
Recover
This is where you work collaboratively to get back to either:
- The position before the crisis
- An enhanced position is possible
- The best position you can, if there has been too much damage
Your focus should be on critical systems and operations.
Communication – Key Message: We are back in control and restoring capabilities in a carefully considered sequence.
Communication – Secondary Message: Here’s the timeline we are confident we can commit to. This is what it means to you.
Learn
Once the crisis is over and you are back to normalcy, it’s time to get the team together and reflect on the experience, everything that:
- happened
- caused it to happen
- you did
- worked
- failed
- could be improved
- should be documented
Communication – Key Message: Everything is back to normal, and we are learning lessons.
Communication – Secondary Message: The lessons we have learned and what we will do differently from now.
Key C’s
Throughout, my four Cs of Crisis Management will set your priorities in your way of working. These are:
- Communication
Communicate clearly and often throughout the team working on the crisis. Appoint a spokesperson to communicate with stakeholders. - Clarity
Gaining clarity and clarifying for others will ensure that everyone knows the situation and what their role is in making it better. - Collaboration and Coordination
Crisis is not a time for sole operator heroes. Coordinated action and collaboration are what keep people effective and safe. - Confidence and Competence
Your team needs to be prepared, so they can act competently and confidently to both get things done and inspire the people around them. You, as a leader, must role model confidence, competence, clarity, collaboration, and good communication.
What is Your Approach to Spotting and Handling a Project Crisis?
We’d be keen to hear different perspectives on this vital topic, and will respond to every comment you make.
