What Does ProjectClarity Do?
ProjectClarity helps technically complex projects
like cutting edge DoD acquisitions or software development:
-
Make
Your Deadlines -
Contain
Your Costs -
Meet
Your Requirements - Facilitate Team Communication
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How?
Identify Problem Areas Early
Fire Alarms (Speed is Everything)
When a fire alarm goes off, the difference between the fire department arriving after 5 minutes or 15 minutes is —life and death. Cost overruns and schedule delays are like fires: the damage only gets worse with time. Project managers need to think like firefighters: 'Damage Control'. The best case scenario is stopping it before it spreads. Use ProjectClarity to install fire alarms on your projects to alert you about problems when they're small and easily fixable.
Feedback
Project managers are fighting fires they can't see. How do you know when an invisible fire is extinguished? Methods for reporting information on projects are so coarse that there's no way to determine the impact of specific actions taken. If your first action isn't working, you need to gain feedback quickly so you can re-evaluate and actually solve the underlying problem. Use ProjectClarity to find out whether your fixes are working, and make adjustments if needed.
Jump Start The Conversation
The current method of reporting about project status is severely flawed—e-mails, phone calls, meetings, TPS reports, etc. ProjectClarity is a web-app that ... . Meetings become more productive when problems are already identified and the focus is on collaboratively coming up with creative solutions. By utilizing meetings actively, potential problems can be averted before spiraling out of control. ProjectClarity facilitates the off-the-record forum that quickly identifies problems, leaving you to decide how best to solve them.
Why Does That Work?
Anonymity Jump Starts The Conversation
Awkward situation: Everyone knows. The Boss Doesn’t. Who’s gonna be "that guy"
For all of these status meetings attended, no truthful revelation occurs because no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, especially in person, in front of all their peers and their superiors. Team members hide their setbacks from superiors until things are so bad they can't be hidden any longer. Then the conversation changes from what should we do to who is responsible? Everyone moves into cover-your-ass mode and the witch hunt only serves to reinforce team members not to be forthcoming about problems.
Ownership
A firm posted annual budgets for their employees and asked for feedback. The response was always the same, “Looks good, boss!” Yet, the firm overshot that budget by 12%. Employees weren't telling management something. There was no incentive for anyone to offer risky feedback. Employees are not rewarded for disagreeing with their superiors.
"I made a decision, what do you think of my decision?" doesn't get great feedback. No one is going to tell their boss "your decision is wrong."
Seek input from your employees before posting management predictions. Try, "we would value your feedback before we make a decision." You’ll be amazed by how diverse your employees’ opinions really are, and how accurate your new budgets and schedules will be.
Collaborative project planning gives everyone an equal sense of ownership of project expectations. "My boss's plan failed," becomes, "our project plan failed." When people feel ownership, they're much more tied into the success or failure of the project.
If you start collecting information from everyone on the project from the beginning then everyone takes ownership of the expectations. As new information becomes available, individuals will take initiative to share that information by updating project metrics themselves.
Wisdom Of Crowds
At your company, you hire really smart people, right?
Why aren’t you asking them what will happen in the future?
Galton stumbles upon a contest at a livestock fair where members of the crowd are trying to guess the weight of a cow. Galton observed that the guesses quickly converged on the correct weight. He realized when one person shouted their guess, everyone else heard it, and factored this new information into their own guess.
Who has all this information? Engineers do; people on the ground level. They're the people who are closest to the project and the most familiar with it.
But, it would take far too long to have each and every engineer working on the entire program to sit down and explain to their boss what they know and how it will impact project metrics. Right now, project managers limit themselves to a handful of information that will have the largest impact on the project. They do so while ignoring a wealth of knowledge trapped in the "long tail" of countless smaller details. While none of these smaller details has any significant impact in isolation, together they can make the difference between shipping on time and shipping two years late.
Even if you did have the time to meet with everyone, they wouldn't be able to explain everything. But you don't need them to. Our brains are awesome. They can quickly interpret a mountain of tiny details, many of which we don't even realize we're considering, and decide how the project will be impacted. That's why ProjectClarity only collects estimates for the bottom line: how much will it cost and when will it finish?
Chain of Command
Remember playing Telephone when you were a kid? As the message was passed around the circle, it was altered more and more. The message that makes it to the last kid bears little resemblance to the original meaning. The same thing is true at your company. The more middle-level managers you have between those on the ground level and those with decision-making power, the slower information moves and the more distorted it becomes. ProjectClarity makes the information collected on the ground level available to all levels of management in real time, eliminating any delays or distortions in the transmission of information.
Bottlenecks
Software like MS Project introduces a dangerous bottleneck into the planning process. Only one person can enter information at a time. So one project manager attempts to gather and process all the information that could possibly impact project expectations on their own. That one person will never be able to interpret all that information, let alone gather it by themselves.
The good news is those engineers working on the project are not only a wealth of information, but also excellent at interpreting it. ProjectClarity lets you get at that untapped knowledge.
