Brick Or Sponge: What Is The Stiffness Of Your Project?

Different road condition require different suspension systems and settings to a car. If you are driving on roads in perfect mint condition, you need a different level of absorption than when you are following a trail through the jungle or the dessert.

What conditions have the roads you drive your project on?

Photography by Freeparking.

If you work under mint conditions you can create the perfect plan, centralize control and outline every detail in a procedure. You can hit the big red button that reads “EFFICIENCY”.

If you drive in “EFFICIENCY” mode and steer through the jungle of Borneo, you will wreck the bottom of your car on the first turn. What you need here is absorption, the ability to handle unexpected disturbances; you need to hit the big green button with “RESILIENCE” on it.

When setting up the structure of your project, you have to determine the “stiffness” of the structure.

Are you turning it into a “brick” or are you creating a “sponge”?

Are you going for efficiency or are you going for resilience?

You have to choose your settings for every element in your Project Potion:

• Strategy: What are the steps taken in the project, and what are the sequence and time frame?
• Organization: How is your project organization constructed?
• Feedback: How is the feedback to the stakeholders on the status and content of products and processes organized?

Most plan-driven methodologies provide you with enough clues to create bricks.

Letting your creativity run wild can provide you with all kinds of ideas to put resilience into your project.

BUT… before you start tweaking those settings though, before you determine the stiffness of your project structure, map out the terrain you will have to drive through:

• Analyze the stakeholders and their interests and expectations (Stakeholder Analysis).
• Determine the potential risks that might exist (Risk Management).
• Use techniques to find the root-causes to complex problems (like Panarchy and systems view).

And only then create your project approach.