Plan A or B ... or C?

I'm sure most of you would have followed the Chile miners' rescue story... I was particularly interested in that story from the project management perspective. A great amount of precise planning, co-ordination, leadership and teamwork was at play, all of which was imperative to make this project a success. There are loads of lessons learnt from this project ... I wanted to cover one lesson in particular, namely "the contingency planning". I won't go into the technical details as can't claim I know much about mining or mning rescue, however what was interesting about it is that 1) there not only was a Plan B .... and a Plan C (for getting access to the miners so they could be pulled out),  but all three plans were executed at the same time; 2) Plan B failed in the early stages but rather than being abandoned, it was adjusted and reinstated and in fact it was Plan B that worked in the end! So, what are the lessons leart?
Lesson 1: Do have a contingency plan - ALWAYS!
Lesson 2: If possible, and taken into account the cost/benefit trade-off, initiate the back up plan in parallel to the main plan, or have everything set up so that Plan B (or C or D) can kick in as soon as the main plan fails, or even better as soon as it is identified that failure is imminent
Lesson 3: Never Give Up!

Cirque and Project resourcing

Last night, I went to see an amazing show "Mother Africa Cirque". Apart from it being just a fantastic display of dancing, singing, colour and acrobatics, it made me think about one aspect of project management: Resource Management - particularly resource allocation and roles & responsibilities
How many times have you worked on a project that was inadequately resourced? I'm not talking so much about too few resources, but rather not adequately skilled ones. Not sure about you, but I constantly find myself in a situation where BA work is done by a Team Assistant, change management is left to a Technical PM.... Now, imagine if a cirque had an act that would require a person to be extremely flexible as they would need to REALLY bent over backwards, like the snake girl on the photo - it hurts just looking at it!

The cirque Director really wants this act on his show, the only problem is that there is noone with a body flexible enough to do that. So he nominates one of the music band (!) members (I thought about it when I saw a particular member of the band in last nights show) to do a bit of stretching and training so that he can fill in the gap. I'm sure you can imagine the effect yourself.

That's exactly what happens on projects! Too often do we/organisations try to fill in project resource gaps with either BAU staff (who not only have their "day job" and usually are not really interested in your project, but also hardly have the skills required to deliver the desired outcomes), or by the available project team wearing many hats. Please don't take me wrong, I have no problem with multi-tasking and multi-skilling, however this does not always work, particularly where specialised skills are required and PM should be left to actually manage the project than spend time on trying to find a free meeting room..

Finally!

Wow, I've done it! My first blog.. oh no actually it's my second blog.. first one was for the Pink Triathlon.
Anyway, I'm planning to use this space to share ideas and thoughts about the various projects that I come across, or experience first hand. Hope you enjoy it!