Are You On The Right Train?

One of the questions the Secret (the movie and book) leaves unanswered is what it is that you should wish for. If you think about it, there are so many wonderful things out there you could get or accomplish that day-dreaming about a new car seems pretty meaningless and wasteful.

Yesterday somebody told me a story that powerfully resonates with this thinking.

Two men took a train to get home. As the train left the station, the first man made himself comfortable by the window to enjoy the beautiful surroundings of the area the train was coming through. The second man seemed nervous. He started running back and forth inside the car looking lost and and distraught. The first man distracted from his quiet thoughts lifted his head and asked the second man as to why he was running around. The second man replied that he was trying to get home faster. Why, asked the first man. You are already on the train that will take you home, and all this running won't get you there any faster.

The morale of the story: the most important goal is to choose the right train, as once you are aboard, it'll take you where you want to go. Are you on the right train?

Listen Between the Words

When was the last time you had this conversation with somebody?

You: What's wrong?
They: Nothing.
You: I can tell something is wrong. What is it?
They: I said, nothing. I am fine.

According to the words you hear, the person is fine. And yet somehow, through non-verbal clues and the tone of their voice, you know that they are not.

Albert Mehrabian, a pioneer researcher of body language in the 1950's, found that the total impact of a message is about 7 percent verbal (words only) and 38 percent vocal (including tone of voice, inflection, and other sounds) and 55 percent nonverbal. These ratios were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (e.g. like-dislike).

The conversation above is a simple and obvious example of this theory in action. At work, we encounter many highly complex situations where we miss the lack of congruency in the message being said, not paying attention to the clues in front of us.

On a project I recently completed, we presented the visual design of a new application to a client and heard the words that the design was good, give or take some minor tweaks. A couple of months later, the tweaks shaped into a major redesign effort, which could have been avoided, had we listened between the words in that meeting and caught the clues that the client wasn't fundamentally happy with the look and feel of the application.

So, what's in it for you beyond awareness? Here are some tips that can help you become a educated listener attuned to verbal and non-verbal clues:

1. Trust your intuition. If you are feeling that something is off, it is because your brain is processing all of the signals it's receiving, comparing them to each other, detecting incongruity between them, and trying to alert your conscious mind.

2. Check with your colleagues. If you have other people in the meeting, talk to them afterwards and ask for their observations and feelings. If they walk away with the same feeling as you, the chances are your perception is reality.

3. Read some books on neuro-linguistic programming. It'll provide you with an understanding of how you can read and decipher non-verbal clues.

4. When preparing for a meeting, make a mental note that you'll pay attention to the non-verbal language of other people. This will help heighten your sense of awareness.

5. Watch for people's eye movements, posture, and hands. Armed with the theoretical knowledge from the reading and trusting your instincts, you'll be amazed at how much non-verbal clues can tell you.

6. Ask non-threatening questions to validate your assumptions. Circling back to the example at the beginning of the post, you could put yourself in the other person's shoes and say something like this: "If I were you, I think I would feel [adjective], because [reason]. How do you feel about it?" This turns the situation around from confrontational to empathetic; the other person realizes that you are on the same wavelength with you and will be more likely to verbalize what you already suspect.

Highlights and Lowlights in Status Reports

Somebody from Microsoft gave me an idea of using colored arrows for accentuating high- and low-lights of the project on the status report.

It looks like this:


While it is a minor formatting enhancement, it'll help your audience to focus on the key areas, and the use of arrows makes this apporach work for color-blind people as well.

Earned Value and Contingency

April was a crazy month for me, as I was completing two projects and getting ready for a national ballroom dance competition in LA. Now that the madness is over, blogging can regain its spot under the sun again.

Rather than talking about something as abstract as my thoughts on Harvard Business Review, I would like to add to the subject of Earned Value today.

When you plan a project, you always account for some sort of a contingency or buffer (if you don't, you should!). Depending on the complexity and size of the project and the specific approach chosen by the project manager, the contingency could be applied to the entire project or could be calculated against individual summary tasks or even work packages. Either way, at any moment in time you should be able to calculate Earned and Planned value pre- and post-contingency.

All of the Earned Value charts I've shared so far showed a single Earned Value line. In this post, I would like to show you a chart that shows the pre- and post-contingency. Why is this important for both the Project Manager and the client? The contingency is essentially an indicator of how much risk the project can handle. For example, if your pre-contingency Planned Value is $120,000 and the post-contingency Planned Value is $150,000, the $30K delta is what you count on to address any expected or unexpected risks or changes that come up throughout the course of the project. The closer your Actual Cost to the Pre-Contingency Planned Value, the greater you ability to handle risk and changes. As you move closer to the Post-Contingency, you are using up your reserve, and your position weakens.

Showing both pre- and post-contingency Planned Value lines on your reporting chart is a quick way to relay the project risk to the stakeholders.

Here's how you can do this using the Excel spreadsheet I showed you in previous posts.

1. Rather than having a single Earned Value row for the chart data, replace them with a Pre-Contingency and Post-Contingency Earned Value rows:

2. Add the Pre- and Post-Contingency lines to the chart:

Please note that this version of the chart no longer has the Budget line. I am still deciding whether it is useful or not so please feel free to comment on it.

3. Track your actual costs as usual. Ideally, they should be between the blue and the green lines: