Context Matters

I learned to drive in my friend Josh’s little blue car. It was twenty minutes from his house to mine, and thirty in the opposite direction to Bloomington. Forty miles total, all in a straight line, down the same state highway stretching west to east across the county. Forty-some-odd years later, and I still know the route by heart. I can picture every bend and crest in my mind’s eye, but I could not tell you the highway number if my life depended on it.

When we first started exploring Bloomington, I only knew one way in and out. My highway went from two lanes down to one, shrinking into what I knew as Second Street. If you followed Second Street through town, you would arrive at the mall, precisely where every teenage girl wants to go. I must have been an undergraduate student before I ever intentionally turned off Second Street; it was my asphalt tether to home. When new friends asked where I was from, I would respond, “You know Second Street? Just get on that and drive West.”

Gradually, I grew more confident. There were friends to visit and a boyfriend across the state, and so I started to adventure further and further away. In preparation for each trip, I’d print my directions, carefully highlight my route, and tape the page to my steering wheel. If something went wrong, some unexpected detour, construction or traffic, I would be stuck. I could not fathom adapting in the moment; I would not have dared to stray from the bright yellow line on my map, for fear that I might wind up somewhere unexpected.

I was born just exactly on the thin line between Gen-X and the Millennials, enjoying both a technology-free childhood and yet a fully online adulthood existence. Somewhere along the way, I was gifted a clunky TomTom device and now GPS technology lives in my pocket. I can plug my phone into the car and instantly be ready to drive anywhere. And best of all, if there’s an issue, the friendly voice inside the computer anticipates the problem and provides viable alternative routes in an instant. Magic.

When I look at a Gantt Chart, I see magic too. I see a GPS screen. Every project is a journey. We are beginning here, at the starting point, our current location. There is where we want to go, our desired destination, the Project end. The task list reads like a set of directions, “Please drive to highlighted route. Turn Left. Drive on. Turn Left again. You have arrived.” To complete the journey and execute the project, we must follow the steps in their proper sequence. They are each related to the other. Finally, the system looks ahead, predicts my expected arrival time, anticipates risks, suggests options, adjusts my expectations.

All project managers want to manage their projects well. We want to deliver on-time, on-budget and within scope. We expect that success means everything has unfolded exactly to plan. But this isn’t reality; there will absolutely be obstacles and surprises. Something always veers off track. In my experience, projects fail for two reasons: they don’t know where they are going, and they can’t adapt along the way. In short, context matters.

Context matters because if we don’t know the end goal, the big picture, then we can’t develop the most effective path. What interstate would I highlight? We’ll waste precious time, energy and resources driving in the wrong direction. We’ll never know if we are on the right road, or if we’ll arrive on time, because we can’t measure or see where we are headed. Every ripple, every deviation from plan will be catastrophic because we can’t judge what really matters. There is no critical path without a destination.

Context also matters so that we can adapt as we go. We must understand all of the forces pushing, pulling, nudging and knocking us around. We cannot be blind to our environment or to the reality of our current situation. In order to continue forward progress we must continuously and methodically monitor the contextual storm swirling around us so that we can adjust the sails.

The Contextual Gantt Planning System (CGPS) is a simple approach to creating clear paths through complex projects. Just like GPS navigation on the road, CGPS navigation in our projects is the key to arriving at our destination. Both technologies are action enabling; they provide the context we need to organize ourselves and make decisions to move forward through the journey.

In the next several posts, I’ll break CGPS down into a series of six simple steps that can easily be applied to your projects:

1. Orient – Know where you & where you are going.
2. Scope – Define all the steps in between.
3. Sequence – Understand how each step relates to the other.
4. Constrain – Name your constraints and planning assumptions.
5. Reconcile – Calibrate the plan, reality and the goal.
6. Iterate – Continuously monitor and adapt to new information.

I’ll demonstrate each step with candid examples from my own life, times when I’ve succeeded and other times when I fell short but learned something useful. I’ll dive into the guiding principles of CGPS and the simple tools I recommend for implementing this approach into your own projects. There will even be some context from my life outside of project management sprinkled throughout. I’ve been reading, studying and practicing project management concepts for almost two decades, and now I’m excited to put pen to paper and share the CGPS framework with you.

#Navigation