Context Matters

The law of cause and effect is the law of laws. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mom was known for her carrot cake recipe. It was her go-to dish, the one she baked for every holiday and every birthday. She almost always made two cakes at a time, because my family loved it so much. Even later, when our family was smaller, she continued to bake two at a time, keeping one and gifting the other.

Baking carrot cake, at least my Mom’s way of doing it, was a time-consuming effort. It was best to set aside a full afternoon. As a child, I remember dragging a kitchen chair over next to her at the counter. Climbing up to eye level and waiting eagerly for a taste of the rich batter. (I know, I know, don’t do this now, raw eggs are questionable.)

She would start by preparing her pans, coating the bottom and sides with creamy butter or slick, white Crisco. Then she spooned in the flour, handing me a pan to twist and turn until all of the sticky parts were fully dusted. We tap, tap, tapped the sides, knocking the excess powder into the waste bin, and then carefully set the pans aside on the countertops for later.

Next, we shredded the carrots, grating the thin orange curls into a small cereal bowl. I would complain, the effort made my arms tired, “Why can’t we just buy pre-shredded?” “It never tastes the same,” she would chide me back, “The end result will be worth the work.” We’d grate the carrots down to nubs, popping each final chunk into our mouths for our reward.

There was a special contraption for the nuts: a little jar you filled halfway. The lid had a series of spinning blades attached to a plunger, so when you pressed down the blades would spin and chop the nuts into smaller and smaller bits.

Finally, we came to the baking part, carefully measuring the flour and cracking the eggs. My first experience with chemistry, examining the yellow Arm & Hammer baking soda box while she beat the ingredients together with our old hand mixer . The end result, a rich, thick, cinnamon-colored batter with specs of orange carrot and purple raisons peeking through. We poured the mixture into our pans, slid them into the oven and licked the sticky goodness from the beaters; one for her and one for me.

The cake was consistently delicious every time. A constant in our chaotic household. We cut huge wedges and stuffed delicious forkfuls into our mouths. Carrot cake was an acceptable choice at all hours, for any meal. If it lasted, it only improved after sitting overnight in the fridge, the icing forming stiff peaks that melted into sweet sugary bliss in your mouth the next day.

I asked Mom many times to write down the recipe. My baking skills are pretty rough, and I wanted to know exactly her way, so that I would get it right for my kids. When she passed away it felt fast but in slow motion. There was no time to worry about cake, and I worried that the recipe might be lost until one day several months later I found a small square card tucked into a stack of paperwork and receipts. There, in her round proper script, was a list of ingredients and baking instructions for carrot cake.

What I learned from baking with my Mom is that the sequence of the steps matters. There is a reason why you prepare the pans in advance and grate the carrots first. You need to incorporate the wet ingredients before you dump in the flour. If the nuts aren’t chopped, everything else must sit waiting on the counter. Each step in the process has a relationship to the others, a sequence that makes sense. If you try to bake with the steps out of order, the whole process takes longer, and your cake becomes a sludgy mess.

In previous posts, we’ve been talking about the Contextual Gantt Planning System (CGPS), an approach to project management that can help chart a path through complex projects. CGPS is a systematic approach that moves PMs through the six steps of Orienting, Scoping, Sequencing, Constraining, Reconciling and Iterating. When we Orient, we define where we currently are at this moment and where we want to go in the future. We define the goal. In Scope, we made a list of every step required to take us from here to there, and then organized that list into an outline.

Now we are at Sequence, where we define how each of the steps on our list relate one to the other. The order of activities in a project directly relates to the outcome. The first step is the catalyst, setting your project in motion, and each action’s completion then becomes the trigger for the start of the next step. Again and again, action trigger action trigger, all along the path of your project until we reach the final step – the Goal.

Often, steps are completed linearly, one at a time, following finish to start. In other cases, the actions may happen in parallel starting together or finishing in tandem. As a Project Manager, it is our job to understand these nuanced relationships. In complex projects, there will be many threads of activity weaving in, out and around each other on the path to the goal. By identifying triggers and thus defining gating activities the Critical Path emerges.

Go back to your project outline and begin at the top, go line by line through the list. Identify for each action each step that must precede it and every step that can follow. In most Project software programs, this will be called defining predecessors and successors. We are looking at each step in relation to the others, defining what comes before and then what comes after. We are establishing the Sequence of events required to achieve the goal.

Not long ago, I tried to recreate my Mom’s carrot cake for a family get together. I set her recipe card on the counter, pulled the flour, sugar and salt from the cupboards. Today I’m in a hurry, so I spray the pans with cooking spray and buy pre-chopped nuts and pre-grated carrots. I know I’m taking a flavor risk but cross my fingers and hope for the best. But then it hits me, as I look more closely at the recipe. Mom has given me a list. I have each required ingredient carefully written with measurements notated off to the side. But there are no instructions, no sequence of steps, no order of operations.

I try to let memory guide me, think hard back to those days standing on a kitchen chair or beside my Mom at the counter. I think about other recipes and consider what might make sense, and then again in the interest of time, I dump all of the ingredients into the bowl and go. I was never a patient one.

Of course, my cake is terrible. The consistency is off, the flavor is weak. The icing drips down the sides because I didn’t allow enough time to cool. I’ve executed the plan, but in hindsight, it is clear that I did the steps out of order. I neglected the proper Sequence and the end result is an inedible mess. I’ve reached the destination but missed the goal completely.

Thankfully, the other lesson I’ve learned from Mom has been the value of trial and error. This cake was a flop, but that’s okay. I’ll learn from it and get better for the next try. Mom left me the most important parts, the ingredients and the memories, I’ll work to fill in the details with my daughter. Projects offer the same opportunities, sometimes you will nail it and others you will learn from. Your past experiences will help you build better future plans and more direct future paths. Experience will help you identify where there may be options, or levers available for your use.

In the next post we’ll talk about the Constraining step. Now we know where we are and where we want to go (Orient). We also know all of the steps to get us there (Scope) and the relationship of those steps to each other (Sequence). We’re starting to build a scale-model of our project down on paper. In Constrain, we are going to consider the facts of life. What do we know about the context and circumstances around our projects that will influence our journey along the path? If there is an unnatural activity trigger or gate, or a stated non-standard planning assumption, then our model needs to account for it. Understanding this context will allow us to Constrain our project to reflect reality.

I hope that you are enjoying this review of the CGPS approach to project management. If you can’t wait to see the next post, please be sure to sign up for our newsletter. I’d love to hear from you too, so please feel free to reach out!

#Sequence