Page 103 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

In IT Projects better questions lead to better solutions - faster too

“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have
the solution,” so said Steve Jobs.
I love this quote.

Often though, IT projects run into trouble because the
team is working hard to answer the wrong question!

I’ve shared this story with you before, I’m sure, but I
think it sums up the problem. One of the founders of
Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute Of Design (the
‘d.school’), Bernie Roth tells of the time that he hired a
car. He needed fuel so he pulled into a petrol station
and looked high and low for the release for the petrol
cap. He applied his designer’s mind to the problem. He
tried to think where, if he’d designed the car, he would have put the little lever ... but to no avail.
Eventually, another car, like Bernie’s drove onto the forecourt and he walked over to ask the driver
is she could tell him where the release was. The woman looked at him bemused before answering
that there wasn’t one.
Bernie had been so busy trying to answer the question ‘where is the release for the fuel tank’
whereas the actual question he should have been asking was ‘how do I open the fuel tank’.
THE SAME PROBLEM IS FUELLING IT PROJECT FAILS

A client told me of a similar, recurring problem within their IT Project portfolio once. They had a
resource allocation issue and it was costing them. Projects were either late, overbudget or simply
failing to deliver and, each time a red warning flag appeared the project leaders would shuffle the
team, re-allocate resources, reschedule the workflows … etc, etc.

And, in almost no time at all, a new problem would arise and they’d have to repeat the process of
resource allocation! This happened time and again.
The problem they were trying to solve was how to deliver the IT Projects they had with the
resources they had. Literally, the question they were asking themselves was ‘how do we best
allocate the resources we have to deliver the projects in our portfolio?’.
One day, a bright spark had a eureka moment and realised they’d been asking the wrong question
and instead asked ‘how do we best deliver the projects in our portfolio?’.

Just by removing the limiting part of their problem, the part that tied them to the resources they
had, they opened up a solution space. They Googled “project management resources”, found Project
Management as a Service (PMaaS) and called us. All of their projects are now fully resourced, on
time, within budget and delivering all stakeholder expectations.
They asked the right question.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them,” said Albert
Einstein.