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Is your project over budget? Are you behind schedule? Are you missing key people and resources to make your project a success? Do you constantly feel like you are fighting fires and can’t get ahead? Today we are going to embrace our inner child and learn how to be a Project Fire Fighter. Let’s start with the basics: Stop, Drop, and Roll. Step 1: Stop – Too often when we start to see a project slipping, our instinct is that we can make up the time or budget if we just shave a little off here or there. We tend to try to move faster to outrun the problem and somehow get in front of it. Whether you are going over budget, behind your schedule, or missing key resources, running faster will not make the problem go away. In fact, much like a fire, running faster will most likely add fuel to it. Our first step is to stop. Stopping can be scary but this leads us to our next step: Step 2: Drop – As a leader, it often makes sense to keep a 30,000 foot view. It is critical that you create the right balance for your team by both Trusting and Verifying the reasons for a change in the plan. When that first change comes, it is the BEST opportunity to determine the root cause and adjust approach. This can feel like overkill or overreach –especially early on in the project life-cycle. However, as firefighters know, the difference between an errant spark and a forest fire is not much. If the root cause of the needed change is not addressed, it is likely that it will happen again and again. The budget overages and delays will keep coming and can grow rapidly. Don’t hesitate to drop down to support your team to identify the sparks, ask the right questions, request the details, and help the team address not only the initial spark but give them the tools to put that first small fire fully out and avoid relapse. Step 3: Roll – Which brings us to the final step – Roll. The act of rolling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, is critical to avoid the most intense damage and also avoid a relapse. In Project Management terms, the act of rolling back and forth highlights the need for excellent communication with all stakeholders to make sure that all team members are aligned with the project plan and bought into the solution and how to manage change. Regular team meetings, and status updates that focus on risk management, help to identify potential issues early and develop mitigation strategies to avoid the most damaging ones. John Maxwell said “Change is inevitable…. Growth is optional.” Managing change can be challenging, but we can avoid a project firestorm by choosing to learn from our mistakes, and: 1. Stopping ourselves from rushing past them, 2. Dropping down to identify the root cause, and 3. Rolling changes out with effective communication, If you are currently in a project firestorm, reach out to Molly@EchoConsultingPM.com for a targeted intervention and support correcting your course. You can fight fire with fire and the support of Echo Consulting, because: Projects are meant to be temporary, but your success should not be.

For many teams and initiatives, it can be very hard and time-consuming to come up with measurements that accurately represent their desired results. BUT if you don't spend the time defining how to measure it, how will you determine if the time you spend to get the results is worth it? - Giving up on setting measurable targets may save time in the short-run, but in the long-run it hurts productivity and growth.

As a project manager, I have always promoted frequent retrospectives as a proactive risk management technique. No matter how streamlined the process or plan, there is ALWAYS room for improvement and opportunity to learn and optimize. It doesn't matter if I'm managing a mission critical system cutover with a very structured waterfall methodology, or whether I'm working on a custom product development project with a more agile approach - I encourage retrospectives in order to identify risks early and often and implement frequent smaller course corrections throughout the project. Also, I'm selfish, and I'd prefer to apply the benefits of lessons learned during the current project, rather than wait until the end of the project or phase, when typically I find teams only remember the last few weeks of testing and any launch/stabilization issues, and forget the details from the earlier discovery and planning and documentation heavy phases. Anyone that has been on one of my project teams knows that I end almost every meeting with the question "are there any other risks or issues we have not discussed today and need to be added to our project log?" As a project manager, I try my best to make a safe space for teams to bring forward risks, but it is a constant battle, especially with new teams and team members that are not as comfortable speaking out during larger meetings with more forceful teammates. If a team is not comfortably bringing up risks early and often, and collaborating on mitigation strategies together, the project is much more likely to encounter issues that pose significant risk to project success, and require more substantial change orders. I love the idea of pre-mortems because it combines the concepts of both retrospectives as well as a team building opportunity for working together on risk identification and mitigation strategy planning. Instead of just drawing from historical records of retrospectives (if they even exist and are accessible), it invites the team to share their personal lessons learned from their individual experiences as well as their worries/concerns for the current project in a "safe" environment where everyone is sharing at the same time. It also provides a much broader risk pool to start planning from early on vs the battle I often face in dragging the risks out of my teams prior to the point of almost being blocked/becoming an issue. As children we learn how to knock down towers before we learn to build them. Maybe if we encourage our project teams to knock down, poke holes, and destroy our plans ahead of time, we could start from a much stronger foundation for our projects. Harvard Business Review: Performing a Project Premortem

First year at Echo Consulting in #'s: * 11 New Clients * 14 Projects * 23 Events attended * 42 Invoices sent * 166 project team members led * 1308 new connections Can't wait to see what the next year brings! I'm SO thankful for my amazing clients, fantastic teams, and supportive network. Echo Consulting, LLC is possible, because you believe in the power of passionate project management!