Chapter 6
Things either are or they aren’t
How do you know if you’re making progress towards your objective? Because things either are or they aren’t; things are either done or not done. This chapter describes how to know when things are one or the other.
Questions
A couple of multiple choice questions this time:
- Someone’s working on a task for you. When asked how it’s going they say they’re ‘90 per cent done’. What does this mean?
(a) He had 100 widgets to process, he’s done 90 of them and so there are 10 left. Therefore he must be 90 per cent done.
(b) He had 10 days to do the task and day 9 is about to come to an end. Therefore he must be 90 per cent done.
- You are part of a project team. You finish a job several days early. Since this job is on the critical path (i.e. the shortest path through the project) this means that the project itself can be shortened by the same number of days. You go to the project manager and tell him. What is most likely to happen with this gift of several days that you hand him?
(a) He’ll give you something else to do to fill the several days.
(b) Nothing. The several days will just get frittered away.
The rule
But before that, the answers to the questions. Question 1 – answer (a) is what the phrase ‘90 per cent done’ ought to mean. Typically, in my experience, answer (b) is what it actually means. Question 2 – answer (a) almost certainly; answer (b) equally almost certainly, in my experience.
Okay – the rule. The rules we’ve talked about so far – rule 2, know what you’re trying to do; 3, there is always a sequence of events; 4, things don’t get done if people don’t do them – provide a framework for getting things done. Our fifth rule, things rarely turn out as expected, points out that things will almost certainly turn out differently from the way rules 2 through 4 may have led us to believe. Given that this is so, we need a way of finding out how things are actually progressing.
As usual, the textbooks give us all sorts of ways – per cent complete, earned value, milestones passed, number of tasks complete, per cent of budget expended, the list is endless. But for us exponents of common sense, there is really only one measure that makes sense. That measure is to say that once we have our sequence of events, and once we know who’s doing what, then each job on the sequence of events can exist only in one of two states. Either it’s done or, failing that, it’s not done. That is rule 6. Things either are or they aren’t. Things are either done or they’re not done. Jobs are either complete and therefore finished or they are not.
Now you may immediately object to this and say that you may be somewhere in the middle of something and that this is more useful information than to say ‘it’s not done’. However, to say that you’re ‘in the middle of something’ is really not all that useful either. So can we do better than just saying ‘I’m in the middle of something’?
Once again, the trick is to break things down and, as we saw in Chapter 3, to do it in as much detail as possible. If you’re working on a two-month job, and you tell me that you’re ‘halfway through’, then in almost all cases this really means nothing. However, if the two-month job can be thought of as being composed of, say, 10 or 15 smaller jobs, each of three or four days’ duration, then you now actually tell me a lot of useful information.
If the first month is over and you tell me you’re still working on job 1 out of 15, there’s clearly a problem. Equally, if one month is over and you say to me that jobs 1 through 7 are done and you’re now working on job 8, this tells an entirely different story. So too would telling me that after one month, only 1 job out of 15 remains to be done.
Since – it is hoped – you will have already built your sequence of events in as much detail as possible, it should be no great hardship to monitor progress in this way. If, of course, you don’t put in this kind of detail, the job becomes something of a black box, where you have no clear idea what’s going on inside. It’s out of this lack of clarity that surprises and firefights are born. With black box jobs, you have no real early warning system.
Another issue here is the whole business of what constitutes ‘done’. Here we can use rule 2, know what you’re trying to do, to help us. In the same way that it is important to know for large projects or stratagems precisely what it is you’re trying to achieve, it is also important to know this for each of the jobs in our sequence of events. Each job should produce some ‘deliverable’, something that we can look at or hold in our hand, and say ‘yes, the existence of this thing means that this job is done’. So then the test of done or not done becomes a simple case of whether or not the deliverable exists.
How to
How are we doing?
The first of our tools is the one we have hinted at in the opening section. When assessing progress, we will think not in terms of part way through or 60 per cent done or any of these dodgy notions. Rather we will break a job down into elements (smaller jobs), and we will then record those jobs as being either done or not done. If somebody tries anything else, we will ask them to break the thing down into jobs which they then classify as either done or not done.
At first, people may find this notion a bit alien and you may have to coach them into understanding what you mean, what you want and why what you’re asking for might actually make sense. I think you’ll also find people motivated to break things down into smaller units of detail because of the following effect. Let’s say you have weekly meetings whose purpose is to assess status. Somebody won’t want to be coming week after week and reporting something as not done. Instead they will break it down into smaller components so that they can report progress from week to week.
Are things better or worse?
A variant on the notion of things either are or they aren’t is the idea of whether things are better or worse. Things either are or they aren’t is an instantaneous snapshot of the status of something. However, we may be interested in the trend – how the status of something is progressing over time. Let’s say, for example, you run a company and it’s experiencing cashflow difficulties. You are anxious to know some key indicators:
- Are costs decreasing?
- Are revenues increasing?
- What’s happening to profits?
- How far am I in on my lines of credit?
Asking whether things are better or worse, from day to day, from week to week or from month to month, will help clarify for you what the trends are. Graphing the answer to the question ‘Are things better or worse?’ will make all of this abundantly clear.
Examples/Applications
Example 1 Monitoring progress
We have looked at the idea of breaking things down and then reporting the smaller jobs identified as being either done or not done. There is an additional aspect of this which is worth noting. Say, for example, you have a weekly status meeting where people must come and say how they’re doing. (These comments apply equally well when the status is reported via progress reports rather than a meeting.) If someone is coming week after week and reporting that a particular job they’re working on is not done, the pressure (peer or self-imposed) generated by this should cause them to focus more on getting the thing done, so that they can report that it’s finished.
Example 2 Reducing stress #1
You can use this rule and rule 3, there is always a sequence of events, to help you reduce stress. We saw in Chapter 3 the idea of thinking of the sequence of events as a stack from which we took jobs as they needed to be done. One way we can consider each job is to say – using rule 6 – that either it must be done by us or it mustn’t. Now, if we must do it, then let’s go and do it. If not, somebody else must do it. In that case, there is nothing you can do about it, there’s no point in worrying about it, so just wait until they get it done. (The Dalai Lama puts it succinctly like this: ‘If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.’)
A variation on this which makes it even more watertight is to do the following. When you’ve identified that the next move is theirs, ask yourself one additional question. Is there anything you can do to expedite the next job, even though it is theirs? If there is, this becomes a job in the stack for you. That being the case, you go and do it. If, however, there is genuinely nothing further you can do, then that’s you off the hook until they get their bit done.
AND SO, WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
Monitor progress on the basis of done or not done. Break things down to a lower level of detail where necessary.