Beware overly simplified approaches to complex issues.
Several years ago I participated in a 3-day planning workshop with a client who was starting a Pre-Feasibility Study for a large gold mining project. It was a project with challenging geology and mineralogy, and was located in a remote area with complicated logistics, not to mention the community and social considerations that needed to be addressed. At the end of the workshop we had a well thought-out plan for the project, had identified the major activities with a detailed schedule, and most importantly, had communicated and achieved buy-in to these plans with the entire project team. The result of the workshop showed a Pre-Feasibility study duration of 18 months – considerably longer than the average study – with extensive geological and metallurgical testing to reduce the technical uncertainty in the study, as well as substantial execution planning and community consultations to reduce the uncertainty caused by remoteness and the environment.
On the day after the workshop, I met up with a former colleague and shared the insights I gained from the planning approach. I told him I was proud of the work we put in and the result we got out of it.
“Eighteen months to do a pre-feasibility study?” He said with disbelief, “That’s way too long. You’ll kill the project if you don’t get it done faster than that. No way it should take that long.”
At the time I shrugged off his comments and moved on to another topic, but his comments still bother me now. Without asking a single question or looking at a single page of our plan, he determined that our approach was flawed. Why? Because a Pre-Feasibility Study should take 6-10 months. It didn’t matter than 20 professionals sat in a room for 3 days to build this detailed schedule. He felt he knew better.
This is the kind of thinking that so frequently trips up projects: substituting gut-feeling and intuition-informed decisions for proper analysis and planning.
I understand the usefulness of benchmarks, heuristics, and rules-of-thumb in analyzing project plans and performance. I also understand how individual projects may deviate significantly from average values and how the failure to appreciate the specific context or particular details of a project can result in bad ideas and bad implementation.
A topic I’m going to explore a lot on this blog is the concept of critical thinking and decision support in project management, a term that I call project analysis. It’s something that I feel hasn’t been adequately addressed in either the project management or project controls domains, but is crucial to making sure that key project decisions are framed and understood correctly.
Next post I’ll start delving into the specifics of project analysis, but for now I’ll leave you with this: just because you did it that way before doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do it now.