Do these questions sound familiar?

• Did you finish X?
• Where do things stand with Y?
• Are we on schedule?
• Are you on budget?
• How long do you think that will take?
• Do you need help?
• What are we going to do about Z?

These are pretty typical questions managers and project managers ask their team members.

Unfortunately, these are dangerous questions. They encourage a check-it-off-the-list, show-progress, and feel-good-mentality. The employee naturally wants to look good and you are generally eager to hear good news so you can turn your attention to more obvious problems. The conversation accomplishes little and you walk away either with a sense of false confidence or a nagging feeling that all is not well.

As manager or project manager, you are rightfully concerned with resources, budgets, and schedules. You want to see a plan and then see progress against that plan. However, plans are only accurate when the task is totally familiar, totally understood, and totally predictable. How often does that occur?

Thus, the most important part of your job is not to monitor the plan. The most important part of your job is to anticipate and prevent problems arising from all the things omitted from the plan, the unfamiliar, the unpredictable, the unknown. And the questions above do little to uncover those potential problems.

To improve your odds of success and decrease unwelcome surprises, try questions like these:

• What have you learned since we last talked?
• What don’t we know yet?
• What are we taking for granted?
• What’s changed?
• Why do you think you will finish on time?
• What could go wrong at this point?
• How will we know we’ve succeeded?
• Who are we forgetting?

Success requires learning what you don’t know as early as possible. Get your whole team focused on anticipating and preventing problems, and you will see your on-time delivery improve while defects and rework drop. This is exactly what happened when I helped the design engineers at Hitachi establish a new design process.

Your entire organization can benefit from this approach and I can help you create that mindset quickly. Call 800-527-0087 or email info@uncommonclarity.com today.