With the changing market dynamics, there are a lot of companies wanting to create more dynamic, innovative projects to meet their customers’ needs quicker or to simply stay competitive. They start with a good intention of creating something new, giving room for ideas and then very often fall back to old patterns of thinking and executing linear processes and creating documentation.
Being part of such projects for a long time, I have asked myself how more classical project management methods and frameworks like PMI and Prince2 can be applied. Coaching program and project teams, I almost felt a resistance to apply some of these rigid tools. Seriously, when was the last time your project maintained a formal “Stakeholder Register” or a formal “Scope Statement” thoroughly until the end?
After a while I began to understand the link between these classical methods and frameworks and the tools of innovation, ideation and design thinking often referred to as “the VUCA world”. Same as with waterfall and agile there is an application and value for both once you know when to apply what. In this article I want to share a mental model to process some of these differences in those projects and hope to make your projects more pragmatic but also enjoyable for the people working in it.
“Blue” and “Red” Parts of Projects
You might have heard this differentiation on a bigger scale. Tayloristic, linear and process-driven companies and environments are often referred to as the “blue world” whereas startups, innovative companies or environments are referred to as the “red world” or “VUCA world”. Taking the example of the SpaceX journey building a rocket ship and launching it certainly has a big amount of process-oriented and blue parts. Coping with the landing of the Spaceship without destroying it, which was unprecedented before certainly required a red part to solve the challenge.
Breaking this down through the lens of project management, a project’s blue activities of projects can be tackled with knowledge and methods. For example, controlling your project costs, reporting capital vs. operational expenses follow a certain set of rules in accounting and based on your company standards. There is no need for a lot of creativity, only for discipline and following the rules. This also means, that knowledge can be transferred more easily to other team members.
Red parts are the surprises where knowledge does not help, because the problem is too complex and new. The project team needs talent, ideation, and creativity to solve the problem.
There is no judgment what is better: “red-or-blue”. It is simply a question of what is needed where and at what time. We go as far and consider that the projects have a “dual” structure. To be successful you need the blue and the red parts. To work on the red parts, you need to make them visible within the team which is the responsibility of a good project manager and coach.
For example, your (R&D) project might have an ideation phase in the beginning to find out what is going to be researched (red), a planning and budget phase (blue) and an execution phase (more blue, some red parts). Maybe there are some problems towards the end which the team needs to solve creatively (blue) and some documentation to be created to close it off (red).
Another in-project example is risk management. It is essential that you formally document the risks of your projects in a risk-register (blue) but it is even more essential to make it part of your project cadence and routine (blue) to discuss potential mitigation actions (red).
In times of crisis – duality of projects
Maybe you realized this as well: In times of crisis or if a project is not performing well, usually there is a tendency to be more rigid with PMI standards and introduce more process methods like quality gates.
There is also a tendency to “blame the tool” whereas the tool is usually designed to depict most of the blue parts of the challenge, not the red parts.
In consequence, in the design of our project environment, which includes the tool, we need to be aware of the difference between red-and-blue to effectively lead, manage and rescue a project.
The project level – example on how status reports as a blue tool can help facilitate the red part of the solution
To illustrate the duality of projects let us assume we have a problem with a project. The goal of the project is to select a new production site for a medical product. As well as creating a “harmonized” best practice process “for the whole company” to deliver a product.
Note that so far, the project description only included the blue part of the project goal (selecting a production site to perform “the best”). The goal did not yet consider politics, employee dynamics and battles around finances.
The status report indicates a green light on time, cost, and quality. Still, the leadership team has the impression the project is going slow and not progressing and asks the team to investigate. They enforce weekly status reports to be better in the loop and want to see the production process updated regularly on paper.
The project team finds out that there is an internal fight between the production sites on who will get the budget if they are selected. Also, the team identifies two players who see themselves as thought leaders to identify the process, but they have not been asked. This complicates discussions and delays the project whilst the timeline and milestones originally reflected remain on status green.
None of this would normally make it into the formal status report, because there is fear of blaming people or calling them out. In this state the status report aka the tool is only focused on the blue part of the goal.
To encourage a solution the team could create a series of discussions between humans (not job titles) and capture some of their ideas in a separate private place and agree on one voice to the leadership team.
The leadership team can acknowledge the team’s findings and make them part of the project statement, risks catalogue and goal encouraging the team to capture their ideas in a separate area of a status “team impulse” report. This means the objectives and involved stakeholders are now reflected and visible in the official projects documents like the charter and hence can be tackled by the team.
We chose this pragmatic and real-life example as we hoped it resonates with a lot of project team members out there. There is another example more on the strategic level, why we think some projects or change requests get delayed or not delivered linked to the same problem.
The strategic level – Example of introducing a capability as change request (Resource Management)
When initiating a project change or asking for a capability change request, we often see our customers focus on the blue part of the process. The focus lies on addressing the process – blue – problems or more of the “what”. A good example is the desire to introduce a “resource management process” (clearly blue). Given a good analysis of the problems at hand they mostly focus on lack of visibility of availability, overcapacity of resources and similar process related missing data. Whilst this is not a bad-goal per se the red-parts of the challenge at hand are overlooked or not named.
With the awareness of the differentiation between blue and red the leadership team might encourage the team to look at the current informal ways of how resources are managed. How project managers fight for the resources, why resources stay in the project and so on. Addressing those questions as part of the project and in cooperation with the team can help to accelerate the value creation immensely.
How to potentially solve this?
For innovation, ideation, and human-related challenges the team needs a safe space to discuss honestly what the backstage challenges are and needs to agree on a way forward with the leadership.
These three steps can be followed:
- Awareness: is the problem and task at hand of a blue or red nature? Do we need to apply knowledge and process, or do we need to encourage ideation and creative problem solving of our talents?
- Recognize: bring the backstage topics like politics and personal interests to the table without blaming. Make it a goal to address those in a professional and empathic way.
- Transform: See your team work on blue and red parts consistently and harmoniously and experience integrated change management.
In the engagements with our customers, we identify the blue-and-red parts of the challenge at hand in a culture observation period and encourage the clients to schedule a workshop prior to the project start to bring those topics up in a safe environment. These kind of observations or workshops can happen in various formats and on an as-per-need basis throughout the project. This brings clarity to the team on the part of blue and red goals, challenges and opportunities to tackle.
We hope this differentiation helps you and your team to select the right level of discussion to proactively and pragmatically solve your problems and create a safe space for innovation.
Stefan Haberberg