Stick to the plan or re-plan on the fly?

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates, but this thing called work seems to have been occupying a fair bit of my time recently, but now I'm back.

For this post, the inspiration actually came from the department to which I am currently allocated, which have been working with improving meeting efficiency. One point is the preparation of a meeting/workshop, which among other things requires the preparation of an agenda, topics to be discussed etc. Usually it is good meeting etiquette to stick to the agenda, make sure that there is time for all parts of the agenda and so forth. These are all sound priciples, but...

I think everyone knows the dilemma, stick to the plan or go of in another direction? It occurs daily to all of us, whether we were just on our way to the grocery store and "accidentally" stepped into our favorite clothing store, or we were on our way home, and decided to take another route to avoid traffic even though it might be a longer drive. (I know, I know. I promised, no more traffic metaphors!)

In the world of business analysis, it is not uncommon that a meeting gets "high-jacked" by someone with a different agenda, and the question is then how do we handle this? The answer is of course a clear cut: Well, it depends...

To keep it simple, I see three basic outcomes of our decision:

1: We fend of the high-jacking attempt and return the originally proposed agenda, but not being pirates, we also make a decision on how to handle the issues brought up as the alternative agenda.

2: We declare a ceasefire, ending the current meeting/workshop and convene at a later point in time to discuss the new situation.

3: We declare us beaten by the high-jacking and change our agenda to accommodate the new information.

No strategy is better than the other, per see, as they are highly situation dependent.

So how do we as the meeting leader/facilitator decide which strategy to use? I see four important parts which have to be taken into consideration.

A: Are the meeting participants the right ones to discuss and make decision on the new agenda?

B: Is the necessary information present, both with the meeting participants and are documents etc. to be discussed available ?

C: Am I as the meeting leader/facilitator prepared to/capable of changing the agenda?

D: Does the information in the "high-jacking" render the current agenda useless?

Based on this we can make a decision:

In order to change the current agenda, we need to be able to answer yes to A, B and C. Otherwise we cant continue the meeting with a new agenda. If we answer yes to D we only have option 2 left.

If we answer no to A, B or C, we can choose between options 1 and 2. Here question D becomes the tie-breaker. If we answer yes to D, we should end the current meeting and convene at a later point in time when we have the necessary information or attendants.

I have tried to illustrate it in the figure below:

While question A, B and D are quantifiable, question C is tricky and a point where the meeting leader has to be honest with him-/herself and the other participants.

As the meeting leader it is hard to announce that you are not capable of continuing the meeting, even though the necessary people and information is present. I do however think it is better to make the decision to postpone the meeting rather than continuing with a meeting where we are unsure of the outcome because we don't now whereto or how to steer our ship.

Continuing without a captain can cause worse results than dropping the anchor and make sure we have the right position and direction.

Handling known risks (and something about matching expectations)

Last time I promised to try to stay out of the traffic metaphors, and I shall do so...almost.

As business analyst we are used to working with risk analysis and risk mitigation.

Thus it makes me wonder how almost everyone, myself excluded of course, gets surprised by frost and snow here in Denmark. By everyone I do mean everyone from individuals to large government controlled companies.

It is a known statistically proven fact that sometime in November or December, even with global warming and all, the first frost and/or snow will appear. Nevertheless it always seems to catch a rather large group by complete surprise.

(On a side note it is rather the irony of destiny that it is snowing in Copenhagen during the COP15 summit)

In our projects we usually identify risk a plan mitigating actions according to risk size etc. Somehow we fail to do the same to a risk that is almost sure to occur at the same time every year.

In the current case of snow and frost mitigation actions are of course to to fit the appropriate tires to the car, make sure the cooling fluid is frost resistant etc. and should this not be enough be sure to keep blankets and drinking water in the car.
How the train operators prepare I'm not sure, but it is often not that effective, or rather it is probably a cost benefit consideration/decision.

To project this to our project world, do we have similar risk that we can almost guarantee will occur at a specific time in a projects life cycle?
I think so, examples could be the ability to gathered the user requirements on the scheduled time, testing takes longer than planned and probably many others.

Do we not have the mitigation in place? Sure, add more time! Cut functionality! Cut on Quality! But that is however not always the option, as this now gets political and I will not go into that here.

But the least we can do is mach the expectations of action from all involved parties. If a risk is high enough, and we are more or less sure that it will occur, then we must at least trust that we take the agreed action.

If we can agree on who does what, we might have a chance to at least softening the blow a bit, and not get knocked off course, just like the traffic on the slippery road.