2023 is here, and I’m not ready. As the project manager at QIC, I ensure that our project objectives are met using techniques rooted in the Agile methodology. No project has felt too daunting to manage nor a team too challenging to collaborate with. Yet here I am, staring January in the face, terrified of how I will manage my family and household. I need a plan. I need help. There’s going to be a crib-to-bed transition. Potty training. Swimming, ballet, soccer, gymnastics, skating, and karate classes. It’s. All. Too. Much. How to stem the hysteria? How to tackle this overwhelm?
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I repeat I’m a capable, successful project manager. Can’t I use the same tools at home to bring order to the chaos? As it turns out, I’m late to this revelation. According to Bruce Feiler (TED talk), Agile was just what his household needed to “cut parental screaming in half.” I was simultaneously floored and elated. I had spent a decade working on mastering a framework that I could have been using in my personal life all along.

I will spare you the history and details of Agile, but if you’re interested, here is an excellent place to start. In short, the purpose of Agile is to make progress in an ever-changing environment, utilizing an empirical process to make decisions to ensure we move the needle in the right direction. As we understand at QIC, R&D contracts often come with many unknowns, having to meet tight timelines and budgets while leaving room for exploration, collaboration, and adaptation. Using Agile principles, our team meets at predictable regular intervals to regroup and connect to share progress and information to continue to improve and deliver value.
  
On the home front, my husband and I connect after the kids’ bedtime to have a warming beverage and look at the day ahead. This often involves laughing over who cried more, us or the kids, and ways to reduce tears. This is similar to the sprint retrospective when the team discusses ways to work better together to avoid recurring problems. It is also like the daily standup when the team shares what they will be doing for the day, enabling them to communicate roadblocks early, and assist where necessary. Granted, we may not have much progress involving our 2yo and 5yo kids in these discussions despite being key stakeholders; I would like to think that very soon they will be. Empowering them to participate in the process will hopefully lead to cooperation and a happy home life.

​Agile applied in the home is a compelling idea, one that I’m willing to try this year. If I fail, at least I’ll be failing fast! Would you try any of these approaches to household management in your personal life? What skills do you hone in your workplace that you could apply at home?  

While failure is no fun, it is a part of life. Whether summitting mountains or managing projects, there are times when one must recognize the signs of failure, make the tough decision to call it a day, and learn from the experience to return smarter and stronger next time.
This past summer, I took a vacation to Colorado which was a blast. Three days on the agenda consisted of backpacking into the Chicago Basin, camping, and summiting 14ers (mountains over 14,000 feet). I had no prior mountaineering experience though was with someone who did, and we planned extensively. I had the right gear, was in good shape, and the conditions were ideal; I was feeling confident. On the second day, as I attempted a second summit, I began feeling fatigued, making mental errors, and falling behind. Though I tried to press on, I was aware that poor decisions and continued mistakes, especially near the summit, could be catastrophic (see Wickens, Keller, & Shaw, 2015). 

I made the difficult call to abandon the summit bid and hiked down to lower elevation. Watching the beautiful sunrise over the basin lakes, I began to reflect on the failure, thinking about it in terms of project management given a summit bid, like a project, is “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique…result” (Project Management Institute, 2008, p. 5). Though a project manager (PM) never plans to fail, they do identify the risks and notice the potential signs of failure so that they can correct course. As a last resort, a responsible PM may decide it is best to call it quits before stakeholder and company losses become too great. 

Recognizing the Signs
In a Project Management Institute (PMI) published article "Managing Troubled Projects", Alaskar (2013) outlines signs that a project may be in jeopardy. Several of these apply to my summit bid:

• Delays in meeting milestones or completing deliverables
  • We left camp late. Scheduled departure was 4:00am and we left at 4:15am
• Project is unacceptably behind the planned schedule
  • The late departure put us immediately behind schedule and it did not get any better from there as we continued to lose time following a missed turn in the dark and several unplanned stops enroute to the summit
• High risk to the project's likelihood in delivering anticipated benefits
  • The delays and my increasing fatigue significantly threatened the likelihood of success, the obvious definition of success being reaching the summit 
• Critical and/or significantly growing technical issues with the project, and
• Frequent intervention required by the management team
  • My travel partner had substantial mountaineering experience, having summited 47 of the 58 Colorado 14ers to that point, making her pretty awesome and the de facto manager on this adventure. The more mistakes I made, the more she had to intervene, such as my hiking pole bottom falling out (I did not properly secure it having rushed to begin the hike) and her catching it while below me on the slope.
• Morale of the team has hit rock-bottom
  • We were both frustrated, with the rushed situation, the mistakes, and admittedly with each other. This contributed to low morale and there was little time to regroup.
    

Of course, in recognizing these signs, there is always hope for turning the project around. A PM certainly need not accept failure, and there is plenty of literature on how to save troubled or failing projects. Yes, I may have been able to eat a CLIF BAR® and rally, but that was not the case. So, in the rare and unfortunate event a project does fail, you can learn from that experience.     

Learning from Failure
In another PMI published article, Ranganath (2006) presents a learning from experience (LifE) cycle for project management that applies to dealing with project failure. The cycle involves:

• Planning the experience – identify milestones where it is important to assess risks and points of failure
• Living the experience – accept that failures and problems are as much a part of the experience as successes
• Reflecting on the experience – examine the symptoms and determine the probable causes of failure
• Learning from the experience – analyze the data to inform appropriate corrective action for the next time, document patterns that may be recognizable in the future, and establish change initiatives for improvement
• Acting on the experience – determine the effectiveness of the change initiatives through execution
• Reliving a new experience – move forward, not dwelling on the mistakes of the previous lived experience while continuing to monitor risks and look for opportunities to improve

My initial reaction was that I will not relive a mountain summit bid experience having learned to restrict my endurance activities to sea level. Upon further reflection, I am willing to attempt another summit though I need to better prepare, now having a more complete understanding of the work to be done and the potential points of failure. This preparation would include modifying my approach to physical training and trying to gain more exposure to heights. I’m hopeful that reliving the experience while better prepared will result in success. However, there is always the chance that, as John Popper aptly sang, “the mountains win again.”