“Turn the ship around” by David Marquet is a rare gem of a book. It is one of those books that come around once a decade. The book is very well written, provides a lot of lessons that you can apply to your situation, and is very entertaining to boot. In his story of how David Marquet turns around the Sante Fe, we can see similarities to companies, jobs, and teams in our own situations.
It is an inspiring story how one can turn the leader-follower model and turn it into the leader-leader model, even in one of the most seemingly hierarchical situations in the world, the military. I’ve read multiple books now that dispel that myth. I think the military probably gets a bad reputation of being hierarchical, but to survive has probably adapted more and quicker than perhaps any other industry.
Mistake Monitoring
There are many things that you can take away from David Marquet’s book based on what you are experiencing and what problems are foremost in your mind. For me, I was thinking about the challenge of making project reporting more lean and valuable.
So when I read the section lamenting that monitoring in the Navy was just focused on preventing errors and mistakes but not at getting better or more efficient, I immediately saw parallels with project reporting. I was thinking the same thing about our project reporting. We report about whether the project is yellow or red and what problems we have encountered, but we rarely if ever discuss how we became more efficient or got better on the project. If we are lucky, we discuss those items in the project or iteration close outs. Many times, the items are small improvements and many times they don’t get shared outside of the project team.
It got me thinking, how can we monitor and focus on efficiency improvements on our projects? As Marquet mentioned, the bar is set quite low if success is measured by the absence of errors and mistakes. If success is just based on meeting budget and schedule, are we really trying to improve and get better? Why wouldn’t team members just provide large estimates so that they were deemed a success. Where is the focus on continuous improvements and wanting to get better? I want to do more on my projects than just avoiding mistakes.
I don’t have answer for where this will lead and what we are going to monitor and share. But thanks to David Marquet we are asking the question to our teams and trying to determine how we can set the bar higher and get better and more efficient on our projects. Maybe that is a good place to start, to say finishing a project on time and on budget is not enough and to ask the stakeholders what other goals and objectives should this project have? And then overall, what goals and objectives should the Project Management Office have?
I’ll report back in a future blog on what we have tried and what have worked.
Agile PMO 