How to Improve Strategic Plan Facilitation by Reviewing Dashboard Design

Dashboard design and use tells us much about an organization's connectivity when facilitating a Strategic Plan.

The Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) business leader was frustrated. Three years ago, the organization moved to a new system and a big part of the implementation was to make the user dashboards more useable. The problem was not solved, so a year later, he hired a different consultant to tweak and improve the dashboard. The result was the same.

“I need you to bring your industry knowledge to my dashboards," stated the CMMS administrator. “The current dashboards have been developed without the practical knowledge to make them more useful to our staff."

I wish this type of exchange were more uncommon than it is. While my forte is not dashboard development, making management systems more useable to the operations side of organizations is.

“Why do you think you are not showing the most relevant information,” I asked, which was always my leadoff question in this type of discussion.

“Because we have worked for several years to improve the data quality. And we have the visualizations right,” replied the system champion. “The programmers are not tied as closely to the front lines as they should be. They do not understand what the users need to see."

“Let’s take a look and see,” I countered. “Your consultants may not be as close to your staff as they need to be, but that is probably not your biggest problem.”

Dashboards

Dashboards are common to information management and operations management. Senior management loves to have dashboards to keep their fingers on the pulse of the organization that they manage.

A dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, "dashboard" is another name for "progress report" or "report" and considered a form of data visualization. (Source: Wikipedia)

By this definition, focusing on big data to produce graphs, detailed mapping of business processes, and implementing a software system that produces a readable report are three keys to success. Or are they?

Unfortunately, the information management world has hijacked a common term. We gain much understanding of what is missing from our business dashboards by examining the old-school definition.

Dashboard: a panel extending across the interior of a vehicle (such as an automobile) below the windshield and usually containing instruments and controls. (Source: Merriam-Webster)

Actionable Items in Front

Look at the dashboard of a car, airplane, or boat. The information directly in front of the driver is current, real-time information used to navigate the vehicle. Historical and non-essential information (like the radio) are on the sides.

I use my own experiences racing sailboats through storms as my acid test. In those situations, I need to know my direction (compass), the wind speed and direction (anemometer), and usually how close I am to horizontal objects (GPS) and the bottom (depth finder). That’s it.

It’s nice to know the information from the last thirty days or the trends over the past four quarters, but I will also look at it when I have the chance. Managers need the information to help them drive the organization today.

One Big Issue

The biggest issue regarding dashboards is whether the managers are using them. After asking, "are you using the dashboard," the next essential question is, "how often are you using it."

Most front-line managers will tell you they are using the dashboard because no one wants to criticize someone else's work. You will find the truth when you get down into the second or even a third layer of questions. The truth in most cases is that they look at them from time to time, which means the dashboard provides them little help in driving their operation each day.

As a facilitator of Strategic Plans, Board Retreats, and management system improvements, I like to include dashboards in my pre-session exchanges. A dashboard, at least in theory, should be a risk management tool. I usually find that senior management is not using them at all, which tells me the executives are using something else to sail the ship through choppy waters. Something else may be their experience or their biases, but it is probably not the best evidence-based information that the organization has available.

To call senior management not using their dashboards as discouraging would be an overstatement. Not using dashboards to steer the organization is simply an opportunity lost. The unfortunate part is that it is far too common. But as a facilitator and a risk & reliability expert, it sheds light on every organization with which I interact.

Moving Forward

Dashboards contain the information and controls that we drive vehicles and organizations. We need viable dashboards to manage our organizations daily, especially when uncertainty is high and visibility is poor. If you want to make your dashboard more effective, then focus most on today’s information and less on historical data, business processes, and fancy visualizations.

Dashboards are good indicators of the integration of organizations from bottom to top. If the dashboards do not reflect what managers need to run their work divisions, then it is likely that the organizational data is disconnected from operational decision making. Even worse, if senior management is not using the organization’s dashboards in their strategic decision making, then the head of the organization is detached from its body.

The good news is that dashboards, good or bad, inform facilitators of the potential challenges of identifying and implementing actions of great importance to the integrated whole.

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JD Solomon Inc provides solutions for facilitation, asset management, and program development at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Founded by JD Solomon, Communicating with FINESSE is the community of technical professionals dedicated to being highly effective trusted advisors. Learn more about our publications, webinars, and workshops. Join the community for free.

Less than Obvious Tips That Will Boost Your Project Milestone Reviews

Improving milestone reviews involves doing the basics well while avoiding some less obvious aspects that undermine effectiveness.

Four basic things to improve project milestone reviews

Autopsies and Improving the Dreaded Project Milestone Review provides insights and four basic things to improve project milestone reviews:

• Do not do a milestone review on every task.

• Approach the milestone review with a positive attitude.

• Seek an experienced facilitator.

• Allow ample time.

Remember, we want to break the program into parts just like an autopsy, but the participants do not need to feel like they have been on the slab. And no one should call the funeral home when the milestone review is done.

An average autopsy case takes about four hours, including the paperwork. Milestone reviews are similar.

Communication is Important

A milestone review is a facilitated session. Unfortunately, we often approach milestone reviews as just another meeting.

The cause and effect relationships in the FINESSE fishbone diagram apply to effectively communicating at a milestone meeting. The seven bones are Framing, Illustrations, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics. The Five Reasons Being An Effective Communicator Helps Your Technical Career will also help your milestone reviews.

Less than Obvious Tips

1. The Project Charter Consistently Pays Dividends

The benefits of a formal project charter should be obvious to all project managers; however, in practice, this is not the case.

A project charter is a short document that outlines the entirety of the project. It includes the project mission, goals, deliverables, tasks, timelines, roles & responsibilities, performance measures, and stakeholders. The Project Management Institute’s PMBOK Guide (and other best practice standards) describe it as an essential deliverable t and one of the first deliverables in every project.

The primary benefit of a project charter is that it sets the working contract between team members rather than following the legal contract between all parties. Legal contracts should be modified if they are not in alignment with the collective direction of the project.

2. A Synthesis Document Prevents Backsliding

A synthesis document aims to combine a number of different pieces into a whole. The document includes all of the relevant decisions, work products approved by project participants, points of contention, project performance metrics, and supporting information that will facilitate everything into final form. It is more detailed than a decision log and much more concise than a SharePoint site.

In practice, a synthesis document progressively builds into a final form that lets the project team know they are finished.

The synthesis document identifies conflicts early and often. The document also prevents re-oping decisions or backsliding from previous agreement points.

3. Make It Interactive

The typical milestone review centers on a Gantt chart that describes the tasks, their dependencies, and timelines. The project controls function usually brings in reams of papers or crushing PowerPoint slides. Although the official tools to analyze and report on the schedule, budget, and quality are necessary, the entire meeting does not need to be aligned with these energy-sucking elements.

All of this information should be provided to participants in advance. The first ten to fifteen minutes of the milestone meeting should be devoted to quiet time for the participants to read the information. Getting the material in advance and allowing time to review it provides the opportunity for a more interactive review.

There is no need, and it is disrespectful, to read basic information to trained professionals. Use your valuable time together for a more beneficial purpose.

The primary benefit of group interaction is that critical thinking can be applied to issues like quality and risk.

4. Avoid a Beat-Down Session

By their nature, milestone reviews identify gaps. However, the event's primary purpose is to provide the team with project status and frame potential corrective action. Most corrective actions cannot be finalized in the meeting because the actions require some re-allocation of resources that, in turn, require senior management approval.

Remember that an autopsy should not make those participating in it think they were on the slab.

The benefit of avoiding a beat-down session is continued energy for the project, subsequent milestone reviews, and a successful end product.

5. The Follow-Up Is Critical

Most of us are happy when the milestone meeting is over. We wait for the project manager to send us the notes and the updated project control documentation. Then we more or less keep doing things the way we did before the milestone review.

One useful practice is to set multiple meetings related to key tasks over the next two weeks while in the milestone meeting. The big stuff is obvious, but here we are including some of the small stuff too. For the project manager, success can be described as being busier in the two weeks after the meeting than they were in the two weeks preparing for it.

The benefit is that creative thinking continues. Some things that seemed small in the milestone meeting were actually swamped by the larger issues. Better clarification and improved solutions will be gained in the aftermath.

Three End-of-Year Examples

A recent major infrastructure project had a milestone review that went below average. The session was cold, stale, and limited progress toward getting some milestone activities on track. I attribute it to a project manager and an executive sponsor who continued doing things they always had and did not spend much time making the review more productive. This one gets a ragged C.

Another recent example comes from a multi-year asset management project. The project manager was fully engaged, and the creative executive sponsor was present throughout the milestone review. The participants used the master schedule and project charter as the basis of the meeting but focused the meeting on interactive and avoided any beat-downs (although two were probably in order). The information was provided to participants in advance. The follow-up meetings are aggressive and in progress. This one gets a high B.

A third example is related to a multi-year planning project. The project manager and executive sponsor are fully engaged. Both rely on their team of subject matter experts and facilitators to be creative. A charter and a synthesis document guide the process. All information for the milestone review was provided the week before the session. The session was highly interactive and productive. This one gets a solid A.

Putting It into Practice

Improving milestone reviews involves doing the basics well while avoiding some less obvious aspects that undermine effectiveness. Project managers who seek to excel by practicing these tips will keep their projects on track. Moreover, they will keep their team members coming back and off the autopsy slab.

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JD Solomon Inc provides solutions for program development, facilitation, and asset management at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Contact us if you are looking for more effective approaches to program development and program management services.

Founded by JD Solomon, Communicating with FINESSE is a not-for-profit community of technical professionals dedicated to being better trusted advisors. Join the community for free.

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Three Things To Avoid When Performing An Environmental Root Cause Analysis

Environmental root cause analysis creates some special considerations; however, an RCA is an RCA no matter where you find a failure.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a collective term that describes a wide range of approaches, tools, and techniques used to uncover the causes of problems. The American Society for Quality (ASQ) defines a root cause as a factor that caused a non-conformance and should be permanently eliminated through process improvement.

The international risk standard, ISO 31000, adds clarification that root cause analysis attempts to identify the root or original causes instead of only the immediately obvious symptoms. RCA is most often applied to the evaluation of major loss but may also be used to analyze losses on a more global basis to determine where improvements can be made.

Typical Environmental Situations

Environmental root cause analysis is relevant to a wide variety of situations. A few that I have evaluated include the following:

• Intermittent dye discharges from an industrial facility into nearby streams

• Algal blooms in lakes and ponds

• Fish kills and aquatic plant damage

• Regulated or emerging contaminates discharged in rivers and waterways

• Sand blockage of a shallow-draft, coastal inlet

• Sedimentation accumulation in streams and ponds from construction activities

• Air quality impacts from commercial and land-clearing operations

• Numerous regulatory violations related to surface water, groundwater, solid waste, hazardous waste, and air quality where a single source of responsibility is not easily identified

Three Things To Avoid

Equipment and business process failures are usually identified in a short time, whereas environmental failures are not realized for months, years, or decades after the first distress is experienced.

Environmental failures are often more related to biological and chemical interactions, whereas physical interactions heavily influence equipment and business process failures. Once failure begins, there is a steady progression and little self-healing in physical systems. In natural systems, there is a greater opportunity for self-healing. The sum effect is that symptoms are usually noticed earlier in physical systems than in natural systems.

The P-F curve used in mechanical systems has similar applications to natural systems. (Source: Aladon)

In reliability engineering, Potential Failure (P-F) is defined as the interval between the point when a potential failure becomes detectable and the point at which it degrades into a functional failure. The P-F curve is conceptually powerful in establishing condition monitoring technologies or predictive tools to detect these potential failures before they occur.

Regardless of how fast a failure occurs or how noticeable it is, a failure analysis is a failure analysis no matter where you find it. Good root cause analysis principles are the same for any type of system.

Three primary mistakes occur with doing environmental root cause analysis.

Too Much “Physics of Failure”

In physical systems, the concept of the physics of failure refers to the use of degradation equations that describe how physical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, or electrical mechanisms evolve over time and eventually induce failure. Underlying the physics of failure are failure mechanisms that essentially describe how something fails (for mechanical systems. corrosion, erosion, fatigue, and overload are the four primary mechanisms of failure).

Failure mechanisms shed light on how things fail but do not provide the causal relationships needed to establish and mitigate the root causes.

In all RCAs, it is easy to dwell too much on studying failure mechanisms. This is especially true when performing environmental RCAs because the environmental sector contains more scientists and researchers than engineers and financial professionals. The applied nature of the latter two types of professionals leads to a “good enough” effect that optimizes resources and time-effectively gets to the end game of reducing future failures.

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is spending too much time studying.

Too Little Structure

Most formally trained RCA professionals are in the manufacturing or healthcare sectors, where the cost of failure is readily noticeable and can be acute. Many seasoned RCA professionals have environmental RCAs in their portfolios, but they are not usually on top of the contact list of scientists and regulators.

Neither formally trained nor having ready access to seasoned RCA professionals, many scientists and regulators use (or develop) their own approaches for doing the failure analysis. The result of not using a proven RCA methodology results in spending too many resources, taking too much time, and, most importantly, not identifying the correct root causes.

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is not usually a proven RCA methodology.

Too Much Focus on a Single Cause

Environmental RCAs are usually driven because of non-compliance with statutes and regulations. Regulators, impacted parties, and their attorneys seek to place blame (and restitution) on a single party.

This leads to erroneous RCAs because, by definition, there are multiple causes of failure when a failure occurs in any system.

The problem is further compounded by environmental failures falling into the domain of regulators and politicians, who naturally seek to assign the blame and move on. The healthcare system is most akin to the environmental sector in this way; however, the healthcare system is more interested in risk mitigation and continual improvement of systems (albeit quietly).

One common mistake with environmental RCAs is not recognizing that there is always more than one root cause.

One Big Solution

The one big solution is to use a formally trained RCA professional with a standardized methodology. The process ultimately will take less time, require fewer resources, and identify the true root causes that lead to better performance and fewer risks.

Moving Forward

The three things that every science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professional should do is:

1. Take a course in root cause analysis

2. Identify an RCA professional you trust (you will need one at some point)

3. Insist on doing a proper RCA when a failure occurs

An RCA is an RCA no matter where you find the failure.

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JD Solomon Inc provides program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Contact us about our FAST (Frame, Analyze, Solve, Transmit) methodology for root cause analysis and our RCA experience in the environmental sector. Visit Communicating with FINESSE for communication approaches for issues involving complexity, uncertainty, and failure.

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