Or as we say - Lights, Camera, Act!
As we continue our series on the IMPACT methodology breakdown, let’s turn our focus now to the “A” which stands for Act. Once you have completed your plans and preparations, it’s time to act and execute. During this phase, it is inevitable that something will not go according to plan. The art of the Act (execution) phase is knowing how to evaluate situations and make decisions that will ultimately have the least negative impact or the most positive impact to your objective. It’s important to remember that when things go wrong, don’t abandon your plan or your goal. Instead, evaluate which modifications need to take place and what the impact of those modifications will be.
When evaluating impacts, you can remember the categories that must be considered using the acronym SQERT. The SQERT model is a great tool to help manage your decision-making and the evaluation of impact on your plan. Ultimately, SQERT will help mitigate negative impacts on your project.
What does the SQERT method include and how is it utilized?
The components of the SQERT model are:
- Scope: The list of activities, objectives, and goals required to complete the project. It creates boundaries for your project and communicates what you will or will not include or do.
- Quality: Details how you will meet the requirements of your stakeholders or customer.
- Effort: The resources required to deliver the project's goals. This includes materials and labor, of which both have a direct impact to the budget and overall cost of a project.
- Risk: Identified scenarios that could potentially have a negative impact on the project. There is a key difference to keep in mind - a risk has not been realized, whereas an issue has. Issues must be resolved immediately. A risk will either be mitigated or accepted by the stakeholder(s) before it is realized.
- Time: The required duration to deliver the final results - commonly referred to as your schedule.
Delivering a project or product on time and on budget is every project manager and stakeholder’s goal. This helps to control costs and establish a sense of trust in the supplier from the customer. But with any project, there will be risks that can quickly transition to issues, and sometimes unexpected surprises. Next, let’s walk through a home renovation project to see how the SQERT components can be utilized in your decision making.
You have decided to hire a general contractor to renovate your master suite. You have met with the architect and developed the new design. The project manager has evaluated the effort to complete the request and has provided a quote and project completion date. Everyone is excited and ready to act. The demolition team begins to breakdown the existing structure to make way for the new design.
Scope – The homeowner was watching HGTV the night before and walks into the open space with a “great” new idea to reconfigure the space to include a laundry room in the master suite. The project manager smiles and replies, “We can do that, however it will increase the overall cost and add another two weeks to the schedule”. This is an example of “scope creep”. Scope creep occurs when additional, nice-to-have features are introduced into the project after the initial design, budget, and schedule have been established and agreed upon.
Quality - “We were running over budget, so I thought we could use these this instead.”
Adjusting quality as a compromise to the impact of one or more of the other categories is possible if it does not impose additional compliance risks or reduce the integrity of the solutions. A recommendation for protecting the quality of your solution is to use an approach called Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This is where you identify the minimum features and quality levels required to deliver a solid product or service to the customer. After the Minimal Viable Product is released, you can deliver periodic enhancements at a later date. This practice is commonly used in software development. This is why you get regular updates to your mobile phone and apps.
Effort - It is important to plan for the unexpected. Standard practice is to add additional
buffer time and budget to absorb situations where additional material and/or labor cost and time are required to resolve unforeseen issues. Estimating effort is based on prior experience with executing a particular task. An experienced professional should factor the known risks into their estimates. This is referred to as “buffer”. However, there are always unknown risks that come to be because they we created by things that were out of your sphere of control. Anytime you are making a change to something already in place (software, process, structure, etc.), it is important to mentally prepare yourself for impacts to your budget from a labor or materials perspective.
Risk - There are various risks that must be managed on a project. Compliance and
regulatory risks are critical and cannot be compromised. Quality and safety risks should be closely and proactively monitored and mitigated. A compromise on these two risks can result in a larger consequence of customer satisfaction and company reputation that may have an unforeseen or unmeasurable negative impact. Budget and schedule risk can be accepted if necessary. There is a common instinct to remediate issues yourself in order to “save money”. For example, you decide to replace a light switch with a Wi-Fi enabled smart switch. You watched the YouTube video, but when you removed the original switch there were more wires than you anticipated seeing (because it was a three-way switch) and they are not the colors explained in the directions or in the YouTube video. Additionally, you didn’t take a picture of the original wiring and can’t figure out how to reinstall the original switch. True story. A call to the local electrician and $300 later the switch was installed and the other switches also worked again. The lesson learned is, if you are not skilled in that activity it can cost you more in effort, time, frustration and actual dollars in the long run.
Time: Your schedule is generally the easiest component impacted. However, if not
kept in check, it can run away from you and will likely cost you more in the long run. Remember, “time is money”. Pushing the schedule out may require steps, like reviews and approvals, to be repeated, which will ultimately cost you more money. When considering time extensions, ask yourself if this is a critical extension that must be accepted or if there are other options to consider that would minimize the time extension while still fulfilling the need (ex. Brief period of overtime, running steps in parallel, etc.).
The ”Act” phase is an exciting time to see the designed changes or new creations take form. It can also be stressful at times. The best way to minimize the stress and frustration levels is to proactively take the time to develop contingency plans for the various SQERT categories. That way you are prepared to handle situations as they arise with action plans that have been developed prior to emotions running high.
The key principles to remember when things go wrong (…and they will):
- Stay grounded in facts and logic. Don’t let your emotions take control.
- Don’t abandon your plan or your goal. Simply evaluate what modifications need to take place and what the impact of those modifications are.
- It does not have to be perfect the first time! Establish a mindset of continuous improvement and make small incremental changes and enhancements.