25-Minute Rule: The Art of Using Stretched Targets

I deliver more than 40 workshops each year. Almost all these workshops have time slots for group discussion or activities and a final presentation from each group. When the time for group exercise comes, I often tell them they have 25 minutes for discussion. They’d usually think 25 minutes are more than sufficient, until about 3 or 5 minutes before the presentation time they suddenly realize that they need more time. They will then plead with me for more time. So we enter into a negotiation, or more likely a bargaining. “We need 10 more minutes.” No you can only have 3 more.” How about 5 minutes.” Okay, deal. Each group has 5 more minutes.” This almost happens in every workshop, even in every group exercise.

I call this the 25-minute rule. In the end, there will be effectively 30 minutes for each group, but I always start with a stretch target of 25 minutes. Does this sound familiar to you? In real-life projects, don’t most managers use this technique to squeeze the most out of their project teams? I do this all the time when I run projects. When activities are defined and leaders identified, there goes the difficult task of time estimation.

As a project manager I have to let them state their opening bid, i.e. how much time they think they need. They are the experts in their own tasks so I cannot enforce some timeline to them unless in the case that there is an externally imposed deadline for that task (for example the insurance product has to be submitted to a government agency for compliance review.) When the leader tells me he needs 6 weeks, I will start negotiating based on my experience about the task from previous projects, opinions from other experts, or some external factors we cannot control (such as dependency of the following tasks which the responsible organization has resource constraints after a certain date), we will eventually settle at a duration say 4 weeks that both of us are comfortable. So lesson number one is never accept the opening position as-is, because people tend to overstate what they need.

So how does this 4-week duration agreeable to both parties sound to you? Is this an optimal duration, taking into consideration of the interests of both the performing team and you, the project manager? The short answer is no. This is actually a duration that is more comfortable to you than the performing team. In project management it’s called a stretched target. In fact you may have 5 weeks in your pocket but you push for 4-week duration. Chances are the performing team feels that 4 weeks are not sufficient, and they have to work extremely hard to meet the deadline. You may probably ask, “Isn’t mutual trust, open communication, and fairness important to a project? Why don’t you use a target that’s comfortable and ‘fair’ to both sides? “The answer is pretty simple. If you use a target that’s comfortable to the performing team, say 5 weeks, they would eventually finish the task later than 5 weeks. That is not acceptable to you. You are the project manager, and you have to ensure the overall project is on time. So you push for 4 weeks and have a one week cushion that is kept only to you.

There are theories behind stretched target. The first is Student Syndrome as observed by Profession William Goldratt. Just like students, when a team knows that they have more time that is needed to perform task, they will relax in the beginning. So in a corporate environment they will probably work on some other urgent things first. Not until a time when they start feeling there is probably not sufficient time left, they won’t start working on your task.

The second theory is Parkinson Principle - People will expand work scope to suit the time given to them. If you give them 5 weeks which is more than what they need, and assuming they have nothing else to do except your project, they will still deliver the task late because they would keep adding new things to the original task. And most of the time these added things are not useful to your project (for example, more beautiful fonts and formatting for a Functional Specification document.)

So, is stretched target always ‘stretched’? Or since the work team knows that you are going to try squeezing on a stretched target, they would probably open a negotiation with a position that offers them more margins (say opening with 7 weeks instead of 6)? This is possible. And this happens in the real world all the time. Remember this is an art. Nobody knows exactly what the ‘right’ duration for a task is. Depending on your trust level with the working team, imposing a stretched target may harm relationship, or end up in a corporate bargaining game (for example, I heard some managers always cut duration estimation from the work teams by 50%, leading to the work teams increasing their opening position in the next round, and managers cutting by 60%, and so on.) Your ability to master this art of stretched target (and all these negotiations and politics) demonstrates your calibre as a successful project manager.

Next time when you attend my workshop, you probably won’t be surprised that when I say 25 minutes, I actually have 30 minutes in my pocket. :)

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.

Crisis Management vs. Project Management Part 3 (Final)

For team composition, a project should have a team defined in the very beginning. Some may argue that in the real world this may not be possible all the time, particularly in this state of economy when resources in most organizations remain tight. Having said that, it’s fair to say for most projects cannot proceed without a team structure in place and a large portion of the team members (say 80%) defined before the project starts.

A crisis team, on the other hand, will change depending on the work at hand. Handling a crisis requires a series of actions, usually in the form of projects. During different stages of the crisis, various teams will be formed. Back in May this year, Hong Kong still tried to prevent the first case of H1N1 from happening. The Control Centre kept track of any possible outbreak cases that would be ‘imported’ from other countries. When the first instance of H1N1 was spotted, they quarantined a hotel. That required the support of the Police and Immigration. During the second stage when the virus was clearly spreading within Hong Kong, the Control Centre worked with the Education Department and their own clinical staff to try containing the spread of the epidemic.

Finally it is really hard to give a designated end date for a crisis. Human knowledge is limited and it is really hard to give an end date to a crisis. Even it’s quite clear a crisis has ended, most of the time a small team will still be in alert mode carefully watching for any sign the crisis may re-emerge. A project, in contrast, always has a well-defined end date. This concludes our analysis of differences and commonalities between project management and crisis management.

Copyright © 2009 Knowledge Century Limited.