Complex IT Project Management: 16 Steps to Success

2.9 Why You Assign Issues

It is a bad idea to use team meetings to resolve specific issues. Solving multiple issues in a group setting is normally a waste of time and can do more harm than good. For some reason, people do it anyway. Let us examine this a little more closely.

A portion of airport scope dictates creation of a people mover that will carry airport patrons and employees between terminals, rental car sites, and parking lots. Also, the people mover must link up with local mass transit. During the Big Thirteen process, we learned that there is no local mass transit. If you follow our advice, you get this assigned to someone as an issue to be worked offline. Because it is rather significant, you should get a verbal update at your regular team meetings along with the other major items. If, however, this "missing link" becomes part of ongoing group concern, you will find yourself going down one of the three roads depicted in Exhibit 4:

Exhibit 4: Airport Wheel of Dependency

• First road. The team decides to develop one or more "end points" on the airport perimeter that allows linkage to whatever the future holds in terms of mass transit coming into the airport from the outside world. This choice was actually made at the Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. The real Port Authority built a monorail system on the airport grounds that interconnected key airport facilities, with an end point at the airport boundary into which a future local mass transit could "plug in." Five years later, it was connected to the Amtrak Northeast Corridor commuter rail line. This came to life as a totally separate project, although obviously there was significant carryover in the ranks of stakeholders and contractors.

• Second road. The airport project team starts out following the previous strategy, but gets so wrapped up in what the link to the offsite mass transit system could be that we cannot decide what kind of people mover to build on the airport proper.

• Third road. The airport project team gets drawn into countless meetings with various local and state agencies regarding the planning of potential mass transit systems that could link to the airport. Once we engage all the political, governmental, financial, environmental, and citizen groups that claim an interest in the off-site transportation system, the potential requirements for that external transit system end up driving the on-site people-mover design.

Clearly, the top wheel segment is the preferred outcome, although the other two are equally probable in the absence of good leadership. In our example, the correct move is to keep your team focused on the airport project, not the regional mass transit project. In other words, stick to your knitting. Cooperate with other projects, but do not do their work. That is counterproductive and generally ends up making more enemies than friends. In other words, do not let a dependency turn into a deliverable. Minimize its impact on your requirements to the best of your ability, because this is a great opportunity for "scope creep" to find its way into your project.