Supervisory Leadership

Ever wish you could make your projects more effective? It turns out that all you need to do is ask a few key questions. The fellow who identified the important questions is named William Miller.

Dr. Miller was working at the think tank SRI International and he was interested in the difference between how successful project managers and change agents handled projects and how the rest of us did it. He discovered that the successful ones asked more of four specific questions than their less-successful peers. Here are the four questions.

What is our objective? Call it the objective, the goal, the end-state or whatever you want. What’s going to be different when we’re done with this project?

Who’s involved? This is not just folks on the project team. Stakeholders count, too. You also want to know about folks who’ve done something similar.

What’s the process? Answer this one with the route to the destination and the resources needed. Pay attention to the sequence. Figure out what obstacles you may face along the way.

Finally, what would be fun to try? This is the place to put all those “if time and money were not a factor” ideas. Answers to this question help stretch your thinking. They also give you a parking lot for ideas that you can’t use right away, but might want to use later.

Most of the managers Miller studied asked only one or at most two of these questions. But the best managers asked all four questions about their projects.

Miller also found that everyone seems to have a favorite question or two that they ask automatically. My favorite questions are the ones about goals and what would be fun to try. Identify your natural questions and you’ll know which other questions you have to make a conscious effort to ask.

Next time you’re confronted with a project to plan ask these questions. Ask all of them. Odds are, it will improve your performance.

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