Iris Bohnet is the Director of Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and cochairs its Behavioral Insights Group. She was recently interviewed by Harvard Business Review, where she made the point shown above in connection with diversity training. She contends that rather than running more workshops or try to eradicate the biases that cause discrimination, companies need to redesign their processes to prevent biased choices in the first place.
Now, think about this for a second and how it relates to how you execute and control your projects. Are you putting in place processes that will enable top tier project execution performance? Or are you content with just sending your team to generic project management training? While training is good, it is not enough to reach top tier performance.
As she puts it, “our minds are stubborn beasts”, so putting the focus on your processes first seems like the path of least resistance. Just like many projects have been successfully completed (or failed) without due thought going into why and how, she highlights that within diversity a lot of programs are put in place without measuring whether they work, and what made them work.
In short, her recommendation is:
- Gather data, but be critical to what data you actually collect and use
- Study the data
- Make changes
- Measure progress
As you read these bullets you can probably draw similarities to Deming’s PDCA cycle here (Plan-Do-Check-Act).
In short, by focusing on developing a data driven project controls organization you will work yourself toward top tier project performance in a structured and intentional manner — starting with your processes and tools.
Vik Bulletin 