PMBoK7 Perspectives: Be Adaptable

Being adaptable as you manage your projects can support the success of your projects, a new element of project delivery in the Project Management Institute’s seventh version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few beneficial ways to be adaptable as you manage projects. 

• Don’t fixate on perfection. It would be nice to build a perfect plan with accurate estimates and task dependencies, but it’s not realistic. Instead, work on learning as your project progresses and being adaptable to change estimates and plans as events unfold. Change isn’t admitting you’re wrong! When proposing project plan changes, skilled project managers share what they’ve learned to educate their management teams. It’s far better to proactively change plans, rather than try to meet planned expectations that are now impractical or high-risk. In estimating, the focus should be on being “less wrong” as your project progresses and you can use new insights to construct better estimates and plans.
• Watch and respond to your organization’s direction. Projects are launched to change capabilities for an organization and/or its customers. However, organizations aren’t static while projects progress. Circumstances can affect how the project fits into the organization’s direction. Projects may be postponed, slowed down, team members swapped, or project outcomes may need to be brought forward. Great project managers don’t wait until they’re told to alter a project’s direction. They watch what is happening in the organization and draft what-if changes to project plans for presentation to management. The adaptable project manager responds, versus reacts, to changes in the business. 
• Launch open-ended organizational conversations. Great project managers develop ideas about how to deliver a project. And they are adaptable to the desires and ideas of key stakeholders. They initiate conversations with and between those key stakeholders to discuss approaches for delivering the project and they present their ideas in those conversations. They combine their ideas with ideas from stakeholders that hold merit and support the needs of the business. You might be nervous about conversations without knowing where they might lead, but the long-term outcome of collaborating and adapting to pragmatic stakeholder project delivery desires can outweigh those risks. 
• Defer decisions. Better decisions are made when more information becomes available. Although waiting to set a direction can be stressful, delaying a decision can be the best way to adapt to some project situations. For example, your vendor may be coming out with an updated version of their product, but the release date isn’t finalized yet. Rather than gamble on using the new version or creating solid plans to use the current version, set the software decision point as late as possible in your plans. When your decision point arrives, you can use up-to-date information about the release to decide.  

How has being adaptable contributed to the success of your projects? Share your experiences in the comments section.

For more about adaptability, check out Dorie Clark’s How to Be an Adaptable Employee During Change and Uncertainty course.