Project Management Soft Skill Tip #3

All project managers must deal with the Law of Triviality.  The law states that there is an inverse relationship between how important something is and how much people want to talk about.  Engineers like discussing what they know best.  For example, pump performance for the new water treatment plant design.  Issues like project change control, scope management, project schedule updates, earned value management, etc. - engineers will have difficulty getting too excited over discussions of project budgets during critical review meetings.

How do you get your project team to focus on the big matters at hand during a project review meeting?  One important point is the language you use in the meetings.  It is hard to get people too excited when using terms like "project budget constraints" or "financial targets" or " staffing plan" - but things like, "We don't have enough money to go on working like this.  From tomorrow the project team is going to work twice as hard.", gets people back to the big picture moment and away from the pump curves very quickly.  One other method to manage the Law of Triviality is to establish direct implications in the project review meetings.  The goal must to tie project financial targets with team and individual performance.  Without direct implications, the world of pump curves will continue to seem much more interesting.