Enhanced Quarantine Posts Part 1

During the COVID19 Luzon Wide Lockdown or Enhanced Community Quarantine. I’m working at home, and will be doing a lot of Deep Dives which scare me. I don’t like going into look deep work without confirming my assumptions with end-users and the rest of the stakeholders. Deep distort my perspective and I emerge changed and typically need to recalibrate.

Unable to Directly Observe Operations and Problems

80% of my work is GEMBA (direct observation and auditing of work and conditions) since I work 3 sites: Plant, Tech Center, and Main Office.  With the quarantine, I get to catch up with all the work I want to do, but I’m afraid to do – creating the Organizational Process Assets (Project Charters, Project Management Plans and all Subsidiary Plans).

I’ve deferred it because it has to work on a Pull-basis. That there must first arise a Need for it. Even if a process is rough and prone to rework, it has to go through a priority – the ones that create Reported Non-Conformity first. Because those processes have political convenience for correction.

There are a lot of processes I wish I could automate – even with cheap options like GSUITES publisher but as my prototyping has revealed: alone I can go only so far. When I prototyped the solution, there was a lot of support (workarounds and training) needed for these systems before they mature. I would need the entire IT team to help, which I can’t access because they are allocated to the current status quo).

When I do GEMBA, I can get precisely the needs of end-users, and employ tiny workarounds. Working without feedback from end-users can create a lot of wasted effort and its harder to find small wins.

Risk Management – Includes Diplomatic Framing of the Problem 

The risk management plan (RMP, a subsidiary plan to the project management plan) is the most difficult mindset to communicate. Its mostly communicated through Anecdotes and Stories. The Project Management Team’s challenges with RMP is that firefighting already exists and keeps the Status quo of firefighting. Firefighting can eat up all efforts that no resources are left to do preventative. You can catch one lucky break and have resources to prevent firefighting – but then you have to deal with Organizational Inertial – you have to make all parties Save Face.  
The way Vivian Balakrishnan approached the management of the problem is a teachable case study. I can imagine a class where a professor or a team lead will ask those who watched it: what did he do differently as compared to most other leaders.  Imagine doing this when there is immense pressure to demonize, overgeneralize, and threaten to put blame on the peacemaker.

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