Bringing Clarity from Chaos
Chaos creates a stressful environment where things can spiral quickly. Pausing gives you the opportunity to regain control of the cadence and create the space to reset, pivot, and course correct back to the goal of the project.
I’ve been in project management for nearly 20 years and have been fortunate to have held a diverse set of experiences from roles focused on one area of the development lifecycle to end-to-end product owner. The most valuable currency earned collectively has been the lasting relationships built and lessons learned.
🏞️The Landscape
Chaos shows up in different forms in the project portfolio environment—a project that went sideways, frequently changing priorities, constant firefighting, overworked project teams, delays in critical decisions—the list can go on and on.
This is the reality for a project manager and the question is how do we bring clarity? 🤔
🧭 The Journey
When looking to understand the causes of chaos, here are 5 steps I use to create clarity:
Pause and Breathe—give yourself and others a moment to reset and reconnect.
Curiosity is your friend—create an exploratory environment for the team to ask questions. Lead with the intent of the conversation(s)—to understand the various components and not to assign blame; this detail is critical.
Unleash your inner master builder—it’s time to connect all the story pieces together like building blocks and see the full picture. This step can result in multiple creations depending on how the blocks are put together. Be sure to note this when reviewing with the team.
Remember the goal—briefly revisit what the project was originally designed to accomplish and document the plan to reroute back to the goal. If this is no longer feasible or the goal has now changed, escalate to the impacted stakeholders and governance committee for next steps.
Close out and lean in to learning—when the project has reached its conclusion, review the information in steps 3 and 4 for underlying patterns and implement the corrective actions.
Pro tip—be sure to document as you move through the steps so that you can build an information library and archive in a central location for future reference and easy accessibility.
📍The Outcome
Chaos creates a stressful environment where things can spiral quickly. Pausing gives you the opportunity to regain control of the cadence and create the space to reset, pivot, and course correct back to the goal of the project.
Lessons learned are incredibly useful as you have the opportunity to dive into the data and understand whether issues are systemic or isolated in nature. Whichever bucket this falls into, these learnings help strengthen your processes and add to the valuable catalogue of historical project performance for your organization.
💡Why this matters?
While there is no elixir to cure chaos simultaneously, with grounded discussions, surgical focus, and detailed planning clarity can happen systematically.