Is your project on track? The 3-Second-3-Finger-Check.
I would like to share a simple tool that I am using with my project managers to check if they are on track or not.
Years ago, when I was still a newbie-CEO I just had hired my third project manager. He had no IT experience at all. I wanted to give him a navigation system for his IT projects: something he could use to check immediately, without big data, without spending an hour seeing through tickets if he is fine with his project or if he needs to go and do additional work.
I came up with this simple three finger check: you hold up your hand and show 3 fingers and intuitively answer the following 3 questions (don’t think, answer what your gut feeling says!):
1. Are developers busy?
2. Is the customer happy?
3. Is your boss happy?
I’m using this now constantly with my team, especially in critical situations to do a quick cross check if the answer for one of the questions is NO, we instantly check: WHY? Once we identify the “why”, we take action to ensure that the problem will disappear.
In my experience in 80% of all cases when some of these questions were answered with NO, we could instantly take action to improve our project situation.
Why did I chose these 3 questions?
#1 It is very important to me that people are productive and don’t waste the company’s money. I work in a project-based business, where timeliness is absolutely critical: if you finish early, you make lots of money. If you finish late, you loose more than you can earn. Therefore knowing that preparation, approval, tests etc. — all the conditions for a dev team to be productive — are met is critical and a important contribution to success.
#2 client happiness rules. No comment on that… ☺
#3 is your boss happy? He will not if you are late, your client is unhappy, developers are idle or quitting but also if the project risks to loose money or fails to achieve its goals. Usually bosses get nervous easily especially if their projects are not going well. So if your answers to #1 and #2 are YES then this is an excellen indicator if your project controlling is fine too…
I use the three-finger-three-seconds-checking to regularly challenge my PMs and make sure that they did not miss anything. This is a duty I have as a boss, and this small exercise always helped me a lot in fulfilling it. Especially as anyone on the team can also check themselves and take actions based on their findings.
