Potential Actions And Decisions

What can you do about an issue?

Most of the time you should do nothing about an issue.

Why nothing? Because you lack information. The issue may not yet be “ripe” in terms of urgency. If you act too soon, management may not support your decision. That can look real bad. Also, you may end up treating a symptom and not the underlying problem. The issue will then surface again in another guise. It is the same with children growing up. If the parents run to the doctor with the child for treatment for every cold, the child could become over-treated with antibiotics. Then when the child really becomes sick, the antibiotics are not effective and the child gets sicker.

There is another guideline here. Many issues that surface in one country are specific to a situation. The situation may change on its own and cause the issue to change or go away. Or it could become more pressing. This is especially true with issues that you do not control.

There are political currents related to issues. You may not want to solve an issue right away. You and team might look better to management if the issue becomes more acute. This sounds perverse, but remember you are dealing in a political world. If the project and the world around it won’t collapse, what is the harm in doing nothing? If you keep acting on issues quickly, you can be seen by some managers as “shooting from the hip” without thinking—not a good way to be typecasted.

You can also examine the following as decisions and actions to take. Use this as a checklist when you are evaluating an issue.

• Add resources to the work;

• Take resources away from the work;

• Stop using the method or tool;

• Enforce a different use of a method or tool;

• Change a policy to alter the scope of the project to make the issue disappear;

• Change the issue into another form that may be less political and easier to address;

• Break up an issue into parts and deal with each part;

• Combine issues so that one issue is swept up in the actions for other issues;

• Assign the issue to a different person;

• Throw money at an issue;

• Throw more technology at an issue;

• Involve a vendor in the issue;

• Take a vendor out of the issue;

• Reorganize the work;

• Move the issue away from the project to the line organization or another project;

• Restructure the project plan;

• Apply different types of resources in the project.

• Make sure that the group of issues is related in some way that is acceptable to management.

• Take care to have the issues stated clearly and succinctly.

• Ensure that management is aware of the issues. Surprises are bad here.

• Examine as many alternatives as possible before making any decision.

• Weigh the effect of delaying a decision with that of making a decision.

• Make certain that the decisions that you are about to make are backed up completely by the actions.

• Work to understand the business, technical, and political implications, impacts, and effects of the actions and decision at both the local and headquarters levels.

• Define how you are going to measure the actions after they have been carried out.

Many mistakes made by many governments on the international level could have been prevented had these actions been taken.