Secret Sauce Ingredients: Judgement, Experience and Confidence

Posted by Rich Crowley in leadership, management, people, Project Management, teams

The website dictionary.com defines judgement as “the ability to judge, make a decision, or form an opinion objectively, authoritatively, and wisely, especially in matters affecting action”. I believe one of the most important attributes of a good PM is the ability to apply sound judgement at key times. (In fact, this is probably true of good managers in general.)

Projects require thousands of decisions, small and large, over their life cycle. All participants are required to make them and in that sense, judgement is a good attribute for anyone and everyone to have. However, in my experience, the PM usually has the opportunity to make a small number of very important judgements during the life of a project that influence it more than anything else.

I worked on a project once that had a very influential group of very strong performers. They had some significant concerns about how the project was being executed and in their opinion, we were in big trouble. I trusted and valued their instincts and knowledge but at the same time, didn’t share their concerns to the same degree. Things appeared to be getting darker by the day but we were a long way from our target completion date and so had time on our side to some degree. I felt compelled to make a decision of some sort that involved either significantly escalating our plight to senior management in order to gain support for a change in the project parameters or standing down and letting the team continue to gut it out and work through the problems we had, without significantly changing course. I chose the latter.

It wasn’t an explicit decision that was visible to all project participants (although I did share with senior management that I wanted to stay the course) but it did require me to assess the situation, form an opinion and then apply any required changes to our approach that I felt were necessary. A key ingredient in this scenario was my confidence level in making my assessment, which in turn was influenced by my prior experiences. I have managed many projects over many years and I had been in situations before where things looked very bleak. In some of those, things did indeed get worse and changes were ultimately required to the project parameters. However, in many other situations, when we stuck to the plan, worked hard, and stay focused, we eventually succeeded. On this project, I was confident that we had the right people, skills, knowledge and enough time to work through the problems and be successful.

On this project, my judgement turned out to be spot-on and the project passed through that particular storm within a couple of months, settled down nicely and we executed wonderfully through to its conclusion. Without having experience on my side, I may not have had the confidence to make the judgement I did. I made hundreds of smaller judgements on this project, most of which I have since forgotten, by I got this one right and it was by far my biggest contribution to the project’s overall success.