A recent interactive article in the Harvard Business Review is downright scary.

According to Barry Gill, an enterprise consultant, workers spend half their time on email.

First, there’s no methodology listed, and I don’t believe this number. I don’t think workers are nearly that inefficient. Even at Microsoft, an email-heavy culture, few people spent half their day on email.

Still, even if this is half-right, if people spend a quarter of their day on email, that’s scary. Doing email isn’t the same as doing work.

Yikes.

(And if you’re looking for more information and some ideas on how to escape the email trap, check out that book listed in the panel at right, The Off Switch!)

Engineers refer to the fallen Skagit River Bridge as having a single point of failure, or fracture-critical: Take out any of the truss’s structural beams and the bridge will fail.

As you know, an oversized trailer proved the point a few weeks ago. Dramatically.

From a project management standpoint, however, the failure was the result of a string of decisions. Below I list those decisions, with the reason for each, as best I know it, in italics beneath the failure point.

Here’s the key – most project failures come from a string of errors and misjudgments.

As a project manager, you are relatively powerless to prevent every single issue in the necessary string of occurrences. That’s fine.

You only have to prevent one of them.

So get out in front of your project risks. Identify them and select the ones for which mitigation is reasonably within your control (the items in blue in the list below).

Here’s that string of failures:

• The choice of a single-point-of-failure truss design.
  • In the dark days BC (before computers), it was far, far easier to correctly calculate the design of a simple truss than a more complex truss-type span.
• The choice to make it a through-truss design, where the roadway goes through (rather than over) the truss.
  • The state needed to retain clearance above the river, which rises to flood stage in the spring and which carries some recreational-boat traffic, mostly runabouts and the like.
• The design decisions that kept the clearance at the sides at just over 14 feet (14 feet, 5 inches).
  • There was little or no consideration 50 years ago of trucks carrying loads higher than 14 feet. Remember, the Eisenhower administration built the core of the Interstate highway system in a hurry – which was (mostly) a good thing.
• The failure to indicate clearance height on the bridge (let alone at the exit before it).
  • Washington state law requires only listing clearances less than 14 feet – again a belief that loads (almost) never exceed that height, coupled with the apparent assumption that drivers with loads greater than 14 feet know their load is a problem and will do some serious research on routes.
• The absence of an overheight warning device such as dangling chains or an infrared beam coupled to lights or a horn.
  • Expensive for something rarely used. Not as expensive as replacing the bridge, let alone accounting for lives lost (which luckily didn’t happen here). Also, the infrared devices have their own problems vis-a-vis fog, birds, etc.
• The failure by the truck’s route planner(s) to discover the height issue.
  • I have trouble understanding how this happened. See the image below, from the state Department of Transportation site, noting – and underlining – the clearance issue. That said, human nature is such that a project manager has to understand that such failures will happen.
• The failure by the truck driver to move to occupy both lanes before approaching the bridge.
  • I find this failure inexplicable as well. Yes, by the time he reached the bridge, he was apparently hemmed in on his left by a passing semi, but he had plenty of time to move over before he got there. The bridge is visible from over a mile away on a straight and flat road. 
• The failure by the pilot car to discover (or inform the truck about) the height issue.
  • The pilot car was supposedly equipped with a pole a few inches higher than the load. The driver should have alerted the truck to the clearance issue. Supposition: the pilot car moved to the left lane, assuming the driver would do so as well. But if she did, then why didn’t the truck follow, since the truck driver would have been well behind the pilot car and not yet blocked by the passing semi.
• Simple bad luck that the strike caused the bridge to fail.
  • The state DOT has noted that this bridge gets struck a few times each year by overwidth or overheight loads, until now without damage.

One other item that might have helped: Washington state, unlike many other states, does not require a second pilot car behind oversize loads. Such a car would have blocked both lanes approaching the bridge, preventing the semi from hemming in the truck at issue. However, it’s hard to list this issue as a true failure point.

[This is a project management article disguised as a sports metaphor.]

In National League baseball, pitchers have to bat, for some absurd reason.¹

It’s said there is no feat in sports harder than hitting a professionally pitched ball. Most teams find only three or four hitters who do it well, and then another half dozen who do it at a mediocre-at-best level.

Pitchers are almost never among them.² They do something else incredibly difficult, throw a ball at 80 to 100 miles per hour consistently to a circle about three inches across. If they lack the control to consistently hit that circle – which moves from pitch to pitch, according to the catcher’s dictates – they get relegated to mop-up duty, which means pitching when you’re behind by eight runs and the manager doesn’t want to wear out the arms of the guys who can hit that circle.

In most of organized baseball, pitchers don’t hit. There is a designated hitter who bats for them, usually someone who can hit but can’t field well enough to earn a spot defensively.

Except in the National League. There, pitchers hit.

Or try.

Except that when there’s a runner on base and less than two out, they bunt. They hold the bat softly in front of them, make gentle contact with the ball, and let it roll out about 40 feet toward first or third base. The runner gets to the next base, and the pitcher is thrown out. But at least it advances the runner, and keeps the team out of a double play.³ So they bunt.

Or try.

Last night, I tuned into a bit of the Mariners/Padres game. Because they were playing in the Padres’ park, and because the Padres are in the National League, the pitchers had to hit.

Or try.

With a runner on first and nobody out, the Padres pitcher comes up to bat. Obvious bunt situation. And so bunt he does.

Or tries.

And fails.

I mean, he badly fails. He misses one pitch completely, and bunts two others not just foul, but very, very foul. I’ll be 63 in a few months, I haven’t wielded a bat in anger in 30 years, and I could probably bunt at least as well. Bunting – at least getting the bat on the ball and pushing it into fair territory – isn’t hard in the scheme of things, given that these men are professional athletes.

It was embarrassing. And I’m a Mariners fan! But I hate to see anyone fail that badly, in front of thousands of people.

Okay, let’s get to the Legal Project Management point of this story.

Learn to Bunt!

A lawyer is a pitcher – highly specialized skills, extremely good at the core skill of throwing a legal argument over the plate such that the other side can’t make solid contact with it.

But occasionally a lawyer is asked to bat, to manage projects.

And when she comes up with a runner on base, she has to get that bunt down. It costs the team big-time if she fails.

As I said, bunting (managing legal projects) isn’t that hard. A great project manager (.300 hitter) is always appreciated, but you’re hired for other skills. However, when you come to the plate, even if you’re not a big hitter, it behooves you to get that bunt down properly.

That’s the rationale for Legal Project Management in a nutshell.⁴

The goal for a lawyer of learning to manage legal projects isn’t to turn yourself into a project management wizard. Rather, the goal is competence, getting the basics right. Bunting the runner over so you can maybe score a run or two and then, when you’re on the mound, pitch with a lead instead of playing catch-up.

A (National League) pitcher who doesn’t learn to bunt does his team a disservice. As good a pitcher as he may be, he can’t win if his team doesn’t score runs. He may not be able to drive in runs by slamming balls off the outfield wall or into the seats, but he can help set up the runners so they can score when the next batter hits a single.

Think of yourself as a pitcher. As effective as you may be at your specialized skills, occasionally you’ll be in a position where you need to draw on a skill set beyond your comfort zone.

You’ll need to manage your legal project.

Doing it brilliantly would be an added bonus, but your client and your practice and group need you to do it at least competently.

Don’t be like that guy on the Padres. Get that bunt down. Help your team even when it’s out of your comfort zone.

Project managers must beware of single points of failure: One specific thing going wrong means the project fails.

Lawyers recognize this in the courtroom, of course – the key witness undercutting himself with a falsehood, for example. It’s no different on the project side of the ledger, such as a team member who is the sole possessor of critical knowledge leaving the project suddenly.

Project managers must first take stock of their potential single points of failure, and then develop mitigation and contingency plans for them:

• Mitigation Plan: What you do to prevent it from occurring, minimize the likelihood of occurrence, and/or minimize the damage should it occur.
• Contingency Plan: What you will do to keep the project rolling should the event occur.

For example, if you worry about losing a key player – the most common risk on almost every project – you might consider the following:

• Mitigation: Ensure other people pick up some of that knowledge; have the key player document the work she’s doing so that someone else can pick it up; speak with her manager about the important role she plays in the project and ask¹ that she not be pulled off during a critical period; identify someone else who can do the work, albeit not as well or as quickly.
• Contingency: Bring in the substitute player; work with various parties to extend deadlines to cover the learning curve of someone else picking up the pieces; negotiate a deal with the other project for at least enough of her time to answer questions.

Note that most mitigation plans have a cost associated with them. It’s like insurance; you pay a little against the possibility of needing to pay a lot unexpectedly. Even the ask-her-boss-for-support plan has a cost, though more political capital than time/money.

The Skagit River Bridge Collapse

You’ve seen the news about the Skagit River Bridge on I-5 north of Seattle that collapsed earlier this week. (For what it’s worth, I drove across it maybe 40 times a year for the past decade. I never thought about it collapsing, but I sure didn’t like it – narrow lanes, no shoulders, and cars averaging 65-70 MPH in a 60-MPH zone.)

How can a simple semitrailer take down a bridge by bumping into one² of the girders? That’s the danger of a single point of failure.

Given that four days in I still haven’t seen a simple explanation posted, I thought I’d dig way back into my engineering background and essay a (likely) explanation.

We know that a wide-and-tall-load semitrailer struck at least one of the trusses on the bridge seconds before its collapse. It’s a reasonable working theory that this impact precipitated the collapse.

Here’s how a simple truss bridge works:

The gray lines represent the steel truss structure, the red arrows compression forces (pulling things together), and the yellow arrows tension forces (resisting compression and keeping them apart). The diagram and forces are highly simplified.

Flex your bicep. Your muscle is a compression force; your arm bone (humerus) acts in tension to keep your elbow from rushing to your shoulder.

Note that the roadway itself doesn’t support the bridge; it’s not like a pencil placed across two dominoes. Rather, a steel superstructure spans the foundation pilings, and the roadway hangs from that superstructure.

Simplifying even further, the outside (top and sides) of the structure carry the load. The inner diagonal beams keep the structure from moving, hold up the road (see the suspension girders in the diagram), and prevent the “elbows” of the outside from rushing toward their respective “shoulders.”

Now add a truck moving 50-60 MPH that’s considerably wider than its lane. For some reason³ it didn’t travel down the center and occupy both lanes the way it should have. It struck one or more steel beams: the first (outside) diagonal, the second diagonal, or both.⁴ See the starburst marked Impact on the diagram.

From the pictures of the bridge available so far, I can’t tell whether that diagonal was torn loose or bent/folded. (It’s underwater.) The result would be the same, though the sequence of failure would be slightly different. The next diagram assumes it was torn loose (or that it broke).

In this diagram⁵, you see the broken or disconnected girder. Without it holding the tension/compression members in balance, forces are pulling the bridge apart. The structure is rotating, and the tension members plus gravity have fractured the roadway. The bridge is doomed.

Here’s a picture of the bridge section, looking west. The truck approached from the north (right), in the far lane. You can see clearly how the bridge has folded.

(The orange triangles on the surviving roadway at left are caused by sunlight. The sun is on the horizon in this shot, and this far north – closer to the north pole than the equator – the sun sets in the northwest this time of year.)

Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh recently spoke at the San Francisco Film Festival, giving his take about what’s wrong with the movie industry today. (Yes, of course it’s a long article. Think about how much is wrong with today’s movies!)

Along the way, he made a very valuable point about after-action reviews (or project debriefs, as I prefer to call them), using the attendance figures for his own recent film Side Effects as the example. Here’s the key passage:

How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We don’t. Everybody’s already moved on to the next movie they have to release.

How many projects don’t get debriefed because “everybody’s already moved on to the next” project?

Yet without debriefs, Soderbergh’s question remains hanging: How do we figure out what went wrong? Equally importantly, how do we figure out what went right?

People make assumptions. Sometimes these people are smart about project management (or movies). Sometimes they’re not. And even smart people can draw the wrong conclusions.

A project debrief takes only a small amount of time even on a large project. I figure it works out like this:

• Project manager: 90 minutes (prep, meeting, summarizing)
• Attendees: 30 minutes (20 minutes for the meeting, another few minutes reading the summary)

More time would be valuable, but even 30 minutes/person can make an enormous difference in the success of future projects – and the happiness of the team.

Oh — and if you ever go to movies and wonder why there aren’t more good ones, or think about the movie business at all, listen to the talk or read the transcript. (Note that it has three or four “blue” words in it.)

Here’s the full passage from which I quoted (“[laughter]” in original):

But let’s go back to Side Effects for a second. This is a movie that didn’t perform as well as any of us wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It can’t be the campaign because all the materials that we had, the trailers, the posters, the TV spots, all that stuff tested well above average. February 8th, maybe it was the date—was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after the Oscar nominations are announced, and this year there was an atypically large bump to all the films that got nominated, so that was a factor.  Then there was a storm in the Northeast, which is sort of our core audience, Nemo came in, so God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism [laughter]. Was it the concept? There was a very active decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller and kind of disconnect it from this larger social issue of everyone taking pills. Did that make the movie seem more commercial, or did it make it seem more generic? What about the cast? Four attractive white people …this is usually not an obstacle. [laughter]  The exit polls were very good, and reviews were good. How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We don’t. Everybody’s already moved on to the next movie they have to release.

 

Heads up. Adobe has a Flash update that contains security fixes (and thus is probably worth installing), but it also contains something that technically meets the definition of a virus:

• You didn’t ask for it
• It installs anyway
• It runs on your computer and does stuff
• It will ask you for money to remove threats to your computer

Now, unlike a real virus, any threats it finds will be real, not malware it put there itself, and the money will go to a legitimate (but very annoying) antivirus program. So if you don’t have current antivirus software, you could go ahead with this… or you could should must immediately go get one of the excellent free antivirus/firewall programs or make a conscious decision about purchasing one.

Note the tiny box that comes pre-checked in the Adobe update screen.

There’s nothing illegal about it, but it is in my opinion dishonest. (Other folks would simply call it marketing.)

Unless you really want this extra software on your computer, uncheck the box before installing the Adobe update. (And if you don’t have antivirus software, get it. Now.)

Journalist and gadfly H.L. Mencken once wrote¹, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

In 30+ years of managing projects (and 60+ of life itself), I’ve learned to respect that maxim as perhaps even more important than Murphy’s Law.

However, every law has its exception, which leads me to this exchange between co-workers:

A: “Hey, my start bar is going crazy, and my keyboard won’t respond.”

B: “Pick up your cell phone.”

A: “That worked! Was the radiation interfering with the computer?”

B: “No, it was sitting on your space bar.”

Some stuff is broken all of the time, all stuff is broken some of the time, but not everything is broken all of the time.

Catching up on some work while on vacation (everyone else is still asleep!), I saw a note on “suicide pricing” in legal, pointed out by Pat Lamb of Valorem in Chicago.

I don’t know how true or widespread the trend might be, but it’s worrisome in a much broader sense than the article suggests. Not only is it not such a good thing for firms, in the long run it’s not such a good thing for clients either, since in other industries, these trends keeps spiraling downwards until Stein’s Law¹ kicks in.

Consider airlines. How much flying do we do, for example, in regional jets (carriers branded as adjuncts of United or Delta, for example, but really independent entities) where pilots are paid would-you-like-fries-with-that wages. How much critical maintenance is outsourced — to folks who will not be betting their own lives on those planes — or put off?

Yet, in a focus group I read about recently², customers were asked about a cross-country round trip flight for a low amount – $300, I think. Once that was set as their anchor price, they were asked how much extra they’d pay for a better experience. The leader described first/business class without using the name – free meals and drinks, wider seats, more legroom, first-on-first-off boarding, etc. $325? Most hands still raised… but not all. $350? Most hands now down. $375? Only one hand in the air… and he wavered.

I’ve seen this myself in action. It really plays out like this. Once a very low anchor price is established, few want to spend more, even when they get more.

Of course, some people will always pay for first class, just as there will always be bet-the-company matters that receive a different  pricing level.

Some will. But most won’t.

And once prices drop below a certain point, service degrades. (Love your cell company? Your cable company?) It has to, because service costs money, and companies that don’t make profits disappear rapidly. No matter how much lawyers love what they do, they won’t do it for free for very long.

Kids are stirring, and we’ve got a tee time later, so I’ll just leave this note with a suggestion that you take a look at the article. I don’t know how widespread this practice is… but it’s a scary thought.

Steve Sinofsky had a variety of posts at Microsoft for 20+ years, including leading the Windows division during the difficult transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7.¹

Here is a recent article of his on why micromanagers often “edit,” or correct the work of others – a very common practice in the legal world. Not only does editing damage the team’s ability to give their best work, it drains energy from the manager as well. (“UX” in his post is slang for “user experience.”)

Of course, there will be specific times a lawyer needs to edit, or instruct – e.g., when a court requires a document be formatted just so. Don’t let those occasional times overflow their rather small bucket and seep into the rest of the work you do as a team lead and project or people manager.

(Sinofsky left Microsoft abruptly five months ago.)

I got the following email offer from Amazon over the weekend on one of my non-business accounts:

Nice to know my book is at the top of the list… unless, of course, Amazon knows that this account is mine and they have an ego-stroking algorithm.

Anyway, if it’s on sale for 10% off, this might be a great time to grab a copy. Or get ten for your colleagues….

(The book right below it is a rather interesting read as well. Unfortunately, a number of reviewers didn’t notice the question mark after “Lawyers” and took issue with Susskind’s premise without even reading the book.)