Managing defensiveness
Teams that create rigid solutions tend to rigidly evaluate outcomes. They become blind to outcomes they believe are unlikely or impossible. This bias often leads to meaningless process explosion as the team attempts to avoid the outcomes they’re dismissing.
A good team is willing to entertain probability without chasing every possibility. Members must have a firm grasp of the obvious and be open to new ideas.
Gather supporting data
Eventually, I would have to report back to a funding committee much less excited about our journey. They would want to hear concrete results and review hard numbers. I had to show them that our endeavors had provided cost-effective results.
Seattle Public Utilities’ current mapping process had been optimistically estimated to be about 80% accurate. That means our assets were depicted incorrectly, or not at all, one in five times.
Bad as that was, gas, fiber optic, steam, and other private asset data were worse. We stopped mapping franchise utilities more than 10 years ago because someone decided (incredibly) it wasn’t our responsibility.
Now it was our liability.
Ultimately, variance reports told the story. Initially, the asset surveys showed that more than half of our utilities weren’t being constructed as designed.
There had been some argument among our engineers about thresholds. Most thought the most important issue was functionality, as in, “We don’t care where the asset’s buried as long as it works.”
Whaaaaaaat? Tell that to the excavator operator or an engineer trying to design new infrastructure near our assets. “WHERE” is everything! This narrow thinking is mostly based on limited resources. Smaller projects carefully avoid any costly or unnecessary processes that don’t have a direct impact on the project in the present.
After submitting several variance reports for newly installed utility assets, we noticed that the variances began to narrow dramatically. Wow. When you’re checking, the contractor’s work improves! Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Next page: Developing simple talking points
