A memorable Rumsfeld quote: Project Management-speak

A memorable Rumsfeld quote: Project Management-speak

More than ever, the political scene lately has generated some memorable and oft-repeated phrases. No, I’m not going to discuss the meaning of ‘is’ or pick on Greenspan’s ‘irrational exuberance’ or one of President Bush’s many tongue twisters. Instead, I want to discuss a quote by Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, in answering a question about weapons of mass destruction in 2002, patiently explained:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

While this quote sounds extremely confusing, this statement doesn’t need to be explained to many of us project managers, especially those among us who have attended formal PM training and/or passed the PMP® exam. Those of us who practice sound risk management and budgeting know exactly what he is talking about.

We learn in training that known unknowns are those items that we identify on our projects which may occur. We often call these risk events or risk items. They are known because we identify them, they are unknown because we do not know if they will occur or not. For those, we apply a contingency or buffer. The unknown unknowns are those items which we don’t identify up front as risk items, whether because of poor planning or because we could not have anticipated these events. These are called unknown unknowns because they are not identified (unknown) and we don’t know whether they will occur or not (unknowns). Unknown unknowns are those items that catch us completely by surprise, and management reserve covers those, in terms of additional money or time. The unknown unknowns are a much smaller percentage of risk items than most people think, because most items should be able to be identified. This is part of good risk management and understanding your budget.

This begs the question. Was former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a Project Manager? Stay tuned to Part 2 of this thread to explore this question.

Vicki Wrona, PMP®is the founder and President of Forward Momentum, LLC, an 8(a) consulting and training company found at www.forwardmomentum.net. She has been managing projects and mentoring project managers for the past 20 years in both the private and public sectors. She is an instructor for Global Knowledge and developed GK’s PMP® Exam Prep Boot Camp, part of the program that won PMI’s ® Professional Development Product of the Year Award in 2007. She has trained over 3,300 professionals, including over 1,600 on the PMP® exam. Currently, she is serving on PMI’s® PMBOK® Guide 4th edition creation and review team.

Donald Rumsfeld: Lessons in Project Management

In the first part of this blog, I explored a quote by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that sounded extremely confusing, but one which makes sense to project managers who practice sound risk management and budgeting. This installment will discuss whether Donald Rumsfeld was a project manager in his role as Secretary of Defense.

Was Donald Rumsfeld a project manager? Much of his work involved projects or temporary, unique items which should be managed like projects. Did he follow proper PM principles?

Let’s take the Iraq initiative. I don’t want to get into philosophical debate on the war in Iraq, but instead step back and take a look at it from a project management perspective. The initial military activities in Iraq seemed (from my outside and admittedly limited perspective) fairly well thought out, and the operation itself was planned and implemented. From a project perspective, so far, so good. But what was not planned was the transition from project to operation, or in other words, the plan after the initial military operation accomplishes its goals. It does not seem that there was a plan to manage the transition from one government to the next and then hand off the end product to the customer, envisioned to be a new government to the people of Iraq. The implementation and rollout seemed missing in the plan.

A good project manager thinks through all scenarios, and has a plan for each one. Proper risk management, from a PMI® perspective, would include the negative events, called threats (initiatives take longer than planned, for example) as well as the positive events, called opportunities (initiatives are more successful than planned or take less time than planned, for example). Could it be that the success of the operation happened more quickly than planned and so Rumsfeld and his team were not prepared for the implementation or transition phase? Or maybe certain parts of the initiative were taking longer than planned, in which case a contingency plan was not identified or implemented.

One way or another, it seems the overall plan was incomplete. It does not seem that the initiative was thought through to the end, taking into account various scenarios, alternatives, or nuances, including transition planning to a new status quo or an organizational change management plan to allow stakeholders (the Iraqi people) to get used to and be able to manage the new system, whatever that system may be. A good PM would have accounted for the various scenarios and been ready.

Philosophy aside, by many definitions, this project was not a success, and, as is true for many projects, for many reasons. The warning signs of imminent project failure are many. If there is interest, I’ll explore troubled projects in a future post.

Vicki Wrona, PMP®is the founder and President of Forward Momentum, LLC, an 8(a) consulting and training company found at www.forwardmomentum.net. She has been managing projects and mentoring project managers for the past 20 years in both the private and public sectors. She is an instructor for Global Knowledge and developed GK’s PMP® Exam Prep Boot Camp, part of the program that won PMI’s ® Professional Development Product of the Year Award in 2007. She has trained over 3,300 professionals, including over 1,600 on the PMP® exam. Currently, she is serving on PMI’s® PMBOK® Guide 4th edition creation and review team.