Use a RAM to make people cooperate

The bane of my existence as a planner is the person who, despite me having explained it a dozen times, comes to me at deadline and asks what they are supposed to do. Or what I want from them.

I've found that using a Responsiblity Assignment Matrix (RAM) is an effective tool for herding just this sort of cat.

A RAM sets out, in a chart, the tasks that will be accomplished, all of the people involved in a process --- and then at the intersection between person and task, defines what that person's role is.

Say, for example, I have a particularly difficult senior manager who rarely reviews and approves draft -- then at the end of a process asks for several dozen changes. A RAM I might submit at the start of the project might have definitions like this:

Planner Send out instructions.
Program Officer Create first draft.
Senior Manager Review & approve draft.

A RAM is really only effective if you use it at the very start of a project, as it defines how people will be involved. That's why it's usually one of the first documents that I introduce to a process - often at the Memorandum of Understanding or Agreement In Principle stage.

With a RAM in place, when we reach deadline and someone hasn't fulfilled their role, I can point to the RAM and say "I thought that we had defined this as your role. Why didn't it work?" More often than not, the person will feel sufficiently chastised to let the project proceed -- and will make sure they understand their role next time I come to them with a RAM.

Read more about the Responsiblity Assignment Matrix, and other Project Managment Tools, in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

Break out the spandex and big hair - it's time to define your key performance indicators

It's hard to believe that the big hair behind such classics as Jump and Panama could be the basis for a lesson in performance measurement. But Van Halen, and David Lee Roth, are just that.

You've probably heard the story about Van Halen insisting that there be no brown M&Ms backstage. But what you may not have known is that it wasn't (just) the band acting like rock & roll divas; it was actually an ingenious performance indicator.

David Lee Roth explained the clause in the band's rider in his auto-biography:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets.

We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. [...] So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production.

Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.

Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

So next time you're trying to explain to a group of managers that you don't need to know the number of emails they sent last week, you only want performance data that gives an indication of the state of affairs -- try tossing on Hot For Teacher, and challenging them to find the brown M&Ms in their own programs.

Read more about Van Halen and the brown M&Ms. Check out Dan & Chip Heath's book: Made To Stick!

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html