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Tip Sheet for Crisis Managers

Project Management Journal, September 2001

This is my original unabridged version of the above article  - 20 bullet-points that summarize my approach.

Avoiding problems is not Boris Hornjak’s style. In his new book, The Project Surgeon: A Troubleshooter’s Guide to Crisis Management, he shows project managers how to tackle problems proactively. Put on your surgical scrubs, grab a scalpel and save an ailing business or project.

1.       A crisis behaves like a project. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and you must resolve it with limited resources.  During a crisis, the “vital organs” of the business must continue to function. You do not have the luxury of suspending operations while a solution is found.  It’s like flying a plane, rather than driving a car – when the engine blows you can’t pull over, open the hood and act befuddled. You have to fix the problem while attempting to land safely.

2.        Every business crisis is a crisis of resources – primarily time and money.   Mastering cost and schedule control techniques is the most important crisis management skill. Develop and carry an emergency toolkit of your own skills.

3.       Get your head out of the sand - procrastination and avoidance kills. Deal with your problems, not with the aftermath of failure. The longer we wait to implement recovery action, the harder it is to get back on track. At some point it becomes impossible to jump back on the recovery line — it is too late and takes too much effort. In a crisis, doing something is always better than doing nothing – doing nothing leads to bankruptcy.

4.       Don’t sweep dirt under the rug. Recognize the problem, devise a solution and take responsibility for consequences – don’t permit a corporate environment conducive to crisis festering and responsibility avoidance.

5.       First, do no harm.  At the business accident scene, first stop the hemorrhage – address the symptoms and patch things the best you can. Life takes precedence over limb. What vital functions must be preserved to save the business? Fix that. Everything else is expendable.

6.      Triage your problems. Look over the corporate battlefield and fix those problems with the best chance of survival. Don’t treat the most difficult problems – they’re DOA. Don’t waste time on the easy problems either – they can survive on their own. With this approach a large number of simultaneous problems become manageable.

7.       Think short term and long term concurrently.  Identify, assess and act on the problems on your triage list promptly. Don’t let unresolved problems sit in a pile. Clean your slate on Friday, and start a new triage list Monday. But at the same time, remember the lessons learned and implement them in your business systems to prevent the same crisis situation from occurring again.

8.       Support your winners. Provide overwhelming, concentrated support to teams that are making a problem-solving breakthrough. Dispersing resources such as manpower, information, money and time to losing endeavors - beating a dead horse, is a formula for failure.

9.       Humans are the main cause of business crisis.  In nature, bad things do indeed just
”happen:” earthquakes, floods, etc. But there are few “Acts of God” in business. Crises are caused by people who are incompetent, who procrastinate, fail to recognize and address problems, fail to make decisions and fail to learn from their mistakes. Such people avoid problems and dive overboard while the ship sinks.

10.   Protect all critical points. Critical points are those work components that are of high importance and have a high failure effect — their loss makes a big difference in crisis recovery. The most common critical points in business are your best people, who are by and large overworked, and over-stressed. Look around in your organization – the best people are always in a crisis management mode, on the firing lines. In the meantime the losers lead the life of Riley. Work hard to divert crisis impacts away from your best performers.

11.  Maximize, reduce and eliminate. An essential way to create a crisis-unfriendly environment is to maximize productive work —fix and improve the activities that add value. Then reduce contributing activities — those aspects which do not generate revenue, like supervision. Finally, eliminate non-productive activities which add no value, like delay, bottlenecks and obstruction. Often it is better to reverse the process – cut out the dead wood first, and the producers will thrive.

12.   Accurate diagnosis of crisis causes is paramount - Learn to hunt and trap. There are two basic ways to diagnose a crisis. You can actively pursue the causes, i.e. hunt for them, or you can set a trap and return to see what was caught. Hunting is the preferred strategy; it is active and aggressive. The best traps are early warning systems or red flags that let you know when something goes wrong,, such as failing to meet a goal.

13.   Cut through the data smog. Convert raw data to facts –you need facts to make crisis decisions, and fast. But most of what you’ll hear is nonsense and background noise. Maybe 10% of all “data” is real facts that can be used in crisis decision-making. Use logical, analytical methods to filter mumbo-jumbo down to a factual essence.

14.   Cut through the bull. While you are attempting to solve a crisis, business demagogues and spin doctors will intentionally cloud reality and obfuscate facts. These problem avoiders are the masters of doublespeak. Ignore the bull and the bull slingers. Learn to mercilessly eliminate the untrue and irrelevant.

15.   Don’t be delusional or allow yourself to be misled. Reality is what it is, and sooner or later the truth will come out. Assess the crisis situation realistically. To what degree can the situation be saved? Don’t wish yourself into fully recovering a project if the best that can be done is a partial salvage.

16.   Measure twice and cut once – but when you cut, cut without hesitation. Once you have the facts you can make rational decisions. Avoid paralysis by analysis. You have asked all the questions, now shoot.  Implement a good enough solution now, rather than a perfect solution when it is too late.

17.   Don’t get bogged down in “execu-trivia”, while Rome burns.  Standardize operating procedures and focus on the exceptions – the red flags that signal a crisis.

18.   Carry a spare. In redesigning business systems, put in backup systems in case something goes wrong. Find operational redundancies and build them into every new system.

19.   Good people fail in bad companies. In sloppy and poorly organized companies, competent people will bypass roadblocks for a while. Because they don’t fit in they will eventually be fired or leave. Rather than losing good people and preserving a shoddy company, fix the corporate culture to retain the right people.

20 Finally, work yourself out of a job. Commit to preventing crises. Put preventive mechanisms in place so that a crisis does not happen again. A general prevention strategy is “the right people doing the right thing the right way."

For More Information Contact the Author:



Internet: hornjak1@cs.com

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