Tips of the trade - Actively Manage Assumptions by Anticlue

While planning a project, there are decisions which are based upon presumed truths. These presumed truths need to be in place for the project to be successful. As a project manager is it your responsibility to manage the assumptions within your control and properly escalate others.

Assumptions are those common placed truths which have a nasty habit of wacking the project execution with a wreaking ball when they are found not to be true. So let's talk about some common place assumptions in healthcare projects.

Managing Assumptions should be aligned with how you manage risks, the key here is to assure the assumptions are transparent, well defined, and have an individual accountable who is empowered to assure the assumption holds true.

There are three key practices in managing assumptions:

1. Identify Planning Assumptions - We first start by reviewing business case, charter and high level scope definition. Here we pull out those planned truths. Don't just stop if there is a section, labeled "assumptions". Review all existing documentation for assumptions. Once you have them, let's be sure to clean them up. Applying our smart methodology to assumptions, resources will be made available as needed becomes. From October through January, the nursing manager, director of medical informatics and 2 system analysts will review the future workflow. The resources will commit 8 hours a week to this effort which will be measured by reviewing the time logged and deliver a completed workflow for each service on a bi-weekly basis. Now let's place these either in our RAID sheet or our risk register.


2. Analyzing Planning Assumptions - The next step is to review the assumption, determine a leading event to show that the assumption is failing. For example on the above if the weekly workgroup meetings are canceled, there is a high probability the output will not be obtained. Also identify an accountable individual for managing this assumption. Here it would not be project manager but perhaps the director of nursing and medical informatics. If this does not happen, what is the impact to the project.


3. Develop Action Plans - Here is how the accountable owner of the assumption will be managing it. Perhaps there is a control put in place, like a notice to the directors before the meeting is cancelled to eliminate the conflict, or another standing meeting has time carved out to make the participants available. If this is going to be a continual problem, perhaps another resource is assigned to walkthrough the new workflow with each participant individually, with a 3 day turnaround for agreement.

If you enjoed reading this article, perhaps you would also like:

• Pre-Charter


• Checklist of Charter Components


• Quick Little Risk Management Checklist

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