Virtual Management By Walking Around

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I gave a talk recently to the DC chapter of the Project Management Institute about the relatively old concept of management by walking around. While it’s not necessarily something PMI has traditionally embraced, I think Hewlett and Packard did a fine job of quantifying the value – management by walking around significanly increases an organization’s likelihood of covering the intangibles of project risk. Too many risk management cultures are unwilling to simply walk around and ask what people are concerned about because their responses are seen as qualitative and unmeasureable. The reality is that simple categorization of those responses makes them measureable, and makes them an extremely valuable part of the risk identification toolkit.

In a virtual or distributed environment, literal walking around becomes more than unpractical – but that’s really no excuse for not doing it. The more consistently an organization can let teams raise their hands and point to a source of concern, the easier categorization and ultimately pattern identification can happen. Obviously, the more complex the mark-up of the data, the more analysis the organization can really do. In the dialogue that followed my talk, this attribute of data analysis ultimately led most people to feel that a mechanized form of management by walking around was superior to traditional methods in many ways.