Popping the Bubble

If you rub your hand along a carpet starting along one wall and continue to the opposite wall, your hand will always move steadily and level but a bubble will slowly grow. Eventually, you'll have to pop the bubble to reach the opposite wall.

Many projects, especially IT related projects, develop a bubble throughout the project. In fact, many projects appear to move steadily onward while the bubble grows larger. The challenge for project managers is to identify the growing bubble and do whatever it takes to stop the bubble from growing. In most cases, any problems or issues should be resolved promptly - don't let them add to the bubble and potentially create other dependent problems and issues. Sometimes it's not clear that a bubble exists.

With our recent warehouse automation initiative, we did not identify all the corrupt data until the 11th hour. During our pilot, we actually were compounding the problem due to an internal system error. Eventually, we tackled the problem (literally) using a small army of employees to correct the data over a period of several days. During our postmortem, I remembered the "popping the carpet bubble" metaphor as we discussed the series of events that led to our final push to complete the project.