In December, my one and only child, my daughter, dropped the bomb that she was moving to Portland. I initially thought . . . that’s not so bad. I love Portland, Maine. I soon realized that it was Portland, OREGON! There would be no more Sunday afternoon walks or hanging out sipping tea watching The Great British Bake Off or donning our silly matching ruffled aprons and trying our hand at baking the recipes from the show.
I had a pity party for myself for several weeks and eventually allowed myself to put it into perspective. She was not moving to Haiti. (One of my friend’s kids sold her worldly possessions and moved to Haiti to do mission work.) She was not moving to Australia, which apparently had been a possibility.
Emily is an avid cyclist and Portland is very bike-friendly. They have well-marked bike lanes and cyclists are everywhere, so people are used to looking out for them. Before the move, she was riding her bike a few days a week from Framingham to her office in Burlington. Anyone who knows the area can appreciate that the risk was pretty high that she would hit a pothole or be struck by a car. She had one collision that I am aware of (she tried to keep it from me) where a car crossed her path. There was no way that I, her mother, could mitigate or avoid this risk. It was all up to her. She assured me that experienced cyclists think differently – they are always looking at cars, pedestrians, and other cyclists thinking about what they might do. The cyclist might actually change their path in anticipation of a stupid move by a driver – sort of risk management by the seat of their bicycle pants.
Getting back to the move… Emily then broke the news that she’d actually be driving cross country and was wondering if I would be interested in joining her. There was no way that I was going to let her make this trip alone; of course I would join her! And then she told me the drive was likely to happen the first week in February. February?! Red flags shot up. What about snow and ice storms in the mid-west and how the heck were we going to get across the Rocky Mountains?! Emily was in charge of planning how we were going to get from point A to point B, but I was all about identifying and managing the risks.
What if we hit bad weather and the trip were to take longer than planned? It was highly likely that this would happen. We could have avoided this by going a more southerly route, but it would have extended the trip a great deal – we would have had to go very far south to avoid the mountains. So we chose to accept the risks and go over the Rockies. I let my manager know this was a possibility and I made sure that I had my VPN token and laptop with me just in case we were holed up to wait out a storm along the way.
Worse yet, what if we were out in the middle of nowhere and got stranded in a blizzard? We packed lots of protein bars and had a good-to-25-below down sleeping bag just in case. We also surmised we could increase our mileage during good weather, possibly even put in an all-nighter, to offset delays due to bad weather.
We set out on the Monday after the Super Bowl and hit lake-effect snow as we drove across New York and into Pennsylvania. On day two, we hit more of the same as we passed from Ohio into Indiana and Illinois. We even saw a car up ahead spin out into the median and come to a stop up to its axles in snow. Luckily, no one else was involved and we cautiously pushed on through extremely poor driving conditions.
After two days of driving through less than optimal conditions, we made it just over the line into Iowa and found ourselves behind schedule. We did the math and knew that for us to reach Portland by Friday afternoon, we would need to put in two 700-mile days, but thankfully no all-nighter would be needed, at least not yet. An uneasy feeling hung over us as we contemplated driving across the rest of Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and corners of Utah and Idaho, reaching 8,000+ feet above sea level somewhere along the way.
On day three, after traveling 740 miles (nearly 2,000 miles total), we made it to Cheyenne, Wyoming. At this point we had seen herds of deer and antelope, flocks of migrating birds, and even a majestic bald eagle! We celebrated each 1,000 miles driven by eating King Kones!
The weather looked okay for the days ahead and we managed to cover another 760 miles as we passed safely over the Rockies with panoramic views and great relief! On Friday, we made it to Portland by mid afternoon, on time and within our budget, having traveled a whopping 3,133.7 miles.
Many things about this trip parallel our work as project managers. We identify resources, we set goals and define scope, we create schedules, we identify possible risks and ways to mitigate them, we celebrate milestone accomplishments along the way, and conclude with lessons learned.
Unfortunately, all too many projects are cancelled when they run into problems and/or run out of money. I have never experienced it, but I imagine that in some instances, risk can be so high that a project may be canceled before it gets off the ground. Sometimes a project is quite risky, but must go on. What has your experience been? Have you ever had to cancel a risky project? What would you have done differently?