This past Tuesday morning at about 1:15 AM I rose out of bed to the smell of smoke. As I walked down the stairs, the smell grew stronger and as soon as I turned on the lights I noticed the source. Seeping out around the location where the stove pipe enters the chimney was a continuous flow of smoke. A raging chimney fire was under way.
The following picture shows the damage from the inside (the outside view is a bit more discouraging so I don’t want to post it here where I may see it from time to time). As you can see, the major damage area was confined to the wall behind the stove; but why? If you know me, you know that I’m always trying to learn lessons out of life. In this post, I want to share three lessons of which this fire reminded me.
- Install smoke detectors. We have smoke detectors in our house. They didn’t help in this situation because my built-in detector (my nose) worked faster than they did and we were able to call the fire department before the fire set them off; however, this does not diminish their value as I cannot always rely on my senses alone. The smoke detectors are analogous to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that we watch in our IT projects. A good project management system should allow you to configure thresholds for the KPIs associated with your projects. This way you won’t have to watch (or smell?) your project every minute of the day.
- Listen to your nose. My nose sensed something out of the ordinary. Because I listened to it, the worst of the fire damage was contained to one room in the house. Had I ignored it, things would have been much worse. Your physical senses are analogous to the instinct or intuition that you build over time. This is a key difference between experts and professionals. The expert has developed her instincts with more than 10,000 hours of practice. Listen to your instinct before your project gets out of control.
- Get out of the house. The first thing we (my beautiful wife and I) did was get the kids out of the house. Sometimes as a project manager, you need to know when to bail. It’s part of effective project management. Some argue that successful project planning will prevent project cancellation. I suggest that project cancellation is part of effective project management in a real and dynamic environment. Certainly, we want more successes than failures; but without failures, one has to ask if enough risks are taken.
Maybe these lessons will help you on your next project. I know they are fresh in my mind. Now that the dust has settled (literally, all over my house) I can evaluate the damage and make reparations; however, I know the damage is less than it could have been because we installed smoke detectors, listened to our noses and got out of the house.
