In the undergraduate IT courses I teach, my students examine written project management communications, including scope statements, business cases, retrospectives, recommendations, and situation analyses. We dissect sentences and scrutinize project documents saturated with word salads of participles such as maximizing, optimizing, prioritizing, focusing, and utilizing. Next semester, I will offer a $50 gift card to the first student who discovers an example containing all five in the same sentence. It’s out there somewhere.
The purpose of this exercise is to address the Sisyphean task of improving project communication. Routine artifacts in project management writing rankle me. Colloquialisms (“Lack of governance will impact others down the line”). Redundancy (These factors combine together to make an effective project team”). Wordiness (Advanced supply chain technology does present challenging problems that various other companies may not face”). Hyperbole (“With this new IT technology, our business opportunities will be endless”). Vagueness (“Adding newer functions will give the project team a decent chance of meeting the customer’s expectations”). Mealiness (“The project team should attempt to find a cost-effective workaround for the problem”).
But no project management writing transgression annoys me more than reading ensure in situations that lack surety. Example: “. . . creating a good experience delights clients and ensures that they keep doing business with you in the future.” I commonly see ensure in student writing assignments and find it throughout articles outside academia. We all want certainty in our lives. I get it.
Ensure sticks in my craw because it fosters the illusion of surety, and that leads to a poop-ton of poor business decisions. Ensure means to “make certain that (something) shall occur or be the case.” Many of my students are cyber security majors, and I asked them if there was anything programmatically or systemically that they could design, develop, or implement that aligned with that level of confidence. The unanimous response was no. Similarly, based on my 40-year IT career, I could not recollect an instance, artifact, or situation where I did anything that ensured a particular result. Clearly, my students understand a nuance that many more experienced IT professionals do not: in project management, let alone in business, nothing is ever ensured.
I make a special point of calling out ensure because surety – or the illusion of it – frequently surfaces as a root-cause of project failures. “We don’t understand why the project tanked. Going into it, we were so confident of the outcome!” Another project, flattened by a screeching locomotive that management, head stuck in surety sand, failed to recognize. Ensure undermines effective risk management. In situations where surety is assumed, why create risk mitigation plans and risk registers? Why develop alternate approaches and redundancy? That is why ensure must be purged from project management communication – and project management thinking. Positive customer experience does not ensure customer loyalty. Customer loyalty does not ensure increased revenue. Corporate codes of conduct do not ensure stakeholder safety. Algorithms do not ensure the elimination of bias. Error trapping at the point of transaction does not ensure clean data.
Executives covet certainty. Hence their insatiable appetite for “accurate forecasts” and projects that “ensure” a particular result. But many decision makers recognize that probabilistic thinking – not surety – provides a more useful foundation for implementing strategy. The problem is that probability does not look as good on Powerpoint as surety. Expressing outcomes probabilistically requires longer sentences. It requires hedging on expectations and predictions. In many situations, it requires . . . math. All of which can be nettlesome to multi-tasking executives seeking to appear confident and insistent on having “clear choices.”
Fortunately, in project management, we have many alternatives for replacing or avoiding ensure in project communication. Likely, likelier, more likely, less likely, possible, probable, more probable, improves, substantially improves, increases, reduces, accelerates, limits, nearly eliminates, expands. Those words and expressions constitute the language that project managers must routinely use in project communications. Compared to ensure, they are safer. They are more credible. They are more realistic. Appropriately embedding them in communications reduces project risk and enables better decisions.
I checked with ChatGPT to discover whether an algorithm knows better than to repeat the surety mistakes we mortals commit. It did know better – till it didn’t.
Based on my question, “Is it possible to ensure an outcome in IT project management?” Chat GPT returned this first sentence: “In IT project management, it is generally not possible to ensure a specific outcome with absolute certainty, as there are often many factors that can impact the success or failure of a project. However, there are steps that can be taken to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome.” Pretty good, except I object to the expression absolute certainty since anything less than absolute is not certainty. The last sentence was also solid because it expressed probability clearly and succinctly: “While it may not be possible to guarantee a specific outcome, by taking these steps, IT project managers can increase the likelihood of success and minimize the risks of failure.”
But one paragraph in Chat GPT’s six-paragraph answer irritated me and brought out my editor’s pen: “Effective communication and collaboration among team members and stakeholders is also crucial in ensuring a successful outcome. Regular status updates, transparent reporting, and active stakeholder engagement can help keep the project on track and ensure that any issues are identified and addressed early.” Ensure, times two. No! Yuck.
Did Chat GPT forget its opening premise and closing statement? I am not the first person to discover Chat GPT contradicting its assertions. But happily, I now have a new artifact to provide to my students for improvement. The assignment: find the instances of misguided surety and provide alternative words that might reduce project risk.
