Good for the Goose!

All summer long we had dogs chase away the birds from the man-made pond around our office.  They jumped out of a truck and ran around the pond watching and chasing until the birds decided to fly away.  Most of the birds were Canada Geese I am told which are seen as a nuisance.  I can understand why as they are a large bird which produce a large amount of  fecal matter and can harm water quality and also apparently pose a threat to air-craft when they gather too close to airports. 

This week ducks and geese arrived fearlessly back at the pond in massive numbers with seemingly orchestrated patterns of arrivals, take-offs and fly-overs -- truly beautiful to watch as many of us did.  It's cold and wintery now and the border collies are off the payroll but if they were familiar with the Hitchcock movie 'The Birds" I think they would have called in sick this week anyway!   

Watching the hundreds of birds fly in and hanging around the pond made me think about the whole problem and how the efforts were not a very complete or root-problem solution.  In the summer, the dogs came and moved the problem to another location where there were no dogs at the moment - maybe to your pond?  So we only solved the problem from our perspective and really only moved it on down the line to someone else not addressing the root cause. 

We also don't have our deterrent (dogs) here all the time so the birds came back by the hundreds and for a week or more and made themselves very comfy in and around the pond.  I'm not suggesting that we should address the root issues with the bird problem or that it should be managed any differently going forward.   I think most projects have aspects like this that cannot be solved in the current effort and require work-arounds and temporary fixes to  meet the other project objectives like time, cost, scope.   So my question is  if we sufficiently consider which problems should be fixed at the root cause and which ones are ok to treat like the 'goose' problem.  My guess is that we treat too many problems like the 'goose' problem because it is seductively easy to do so - right up until you are tip-toeing through a fecal-matter landmine!


Here are some potential questions to ask yourself to help your decision:

• How much more effort is it to fix the whole problem permanently?
• How many other ponds are nearby?  - are we pushing this problem onto the next project(s)?
• Is there an potential business case/ROI on fixing the problem
• How much float/capacity does my project have to fix this and still meet the other project objectives.
• How would you have wanted the last PM to have handled this problem?

Do you have others???





Do Great Things! -- (with wings!)



Ed Sullivan, PMP