What is the Adaptive Thinking Process?
SECOND EDITION
By Gauranga Deka
Texas, USA
Abstract
Over a period of just few days in March 2023, the Silicon Valley Bank of California went from solvent to broke and eventually closed on March 10th. This event marked the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual’s in 2008. A few days later on March 12th, the Signature Bank of New York was shut down. Then on May 1st, the First Republic Bank was closed by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. At that point a large number of financial institutions, on war footing, had to swiftly plan and execute multiple projects of critical and strategic importance. The author was tasked with leading a few such projects that were to be completed within 12-16 weeks.
After a couple of failed deployment attempts, finally, in the 16th week, major product features were deployed to production environment and rolled out to the entire company across the globe, thus marking the success of this critical initiative.
The suddenness of these few projects created the need to build a foundation of how to plan and execute unforeseen yet strategically critical projects in a compressed timeframe. One of the important learnings was the recognition and understanding that environment induced stress narrows focus of the human mind. Based on this experience, for future projects of a similar nature, we had to develop appropriate processes and tools. We realized that the project team must develop adaptive thinking habits so that our cognitive behavior would become automatic. Habits develop only through repetitive performance to cause our behavior to become automatic. We conceptualized this within our group and built relevant important processes and tools to execute similar critical projects in the future.
Keywords: adoptive project management, estimation, forecasting, queueing, sequencing bottlenecks, power distance index, PDI, thinking process, decisions under uncertainty, global project team, motivation
Introduction
The US Financial market is the largest and most liquid in the world. In the year 2020, the finance and insurance sector were about $1.7 trillion which is roughly about 8.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. This large, highly developed sector creates substantial economic activity within the country. The Financial services and products help facilitate and finance the export of U.S. goods and services. In the year 2019, the United States exported $151.9 billion in financial services and insurance. At the end of 2018, this sector employed more than 6.3 million people in the country. This industry offers the greatest array of financial instruments and products to allow consumers to manage risk, create wealth, and meet financial needs. In this paper, I am going briefly touch upon some of the events that happened in 2023 which impacted functioning of several large financial institutions. During this time, the author was involved in managing multiple projects in a large financial services organization. Due to market situations several business consolidations happened. That resulted in merging two or more businesses. The situation also accelerated retirement of some of the infrastructure-related initiatives.
Working groups were formed, which simultaneously initiated brainstorming sessions to develop plan of actions and the next logical steps. Within weeks, dependencies were identified and resources were mobilized. The team created a delivery baseline and identified sequencing bottlenecks & node points. Budget was quickly re-purposed and provisioned. Investment requested were approved and projects were created in project tracking system of the organization. Simultaneously, high level EPICs were developed in JIRA. A detailed stakeholders communication plan was developed for teams, interdependent departments and different levels of management. Thus, these short duration projects were initiated as per the organization PMO[1] standard.
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Editor’s note: Second Editions are previously published papers that have continued relevance in today’s project management world, or which were originally published in conference proceedings or in a language other than English. Original publication acknowledged; authors retain copyright. This paper was originally presented at the 16th UT Dallas PM Symposium in May 2024. It is republished here with the permission of the author and conference organizers.
How to cite this paper: Deka, G. (2024). Big Companies, Small Projects – Big Impact: What is the Adaptive Thinking Process? presented at the 16th University of Texas at Dallas Project Management Symposium in Richardson, TX, USA in May 2024; republished in the PM World Journal, Vol. XIII, Issue X, October/November. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/pmwj146-OctNov2024-Deka-Big-Companies-Small-Projects-Big-Impact-1.pdf
About the Author
Gauranga Deka
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX USA
Gauranga Deka, PMP, PMI-ACP, SAFe SPC4 is an IT Project Manager with sustained expertise in building complex software solutions. Currently, he is a member of Project Management Institute & PMI Dallas Chapter. In last 20+ years, he has been leading critical roles in the development of very large, complex, mission critical software products in Banking/Financial Services Domain. He is well versed in software size & effort estimation, forecasting, Agile, Scaled Agile framework (SAFe) & Water fall model of software development process. He has authored & published scholarly articles on software project management topics. He regularly reviews articles as well as books on the project management area, some of which are published on PM World Journals periodically. Mr. Deka, as a mentor, guides young project managers/agile practitioners in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area & also participates on expert panel to discuss important topics that influences contemporary project management processes in the PM Symposium at the University of Texas at Dallas TX.
Gauranga Deka received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MANIT, Bhopal & Executive MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
Email address: G_deka@yahoo.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaurangadeka
[1] PMO – Project Management Office
