Fitness PM Thursday: Problem statements (i.e. using your big fat body as leverage)

Have you ever noticed that it is often difficult to motivate people to take action?  Have you ever noticed that sometimes one of those people is yourself?

As a project manager, I often have to influence resources who do not report directly to me.  These may include the people who do the work on my projects, my project sponsor, and project stakeholders (e.g. customer, peer team members, suppliers, etc).  Sometimes I will see teams working...but they are not working cohesively, and they may or may not be addressing the appropriate problem with the urgency it needs.

As a regular guy (or gal), oftentimes we have similar problems in our personal lives...and our fitness is no exception!  It is all too easy to continue going through the motions and not taking focused steps to address our issues.  Further, our family and friends might not support our personal "projects" as they may not grasp how important these endeavors are.

This leads me to today's topic:  creating a problem statement.  A Problem Statement is used to gain agreement from stakeholders on what problem is to be solved, and what is the impact of not solving this problem.  I do this as a first order of business when establishing a new project team, and I have begun doing this for my home projects.  An effective problem statement will focus a team and garner attention from sponsors and other stakeholders who can remove "project roadblocks."

A problem statement is constructed as follows:

• <Current situation> <impact of doing nothing>
• Example:  Our XYZ website crashes when we have ABC users logged in simultaneously.  The impact is that we are lozing up to $ZZZ in sales per day and have experienced a

A couple of notes:  The problem statement should have some sort of quantifiable measurement, both in the current situation and the impact.  Making this tangible is the best way to grab people's attention and unite their energies.  The problem statement, in my opinion, should NOT include any solutions.  It also should not state Goals (this is a separate activity, see my goal-setting blog from a couple weeks back).  When a team is too focused on solutions and goals without first agreeing on a problem, this is analagous to straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Trust me - this applies to personal fitness!  My example:  losing weight!  At the end of graduate school, I was tipping the scales at 215 lbs.  In fact, my Nintendo Wii Fit character was round!  I needed to address this, and I needed support from my family.  Here's the problem statement that I came up with:

• My weight is 215 lbs and BMI is > 27.  The impact of this is that I have to buy new pairs of pants and snore heavily (which keeps my wife awake).  There are also long term health impacts including susceptibility to arthritis, back pain and needless risk of Type II diabetes.

Simple, powerful, and useful when focusing my attention on improving my diet and forcing me to work out.  There were measurements (weight, BMI...I could have gotten into my waist size, cholesterol, etc - but you get the idea).  The impact was also very clear - this would impact my wallet, impact my wife's sleep, and impact my family.  Creating this statement got my wife to allow me to buy P90X (and ultimately the Insanity and Rush Fit).  Yes - I ultimately lost 30 lbs (have gained 5-7 back - but am in good shape).

I hope this is helpful.  Have you ever had problems focusing your resources?  (or yourself?)  Send me some feedback or drop me a line on Twitter (@PMGeekAndy) if you have any questions or would like help crafting your fitness problem statement!