While in Afghanistan, just outside Musa Qaleh in Helmand Province, my platoon and I were conducting a resupply operation. Suddenly, an explosion hit the vehicle in front of me – an improvised explosive device (IED) hit my Marines.
This sudden explosion mixed with the possibility of my Marines being injured. You would think that I would have jumped out of my truck, ran up to their truck, and assessed the situation.
Instead, I focused on my breathing and counted 5……..4…….3…..2……1…… Then I started to pick up my radio – when out of the blown up vehicles window, I saw something thrown out the window.
A green smoke grenade burrowed into the air.
Green smoke was out. This signal was our “No Radio, Communication Plan”, meaning everyone in the vehicle was fine, but they had lost radio connection. My team and I started working through our risk response for an IED strike. This involved a slower process of recovering the Marines, hooking their vehicle up for tow, and continuing on our mission.
Why did I focus on my breathing and count back from 5 after the strike? I was taking a combat pause, a time to focus on the situation, get my mind together, and wait for a signal from the vehicle.
We had trained and planned for this situation – no signal would mean the worst, and we would have responded accordingly. Rushing to help would not have helped anything – secondary IED’s, direct fire ambushes, and other threats waited for those type of .
responses. Instead, we took 10 seconds to allow for the appropriate response to the known realized risk of an IED attack.
The Importance of Focus Time in Project Management
Gloria Mark clarifies that we lose 23 minutes every time we are distracted in her paper on The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.
Focus time puts dedicated periods of time on our calendar to concentrate or focus on specific tasks without disruptions. The goal of this period is to think through a problem, complete some documents, or do whatever else you need to get done that day.
And the goal should be to get that work done deliberately with a clear mind. Using this uninterrupted focus time means you
Project managers need focus time when conducting their “Monitoring and Controlling” of the project. Reviewing timelines, change requests, stakeholder requests, and risk management takes focus time if you want to produce a top-quality output.
The Concept of a Combat Pause
A combat pause is similar to focus time. The military often uses this concept to halt operations temporarily, reassess the situation, regroup forces, and plan some next steps.
This is best thought of as a “Strategic Break”. This break allows the leaders and team to adjust, recharge, and renew their focus and clarity. In turn, you get efficiency, error reduction, and sustained performance throughout the execution of the project.
Situations that warrant this would be like in my Change Request Being Denied article. You don’t want to REACT – but you want to respond to the situation systematically. To do this, you need time to think – your actions must be intentional and not one of pure desperation.
Origins of the Combat Pause
Militaries have been using the combat pause (also called tactical pause) dating back to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.
In “Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander”, Arrian provides accounts of Alexander the Great’s battles, mentioning his pauses and tactics.
In “Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico”, Caesar also describes his use of strategic pauses for planning and refitting his forces.
Two great military minds showed that they saw the importance of taking a time of rest. Taking the time to pause movement, reflect on the moment, relax ones mind, and keep pushing – they both proved as a useful and effective strategy.
Since then, militaries worldwide have learned about these combat pauses, allowing for focus time sessions on where we are, where we want to be, and how we will be there.
Applying the Combat Pause to Project Management
In project management, we know to use a focus time block on our personal calendar or schedule a team focus time on our calendars for cross-coordination. Taking time for uninterrupted focus on work helps knock our tasks off our backlog.
But what about when the work backs up?
What do you do when you lack time to complete every task?
Or if worse, what do you do when you reach a point in your project where multiple issues pop up simultaneously?
You need to take a combat pause, reassess, and get back into execution with a fresh, new look.
Benefits of Taking a Combat Pause
Taking a combat pause during your project can have multiple benefits. Some quick and easy ones are:
Reassessment and planning
Enhanced communication
Risk management
Regrouping and Motivation
Enhanced Decision Making
Reassessment and Planning
When you take a combat pause, you can take a step back to get a good look at the state of your project. You can reassess your schedule and milestones, revalidate deliverables, and conduct a detailed EVM analysis against where you are vs. your project plan.
In turn, you can draft change requests or establish new risks for your project plan. Using this time effectively allows you to get some critical task work done around your project and ensure your project stays on track.
Enhanced Communication
Taking a combat pause allows the team to collaborate around the projects objectives, goals, and priorities – getting everyone back on the same page.
This allows you to get feedback from your team and stakeholders on any issues happening within the project. It also allows them to voice concerns about how they ended up in this combat pause situation.
Risk Management
A combat pause allows you to reevaluate your risk register. If you pause due to multiple issues quickly, you need to conduct a new risk identification meeting and risk analysis session.
This time allows you to reevaluate your risks and risk responses, ensuring that even the most minor risks become more significant than you can afford within your contingency and reserve budgets.
Regrouping and Motivation
If you’ve ever been on a big, longer project, you know it is easy to experience burnout. A combat pause allows you to recharge while reducing fatigue and stress.
In turn, you can boost morale, increasing the team’s high-quality output for the project. Doing some team-building exercises to increase relationships and celebrating small wins help increase morale while bringing the team outside the stressors of the project.
Enhanced Decision Making
Taking a combat pause allows leadership to evaluate where you are – and then make any decisions needed to keep the project moving. Budget issues, new risks, scope changes, and/or whatever must happen.
By taking the combat pause, leadership learns where you are and where you are going, meaning they can make the best and most effective decisions for your project.
Common Hurdles to Implementing a Combat Pause Into Your Projects
Resistance to Change
Leadership, stakeholders, and sometimes even PMOs can resist changes in your project. This can become true, especially when they are pressured to deliver the project under tight deadlines.
When you get this pushback, it is important to communicate the benefits to leadership, emphasizing clearly how it leads to a better outcome. To gain easier buy-in, you must involve your stakeholders and team members while planning the pause, ensuring you meet their concerns.
Lack of Clear Objectives
When planning a combat pause, you must establish objectives for executing the pause. The same applies to your combat pause just like you wouldn’t go into a project without a detailed project plan.
Set your objectives, ensure you have SMART goals for the pause, and share your agenda with your leadership. Set up a detailed presentation or a meeting detailing the team’s ability to meet the goals during the pause.
Insufficient Leadership Support
If leadership does not support your combat pause, you will not be able to implement it, let alone establish priorities for executing your plan.
Be transparent with leadership (hopefully, they already know) about the project’s status. Share with them why you are doing the pause and your goals/outcomes from its execution.
You want them to realize the success of your project relies on this combat pause. They need to understand this and participate in its planning and execution. Manage your stakeholder management plan to understand what stakeholders need the most involvement.
By anticipating these hurdles and addressing them before they become another issue for you, you can easily enhance your project’s outcomes and overcome your project’s issues
Ineffective Execution
This is very easy to do – especially when scheduling a combat pause in the future. You make a plan, establish priorities for the pause in work. Then, your boss or organization decides they will take this time to also implement mandatory training.
Or, what worse, you don’t stop working. You get caught up in the deliver fast and deliver early – eventually leading to burn out or not meeting quality Standards.
The execution of the Combat Pause is the most important part of the pause. You want to stop, shift mindset to the problems on hand, establish a plan and move forward.
There is no time minimum or limit to how long a pause needs to be. It is up to the team executing the pause – and the issues they are working to overcome.
Linking the Combat Pause and Focus Time
Depending on your organization, having the opportunity to schedule focus time can be limited. As we show above, not having the time management strategy can create an environment of switching tasks and losing valuable time.
But, I’m sure you want that time to work on important tasks.
Using the combat pause gives us the ability to stay focused on high-value tasks and push your project over the finish line.
Be Proactive Over Reactive
Work with your leadership, and do not wait for your project to reach a state of despair. Put your combat pauses as a strategic part of your schedule, giving yourself scheduled time to put in the necessary work.
These pauses do not have to be weeks long, maybe no more than a few days. When proactively putting them on the schedule, you can easily put time blocks of specific tasks that allow you to get ahead in your project.
Having this time of undivided attention to focus on project management work ensure your schedule it up to date, risks are identified and assessed, and budget aligned. All focused on delivering a project on time and within budget!
If You Have to React, React Effectively
Problems happen; they are inevitable.
So when they happen, you need to have a way to respond to them head-on so that you and your team can ensure you deliver a valuable project.
When an issue occurs, have the combat pause in your back pocket. Stress the value it brings because it gives you the focus time to get the project back within scope, time, or budget.
Conclusion
Incorporating a combat pause into your project management lifecycle transforms your team’s ability to either be proactive or reactive or respond to sudden issues. You can make more informed decisions by taking this moment to breathe, assess the situation, and respond clearly.
All are focused on ensuring your response to your project’s problems is measured and effectively completed to bring value to your customer.
While in Afghanistan, a few seconds made the difference between chaos and control. In project management, a brief combat pause with some focus time allows you to navigate issues and have project success.
Embrace the power of pausing your project, the time spent is value added as it allows you to focus on your problems, increase decision-making, and improve project outcomes to meet customer demands.
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