Groundhog Day. Again.

Every day is the same. You’re trapped in an eternal loop, doomed to repeat the same mistakes on your project over and over. Sound familiar? Well, Groundhog Day may provide some tips, writes Richard Young.

One of the richest seams in project management theory and practice is how to capture experiences and embed ‘lessons learned’ about your personal or organisational approach. Time and again, we hear how exhaustive post-mortems generate documents that are never read; or how organisations fail to capture individual lessons and repeat mistakes.

Which makes the 1993 movie Groundhog Day – for project managers, anyway – not just a morality tale about the search for searing honesty and pure intentions, but also a fantasy world where project failures can be reviewed, replayed and ironed out to perfection.One of the richest seams in project management theory and practice is how to capture experiences and embed ‘lessons learned’ about your personal or organisational approach. Time and again, we hear how exhaustive post-mortems generate documents that are never read; or how organisations fail to capture individual lessons and repeat mistakes.

It’s an iconic film, but for the uninitiated… our (anti)hero is Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a cynical and sleazy TV weatherman who’s sent to small-town Pennsylvania – Punxsutawney, to be precise – to cover the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. The myth states that if the large rodent (also called Phil) emerges from its hide and sees its own shadow on the morning of 2 February, there will be six more weeks of winter.

But when bad weather closes in and forces him and his crew – producer Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell) and cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) – to return to the town for the night, Phil becomes trapped in a time loop, forcing him to relive the same day over and over again. Nightmarish hellscape or, as the film eventually reveals, heaven-sent opportunity for personal growth?

Haven’t we been here before?

There are really three projects for Phil to manage. The first is the most straightforward: get the piece to camera covering the groundhog recorded and filed. And it offers us a couple of lessons about project management. First, the experienced project manager develops a kind of muscle memory around familiar tasks – which can be both positive and negative. Phil has done the Groundhog Day report before; he knows how to deliver a piece to camera and he’s able to execute it perfectly well with minimal fuss. He delegates – letting his cameraman set up – and gets the report done.

So, a good project manager, then? Not so fast. To begin with, there’s the way he treats his project sponsor. Let us assign that role to Rita. A producer ought to be a project manager, of course, but in this case she’s the one expecting an outcome from Phil’s work – and she’ll be the one to judge how well he’s performed. He’s dismissive of her talent – not least because she’s a woman; at the start of the movie Phil is very much at the wrong end of the sexism spectrum. He more or less ignores her requests to provide input on the project scope. And he considers his work done when he decides, not when she’s happy.

That’s the second lesson: project familiarity can breed contempt. Phil’s experience and confidence result in him becoming cavalier, cutting everything fine because he thinks he knows exactly what needs to be done without really trying. When you start to feel stuck in a rut, it’s time for a change. That might be automating dull tasks or going out of your comfort zone in a new field or industry.

Haven’t we been here before?

The second big project dawns on Phil after he wakes up to repeat the same day all over again. The first time it happens, he feels like he’s suffered some kind of extended bout of déjà vu – it’s disorientating and other-worldly, and he can barely make sense of it. But after the second and third times, he begins to glimpse the freedom from responsibility offered by the resetting of his life after every day. This project, then, is how to exploit the environment he’s in. And it’s a lesson in agile.

Unlike most agile projects, there isn’t a meeting every morning to review progress and hammer through the tasks for the day. Phil already knows, in increasingly precise detail, what his project environment is like; he becomes familiar not just with the foibles of his user base and the way his organisation runs – he can predict with absolutely certainty what everyone is going to say.

Phil does lack one key element of a good agile team: documentation. There’s no wall-planner, status update or chart covered in Post-It notes to clarify who’s done what and which tasks are next. He has to memorise everything in order to make ‘progress’. Why the quotes? Well, in this project, ‘progress’ is purely procedural. There’s no sense of the project having a grand objective or purpose. For example, Phil learns beat-by-beat how the cash delivery to the bank works, exploiting a lapse in attention by a guard to steal a bagful of money. But how much can he spend in one day?

Even more cynically, he memorises the personality traits of a woman in the town diner in order to seduce her. He can be horrible to people, beat them up even, and never faces any consequences. In time, this also gets boring. Project-without-a-purpose ennui sets in. How do you stay motivated when the answers become obvious but the mission remains worthless or the objective never seems to get closer? Phil’s solution is to try to end his life. But even this act is empty and purposeless – and it fails every time, leaving him waking up after each attempt to the same terrible radio jingle.

Haven’t we been here before?

Is there anything intrinsically wrong with exploiting your expertise in project disciplines or familiarity with an organisation or industry? Of course not. But staying motivated is much easier when you feel the project has a bigger meaning. Phil’s third project comes to life when he wakes up to that fact. And the higher purpose he uncovers is using his unique situation to give the town of Punxsutawney a perfect day.

It doesn’t start out quite like that. Realising that he is attracted to Rita, he initially attempts to use his sleazy techniques to seduce her. But he consistently fails. After his epiphany, he realises that this is an unworthy project. She is pure of heart, and only by becoming altruistic himself can he hope to win her love.

That altruism is all-pervading: from completely re-imagining the report he films for Groundhog Day as an inspirational speech, to saving townspeople’s lives, regaling them with piano recitals and making ice sculptures – skills he’s learned during his loops. When his positive behaviour and selflessness become instinctive and sincere – and he can honestly win Rita’s love – the spell is broken.

It’s a rare project manager who doesn’t replay the project scope or rue the missed opportunities when they reach each stage gate. Even when a ‘lessons learned’ process reveals some blinding truth or actionable insight, it’s always too late to fix what happened. But although Phil is afforded that luxury, it’s not the ability to make every task just-so in his project that makes it so perfect. It’s the honesty and purpose in his project management that ultimately saves Phil.

So is the message that we should only do projects with some kind of moral objective? Not exactly. For project managers, Groundhog Day is more of a lesson in purity of heart. We’re always going to have to deal with project politics and expedient decisions, resource constraints and truculent team members. But tackling each part of the project openly, honestly and with clear intent can only yield positive results.

Ned? Ned Ryerson?!

The real star of Groundhog Day is Stephen Tobolowsky playing insurance salesman and all-round dork Ned Ryerson. Ned greets Phil on his way to Gobbler’s Knob to film his piece, and reveals himself to be an old school ‘friend’ of Phil’s – whom the weatherman can barely remember and treats disdainfully. Through our project management lens, Ned is that project team member you really don’t like. They might be a long-term fixture in the organisation or a functional expert assigned to ‘help’ you – but they’re impossible to engage with and far too easy to hate.

But mature project leadership is all about accommodating the team in a way that helps everyone be productive. Cynical Phil starts out by brushing Ned off – the equivalent of ignoring him in meetings, or muting his Zoom feed. Desperate Phil punches Ned in the face – needless to say, open hostility to a project team member is never acceptable. But enlightened Phil does what every great project leader can: embrace the contribution of team members even when they feel inconvenient. Phil’s redemption might not be secured just because he learns to engage with Ned – but being open and even welcoming to someone who grates is the surest sign of the personal growth that does bring his project to a close.

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2021 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.