Project: The Australian Defence Force in East Timor

With ‘reactive’ experience in other locations such as Somalia, Moon emphasises the value of knowing the parts of the project on which a manager should not compromise.

“Projects like this are usually reactive and that brings a couple of complications,” he says. “You need to get a clear understanding of the fundamentals: what are the things we must get right so that we can react to the changed circumstance? We knew if we got that right, as the requirements changed on the ground as they invariably do, you’re moving from a firm base.”

He adds that the time factor also plays a part in this process. “What can I actually do properly in the time I have without trying to be a thousand miles wide and an inch deep? That’s a trap for all of us. What do I absolutely have to do well? Stick to that in your team building.”

Risk tolerance

This team-based contingency feeds into his observations about risk management, which is a vitally important and prominent area of any military project. The difference with army risk management is that the risk are generally all human.

“We take that pre-formalised risk management model and then we throw in an enemy threat, which is a human force. There are competition threats in a commercial world that involve humans so maybe it’s not as strange, but one of the things I had to do in Timor was take a risk to reduce a risk,” Moon explains. “We can actually take some risk in a certain area by the positioning of forces to reduce risk over time by striking more severe blows at the threat.”

This means that rather than straight risk management, military risk management is more likely to be a balance of different risks with a choice of which to take that will give them the overall advantage. Moon calls this ‘risk tolerance’.

“How much risk am I willing to take to reduce a risk somewhere else? For a commanding officer it all comes down to that risk tolerance, risk management question,” he says. “We have a pretty standard decision support methodology for how we analyse our missions and we have a mission analysis structure all about that. We need to spend time up front with a formal process that does just that: it analyses the mission, it draws from the mission specified and implied tasks.”

Moon is most proud of the way that the team stepped up to meet a challenge that was higher than the challenge it was designed to meet and he credits the strong training foundation model for giving his personnel that ability, and the sturdy analysis they conducted up front to identify the capabilities they needed to cover.

“My mission never changed during the project but the way we achieved the mission had to change immediately once we were on the ground. Had we not done the analysis up front about what the job was all about in reality, it would have made the changes below that a little less precise,” says Moon.

His advice to project managers is to build your milestone model and be wary of false achievements: “What are the millstones that are just going to distract you from the main game?”

Success for any project needs to be based on a strong foundation, Moon states, and this begins with a triangle of thorough analysis of the situation, proper contingency and an understanding of risk tolerance: “We deal with that every day. A man or a woman has to stand up and say ‘I’m a leader and I take that risk’ and know full well what it means.”