Bridget Jones’s risk register

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with respect to Bridget Jones: if you’re going to keep a detailed record of your project and still manage not to summarise and apply lessons learned, then you really deserve everything you get.

In the film version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) starts her diary in an attempt to monitor and inform her self-improvement project: “Resolution number one: obviously, will lose twenty pounds. Number two: will find nice sensible boyfriend and not continue to form romantic attachments to alcoholics, workaholics, peeping-toms, megalomaniacs, emotional [expletive] or perverts.”

But despite this clear set of project parameters, subsequent diary entries – in which she carefully catalogues her emotional states – don’t seem to evidence any progress on the project or set out its viable stage gates (a nice date, maybe; meeting his friends) or ultimate goals.

One thing we can say about Bridget is that she at least recognises the ‘burning platform’ business case that requires the project to kick off. This is provided by family friend Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) who accurately diagnoses her as “a verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother”.

He doesn’t say this to her face; she overhears him at a party. It’s a valuable lesson for project managers: sometimes to get to the heart of an issue, you need to tap into what people really think about your organisation, not what they think they should say. And whether Bridget knows it or not at this stage, Mark’s tough talk is going to turn into tough love.

A truth universally acknowledged…

Her other source of intel for the self-improvement project is boss Daniel Carver (Hugh Grant), who mercilessly exploits her infatuation with his good looks and charm to woo her for what can only be assumed are distinctly earthly ends. No noble project purpose for him! Bridget’s diary records his rakishness, and even turning back a few pages to review the project goals would show Daniel is precisely what she needs to avoid. Just recording your observations on a project is no good if you don’t act on them.

When that sub-project is derailed – the last straw is a naked ex lounging in Daniel’s flat – Bridget recognises that Project Mr Right needs a rethink. This is all too common: we know where the risks lie and even write them down. But it’s only when they crystallise that we take them seriously. And it’s all too easy to cling onto the upside potential, even when the downside risk is clearly much more likely to occur.

A course-correction, then: Bridget rewrites the project plan and the “sensible boyfriend” stage gate is swapped out; Mark in, Daniel out. And you’d think a project rethink is a good time to review all your documentation and pick up lessons from recent failures.

Bridget… well, reviewing her diary entries, she might have concluded that bad men should be taken at face value and avoided; good men sometimes come across as dull-but-dependable; and indecision is a recipe for losing genuine progress on Project Mr Right.

Instead, just as she’s developing deeper feelings for Mark, she allows a (drunken) Daniel back into her life, and when the two men duke it out in a London street, she has a go at Mark, dithers and sends him away.

Elements of the ridiculous

So, rather than choose the ‘minimum viable product’ version of a boyfriend as a base to work from, Bridget chooses drama and a completely missed stage gate. The consequences of indecision on a project are often that conditions enabling a particular course of action shift while you dither, and sure enough, by the time Bridget confesses she might love Mark, he’s off to New York with classy ice-queen Natasha. Where’s your agile methodology, Bridget?!

Project managers IRL are rarely lucky enough to have externalities fix themselves in time to save their project. But Mark considers that maybe Bridget hits the success criteria of his own Project Miss Right and decides to tell her. Then he reads her lessons learned – her rather-too-frank diary. She thinks this has put him off again. But rushing half-naked into the street to catch him up, she finds he hasn’t disappeared after reading her internal project review; he’s popped out to buy her a new diary to mark the fresh start of their life together.

Which means, of course, that Mark is an even worse ‘client’ in this project than Bridget is a project manager. He should know: wiping away the lessons learned isn’t a way to start afresh; it’s a recipe for repeating all the same old mistakes… and giving us three sequels, all with roughly the same plot!

Who said romance was dead? Happy Valentine’s Day.