PMI COS Seminar

This week, I will be presenting live from Australia the final session of the Fall PMI College Of Scheduling (COS) Wednesday Webinar Series: Scheduling in the Age of Complexity. This hour-long event will provide key insights for better scheduling from a personal level: What is the role of the scheduler and what is our future?

The PMI-COS Fall series is designed to bring highlights from the 6th Annual Scheduling Conference held in Boston, MA earlier this year.  Archived presentations are available at http://www.pmicos.org/ondemandlearning.asp if you find them of interest, why not sign up for the College?

The Featured Presentation:   Scheduling in the Age of Complexity

Scheduling was developed as a computer based modelling process at a time when ‘command and control’ was the dominant management paradigm. The mathematical precision of the early scheduling calculations were somehow translated into certain project outcomes. Today, the certainties are no longer so apparent. Most projects run late and uncertainty and complexity are starting to take center stage.

This paper identifies the key elements in Complexity Theory to suggest the real role of a schedule in ‘the age of complexity’. It concludes by recommending a way to re-establish the role of the scheduler in the successful delivery of projects in the 21st Century.

DATE:  Wednesday, December 2, 2009
TIME:   5:00pm EST (US Eastern Daylight Savings Time); Doors open at 4:45pm

LOCATION: http://pmi.acrobat.com/r31077016/

There is no dial-in telephone option for the presentation. All voice will be through the classroom platform.

Schedule Density

I have mentioned the work being done by the CIOB (UK) to develop a practice standard for scheduling in a few posts. This valuable work is now at the public comment stage and has a number of really innovative ideas.

The concept of schedule density contained in the CIOB ‘guide’ is not dissimilar to rolling wave planning but has far more practical advice.

The concept is based on the idea that it is practically impossible to fully detail a schedule for a complex project at ‘day 1’ – too many factors are unknown or still to be developed. The CIOB advice is to plan the overall project at ‘low density’, expand the work for the next 9 months to ‘medium density’ and plan the next 3 months at ‘high density’.

Schedule Density Over Time

Low density activities may be several moths in duration. Medium density activities are no longer than 2 months and focused on one type of work in one specific location. High density activities are fully resourced, with a planned duration no longer than the schedule update period and with specific workers allocated.

Activites are expanded to increase density

As the ‘density’ of the schedule is increased, the plan takes into account the current status of the work, current production rates and what is required to achieve the overall objective of the project.

This approach has a range of advantages over more traditional ways of scheduling not the least of which is engaging the people who will be responsible for doing the work in the next 2 to 3 months in the detailed planning of ‘their work’.

More later.

The Demise of the Iron Triangle

The iron triangle was invented by Dr Martin Barnes in 1969 to demonstrate the connection between time, cost and output (correct scope at the correct quality) – see The Origins of Modern Project Management. The correlation remains but the concept of the triangle is fading and becoming more complex.

The problem with the triangle is whilst the three interconnections are relevant; the way the elements interact geometrically is not intuitive or correct. Output should react inversely to the other two dimensions. Less output is bad, but less time or cost is potentially good.

As we move into second decade of the 21st century, leaving the ‘noughties’ behind, PMI have dropped the concept of the iron triangle from the PMBOK® Guide and the search is on for more meaningful and unfortunately complex metaphors to define the challenges of satisfying a project’s stakeholders and customers. This is a multi-dimensional problem and there is a real need for a new paradigm similar to the iron triangle but representing the many different facets of success.

As Albert Einstein once said “For every complex question there is a simple and wrong solution.” And whilst the iron triangle was not intrinsically ‘wrong’ in the 70s, 80’s and possibly 90’s it is certainly incomplete in the complex world of the 2010s.

I have seen several attempts to replace the simplicity of the triangle with tetrahedrons and multi dimensional effort charts but they lack clarity of insight. Another quote from Einstein is “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” The question and challenge is how to replace a project management icon as powerful as the ‘iron triangle’ with a more representative symbol.

What will be the new symbol of project management in the ‘teen years for the 21st century? Any ideas are welcome.

The Probability of Chance

I have just returned from a trip to Singapore where I was facilitating a workshop to set up the initial risk register and risk management plan for a $1 billion project to deliver one package in a multi billion oil development. The beginning of November is also the Spring Racing Carnival in my home state featuring the Melbourne Cup – the race that literally stops the nation. The combination of these two events and many hours sitting in aeroplanes started me thinking about the difference between project risk and the more widely understood actuarial risks managed by insurance companies and the like.

I have already posted on some of the challenges faced by project risk managers dealing with a single occurrence, the project, using theories based on constrained probability distributions in large populations (see: A Long Tail); and written a number of papers on risk management, see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Resources_Papers.html#Risk. This post looks at the challenges from a different perspective, how people in project teams perceive and understand probability.

The Singapore workshop started with the consideration of range statements for two sets of parameters, the likely impact of a risk event and the probability of it occurring. The outcomes were quite straightforward:

• >$20 million was seen as a very high impact risk through to <$500,000 for a very low impact risk.
• >70% probability was seen as a very high probability through to <5% for a very low probability.

The valuation of a ‘very high impact’ was based on a percentage of the project’s anticipated profit. Interestingly, the project manager for the overall project (some $20 billion investment) thought the monetary values were on the high side but accepted the views of the engineering company I was working with.

The focus of this post is on the difficulty of assessing probability based on limited data for a one off event such as a project. The following simple scenario illustrates the problem:

There are 3 sealed envelopes – one contains $100.

As a starting point, most people would agree there is a 33.33% chance any one of the envelopes will contain the money.

If we open one envelope and it is empty, there is now a 50:50 chance either of the remaining envelops has the money. One does, one does not.

Now to make the situation interesting…….

I give you one envelope and keep two for myself.

As a starting point you have a 33.33% chance of having the money and I have a 66.66% chance – the odds in my favour are 2 envelopes to your 1 envelope

Now I open one of my envelopes and we see it is empty. What does this do to the probabilities?

One perspective says there is now a 50:50 chance the money is in your envelope and 50:50 it is in my envelop – we know it has to be in one or the other and it has not moved.

On the other hand nothing has changed the original starting scenario – the odds in my favour were 2:1 and at least one of my envelopes had to be empty so on this basis is there still twice the probability my remaining envelop has the money compared to yours…… we have done nothing to improve your chances, you still only have one out of the three original envelopes!

Which scenario best represents the situation and why??

Now to make the situation even more interesting….

If I was to offer you $40 for your envelop would taking the money be a good or a bad bet???

If the scenario suggesting a 50:50 chance is true, the Expected Monetary Value (EMV) of your envelope is $100 x 50% = $50

If nothing has changed the starting scenario the EMV of the envelope is $100 x 33.33% = $33.33.

Which option is correct????

Peter de Jager posed a similar question to the PMI Melbourne chapter and favours the 2:1 option remaining true, many of the chapter disagreed.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Earned Value, Courting the Law

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. From the first chapter in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a fictional court case in Chancery but there is another court case that almost fits Dickens’ morbid description………

The A-12 “Avenger II” was to be a carrier-based stealth attack aircraft for the US Navy that has been in the courts since 1991. The plaintiffs (McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics – since acquired by Boeing and Lockheed Martin respectively) sued for relief after the Navy terminated the A-12 development contract for default.

Based on the contractor’s Earned Value analysis that showed ‘catastrophic’ cost and schedule problems on this complex, multi-billion $ fixed price incentive contract, the then Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney withdrew his support for the program.

Wayne Abba was selected by the Department of Justice/Navy litigation team as a fact witness who could have an opinion about the EVM data because he had not been involved in the Government’s decision making process. Wayne testified in the 5th trial after the appellate court agreed with the government that performance (or lack thereof) was indeed an issue. His testimony helped set the stage for a reversal by the trial judge from his prior 4 decisions – a reversal that has been upheld by appellate courts since, most recently in June 2009; with further pleadings this month.

As Dickens continued…. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why…… Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; …… but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

This is an important decision for anyone involved in the proactive management of projects. If the US Governments position holds, reliable predictive data that clearly shows a ‘catastrophe’ in the making will allow project owners to take pre-emptive steps to protect their position. If the plaintiff contractors eventually prevail, the only safe option for owners will be to wait for the train wreck then try to pick up the pieces.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait another 18 years for an answer……….

Advances in Project Schedule Management

In 2007/2008, the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) undertook a survey of the state of time management in the UK construction industry. The findings painted a dismal picture of the current state of planning and scheduling with low usage of CPM schedules, minimal updating and almost no proactive forward management (download report summary). On a more general basis, the construction and engineering industries were at the forefront of effective time management through the 1960s, 70s and 80s (along with defense industries) which would suggest other areas of business management such as IT are unlikely to be better situated.

Based on these findings, the CIOB believes that it is essential to educate both project planners and schedulers in construction time management best practice with an aim to reduce the incidence of delayed completion on construction projects. To achieve this, the CIOB have adopted a three-phase strategy to provide the required standards of performance in effective time control:

• Phase 1
  The education training and accreditation of project schedulers, including:
  • The development of a ‘Guide to Good Practice in Project Programming and Scheduling’.
  • The production of an educational framework for current and future project schedulers.
  • The accreditation of qualifications in time management.
  • The dissemination of the Guide to other professions in the industry.
• Phase 2
  The promotion of amendments to standard forms of contract to facilitate effective time management.
• Phase 3
  The education training and accreditation of project planners.

Download the CIOB’s policy Statement.

Phase 1.1, the development of the Guide, is nearing completion. The provisional draft of the Guide is nearly ready for public comment and feedback.

I have had the privilege to be part of the team working on the development of the Guide and believe it is a major advance on anything currently available. Whilst focused on construction/engineering, the skills of effective planning and scheduling are highly transferable. Consequently, when published, the guide will be a valuable resource for PMO Managers and schedulers in most industries.

More information shortly……

Schedule Float

Scheduling has lost a lot of float in the last few years! And arguably the practice of scheduling is sinking…..

Are the two phenomena connected? Is this a total disaster or largely irrelevant??

As part of my research for the new CIOB scheduling guide, I have been digging through some old books and resources from the 1960s and 70s. 40 years ago, float was a far more sophisticated concept compared to today but how significant is this loss of insight?

You are invited to read the discussion paper ‘Schedule Float’ and then comment on this blog.

Project Management 2.0

Project Management 2.0 (PM 2.0) seems to be going the same way some Agile anarchists are trying to take software development which is essentially not to do project management and hope a group of people with good will and good luck will create something useful.

Not doing ‘project management’ is a really good idea if you and your client have no idea what’s needed, when its required, or how much budget is available. Journeys of exploration can be fun and can be highly creative but are nothing to do with managing projects.

Wikipedia (retrieved 27/9/2009 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_2.0) lists the following differences between PM 2.0 and ‘traditional’ project management.

PM 2.0 -v- Traditional PM

Whoever wrote this has absolutely no idea what good traditional project management looks like and has probably never worked on a successful major project. Good traditional project management differs from this highly subjective and biased list in many ways:

• Control is not centralised, authority and responsibility are devolved to the appropriate management levels.
• All good project management is based on collaboration.
• All good project management requires open access to the plan both as an input to its creation and to know what needs doing during delivery.
• Access to information is vial when and where needed.
• Open and effective communication is critical.
• Project are,  by definition, separate management entities – a holistic approach (ie, not doing projects) is called general management.
• Tools, see: A fool with a tool is still a fool, and you need the right tools for the right job. Amateurs try to do jobs with inappropriate tools. Easy to use and flexible are fine if you know exactly what you are doing, it is a recipe for wrong information and wrong decisions if you don’t.

The table is correct in so much as project management involves a degree of top down planning. Project management is about delivering a required output to the specifications requested by the client. The product or service is a failure if it does not meet the quality requirements set by the customer; which may include time, cost and scope parameters.

It is also correct in respect of the implied structure – projects work because there is an implied structure that sets a framework for collaboration. If you don’t know who is doing what it is nearly impossible to collaborate. Even Wikipedia and Linux have structure in their collaborative frameworks.

I have emphasised good project management throughout this post. Bad project management involves excessive attempts to ‘control the future’, lack of stakeholder involvement, excessive bureaucracy, and many other problems. These traits are bad management full stop.

One comment on the Wikipedia article is important though: PM 2.0 is good for small jobs. This is consistent with a survey of construction projects in the UK undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Building, focused on time management, which found that on ‘simple projects’ there was no difference in performance between those projects with a properly developed and managed schedule and those without. The same proportions finished early, on time and late.

However, as soon as the projects became ‘complex’; there was a marked difference in performance. Projects with effective schedule control performed significantly better than those without, and the bigger/more complex the project, the more significant the difference. ( I will put up a post on the CIOB’s work and its new practice standard for scheduling in a few days).

The CIOB’s findings and a closer look at many of the blogs and comments on both PM 2.0 and Agile seem to fit this trend. I would suggest two conclusions could be drawn:

1. If the work is small, simple and easy to understand there is no need for much in the way of traditional project controls. Knowledgeable people know what needs to be done and can just get on with the work.
2. If the required output is not capable of being determined by the client and the objective is to ‘create something wonderful’ it is very difficult to apply too many project management techniques – basically you don’t know what needs to be planned, costed and scheduled, etc. Time and cost are secondary to creativity and the exploration of problems.

In both of these circumstances traditional project management may not be appropriate. In fact I would question if either circumstance is actually a project given the definition of a project is to produce a defined product, service or result that meets the needs of a customer.

The challenge for senior organisational management is recognising the threshold where PM 2.0 and ‘free form Agile’ cease to be appropriate and more traditional forms of project management are needed. Traditional project management does not mean ridged control, the type of project influences what’s needed (see: Projects aren’t projects – Typology) but appropriate systems do help optimize cost, time and quality to deliver client satisfaction.

This does not mean dumping the new ideas, rather melding them into an improved project management process. Agile software development fits in nicely to ‘rolling wave’ planning. Similarly some aspects of PM 2.0 can really help enhance team communication and collaboration. Used wisely, these ideas and technologies simply help improve the way projects work to deliver quality outputs to their clients. This change is really no different to the shift from faxes and carbon copy paper to emails. Good project management has always adapted to use improvements in processes and technology to improve the quality of service provided to the project’s clients. This next wave of improved technologies should be no different.

However, be wary of the zealots suggesting the ‘old ways’ don’t work and should be abandoned and use examples of really bad project management to prove their point. This is even more important if the zealots also advocate employing them to solve all of your problems for a fee. Management fads come and go – modern project management has been generally successful in achieving positive outcomes for well over 50 years now and continues to evolve and improve. For further comment see Glen’s post on: Herding Cats

Stakeholder Management with apologies to Dr. Seuss

When beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle…
…they call this a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle.
Excerpted from: Tweetle Beetles, ‘The Fox in Socks’, by Dr Seuss

The connection between a book written to be read to under 5s and business stakeholder management is the ‘puddle muddle’ otherwise known as the stakeholder pool. The challenge of managing stakeholders is a factor of the disturbance caused by dozens if not hundreds of battles most of which, the person attempting to efficiently manage his or her stakeholders has no control over whatsoever.

Most stakeholder management methodologies start by assessing the stakeholder from the perspective of the work. This is not unreasonable but can easily miss many important factors.

Figure 1: The Stakeholder Pool

Figure 1 shows ‘the stakeholder’ in the overall stakeholder pool being influenced by the ripples created by your battle in your part of the pool (your puddle). Unfortunately the stakeholder pool is a much bigger, more turbulent place.

Figure 2: the Stakeholder Pool with turbulence

Show some of the other disturbances in the pool and you start to see the stakeholder buffeted by waves and impacts from all directions, in Figure 2. ‘The stakeholder’ is continually being buffeted by waves from other projects, the organisation and many other influences. These other waves are one of the prime reasons stakeholder responses to your perfectly reasonable needs or suggestions are frequently so unpredictable. All of these influences, both current and past have helped shape the stakeholders perceptions and attitudes towards your industry, your organisation and ultimately, you.

Consequently, a single view point is really not sufficient! Effective stakeholder management needs an organisational approach. Successful stakeholder management requires all of the influences perceived by the stakeholder to be coordinated and authentic. And this can only be achieved by the organisation as a whole adopting mature, ethical stakeholder management as a core discipline.

Very little has been written about mature organisational stakeholder management until recently. To date, the focus of most papers have been one dimensional focusing on CRM and the ‘customer experience’ or one dimensional focusing on the relationship between the stakeholder and a project (or other organisational activity).

A new book, Stakeholder Relationship Management: A Maturity Model for Organisational Implementation, by Dr. Lynda Bourne takes this next step to define the interaction between the organisation as a whole and its stakeholders using the Stakeholder Relationship Management Maturity (SRMM®) model.

Effective and ethical stakeholder management cannot happen overnight and cannot happen in isolation. The preconceived perceptions of stakeholders towards your work are based on multiple experiences over an extended period of time, and the stakeholder-to-stakeholder conversations that occur outside of your hearing or control. To actively improve these conversations and create a positive and supportive stakeholder environment needs a long term consistent effort, organisation wide.

Bourne’s SRMM model offers a practical framework that can be used by organisations to build from ad hoc, single project attempts to manage stakeholders to a situation where stakeholder management is a core skill used by the organisation as a whole to maintain a competitive advantage. As with any culture change, this cannot happen overnight but at least Dr. Bourne’s new book provides a road map organisations can use to improve their management of stakeholder relationships to the benefit of both the stakeholders and the organisation.

Stakeholder Relationship Management: A Maturity Model for Organisational Implementation is published by Gower, ISBN: 978-0-566-08864-3

Free PMP Questions

The quality of many comments and resource available on the web for the PMP exam are doubtful to say the least.

Apart from issues with various PMP guarantees discussed in an earlier post (view: Guaranteed PMP Pass?), my major bugbear is the array of half-baked PMP questions available. I am sure the high PMP fail rate is partly due to people having a false sense of security based on ‘successfully’ answering a range of simple free questions…….

To help counter this we have developed a set of 30 questions as a free resource (no log-on required) focused on real PMP level knowledge assessments. If you, or anyone you know wants to see how their knowledge stack up you are welcome to have a go….. The questions are available from http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Free_PMP_Questions_1.html.

Whilst the problems with CAPM are less, we have also developed 25 CAPM questions which are available from http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Free_CAPM_Questions_1.html.

Apart from normal web traffic monitoring there are no systems on these pages to track users or downloads and being we are a small business based in Melbourne Australia there’s little ‘commercial’ value to us in people making use of the free facility outside of our home base, so please feel free to pass this resource on to anyone you know interested in the PMP exam (having done the hard work writing the questions I would hate to see it wasted).