 Reforming Project Management |
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Thursday, February 12, 2004
Time to Confirm Your Attendance
The next conversation with authors is February 19th, 1:00 - 2:15 PM EST. We're interviewing Phil Clampitt and Bob DeKoch, authors of Embracing Uncertainty: The Essence of Leadership. If you haven't done so already, then enroll in the series and then confirm your participation in this teleconference by replying to the email you receive after enrolling. Safety Book is a Winner
Ok, I have nothing to compare this book to. I haven't read others. And you can't get it in the US. The book is published by The Swedish Rescue Services Agency, www.srv.se. The title is descriptive of the authors' premise: "In a dynamic environment...risk management can no longer be based on responses to past accidents and incidents, but must be increasingly proactive. Risk management must apply an adaptive, closed loop feedback control strategy...(A) human organization presents a particular potential for such adaptive control, given the right conditions -- people are a very important safety resource, not only an error source." That "important safety resource" is the same as the capacity for autonomic project controls. It is the untapped observation and assessment abilities of the project participants scattered about our work sites. We need to learn to call on that capability, to develop it further, and to redefine the (arbitrary) boundaries of planning, execution, and control. Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Project e-Tip: Trust the Terrain
This e-Tip encourages us to not get too attached to our plans. Have a read...
How about some good advice from others? Write me. Tuesday, February 10, 2004
No Critical Path! What is a Project Manager to Do?
Our common sense understanding of projects has us believe there is a critical path that must be followed if we are to be successful on our project. Many contracts require that an 'accurate representation of project priorities' be represented as a critical path. Here's what I said in my state of the art assessment: 6. There is no critical path. Of course I'm not saying that one can't calculate a critical path. Of course you can calculate it. I'm saying that it is not a thing, just a characterization. Like anything, a CPM schedule is only as useful as the data that is available for doing the calculations. CPM schedules use task and duration data for the calculation of the critical path. The problem is the data is not fact. The only project facts we have on task effort and durations is available after the tasks are completed. At that point critical path calculations have limited value. Schedules are constructed using estimates of task durations and task dependencies. Goldratt showed us the effects of dependence and variation on the predictability or reliability throughout a project. At best we have reasonable estimates. But they are estimates. Rarely do people take the time to produce estimated ranges of effort and duration. Consequently, our schedules fail to represent the stochastic (probabilistic) nature of the project. Yet we treat our schedules as if they are deterministic. This is the fundamental flaw in our use of the critical path method. The dirty secret of construction projects is the critical path schedule is not critical. Construction superintendents and project managers have their own set of priorities that dictate what gets done first. For more on my views read: CPM: Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice. What is the project manager to do? Paraphrasing David Schmaltz, project managers already know what to do, and many are already doing it. How about the rest of you? Monday, February 09, 2004
Next Up, Embracing Uncertainty
Let me tell you a little about the book. The idea of the book came from some research and a set of papers of the two authors. You can read their precursor paper Embracing Uncertainty: The Executive's Challenge. I've not met either author. The book reshaped how I think about uncertainty. I used to take the six sigma quality approach setting out to drive all variability out of the project. But unlike process, the latent uncertainty in a project is greater than the variability that we can minimize. Phil and Bob provide a framework for thinking about that and for taking action. Their framework helped me make sense of project dependence and variability. Regardless of how much variability we remove from our project, the project is comprised of people who bring their uncertain lives together in a mix that is beyond prediction. Projects are fundamentally emergent. We can't predict the outcomes with certainty. At best, we can prepare project participants for the uncertainty they will encounter. In that way, we set the project up for success. Please join us in the discussion. Visit the Archives for more postings |
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