Put project controls where you need them...

Although a quantitative kind of project manager generally, my default isn't to measure everything to oblivion and beyond. There's reasons for that of course but there's probably something to be said for '...if you can't measure it, you can't manage it...' and the less common supplement that '...if you can't manage it, you can't deliver it...'. But that's somewhat specious isn't it? Because it infers that measuring something is managing it. And managing it is delivering it. And, neither of these statements is true.

That all said - one of the first things I do on a new assignment is to check two things. The existence of Excel on my laptop and SharePoint on the network. Give me those two things and I can create custom lists and workflows which support well documented processes and dashboards in Excel which dynamically update and track the work minute by minute. People like that sort of thing - and I understand why.

Is this governance? Well, no - not by my yardstick. Is it control? Well maybe, maybe not. You might be either controlling what doesn't need doing or not doing all the things that need controlling. In practice you're probably doing both of those things to greater or lesser extent. Certainly more than you'd want do.

So what does the thinking PM do about this? We'll (of course) it depends on the size and shape of the red box in the below illustration.

So - with a little three dimensional visualization and we can see that we've got a relatively tight margin on cost but, a bit more leeway on time. Quality-wise - well that looks like we can just throw it over the fence and it'll be just fine.

You could quantify all this rather than just obsess over post graduate standard colouring in and this will probably bring some benefits.

But even more useful you could instate some fairly bespoked controls which would tightly control cost, control time satisfactorily and ensure that no more money was spent on quality control than was appropriate.

...but there's more.

If I were the big bad boss of change in an organisation, or the Chief Project Portfolio and Project Officer (C3PO) I'd set myself some loose objectives along the following lines.

1. Reduce the overall cost of project failure by failing less and failing quicker
2. Put in place KPIs / controls to support and track progress against the first objective
3. Develop quantitative approaches to inform project initiation and approval activities. i.e. stopping or changing potential candidates for failure before they start.
4. Reduce the amount of change incident on projects and, where inevitable, re-evaluate that project. We'll come back to this point much later on.

So how does our bit of three dimensional doodling above help with this? Let's take a moment to look a little closer.

There are the typical sam three variables which can be teased out and analysed.

Cost has a headline figure (well say £100) and we have some acceptable margin of variance (say £5).

Time-wise, it's a similar undertaking. We can say that we have a duration of 50 hours with an acceptable variance of 5 hours. It's not appropriate to overlook incorporating the level of effort in some shape or form - but I'm not going to worry to much about that just now.

Quality is just a little less straight-forward. And, I'd probably look to have some sort of qualitative assessment based on a scoring matrix. So we could have a range of (say) 1-5 to indicate a range of required quality from low to very high. There are undoubtedly numerous other approaches.

Sounding laborious and complicated? Not really.

We stick some numbers in a table that make sense. In point of fact your duration is more likely to be in weeks or months. And, your cost is likely to be in £000's. We can use some very straight-forward Excellery to create a very simple calculator. The specifics of which are very much down to you. It is the case however that as Duration, Cost and Quality figures goes up - so should your score and as the Variance goes up, your score should go down which is why there's a little fiddling about with the figures.

...but there's more.

The figures we could collate when reflected across historical information may yield up a threshold beyond which success becomes a very uncertain outcome. That's handy - because we could stop or re-configure those projects before they start - or at least make sure that they sit under the stewardship of the A-team, not (for instance) the B-team. Which bring us to an interesting point - the controls and scope of ambition ascribed to any project should clearly relate to the trust and experience of the project team.

Remember point 4 above which we'd said we'd come back to? If you move the goal-posts within a given project, all of the good work above will be for naught. The controls you had may not be the controls you need and you may suddenly find yourself sitting on a programme that far exceeds your appetite for risk. So, how can we defend against this?

Well, one way is to use the existing analysis above. You can see my use of the adjective 'moderate' and by inference there are other adjectives - maybe 'low', 'high', and 'abandon hope'. So, for me, I'd create a wrapper around the existing quality, cost and time constraints which constrain the project to remain within set boundaries. If you start out as a 'moderate' project, you finish as a moderate project. If this changes - you need to come back to project assurance to make sure you're still operating within acceptable boundaries. 

Because we've gone to the trouble of quantifying things - we're not limited to gut feelings in a project board meeting. We categorically know that if we have change (up or down incidentally) that is in excess of predetermined boundaries  - we must seek leave to proceed. This has the advantage that it will probably reduce project change. And very lastly, I think with a bit of work this could quite easily be incorporated in your organisation's default MS Project template - so once a project was baselined, it would immediately alert project planners if you breached the allowable boundaries.

Good things come in threes...

There are certain topics that I've historically given a wide berth to. Project governance is one of them. It's too easy a target, too contentious and every one has an opinion on the matter. Here's mine.

One of the things that's constrained having any sort of consistent dialogue / vehicle / entry point (delete as appropriate) via which governance is (or ever could be) dealt with in projects (and programmes) is the lack of a unified consensus.

Well, you ask, what does that mean? Good question. If you asked 10 project managers what do they understand to be implicit in the term project governance you will (I hazard) elicit a variance in the responses that is extremely difficult to unify. You could even swim into less certain waters still by asking "What are the hallmarks of a well governed project by comparison to a poorly governed project". Could anyone be confident of any kind of spontaneous consensus?

The splenetic Steve Jenner (who will I hope overlook any referencing of his words in deference to my describing him as splenetic) offered that "...governance is the job of defining what decisions are made, by whom, when and to what criteria...". I remember feeling a sense of overwhelming gratitude to Steve for having (I felt) pinned the tail onto the donkey quite so precisely, succinctly and without apparent contentiousness.

But then, you've also got corporate governance, IT governance, data governance and quite a bit more besides.

...and that's just the different areas of governance. There are different approaches to governance such as collaborative or multi-stakeholder. And then of course there's applying both the required area of governance (say Project Governance) to (say) an IT Project in (for instance) a multi-organisational project. Oh, and just in case that wasn't enough - how about meta-governance - the governing of governance. (I do yearn for a bit of this now and again mind you).

Incidentally - just in case you were about to yawn and look for your entertainment elsewhere since this wasn't a terribly interesting topic, consider for a minute a project in which the wrong decisions are made, by the wrong people, at the wrong time and to the wrong criteria. Does this sound a bit more engaging now?

Like any project manager faced with unmanageable levels of complexity I revert to the mental state of a 3 year old, effect a brief but meaningful inner tantrum and cling to the mantra - surely there is a simple way of ensuring that tomorrow is better than today.

...and of course, there is.

Simple step one to improving governance today

Documented process is an enabler (dependency?) for improving governance. So, in the very simple situation below we have an input, a decision and two possible outcomes. We have a decision point, some inputs (criteria) and presumably a forum or framework in which that decision will be made. Sounds a bit like we're half-way to something Steve Jenner might just suffer to include under the heading of governance.

Simple step two to improving governance today

Create a register of all the formal documentation to be produced during the course of your project / programme. Include information about who is going to produce it, who is going to review it, who is going to sign if off and who is going to own it going forward. And, any schedule information for when this documentation will be created. Publish this register to appropriate stakeholders (and in many instances this will simply be all of them).

This resource, at a glance, allows a range of stakeholders to discern what documentation is to be produced (and what documentation isn't), by whom, when and who is (and isn't) involved in review and sign-off.

Simple step three to improving governance today

Create and publish a product breakdown structure (PBS). Derive from this appropriately detailed product descriptions and keep these someplace useful (say a product dictionary - a.k.a. an Excel worksheet. This is very much the same carry on for step two (which applies specifically to documentation) but in this case we're looking at specific project deliverables (which may or may not be documents).

This resource, at a glance, allows a range of stakeholders to discern what products are to be produced (and what products aren't), by whom, when and who is (and isn't) involved in review and sign-off.

And that will do won't it? No expensive management consultants. No particular undue stresses and strains. Not even a requirement for the oversight of assurance satsumas mandarins - just a bit of practical elbow grease.





Problems with unrealistic objectives

A while back I wrote a post entitled "Fail less with project management" I remain broadly happy with the sentiments I expressed. Perhaps the most succinct summary I can relay is via the metaphor of an aircraft flight in which a plane, encountering stronger headwinds than expected, will burn a bit more fuel and take a bit more time. It will however ultimately touchdown safely at its intended destination. A success in aviation terms. Not quite such a clear cut case in project delivery terms.

I only found out recently that the Association for Project Management has a vision of "...a world in which all projects succeed".

Does this mean that collectively we cease to embark upon projects that are deemed risky? Does this mean that project managers who do not succeed in delivering projects have failed?

And now for a bit of multi-choice.

There is often a tension between two competing imperatives for the project manager. The delivery of a successful project and the successful delivery of the client's strategy. As an experienced and seasoned project manager is it your job to;

1. Deliver a successful project whether or not it is the strategy of your client
2. Deliver the strategy of your client whether or not it results in project success
3. Neither option

For me and my blog, the answer is option 2. In a client facing scenario, what I'm actually going to say is that as a professional change practitioner my job (and that of the team) is to reduce risk, add value and accelerate delivery. 

For those of you who went  for option 1 - best of luck - I recommend you keep the phone number of your professional indemnity provider handy.

For those of you who went for option 3 - with some sort of managed approach to influencing the sponsor away from his or her chosen strategy (assuming you have good reason for doing so) I would offer the following. First, the most effective way to do this may well be to fail quickly and conspicuously in any attempt to deliver it. Secondly and more importantly, as an "experienced and seasoned project manager" that isn't your job. Is it? (If you can't live with this, fear not. A successful career in project assurance may be beckoning).

But I said 'problems' with unrealistic objectives. Not 'problem'. Personally (though it may yet limit my career) I don't have any problems in telling the client that we've burnt a bit more fuel and we're going to take a bit more time because the headwinds we encountered were a little greater than we forecast 6 (12, 18, 24+?) months ago. One of the reasons I don't mind is that my job is to add value, reduce risk and accelerate delivery first and to deliver successful projects second.

If you don't adopt this sort of credo, you might find yourself overusing words like "contextualised success", "positioning" or possibly even "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage".
 
So, if your client has opted for an approach to change that you're not altogether convinced about, I'd recommend helping the client develop the necessary information assets as quickly and cheaply as possible so that you can back-up, rethink, re-plan and take a second swing at it.

Other views undoubtedly exist.

This is not a post about critical chain project management

Ever had an itch you can't scratch? I don't have one of those.

What I do have is a lingering doubt. A sense that something or someone could answer a lot of questions if I just knew the right questions to ask and the right forum in which to ask them.

Some of these doubts and uncertainties have been discussed previously in this blog. But for clarity I'm going to cite the half dozen things that (I think) are just not good enough in project management right now.

1. Planning. Consistently falls short of what is required. Work is not identified, not adequately defined, not forecast accurately and doesn't have the corresponding supporting information to enable the brokering of appropriate resources. Successors and predecessors aren't pinned down accurately, F-S, F-F, S-F relationships aren't identified with the precision required
2. Resource brokering. If (as is the case within technology infrastructure projects) your project's delivery is dependent on skilled and scarce human resources  then resource brokering should be fit for purpose. Hands up all those people who work on projects with great resource brokering.
3. Success. Don't get me started (mainly because there's an angry man here who already has)
4. Perception. Does anyone out there hold projects, project teams, project managers in high esteem?
5. Benefits / return on investment. Goodness me but there are far to many people charging out for delivering change when surely the game should be delivering benefits.
6. Profits. Executing change effectively and efficiently will enable you to deliver your strategy with less risk and more value than your competitors. It follows that your costs will be lest, your agility greater and your profits will reflect this. 

Notwithstanding all this, there's Prince 2 and PMP accreditations, quite a bit of software intended to solve some of the knottier project management headaches, a recognition that practitioners of change are specialists and even that some expenditure on those specialists is a worthwhile investment. And, health checks, specialist consultancies, more historical data than you can shake a stick at, more than one MSc and a partridge in a pear tree. 

Perhaps most importantly (and I can speak a bit from experience here) there's quite a few bright folks in the industry and there is no limit to their determination and tenacity in trying to bring projects in on time (whatever on time means - 'cos I'm starting to get a bit jaded around that - but more on the "Aggressive but Possible" (ABM) vs. "Highly Probable" (HP) paradox another time. Discussions of 'on-time' aside, there's still the questions of scope, quality, benefits and cost.

Could it be there's something fundamentally wrong with the underlying mechanisms of project management or their application? I could go the route here of an extended negative hypothesis routine in which we discounted one by one all the other candidate explanations. I'm reasonably certain that a blog post is neither the time or the place. So let's cut to the main course.

Planning assumption #1 then; there's something wrong with project management approaches / mechanisms. Or at the very least something wrong with the way they're applied. 

If this planning assumption is born out (and there's quite a weight of evidence to suggest that it might be) then ideally we'd need something waiting in the wings as a substitute. While the current status quo is (ripe?) for improvement, it wouldn't be impossible to make it worse.

And that substitute just might be Critical Chain Project Management. I'm not going to tell you what I think. There would be an implication perhaps that you too should be thinking that. I think we all need to come to our own independent conclusions about Critical Chain Project Management but I will post on it again in the future and if it elicits only critical scrutiny of existing methods and approaches then that alone will be a worthy objective.

Late for a very important date - again?

Say what you will, most projects don't get delivered on time. A critical appraisal might include the word late. I'm starting to think however that the terms 'on time' and 'late' are worth consideration. And maybe, if enough consideration is given to the subject perhaps there might be something genuinely novel and interesting to conclude about the nature of projects generally, the frailty of current management approaches and what can be done about it.

There's an interesting blog post here that I read sometime ago - you should read it but in absolute summary - there's no such thing as slipping dates, just bad forecasts. I remember this really making an impression with me when I read it. I don't just think its a good point, I think its a potent entry point to a much richer discussion.

A while back I prattled on about an idealised constant 'K', which represented all the work that was required to be done to complete your project assuming no waste. I've re-rendered the drawing below.

There's some simplification here. There's no discussion of change requests, procedural acumen or PMO statistics for this sort of project run in your organisation but broadly;

Work that needs to be done to complete your project is K
Work that you identify to be undertaken for your project is Kb
Magnitude of error in plans is K - (k2) + (k1).

k2 is interesting as you may or may not end up doing it and to some extent it cancels out k1 which you'll always have to do.

What's our list of variables then? Things that might influence k1 & k2. I suggest the following

1. Preliminary planning fails to identify accurate the work that needs to be undertaken or the time it will take to complete it.
2. Failure to accurately identify dependency relationships, leads and lags
3. Blunders, poor forecasting and re-work
4. A change budget (£/$) but no corresponding schedule allowance
5. HR Management issues (absence, incompetence and ineptitude)
6. Failure to manage complexity
7. Criminal or unlawful activity
8. Acts of nature

Of the 8 points above, I would suggest that item 1 is far and away the most significant. Some other time I might take the time to blog on the predilection of homo sapiens to focus on outliers at the same time as dismissing the significant but for the time-being I think I'll simply focus on items 1, 2 & 3 above.

Let's take a moment to summarise and take stock. Project delivery consistently moves to the right (perhaps systematically so) and there is (I suggest) some consistent harbingers of this movement. Interesting this isn't it? We've got a consistent output (delays and destabilisation of the project schedule), consistent inputs (I'll continue to subscribe to points 1-3 above - other views almost certainly exist). Shouldn't this mean we can do something to quantify and assess the potential impact to our projects?

There's a little bit of overlap here potentially with the schedule performance index which I mention here. But its not quite the same animal. Firstly, you've actually got to implement some rudimentary earned value management and (somewhat shockingly) almost no one ever does. But it will only help you so much as it will only use a sample of work done so far rather than a more useful measure the project in its entirety. This means you'll get increasingly good data as your project progresses but at the outset, it'll be highly unreliable.

At this point, I feel I want to talk about cooking for a while. 

Cookbooks are full of recipes. They describe the ingredients and implements required, the steps, temperatures and techniques to use and usually describe the output. They do this consistently well otherwise people wouldn't buy them.

If you follow the instructions and you have a little culinary acumen you can have a high level of confidence that what is delivered will be edible. Delicious even. If however, you use second rate ingredients, rush the prep, burn the food and respond to a late request to remove the anchovies, there's significantly less chance that what you deliver will be fit for purpose or on time.

Cookbooks are a good illustration of our idealised constant 'K' that I mentioned above. They do have the advantage however that a) they're not a unique undertaking and b) almost universally they'll have been reworked and rehearsed perhaps over several generations. So, they're not projects are they. But they do highlight the importance of knowing everything there is to know at the outset and what the benefits of knowing everything are.

Continuing on our epicurean line for a spell longer. If we removed some of the ingredients and steps from a recipe we'd be doing something to model in abstract the deficiencies in planning to which many projects (all?) find themselves prone. Would we be able to identify the omissions? What could we do with them if we did identify them?

We'll, there's one sure way of identifying that there are omissions (as opposed to what they are) and that's cook the dish. I don't think its too much of a stretch to suggest that any omissions could be identified and quantified. So what's the benefit of investing this time and effort? What can we do with the information we're now in possession of?

Can we extrapolate anything about the remainder of recipes in the cookbook (project)? Can we play any discrepancies across the remainder of the project? Well, maybe. Omissions from the fish section might not be applicable to the dessert section and should you take your cookbook to your aunt's for Sunday roast, all bets might be off when comparisons are made with cooking in your own kitchen. This is where the schedule performance index (and cost performance index) fall short for our purpose here - they focus exclusively on the sample of work that has been done, not a proportionate sample of the whole piece.

What I am tilting at here is that if we cook a few recipes up front we'll be better able to assess the cookbook in its entirety. The more recipes we test (the greater the sampling) the better picture we'll develop of the overall scheduling, scope and procedural quality.

So what next? I'll seek to elaborate the points above and answer the following questions.

1. When is this sort of critical appraisal essential as opposed to desirable or superfluous?
2. What could the job of analysis of a project scope / schedule entail?
3. What could the output be used for?
4. Who would do it? When? And for what purpose?

Forecasting - part four

Ironically in my first post on forecasting I cited the following points which I would aim to cover.

1. Parametric or reference class forecasting
2. Guessing, uncertainty and pragmatism
3. Never mind 6 Sigma - 1 will do you quite nicely
4. The PM's job in fighting for exactitude and rigour in the planning process
5. Some helpful language and strategies to challenge sub-standard practice
6. Some real life scenarios and tools consistent with other articles in this blog that I hope will add a bit of value

And here we are on the fourth post on the topic and I think I still have pretty much the lot still to get through. Something relevant to the topic of forecasting in their somewhere methinks.

Let's hustle on a bit. 

Parametric or reference case forecasting is simply the process of using historical events to inform forecasting. Let's go back to our example of changing a car tyre. I discussed some useful stratagems on getting to a more accurate forecast, but ultimately you can't beat having changed a tyre yesterday to inform a useful forecast on how long it might take today.

Guessing? Don't do it. If you don't know how long something is going to take, set a duration on your project plan and commit to using a schedule performance index to track progress and assign more (or less resources as appropriate). Or, some other similarly pragmatic approach.

Standard deviation isn't something we've talked about before and I think it would be worth keeping this back for a specific post. (That's the point on 6 Sigma / 1 Sigma above). What I think I will do for the remainder of this post is focus on point 5 above.

There are undoubtedly a great many opportunities for the activity of forecasting to fail. I'm going to describe a few ways that (I've seen) project delivery deviate wildly from the forecast and then highlight some stratagems to help avoid it doing so.

Shoddy project planning - I don't know how many more project plans I'm going to have to work with that comprise 1000+ lines, rely wholly on duration based (rather than effort based) planning and (to top it all) incorporate 50%+ of hard coded dates.

I don't have the knowledge, capacity or inclination to write at any length on the topic of project planning and good practice using MS Project (or other). However, allow me to suggest that the inputs to creating a project plan include the following;

• Experienced planners who understand critical path analysis, activity on node / on arrow techniques
• Knowledgeable staff who have either been through a structured programme of learning or other activity necessary to equip them with the knowledge needed

And some general useful pointers while we're on the topic

1. The near term should be at a far greater level of detail than than the mid- or long term
2. Decompose tasks to an 'appropriate' level of detail
3. You don't have to, but project plans comprising tasks which track back to product break down structures and product descriptions tend to have a much firmer foundation
4. Supplement your forecasting with appropriate controls so that if you're wandering off schedule, your have good information early
5. Make sure public holidays and staff leave are configured within your resource planning
6. Agree up front what the resource capacity is (70%-90% - typically 80%). Never 100%.
7. Practice rigorous change control. You may (or may not) be able absorb additional tasks of less than 0.25 days effort. Make sure you have a mechanism to manage anything that exceeds what you can comfortably accommodate.
8. Building (clandestine) budget contingency into business cases and budget forecasts is wrong (and can be fraudulent). However, I'm pragmatically fairly well disposed to building in a degree of flexibility / contingency into forecast schedules. You'll be able to cope with a greater degree of unforeseen events and I've yet to find a client who complains when you bring something in a bit early. You'll also be able to give the client an answer other than no when he asks if you can bring something in a bit quicker.

Supplier management issues certainly figure highly in my short list of frustrations most likely to unhinge a project plan. You're embarked upon a project and chances are, so is your supplier with all the vicissitudes to which projects in general or prone. Some points intended to enhance stability follow.

1. Don't blur the lines between dependencies. If you have a dependency for which the supplier is responsible, don't start to re-plan and re-forecast (unless absolutely necessary) when the supplier starts to slip. That's a recipe from a problem shared is a problem doubled.
2. Make sure your contract and commercials with the supplier are appropriate
3. Make sure you have the appropriate written and agreed documentation to support the supplier's statement of work and scope of supply. 
4. Verify your supplier has instated 'good practice'.

Governance or lack thereof. Get the right decision made, at the right time to the right criteria. Incidentally, it's worth mentioning IT Governance in here - this is distinct to the typical corporate and project governance insofar as it's principal objectives are maximising value and minimising risk. Technical design assurance, testing, change management and a solid approach to service transition all comprise elements of good IT governance.

A little more yet to cover on this topic generally. If I'm feeling suitably whimsical, I may relay at some future point my thoughts on the role of analogue computing to forecasting in project management (another first for PMfizz surely?)

More on forecasting

Before going on too much further let's discuss a couple of real world scenarios that apply to any project plan.

You're relatively new on site, new to this particular project, or perhaps new to project management. Nothing wrong with any of those by the way.

You're of the opinion that as a project manager you should be able to tell the client where he's going to be in 3 months time (reasonable). The client is applying pressure for a project plan so he knows what the next 12 months looks like and there is a requirement to commence resource planning as soon as possible. A common enough set of circumstances. 

We can approach project planning in any number of ways, but I'm going to make a useful distinction between two approaches. In doing this I'm going to mis-use a couple of terms - who knows maybe it will catch-on and then it'll be correct use.

We can adopt a 'top-down' planning approach where we define the duration (say 12 months) and then attempt to undertake delivery of the project's scope in this time. Or, we can adopt a 'bottom-up' approach in which we define the PBS and WBS (I discuss these in previous posts), elaborate the work and resources required to deliver the work and let our project planning software tell us when the work will be finished.

For me, the imperatives that serve project sponsors and project management are conflicting, difficult to reconcile and are a re-current source of tension. It should be as simple as enshrining the approach in the PID, mandate or other documentation, but in my experience it isn't.

Let's look a bit more at the various advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches.

In theory at least, I'm all for top-down project planning. Sponsors define the durations (and I might add the scope and budget) and authorise (compel)  the delivery of the project's scope within a that duration. All sounds terribly straight-forward doesn't it? But then, I am of course reminded of the words of Commander C. Theo Vogelsang, USN “… in its relationship to strategy, logistics assumes the character of a dynamic force, without which the strategic conception is simply a paper plan.”. I don't think anyone has ever put it better than Commander Vogelsang.

A positive zoo of wise pragmatism on the subject of logistics from military theatres can be found here.

So, while we like top-down planning, we now recognise that it's not the be all and end all. 

So - let's have a look at bottom-up. We have a scope, that we're going to elaborate into a product breakdown structure, create a work-breakdown structure that will deliver the product breakdown structure and commence delivery. Well, no, you're not. You probably won't have a detailed project scope at the outset of a project, you won't have any funding to commit resources to the work necessary to deliver the WBS and PBS, let alone enter into the commercial contracts potentially required to deliver the actual work. In fact, you won't even get past funding approval.

Some readers may be falling back on a bit of real world experience at this point and envisioning that we commence project start-up with the top-down plan and successively work towards a bottom up plan and in reality that is not uncommon. However, this too has its problems as funding and cost expenditure profiles are often aligned to the top-down plan, and don't necessarily adapt well to that schedule being destabilised by something as annoying as a plan that actually reflects the work that needs to be done and the duration that it will take.

Recognising that I'm beginning to drone on interminably here, I'd better quick bring the end of this post into view.

Consider the following illustration. Hopefully this is broadly self explanatory. The only note I'll add is that (particularly in my field of technical infrastructure, there will always be an unalterable volume of work required to get a job done. Short term variances arise in the identified or forecast volume of work due to imperfections in diligence and discovery at the start and blunders during the work's execution. Below I refer to this unalterable volume of work as 'K'. 

In an ideal world, Kt is about the same as Kb which is about the same as K. in reality you never know K until you've finished your project. However, deciding on how important it is to know Kt or Kb accurately, or the acceptable variance between these and K should be decisions made with full disclosure at the outset of the project start-up. Needless to say - any decision should be data driven and the criteria that might inform this decision might include; cost, criticality, complexity and risk.

I think there's a few more interesting observations to be made for the illustration above - but I'm not going to elaborate that too much. What does it mean for your project's in your organisation?

More yet to come on forecasting.

Ubiquitous constraints (and what to do about them)

For the record, when I say constraint I mean some circumstance or factor which limits an activity, benefit or the overall success of part or all of a project. (I do like to cast my net wide with these things!)

I personally think they're a bit under-nourished in the general scheme of things. I'm not at all certain that within most projects there's a consensus on what a constraint is. There's often little or no effort to record or track constraints.

I think most projects face constraints in various forms, but there are three in particular which are almost omnipresent.

Before I go too much further, I suggest that unless you're intimately acquainted with Eliyahu M. Goldratt's theory of constraints, there's no better time than now to hop on over to Wikipedia and brush up on what I think is some pretty smart thinking about the way the world works.

All the way back in 1984, Mr. Goldratt was putting pen to paper and publishing material that included the following:

Types of (internal) constraints

• Equipment: The way equipment is currently used limits the ability of the system to produce more salable goods/services.
• People: Lack of skilled people limits the system. Mental models held by people can cause behaviour that becomes a constraint.
• Policy: A written or unwritten policy prevents the system from making more.

*Source - Wikipedia

I don't have too many unbreakable golden rules but I do take the time to reflect on these three constraints roughly speaking at the following junctures.

1. Spend approval
2. Project start-up and initiation and every subsequent stage boundary
3. All discussions relating to project change

Equipment

The effective delivery of change can be hindered by simply not having the tools for the job.

Whether this is heaving lifting machinery, the right widgets, collaborative toolsets for the project team or specialist software tools it matters not.

How to defend against deficiencies in equipment? Good planning principally. Not altogether intuitively, a detailed product description can often identify the particular equipment requirements for the delivery of a product.

The PMO too (if you have one) should be a source of lessons learned, historical data, policies and standards of its own that illuminate requirements for equipment.

Lastly, subject matter expertise is often the differentiator between getting things right the first time or slowly learning the right way through time and patience.

Your approach (as ever) should be proportionate and informed by risk.

Policy

I've seen a few of ways in which absence of policy can seriously undermine project success.

1. The output of a project isn't used due to a lack of policy
2. Resources cannot be brokered for a project due to lack of sponsorship
3. Lack of stakeholder engagement (because no one's telling them any different)

I think this is my personal favourite having been caught on all three counts at one time or another.

The really simple answer (really far too simple) is simply get a clearer than clear project mandate. I've yet to see one. The less simple and less effective answer is wrap your project's mandate up in a terms of reference (PID probably, charter or brief maybe) and get that approved, authorised and sponsored.

If you're still worried, add it to the issues log - this won't help ever so much potentially, but you will have done your job as a project manager to the degree possible.

There's a bit of an addendum to this as well. There's (certainly in the UK public sector) an increasing drive toward the management and realisation of benefits (at last!). This can help the mandate / policy quagmire as all of a sudden, staff outside the project team are likely to be accountable for the delivery of benefits and this might get you an entry point to a discussion about policy / mandate or lack thereof.


People

You could spend a lot of time discussing the various human fallibilities that can constrain a project's success. I think there are pretty much three principal headings.

• Management
• Culture
• Availability

Consider the following to assist with the management of staff assigned to projects.

Responsibility assignment matrixes are (I think) very important in most projects. Projects are temporary, unique and time-bound (aren't they?). Thus, it is not reasonable to require a team to know what is expected of them unless they're told. And, in my sometimes prescriptive and process orientated world, telling people anything important should be documented, versioned and recorded.

I like the RACI chart - there are others.

Use a skills inventory. A skills inventory is a system or tool that identifies the skills and skill levels required to deliver your project, programme, specific work packages or products. It may also specify the individuals who possess those skills. Skills inventories are most effective if they are aligned with a particular programme.

I don't think it will often be within the scope of project manager's accountabilities to influence or manage cultural change within a project or programme team. I think this is one of those situations where if the culture isn't (for instance) delivery focussed, then you'll need to adopt a suitably appropriate posture to ensure the project's objectives are still attainable.

As far as availability is concerned, I cite the following.

1. Planning is criticial, as is estimating and forecasting. If estimating and forecasting is to be worthwhile, it must be based on historical data. One of the jobs of resource planning must be to specify what is actually going to be required in terms of resource burn.
2. Sponsorship from resource brokers (see policy above). This should be two fold. First, to release the resources for the period specified at the time specified. Secondly, to deliver (as far as possilbe) the scope of work agreed to schedule, cost and quality.
3. Manage change and issues so that deviations from what is agreed is predicatable, sustainable and planned.

On another occasion, I'll upload a RACI template and skills inventory tracker to the resources page.