Project

OK, one more rant before I stop for the day. mythologies and superstition seem to be rampant in the project management world both in terms of consumption and creation. And a lot of the PM blogs use big or marketing type words - primarily the ones with books to sell. I'm gonna have to think up something catchy to match up with things like "lean", "agile", "TOC" and the like. Either that or learn enough about them to write a boatload of nasty comments. I think I'll tackle TOC first...

You can look here for some of the fun that is being had:
projectified: Glen is on a Roll!
I've posted about MS Project haters in the past. They are quite common beasts after all. On the other hand, those that "Love" Microsoft project are as rare as unicorns. Brian sticks up for it just because he is righteous and works for Microsoft :-). I think part of the problem is that it has a complex soul. It is hard to get close to it without accepting it on its own terms. It also carries a lot of baggage and thus is not as streamlined, simple and shiny as it could be. Bloat is not a pretty word so I'll refrain from using it.

Excel and Word get new ribbons for their hair in their upcoming version 12, but Project for the most part has to be content sweeping out the fireplaces of enterprise while the others are at the ball. One almost wishes that one could wave a wand and convert the resource substitution wizard into a golden full fledged resource leveling engine with a team of dalmations running along behind or that the tired old gui could be cleaned of soot. But I fear it is not likely, and even if by some miracle Project were cleaned and polished at the end of the evening someone will shut down the program without saving leaving only a spool file blinking in the task tray.

No, dreams are not practical. The best approach is to jump into the swamp with project anyway. You can kiss it if you want, but it won't turn into a princess. Not that you would want it too. It is a pretty useful as a frog as it is.

It's all about helium these days. First my 9 year-old asks me if Helium-5 burns, then the Russians are reportedly planning to mine the moon for Helium-3 for reactors. Then Oil-man Bush gets all hot about alternative energy research, Richard Branson commissions Philippe Starck to design a multi-million$ space port in New Mexico (Hm... the logo is a blue eye?) and of course part of the US mission to Mars involves an extensive layover on the moon with a lot of time for exploration and other activities, so maybe we are all thinking the same thing.

Don't believe me? Well maybe we can read some of the documentation and see what is up.

Take a look at the Level 0 Exploration requirements for the mars mission. The basic idea is that development of the capabilities proceeds in a spiral fashion, each loop providing a foundation for the next. The moon plays a big part in this as it is a testing ground and staging point. There are 3 main phases of the project:

1. Crew Exploration Development and Test - The goal here is to build a crew exploration vehicle (CEV) and Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) along with supporting infrastructure to put humans into Low Earth Orbit. This step is underway. Test flights expected in 2010 with the systems fully operational by 2014.
2. Global Lunar Access for Human Exploration - Establishes the capability to conduct human exploration missions to any location on the surface of the Moon. This includes robotic systems, a Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) and a Cargo Delivery System. The robotic part of this is supposed to commence by 2008.
3. Lunar Base and Mars Testbed - Estabishes the capability to conduct long term (several month) lunar surface exploration. This includes development of "surface power systems".

The thing that is a bit odd is that it stops there. Having guys living on and driving around on the moon is the end state of the currently published plans. But it is not inconsistant with the mission statement which is:

"NASA shall advance U.S. scientific, technological, security, and economic interests through a robust human and robotic space exploration program."

"(1.3) NASA shall explore Jupiter's moons, asteroids, and other bodies to search for evidence of life, to understand the history of the solar system, and to search for resources"

So what is it about Helium-3 which is so attractive? The Helium-3 isotope has a nucleus with two protons and one neutron. A nuclear reactor based on the fusion of helium 3 and deuterium, which has a single nuclear proton and neutron, would produce very few neutrons -- about 1 percent of the number generated by the deuterium-tritium reaction. This means both greater safety for humans and elimination of much of the radioactive shielding which is necessary for other reactions. Unfortunately He-3 is very rare on earth, but much less so on the moon where it is deposited by the solar wind. Uranus and Saturn are presumed to be rich in He-3, so the stop on the moon is just a stepping stone.

Reportedly, just 25 tons of He-3 could supply the current energy needs of the US for an entire year. The moon is estimated to have a million tons of the stuff. Seems to me that the space race is back on. Or at least I hope so. If it all works out it would be a good thing for our planet.

At the very least I hope this post explains why Martians speak in high squeaky voices.

I've started working at Pcubed in their San Francisco office. You can now officially put me in the category of Project Management Consultant. With almost a whole two weeks under my belt I'm noticing a few differences between being an internal or "captive" consultant in a staff position and being an external consultant. Very briefly they are:

• Introductions are more frequent and elaborate.
• You are surrounded by people who understand the same things you do.
• The client businesses are diverse, their problems are strangely familiar...
• I spend more time on the telephone.

So far I'm really enjoying meeting clients and potential clients. They offer an endless stream of things to think about.

If you are in need of any help getting project management practices under control feel free to email me at: jack AT zo-d.com and we will see what can be done.

"Project Life Cycle" is a misnomer as far as I am concerned, but digging around the origins of that term brings up some interesting ideas. Why is it that "Life Cycle" was chosen? There are plenty of other things which are cyclical which do not bear the first name of "Life". Motorcycles, Bicycles, Kreb cycle, Stirling Cycle, Ring Cycle ... you can keep rolling on from here endlessly.

But Project Life Cycle is different from other cycles. It insists on LIFE. What is LIFE? Stripping out the concept of the individual, after all individual drones are alive in one sense of the word (even cubicle drones ... I think), Life on earth can be stripped down to birth, reproduction and eventually death. Does a project conform to that model?

If projects are actually a life form, what is their means of reproduction? This isn't to say that some projects don't create life. Many do. Every major project I've worked on has had it's own mini baby boom tied to some significant project event, but those are human lives, not the life of the project. Do project create new projects? Or are projects just a cycle of some sort which enable an organization to continue on with its life?

It seems a project may be a closer fit to the process of obtaining sustenance by hunting and gathering and in some case cooking and serving. In consumption they come to an end. Well - I leave out digestion and beyond. Ashes to ashes... Perhaps there is no exact analog in life for them.

The point that it raises is the bigger one, Not what is the correct term for a project cycle (I'm convincing myself that they do not have a LIFE cycle), but what is the way that an ORGANIZATION lives? Does it just experience birth and death or does it reproduce and how does it sustain life? What nourishes an organization? Is "maturity" in a biological sense something that an organization passes through? There has to be some insight in there somewhere.

It being Friday, it seems a good time to add to the store of project management humor. The following is from William Duncan:

Top Ten Mistakes Made by a New PMO Manager (with tongue mostly in cheek):

• 10. Selling his/her house to be closer to the new job.
• 9. Buying stock in her/his new employer's company to demonstrate commitment.
• 8. Failing to understand that PMO stands for "Project Managers are Opposed."
• 7. Believing what was said about senior management commitment during the interview process.
• 6. Believing what was said about the skills of the PMO staff during the interview process.
• 5. Thinking: "how hard can it be to get this organization to support something that is clearly in its best interests."
• 4. Thinking: "how hard can it be to get the project managers to support something that is clearly in their best interests."
• 3. Planning to hire an outside organization to develop all new procedures.
• 2. Deciding that better project management training is all that's really needed.

And the Number One mistake ...

• 1. Taking the job.

Source: Posted by William Duncan, the Newgrange Mailing List.

This study from Deloitte suggests that survivor bias and a lack of rigor discredit the "research" in books like "In Search of Excellence" and "Good to Great".

Link: http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/us_consulting_persistencerandomsearchfor_April2009.pdf

They claim that "success studies tend to rely exclusively on intuition to justify the noteworthiness" of the companies which are studied and go on and provide a pretty easy to understand explanation of why what is presented as the secret of success in innumerable business books is really no more significant than seeing "Elvis in a slice of pound cake" Mmmmmm.... pound cake...

Sure, they are shilling for their own research, but it is definitely worth a read. I've seen all sorts of organizations try to claim success as due to their particular efforts - sometimes to laughable levels which I can't repeat, but if you are a consumer of business practices or business "research" it is a necessary read. Snake-oil salesmen may be well intentioned, but sometimes they are just plain wrong.

As an aside, often I don't get a chance to read some of the more popular business books until their fad has passed. More often than not, the tide has turned on a number of the companies profiled and they have fallen from greatness. The lesson learned: life is fleeting. Make what you can from it while you can.

1. You are getting paid based on it - when your work is tied to a schedule of payments for a set of measureable work it is just a short step away to set up earned value, and it offers a great way of knowing if you are profitable and on schedule.
2. You are getting paid to do it. This usually means that you are a professional and it shouldn't be too difficult for you. The organization values your efforts.
3. You are cash constrained - while earned value does have schedule performance indexes and is intimately tied to a schedule, the primary purpose is to know how you are perfoming against your budget. The timescaled aspects of it primarily help you understand if your burn rate is reasonable or not.
4. You are resource constrained - ok, I lied just above. You can also use earned value to see if you have enough resources to achieve your goals. Adding cost loaded resources to your plan and seeing if you have enough resources to complete the work in time will give you an excellent idea of whether you are fine or finished before you start.
5. Your management insists on it - what more to say about this?

Now 5 reasons not to:

1. You just don't care - I've worked at a number of places where it just doesn't matter. The cost of the work being scheduled was inconsequential to the overall value of the project. Doubling or tripling the development cost moved the IRR or NPV of the project by a miniscule amount. In environments like that the goal is to complete the work as quickly as possible and the challenge is focusing the team on completion. EV advocates (hey I'm one of them) will state that without knowing your rate of progress you can't know how far you are from the finish, but as financial advisors are legally bound to advise, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. EV is not particularly powerful at focusing the mind on innovative ways of achieving the goals. Driving the team to delivery should be the primary goal.
2. You don't trust the data - THere are a number of reasons not to trust the information provided by an Earned Value schedule. The initial estimates and budgets may have a very wide confidence interval - which of course should be maintained through out all of your calculations based on it and actions taken based on those calculations. If you are taking (potentially expensive) corrective actions based on a 5 or 10% threshold and your estimates are only accurate to +/- 20% then you may be over-reacting and causing wasteful churn. The flip side of budgets and forecasts is Actual data. How accurate are your measurements? Do you trust your current schedules and forecasts? Do you have inspectors of one sort or another verifying work in place? Is progress measurable?
3. You aren't getting paid to do it - maybe there are more important things to do? WHen it comes to payback on a system that requires involvement of your team, and EV can have a fairly high involvement, there is an opportunity cost associated with any initiative. everything takes time and money and steals attention. Are the problems solved by using EV your most serious? Is the time of your valuable team members best used caring for and feeding an EV system rather than working on issues and risks and just getting work done? Does it make sense to take the attention of your organization for this? What payback will you see which can't be delivered by a simpler or less intensive system?
4. You can't do it - Earned Value is fundamentally simple, but it becomes complex when there are a large number of people involved and where a number of different systems need to be brought together to produce the calculations. It becomes more difficult when the types of work to be modeled are diverse across the organizations involved. When people are involved they sometimes need to change and change does not come easy. Not to mention managing change on the project. EV demands good change controls in order to give meaningful results. Do you have change control handled now? If not, manage that first. Do you have the political power and technical expertise to put a large EV system into play? What are your inputs to the system? How timely are they? Do you have a way to capture all of the actuals expended? If you capture costs in one system can they be mapped to your scheduling sytem? What will your people put up with? Are your people ready for it?
5. Your management insists on it - if they are insisting without a fundamental understanding of the costs, benefits and probability of getting good actionable data out of it, you should definitely be afraid that it might not be possible to meet those undefined expectations. Better to explain why and what and move away from insistance and toward informed consent.

1. You are getting paid based on it - when your work is tied to a schedule of payments for a set of measureable work it is just a short step away to set up earned value, and it offers a great way of knowing if you are profitable and on schedule.
2. You are getting paid to do it. This usually means that you are a professional and it shouldn't be too difficult for you. The organization values your efforts.
3. You are cash constrained - while earned value does have schedule performance indexes and is intimately tied to a schedule, the primary purpose is to know how you are perfoming against your budget. The timescaled aspects of it primarily help you understand if your burn rate is reasonable or not.
4. You are resource constrained - ok, I lied just above. You can also use earned value to see if you have enough resources to achieve your goals. Adding cost loaded resources to your plan and seeing if you have enough resources to complete the work in time will give you an excellent idea of whether you are fine or finished before you start.
5. Your management insists on it - what more to say about this?

Now 5 reasons not to:

1. You just don't care - I've worked at a number of places where it just doesn't matter. The cost of the work being scheduled was inconsequential to the overall value of the project. Doubling or tripling the development cost moved the IRR or NPV of the project by a miniscule amount. In environments like that the goal is to complete the work as quickly as possible and the challenge is focusing the team on completion. EV advocates (hey I'm one of them) will state that without knowing your rate of progress you can't know how far you are from the finish, but as financial advisors are legally bound to advise, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. EV is not particularly powerful at focusing the mind on innovative ways of achieving the goals. Driving the team to delivery should be the primary goal.
2. You don't trust the data - THere are a number of reasons not to trust the information provided by an Earned Value schedule. The initial estimates and budgets may have a very wide confidence interval - which of course should be maintained through out all of your calculations based on it and actions taken based on those calculations. If you are taking (potentially expensive) corrective actions based on a 5 or 10% threshold and your estimates are only accurate to +/- 20% then you may be over-reacting and causing wasteful churn. The flip side of budgets and forecasts is Actual data. How accurate are your measurements? Do you trust your current schedules and forecasts? Do you have inspectors of one sort or another verifying work in place? Is progress measurable?
3. You aren't getting paid to do it - maybe there are more important things to do? WHen it comes to payback on a system that requires involvement of your team, and EV can have a fairly high involvement, there is an opportunity cost associated with any initiative. everything takes time and money and steals attention. Are the problems solved by using EV your most serious? Is the time of your valuable team members best used caring for and feeding an EV system rather than working on issues and risks and just getting work done? Does it make sense to take the attention of your organization for this? What payback will you see which can't be delivered by a simpler or less intensive system?
4. You can't do it - Earned Value is fundamentally simple, but it becomes complex when there are a large number of people involved and where a number of different systems need to be brought together to produce the calculations. It becomes more difficult when the types of work to be modeled are diverse across the organizations involved. When people are involved they sometimes need to change and change does not come easy. Not to mention managing change on the project. EV demands good change controls in order to give meaningful results. Do you have change control handled now? If not, manage that first. Do you have the political power and technical expertise to put a large EV system into play? What are your inputs to the system? How timely are they? Do you have a way to capture all of the actuals expended? If you capture costs in one system can they be mapped to your scheduling sytem? What will your people put up with? Are your people ready for it?
5. Your management insists on it - if they are insisting without a fundamental understanding of the costs, benefits and probability of getting good actionable data out of it, you should definitely be afraid that it might not be possible to meet those undefined expectations. Better to explain why and what and move away from insistance and toward informed consent.