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Monthly Archives: October 2014

Opportunity Lost

Posted on October 3, 2014 by | Leave a comment

The first edition of the RICS / APM guidance note on Stakeholder Engagement is a missed opportunity. Hopefully the second edition will plug many of the glaring gaps.

The guide is built around ten principles:

  • Principle 1: Communicate
  • Principle 2: Consult early and often
  • Principle 3: Remember they’re only human
  • Principle 4: Plan it
  • Principle 5: Relationships are key
  • Principle 6: Simple, but not easy
  • Principle 7: Just part of managing risk
  • Principle 8: Compromise
  • Principle 9: Understand what success is
  • Principle 10: Take responsibility

All sound principles but in a strange order

Any complex endeavour needs a clear understanding of its objectives and then a plan to achieve the objectives before starting work, but ‘Understand what success is’, is at #9 and ‘Plan it’ at #4.  Surly the whole point of engaging stakeholder is to enhance the probability of success. Which means #1 understand what success is, #2 plan how to achieve success and then move into implementation.

But implementation needs focus, completely missing from the guide is any practical guidance on ways to understand the stakeholder community, prioritising the stakeholders so the communication effort is focused where needed and then managing the overall engagement effort for maximum effect. The best the guide can offer is a simplistic 2×2 matrix. My methodology, the Stakeholder Circle® is one of several that recognise the multiplicity of dimensions needed to understand a stakeholder, the outline is available free of charge from http://www.stakeholdermapping.com/stakeholder-circle-methodology/

The last omission is considering the path to stakeholder management maturity. The path to maturity is mapped at: http://www.stakeholdermapping.com/srmm-maturity-model/

I had hoped stakeholder engagement was moving beyond the soft ‘fluffy’ platitudes of the past into a pragmatic management process, allied to risk management, focused on maximising the aggregate benefit from a project to all of its stakeholders.  These ideas are in the RICS Stakeholder Engagement guide but unfortunately the guide lacks any guidance on how to achieve these objectives, with the exception of the CASE model in Appendix 3.

Hopefully the 2nd Edition will not be too far away.

The 1st Edition is available from http://www.rics.org/shop

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Schedule Calculations – Old and New

Posted on October 1, 2014 by | 4 comments

The way CPM schedules were calculated in the 1970s and 80s (prior to the availability of low-cost PC scheduling tools) used a simplification designed to minimise error and speed up a tedious task.  Whilst some of us are old enough to have used this ‘manual’ technique on real schedules, everyone in the modern world recognises Day # 1 = Wednesday 1st October and a 3 day duration activity will work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to finish on the 3rd October and the fact 1 + 3 = 4 is simply an anomaly in the way integers and ‘elapsed time’ interact that has to be dealt with inside the computers computations to produce accurate date based bar charts and tabulations.

Unfortunately there has been a rash of postings on linked-in over the last week totally confusing everyone with their nonsense about CPM calculations.  This blog is designed to correct the message!

To overcome the problem of a 3 day activity starting on the 1st October finishing on the 3rd October, but  staring on day 1 and adding a duration of 3 gives you 1 + 3 = 4, the simplified manual calculations assumed the starting point was ‘day Zero’ 0 + 3 = 3!

However, the old manual calculations starting from day Zero have never been correct – the start day number for every activity in a schedule is always the day before it actually starts.  The end dates (day numbers / dates) are correct and the advantage of this option is it only requires one simple calculation per task for both the forward and back passes and the Free Float calculations are a simple subtraction.

EF = ES + Duration
LS = LF – Duration ….  Easy!!

This simplistic methodology was absolutely essential for manually calculating large PDM schedules. The ‘normal’ scheduling practice through to the mid 1980s when affordable PCs arrived – very few companies could afford the expense of mainframe scheduling tools and those that did wanted to make sure the data was correct before the computer run.

The accurate calculation used in all scheduling software, recognises that a 3 day activity starts at the beginning of day 1 and works on days 1, 2 and 3 to finish at the end of day 3 and its successor (assuming a FS0 link) starts at the beginning of day 4.  Unfortunately these ‘real’ calculations require much more complex calculations[1].

ES = 1, EF = (1 + 3) – 1 to get to the end of day 3.
The Zero duration link requires (EF 3 + 0) + 1 = the next activity ES is the start of day 4.

This approach more than doubles the amount of calculation effort and increases the opportunity for error and of course affects Free Float calculations as well.

Fortunately computer software is not prone to making calculation errors and runs these more complex sums 100% accurately to calculate the date activities start and end accurately when transposed onto a calendar. For more on the actual calculations see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/PDF/Schedule_Calculations.pdf

Given no one has used manual calculations to determine a major schedule in the last 20 years (at least) the old simplistic manual approach is redundant and should be consigned to my area of interest, the history of project scheduling (see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/PM-History.html).

[1] For a more complete discussion see the excellent paper by Ron Winters written in 2003 and entitled ‘How to Befuddle a College Professor’, which can be found at:  http://www.ronwinterconsulting.com/Befuddle.pdf

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