The PMI 2024 Pulse of the Profession has introduced a framework for categorizing projects based on the management approach being used of: Predictive – Hybrid – Agile. If generally adopted, this framework will at long last kill of the notion of waterfall as a project delivery methodology.
As shown in our historical research The History of Agile, Lean, and Allied Concepts, the idea of waterfall as a project delivery methodology was a mistake, and its value as a software development approach was limited.
The PMI framework has some problems but the predictive project delivery paradigm is described as focused on schedule, scope, and budget. The projects tend to use a phase-based approach and are plan driven. This describes most hard projects and many soft projects that are not using an unconstrained agile approach.
The best governed organizations will have ethical failures, even criminal activities, occurring from time to time. When an organization employs 1000s of people there will always be some who make mistakes or choose to do the wrong thing. The difference between a well governed organization with a strong ethical framework and the others is how they deal with the issues.
The Bad
Over the last few months there has been a lot of commentary on major ethical failures by some of the ‘big 4’ accountancy firms (see: The major news story everyone missed: KPMG hit with record fine for their role in the Carillion Collapse). With a common theme being attempts by the partners running these organizations to minimize their responsibility and deflect blame. As a consequence, there have been record fines imposed on KPMG and massive long-term reputational damage caused to PWC by the Australian Tax Office scandal.
The Good
The contrast with the way the Jacobs Group (Australia) Pty Ltd (Jacobs Group) has managed an equally damaging occurrence could not be starker! Jacobs Group had pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to cause bribes to be offered to foreign public officials, contrary to provisions of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth). But, the exemplary way this issue has been managed is an example for all.
Offering bribes to foreign public officials has been a criminal offence in Australia since 1995, and the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Combatting Foreign Bribery) Bill 2023 has just passed into law significantly increasing penalties.
Despite this, between 2000 and 2012, SKM was involved in two conspiracies in the Philippines and Vietnam. Both conspiracies involved employees of SKM’s overseas development assistance businesses (the SODA business unit) paying bribes to foreign public officials in order to facilitate the awarding of public infrastructure project contracts to SKM. SKM employees embarked on a complex scheme to conceal the bribes by making payments to third party companies, and receiving fake invoices for services which were not in fact rendered. The conduct was known to and approved by senior persons at SKM, although concealed from the company more widely.
Jacobs Group acquired SKM in 2013, after the conduct had ceased. During the vendor due diligence processes, the conduct came to the attention of persons outside those involved in the offending, and the company’s external lawyers.
Despite the lawyers findings being subject to legal privilege, and the very remote possibility of the Australian Authorities discovering the crime, the non-conflicted directors unanimously voted to self-report the findings to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), to waive legal privilege in the draft report, and to make it available to the AFP. The company also reported the findings of its investigation to a number of other authorities, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, AusAid, and ASIC.
The company and a number of individuals were charged in 2018, and Jacobs pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to cause bribes to be offered to foreign public officials. The matter only came to our attention because of a recent High Court ruling dealing with technical issues around the calculation of the fine to be paid by Jacobs.
When Justice Adamson in the New South Wales Supreme Court sentenced the company on 9 June 2021. She found that while each of the offences committed fell within the mid-range of objective seriousness for an offence, this was mitigated by the fact that the company had self-reported the offending to authorities, and that the self-reporting was motivated by remorse and contrition rather than fear of discovery. The sentencing judge also found that the conduct was not widespread, and effectively limited to the SODA business unit. She accepted evidence from the AFP that it was unlikely to have become aware of the conduct absent the company’s self-reporting, and that the company’s post offence conduct was “best practice” and “of the highest quality”.
Based on these findings the amount of the fine to be paid by Jacobs is likely to be in the region of $3 million – a massive discount from the potential maximum that, based on the High Court decision, is likely to exceed $32 million.
Lessons on Governance and Ethics
The approach taken by Jacobs Group, following the identification of potential criminal conduct, is a useful guide as to how an ethical organization works:
The prompt retention of independent external lawyers to investigate suspected instances of criminal misconduct.
The decisions of the board of directors to self-report the conduct to authorities and provide ongoing assistance and cooperation to law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities, notwithstanding the risk of criminal sanction.
Committing to remediation steps to address the conduct (and seeking to prevent any repeat of it), including by overhauling relevant policies and procedures and making appropriate operational changes including:
suspending and then terminating relevant individual employees who had participated in the conduct;
operational changes to management and oversight of the SODA business unit that had been involved in the conduct, and changing approval processes for all payments by that unit;
introducing a new Code of Conduct which explicitly prohibited the offering of inducements to public officials;
introducing a requirement for the completion of a bribery and corruption risk assessment before committing to new projects;
upgrading various internal policies, including the company’s whistleblower, donations and gifts and entertainment policies. It also introduced new policies which discouraged the use of agents, and required the screening of all new suppliers and sub-consultants for bribery and corruption risk. The company also engaged an independent monitor to review the changes made to its policies;
updating and expanding existing bribery and corruption training programs for staff; and
modifying internal audit practices to more closely scrutinize non-financial risks, such as bribery and corruption.
One definition of ethical behaviour is doing the right thing when no one is looking. The contrast between Jacobs and KPMG’s outcomes is a lesson worth remembering.
Hidden in the pre-Christmas holiday fun, the ABC[1] published an ‘investigations exclusive’ by Linton Besser and defence correspondent Andrew Greene[2] that needs more attention.
It appears project ICT2284 (One Defence Data), a $515 million project to unify and exploit the data resources held by the Department of Defence is in trouble due to Hastie (pun intended) decisions made before the last election. Within this overall project, a $100 million One Defence Data “systems integrator” contract was awarded to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions on the eve of the last federal election, and the then assistant minister for defence, Andrew Hastie, announced KPMG’s contract, promising it would “deliver secure and resilient information systems”.
This award was made after KPMG had been paid $93 million Between 2016 and 2022, for consulting work on a range of strategic advice, which included the development of ICT2284 and its failed forerunner, known as Enterprise Information Management, or EIM.
Unsurprisingly, the review by Anchoram Consulting highlighted both governance and procedural issues including:
The project has been plagued by a “lack of accountability” and conflicts of interest.
The documents suggest there is profound confusion inside Defence about who is in charge and what is actually being delivered.
Core governance documents have not been signed off and key requirements of KPMG’s contract have been diluted from “mandatory” to “desirable”, sometimes in consultation with KPMG itself.
The project had been “retrospectively” designed to justify a $100 million contract that was issued to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions, or KTech, exposing the department to “significant risk”.
The heart of ICT2284’s problem appears to be the project’s fundamental design work had “not been done due to … the rush to meet deadlines tied to the Cabinet submission and related procurement activities”, with “no understood and agreed, desired end-state”.
Predictably both the area of Defence running the project, known as CIOG, or the Chief Information Officer Group, and KPMG reject the report findings.
From a governance perspective the biggest on-going issue appears to be the lack of capability within CIOG and government generally to manage this type of complex project. The downsizing and deskilling of the public service has been on-going for decades (under both parties). This means the outsourcing of policy development to the big consultancies is inevitable, and their advice will be unavoidably biased towards benefitting them.
The actions by the current government to reverse this trend are admirable but will take years to be effective. In the meantime, we watch.
The publication of BS 202002:2023 – Applying benefits management on portfolios, programmes and projects, last year has prompted an update to our Value and Benefits Realization page, including a link to the new Standard’s home page.
As we know, organizations invest resources in projects to derive benefits and create value. But those benefits don’t happen by themselves, they need to be managed. BS 202002:2023 is a new British standard on how to deliver the planned benefits of projects, programmes and portfolios to create value for the organization and its customers.
While the Standard is quite expensive to buy, all of the publications on the Mosaic ‘Value and Benefits’ page are free to download and use and cover: – Value and Benefits Overview, – Defining project success, – Benefits Management, – Value Management and Value Engineering, and – Useful External Web-links & Resources.
The best known LMM (Large Language Model) is ChatGPT. The developers acknowledge ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as during the LLM training there is no single source of truth (the app is biased towards what it has been taught). The ‘training source’ for ChatGPT is the internet which has 1000s of incorrect posts on various aspects of project management – GIGO applies.
To overcome this problem a number of developments based on groomed training materials are in development, some proprietary in-house, and some to be publicly available. Two of these are:
Marvin, a collaboration between Projecting Success and Praxis, Mosaic is supporting this development – watch this space in 2024.
PMI’s Project Infinity, based on the vast library of publications and papers held by PMI. This tool is still in Beta, but as a PMI member I’ve had access to test the model.
Project Infinity Test (1)
The ‘intelligence’ in LLM applications is the ability to understand and reply to language in a coherent way. You ask a question, the app understands what you have asked, searches its learning, and formulates an answer you can understand. What seems to be missing is the ability to qualify the information in its systems, particularly when specific facts are required.
My test for Project Infinity was based on asking “What is the critical path?”. The correct answer to this question based on the PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling (Third Edition) and ISO Standards is something similar to:
Critical Path: sequence of activities that determine the earliest possible completion date for the project or phase. See: Defining the Critical Path
As anyone with even a limited knowledge of CPM scheduling knows, ‘Zero Float[1]’, or float in general cannot be used to define the critical path for the following reasons:
‘The critical path is the longest sequence of activities in a project plan which must be completed on time in order for the project to be completed on schedule. It is determined by identifying the activities that have zero slack or float time,….’
Q2 – Why are you claiming the critical path has zero float when it may have negative float?
‘Negative float can occur when an activity’s late finish date is earlier than its early finish date, which means that the activity is taking longer than planned and is delaying the project. However, the critical path always has zero float because any delay in the critical path activities will cause a delay in the overall project timeline. ……. In summary, while negative float can occur in non-critical path activities, the critical path always has zero float because any delay in these activities will cause a delay in the overall project timeline.’
Q3 – so what happens when the finish milestone and the project overall have a constrained finish?
‘When the finish milestone and the project overall have a constrained finish, total float may be used to provide an early indication of potential project completion slippage.’ [Note: I’m assuming ‘Total Float’ can be negative PI did not say so.]
Q4 – Why does your third answer contradict the first answer?
‘My third answer does not contradict the first answer. ……’
This simple test shows at the current level of development Project Infinity has a lot or learning to do:
It ignored key PMI documents, in particular the PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling (Third Edition)
It failed to recognize a direct contradiction in its answers.
Therefore, while LLM tools can help save time bringing together information from diverse sources, their training to date is limited to absorbing information from documents, the next stage of development involving qualifying and grading the data may be a way off. So if you do not know the right answer to a question, you cannot rely on an AI tool using LLM to provide you with a way out.
To make matters worse, accountability in AI is a complex issue. We know AI systems can misstep in numerous ways, which raises questions about who is responsible? This is a complex legal issue and in the absence of someone else who is demonstrably at fault, you are likely to carry the can!
[1] The concept of the critical path having zero total float arose in the 1960s when computer programs were relatively simple and most schedules were manually drawn and calculated. With a single ‘Day Number’ calendar and no constraints the longest path in a network had zero float. The introduction of computer programs in the 1980s that allowed multiple calendars and constraints invalidated this definition.
Project controls are facing a dilemma, on one hand there is a strong push to make projects agile and adaptive, on the other the need for on time delivery, organisational reporting requirements, and the law of contracts require precision and certainty from project control systems. For a wide range of projects, traditional critical path scheduling (CPM) is no longer fit for purpose, a new controls paradigm is needed.
CPM is based on scientific management concepts. It assumes there is one best way to undertake the work of a project, management know what this is, and their intentions can be modelled in a CPM schedule. While the CPM paradigm remains true for many projects, experience shows there are also many where this assumption is simply not correct including both soft and distributed projects. In this type of project, there is an ongoing level of flexibility in the sequencing of work that can be exploited to the benefit of the project and the client. However, most of the available management tools such as burndown charts, Kanban boards, sprint planning, last planner, etc., are specific to a methodology, focus on optimising work in the short term, and lack a rigorous predictive capability.
This presentation define the characteristics of projects that are not suited to CPM, including agile, adaptive, and distributed projects, and describe an approach for managing this type of project based on agile and lean, while recognising there are likely to be some mandatory sequences that must be followed. WPM offers a rigorous framework for identifying progress and predicting the project completion date based on the quantity of work achieved compared to the quantity planned to be accomplished.
This presentation is part of an ongoing project focused on identifying the challenges, and opportunities created by adapting an improved management approach to control agile, adaptive, and distributed projects focused on optimising resource productivity.
I’ve been involved in three events recently, each having a focus on reducing the carbon footprint created by the construction industry:
The RMIT University PCPM Industry and Research Awards Night 2023, where I presented the CIOB Certificate of Excellence to a student CIOB member in their final year with the highest GPA in Construction Management. A significant proportion of the student projects on show at this event had a focus on sustainability and carbon reduction.
ZERO is an industry group focused on embodied emissions from construction. Our latest discussion was on tools to measure embedded carbon in buildings. For more on Zero see: https://zeroconstruct.com/
Representing the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB)[1] at the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) awards night for young engineers where the focus was again on reducing carbon from construction activities, with at least some of the award winners looking at the full lifecycle of a building.
Given construction activity accounts for 12% of all human carbon emissions, reducing the industries emissions makes sense. But to be effective, this needs a wholistic view of the carbon lifecycle in the built environment.
At the moment, the trend seems to be focused on measuring the carbon embedded in a structure during the building process. The tools discussed in the recent ZERO Zoom meeting need improving, but they are designed to plug into a BIM model[2] and calculate the embedded carbon.
While this is useful, and the technology is exciting, I have a feeling this focus is missing 90% of the problem. Just focusing on ‘the building’ creates the impression low carbon buildings are relatively expensive and designing for minimum carbon in the structure can cause overall emissions to rise significantly. This is a lose-lose outcome.
From my perspective, some of the easiest ways to reduce carbon overall and reduce building costs lay in other areas. The cost of a building through its life is expressed by the ratio 1:5:200 where: – 1 is the cost of construction – 5 is the cost of facilities maintenance and refurbishment through the life of the structure – 200 is the cost of the operations undertaken within the structure.
While this is a financial ratio, spending money involves doing work which generally creates carbon, probably in similar proportions. Therefore, a small saving in construction that causes an increase in the ownership/operating costs is going to be highly counterproductive.
A few random ideas on ways to reduce carbon within a whole of life perspective include:
Passive Design to reduce operating/ownership costs. One example is eaves on domestic houses.
Traditional houses had relatively wide eaves (particularly in warmer climates such as most of Australia). These provided shading to the walls and windows. Modern design eschews eaves, which means the walls and windows are hit with the full blast of summer sun. The cost of the extra air-conditioning over the next 50+ years will far outweigh the cost of the eaves. Add in the colour – dark colour absorb heat, the house pictured may be a good design for the northern half of Sweeden, but it is not very carbon friendly in Sydney. Other design considerations include natural lighting, passive ventilation, etc.
Design for a long life a well-constructed house or other building should have a life of 100+ years. The way the structure is used will change but if the basic frame is designed for a long life, it can be reused and redefined for far less cost than demolishing it and building something else. One really daft trend has been to clad buildings with timber (driven by various ‘star-rating’ schemes). Timber rates very well if you focus just on the carbon embedded during building. It is a disaster if you allow for repainting many times, then ripping off the rotting façade in 20 to 30 years’ time, sending the decomposing timbers to a tip and replacing the cladding with something else. A brick wall may be more carbon-intensive than a wood wall, but a well-built brick wall will still be standing and doing its job in 200 years’ time.
Design to reduce construction waste every skip load of rubbish shipped off site is wasted carbon (and money). There are many ways to reduce construction waste including: modularisation, off-site manufacture, intelligent packaging, etc. This is probably the easiest of the ‘low hanging fruit’ – saving costs and reducing carbon at the same time. Unfortunately at the moment, the tools used to measure embedded carbon don’t really have any way to measure the carbon in waste.
Design for maintenance and repurposing rather than demolition. Making building maintenance and repurposing easy, should increase the value of the structure while reducing its overall carbon footprint. But achieving this also needs a change in mindset from building owners. The Victorian government has announced the replacement of 100s of social housing units. There is no argument they are old and do need replacing. However, their default approach is to demolish everything and re-build from scratch. But the buildings have solid concrete frames with another 100+ years of life – a carbon sensible approach would be to strip the frames and design new cladding, interiors, and services. Done well this would be a lower cost and lower carbon option.
Conclusion
The need to reduce the carbon footprint of the built environment is a given, and new materials and improved measuring tools are both important. But, just focusing on one aspect, the carbon embedded in the construction process is a recipe for failure. The important missing elements are:
Changing thinking and attitudes of asset owners. Governments are responsible for a very large percentage of the overall built environment and their innate conservatism is creating thousands of tones of carbon: Local Authorities are largely ignoring recycled and low carbon alternatives for road surfacing. The Victorina Government immediately defaults to ‘knock everything down and rebuild’ in its social housing renewal. Etc.
As with other aspects of construction, remember the 1:5:200 ratio. Building cheap / low carbon is only good if you have no interest in the operation and maintenance of the facility. Nirvana is building cheap / low carbon structures that are easy to maintain, efficient to operate, and have a long life.
Requiring a whole-of-life approach to carbon in the built environment. This should be through amendments to building regulations and to measurement systems. Think of the impact if developers had to provide certified information on the 10-year and 20-year cost of ownership to prospective buyers…….
The emerging tools and technologies are important tools in the process of reducing the carbon footprint of the construction industry, but real change needs a wider focus. And as per the title of this post, in the construction industry, the wider built environment, and every other aspect of commercial, professional, and personal life, every decision you make, every action you take leaves a carbon footprint – it needs to be included in your thinking.
[1] The CIOB were early proponents for the reduction of carbon in the construction industry and a lot of the thought above are founded on my involvement with the CIOB Carbon Action 2050 campaign unfortunately this initiative seems to have faded in the last decade: https://www.ciob.org/industry/politics-government/campaigns/carbon-action
In 2018 the Carillion group of companies were bankrupt owing £1.5 Billion ($2.9 billion Australian), at the time, the largest bankruptcy ever in the UK. The latest news is in October 2023, KPMG was fined a record £21 million (AU$40 million) for a ‘textbook failure’ in its audits of Carillion. This long running saga raises questions of ethics both within KPMG and the Carillion Board, and controls. Did the Board and Auditors not know (a management failure), or was it a case of not wanting to know the true situation (a governance failure)?
A wider question for another time is the way the ‘big four’ accounting firms operate. String together Arthur Andersen and Enron in the USA (2001), KPMG and Carillion in the UK (2018), and PWC and the Australian Tax office (2022) suggests there are major structural issues with the ‘big four’ partnership model.
The Carillion Story
Carillion was created in July 1999, following a demerger from Tarmac Ltd., which had been founded in 1903. Following the demerger, Tarmac focused on its core heavy building materials business, while Carillion included the former Tarmac Construction contracting business and the Tarmac Professional Services group of businesses (I worked for Tarmac Construction in 1971/72 – it was a great company in those days).
As an independent company, Carillion undertook a series of acquisitions and expansions including:
2001, expansion into the facilities management services sector
2001, acquired the 51% of GT Rail Maintenance it did not already own
2002, bought Citex Management Services
2005, acquired Planned Maintenance Group
2006, Mowlem support services business
2008, Alfred McAlpine
2008, Vanbots Construction in Canada
2011, Eaga, an energy efficiency business rationalised later in the same year
2012, 49% interest in The Bouchier Group, providing services in the Athabasca oil sands area
2013, the facilities management business of John Laing
2014, 60% stake in Rokstad Power Corporation, Canada
2015, Outland Group, a specialist supplier of camps and catering at remote locations in Canada
2022, Ask Real Estate, a Manchester-based developer
All of these acquisitions came at a cost, in March 2015 concerns about Carillion’s debt situation were raised and by October 2015, Carillion had become hedge funds’ most popular share to ‘sell short’ as analysts questioned the lack of growth and rising debt; the company’s share price fell 19% over the same period.
On 10 July 2017, a Carillion trading update highlighted a £845 million impairment charge in its construction services division, mainly relating to three loss-making UK PFI[1] projects and costs arising from Middle East projects. These and other write downs together exceeding £1 billion occurred only a few months after KPMG had given an unqualified audit opinion on the correctness of Carillion’s accounts.
However, despite these problems, in the five-and-half-year period from January 2012 to June 2017, Carillion had paid out £333 million more in dividends than it had generated in cash from its operations. But, net cash from operations was also needed to pay for investments, and interests on debt (Carillion’s interest charge was £30 million in 2016).
The Carillion Collapse
At the time of its implosion in January 2018, Carillion employed 43,000 people in defence, education, healthcare, transportation and construction and service activities. It had around 420 contracts with the British public sector and many other commercial contracts in the UK and overseas.
Reporting at the time highlighted the aggressive growth strategy, a complex internal management structure, a fuzzy governance structure, poor supervision of daily activities, and the loss of control on some of its flagship projects.
Carillion had liabilities of £7 billion and just £29 million in cash when it went into liquidation. The primary cause of the Carillion collapse is undoubtedly the actions of its directors and managers and there are ongoing court actions against these people. However, the role of an auditor, is to provide an independent assessment of the organisation’s accounts, to identify the types of issue that lead to the collapse of Carillion and provide either assurance, or warnings to both shareholders and creditors.
The KPMG Involvement
KPMG were the auditors for Carillion, their involvement in this saga was finalised a couple of weeks ago when Britain’s accounting regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), fined KPMG a record £21 million (AU$40 million) for a ‘textbook failure’ in its auditing of the Carillion accounts. The FRC said the number, range, and seriousness of the deficiencies in the audits of Carillion including not challenging Carillion management, and a loss of objectivity were exceptional, which meant that Carillion was not subject to rigorous, comprehensive, and reliable audits in the three years leading up to its demise. The FRC fine would have been £30 million, but was discounted due to admissions and co-operation by the auditor.
In addition to this fine KPMG and its partners have received the following penalties:
KPMG was ordered to pay £5.3 million in costs
The lead auditor for 2014 to 2017 was fined £250,000 and banned for 10 years after a discount to reflect his cooperation and admission of failures.
The lead auditor for 2013 was handed a £70,000 penalty
Three other auditors were respectively; banned for eight years and fined £45,000, banned for seven years and fined £30,000 and banned for eight years and fined £40,000
KPMG was also fined £14.4 million in 2022 after providing false and misleading information to the FRC during spot checks on its audits of Carillion and another UK company
In February, KPMG paid an undisclosed sum to settle a separate £1.3 billion legal claim by the company’s liquidators, who claimed the auditor had missed ‘red flags’ resulting in the group’s accounts being misstated.
The FRC found that KPMG had failed to respond to numerous indicators that Carillion’s core operations were lossmaking and that it was reliant on short term and unsustainable measures to support its cash flows. The Carillion case is the 16th since 2018 in which the FRC or an industry tribunal has imposed sanctions against KPMG. It takes the total penalties and costs levied against the firm in that time to more than £95 million — far more than its rivals.
Conclusions
The lack of press coverage of this saga in Australia at least can be attributed to the coverage of first the referendum, then the war in the Israil, plus the years of investigation and multiple trials since the Carillion collapse in 2018. The still largely unanswered questions include:
Can large organisations really be that bad at controlling major projects? My answer is yes – look at London’s Crossrail project[2], HS2, and a long list of other projects.
A more focused controls question is are the controls failure on this type of project a question of not knowing, or not wanting to know? My answer is in Carillion’s case, the Directors did not want to know! Other situations are likely to vary[3].
Who is responsible for the controls and reporting failures? My answer is the governing body. It is the Board of Directors who set the standards required from management and you do not get good controls without a significant investment[4].
What about the Auditors? My answer is both governments and corporations need to seriously rethink the way they engage with the ‘big four’, and the ‘big four’ need to be completely restructured – the ‘partner model’ has clearly failed.
This webinar presented as part of the free PGCS 2023 Webinar Series looked at two processes that are ‘baked into’ standard project management estimating and control to show how recommended good practices are still optimistically biased.
When preparing an estimate good practice recommends using Monte Carlo to determine an appropriate contingency and the level of risk to accept. However, the typical range distributions used are biased – they ignore the ‘long tail’.
When reporting progress, the estimating bias should be identified and rectified to offer a realistic projection of a project outcome. Standard cost and schedule processes typically fail to adequately deal with this challenge meaning the final time and cost overruns are not predicted until late in the project.
This webinar highlighted at least some of the causes for these problems. Solving the cultural and management issues is for another time. Download the PDF of the slides, or view the webinar at: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-PBK-046.php#Process2
The purpose of project controls has been defined as: Project controls are the data gathering, management and analytical processes used to predict, understand and constructively influence the time and cost outcomes of a project or program through the communication of information in formats that assist effective governance and management decision making[1].
The question posed in this short post is how can we fulfil this objective when different processes calculate completely different completion dates for the same set of project data? The options for the calculated project delay for the simple project outlined above are:
– CPM using progress override calculates a 3 week delay.
– CPM using retained logic calculates a 4 week delay.
My suggestion is a realistic prediction of completion needs more than a simple CPM update that assumes all future work will miraculously be completed as planned. WPM (Work Performance Management) has been developed to apply a similar approach to EVM, ES and ED, based on understanding the ratio between work performed and work planned and applying this factor to the future incomplete work to assess the likely completion date if nothing changes.
Pat Weaver
Lynda Bourne
Aavssitedev's Blog