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Monthly Archives: May 2014

PGCS #2 – the importance of communication

Posted on May 11, 2014 by | 1 comment

A consistent theme running through many of the presentation at both the Project Zone Congress  in Germany and the Project Governance and Controls Symposium  in Canberra was the importance of effective communication. This is particularly so when dealing with complex projects involving ‘teams of teams’ many of which may be focused on ‘their objectives’ ahead of the overall project.

Mark Phillips  a keynote speaker at  PGCS highlighted some of the concepts in his new book ‘Reinventing Communication: How to Design, Lead and Manage High Performing Projects’.  Several of the concepts align closely with our views.

The first ‘reinvention’ we fully agree with is the importance of in-person communication – in-person allows energy top build within the communication and facilitates knowledge development by the parties to the communication!  Remote communication is limited to knowledge transfer (see more on communication theory).

More important is the need to design your project’s organisation to allow success to be created. The hierarchy of design is:

  • Setting the right governance systems, policy and regulations
  • Designing the organisation structured to facilitate communication
  • Developing the people and the networking environment
  • Encouraging open, effective and fearless communication (frightened people won’t communicate bad news)

With the right communication structure and attitudes in place, innovation can thrive leading to problem solving and the creation of the outputs needed for success.  Conway’s law (1968) states that ‘that organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations’.  A fractured communication landscape leads to disjointed project deliverables.

With communication central to success, one of the key strategic intents of the project design should be to engineer an effective communications environment and then to measure the effectiveness of the communications taking place.  However, when setting KPIs it is important to measure the effectiveness of the communication, not just the volume!

This is not easy, some of the challenges associated with creating an effective communication environment are discussed in this RSA Animate video – Re-Imagining Work!

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Posted in Communication, Project Management Conferences

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Project Governance and Control – The Building of the Crystal Palace

Posted on May 8, 2014 by | Leave a comment

My latest article on governance has been published in the May edition of PM World Journal.  Focused on the management of the project, it identifies sophisticated control processes for cost and quality, supported by good governance.   However, the processes used to manage time across an extensive supply chain and large on-site workforce remains elusive.

To read the article see: http://pmworldjournal.net/article/project-governance-control-building-crystal-palace/

For all of my ‘history’ papers see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/PM-Knowledge_Index.html#General_Interest-02

 

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PGCS 2014 Update – I’ve been proved wrong!!

Posted on May 7, 2014 by | 1 comment

The Project Governance and Controls Symposium 2014, Canberra, is in full swing with wall-to-wall interesting presentations!

The focus of this post is the presentation by Stephan Vandevoorde on the work he is involved in at Ghent University, Belgium focused on developing  processes for the validated testing of project control tools entitled ‘If Time is Money, then Accuracy is Important’.

The problems with studying the effect of project control processes in live projects are many, the most significant being:

  • The control function generates information that influences management action causing different outcomes.
  • The ‘Hawthorne Effect’ where people being ‘observed’ change behaviour because they are being observed.
  • The uniqueness of each project, its team dynamics, luck, and the overall operating environment making replication of an ‘experiment’ difficult.

As part of their on-going work to validate Earned Schedule (ES) the Ghent team have developed a set of project networks using different topologies to emulate schedules ranging from those that are largely sequential, through to those that have a high level of parallel working.  The models are updated with a range of 9 different progress options leading to a total of 2.8 million unique data sets. This resource provides a unique test bed for evaluating the effectiveness of various predictive and preventative tools and techniques.  For more on this valuable resource, which is available for research, see http://www.or-as.be/research/database

One of the earlier studies (on a smaller simulation) focused on testing the effectiveness of various techniques in predicting the final schedule outcome of a project. And this research has proved me wrong!  In a blog post following last year’s PGCS ‘Earned Schedule comes of Age’  I lamented the fact that a detailed study proving Earned Schedule (ES) was significantly better at predicting project completion than the traditional Earned Value SPI had not taken the extra step and also demonstrated its predictive effectiveness compared to traditional CPM.  My paper Why Critical Path Scheduling (CPM) is Wildly Optimistic highlights the issues but lacks statistical validation.  As it happens, the ‘missing’ studies had been done and the outcomes presented by Stephan showed the results of a 2008 study by Prof. M. Vanhoucke (also of Ghent University) that demonstrate the superiority of Earned Schedule as a predictive tool designed to complement the true focus of CPM which should be the optimisation of resources and workflow (rather than the projection of the overall project completion – for more on this read my paper).

So the basic research has been done, the results are conclusive and based on the research the effective controlling of projects needs a combination of CPM, EV and ES for optimum results!  The research frontier is moving towards effective early indicators such as the ‘P factor’ and intervention and with the data tools now available, statistically  significant analysis becomes feasible.

With the steady stream of papers validating Earned Schedule, I hope the flow of misleading information from a few die-hard traditionalists in the USA is finally extinguished and comments from leading authors such as Quentin Fleming and Joel Koppelman in the  4th Edition of ‘Earned Value Project Management’ (2010), that ‘The authors do not endorse [earned schedule]. Nor have they ever read any scientific studies that support [it]’ disappear.  It really does not matter what Fleming and/or Koppelman have bothered to read, making misleading statement like this helps no one.

The challenge is developing tools and techniques that help manage projects in an environment of increasing complexity – and as one of the other presenters, Stephen Hayes from the International Centre for Complex Project Management (ICCPM), traditional tools such as CPM and EV are important, but simply not sufficient in the emerging domain of complex project management, or  as my paper to the PGCS suggests, Agile projects.

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Posted in EVM & ES

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New Articles posted to the Web #3

Posted on May 3, 2014 by | Leave a comment

We have been busy beavers updating the PM Knowledge Index on our website with White Papers and Articles.   Some of the more interesting uploaded during the last couple of weeks include:

And we continue to tweet a PMI style of exam question every day for PMP, CAPM and PMI-SP candidates: See today’s question and then click through for the answer and the Q&As from last week.

You are welcome to download and use the information under our Creative Commons licence

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Posted in General Project Management

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Project Zone Congress, Frankfurt #2

Posted on May 1, 2014 by | Leave a comment

The Project Zone Congress is now over and the two conference days lived up to the standards set on pre-conference workshop day (see my first post)!

A few of the ideas picked up as vignettes:

Oliver Lehmann commenting on competency made the point that experience is a teacher, you need to be a good student to learn from your experiences (and the same applies to training courses), this requires taking the time for reflection and then implementing the insights. We are planning a blog on this a bit later.

Peter Taylor asked what’s the best way to develop solutions? ‘End-user’ involvement. or remove the hyphen and ‘end user involvement’?  The challenge is communication and understanding – what do the customers actually understand from your project documentation??

Peter again, project management has progressed from the ‘accidental project managers’ of 20 years ago, to the ‘non-accidental, qualified project managers’ of today and the emerging generation of ‘intentional project managers’ – where people are making specific career choices to become PMs.  Effective sponsorship is a crucial element for project success but no-one is training or supporting sponsors – we are still in the era of the ‘accidental sponsor’.

Organisations are changing and this affects project governance! The effect of the industrial revolution was to progressively isolate organisations from the natural environment with mechanical sources of power (starting with steam) and ‘factory walls’.  The knowledge revolution is increasingly forcing organisations to connect with the ‘virtual world’; connectivity and integration are becoming normal as are the pervasive social networks.  From both a governance and management perspective it in no longer possible to ‘hide’ behind the organisation’s walls.  Openness and accountability are the new normal.

Senior management attention is the key resource in any organisation and is in very short supply.  Maintaining access to this resource is the key to obtaining all of the other resources you need for your project.  This means ‘Advising Upwards’ effectively to be seen and to be successful!

Change management and the difficulty of implementing change was a constant theme – probably the only person who really likes a change is a wet baby…..  change is generational within organisations – taking 4 years to fully bed down and one successful relapse that goes uncorrected needs 20 corrections to erase the memory of the ‘success’.

Agile was one of the three streams in the conference – my paper on the challenges of developing an effective governance regime ‘Governing Agile – the changing role of project controls in an ‘agile’ environment’ focused a lot of discussion from the more senior managers in the room, good questions and clearly identified issues but at the moment no generally accepted answers to the challenge of governance oversight and control.

Overall a great way to spend 3 days and recommended for anyone looking for a good reason to visit Frankfurt next year (or one of the other conferences organised by Stamford Global Ltd).

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Posted in Agile Ideas, General Project Management, Governance, Project Management Conferences

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