My best friend and I meet up once every year and we invariably end up chatting about our mutual passion for project planning. His view is a little extreme but one with enough merit to warrant discussion: “Ban activities and tasks from scheduling tools…” he says. For those of you who use scheduling tools such as MS Project or similar, you will know this is verging on project planning blasphemy.
So much hinges on the project schedule, yet so few team members contribute to it. Whatsmore, they typically don’t care about critical paths, constraints and other building blocks; they just want to know “what, where and when.” We’re overdue for consensus-based planning tools that bridge execution and analytics.
Globally recognized project analytics thought leader and software entrep…
Is this you?
You’re stretched across too many projects.
Not only that, but you’re frustrated that there are quite a few projects in the company that seem to have little benefit, and yet they just drift on.
Worse still, these projects tie up precious time and money that you believe could be diverted to something more worthwhile.
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Projects are routinely finishing late. Whilst many have no effective schedule controls a significant proportion do outlay significant amounts of money on scheduling software and people to operate the computer systems and still finish late. The simple fact is most schedulers have no effect on the management of the projects they are working on - they are either there to comply with client specifications or to gather data for the ‘inevitable’ claims or both.
Complexity is not a synonym for complicated or large is just one of the dimensions inherent in every project. The four basic dimensions of a project[1] are:
Project failure rates have remained steady for at least the last 30 years.
Working out the probable completion date for a project and understanding the risks associated with achieving a target date have always been difficult. This article will take a quick look at the evolution of the techniques through to the current state of research reported at the Project Governance and Controls Symposium earlier this month.
The way PMI deals with risk in the PMBOK® Guide is simplistic. Calculating the effect of one risk using the suggested probability x severity calculation provides one value. For example, if there is an 20% probability an estimate is under valued by $50,000 the Expected Monetary Value (EMV) for this event will be:
-$50,000 x 0.2 = -$10,000 it is simple but its not a lot of use in the real world.
Breakdown structures are central to the practice of project management and have their origins in the industrial revolution. In the ‘Wealth of Nations’ Smith advocated breaking the production of goods into tiny tasks that can be undertaken by people following simple instructions. ‘Why hire a talented pin maker when ten factory workers using machines and working together can produce a thousand times more pins than the artisan working alone?’ Similar ideas underpinned Newtonian physics. Newton saw the world as a harmonious mechanism controlled by a universal law.
As planners we use numbers every day of the week but how real are they?
In the western world, numbers in the form we know and use today appeared in the 13th century when Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250), known as Fibonacci an Italian mathematician, published the Liber Abaci (1202). In the book, Fibonacci advocated numeration with the digits 0–9 and place value, and showed the practical importance of the new numeral system by applying it to commercial bookkeeping, and other applications.