Blogs

As the end of 2012 approches, and assuming the world won't end of the 12/12/12 I have a few thoughts for every scheduler’s New Year resolutions.

I had a situation recently where a client stated that despite his people working as fast and seemingly efficiently as they could, he was seeing next to no progress reflected in his performance reporting, his end date was pushing out, his efficiency was down, people were asking questions.

Undoubtedly the longest running ‘urban myth’ in circulation within the general project management community, arising from US Defence based research from the early 1990s, that the Cost Performance Index (CPI) always stabilizes at the 20% completion and the final outcome will be within 10% of this value and usually worse. This myth has been extended by some authors to all projects in all industries; and I would suggest that this is demonstrably false in at least some circumstances.

These are words of desperation, a client or senior manager who's got his back to the wall.

I was faced with this exact situation on a consulting job a few weeks back, the business owner, facing heavy penalties for late delivery was desperate for answers and didn't know a better way to react.

Unfortunately, what he hoped were a matter of weeks to completion, in my mind were more like months to completion! Surely he could see that?

The quality guru W. Edwards Deming said ‘In God we trust, all other bring data’. However, developments in the Victorian Government health system (Australia) offer a salient reminder to any PMO manager on the value of data.

It is failry common to come across lots of people in planning who are actively engaged in planning but have never visited or worked on the site. This is deeply disturbing. It also applies to other industries as well as you must have noticed. Well, in any case, I belong to the Construction industry and have come across a number of people, at all levels, who may have walked into the construction industry to 'n' number of reasons but at least in my opinion can not be good planner as they have missed several steps.

A long time back, late Seventies to early Eighties, it was quite a fun to prepare Plans and programmes for Projects. It used to be challenging, creative effort involving lots of hard work but quite satisfying and enjoyable. This went on for quite sometime and this area generally there was no intrusion. Gradually I have seen intrusion in this space by others to the extent that there is no more independence, creativity, positivity anymore.

The situation where a contractor has been awarded two or more different contracts for different phases on the same site must be failry common because I have encountered it three times so far in my career.

It is a recipe for disaster for the Employer because if the contractor causes a delay on Contract 1 which then delays acces to Contract 2 then the same contractor is entitled to an extension of time on Contract 2 on the grounds of employer's denial of access.