Is planning works?

Well written, James...and Here here!!!



Maybe I am in a fortunate position - but I am sitting beside the PM upon whose project I was working up until October last year. The project was just entering into the manufacturing stage (but still required all of the assembly, testing and installation documentation). I was "released-back-into-the-business" because the PM thought that there was no real need for further, detailed planning & monitoring of the outstanding work. Moreover, he concluded that he himself would be writing a lot of the documentation with one of the other engineers. He was extremely optimistic.



Many months prior to October 2006, I had expressed my extreme concern, on a number of occasions, that the amount of remaining work was substantial (all validated via the programme). All to no avail - although he had noted my concerns.



Result: The PM’s head almost rolled when the forecasts kept rising and rising, month-by-month. "Emergency" programmes were written (by everyone else)......but why? All the data was already in the original programme that was constructed nearly four years ago.



In essence, I was transferred way too early (cost saving???) - even though it was totally obvious that there was still a huge amount of work to be planned, progressed and monitored.



I still get on well with the PM - and he acknowledges the fact that I’d warned him about the amount of work. Will he have learnt his lesson about getting rid of planners too early? Dunno, but I certainly get to see the direct results of NOT planning.



James.

Uly,



Basic question shud b, is PLANNING important?? If it is important, then definitely it must b working. Comparing the growth in salary of planning engineers in last 6-7 years, one can definitely assume that planning must be working, not only on paper but in reality too.



What james has written is absolutely correct. "Communicating that plan to those who will execute it is the real challenge."



:-)

we have an ongoing discussion on this subject in my office at the moment. We do maintenance turnarounds, thus we have a 5 year cycle for shutdowns, "repeating" the same work every cycle, plus improvement or investment projects on top.



Some think that once the cycle is complete, we can put the plans in a box and just get them out, dust them down and apply them when the relevant part of the next cycle comes around. Of course it never really goes like this. the equipment is 5 years older, safety and environmental rules change and the corrosion cycles on some equipment is considerably longer than the maintenance cycle meaning the scope will change each time.



Scott’s point about feeding the as built plan back into the project database is a particularly relevant one for us as, even if the next cycle won’t be exactly the same it will at least be similar, but it’s still a difficult discipline. The last thing people want to do at the end of a tough project (redundant use of the word tough there) is pick through the ruins. Instead, we all want to go down the pub and pat ourselves on teh back then go find somewhere to recuperate ready for the next big push.



As for the OP, my feeling why most projects do not complete "as expected" is pretty clear from the stats you quote (which, if you consider the approved baseline to define expectation, I would think 80% failure to meet is probably reasonably accurate) and is illustrated by something my mum once told me.



When you have an opinion about something and the rest of the world has a different one, perhaps it is best to reconsider your opinion. You may find that you are still right, but the weight of the evidence to the contrary should not be ignored.



She may not have said it exactly like that, but you get the gist.



I think this is the case with planning. The problem imo is that most finalised baseline plans are ES based with little or no float.



Put the float clearly in the plan, someone will eat it

Hide the float in activities, those activities will just take longer. This plan becomes the basis for the expectations and is doomed to dissapoint those who accept teh milestones without understanding what lies behind them



I’m not sure that I accept that planning can never be more than a best guess though. In greenfield construction, this may be the case, but for repetative work it can certainly be better than a guess. "educated guess" might be closer the mark.



We currently schedule ES+0 float. Our management realise that we do this and so expectations are managed (to an extent). That said, our management are industry people and so "educated clients". any clients I have worked with in greenfield are actually politicians or salesmen. they allow themselves to be sold on ES+0F, not accepting anything more conservative, tthen blame down the line when the inevitable happens. Not very constructive, but what do they care?



The approach that we are considering, and one that others use, is to run the final baseline through a risk analysis procedure, which will run several scenarios of the same plan (adjusting the durations within set limits) and produce a curve of probability against project duration. My guess is you’ll find it about 20% likely to achieve the ES+0 float scenario (which would fit your figure, assuming most projects follow ES+0F). Once you have the curve, you select the 50% likely duration and report that as your budgetted project time and the differnce between ES and 50% as your project float. You then update and follow your plan against the ES baseline levelled withing the ES+0F project duration limits. Thus you plan to be complete by your ES+0f but manage expectations at a strategic level that you budget for the 50% duration. This is an expensive option, which will likely lead to some underuse of manpower when the ES+0F plan starts to slip towards the 50% one, but with the lost opportunities in Oil and Gas shutdowns (often exceeding the cost of teh works) it’s a necessary approach, I think. For greenfield works, setting the baseline to teh 50% scenario, but maintaining induvidual act durations at ES+0F is probably more likely to achieve a good balance.



Of course this is a statistical approach and so only provides estimates. Effects of bad management, client dithering or subcontractor incompetance (or indeed badly written plans) are somewhat more difficult to model.



My final point is that no one, I mean no one, but the planner is likely to even attempt to understand the whole plan in any detail. What I aim for is to communicate strategy to management and relevant detail to the site. Getting people to understand the interrelationship of their task with others behind, beside and in front of them tends to be too much detail (and a certain mount of fingers in ears lah lah lah). Since starting fulltime planning (I’m an ex PM) I have developed a keen sense of the need to communicate the plan in bite-sized, information rich yet digestable portions and have come to realise that the planning itself is to some extent the easy part. Communicating that plan to those who will execute it is the real challenge.



boy, that went on too long :P

Planning can never be more than a "best guess" at what will happen in the future. Those higher up the chain don’t like too much contingency in the plan, because it increases forecast costs & duration - so the "best guess" becomes optimistic rather than realistic.



When reality strikes the plan needs to be updated to reflect what has happened, which leads some to conclude that the original plan has failed. Whether this view is "fair" has long been a subject of debate, and probably always will be.

Hi,



I have reservation with the figure, but for your question my answer is that it is not the entire fault of planners. Some project managers believed that they are the center of the universe.



Regards,



Ed