An outstanding overview of project management.

“A possible “meta” approach of the project management field—the unit of analysis—respectful of the various perspectives in existence, while providing an integrative ontological and epistemological framework.”

Conclusion should also be noted: ”
‘Complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty,’ ‘integrative epistemological approach,’
modeling and its underlying bases (N vs. S-Learning, Praxeology), ‘Acting, Knowing and Learning.’ and Theory of Convention seem to form a robust theoretical background to the development and content of any framework aimed at addressing the challenge of value creation in complex, ambiguous, and uncertain environments and situations.”

Complexity has to be recognized and accommodated.

Bredillet, Christophe (2010) Blowing hot and cold on project management.
Project Management Journal, 41(3), pp. 4-20.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pmj.20179

How can You manage risk if You are not certain? You can’t. But You can focus on uncertainty [1].

Developed further [2], ” in dynamic, uncertain environments, agents must be able to effectively manage their plans during execution” and “learning cannot be planned for in advance”.  A table summarizes the three possible approaches

“Unk” for unknown

“The right combination of instructionism, learning, and selectionism depends on the urgency of the project[…]Precise rules of when to use which approach are currently unknown. ”

[1] Transforming project risk management into project uncertainty management, Ward and Chapman in the International Journal of Project Management
Volume 21, Issue 2, February 2003
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(01)00080-1

[2] On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Complexity in Project Management
Michael T. Pich, Christoph H. Loch, Arnoud De Meyer https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.48.8.1008.163

Ah, the Pareto principle. We know that 80 percent of effort is wasted, as 20 percent of it produces 80 percent of results. Or, simply, 80 percent of everything is crap.

How do we identify the good stuff?

A paper titled Finding Pareto Optimal Front for the Multi-Mode Time, Cost Quality Trade off in Project Scheduling has some interesting math that deserves further examination.

I’m going to look at it when I have the time to enact the math with puppets.  I’ve gotten rusty with formulas and need to write out words instead of looking at the Greek alphabet.

https://panel.waset.org/publication/Finding-Pareto-Optimal-Front-for-the-Multi–Mode-Time,-Cost-Quality-Trade-off-in-Project-Scheduling/9985

• CIO on project management https://www.cio.com/category/project-management/
• Computer Weekly https://www.computerweekly.com/news/IT-project-management
• PMI, sometimes requiring log-in https://www.pmi.org/news-for-project-managers
• Entrepreneur https://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/project-management
• Silicon Republic https://www.siliconrepublic.com/topics/project-management

Just in time for Halloween, some wonderful project failures through the ages

1. City of New York Time Keeping System, 10x over budget, from 60 million to 600 million.  Fraud suspected. Incompetence clear.
2. The NHS’ Civilian IT Project. Electronic records for patients, for the whole of UK, rolled out at large scale instead of targeted pilots.
3. Denver International Airport’s Automated Baggage System 2 billion due to unrealistic hard deadline, underscoping and bad definition of done.
4. US military Expeditionary Combat Support System. A billion USD, rounded to about two or something insignificant like that.
5. Thanks to Sweden’s somewhat higher government transparency, we are aware of the failures in IT projects in dental insurance, patent filing and police case management – the royal trifecta, with a cost of about a billion USD total.

We might as well stop looking for individual “reasons” for failure. Nepotism, lack of self-awareness, refusal to inspect and adapt and outsourcing are the root cause. But really, no surprises. More than half IT projects fail.

https://www.cio.com/article/3068502/more-than-half-of-it-projects-still-failing.html

Sources

1. https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/company-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-500-million/?hp
2. The allways tasty wikipedia IT failures list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects

Some interesting  if somewhat bland conclusions from the Google manager development program. Great managers have the following traits:

A cute public facade presented. Note that talking to some Google refugees, I have heard top managers often don’t show support to reporting managers when the project does not deliver metrics from an early start. Quantification culture has some draw-backs. Does it work for google? Some recent employee outrages over sexism and nepotism compensation for “star” figures will have to further translate to major exodus before we can be sure.

See the source article for some ( general as well ) alarm signs for managers.

Source:

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/the-8-biggest-things-that-google-managers-do-to-su.html