This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Promises and Prescriptions Part 7 - Acknowledge the Unknown -- Most people are reluctant to commit to delivering a project until they know if it is possible. But that is the nature of projects: we never really know at the start whether it's possible or not. But, However, the business still needs to make plans based on project delivery. The solution is to explicitly acknowledge and actively manage that uncertainty.
Develop plans, schedules, and promises with an open, explicit understanding of the uncertainty associated with the effort. Separate the probable uncertainty that leads you to want to cover your assumptions from the possibility that things will go well. (Include in this identified uncertainty not only ranges of task durations, but also ranges of iterations in those looping processes common to software development.) Estimate a range of identified work efforts from nervous but possible if the stars and planets align just right, to safely committable. Translate those ranges into a range of promises for the project as a whole.
If project management is the art and science of turning uncertain efforts into reasonably certain outcomes, then manage the uncertainty. Practice active risk management so that everyone involved can move those stars and planets, enabling the project to do the otherwise improbable.
Plan for the need to plan along the way. Planning and promising is not a one-time effort but an on-going process of assessment of the impact of reality. Use the previously prescribed notion of a "good enough" project range prediction with tasks that might not all be clear up front, accepting a considerable range of possibilities. Consider the idea of planning not details of work to deliver the specific task outcome, but rather the range of processes involved in the likely outcomes of discovery. Include in the plan tasks to refine those fuzzy future tasks, as well as support tasks to assure that necessary and sufficient information is made available to do so.
(Next -- The final installment - Putting it all together.)
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