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.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Promises and Prescriptions Sidebar - Why Projects are Hard -- All projects are an interdependent collection of tasks, performed by resources, human or otherwise, with various skills and capabilities, all leading to some desired objective. Projects are projects, no matter the domain. Beyond that, things are more complex.
If a project objective is worthy of pursuit, it has some benefit associated with it. Our desire to get something done becomes a desire to get it done either as soon as possible or by a specific time, or even a combination of the two. For instance, if a project is delivered sooner, one might get more benefit. Oil wells and new products are examples of such "ASAP" projects. Similarly, some products lose value if not available by a specific time—an Olympic stadium that isn't ready for the opening ceremony or a new computer game that isn't ready for the Christmas shopping season, for example.
At the same time, resources that can do what the project requires are limited. For every project, someone must consider whether the use of the time and attention of a finite pool of resources is commensurate with the expected benefit. Alternative uses of those resources, like more valuable projects or bank interest on the dollar value of those resources, might provide even more benefit.
Both cost and benefit are related to the time aspect through duration and criticality of due dates. This complicates decision-making about the project in question and other projects that share limited resources.
If the objective is known, but how that objective will be accomplished is not clear, the nature of required research, discovery, problem solving, and trial-and-error create additional challenges. The unknowns complicate the process of promise-making, as it requires you not only to deal with the variation of task performance, but also to address uncertainty of looping iterations and tasks of unknown content.
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