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.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Waltzing with Bears - Project Risk Management -- Light blogging this week, due to some interesting developments in my life. However, as recently mentioned, I've recently finished reading Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Even if you are not involved in software as the domain of your projects, I highly recommend this book for its advice on project risk management. The following are some excerpts that I'm sure will serve as fodder for future postings here...
In the absence of explicitly declared uncertainty, achieving anything but the most optimistic imaginable result is a failure. Without risk management, projects have no way to distinguish between stretch goals and reasonable expectations. The result is that they adopt their stretch goals as schedule and then -- since such goals are at the hairy edge of possibility -- fail to meet them.
We have met the enemy, and it is us.
A careful assessment of potential causes of delay should oblige you to admit something like this: "Delivery can be expected sometime between Month 18 and Month 29, with and 85-percent confidence factor date of Month 24."
Interesting that this example range of expectations is in line with the usual Critical Chain project buffer size of about a third of the fully promised schedule...even a bit more.
The worst organization penalize unappealing forecasts but not unappealing results. When the project fails, they reason, "Hey, the guy missed the date, but at least he gave it a good try." This problem feeds upon itself: People understand that promising big is more important than delivering, and everybody learns to act accordingly. If you work for this kind of organization, you might as well go with the flow and keep your risk assessments to yourself.
So true. And so sad.
I've seen this first hand when one person in an organization I worked for kept taking pot shots at the project schedules we had developed, saying -- in the style of Name That Tune -- I can deliver that in less months. Respecting her experience, we asked her to critique our plan to deliver the desired outcome. Line by line, phase by phase, she had no problem with what we had done. It was puzzling until we came across a piece of the system/project that she said she didn't think she would get to in her timeline, so she assumed it would carry over to a later project. She was will to promise the whole package in a fast track schedule when, in fact, she was buffering with scope rather than with time. We were promising two different projects. In a sense, she was "promising big," knowing full well that the old culture would accept less than a complete objective. There's a word for that kind of behavior.
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