Good Day Everyone

Wow!  That was a fast week wasn’t it. Before you knew it, we are back in the blogosphere.

 

I spent much time over the past week thinking about what I would write about this week.  I told you that I would focus on enterprise-wide issues and organizational transformations into world class project management companies.  It struck me as I thought about “enterprise-wide issues” that there are a few of them that I really ought to address right here, right now, in my blog.  You see it occurred to me that there are some issues, actually project management defects,  that are so pervasive in project management land, and most probably in your organization too, that these, are indeed, by definition,  “enterprise-wide issues.”  Before I tell you what they are let me tell you how I know this.  From 1998 to 2008, I have personally analyzed hundreds of project plans, maybe thousands, across virtually every industry; of various sizes from a few person months of effort to literally over thousand person years of effort; in several domains; managed by twenty year project management veterans and PM-newbies; project managers who have been extensively trained and others who have had no formal training.  This has to represent your project managers as my sample size is simply too large and too diverse not to.  What I have seen time and time again, is a failure to apply the fundamentals.  It is quite rare in any company to audit project plans and actually find a project plan where two very basic things are present:

1.   A competently developed Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which would provide the project manager with the ability to produce adequate estimates and also establish the necessary pre-requisites for project control.

2.   A complete network diagram along with the resulting critical path such that the project manager and the project team had clear visibility into the critical work flow of the project.

 

These were not the only defects observed. There were many others like risk management and execution management.  Just know that the WBS and scheduling defects are among the worst offenders.  What you begin to realize after you literally examine project plan after project plan, in one company after another, in one hemisphere or another, across the continuum of years of experience is that project managers, regardless of training, just do NOT apply the critical fundamentals to their project plans, execution and control.  THEY DO NOT DO IT, end of story. 

 

I highlighted the WBS and scheduling defects because if these two areas are not defect-free then a project team literally has little hope of success if relief is not given by the project sponsor on the original cost, schedule and scope. I think I have a sense of why this seems to be the case. After examining hundreds of project plans and discussing them with the project manager, one just kind of gets a sense of things.  Let me give you my thoughts here:

 

First, project management is hard.  It is far harder than text books and training companies acknowledge.  Think about it, the project manager has to bring together in a highly skilled and competent way an understanding of the business and technical requirements of the project; develop a project plan that is based on not only the work but also the internal company methodologies and cultures; make some rather precise estimates of level of effort and time in an environment with many unknowns; and then build an electronic model of all this in some project and portfolio software tools accurately enough to control the entire project.  This is really hard to do.

 

Second, people are really confused as to what a WBS really is. My conclusion after my analysis of hundreds of them, is that people really think the WBS is a “things-to-do list.”  In other words, the project team has sat around and brainstormed a list of things that have to be done during the project, the project teams under the leadership of the project manager include things in WBS’s that are one minute long and in the same WBS you will see tasks side-by-side that are six months long. A WBS is NOT a things-to-do-list.  A WBS is a decomposition of work, and pay attention here, from the top down (that is if you want to build in management and control.)  A things-to-do orientation makes control impossible, adds unnecessary administrative overhead and has a very, very high probability of erroneously leaving needed work out of the WBS. You will hear and read a lot to the contrary but I strongly urge you to work top down and decompose. Any other method is sub-optimized.

 

Third, and this is partially a result of the second item above, project managers just never build a project network diagram without any danglers or hangers.  Every task in a project WBS MUST HAVE a predecessor and a successor task.  There are no exceptions except for the first task and the last task. This is literally true.  If you examine project plans you will see that there is rarely a clear, unbroken network from the start to the finish of the project. If there is not a predecessor and a successor for every task, we cannot be sure what the critical path is or what that matter what the real start and finish dates of every task need to be in order to control schedule.

 

So if you want to improve your projects or you want to improve your enterprises project results, then do a tops down WBS and make sure there is a defect free network diagram.  I am willing to make a bet here and to go worldwide with the results. I have some tools which I have built that give me the ability to rather quickly analyze Microsoft Project (MSP) Plans for WBS and network diagram defects. I will agree to publish anonymously and discreetly here in the weeks to come the defect levels of all MSP plans that are emailed to me. What I would like you to do is to get your MSP project plans together, sanitize them and then send them to me. I will analyze them and publish consolidated results here in a few weeks. I will bet a free project management class that I will not receive any MSP's that are better than 20% defect free, in other words, 80% defective.  Are you on?

 

So, Project-Connectors, have a great week and I will see you back here next week: same Blog Time - same Blog Channel.

 

Respectfully,

Jerry Perone

Mobile Phone:  240-462-1443

Email Address: jerry.perone@verizon.net

Related Links
Our Plan Development series can help you build a better WBS. If you need help estimating tasks to improve your WBS, try our guideline on Estimating Processes and Methods. Our Scheduling Checklist can help you ensure you've covered all the bases.

Comments

Gospel Jerry!
Top-down WBS, truly dynamic scheduling with unbroken network logic that rolls-up accurately,....AMEN!
Thanks for penning my pain!