 Reforming Project Management |
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Saturday, November 09, 2002
Thinking with Your Gut Redux
I didn't get the interest I expected from my posting on Wednesday How to Think with Your Gut. I asked readers to leave a comment describing a situation where a project benefited in a surprising way from someone thinking with his or her gut. No one commented! Might this just be a foreign practice? Or is this uninteresting to comment on? Or is it something else altogether? I'd really like to hear from a few people on this topic. Your comments will help me focus my writing for you.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, my post today will elaborate on Thomas Stewart's article. As I began thinking about yesterday's posting on Managing Project Uncertainty the skill and practice of thinking with your gut looked more relevant. Stewart makes three important points for us as project managers.
"People excel at "abduction," which is less like reason than inspired guesswork. (Deduction: All taxis are yellow; this is a taxi; therefore it is yellow. Induction: These are all taxis; these are all yellow; therefore, all taxis are probably yellow. Abduction: All taxis are yellow; this vehicle is yellow; therefore this is probably a taxi.) Abduction leaps to conclusions by connecting a known pattern (taxis are yellow) to a specific situation (this yellow vehicle must be a taxi). Compared with computers, people are lousy number crunchers but superb pattern makers -- even without being aware of it. "Research suggests that neither nose-in-the-spreadsheet rationality nor pure gut inspiration is right all the time. The best approach lies somewhere between the extremes, the exact point depending on the situation."
Stewart leaves us with the following reassuring thoughts,
Friday, November 08, 2002
When Bad Things Happen to Good Projects
When Bad Things Happen to Good Projects by Robert Hertzberg.
A friend sent along a Quiz: Is Your Project at Risk for Disaster? from Baseline Magazine, a Ziff-Davis publication, on assessing project risk. It took me a while to get to it. (Sorry, Chris.) I toyed around with it for awhile. The quiz is fun. It is interactive and it offers an analysis of your project risk. Try it. The case studies in the accompanying article are better. Hertzberg discusses the four types of variability: variation, forseen uncertainty, unforseen uncertainty, and chaos. He presents a case study for each type of uncertainty along with critiques of project team performance. The quiz and article are based on a paper published in The Sloan Management Review. SMR only offers articles by purchasing the reprint. So like a good researcher I went to Google and found the article available on the INSEAD website. Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation to Chaos by authors Arnoud De Meyer, Christoph H. Loch, and Michael T. Pich. Look for more postings! Thursday, November 07, 2002
On duct work, complexity, evolution and reliable work flow (in under 500 words)
Rectangular duct is manufactured and installed in six steps. Sheet metal is cut (1) to length and folded (2) in half. Then the halves are assembled (beat together in the lingo of the trade) (3) into a sections (a box with a hole in both ends). A series of sections are joined (4) and then lifted (5) and secured (6) in place. Steps 1 & 2 are almost always done in the fabshop. And 4,5 & 6 in the field. Step 3 may be done in the shop or in the field. I asked a mechanical contractor what considerations drove the choice between shop and field assembly. He said that it was a matter of determining the most economic solution. Completing step 3 in the shop was less expensive but that raised shipping costs as folded pieces could be nested for transport. So decision was based on the distance from the shop to project -- or so he said.
This sounded good but the rule wasn't followed. Sometimes duct was shipped unassembled to nearby projects and assembled clear across town. When pressed the contractor said, "The superintendent make the call." So I went down the block to the nearby project and asked why the duct wasn't shipped to this nearby project in assembled sections. After some weight shifting and attempts to change the subject, the superintendent explained it this way. "Sure it is cheaper to assemble pieces in the shop, and that works great if the project is well run. But this is a crazy job. Coordination is terrible so work rarely available in a predictable amounts. I can't always join sections and lift them in place. So I keep the crew small and move them between assembling (3) and 4, 5 & 6. It cost me more to assemble but doing it here is cheaper than having those people standing idle. The crazy thing is, the worse coordination gets, the more work contractors bring to site so there is more to do onsite, making coordination harder. As a general rule, I only bring assembled units to well-run projects." (Well I know he didn’t say it just this way but you get the drift.)Nature builds complex systems the same way. It works from the bottom up by aggregating small units (cells) into larger chunks (organisms). Evolution starts then from "cooperation" as these smaller units learn to work together and continues as they form ever more complex systems. Complex systems do not arise from competition between units. Competition weeds out the units least able to propagate. Evolution of sub-units by cooperation continues as long as the resulting units can evolve fast enough to keep up with changes in the environment. A stable environment helps and a larger population of standard chunks (with a few oddities) is a must if larger units are to form. Back to construction: Projects can be built better, quicker and less expensively by increasing prefabrication but that will require increased workflow reliability. New forms of commercial contract don't hurt -- they open new possibilities for cooperation and aggregation -- but they aren't enough. Evolution demands cooperation and reliability. (along with time, and lots of failed experiments.) Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Planning and Implementing Web-Based Project Managemet Systems
Good 2-part case study written by George Sifri, the consultant who did the work: Planning a Web-based project management system and Challenges to implementing a Web-based project management system. What makes it good? From my experience the case is representative of the usual situation -- no more, no less.
How to Think With Your Gut
I couldn't let this Business 2.0 article slip by. Thomas Stewart writes How to Think With Your Gut a great piece on calling on intuition. Great decisions often lack an underlying rational argument. We need more of this on projects. And according to Stewart, we can cultivate and manage for it.
What surprising results have you seen on projects by thinking with your gut? Please leave a comment. Monday, November 04, 2002
Converging on a new theory
Lauri Koskela and Greg Howell (K&H) argue successfully that current theory is obsolete in their paper The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete. However the authors may be limited in producing a new theory by exactly the same background paradigm that makes current theory obsolete. K&H seemingly accept the machine metaphor as appropriate for projects. Machines can be perfected; machines can by optimized; machines persist in spite of changes to the environment. In accepting the metaphor they make three mistakes.
Where can we look for guidance? I am encouraged by the work in other fields (not projects or production) on autonomic systems, complex adaptive systems, and biomimicry. I also see the relevance of living systems thinking (Margaret Wheatley, A Simpler Way and Turning to One Another), community (Derek M. Powazek, Design for Community), and sustainability (William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle). I doubt current operations theory will provide a unifying theory for projects. Instead, I suspect we will see a convergence of thinking that will lead to new theory. Consider this my leaping off point. Where this will go who knows! Visit the Archives for more postings |
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