Bill Zuppinger

A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long.

Customer Cost Product Schedule

The classic instruments of project management (WBS, CPM) do not guarantee success. The skills of people are more important to success than the formalization of project management.

60% of “successful” projects failed to meet the triple constraint dimensions of time and/or budget. Of the projects that did meet the triple constraint targets, respondents perceived 15% of them to be failures. (PMI, 2006).

Receive RFQ Evaluate Scope, determine capability High level compliance matrix WBS: deliverables driven, structured Schedule: management to goals

◦ Milestone, deliverables driven Resources Risk Assessment Cost Estimate

Is it more important to schedule your time to efficiently solve problems created by conflicting expectations…..or to take the time to work with others to clarify expectations up front?

Is it more important to spend time trying to solve problems created by the lack of communication….or to build the relationships that make effective communications possible?

Communication is built on trust…◦ Less concerned about who is right than what is

right.

“I project manager, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will manage the authorized work, the whole authorized work, and nothing but the authorized work, or so help me project sponsor.”

The PM conflict: we want to deliver the minimum amount required as stated in the original commitment, whereas the customer would seek the maximum amount desired up to the point at which doing more reduces our profit.

“Projects that skimp on upstream activities typically have to do the same work downstream at anywhere from 10 to 100 times the cost of doing it properly in the first place (Fagan 1976, Boehm and Papaccio 1988).”

Scope change: authorized change Scope creep: inclusion of unauthorized work Scope change/creep is a barrier to project

success. It results in conflict.◦ 60% correlation to project failure (Lechler, 2006).

PM’s need to first identify what needs to be managed before they create a plan to manage it.

Tasks in the WBS must add value to the authorized deliverables. The completion of a scheduled task should cause the deliverable.

Tasks that will use scarce and costly resources should create deliverables in the plan.

A CPM schedule seeks to finish each critical path task on time by adding unnecessary safety into the schedule as protection against any task being late.

CPM sends a false signal that any task with 0 slack is important

Work is estimated to provide 90% confidence in meeting completion date.

The Critical path will vary during the project as soon as progress is entered into the schedule.

The reliance on the determination of slack to focus attention on keeping commitments exacerbates conflict.

The incorrect use of sequencing dependencies, date constraints, task types, milestones all contribute to create schedules that are unstable, inaccurate, and not reliable during project execution.

Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.

Manage to milestones that are well defined Manage constraints Micromanagement is an unintended

consequence of too much decomposition when seeking to divide and conquer a complex effort.◦ Do not schedule tasks that are to small or too

insignificant for the project manager to schedule in a network diagram

Instead of striving to achieve zero variance from the baseline, PM’s seek to achieve a favorable variance from the baseline. To achieve favorable variance intentionally, most project plans must include things that project teams do not really intend to execute.

CPM uses slack as localized protection. You need more protection with slack than you would need using buffers.

Projects progress rapidly until they are 90 percent complete. Then they remain 90 percent complete forever.

Unless a resource pool (RBS) has an unconstrained capacity, it will limit the amount of work that the project can complete within a finite duration.

Manage acceptable variation Avoid unacceptable variation