welcome to project management

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Finishing Projects Fast

James R. BurnsProfessor of Operations

Management and Information Technology

Texas Tech University

Presentation by James R. Burns 2

Outline--SourcesGeneralitiesGoldratt conceptsMascitelli conceptsMcCONNELL conceptsKerzner conceptsMaturity conceptsOther sources


Goal:Make some suggestions as to how projects can be completed fast and frugally


Most firmsRecognize project management to be a core competence todayHave established project management centers of excellence for training and development of project managers and project management careersEncourage their employees to propose project initiatives with simple one-page statements of work

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Rationale for Reducing Project Duration

Time Is Money: Cost-Time TradeoffsReducing the time of a critical activity usually incurs additional direct costs.

Cost-time solutions focus on reducing (crashing) activities on the critical path to shorten overall duration of the project.

Reasons for imposed project duration dates:Time-to-market pressures

Unforeseen delays

Incentive contracts (bonuses for early completion)

Imposed deadlines and contract commitments

Overhead and public goodwill costs

Pressure to move resources to other projects

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Options for Accelerating Project Completion

Resources Not Constrained

Adding resources

Outsourcing project work

Scheduling overtime

Establishing a core project team

Do it twice—fast and then correctly

Resources Constrained

Fast-tracking

Critical-chain concepts

Reducing project scope

Compromise quality (not really)


Notes on shortening project durations

(Most of this must be done in the Planning and Budgeting stage)Crashing

Reducing the duration of tasks on the critical path by adding resources

Fast-trackingStarting tasks sooner

Checking for parallelism opportunities in the schedule

Pull as much work off of the critical path as you canBe aware of critical chain issues


More Tips on shortening project durations

REUSE, REUSE, REUSEDo it right the first timeEliminate non-value-added work activities

Make projects lean

Avoid changes to requirementsBut what if the requirements are unstable??


Knowledge Reuse…Requirements Reuse

Based on a Classification of projects

Mapped/Programmed Projects--Everything is driven by and proceeds from the requirements

Project PlanFunctional SpecificationDesign DocumentCodeTests and Test Documentation

ALL OF WHICH CAN BE REUSEDALL OF WHICH CAN BE REUSED


The Quality View on FAST projects:

The further down the lifecycle the defects are found, the more expensive and time consuming they are to fix.


The problem of Complexity

In the early days of simpler code, it used to take a day or less to fix a bugNow, with greatly increased code complexity, it takes weeks sometimes.


Avoid changes to requirements

If possible freeze requirements during execution and control stage


Lean Project ManagementCustomer-perceived value should drive everything

What is the value proposition??If we were to advertise in the WSJ that we have twice as many walkthroughs as our closest competition, would that garner any additional customers for us?

Remove what does not add value


Principles of Lean Concepts Applied to

Projects1. Precisely specify the value of the

project2. Identify the value stream for each

project3. Allow value to flow without

interruptions4. Let the customer pull value from the

project team5. Continuously pursue perfection


Which of the following adds value?

Conducting a weekly team coordinationHunting for needed informationPresenting Project status to upper managementCreating formal project documentsGaining multiple approvals for a project documentWaiting in queues for available resources


Time Batching--Another Time Waster

Analysis paralysisApproval cyclesFormal document releaseRegularly scheduled meetingsPlanning cyclesWork queues


More techniques for shortening projects

Scrub the requirements during or prior to the planning phase

Remove from the requirements those items that add little or no valueRemember the Pareto principle—80% of the value comes from 20% of the functionality

REMOVE SAFETY—GOLDRATTResist multitasking and student syndrome


SafetyExtra time placed in an estimated task timeRemove safety and put it in a time buffer at the end of the projectSafety, when its buried in the tasks of the project, is a bad thing because of….

Multitasking, also a bad thingStudent syndromeTask dependencies

Can’t be passed along or accumulated


Everybody overestimates the time required to do

their taskAccording to Goldratt(This is called SAFETY, as we said)Does anybody want to talk about how much safety they put into their estimates?Is this true in software development?It is if you have an expert doing the estimating, who really knows how long it will take him


What happens after that--a possible scenario

The team leader adds safety time to the task to cover his responsibilitiesThe project leader adds more safety time The project manager may add still more safety time


Implication>>>Most of the time we have built into our projects is …..


The project manager must stay focused

Or the project will not be finished on time, within budgetThis means applying the Pareto principle

80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the activities

By the time progress reports indicate something is wrong, its usually too lateProgress reports tell you that 90% of the project is finished in 90% of the required time. However, another equal period of time is required to complete the remaining “10%,” in many cases


It is hard to stay focused when:

There are too many project paths on-going, in parallelThere are many critical or near critical pathsThere are many projects being managed concurrently


Measurements are a major problem with projects

Measurements should induce the parts to do what is good for the system as a wholeMeasurements should direct managers to the point that needs their attentionSo often it occurs that we measure the wrong thing.The wrong measure leads to the wrong behavior

Tell me how you measure me and I will show you how I behave


More Measurements -- EVA


Projects are like chains

Each task in sequence is a link in a chainEach link has two things

weight, to which cost is analogousstrength, to which throughput (time) is analogous


Cost vs ThroughputGoldratt maintains that management in the cost world is a mirage

efficiency becomes paramountlocal improvements are necessary to get global ones

Goldratt suggests the managers should manage in the throughput world, a totally different paradigm

must find the constraint--the weakest linkconcentrate on thatBy the way, what is the ultimate constraint???


Remember the five steps of TOC

IDENTIFY the project constraint--the critical pathDecide how to EXPLOIT that constraintSUBORDINATE everything to that decisionELEVATE the systems’ constraintGo back to step 1, and find another constraint


SafetySafety is however much time is added on to a task beyond its mean time of completion


Probabilistic task durations

Late durations tend to accumulate and may increase the length of the projectEarly durations do not show upThis explains why safety disappears


More Measurements


Other problems with safety

Is wasted by the “student syndrome”Basically, this is procrastination

Is wasted by multitasking (a person who works on several tasks at the same time)

With each change of task, a set up is required

Is wasted by dependencies between stepsThese dependencies cause delays to accumulate, but advances are wasted

Delays get passed on; advances don’t


Problems other than safety

Early start vs. late startExisting measurements are worthless because they are based on a cost world mentality, according to GoldrattExisting measurements (Earned Value Analysis) do not take into consideration the critical pathWe’re talking about BCWP, BCWS, ACWP, CV, SV, CPI, SPI, BAC, EAC, etc.


Early Start vs. Late Start


How much Safety is there likely to be?

Will project professionals admit how much safety they are putting into their estimates?What happens when these professionals are asked to cut their durations by 10%, next time?These professionals want to be 100% sure of getting finished on timeTherefore, the durations are likely to be twice as long as they should beSo CUT THEM IN HALF


Solutions

Take the safety out of the individual tasks and put it at the end of the critical path in the time buffer, called a project bufferThis means making the tasks roughly 50-60% as long as they would otherwise be.


More solutions

At the point where each feeding path intersects with the critical path, place another time buffer, called a feeding buffer. The feeding buffer protects the critical path from delays occurring in the corresponding non-critical paths. When resources are needed on the critical path, these resources are advised ahead of time exactly when they must make themselves available. When that time comes, they must drop everything else and do the required critical tasks.


Measurement solutions

Measure progress only on the critical path; what percent of the critical path we have already completed. This is all we care about!!Have a project leader measure progress on a non critical path in terms of unused buffer days


Shrinking the task time: Effects

There is less procrastinationThere is much more focusThere is less multitasking


More SuggestionsPut your “BEST” people on the critical pathWatch out for critical chains


What are the ramifications of a delayed software product, intended for

commercial sale?Less market shareLess profit; maybe no profitLower analyst profit expectationsDeclining share priceOut of business?How many firms has Microsoft driven out of business?

Ask Philippe Khan (founder of Borland) what the implications of getting a product late to the marketplace are


What about ProcurementMost firms enter into LOSE/LOSE Strategies

A fixed-price lowest bidder contract is LOSE/LOSE Strategy

This forces Contractors to under bid their costs, hoping to make it back on the changes to the requirements that the customer will have to pay forInstead, Contractors should be induced to deliver product on time, with as much functionality as possibleHow would you do this?

welcome to project management

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