Some discussion around the web have conjectured there are many ways to manage projects. Some suggesting that "counting or measuring" is a waste of time. Some further conjecturing that Project Management as a formal process is inappropriate for many project. Counting the uncountable is the basic theme.
Setting aside the logic behind this statement for a moment, what are some immutable principles of project management. Principle found in every project, no matter to domain, the point of view of the project management process.
Immutable Principles
- Progress is measured by physical deliverables. If progress is measured by the passage of time or by consumption of resources (money), then the project is Level of Effort. By definition Level of Effort means the passage of time = progress. LOE projects or tasks are found everywhere. Even in complex technical projects. But determining what "done" looks like is answered by "when to the money run out."
- Work is defined through some form of requirements. These can be simple requirement. "Mow the lawn and when you're done come in the dinner, on or before 6:00 PM." A simple requirement to our 17 year old son. "Fly to Hubble, replace the batteries, wide field camera, and Number 4 gyro, while doing no harm to the telescope," is a actual requirements statement. This simple statement or course flowed down to 1,000's of other derived or implied requirements and $470M worth of work. In all cases if you don't know what done looks like, it'll be hard to know when you get there, if you can get there, or if you can there with the money and people assigned to get to done.
- Knowing "what is our capacity for work" is the starting point of getting to done. How much can we produce for each period of effort, each dollar of funding? In the absence of this information, working harder may or may not mean progress.
- What risks to our success will we encounter along the way? When these risks become "real" can we mitigate them in some way? With a risk management plan, the project is whistling in the dark. "Hope is not a strategy" is not a very good strategy for project success. Retiring risk requires energy (money, time, information).
- Cost, Schedule and Technical Performance are physically connected. The old "iron triangle" is misused within and without the PM community. But these three dependent variables are connected in an Iron Triangle. There is no free lunch. Knowing the coupling between Cost, Schedule and Technical performance is critical to a success project. Technical performance if not just performance of machines, it can be financial, social, or very soft "performance."
- Time is not always the same as money. Is it the same only when there is a linear relationship between time and money. This is a Level of Effort project. All other projects have non-linear relationships between the consumption of money over time and the production of value over the same period of time. This is the basis of Earner Value, which typically uses an S-Curve to describe the relationship between time and money. Both budget money (BCWS) and value production money (BCWP)
Questions Project Managers Need to Answer
- How much will this cost?
- When will this be done?
- Will it work when we're done?
- What's going to prevent the project from being done on-time, on-budget, and with the agreed upon technical performance(whether that is true technical, social, political or what ever it is you're doing in the project)
A final Thought about Work
There is a suggestion that implicit work cannot be measured. This work (in the mature project management domains) is called "level of effort" and is subject to the "time is money" measurement. In some domains, this type of work is limited to 10% to 12% of the project for a simple reason.
If the passage of time means progress, then the determination of done cannot be made with any Physical Percent Complete measurement.
This is the basis of failure is most projects. If you can't connect expenditure of resources with some measure of progress then you can't answer the questions above in any meaningful way.
This is the immutable principle of project management.
Project managers measure progress through the assessment of physical percent complete