Complex and unstable environments encountered in project work - especially software development project work - calls for critical thinking by all participants. Complexity comes in part from technical uncertainties, starting with requirements for software capabilities. If there is uncertainty in what capabilities are needed, the project is starting off on the path to failure on day one. Certainly the functional and operational requirements have emergent properties that create uncertainty. As do staffing, productivity and risks created by reducible and irreducible uncertainty.
To deal with these complexities, critical thinking is needed on behalf of the project leaders and project participants alike.
The first responsibility of the project staff as well as management is to think. To think what is being asked of them. To consider that they are being paid to produce value by someone other than themselves. To think about why they are there, what they are being asked to do, and how they can go about being stewards of the money provided by those paying for their work. To be true professionals applying their education, training, and experience through analysis and creative, informed thought to make daily decisions.
Failure to apply critical thinking creates a disconnect between those providing the value and those paying for the value. This is best illustrated in the notion that business decisions can be made in the absence of knowing the cost and outcomes of those decisions. The first gap in critical thinking occurs when the decsion making process ignores the principles of MicroEconomics. This gap is future reinforced when the probabilistic nature of all project work is also ignored.
The three core elements of all projects are the delivered capabilities, the cost of producing those capabilities, and the time frame over which those capabilities are delivered for the cost. Each of these acts as a random variable, interacting with the other two in statistically complex ways.
To manage in the presence of these random variables, means making decisions in the presence of uncertainties - and resulting risks - created by the randomness of the variables. These uncertainties are reducible - we can pay more to find out more information. Or they are irreducible, we can only manage in their presence with margin for cost, schedule, and technical performance.
To make decisions in the presence of this paradigm we need to Estimate. Making decisions in the absence of estimating first violates the principles of microeconomics, and secondly ignores the underlying statistical and probabilistic nature of all project work.
When we hear that decisions be made in the absence of estimates, ask how Microeconomics and statistical uncertainty are handled.
