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Is My Project on Time, on Scope?
September 21, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Project Management Musings
Is My Project on Time, on Scope?
By Demian Entrekin
I was speaking with an experienced product development manager and we discussed a recent survey from one of the big analysts about project success or failure. He said something that I recognized immediately. “These stats about project failure are completely misleading.” He didn’t use the word “misleading” but I can’t print the word he used.
“Here’s the problem with all of those studies. The problem is that almost every senior manager I know uses aggressive dates and aggressive scope to put a sense of urgency into the team.” In other words, the managers know before the project even starts that the project will be late and the initial scope will fall short of the plan.
“You see, if we don’t put the pressure on, the team won’t feel the same sense of urgency that the management team feels. It’s a forcing function.” So, to translate, projects are set up in advance to fail in order that they might succeed. Said another way, the arbitrary metrics of on schedule and on scope are often not very meaningful. What matters is tangible value creation. Did the project provide value to the organization in the real world?
I have to admit that I have done this myself. I often put down a schedule that I know in advance is not exactly realistic. I call this the internal plan. Then there’s the external plan. That plan is more vague and has something like a 50% pad built into it. Some people call this sand bagging, but I call it managing expectations.
It’s also about team coordination. We need the different teams and groups to bring their pieces together at the right time. But it’s often impossible to get it right the first time, so you press on one side and hedge on the other. Some managers like to trot out the old saying measure twice, cut once. Unfortunately, most projects are not made of wood. So we plan too aggressively so that we can apply pressure AND coordinate with others.
But which plan is the real plan? Which plan is the one we measure ourselves against? Which plan do we use for the old “we stink” statistics? Which plan gets deployed via the PMO? These kinds of issues are central to the PPM exercise. They are also central to the entire definition of “success.”
Demian is the CTO of Innotas. As founder and CEO, Entrekin oversaw marketing, product development, sales and services for the company. Today, he focuses on strategic product direction. Prior to Innotas, Entrekin co-founded Convoy Corporation and was Chief Architect of its initial products. In that role, Entrekin helped the company lead the middleware market with an annual growth rate of 670 percent and played an instrumental role in Convoy’s subsequent acquisition by New Era Networks in 1999. A recognized thought leader in Project Portfolio Management, Entrekin has published numerous papers on PPM and his blog (PPM Today) explores current issues related to successful PPM implementation. During his 18 year career, Demian has assumed leadership roles as a consultant and as an entrepreneur, delivering commercial and corporate database applications. Demian holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
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