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See When Qualified People Actually Work on the Project
March 22, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Scheduling
See When Qualified People Actually Work on the Project (#7 in the series Measuring Project Progress)
By Johanna Rothman
Too many projects start starved of resources. This can happen if some of the people are still working on a previous project, if people are yanked off partway through the project, or if your project is competing with several others for people’s time. The problem with starving a project is that no matter how hard people work when they are working on the project, they can’t make progress if they are assigned elsewhere or are attempting to multi-task on several projects. Figure 1 shows a project where the total number of planned person-months was 75 percent of the actual person-months. Unfortunately, the team’s output was about 66 percent of the desired result.
For more expense (about 1.3 times the original planned cost), the team delivered fewer features (0.3 times the original feature set). You might be asking why the project team would deliver less than planned for more cost? This project used a staged delivery lifecycle, where requirements, analysis, and architecture were timeboxed. The project team could obtain a good idea about the requirements and their effect on the architecture, but not know all the requirements in detail or know the implications of those requirements on the architecture. The original plan was to spend the first two months obtaining a good idea and the next two months performing an initial iteration to make sure the rest of the project would succeed. In order to be successful, the project plan required all the people planned in those first four months to perform all the initial investigation and iteration work. Since the people were not available and the end date was non-negotiable, the project team needed more people to prototype and iterate in parallel.
As people prototyped and iterated, they found mistakes—work that had not been completed in the initial timeboxing and iteration. Team members decided they would rather release a product that worked a little rather than release a product that had all the features, most of which didn’t work.
This chart supplied the project manager with opportunities throughout the project—and when planning for the next project—to explain to senior management the problem of starving a project.
If you ever start your projects starved of people who are capable of performing at 100 percent, this figure can help explain the consequences of that decision.
This original article can be found at: http://www.jrothman.com/Papers/are-we-there-yet.html
Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.
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