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Tips for Breaking Project Dependencies

January 21, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices

Tips for Breaking Project Dependencies
By John Weathington

How can you make a deadline on a project, when a deadline doesn’t seem possible? A key trick in getting your compliance projects in under schedule is understanding how to break dependencies.

Dependencies in a project happen, when two or more activities depend on each other. The most common kind of dependency is a “Finish to Start” dependency, meaning the first task needs to finish before the second task can start. For instance if you’re building a house, you cannot put up the walls until the foundation is dry.

The obvious problem with dependencies, is that they force a constraint on your project’s timeline. If you have two different activities that both take a day to complete, with enough resources you should be able to get both done in a day. However, if there is a start to finish dependency on the activities, then your group of activities is forced to take 2 days.

For that reason, whenever I setup a project that has been allocated a good number of equivalently skilled resources, I go out of my way to break dependencies. Here are 3 key tips that will help you pull it off:

Tip # 1 : Resist the Natural Urge to Sequence Things

Novice project managers tend to create dependencies, even when no dependency exists! That’s because it’s human nature to think in terms of sequences. Processing things in blocks, and further in sequence, is a natural process that we follow to solve a problem. Let’s take a random example of making coffee. Here’s what comes natural:

  1. Grind the coffee beans
  2. Put the filter in the coffee machine
  3. Pour the coffee beans in the filter, and close
  4. Fill the coffee pot with water, and pour the water into the reservoir
  5. Replace the coffee pot on the warmer
  6. Push the “ON” button

Seems like a 6 step process, but if you step back to think about it, there are a few things we can do in parallel. For instance, with enough people you could grind the coffee beans, put the filter in the coffee machine, and pour the water into the reservoir all at the same time. Most likely you will be able to fill the reservoir and replace the coffee pot before the beans are finished grinding, and pushing the “ON” button takes literally no time. So with some help, you could go through the whole process in the time it takes you to grind beans and press “ON”.

Tip # 2 : Eliminate Soft Dependencies with Risk Planning

A soft dependency is a dependency that in and of itself isn’t mandatory, but rather a “good idea.” Let’s go back to the construction example. It’s a real good idea to paint before you lay carpet, but there’s no physical reason why you cannot ( unlike the foundation example above ). So, what many project managers will do is treat this as a dependency for good practices sake.

What I’m suggesting is that you eliminate these soft dependencies. In most cases, following good practices like this are in-built risk management. By establishing a dependency like this, you’re controlling the risk that paint will get on the new carpet. The problem with this approach is that you’re masking risk management into the schedule, which is a bad idea. The reason this shows up so often, is because proper project risk management is usually overlooked.

The more advanced approach is to break the dependency, and call it out as a risk on your risk management plan. Since you’ve highlighted the risk, you can deal with it as a risk instead of hiding the details in the schedule. Building the dependency is only one way to control this risk. You could also buy paint-resistant carpet, hire more skilled painters, or invest in better painting tools.

Tip # 3 : Eliminate Hard Dependencies with Interfaces

We’ve already discussed what a hard dependency is, so what is an interface? An interface is a simulation or placeholder of sorts, that mocks up the dependency between the two activities. For instance, the walls could be constructed ahead of time, if we had some sort of mock foundation that we could use as a guideline. Also, the majority of the foundation could be poured as long as we had some mock up of where the walls would fit in. The walls could then be grafted in later with steel reinforcement.

Breaking hard dependencies takes a lot of imagination. You have to force yourself to think outside of the box. Fortunately, the human mind has an infinite power to problem solve. To get there however, you have to allow the question, and assume it’s possible to break the dependency. If you tell yourself, “there’s no way to break that dependency”, then you’re probably right. But I would probably come along and pull it off, just by thinking a different way.

In our coffee example, we’ve gone to great lengths to parallelize things, but there still seems to be dependencies. How can you press the “ON” button before the water and coffee is in the machine?

Well, don’t use the coffee pot to fill the reservoir. Use two other containers, one small, and one just the size to fill the reservoir less the size of the small container. Somebody quickly fills the small reservoir with ice cold water, dumps it in the coffee machine, and turns it on.

It will take a while for the cold water to heat up. While the beans are being ground, the larger water container is being filled with room temperature water, and dumped into the machine. The rest of the process goes as planned. Now the entire activity cycle time is dependent on the time it takes to grind the coffee and dump it into the filter.

Breaking dependencies is an art that’s worth exploring, if you want to take it to the next level as a compliance project manager. Some key tips include resisting the urge the naturally order things, breaking soft dependencies with risk planning, and breaking hard dependencies with interfaces. Take some time today to look over your current project plan. With these tips in mind, you should be able to remove some of them, and bring your project end date in.

John Weathington is a management consultant that helps companies dramatically improve process efficiency and avoid penalties and fines. He has consulted for Fortune 500 clients such as MCI, Silicon Graphics, Hitachi Data Systems, and Sun Microsystems where his project management consulting services contributed to fortifying a $100 million government contract. He is a certified Project Management Professional, Six Sigma Black Belt trained at Motorola, Executive Board member of the Northern California Chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants, and chief editor of the popular Flawless Compliance™ newsletter. He is available for consulting, speaking, coaching and training. For more information, please visit http://www.excellentmanagementsystems.com.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in the August 2008 issue of Flawless Compliance.

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