After spending the past decade or more dedicated to project management, I noticed during the economic downturn last year a very surprising trend: despite the significant reduction in the number of major Capex projects being sanctioned and funded, the need for third party assistance with schedule analysis and risk assessments actually increased dramatically. After digging into this a little more deeply, I came to the following conclusion: savvy project schedulers are at risk of becoming a dying breed and as project management specialists, we need to do everything we can to reverse this trend.
The software tools available to planners, schedulers and estimators are more powerful today than ever with the likes of collaborative, web-based, multi-user capabilities and yet as a profession we still struggle to bring projects in successfully under the triple constraint of cost, time and scope.
Savvy project schedulers are at risk of becoming a dying breed and as project management specialists, we need to do everything we can to reverse this trend.
A previous survey carried out by Bull Computer systems showed that 57% of projects failed due to inadequate communication and 39% failed due to poor project scheduling. Similarly, well publicized reports such as the Standish Chaos Report all list pessimistic statistics and multiple causes of project failure.
From a project management perspective, my theory is perhaps somewhat more straightforward. I stand behind the belief that there are only two root causes of project failure:
- The project plan set out by the PM team was unrealistic in the first place.
- Project execution wasn't able to perform to the expectations of the project plan.
While, perhaps these causes initially sound very obvious, in reality they are hard to dispute. It's really all about successfully "planning the work" and "working the plan"...
Let's now consider how to overcome this first cause of failure.
The Keys to Successful Planning
Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling is the de-facto standard for project scheduling. Estimating durations, sequencing work and assigning resources are all common steps in creating a CPM schedule. Yet all too often, the end result is a plan that is either unachievable or unrealistic.
It's All About Top Down Planning
One of the major pitfalls when creating a project plan is to jump straight into the development of the planned work (activities) rather than adopting a more formal, top down approach which tends to be more successful, of defining the project objectives, elaborating scope definition, expanding out the deliverables and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and then, and only then, start to detail out the work (activities and resources) required to satisfy these deliverables.
A well-developed schedule should be able to be rolled up through a WBS to show the entire scope of the project with the underlying work required encapsulated as activities. All too often, project plans omit this formal structure which then leads to inevitable project scheduling challenges.
Figure A: Deliverable-based Planning
Definitely Maybe...
Project scheduling has historically been a deterministic science. That is to say, activities have had definitive durations assigned, single-point cost estimates and so-forth. With the advent of risk analysis, such an approach is being replaced with non-deterministic estimates that combined with risk analysis techniques give not only forecasted completion dates, but more importantly give confidence levels as to how realistic these completion dates are.
The term "Risk Analysis" tends to portray impacts from risk events such as weather, mechanical failure etc. In reality though, most risk regarding project success is actually driven by poorly defined scope. In my experience, I have discovered that 75% of the risk exposure within projects actually comes from scope uncertainty and not discrete risk events captured in a risk register. While this is a huge percentage, it is actually good news from a planning perspective as scope definition is typically easier to handle and reduce than external risk events. Again, further proof that a sound project plan needs to be closely tied to a well defined scope definition.
Not only does this certainty-based project scheduling help with pinpointing problematic areas within a project, it also gives the project execution team a range of dates to target rather than being setup for failure against a single date.
