Volume IX - Issue X - October 2007
Featured Papers
Time Is Up: Assessing Schedule Performance with Earned Value By Robert Van De Velde Time drives projects. Quick and accurate evaluation of schedule performance is crucial. Quantitative assessment provides the PM and others with an objective measure of past performance and a reliable prediction of future performance. Earned Value has proven effective for evaluating cost performance, but it fails for schedule performance. A recent breakthrough, called Earned Schedule, corrects the problem and raises project time management to new prominence. What is EVM? Earned Value Management (EVM) is a technique for quantitatively assessing project performance. Simply put, EVM assigns a value to work that is planned (Planned Value, or PV) and that has been completed (Earned Value, or EV). Planned Value is the budgeted cost of the work to be performed. Earned Value is the budgeted cost of the work times the percent complete. Cost performance is measured by comparing EV and the actual cost of the work performed. Schedule performance is measured by comparing EV and PV. Details of these concepts have been developed over the past thirty years, supported by a host of mathematical formulas. As this article is oriented toward practical application, it focuses more on illustrations and everyday language than conceptual details and mathematics, although some theory and formulas are required.
Wave Planning Editor’s note: This paper is an excerpt from his book 'Complex Project Management', available on amazon.com. Da.vid Dombkins is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Project Management. Wave planning is a methodology for planning complex projects. It brings together the characteristics of waves, cycles and chaos. I developed Wave Planning to help explain how project management could be used to implement change projects. The first Wave Plan was hand drawn on paper and was reproduced in a working paper entitled Project Managed Change. My initial work on Wave Planning was greatly expanded upon in my Doctoral Exegesis. The working paper used the WHOW Matrix to classify projects by type according to their level of uncertainty in both What and How. The WHOW Matrix provided the first typology for classifying projects along a continuum from traditional to complex. From its inception, the WHOW Matrix included organisational maturity as a key criteria – what is uncertain to one, may not be uncertain to another. In this paper the WHOW Matrix has been updated and is superseded by the revised Acquisition Categorisation Framework (ACAT).
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Critical Success Factors for International Projects Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for the 1st UTD Project Management Symposium, held in Plano, Texas, USA on August 6, 2007. It was selected for publication in PM World Today by the conference committee and is included here with permission of the authors and the Graduate Program in Project Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. The future of project management involves an ever increasing number of projects that require the cooperation of geographically and culturally diverse teams. Leaders in the international project arena today are more aware of the challenges and more excited by the opportunities to work with international teams and partners. As experience with these international project partnerships grows, the organizational competencies needed for success are emerging. Most prominent among them are the knowledge and skill to select the right projects and the right project partners for international efforts, as well as the ability to select, develop, and support leaders for projects and programs who have the skills and flexibility to make cross-border collaboration successful. The Challenges of Working in an International Project Environment As corporations all over the world have found time and time again, international project success requires mastering numerous challenges in a complex context. Conducting projects in different countries, with their unique legal and political environment, security issues, economic factors, and infrastructure limitations and requirements, increases complexity far beyond that of projects executed in domestic settings. In addition, the geographic distances, language barriers, and cross-cultural gaps that are typical of an international project environment introduce further leadership challenges and additional risk.
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Product Centric Project Management: Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for the 1st UTD Project Management Symposium, held in Plano, Texas, USA on August 6, 2007. It was selected for publication in PM World Today by the conference committee and is included here with permission of the author and the Graduate Program in Project Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. Why do projects? A simple question for project managers, often answered along the lines of “to meet shareholder expectations,” or “satisfy customer requirements,” or “achieve desired business results.” The problem with these responses is that they don’t really answer the question as they focus on intangible results which can be achieved in many ways (not just through projects) and essentially ignore the outcome given by the standard definition of a project which is “… to create a unique product or service*.” An unintended consequence of this standard thought process is that it lulls project managers into thinking that the project itself “achieves the desired business results” or “satisfies customer requirements” or “meets shareholder expectations.” In reality, there are two critical links in between the project activities and the desired results – creating a product with the proper attributes to enable the results and effectively using the product to achieve the results. Because explicit consideration of these two product centric links is often missing in project planning and execution, I call them the “missing links” to business results. I have observed that explicit consideration of these product centric links during project planning and execution, what I call Product Centric Project Management, greatly increases the project success rate as measured by achieving business results. * PMI Standards Committee, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, © 1996 The Project Management Institute Read complete paper in English
Churchill Personally Communicates By Mark Kozak-Holland Most people are very familiar with Winston Churchill but may not be familiar with his “agile” approach to project management and his skills as a PM in the summer of 1940. Part 13 looked at how Churchill put in place a communication plan to bolster morale in the Government, media, and public. This article discusses how Churchill personally communicated using both verbal and non-verbal communication to fight the mood of defeatism, build confidence, and get buy in into his plan. In today’s world PMs need to set up effective communication mechanisms where “effective project communications preserves your control in a project.” This requires a monitoring component in the communication plan to provide feedback on the plans effectiveness, and what is happening on the ground. Churchill’s project communications were centered around radio broadcasts used to speak directly with the public. The need to keep public opinion behind the war effort and home front morale high was at the core and he was deeply conscious of this. To get it right and to gain and sustain public confidence he invested inordinate amounts of time. For example he would prepare for one hour, an incredible amount of time for every minute of speech. A typical 40 minute speech would take 40 hours of preparation. This is completely unrealistic for today’s PM but it does put the high value of this activity into perspective.
How Male Machismo Shaped Project Management By Bas De Baar Imagine a man dressed in black sitting next to you in the office. He looks over your shoulder, observing as you type up a report. He takes notes, nods and mumbles quietly to himself. He counts the number of keystrokes you perform per minute. You try to ignore him, but have little luck. The next day you get instructions from your boss to remove fifteen keys from your keyboard as “they are very infrequently used,” to count in advance the exact number of words the report will have when finished, and to delegate the writing of a third of the total word count to each of three colleagues. This will surely seem an annoyance. You probably have a hard time believing that this scenario could actually happen in reality. What is remarkable is that this scene basically characterizes how we manage projects. At least, it characterizes project management in its most popular form: plan-driven. There is no denying that the most popular way of doing projects is described in PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). In Europe, PRINCE2 is widely used. Both are examples of plan-driven approaches. One has to ask, though, why plan-driven methods are currently the most widely-accepted. Why do we manage projects the way we do? The argument that they are simply “the best” doesn’t hold. If they were, no one would have created agile methods, for example. This illustrates that plan-driven methods may have some fundamental flaws in their underlying assumptions. Are they easily accessible, and can one quickly learn to use them effectively? On the contrary, the PMBOK is notorious for its tremendous size, dry content and high costs: not the aspects you associate with “easily accessible.” What is it, then, that caused the PMBOK (as the flagship of plan-driven approaches) to be considered the standard in our profession?
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