By Ammar Mango

It was like the superman cliché, but in reverse.  It took them three years to develop it, only to find out that their efforts to develop a network diagram template resulted in a monster workflow model that was too scary to attempt even by the bravest project teams.  This in short was my findings from one of my first project management investigation assignments. 

I was chosen for the assignment because I had done research on project management models during my Masters degree and had the experience of dealing with huge master networks with thousands of nodes in them.  I was given the task to review a generic “network diagram” for a Fortune 100 company which they developed to be used as a template on their future product development projects.  I use quotes around the term “network diagram” because it became clear to me later that what they were referring to as a “network diagram” was not really a network diagram.     Regardless of definitions, the diagram that they had built was a force to reckon with.  It had over 3000 nodes and took three years to develop and finalize. 

One thing I could say for sure was that everybody at the client company was excited about the network, and had high hopes that I would give them some good tips on how they can use it for future projects.  In fact, to be practical, and to speed things up, they asked me to enter the “network diagram” information into a project management software immediately so they can use it on a key project they were about to launch. 

I did not know then that I was getting into my first encounter with a common mix-up many companies have between workflow diagrams and network diagrams.  Many companies assume that defining a workflow of how work should be done on a typical project is the same as a project schedule.  All one has to do, presumably, is to take the workflow and use it as a network diagram.  Since some of these workflows come already loaded with duration and resource estimates, this was supposed to make them even easier to translate into a workable schedule.  In reality, this cannot be farther from the truth.

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