The Long Haul - Part 1
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Date
Long Haul - Part I
This is Part I of a two-part series which references PMI’s two major publications – PM Network magazine and The Project Management Journal. In particular we focus on the two most recent editions of these magazines – the February 2016 PM Network and the February/March 2016 Project Management Journal.
Part I: Hidden Success
The cover story and theme of this month’s PM Network magazine is “the Long Haul”. And while it’s focused on “marathon” projects – meaning those that (although temporary) are long-duration projects, there are several articles and features that talk to the version of “The Long Haul” that we like – which is this: even for a short project, the project manager does right for the project, and right by the project, if he or she thinks way, way, past the end date and to the steady state – to the “long haul” of the project’s product.
Let’s discuss The Hidden Success Factor – an article by Frederico Cox, Jr. In this article the author implores project managers to look beyond scope, budget, and schedule – to the client – to determine if your project succeeded or failed. The entire concept of defining success in a project context (see Part II) is not only fascinating, it is increasingly important for project management maturity. An immature project management culture is obsessed with project measurements around scope, schedule and cost. There is of course, nothing wrong with focusing on these project efficiency measures. They do indeed indicate how well the project is going, and how well the project meets PROJECT goals. But step back for a moment. Think about the timeline as you step back and think about the project timeline (say 8 months) relative to the life of the product of your project (maybe 8 years or 80 years!). With that view – the “Long Haul” view – it is important that the project ran efficiently but isn’t success really defined by whether or not the customer really gained benefits from using the product of your project? This is Cox’s point – a customer may be extremely happy with a project that didn’t achieve its planned scope quality or cost, and, although not stated, the other side of the coin is that the client may be very unhappy with a project that is exceedingly under budget, exactingly on time, and meticulously meets scope.
In our book, Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success, we use our E3 model to describe this. The three E’s of the 3E model are Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Endurance.
As you can see from the figure, our view of project success, like that of Cox, takes into account the way the project was run (“Efficiency”) along with the target producing a result that the client base liked (“Effectiveness”) and we add depth to this by asserting that the missing dimension is how that product serves its customers over time – in the Long Haul – well after the project variances are long-forgotten (“Endurance”).
You can see one example here that was high in Effectiveness and low in Efficiency. The Sydney Opera House.
Check it out. We dare you. Ask anyone who has been to a performance at the Sydney Opera House. Go ahead. Ask them. Ask them if they think the Opera House was a “failure”. They’ll say, “how can you even ask that? It’s a symbol of Australia. We had a great time! It was spectacular!”.
Yet the statistics of that project are spectacularly BAD.
The project was originally scheduled for four years, with a budget of AUS $7 million. It ended up taking 14 years to be completed and cost AUS $102 million. That’s a 1400% over-run in costs and a schedule that ran 10 years late. The original design lacked any considerations for acoustics.
So – to make a very un-Australian baseball analogy…
• Time: swing and a miss
• Cost: swing and a miss
• Scope: swing and a miss
Three strikes and… yer out?
Not necessarily. What does that failed ‘efficiency’ look like now?
“It has turned into one of our most valuable national assets. According to modelling by Deloitte, the Opera House adds $775 million to the Australian economy every year in direct ticket sales, retail and food spending and by boost to tourism to Australia.” - Source" article from Australia's Courier Mail
So maybe, in the long run, it was a home run.
In Part II we’ll talk further about success, based on an article also geared to construction projects, focused on success factors. Until then, you can dream of enjoying a nice show at the Sydney Opera House!
Posted
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Richard Maltzman
on: February 26, 2016 07:57 PM |
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