Beware The Spaghetti Diagram

 

Some years back I had accepted a job to head up a major program office. It had a huge budget, but no cohesive or even usable cost/schedule performance management system in place, and previous attempts at installing one had failed spectacularly. The fellow I was replacing had a Ph.D. in a technical discipline, but didn’t know a fraction of what he thought he knew about Project Management. The person who hired me asked me to attend a meeting of the Program Controls Office team prior to anyone knowing I was about to succeed this Ph.D., and so I did, but made it a point to sit in the back of the rather large conference room and be as small as I could.

The Ph.D. arrived, and strode up to the white board to draw four red triangles across the top.

“These represent the major milestones this program is on the hook for this fiscal year” he began. “Each of them has several subordinate milestones that are part of its scope” he continued, as he drew a few smaller triangles in a row beneath the first triangles, but in a different color.

“We have to provide status on our progress against these milestones to the customer, but the level two milestones are themselves supported by multiple level three milestones” he said as he drew more triangles along the bottom of the white board, in still yet another color.

“Now, these milestones have some relationships we need to discuss” he continued, in what I perceived to be a somewhat condescending tone. “These level one milestones depend on the level two milestones being completed on-time” he said, as he drew lines between the top-tiered triangles and the mid-level ones. “And the level two depend on the level three” as he drew lines between the mid and lowest-tiered triangles. “In addition, some of these milestones depend on the availability of the same facilities or other specific resources,” which he indicated by drawing lateral lines among the lowest level triangles, but in a different color than the lines indicating the hierarchical scope relationship. “And finally, at each level there are going to be milestones that need to be completed prior to the start of others,” leading to more lines being drawn but, since he had run out of different colors, he re-used the color of the level one milestones (red).

Since I was in the back of the room, I had a good vantage point for evaluating the whiteboard from an overall perspective. It was an incoherent mess, but with the level one milestones being represented in red sitting atop smaller triangles and multiple, crisscrossing lines it kind of looked like an immense serving of spaghetti and meat balls.

“As difficult as it may appear, we have to find a way of capturing the scheduling data for these milestones, and report on them accordingly.”

The room erupted in questions.

“Is there a way of prioritizing the level one milestones?”

“Do all the organizations performing the work on these milestones agree on that prioritization?”

“Are all of the projects involved using Critical Path Methodology software, or even the same package?”

The nature of the questions reassured me that the team I was to inherent in a couple weeks knew their stuff, but I became convinced that their (then) director was clueless.

As the meeting wrapped, an old friend of mine who happened to be on the program controls team invited the Ph.D. to sit with me for a moment to get my input. I had made it a point to not say a thing, but now I was cornered.

“Listen, George (not the Ph.D.’s real name), the relationships you just described are well-known aspects of a schedule baseline. When you say that the level one milestones are dependent on the level twos, and so forth, you are describing a decomposition of scope that’s nominally performed by establishing a Work Breakdown Structure. The description of the need to capture common or shared facilities and resources among the milestones is typically handled via a master resource dictionary. And the need to capture which milestones (he meant activities, but I thought it best to use his lexicon) need to be finished before others can start is quantified using schedule logic. Any CPM software package worth the name will be able to accommodate these parameters, and provide the kind of schedule performance information you are looking for.”

My friend who had put me in the hot seat was gesturing towards me as if to say “What he said!”, but George was having nothing of it.

“We’re already arranging a series of coordinated spreadsheets that list all of these milestones, and the relationships I just discussed. We’ll be able to handle it that way.”

I pretty much knew George would reject anything I had to say, but I felt the need to offer it up for rejection nevertheless. The serving of spaghetti-like diagram that he had drawn on the white board provided clear evidence that he was attempting to deal with PM concepts that he didn’t understand, rendering any attempt to convert those concepts into a workable strategy inchoate at best, and utterly misguided (and therefore wrong) at worst.

On the plus side, the whole episode served as a stark example of how, when authors, paper presenters, and, yes, bloggers push figures or tables that indicate entities, functions, or activities encapsulated in shapes that have lines or arrows in between representing some sort of vaguely-defined relationship, it’s a sure sign that the author has a poor grasp of the concepts underpinning the proposed process or strategy, which in turn means it’s probably going to be, well, wrong.

Another unexpected outcome of the meeting: I had to have Italian food for dinner that evening.