Voices on Project Management

By Kevin Korterud

When I first started as a technology project manager, it was not uncommon for a project to have just one deliverable. All of the tasks in the project created the path that led to the single deliverable, which in many cases was a program, report or screen. Life used to be so easy!

As projects became more complex, the need grew for multiple project deliverables that lead to a complete solution. Deliverables now represent the “building blocks” that form a key foundational element of any project.

Whereas scheduling tasks is a fairly straightforward process that involves capturing durations, resources and successor/predecessor networks, scheduling deliverables comes with its own set of complexities. Deliverables don’t always behave in a linear manner like tasks­—so special considerations come into play with their scheduling. In addition, there are typically people and expectation factors that need to be part of a deliverable scheduling model.

Here are three essential reminders for properly scheduling deliverables:   

1. Deliverables Involve a Package of Tasks

Whereas tasks are singular items that stand alone in a work plan, deliverables have a few extra packaging steps in their path to completion.

One of the most dangerous scheduling mistakes to make with deliverables is to have a single task in a work plan that represents the deliverable. This is because of the variation in duration and effort that it takes to complete a deliverable.

Deliverables have a natural path to completion that involves a package of tasks, whose dynamics differ from normal tasks in a work plan. Project managers need to include these extra tasks that chart the lifecycle of a deliverable from initiation to completion.

For example, a sample set of deliverable task packaging would appear as follows:

You can tell from the above table that prior to scheduling deliverable task packages, project managers need to have a deliverable governance process in place. A deliverable governance process that identifies specific deliverable reviewers and a single approver are key to the effective scheduling of deliverables.

2. Deliverables May Require Task-like Linkages

We are all familiar with creating predecessor or successor linkages between tasks to form a linear series of work needed to achieve an outcome. Those linkages serve to drive schedule changes as prevailing project conditions occur.

Deliverables can require the same sort of linkages found in tasks. For example, if you have deliverables that lead to the creation of a marketing web page that involves multiple supplier deliverables, selected tasks in the deliverable package can contain task linkages. These linkages impose conditions which determine the pace at which related deliverables can be completed.

Let’s say there are three design documents from different suppliers required to create an overall design document. The build of the overall design document cannot finish before those three supplier design documents are all approved. So in the work plan, delays and schedule movements in the supplier design deliverables will drive the true completion date of the overall design document.

3. Resource Availability Impacts Deliverables

In addition to the scenario of having deliverables with dependencies, it is just as likely to have a set of deliverables that do not have any dependencies at all. These deliverables need to be completed by the end of the project but do not directly figure into the final outcome of the project. These are often process improvement deliverables that are needed for future projects that are not ready for execution.

When a project manager has a slate of unrelated deliverables, the optimal approach is to bundle them into agile-like sprints. The content of each deliverable sprint is determined by a balance of resource availability for the people who build, review and approve deliverables, as well as any form of relative priority. For example, if deliverable reviewers have low availability during a scheduled deliverable sprint, those deliverables can be pushed to a subsequent deliverable sprint.

Priority can also determine the content of deliverable sprints. Higher priority deliverables would displace lower priority deliverables to future sprints, even if work has begun on those deliverables. For example, if there is a strong need for a certain tool to be used by multiple projects, those deliverables would move into the current deliverable sprint. The deliverable sprint process allows for agility, while balancing value created from the deliverables.

As I shared earlier, life was so much easier when projects created one deliverable. Different times demand different approaches to managing deliverable schedules—especially on large transformations where there could be hundreds of dependent and independent deliverables. The last thing anyone wants to do is insufficiently manage deliverables: Leaving out one of those “building blocks” might cause the house to fall over.

What tips do you have for deliverable scheduling in today’s project ecosystem? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By Ramiro Rodrigues

In the 2009 film Knowing, a boy finds a time capsule filled with documents from decades ago. His father, an astrophysics professor, then discovers that the messages list some recent and impending major disasters, and even predict a global calamity in the near future.

Apocalyptic visions of an imminent end to the world have always brought joy to the film industry—but they bump into the same logical limitations that are still impossible to overcome. As far as we know, we do not have an effective technology capable of predicting the future. Whether it is related to weather forecasting, economics or sociology, we are not able to tell, at present, precisely what will happen at a specific moment in the future.

What we have always had is a great will to take a chance and get it right. Since the beginning of time, man has ventured to predict the future and, during these attempts, we’ve come up with an ocean of predictions that have been proven wrong. But we don't give up.

A New Model of Scheduling

In today’s organizations, modern project management has to meet the need for schedule development that seeks, in a deterministic fashion, to set the estimated dates of future events related to people, project deliveries and work that will be executed. This usually is a great Achilles' heel in the field of project management. The organizational frustration that results from estimated scheduled activities that turn out to be incorrect is very common.

Why don’t they happen as expected? There are different reasons, usually related to people and intrinsic characteristics of the expected activities. But in essence, they happen because it still is impossible to predict the future. Of course, there are some strategies that can help mitigate the risks of the deterministic forecast, but in the end, they are only predictions.

However, we must understand that organizations need to estimate when the returns on their investments will be accessible for use. Some executives will say that there is no progress without clear and foreseen goals.

That’s right. But how do we get out of this complex scenario in which future dates are determined but do not happen as planned?

One trend that has been applied by industries such as consulting, engineering and research & development is the probabilistic forecast of schedules. In this case, with the assistance of simple statistical concepts, the forecasts of the activities and of the project are viewed as a whole, with probability ranges to conclude them.

It is not solely a mathematical solution; the change is conceptual. The idea is no longer to set, within the organization, the delivery estimates at certain dates grounded on the expectation that they will come true. Rather, the goal is to present length ranges that provide the company with a perspective that there is, for instance, a 68 percent, 95 percent or 99.7 percent chance that the project delivery will take place during the expected dates.

This change in principle allows for the understanding that one can never be 100 percent sure of what will happen in the future but, at the same time, enables the management of the risks involved with reasonable control.

This planning model can bring, in the near future, more maturity and quality to the management of schedules and deliveries.

Do you use this model in your organization? Share your thoughts below. 

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D., M.B.A.

Today, developments in emerging technology, business processes and digital experiences are accelerating larger transformation initiatives. Moore’s Law means that we have access to exponentially better computing capabilities. Growth is further fueled by technologies such as supercomputers, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Internet of Things (IoT) and more across industries.

Emerging Tech
The global IT industry is valued at $5.3 trillion in 2020 and is poised to grow 6.2 percent by 2021, according to tech market research firm IDC. Emerging technology like augmented reality and robotics will make up an increasing share of that growth.

Business Process Maturity
Organizations are improving the maturity of their business processes. They’re doing this by automating tasks, eliminating them, improving performance or finding the lowest-cost way to perform a task. Organizations are connecting with experts to collaborate across a wider network of colleagues. This enables strategies to be integrated across the value chain to quickly drive business outcomes.

According to market research group IMARC, automation and the IoT are driving growth in business process management (BPM); the BPM market is expected to grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate between 2020 and 2025.

Customer Experience
In addition, having a formidable customer experience strategy can make the difference between customers choosing your brand or your competitors in 2020. That’s according to Core dna, a digital experience platform vendor.

Customer experience is redefining business processes and digitizing the consumption model to increase brand equity. Gartner reports that among marketing leaders who are responsible for customer experience, 81 percent say their companies will largely compete on customer experience in two years. However, only 22 percent have developed experiences that exceed customer expectations.

Economic Forces
Lastly, the potential for cash flow growth remains high in 2020, despite economic risks, according to the U.S. Corporate Credit Outlook 2020. This will likely lead to capital investments and a fair portion of companies funding transformational projects.

The Way Forward
While transformations have evolved, they encapsulate the way we think and operate. Old methods may seem encumbering and administratively difficult, creating bureaucracy and delays in decision making. The challenge is the velocity of change, which is very disruptive to organizations.

I’ve developed a few guidelines to help navigate this change:

• Work with an agile mindset.
• Fail often and fast to ultimately filter out winning initiatives.
• Define the cultural attributes that propel staff and colleagues to succeed on their endeavors.

Change is now inherent and pervasive in the annual planning process for organizations. Given that, I like to ask: What is the plan to prepare staff and colleagues to compete in this hyper-transformation age?

What observations have you made to keep up with this new era’s velocity of change?

By Lynda Bourne

Any output from a planning process is an embodiment of the planners’ fundamental principles and philosophies. They apply these principles, or approaches, to develop their plans. And different people will develop different plans to achieve the same objectives.

As early as the 1950s, James Kelley, one of the developers of the critical path method (CPM), reflected on this theme. He noted that in a class of 20-plus people learning the new CPM approach to scheduling, developing a 16-activity schedule from a set class exercise would result in nine to 10 different schedules. Clearly, different people use different approaches and assumptions.

What Shapes Approaches

The planner’s approaches may be explicitly stated, or they may be implicit and affected by:

• The values, preferences, beliefs and culture of the organization and its planners
• The circumstances under which planning is done

The conundrum facing organizations is deciding the best approach to develop a plan—one that’s accomplished in the most efficient way within a given set of circumstances, in a given cultural environment, that results in the best outcomes. There is no one right answer to this question, or one way of knowing if the chosen options have delivered the desired result. Each project is unique, making tests and comparisons impossible.

Some of the approaches that can be used in combination, or isolation, include:

This diagram pairs opposite approaches; it’s up to you to determine where on the continuum is best for you in the current situation.

Applying the Approaches
Each of the dimensions diagrammed has two extremes—formalized versus improvised. In some situations, one extreme or the other may be best; most of the time, a more balanced approach is likely to be better.

The challenge is understanding the choices open to you and then making informed decisions about where on each of the dimensions is best for you in the current circumstances. Making overt choices rather than just doing the normal thing will generally lead to better planning outcomes.

For example, an agile project will require a planning approach that leans toward using non-rationality, incrementalism, contingent, emergence, improvisation, utopian, pluralistic, democratic and continuous approaches to the planning activity. A traditional “hard dollar” engineering contract, on the other hand, tends to require the opposite.

My recommendation is you think through these options. This offers you an opportunity to improve your planning practice, as one approach will not suit every project and simply doing the same as last time will inevitably lead to a suboptimal outcome.

How do you think about your approach to planning?

By Ramiro Rodrigues

I'm 50 years old, which means I was born the same year PMI was founded. The last half century has seen a lot of interesting projects across industries, but today I’m going to focus on one area in particular: cinema. 

I’ll start with a question: What swept the Oscars in 1969? You may know it was Oliver!—a British musical based on the work of Charles Dickens. In addition to best picture, the movie also won the awards for best director, musical score, art direction and sound.

The magic of cinema progressed in parallel to the 20th century at large, and I’ve long admired its ability to create fantasies and magnetize audiences. These same capacities evolved as technology and investments provided more technical resources for the enchantment of the audience.

The delivery of a movie has always impressed me, as it has all the ingredients of a project. There is conception, planning, execution, control and conclusion—all with the added complexity of dealing with human emotions even more so than in other business segments. 

Today's major productions involve hundreds of professionals, suppliers and deliveries, so they require a well-structured project management model. And if the delivery of a movie provides all these difficulties, imagine what it takes to deliver a saga of 23 films? Well, this was the case for the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Why should we consider this a grand project? Starting with the first movie, Iron Man, in 2008, you can find several “Easter eggs” referencing the other Avengers. And in the post-credits scene (a practice that started there), Nick Fury appears to talk about the Avengers initiative. Thus begins an intricate sequence of characters and films over 12 years, which translated into the largest franchise and box office phenomena of all time.

If it was not enough complexity to produce a single film of this nature, imagine the magnitude of a long-term project that would involve scores of producers, suppliers and actors. And this was accomplished while delivering a structured and coherent plot that lived up to the expectations of a global audience.

This gives us clues into why more and more cultural producers are looking to specialize in the best practices of project management. These principles have much to contribute to ensure organization and control, without interfering with the magic and emotions that art provides. After all, the show must go on!

I’d love to hear from you. Do you see movies as projects? Share why or why not below.