To Tailor or Not to Tailor: A Foregone Conclusion?
|
by: Klaus Nielsen, PMBOK® Guide-Seventh Edition Development Team member Did you know that many organizations have unsuccessfully tried to implement an off-the-shelf, or ready-made, project management methodology and found that it was unsuitable for their projects, their organization, and their level of organizational project management maturity? This often results in a lot of money, time and effort spent with little return and a decrease in staff morale. The one-size-fits-all approach is not working, because no two projects are the same. Different people, clients, vendors, technologies, cultures, approaches, sizes and such require extensive tailoring. Designing the delivery approach based on the context of the project, its objectives, stakeholders, and the environment is much more difficult than it may sound. Designing the delivery approach requires tailoring. We use tailoring to our project management methodology with the hope of buy-in from team members. In some cases, a tailored approach produces a more customer-oriented focus, centers on best-for-project approach, and reflects a more efficient use of project resources. It also helps to ensure that when the team agrees to use specific processes, tools, or ceremonies, everyone is aligned, and use is consistent. But who has not experienced the damage from tailoring not done correctly? I have! It’s when project team members are not using the methodology, independently modifying the methodology, or following the process for the sake of the process. When we tailor, we have a wide range of options. I tend to look at the processes and see whether it would work or not. Often, I have been faced with too many processes of little value. In some cases, inputs, tools, and techniques may be omitted or changed to make them work within a specific context. Also, when tailoring I examine the level of documentation required, as it’s often a great chunk of work. I want to make sure all project artefacts, documents, and plans provide value — not just documentation for the sake of documentation. Thinking back, if you had to apply everything the same way to all your projects for the last 20 years, that would be a nightmare. Firstly, I rarely do the same kind of projects the same way twice. Secondarily, if I had to do it all over, I would make a lot of changes (hopeful that I have learned something along the way). Think of tailoring as your opportunity to apply lessons learned. I think it’s difficult to talk about tailoring without touching upon efficiency and effectiveness. Now it becomes slightly trickier. I don’t see one without the other. I know some of you may have concerns about the connotations of these terms, so let me try to explain my view. Effectiveness talks to providing our customers with value through product delivery and producing the intended or expected result. It is also associated with the results from the actions of the team members and the project manager. On the other hand, efficiency talks to how we are performing or functioning in the best possible manner with the least waste of time and effort. It is also associated with how things are done. Who has not heard the following statement: “The fundamental reason why projects are late is because of inefficient use of resources. My job as a project leader is to move our expertise around to tackle as much work as possible, and to do so seamlessly?” In this case, efficiency means getting more work done with the least loss of time, which is done by maximizing utilization. In this case, efficient IS effective. In my native language of Danish, we use the same term for these two concepts. For others, efficiency is a poison. For them it also means maximizing utilization, which requires that we overcommit and confuse our staff, leaving them no slack to breathe or innovate. To them, efficient is the OPPOSITE of effective. However, that was not the intention. Just to wrap it up: Design the delivery approach based on the context of the project, its objectives, stakeholders, and the environment. Maximize value, manage costs, develop flow and enhance speed by utilizing just enough process. I think there might be a principle or two in there. |
September Community News You Can Use
|
It’s the most wonderful time of the year at PMI! Global Conference is just around the corner, and with this year’s exciting 50th anniversary celebrations, we are certainly counting down the days! If you will be in Philadelphia for the conference, please stop by the ProjectManagement.com Community booth and say hello. We would love to meet you! In this month’s look at what’s currently happening around the community, we’ll let you know how to keep up with all of the excitement at Global Conference – from near and far – as well as the other great community activities occurring in the final months of 2019! Register for PMI® Business Analysis Virtual Conference 2019: Registration is open for the PMI® Business Analysis Virtual Conference 2019 which will be held on Wednesday, November 13th. This virtual event will explore the latest trends in business analysis and provide you with the insights, resources, and tools to advance your career and enhance project success. Register today! This year, we welcome:
PMI® Organizational Agility Conference Available On-Demand: If you were unable to attend the recent PMI® Organizational Agility Conference on Evolving Approaches to Resilient Value Delivery, you can view all of the sessions on-demand here. Ask the Expert at PMI® Global Conference: Ask the Expert is back by popular demand at PMI® Global Conference 2019! These one-on-one sessions allow you to discuss your project question or problem, get advice about navigating the project management career path, or talk through issues currently facing the profession from a trusted and established ProjectManagement.com expert. If you are attending Global Conference, sign-up for a session here. For those who will not be in Philadelphia, you can follow our Experts at Conference through the PMI Global Insights blog where they will share their experiences and insights from the event. Industry Discussion Threads: This year, PMI launched a new initiative focusing on four industry segments in the fields of IT, Finance, Government and Construction. As part of that focus, we have been highlighting some existing PM Network content on ProjectManagement.com in order to engage the community and learn more about specific industry needs. Check out the industry discussion threads in Project Management Central! Discover PMI - Ask Us Anything! Series: Learn more about PMI’s Job Board by viewing the latest session on-demand - Powering Your Career with PMI: Explore the PMI Job Board to Power You Career - featuring Ansley Stauffer. Project Health Framework: Join fellow community member, Uri Galimidi, as he discusses A Billion Dollar Project Health Framework in his eight part webinar series. You can now access Part 1 through Part 5 on-demand! Check the Live Webinars calendar for the remaining sessions. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to a member of the Community Engagement team – we’re happy to help you. As always, stay tuned to the Critical Path for your community news! |
Adaptation and Value Creation for All Projects: An Exploration of Principles
|
By: Nader K. Rad, PMBOK® Guide-Seventh Edition Development Team member Once Upon a Time! There was a policy in one of the companies I used to work for about 20 years ago: “Every procurement activity should be done in the headquarters, rather than in projects’ construction sites”. They believed it was more cost-effective. One day, I realized that in one of the attempts at cost-effectively purchasing material for covering the joints of concrete sections, the process was so prolonged that the critical concrete work was paused in one of the sites for four days. I was the project planner at that time and I immediately went to the project manager, who simply told me that organizational processes should be respected! I went to the procurement department and realized that we just didn’t speak the same language. So I went back to my desk, called the project site, and asked the technician responsible for that section whether they could buy the material locally. He said they could do it in one hour. The cost? Only about €250 for two weeks’ supply! I sent them €250 from my own pocket to buy the material and resume work. The company reimbursed me but asked me not to do something like that again, and of course, I kept doing that. Diagnosis
One aspect of the problem was that they cared about money (which is fine), but not in the correct way. It’s not only about the money we spend, but also about the money we [can] gain. What we want to optimize is not the cost, but the “benefits ÷ cost” ratio – given that we consider all types of benefits, short-term and long-term, and direct and indirect (e.g., reputation, market reach, and knowledge). Value This relatively subjective “benefits ÷ cost” ratio is what we usually call business value, or value for short. We can always ask ourselves whether our selected choice is the one that contributes most to the value of the project/product. Do you consider value in your decisions? Adaptation
When we talk about adaptation, it’s usually about adapting the product of the project to the environment, which is what happens in adaptive (Agile) projects and is very important and interesting. However, that’s not the only type of adaptation; there’s another one that applies to every type of project: adaptation of our delivery and management approach to their environment. In my example, those problems could have been prevented if proper planning and risk management were in place. However, for some reason, that level didn’t exist. In such a case, when we see that we can’t fix our planning and risk-management system in order to have the ideal procurement method, we need to change our procurement method to adapt to this situation and prevent bigger problems. Do you stick to your ideal methods or adapt to the environment? Outcome Another issue with concrete work in that project was that the concrete was going to be exposed in the final product, and therefore, we needed to do some extra work to make sure the surface was clean enough. One day, someone suggested a simpler way of doing that; according to experienced engineers, the quality was much lower, but it was a lot faster and less expensive. So we decided to experiment with something! The project was for building a central library in a university, and we had access to thousands of end-users! We offered €30 to any student who wanted to join our experiment, and we picked the first 100 volunteers. We had two walls finished, one with each of the two methods, and we asked the students to tell us which one was better. In the end, we found no significant difference in the number of votes for the two methods, and we concluded that the new method was as good as the old one for our end-users, and so we decided to proceed with it. It happens a lot: Either we spend too much money on an element of the product that doesn’t make any difference for the end-users, or we make it in a way that doesn’t satisfy them. Isn’t it a good idea to focus on outcomes before outputs and activities? Conclusion It doesn’t matter what type of project we have; it seems like we can always ask these three questions in our activities and decision-making process:
If these have the potential to help us in all or most projects, then maybe we’re talking about principles for running projects! Perhaps those principles could be summarized as:
|
I’m sure you’re thinking about many problems in this scenario: They needed a more proactive project manager, they needed to use “manage by exception”, etc.
The other problem is that they were not adaptive enough.NEW Discussion Thread for Financial Services Sector Posted!
| In addition to IT, Construction and Government sectors, we selected two pieces of content from the Financial Services sector to help launch the first discussion thread posted within the following links located in Project Management Central: Blockchain Projects Greek Revival: Managing Expectations on the Road to Economic Recovery We welcome you to engage in these discussions! Enjoy! |
The First Step: Understanding the Why
|
By Vanina Mangano, Standards Member Advisory Group Back in January 2017, I attended an annual event hosted by PMI for its group of volunteers serving in a leadership capacity. On the very first day of that conference, PMI made an exciting announcement: it was transforming. I remember feeling excitement and curiosity buzzing through the large room of volunteers – no naysayers could be heard, just intent and curious listeners who wondered what changes would follow suit. Even before PMI kicked off its transformational efforts, some critical conversations were taking place behind the scenes that would drive some of the changes unfolding within the Standards community. These conversations would influence the move from process- to principle-based standards. Brian Grafsgaard and Mike Frenette blogged about these changes back in August, and I thought I would follow their posts with some additional commentary and insight regarding why these changes are taking place. First, did you know that there are various types of standards? Mike already provided a fantastic summary of what a principle-based standard is in his August 28th post. If you missed it, I highly encourage you to read it – not only is it informative, but it was a fun and interesting read! There are three general approaches used to document standards:
Skimming through the three definitions above, mapping the PMBOK® Guide–Sixth Edition to the approach used is not that difficult: it follows the process-based approach. Brian noted in an August 2nd blog post that the standard in the Seventh Edition of the PMBOK® Guide will evolve from a process-based to principle-based standard. The Standard for Program Management first shifted in this direction in its Third Edition and the Standard for Portfolio Management recently followed in its latest Edition. PMI is not unique in going this route; the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has long used this less prescriptive approach. Those “behind the scenes” conversations I referred to at the start of this post have been occurring among Standards leadership over the past few years, largely driven by practitioner feedback – arguably the biggest driver for the changes. Specifically, practitioner feedback stressed that the standards must address the full value delivery landscape. The standard in the Seventh Edition of the PMBOK® Guide will aim to do this very thing – document the stable project management concepts that lead to successful outcomes across the full value delivery landscape. This will be achieved through a set of guiding principles that apply across the value delivery spectrum, including predictive, adaptive, and hybrid delivery approaches. Shifting this direction doesn’t imply that the elements of the “how” fully go away. In reality, more tools, techniques, and approaches exist than can be incorporated in one book. These resources are better collected and delivered through an online tool, which I hear is also in development. PMI will shed more light on that later this year. Personally, I’m thrilled at this new direction, and I can see alignment with PMI’s 2017 Strategic Plan that was first introduced in the 2017 January leadership conference. I’ve seen my fair share of practitioners misinterpret how to apply the project management processes, viewing the processes as Waterfall-based, to be applied in a literal and / or sequential fashion (to be fair, the concept of “tailoring” can sometimes be difficult to understand when digesting a process-based approach). Pivoting to a broader set of parameters within which we operate as project management practitioners will enable us to better leverage the knowledge and core practices that have made PMI effective for decades. I hope the larger community of practitioners feels that their voices have been heard through the coming changes. As Brian noted earlier, the profession is evolving. The set of tools we need to be effective leaders must also evolve and transform. Respectfully, Vanina Mangano, PMP |
