I was recently teaching a course where the discussion turned to project resourcing, and the problem of people being stretched more thinly than ever. I suggested to the student that maybe her company’s mechanism for “project selection” needed to be revisited with her management, so that the number of projects could be decreased until the excessive workload was completed. “There would be no point” she said, “my manager says ‘yes’ to everything”. A few other students nodded in sad agreement, hinting that they faced a similar behavior.
It was very unfortunate because the responsibility of a company’s management is, precisely, to prioritize in the face of constrained resources. It is not to take the easy way out, “say ‘yes’ to everything”, and demand that teams work under stressful conditions. Although it may look like such a manager is being cooperative, this is not the case. The result will be disappointed customers, or overworked employees who will become ill or leave the business. In other words, ‘saying yes to everything’, while easy, is not sustainable. It also doesn’t merit the higher salary that managers command for supposedly making thoughtful and informed decisions about organizational resources.
The PMBOK® methodology from the Project Management Institute is very clear on the topic of project selection. Its best-of-breed steps recommend starting, not by Planning a project, but with a proper Initiation of the project. What happens during Initiation? The feasibility of performing the project, in light of other proposals/ requirements/ constraints is studied and deliberately approved. This exercise can only be effective if the entire portfolio of possible projects is considered and prioritized, to make sure that only the more worthy projects are the ones formally selected. Formal selection means then, being willing to invest enough resources to deploy the effort successfully.
Can this mix of ‘selected’ projects change? Yes, certainly. A few months after the entire portfolio is prioritized, new potential projects can be discovered that merit ‘selection’. In this case, some previously selected projects may have to move to the back-burner, or another source of funding identified to deliver the new mix of projects.
We could think of the whole exercise as a household’s budget. It is finite and constrained, so which expenses will be a part of the budget need to be prioritized and deliberately selected. If suddenly it becomes critical to have little Timmy take guitar lessons, then something else will have to fall out of that budget. And it becomes obvious that the household can’t “just say yes to everything”.
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For more resources, see the Library topic Project Management.
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Hi there,
The result will be disappointed customers, or overworked employees who will become ill or leave the business.
Thanks
Robin
Whoa…… Alicia…… PMI’s PMBOK Guide being “best-of-breed”?
Better look again. Check out page 4, top of the page, where it explains that what PMI advocates is those practices “generally recognized as being good practices”. And that is a step up from previous PMBOK Guides which advocated those practices used on “most projects, most of the time”- in other words, AVERAGE practices.
Now tell me- you are going in for open heart surgery. Someone is going to hold your heart in their hand. Do you want them using the methods used on “most patients, most of the time”? Or those methods “generally recognized as being good”? Or do you want that cardiac surgeon to be using the latest, best tested and proven practices on you?
I am a life-long project manager- not an accidental one. Project Manager was what I wanted to be when I grew up and 45+ years later, it is STILL what I want to be when I grow up. The project management book that sits on the corner of my desk that I use almost daily to help run the projects we do, where our own money is on the line if they fail, is Gary Humphrey’s “Project Management Using Earned Value”. http://www.humphreys-assoc.com/evms/evms-books-project-management-using-earned-value-second-edition-p-16-c-11.html
I challenge you- compare Humphrey’s book against the PMBOK Guide and I will promise you, Humphrey’s will win using any metric, and best of all, it contains a step by step process that actually WORKS.
BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.build-project-management-competency.com
Dear Paul,
Thank you for your comment. Although I don’t engage in ‘challenges’ (candid discussion and good will are my currency) I wanted to explain a couple of points.
Firstly: I agree with you that Gary Humphrey’s discussion of Earned Value is among the best and most detailed in the Project Management body of literature. However, my point was that, unless a careful ‘Project Initiation’ had been performed -as advocated by PMI’s PMBOK- a project may fail because it was selected for the wrong reasons, or not selected at all. In that case, no amount of good progress tracking (no Function Points, no Earned Value) would help the Project Manager. Their project may fail, or be cancelled.
Secondly, hundreds of thousands of PMs worldwide use the PMBOK standard. It has the respect of governments and Blue-Chip companies which have adopted it as their methodology and make it a pre-requisite to hire their PMs. And it has the foresight to require a robust Project Initiation. So among the methodologies at my disposal, it is best-of-breed.
Thanks again for writing; I wish you every success.
Alicia
Hi Alicia,
To help you expand your world beyond PMI, here are the two best-in-breed “end to end models” of project development that I use and recommend. (both of which are coming from the more mature construction sector)
1) The AIA’s “IPD Approach”- http://info.aia.org/SiteObjects/files/IPD_Guide_2007.pdf and/or;
2) From the oil and gas sectors “Value Assurance Process” http://www.zadco.com/CMS/AboutZADCO/CorporateOverviewMissionVisionValues/AssetManagement/tabid/255/Default.aspx (Note: The Zadco approach is used by nearly all the major oil and gas companies and applies specifically to project development in OWNER companies, not contractors)
As you can see, both the AIA and VAP processes put much more emphasis on the “development” of the project, which usually happens well before there even is a project, much less a project manager.
And yes, I agree with you that hundreds of thousands of people hold their PMP and that many organizations have adopted the PMBOK Guide as the basis for their project management methodology. But I ask you- in the 40+ years PMI has been in existence or the 28 years that the PMP has been around, have projects “success” (defined to be on time; within budget; in substantial conformance to the technical requirements while substantially delivering the value/benefits for which the project was undertaken) improved significantly? And why not? Because PMI is focusing MOSTLY on the execution phase of the project, not on the ever so critical development of the project that comes well before Initiation ever begins.
Bottom line- The IT sector is NOT yet a mature user of project management as a delivery system and many of the concepts PMI is touting are NOT working nor will they ever work. If you really want to master the art and science of project management, my best and most sincere advice would be to look beyond what PMI is advocating and start to look at the “end to end” processes, especially those used in the oil, gas and mining sectors for the development of capital projects.
BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.build-project-management-competency.com