projectified : Project Management

PMBlvd Blog Guest Post

brianken — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:43:43 GMT

I guest posted over on the PMBlvd blog “PM Bistro” about keeping processes and PM tools simple. Check it out.

Is Agile Really just “Good Project Management”?

brianken — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:43:44 GMT

Glenn Alleman has a great post here asking the question “If I'm Doing Project Management Right am I Agile?” and my answer is a resounding PROBABLY!!! :-)

I have been thinking this same thing since way back in 2004 when I posted about an article I saw about agile methods. My post was called “Agile Methods: Based on False Assumptions?” In it I talked about how many of the points the author was making about what it called “Traditional Management” was really just bad management. This was at a time when I was on some email lists that talked about PM methods and I was getting the feeling that Agile had been created by a group of people that had worked for the WORST PMS EVER. The stories they told and the processes they talked about were not the PM I understood and practiced. It was some horrible torture method designed by people that did not like software developers. I started to feel like the Agile community was a support group for abused software developers. The hard part was that they were talking about “Project Managers” as if they were an interchangeable set of identical parts” (IRONIC since that was one of the main accusations the agile community was making about how PMs saw software developers.)

That said I don’t think that good project management and Agile methods are a 100% overlap I do think that if you are doing project management correctly and the methods you are using in the management of your project are well fit to the particular project you are managing then what you are doing will NOT be the kind of PM that the agile community rails against. So for the most part the answer to Glenn’s question is YES. :-)

Reliability\Quality of Data

brianken — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:34:22 GMT

In the past few weeks I have seen a ton of questions floating around about users of project management systems wanting to see reporting showing resource capacity vs. demand. Now you might be saying “But Brian, that is pretty common. Doesn’t EVERYONE want this kind of data from their PM system?” to which I would reply “Certainly, but these requests were different in that they all wanted to see it for time periods going out as far as 2 years into the future.” My question is what is someone going to do with a comparison between demand (scheduled work) and availability that far into the future? The instant answer I always get is that they want to see how the current load of projects scheduled is placing demand on their resources and that is a good answer. But in my opinion most organizations are just not good enough at scheduling and estimating and forecasting to make schedule data that far into the future of a quality that would support any real decision making around demand\capacity problems. Schedules are hard enough to get accurate for the next 2 months let alone the next 2 years.

There are industries or environments\situations where the type of projects being done are easy to estimate because they have a high similarity with projects that have already been done but for the most part capacity\demand data derived from project schedules should be looked at as ‘fuzzy’ if the time period of the data is farther out than a few months and even fuzzier if it is more than a year out.

There are decisions that can be made based on this data but they should be made with the knowledge that those numbers could swing wildly in some cases depending on changes to the project as it moves forward. The adage that some data is better than no data holds true for the most part but ‘some data’ that is highly suspect but still used in the decision making process as if it was certain is worse than no data.

When you are looking at data that depends on the quality of your schedule estimates and project WBS you need to think about that quality when you make decisions based on that data. Where are those estimates coming from? Are they top-down estimates (like many that are that far out into the future) or are they bottoms-up estimates coming from the resources that will do the work (hard to do when the tasks in question are months or even over a year in the future?