Sharing Bad News On Project Success

A study in the Journal of Applied Psychology showed much lower willingness to share negative information on a project as it got closer to completion. The study was done on undergraduate students with reference to a fictional project. If the project was only 10% complete then at least 6 out of 10 people would share negative information on the project. However at 90% completion fewer than 2 out of 10 people were willing to share bad news on the project.

Implications

1. Supports the idea that many people are not comfortable sharing bad news.
2. If people are going to share bad news, they will be more likely to do it earlier in a project, than when it’s closer to completion.

Actions You Can Take In Light Of This

• Do everything you can to encourage sharing of all information, not just the positive. This may take more time and prompting, but it will improve project success.
• Knowing that as projects progress, people will be reluctant to share bad news, probe on potential problems and risks early in the life of the project, and then set up ways to monitor them.

Innovation – Sno Bikes

An interesting innovation, after skiing and snow boarding comes the sno bike. I saw one on the slopes recently, although I believe commercial production ceased in 2008.

What Is Strategy?

Useful and  under 2 minute video clip from Michael Porter on what strategy is and isn’t. Many businesses do not use the term strategy in the way that Porter defines it, but as he argues there are costs to the approach of confusing strategy with tactics. Arguably this is the central insight upon which Porter has built his career.

Book Review – The Memory Chalet

This is a compact collection of essays from a post war historian. Most impressive about the book is the tragic context in which it was written, the author was “effectively quadriplegic at the time of writing” .  Tony Judt, who died on in August last year, had a motor neuron disorder (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which he described as “progressive imprisonment without parole” and wrote the book via dictation arranging his thoughts using a chalet as a mnemonic device to organize his ideas, initially the work was just something occupy the author’s mind rather than a text for publication. Nonetheless, the book stands in its own right as a solid collection of autobiographical reflections and insights into the twentieth century. In addition, perhaps because the author is dying the text contains brutal honesty throughout.

The topics range eclectically from New York to Midlife Crises to Intellectualism, but the essays are connected by Judt’s crisp writing style and most contain interesting insight. For example, “Just because you grew up on bad food, doesn’t mean you lack nostalgia for it.” and “Love… is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.”

It’s a short book but those with an interest in post-war Britain, the evolution of capital cities or intellectual thought will likely enjoy it.

Project Management at the BBC

Continuing the theme of UK based projects such as Wembley and Scottish Parliament, the BBC is a state funded provider of television and radio in the UK. The UK’s National Audit Office reviewed 3 recent construction projects by the BBC, 2 of which exceed cost and budget and 1 came in below budget the full report is here.

The key findings are as follows:

• The projects did not identify benefits clearly from the outset, making it hard to assess success objectively
• The importance of financial contingencies – the reason the one project (Salford Quays) came under budget was because it had financial contingencies at just over 10% of the initial budget. The projects which went over budget had much smaller contingencies.
• Change management, all projects had material changes during their lifetime, an average of 41 per project, which generally lead increased costs and in some cases could have been avoided through more thorough planning efforts.
• There is a need to better assess skills required to execute the project relative to the organization’s existing capabilities.

A New Model for Risk/Return on Projects

In finance there is a concept called the Sharpe Ratio, which project management could learn from.

Basically a Sharpe Ratio captures return achieved in exchange for risk.

So it’s not just about how risky (delayed) a project but what what the true return is relative to that. This is not Return on Investment but Return on Risk.

Project management can’t achieve this level of accuracy because both return and risk are much harder to measure for a one off project than for an investment. For example, shares in Ford trade on the markets on a daily basis making it very easy to do complex statistical analysis. Project management is getting better in terms of Monte Carlo analysis to model schedule risk. But at a fundamental level the data project managers have to work with just is not as rich as in finance, because each project is unique.

The point is this, as I look at project failures, the most horrendously delayed projects are also often the ones that win major awards.

For example, would you rather have this on time and budget?

photo rytc (via Flickr)

Or these with delays and cost overruns, (but lots of awards)?

photo: Ian Kroll (via Flickr)

source: Anita363 (via Flickr)

A Holistic Look At The Triple Constraint

I’ve previously argued that the triple constraint is more a myth than a useful project management tool.

Roger Atkinson’s academic paper takes a different approach, the argument is the triple constraint (referred to in the paper as the Iron Triangle) is only a subset of project management criteria, and a better approach is to combine 3 additional sets of metrics to capture project management success holistically, one of the metrics Atkinson proposes is IT specific, but the others capture stakeholder benefits and organizational benefits.

It makes sense, time and budget can be the easiest things to measure but aren’t necessarily the most important. See the full article here.

Better Estimation – Looking Back To Look Forward

It should not be surprising that the best way to estimate how long something will take, is to understand how long it took last time. In many cases this data is not hard to find, even though the project might be new, many of the tasks within it are not.

So how do you do your estimates? Do you start with a blank page, or look back at your last project?

Project Failure – Scottish Parliament

source: Asif Musthafa (via Flickr)

The Scottish Parliament overran initial costs by a factor of ten and was delayed by 3 years.  It is clear that similar to the Sydney Opera House the design was not finalized before construction and estimates were not backed by a credible cost estimation process. For example, here are the 5 finalists chosen from a shortlist of 12 in May 1998. Only one of these finalists adheres to the budget, every other proposal fails to meet the brief in terms of both cost and size. It is absurd to specific minimal criteria for a brief and then fail to shortlist finalists based on those criteria. When a project starts with this level of disregard for process, it is unlikely to ever get back on course.

Source: House of Commons Briefing (for reference EMBT/RMJM was selected)

From there, the project continues to unravel, for example the architect then added 4,000 square meters (+14%) to his design area. It is perhaps not surprising that the project manager resigned just over a year into the project because there was clear tension between the sponsors’ desire to have the Parliament ready as soon as possible and the architects’ desire for a “gestation period” to really flesh out his design together with a need to be engaged in all decision making. The lead project sponsor (Donald Dewar) and architect (Enric Miralles) sadly both died during the construction period, which further complicated the project.

Detailed reports on the project can be found in the Hollyrood Enquiry and Parliamentary Briefing and this article from Max Wideman.

Quality

It is worth noting that the Scottish Parliament has won many national and international architectural awards. This is similar to many delayed projects in that they fail specularly on time and budget constraints, but the quality of what is delivered can ultimately be extremely high, even if the apparent process in creating it was not.

Conclusions

The process of selecting and managing the new Scottish Parliament had no regard for credible estimates from the outset. As a result it is unsurprising that the final result bore no relation to the initial estimates. It also appears that the sponsors of the project wanted quality above all, and in that context it is not surprising that cost and time gave way to that objective.

Johnson on How Innovation Happens

Interesting video from Steven Johnson on innovation (one of the TED talks)

Specifically, within the video it’s worth looking at the example of the baby incubator and the Sputnik to GPS innovations within the video (the links should take you to the right places within the video). Or if you want to watch the full video it’s below: