Finishing Projects Fast

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Finishing Projects Fast

• James R. Burns
• Professor of Operations Management and
  Information Technology
• Texas Tech University

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Outline--Sources

• Generalities
• Goldratt concepts
• Mascitelli concepts
• McCONNELL concepts
• Kerzner concepts
• Maturity concepts
• Other sources

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Goal

• Make some suggestions as to how projects can be
  completed fast and frugally

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Why Projects????

• A way to discretize and plan work that
• Enables comparisons among projects
• Enables the work to be
• formally defined
• formally planned
• formally budgeted
• formally executed
• formally controlled
• Formally finished

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Most firms

• Recognize project management to be a core
  competence today
• Have established project management centers of
  excellence for training and development of
  project managers and project management careers
• Encourage its employees to propose project
  initiatives with simple one-page statements of
  work

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The Stages in the Project Management Lifecycle
Conceptualization Definition
Planning Budgeting
Executing Controlling
Termination Closure
The product the project is to produce is defined
here
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Notes on shortening project durations

• (Most of this must be done in the Planning and
  Budgeting stage)
• Crashing
• Reducing the duration of tasks on the critical
  path by adding resources
• Fast-tracking
• Starting tasks sooner
• Checking for parallelism opportunities in the
  schedule
• Pull as much work off of the critical path as you
  can
• Be aware of critical chain issues

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More Tips on shortening project durations

• REUSE, REUSE, REUSE
• Do it right the first time
• Eliminate non-value-added work activities
• Make projects lean
• Avoid changes to requirements
• But what if the requirements are unstable??

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Knowledge Reuse

• Requirements Reuse
• Classification of projects
• Mapped/Programmed Projects--Everything is driven
  by and proceeds from the requirements
• Project Plan
• Functional Specification
• Design Document
• Code
• Tests and Test Documentation
• ALL OF WHICH CAN BE REUSED

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The Quality View on FAST projects
Do it Right the First Time!!!

• The further down the lifecycle the defects are
  found, the more expensive and time consuming they
  are to fix.

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The problem of Complexity

• In the early days of simpler code, it used to
  take a day or less to fix a bug
• Now, with greatly increased code complexity, it
  takes weeks sometimes.

Complexity greatly increases time and cost
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Avoid changes to requirements

• If possible freeze requirements during execution
  and control stage

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Lean Project Management

• Customer-perceived value should drive everything
• What is the value proposition??
• If we were to advertise in the WSJ that we have
  twice as many walkthroughs as our closest
  competition, would that garner any additional
  customers for us?
• Remove what does not add value

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Principles of Lean Concepts Applied to Projects

1. Precisely specify the value of the project
2. Identify the value stream for each project
3. Allow value to flow without interruptions
4. Let the customer pull value from the project team
5. Continuously pursue perfection

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Which of the following adds value?

• Conducting a weekly team coordination
• Hunting for needed information
• Presenting Project status to upper management
• Creating formal project documents
• Gaining multiple approvals for a project document
• Waiting in queues for available resources

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Time Batching--Another Time Waster

• Analysis paralysis
• Approval cycles
• Formal document release
• Regularly scheduled meetings
• Planning cycles
• Work queues

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More techniques for shortening projects

• Scrub the requirements during or prior to the
  planning and budgeting stage
• Remove from the requirements those items that add
  little or no value
• Remember the Pareto principle80 of the value
  comes from 20 of the functionality
• REMOVE SAFETYGOLDRATT
• Resist multitasking and student syndrome

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Safety

• Extra time placed in an estimated task time
• Remove safety and put it in a time buffer at the
  end of the project
• Safety, when its buried in the tasks of the
  project, is a bad thing because of.
• Multitasking, also a bad thing
• Student syndrome
• Task dependencies
• Cant be passed along or accumulated

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Task Duration Probability -- a Beta distribution
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A Scenario

• You have been asked to do two tasks TASK A ---gt
  TASK B
• TASK A whose most likely duration is 10 days,
  but optimistic duration is 6 days, pessimistic
  duration is 20 days
• TASK B whose most likely duration is 10 days, but
  optimistic duration is 6 days, pessimistic
  duration is 20 days
• Estimate how long, ON AVERAGE, it will take you
  to complete these two tasks?
• What is the probability that you will finish in
  20 days?

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Everybody overestimates the time required to do
their task

• According to Goldratt
• (This is called SAFETY, as we said)
• Does anybody want to talk about how much safety
  they put into their estimates?
• Is this true in software development?
• It is if you have an expert doing the estimating,
  who really knows how long it will take him

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What happens after that--a possible scenario

• The team leader adds safety time to the task to
  cover his responsibilities
• The project leader adds more safety time
• The project manager may add still more safety time

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Implicationgtgtgt

• Most of the time we have built into our projects
  is ..

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The project manager must stay focused

• Or the project will not be finished on time,
  within budget
• This means applying the Pareto principle
• 80 of the benefit comes from 20 of the
  activities
• By the time progress reports indicate something
  is wrong, its usually too late
• Progress reports tell you that 90 of the project
  is finished in 90 of the required time.
• However, another equal period of time is required
  to complete the remaining 10, in many cases

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It is hard to stay focused when

• There are too many project paths on-going, in
  parallel
• There are many critical or near critical paths
• There are many projects being managed concurrently

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Measurements are a major problem with projects

• Measurements should induce the parts to do what
  is good for the system as a whole
• Measurements should direct managers to the point
  that needs their attention
• So often it occurs that we measure the wrong
  thing.
• The wrong measure leads to wrong behavior
• Tell me how you measure me and I will show you
  how I behave

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More Measurements
-5
-5
-5
15
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Projects are like chains

• Each task in sequence is a link in a chain
• Each link has two things
• weight, to which cost is analogous
• strength, to which throughput is analogous

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Cost vs Throughput

• Goldratt maintains that management in the cost
  world is a mirage
• efficiency becomes paramount
• local improvements are necessary to get global
  ones
• Goldratt suggests the managers should manage in
  the throughput world, a totally different
  paradigm
• must find the constraint--the weakest link
• concentrate on that
• By the way, what is the ultimate constraint???

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Remember the five steps of TOC

• IDENTIFY the project constraint--the critical
  path
• Decide how to EXPLOIT that constraint
• SUBORDINATE everything to that decision
• ELEVATE the systems constraint
• Go back to step 1, and find another constraint

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Safety

• Safety is however much time is added on to a task
  beyond its mean time of completion

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Probabilistic task durations

• Late durations tend to accumulate and may
  increase the length of the project
• Early durations do not show up
• This explains why safety disappears

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More Measurements
-5
-5
-5
15
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Other problems with safety

• Is wasted by the student syndrome
• Basically, this is procrastination
• Is wasted by multitasking (a person who works on
  several tasks at the same time)
• With each change of task, a set up is required
• Is wasted by dependencies between steps
• These dependencies cause delays to accumulate,
  but advances are wasted
• Delays get passed on advances dont

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Problems other than safety

• Early start vs. late start
• Existing measurements are worthless because they
  are based on a cost world mentality, according to
  Goldratt
• Existing measurements (Earned Value Analysis) do
  not take into consideration the critical path
• Were talking about BCWP, BCWS, ACWP, CV, SV,
  CPI, SPI, BAC, EAC, etc.

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Early Start vs. Late Start
B 5
A 5
E 10
D 10
C 10
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How much Safety is there likely to be?

• Will project professionals admit how much safety
  they are putting into their estimates?
• What happens when these professionals are asked
  to cut their durations by 10, next time?
• These professionals want to be 100 sure of
  getting finished on time
• Therefore, the durations are likely to be twice
  as long as they should be
• So CUT THEM IN HALF

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Solutions

• Take the safety out of the individual tasks and
  put it at the end of the critical path in the
  time buffer, called a project buffer
• This means making the tasks roughly 50-60 as
  long as they would otherwise be.

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More solutions

• At the point where each feeding path intersects
  with the critical path, place another time
  buffer, called a feeding buffer. The feeding
  buffer protects the critical path from delays
  occurring in the corresponding non-critical
  paths.
• When resources are needed on the critical path,
  these resources are advised ahead of time exactly
  when they must make themselves available. When
  that time comes, they must drop everything else
  and do the required critical tasks.

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Measurement solutions

• Measure progress only on the critical path what
  percent of the critical path we have already
  completed. This is all we care about!!
• Have a project leader measure progress on a non
  critical path in terms of unused buffer days

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Shrinking the task time Effects

• There is less procrastination
• There is much more focus
• There is less multitasking

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More Suggestions

• Put your BEST people on the critical path
• Watch out for critical chains

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What are the ramifications of a delayed software
product, intended for commercial sale?

• Less market share
• Less profit maybe no profit
• Lower analyst profit expectations
• Declining share price
• Out of business?
• How many firms has Microsoft driven out of
  business?
• Ask Philippe Khan (founder of Borland) what the
  implications of getting a product late to the
  marketplace are

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What about Procurement

• Most firms enter into LOSE/LOSE Strategies
• A fixed-price lowest bidder contract is
  LOSE/LOSE Strategy
• This forces Contractors to under bid their costs,
  hoping to make it back on the changes to the
  requirements that the customer will have to pay
  for
• Instead, Contractors should be induced to deliver
  product on time, with as much functionality as
  possible
• How would you do this?

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