“You cannot predict the future, but you can prepare for it.”
A recent post on LinkedIn posed this question “Why do 70% of projects fail to meet either cost, schedule or technical performance?” As of this writing there were 23 comments. They included such things as:
- Not using iterative methods
- Too much planning, not enough implementation guidance
- It’s really not that bad
- failure to quantify risks
- lack of project manager experience
- unreasonable goals
- the project foundation
- not enough details to answer why
- Mistakes made by people doing the work
- Being too optimistic
- Poor planning
- Systemic risk
Many of these are partially true. None, however, identify the root cause, the core problem. Fundamentally, projects don’t meet cost, schedule or performance expectations because of a failure to adequately manage the uncertainty which is inherent in projects. The root cause is that projects are chock full of uncertainty. Think about your project experience. Uncertainty raises its ugly head in several ways. Uncertainty manifests as an inability to hold to a schedule. Uncertainty is documented as a list of risks. Uncertainty exists in the skill of the people doing the work. Uncertainty exists in that a customer’s requirements may well change by the conclusion of the project.
A Freakonomics podcast on “Why Your Projects Are Always Late” suggests the problem is something called an Optimism Bias. It’s not that we’re too optimistic — it’s just that we don’t know the future! What’s going to go wrong? What will we learn? What mistakes will we make? How long will that set us back? How long will it take to recover? Goodness, we’ve even named this phenomenon — it’s called “Murphy’s Law.” Are we simply to be doomed because “s*** happens”?
Uncertainty is why particular collections of work are called “projects” and others called “processes.” Processes are work that is repeated. Projects are work that result in unique outcomes. Consider this parallel: Variability is the #1 enemy of processes. Uncertainty is the #1 enemy of projects.
To master processes, we deploy Lean and Sig Sigma techniques to tame variability and cut process cycle times. The question to those wrangling projects is, what tactics do you have to tame uncertainty and cut project times?
While it’s admittedly impossible to plan specifics for a future we can only imagine, it’s essential to plan for the future reality that things will go wrong. Plans will be upended. The answer, well summarized by the opening quotation, is to plan for things to go well but BE PREPARED for when things go poorly. Currently at GPS, we exercise four tactics to achieve this:
- We stop protecting each task with duration padding (instead using a ‘best case’ estimate of time required to complete the task) and accumulate that time into something called a “buffer”, placed at the end of the project plan and “consumed” when the unexpected happens. This gives us a metric quantifying the impact of the uncertainty.
- We actively manage project risks. That means taking actions to mitigate the risks (either to reduce the probability of the risk occurring or to reduce the impact of the risk if it occurs). That means risks must be specific enough to be actionable.
- We regularly look ahead in the project schedule to identify the tasks that might not live up to expectations. Communicate with the task managers. Take steps to minimize uncertainty prior to tasks beginning.
- We embrace iterative methods within a project plan. We advocate including rapid iteration tasks resulting in outcomes reviewed by users. That may seem like gobbledygook, but it’s one of the true benefits of what you hear as “agile” and serves to reduce the uncertainty of customer/user expectations.
Each of these tactics manages uncertainty. You can manage uncertainty by being alert to when it’s rearing its ugly head — then quickly reacting to adjust the project work accordingly. Your project management processes must include the above tactics.
We call this “Conquering Project Uncertainty.”
