New Year’s Resolutions That All Planners Should Add To Their List!
As the nights grow long and the days grow short, let’s take a moment to contemplate some New Year’s resolutions for all planners.
Active Quantitative Probabilistic Risk Project Management
If you have been among the millions following my blog for the past few years, you know that I’m a fan of a disciplined approach to both qualitative and quantitative risk analysis as a tool to manage schedule and budget risk in project management.
Most often, risk analysis is seen as a tool used at the start of a project to gauge schedule and cost risk, or to assess the potential downside in a failing project. It is very helpful in these scenarios.
Truth Tables and the Construction of Quantitative Risk Models
I gained a great deal of knowledge during my college years, which is as it should be. In a Philosophy Logic class, I learned about truth tables and fell in love with them. Ludwig Wittgenstein is often credited with their invention. Ludwig himself was an interesting character. I read a great biography of the man years back, called Wittgenstein’s Poker. He is not a person one would want to share a dorm room with. But I digress…
The Role of Probabilistic Modeling in Schedule Risk Analysis
One of the more fascinating elements of history is the way in which individual humans can influence its course and change the future. For instance, where would the world be today if Winston Churchill had not stood so indomitably – and virtually alone against Hitler and Nazism? One person can impact the whole of humanity from one point in time forward. Another such contributor to the progress of humanity was Thomas Bayes. Bayes, the father of Bayesian analysis., lived in England in the 1700’s. It was his forward thinking that brought us probabilistic stochastic modeling.
Quality is the biggest risk in Construction Project Management
What if you have carefully planned a project, and skillfully designed its construction, but your contractor does not have the capability to perform the work in a quality manner? That is a risk to your project. The PMI diagram only used to refer to the elements of time, cost and scope. However, as of late, quality has also been included in the triangle.
In an IT project, poor quality usually manifests itself in the software crashing or producing unreliable output. In construction, the project creates a physical object – a building, a bridge, or a subway tunnel – so the risk posed by low quality is much greater than in projects that create intangibles, such as business process transformation or software. When construction fails, people may die. On the news, we hear about developing countries where buildings collapse and hundreds or thousands die, but construction quality problems resulting in loss of life are not limited to the developing world. I’ve been involved in the aftermath of two fatal construction quality problems during my career, and both were well-funded, professional construction projects in the United States. While no devastating consequences come close to death and injury in terms of quality problems, there is at least one other that has devastating impacts on both cost and schedule: re-work. Read More
Organizational Risk Tolerance in Project Management
As project managers, one of the important roles we have is assessing and managing risk for our projects. But risk assessment cannot be performed in a vacuum. The organization, customer, or end user needs to have a voice in how much risk should be tolerated.
Take, for instance, the NASA-manned space flight. It involves risks to human life which can’t be completely mitigated. On the other hand, many construction and engineering firms take a zero risk approach to human life and safety on their jobs. Jacobs Engineering goes “beyond zero” in their approach to safety risks.
It’s interesting to think about the potential for conflicting safety standards within a project. What if a beyond zero safety organization is performing project management for a firm that does not consider safety to be a priority? The customer may see the money being spent to ensure safety as an unwanted cost, while the project management firm will consider these costs essential to their ability to perform work for their client.
Let’s move from health and safety risk to schedule risk. In this case, the same potential for conflict arises if the owner and the PM don’t agree on what is tolerable schedule risk for the project. But in this case, it is possible to use statistical modeling and forecasting to examine the probability of certain completion dates.
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GPM – The Planning Game Changer
With the introduction of the Graphical Planning Method (GPM), the methods and mindsets of scheduling and planning shifted to a hands-on, planning-dominated process instead of the computer-generated scheduling process used in the Critical Path Method (CPM)
GPM offers what could possibly be the simplest process to coordinate activities, relationships and milestones into a network schedule in the shortest amount of time. Additionally, the method’s graphical tools and techniques allow all stakeholders, regardless of training level, to implement, adjust and development schedules.
GPM Innovations
- Logic Diagramming Method (LDM)
- Graphics technology and the visual display of diagramming objects
- Planning and scheduling on an evolving, time-scaled calendar
- One-step view for connected and dated activities allows for easy schedule adjustments
- Resource-limited activity dates and floats are continuously solidified as the schedule evolves
- Activity floats originate with relationships or logic ties
- Activity floats can be realistically apportioned by not letting tasks slip beyond assigned milestones
- Visual plan allows for easy reworking as schedule evolves and develops
- Elimination of the time gap between planning and schedule reporting
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Advantages of GPM Planning
The development of the graphical path method (GPM®) created new paradigms for schedulers and planners. These new models allowed planners more flexibility around designing and optimizing networks of activities, especially when compared to the models used in critical path method (CPM) projects. In addition, GPM also helped planners to solve previously intractable resource optimization problems.
When it was first launched in 1957, CPM was the premier tool for schedule optimization. But as the planning and scheduling process evolved over time and adapted to new technologies such as personal computers, the focus of the CPM process shifted from planning to scheduling. Advances in technology have allowed schedules to grow exponentially to contain more than 50,000 activities. These massive schedules are inputted directly into a CPM software tool – all too often without the first critical step of planning the project. While some organizations continue to use full-wall planning, GPM was developed in part to reintroduce planning back into the scheduling process.
Flexible Planning
GPM also introduced users to a more flexible way to schedule. When planning with CPM, schedulers are often handicapped by its total float calculations, which do not allow for flexibility and adjustments between project start and finish dates. Instead of calculating total float as the late date minus the early date, GPM uses the planned date to calculate float, drift (how many days back can we move without impacting start date) and total float (drift plus float). The GPM algorithm frees the planner from the false framework of early start dates. Which creates a flexible dynamic modeling tool which more accurately reflects the real world realities of planning and scheduling.
This way, schedulers are able to more easily allocate and adjust resources and shift activities or activity chains as needed throughout the schedule.
GPM’s use of the logical diagramming method (LDM), which combines the best of ADM and PDM, creates a graphically represented network. This allows schedulers to set benchmark or fixed events with zero total float along a schedule. LDM relies on embedded nodes to model PDM logic, and recognizes fixed events or benchmarks, which do not shift from their inputted dates.
The combination of GPM’s planning elements brings flexibility to schedulers and stakeholders, and, simply put, makes the process easier to understand. This is turn helps people to create and execute a successful plan.
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GPM & The Future of Project Planning
With the advent of personal computers in the mid-1980s, people enthusiastically embraced computer and software-based planning and scheduling practices. At this point, planning and scheduling began to shift away from traditional graphical and planning-centric methods. New, data-driven methods replaced graphical representations with sophisticated software scheduling engines, reversing the long-time credo of scheduling from “Logic rules, dates serve,” to “Dates rule, logic serves.”
In this new mindset, schedulers became more focused on hitting each deadline or milestone, and logic quickly became a secondary thought. Schedules were software-driven and riddled with anomalies that would normally have been adjusted and fixed through traditional graphic planning.
Finally, the shine of the new technology started to wear off. Stakeholders took notice of the changes in scheduling and started to reminisce about days of graphical planning.
The development of the Graphical Planning Method (GPM) and its interactive visual components allowed schedulers and stakeholders to embrace the technological advances (and still move away from sticky-note wall planning) while still incorporating graphical and time-scaled schedule representation. Instead of relying on databases and inline CPM scheduling engines, GPM software applications rely on graphical objects, encapsulating rules and computational algorithms that interact with continuous real-time process flows and an interactive graphics display.
Visual Collaboration Creates Better Planning
The goal of project planning is to create a workable schedule and plan that provides all stakeholders with the information they need – from activities and tasks to deadlines and milestones. However, the path to creating a workable schedule is riddled with complexities, especially if the schedule is developed within a silo.
Collaborative planning is one way to bridge the issues of silo scheduling and lack of information, but implementing collaboration in the planning process also presents its own set of challenges.
For collaboration to work well, project leadership must blend soft skills, technology and project governance to cultivate an environment of open communication and flow of information. True collaboration requires transparency, communication, symmetrical knowledge, and most importantly, that egos be set aside.