Abstract
The current environment for projects is complex and continues to increase in complexity with the use of distributed teams and multi-cultural business relationships. Understanding the nature of these elements of a project and how their overall structure impacts the unrecognized elements, can influence how a project should be organized to accommodate the unknowns. Behavioral aspects of a project team caused by complex products and services, significant concurrencies and technology uncertainties affect coordination efforts on the projects, and is often ignored or missed early in the planning of the project.
One way to try to combat complexity is by application of a standard work practice in order to estimate effort and schedule. However, standard work, as applied to a project or program, always requires tailoring. So even if we reach PMM level 3 (Curtis, 2004) there is still plenty to do in a modern business environment to craft the total project architecture and prepare teams for performance.
Project Design, as a methodology, identifies, quantifies and characterizes the significant effort of coordination that is present in all complex projects. It accommodates complicated interdependencies and provides a method to quickly recognize, assess and adjust those interdependencies through visual modeling and simulation before time and cost are negatively impacted.
Deploying Project Design methods and techniques to a project can identify as much as 30% - 50% of total project costs and effort that is coordination, normally unidentified and rarely counted.
Introduction
Participation in the global market has evolved from trade opportunities and the simple transfer of products and services across geographic sites. Instead, a view of product development and project management as a collaborative activity emerges, such that local sites join projects as participants with existing products, processes, resources and people. Driven by steps to consolidate, outsource globally and downsize locally in an effort to remain competitive, program complexity has profound implications for the nature of work.
Work in a distributed environment affects teams in that they will lose opportunities for informal collaboration and knowledge sharing. Working in a more internationalized context places further constraints on the way a team works as they not only have to cope with geographical distance, but also time, culture and possibly language differences. If a project manager does not take into account these new global realities, what is the consequence? This added complexity can double or triple the coordination effort and cost due to the organizational impacts and the concurrency between activities within the work process. This underestimation of effort and the resulting cost consistently leads to optimistic schedules and budgetary overruns.
The challenge is to coordinate diverse participants and their resources into a synthesized activity, even though the resulting work structure crosses the boundaries of one’s technical, market, legal, and cultural identities. Managers normally plan projects through the decomposition of activity into tasks and the assignment of product, people and resources across those tasks. However, technical and social diversities in complex projects increase the difficulty of forecasting the significant coordination effort that exists in these endeavors.
This paper describes a way of thinking and practice that will identify, quantify and characterize that significant effort of coordination that is present in all complex projects being undertaken in today’s environment of globalization and distributed projects that we define as “Project Design”.
Why Change the Thinking about Design
Today’s most strategic initiatives typically depend on widely distributed teams - both internal staff and vendors. The challenge is to bring these teams together, get them on the same page, validate planned activity, and put in place a system for ongoing coordination of progress. Traditional approaches to planning fail the dynamics and needed global awareness in these initiatives.
Today’s products are ever more complex while being developed by internal and external teams located across the globe. The difficulty is to optimally organize, direct, and manage these teams, their interactions, and priorities during the design through manufacturing process. Shared situational awareness and sustainable, visual tools keeps their focus on real progress, coordination overhead, and product risk throughout.
The enterprise I.T. environment is complex: ongoing development and rollout of software, hardware, and training across sites, teams, and with various vendors. These rollouts are often planned in waves of related versions. The challenge is to plan feasible, staged releases, bring the teams together around the rollout roadmap, validate their planned activity, and put in place a system for ongoing coordination of progress. Traditional approaches to planning fail to consider the dynamics and needed early awareness in these initiatives.
Traditional Definitions of Design
What do we mean and what do you think about when we hear the term DESIGN?
In the words of Dr. N.P. Suh of MIT it “involves a continuous interplay between what we want to achieve and how we want to achieve it”. (Suh, 1990 , p 25)
“Design is the application of creativity to planning the optimum solution of a given problem and the communication of that plan to others.” (Wright, D. May 2005)
Some form of design and planning exists in all of the methodologies and processes that we use in today’s project/program environment. We may not look at it as “Project Design”, but the effort is expended and some of the same steps are executed.
Design, as compared to planning, leads to a meaningfully different experience for the participants. Planning in contrast often assumes that the target is completely defined, there is no discovery required, and the plan is simply a decomposition of the work for assignment into separable pieces. Design is collaborative, iterative, and deals with multiple trade-offs.
Definition of Project Design
Project Design embodies the evaluation of possible outcomes early-on, before committing to a course of action. By rapidly exploring possibilities -- through dialogue, analysis and prototyping -- awareness is built and better results are achieved. And as things change (they always do, don’t they?) a good design is easily adjusted.
Successful companies would never embark on a product development program and put it into production without modeling, simulations or prototyping.
For example, airlines and the military would never put a pilot into the seat of an aircraft without training and simulation exercises in order to test their ability to recognize and respond to various scenarios that they might experience while in flight.
Investment firms rarely commit large amounts of funds without simulating performance and understanding the sensitivity to market changes.
Why do we regularly embark on multi-million dollar projects/programs without looking ahead to examine the complex interactions, multiple options and understand where our efforts are likely to meet or fail to meet expectations?
The design emerges through top-down consideration, with bottom-up prototypes to test assumptions and dependencies. The target and use of resources evolves towards a feasible, systemic solution.
What’s missing?
Realistic attention to the cost, time and risk associated with coordination, Including the communication, decision-making, waiting and rework common in most projects and programs – particularly in this age of global teams, extended enterprises, outsourcing, quality improvement and speed-to-market.
When and How to Design
Exhibit 1 - Project Cycle
Project Design supports the standard Project Life Cycle by bridging the gap between the strategic decision to do the project and the actual execution of the project. It helps answer the question of what is the best and most feasible way to execute the project.
Typical Steps in Project Design
- Project Model & Simulations
• Requirements
• Dialogue
• Evaluation
• Prototyping/Model
- Design Iterations
• Analysis
• Iterations
• Failure
- Trade Off & Best Plans
• Optimization
• Selection
The goal of Design is to take the scope as defined in the Business case, generate a series of Forecasts that represent the most likely result based on current behavior and project architecture, create a series of optimized plans by Design iteration and then decide which scenario is the best in order to achieve an acceptable business result.
Exhibit 2. Typical Project Design Process Scenario
What Difference does it Make
What impacts project/program COMPLEXITY?
- Project Size (Time, Cost)\
- Organization/Team Relationships
- Geography
- Dependencies between Activities
- Maturity of Technology
- Process Maturity
- Stability of Requirements
- Risk Level
- Relationships between Projects
How much does complexity impact the efforts and schedule of a project? How do we identify, quantify and characterize the significant effort of coordination? What part of these projects or programs do we miss in early planning? Why do we want to “fail” early?
- What is coordination? Any activity that emerges because we are dependent on others.
- Complex Dependencies between activities
- Concurrency in Activities/Tasks
- Shared resources/Distributed Teams – globalization?
- Management of rework
- Decision making
- Quality management
- Communication
- What causes Coordination and increases Communication?
- Concurrency
• Dependencies
• Team distributions
• Individual Culture
• Language
• Organizational Culture
d. How does Complexity Impact Coordination?
• Teams from different time zones, work cultures, costs, and abilities.
• Subsystems and services to be integrated in an overall solution, yet the “central” team does not have complete control
• Costs and risks from coordination, communication, re-work, and quality are a significant % of the real effort
• Expected Results difficult to predict with significantly greater consequences if ignored
e. Judgment is no longer sufficient
• Team Leaders have judgment based on their local background and experience
• Their estimate of work within a team will be reasonably accurate – if not part of a larger activity.
• A “direct effort” estimate of a local activity likely includes team internal coordination costs.
• Coordination activity across the project and between tasks/activities is difficult to estimate from past experience – including its propagating impact on local activity
f. What does early “failure” accomplish?
• Stimulates a response from those involved to propose an acceptable solution
• Results in a strategy that is considered feasible by all responsible parties
• Enhances the understanding of process interdependencies based on the project “architecture”
• Helps all to understand the ramifications of possible decision-making during the project before they have to be made
Exhibit 3. Prediction of Global Coordination Activity
Rules of Thumb for Predicting Distance
- WITHIN a team: how large is the team?
- Are they in the same building?
- How many time zones separate the teams?
- How many projects have they worked together before?
- Do they share the same native language?
- Do they share the same profession/function?
- Do they share the same direct boss? If not, how many business boundaries separate the two teams?
Exhibit 4 - Breakdown of Total Effort
Why are the Results so Dramatically Different in a Variety of Programs
Post Merger Transformation - Executives and program leaders can be supported with a clear and early view of the whole activity across the deployment. The view is based on visual design and forecasting including dependencies, risks, opportunities for improvements and prioritized challenges to be addressed. Strategy for global teaming and a forecasted rollout through rapidly applied simulations of the situation. Given the high-level, visual initiative models, regular portfolio forecasts and analytically based adjustments are quickly available through re-design.
Global Distributed Teams - Executives and program leaders are supported with a clear and early view of the whole activity across the deployment. The view is based on visual design and forecasting including dependencies, risks and opportunities for improvements and prioritized challenges to be addressed. There is a strategy for global teaming and a forecasted rollout rapidly applied to the situation. Given the high-level, visual initiative models, regular portfolio forecasts and analytically based adjustments are quickly available through re-design.
New Product Introduction - Team locations, functional roles and work structures can be optimized to reduce the product development life cycle. Concurrency can be added to the project only in areas where the concurrence yields time-to-market benefit but does not adversely increase risk of failure. You should continue to re-design for optimal project architecture and coordination. Each product development project, while based on the corporations standard work practices, should be fine-tuned for best performance.
Enterprise IT Development – Managers have a way to see all factors affecting the program. They can then direct proactive corrections to the development with the staff and internal customers. This results in a more meaningful product for customer and one that provides a way to maximize the return to the company and minimize the impact on the ultimate customers.
Summary
Project Design is a methodology that identifies, quantifies, and characterizes the significant effort of coordination that is present in complex projects. Project Design accommodates complicated interdependencies and provides a method to quickly recognize, assess and adjust those interdependencies through visual modeling and simulation before time and cost are negatively impacted.
Project Design methodology and techniques presented in this paper, have proven to identify as much as 30% - 50% of total project costs and effort, normally unidentified and rarely accounted. The impact of deploying Project Design Methodology provides a realistic timeline and cost for projects such that projects and programs can be prioritized within an organization or a project can be identified that should not be deployed saving time, cost and resources.
A properly executed Project Design, conducted early in the project cycle, results in not only a better plan but a team with greatly enhanced awareness of overall project strategy and management vision.