As I’ve written here most recently, the most significant proposal coming out of the Integrated Program Management Conference (IPMC) this year was the comprehensive manner of integrating all essential elements of a project, presented by Glen Alleman et al. In their presentation, Alleman, Coonce, and Price, present a process flow (which, in my estimation, should be mirrored in data and information flow) in which program artifacts were imbued with measures of effectiveness, measures of performance, and measures of progress, to achieve an organic integration of all parts of the project that allow the project team to make a valid assessment of achievement against the plan, informed by risk and opportunity. (Emphasis my own). The three-legged stool of cost, schedule, and technical performance are thereby integrated properly at the appropriate level of the project structure, and done in such a way as to overcome the rigidity and fallacy of the single point estimate.
But, as is always the case with elegant models, while they replicate a sufficient portion of reality to allow us to make our assessments using statistical methods, there are other elements that we have purposely left out because our present models do not incorporate them into the normal and normative process. They are considered situational, and so lie just outside of the process flow, though they insert themselves when necessary–and much more frequently than desired. I am referring to the availability of money and resources, and the manner in which they affect the project: through work authorizations (WADs) and baseline change requests (BCRs).
I have seen situations where fully 90% of the effort in project management is devoted to manage and adjust the plan based on baseline changes. This is particularly the case where estimates are poorly developed due to the excuse of uncertainty. Of course there is uncertainty–that’s the purpose of developing a plan. The issue isn’t the presence of risk (and opportunity) but that our risks are educated ones, that is, informed by familiarity with similar efforts, engineering assessment, core competency, and other empirical factors. This is where the most radical elements of the Agile Cult gets it wrong–in focusing on risk and assuming that the only way to realize opportunity is to forgo the empirical process. This is not only a misreading of risk and opportunity assessment in project management, it is a sort of neo-Luddite position regarding scientific management.
The environment in which a project operates undergoes change. The framing assumptions of the project determine the expectations of scope, cost, and what defines success. The concept of framing assumptions was fully developed in a RAND study that I covered in a previous blog post. Most often, but not always, the change in framing assumptions is reflected in the WAD and BCR process, most often in the latter. Thus, we have a means of determining and taking account of changes in framing assumptions. This is in the normal process of project management, as opposed to the more obvious examples of a complete replan or over target baseline (OTB).
So where do we track WADs and BCRs in our processes that will provide us sufficient indicators in our measures of effectiveness, performance, and progress that our resources (both size and type) many not be sufficient or that these changes are sufficient enough that our framing assumptions have changed? I would argue that the linkage for resources must also be made through the Integrated Master Plan (IMP) and reflect in the IMS, cross-referenced to the PMB. Technology can provide the remainder of the ability to integrate these elements and provide the process flow necessary to provide early warning. This integration goes beyond the traditional focus on cost and schedule (and the newly reintroduced emphasis on technical achievement). It involves integration with resource management systems (personnel, skillset assignments, etc.) as well as financial management systems to determine the availability of money (both its sufficiency and “color”*) being applied to the right place at the right time.
Integrating these elements together then allows for more sophisticated methods of determining project success through the introduction of metrics that provide correlations between the elements. It also answers, absent politics, the optimum level of both analysis and reporting.
*The “color” of money applies mostly to public investments in which monies appropriated are designed by their purpose: operations, maintenance, engineering, R&D, etc.
Note: This post was modified to add a point of clarification in applying WADs and BCRs to the PMB.
Life, Project Management, and Everything 